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The Birmingham church bombing occurred on September 15, 1963, when a bomb exploded before Sunday morning services at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama—a church with a predominantly black congregation that also served as a meeting place for civil rights leaders. Four young girls were killed and many other people injured. Outrage over the incident and the violent clash between protesters and police that followed helped draw national attention to the hard-fought, often-dangerous struggle for civil rights for African Americans.

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The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, is considered one of the crowning legislative achievements of the civil rights movement. First proposed by President John F. Kennedy, it survived strong opposition from southern members of Congress and was then signed into law by Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. In subsequent years, Congress expanded the act and passed additional civil rights legislation such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

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United States Public Law 88-452, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 (EOA), authorized the formation of local Community Action Agencies as part of the War on Poverty. These agencies are directly regulated by the federal government. "It is the purpose of The Economic Opportunity Act to strengthen, supplement, and coordinate efforts in furtherance of that policy" The purpose of EOA was to help the poor by enabling them to pull themselves from the grip of poverty and to improve the role of the federal government in the improvement of education.The EOA established over a thousand of Community Action Agencies (CAA's) at the local level to implement Great Society programs. The EOA required the poor have maximum feasible participation in poverty program planning. CAAs sought participation by the poor by opening storefront and neighborhood centers.

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I Have A Dream, Martin Luther King Jr. 1963

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I Have A Dream, Martin Luther King Jr. 1963

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"I Have a Dream" is a public speech delivered by American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, in which he calls for an end to racism in the United States and called for civil and economic rights. Delivered to over 250,000 civil rights supporters from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the speech was a defining moment of the civil rights movement. Beginning with a reference to the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed millions of slaves in 1863, King observes that: "one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free". Toward the end of the speech, King departed from his prepared text for a partly improvised peroration on the theme "I have a dream", prompted by Mahalia Jackson's cry: "Tell them about the dream, Martin!" In this part of the speech, which most excited the listeners and has now become its most famous, King described his dreams of freedom and equality arising from a land of slavery and hatred. Jon Meacham writes that, "With a single phrase, Martin Luther King Jr. joined Jefferson and Lincoln in the ranks of men who've shaped modern America".The speech was ranked the top American speech of the 20th century in a 1999 poll of scholars of public address.

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The Letter from Birmingham Jail, also known as the Letter from Birmingham City Jail and The Negro Is Your Brother, is an open letter written on April 16, 1963, by Martin Luther King Jr. The letter defends the strategy of nonviolent resistance to racism. It says that people have a moral responsibility to break unjust laws and to take direct action rather than waiting potentially forever for justice to come through the courts. Responding to being referred to as an "outsider," King writes, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere".The letter, written during the 1963 Birmingham campaign, was widely published, and became an important text for the American Civil Rights Movement.

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James Meredith is an American civil rights activist who gained national renown at a key juncture in the civil rights movement in 1962, when he became the first African American student at the University of Mississippi. State officials, initially refusing a U.S. Supreme Court order to integrate the school, blocked Meredith’s entrance, but, following large campus riots that left two people dead, Meredith was admitted to the university under the protection of federal marshals. Meredith served in the U.S. Air Force before attending an all-black school, Jackson State College. His repeated applications to the University of Mississippi were denied solely on the basis of his race, according to the verdict of his 1961–62 court battle, which was won on appeal with the legal assistance of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In the fall of 1962, as mob violence seemed imminent U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy called in federal protection so that Meredith could register for classes. Meredith’s tenure at Mississippi was brief; he graduated in 1963 and wrote a memoir about the experience, called Three Years in Mississippi

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The National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) was established in 1961 by young American Indians who were either in college or had recently graduated. The NIYC is a result of youths dissenting from tribal leaders, which began during the American Indian Chicago Conference in 1961, where several young American Indians, a handful of who had become acquainted while participating in the Southwest Regional Indian Youth Council, became disillusioned with the tribal leaders. After listening to the ideas presented by the conservative faction of the conference, the youth began to express dissenting opinions. This group, including Clyde Warrior (Ponca) and Mel Thom (Walker River Paiute), temporarily called themselves the Chicago Conference Youth Council. Later in the year, after that summer's Workshop on American Indian Affairs had ended, the group that had joined together as the Chicago Conference Youth Council met in Gallup, New Mexico. It was there that the National Indian Youth Council was established. The NIYC is the second oldest national Indian organization and was influenced and aligned with the Civil Rights Movement.

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1961 When Does the Freedom Arrive? And Who Is the Congress on Racial Equality 

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1961 When Does the Freedom Arrive? And Who Is the Congress on Racial Equality 

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Freedom Riders were groups of white and African American civil rights activists who participated in Freedom Rides, bus trips through the American South in 1961 to protest segregated bus terminals. Freedom Riders tried to use “whites-only” restrooms and lunch counters at bus stations in Alabama, South Carolina and other Southern states. The groups were confronted by arresting police officers—as well as horrific violence from white protestors—along their routes, but also drew international attention to their cause.

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The SNCC, or Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, was a civil-rights group formed to give younger blacks more of a voice in the civil rights movement. The SNCC soon became one of the movement’s more radical branches. In the wake of the Greensboro sit-in at a lunch counter closed to blacks, Ella Baker, then director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), helped set up the first meeting of what became the SNCC. She was concerned that SCLC, led by Martin Luther King Jr., was out of touch with younger blacks who wanted the movement to make faster progress. Baker encouraged those who formed SNCC to look beyond integration to broader social change and to view King’s principle of nonviolence more as a political tactic than a way of life.

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The “Greensboro Four,” the four young black men who staged the first sit-ins in Greensboro—Ezell Blair Jr, David Richmond, Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil—were students at North Carolina and Agricultural and Technical College. They were influenced by the non-violent protest teachings and strategies of Mohandas Gandhi, as well as the early freedom rides organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1947.

Blair, Richmond, McCain, and McNeil planned the protest carefully, enlisting the help of a local white businessman, Ralph Johns, to put their plan into action. That plan was simple. They would first stop at Ralph Johns’s store so he could contact a news reporter. They would then go to Woolworth’s Five and Dime store in downtown Greensboro and sit at the lunch counters where they would ask to be served. When they were denied service, they would refuse to leave. They would repeat the process daily as long as it took to desegregate the lunch counter. They also hoped their protest would attract widespread attention to the issue and pressure Woolworth to desegregate.

On February 1, 1960, the four sat down at the lunch counter inside the Woolworth store. Woolworth’s lunch counter policy was to serve whites only and the staff, which included black employees, refused the four men service. The store manager, Clarence Harris, asked them to leave, but the four men stayed until the store closed that night.

The next day, more than twenty black students joined the sit-in including coeds from Bennett College also in Greensboro. White customers harassed the black students and the lunch counter staff continued to refuse them service.  News reporters and a TV cameraman covered the protests the second day as the Greensboro community and eventually the nation and the world learned of them. On the third day, more than sixty people came to the Woolworth store. On the fourth day, more the three hundred people took part in the protests which now included the lunch counter at Greensboro’s Kress store (now K-Mart).

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On February 1, 1960, four African American college students sat down at a lunch counter at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, and politely asked for service. Their request was refused. When asked to leave, they remained in their seats. Their passive resistance and peaceful sit-down demand helped ignite a youth-led movement to challenge racial inequality throughout the South.

In Greensboro, hundreds of students, civil rights organizations, churches, and members of the community joined in a six-month-long protest. Their commitment ultimately led to the desegregation of the F. W. Woolworth lunch counter on July 25, 1960. Ezell A. Blair, Jr, Franklin E. McCain, Joseph A. McNeil, and David L. Richmond leave the Woolworth store after the first sit-in on February 1, 1960. On the second day of the Greensboro sit-in, Joseph A. McNeil and Franklin E. McCain are joined by William Smith and Clarence Henderson at the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina.