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While the world watched is a book about what happened in Birmingham in the 1960’s. It talks about the racial injustices that took place, along with a bombing of a church that took the lives of four girls. One thing that stood out to me is how recent this stuff was. I thought of slavery as something that happened 200 years ago and then for a little while after the white people treated the black people bad, but then Martin Luther King came and changed people’s minds. Now I know that there was a lot more that took place, and that it was still happening 50 years ago. I learned that there was actually people killing people over this, before I knew that the black people couldn’t drink out of the same drinking fountains a white people and that they didn’t like each other, but I had no idea that white people actually killed black people, and bombed their homes if they were involved in the civil rights movement or arrested a person and blasted them with fire hoses simply for marching down a street with others.

I learned a lot about the civil rights movement and how bad things actually were at some points for black people. I think that it was just stupid how the color of someone’s skin would justify denying them a place at a hotel, an education, or even meant that it was ok to bomb their houses. This is important because the color of a person’s skin shouldn’t matter in how they are treated or what opportunities they will have in there life.

This book made me think differently about how people treated each other in the 1960’s. I hope that we learn from this and never repeat it again. I am glad that we decided to read this book in class. I have learned a lot for this book and it has changed my perspectives on the civil rights movement.