One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and the Civil Rights Movement

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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and the Civil Rights Movement
An aspect that characterizes the American history to a great extent is the Civil Rights Movement. It refers to the strategies and group of people that aimed to end racial discrimination and segregation against the black people. The blacks in the Southern states experienced a world filled with race-inspired violence, oppression, segregation during the 1950s (History.com). This led to the emergence of activists that led civil disobedience and nonviolent protests in order to bring change. It was during the period of Civil Rights Movement that prominent leaders such as Andrew Goodman and Martin Luther King emerged. The struggles that happened during the Civil Rights Movement can be compared to occurrences at Oregon psychiatric hospital. The patients are oppressed just like the African-Americans during the Civil Rights Movement. Rebellion is also seen in both the psychiatric hospital and Civil Rights Movement. There is also the emergence of leaders that fight for the rights of the people and the patients.
Oppression and segregation were experienced daily by the African-Americans before and during the Civil Rights Movement. An example of segregation that was experienced by the African Black Americans was the requirement to give bus seats to white people. As such, the African Americans faced racial discrimination and segregation that to led the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Nurse Ratched runs the mental ward with harsh and strict precision. She encourages the patients to attack one another as she shames them into submission. In addition, patients that rebelled received electroshock treatments. Therefore, the patients were oppressed. This oppression is comparable to the one experienced by African-Americans before and during the Civil Rights Movement. Therefore, it can be said that the experiences the patients go through in the ward symbolize the oppression the black people went through as they fought for civil rights.
The discrimination and segregation led to the rebellion by the oppressed African Americans. When Rosa Parks declined to give her bus seat to a white person in 1955, she was jailed, but it marked the beginning of similar acts among the black community (History.com). It lasted for over a year. The Civil Rights Movement was also characteriz...