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When Kennedy was elected he chose to eliminate racial discrimination.

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"The active, professed refusal to obey certain laws, demands, and commands of a government, or of an occupying international power."

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"...the practice of restricting people to certain circumscribed areas of residence or to separate institutions..."
(Source: "Encyclopedia Britannica")

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Before the Civil Rights Movement, The Jim Crow was a huge effect to Africans-Americans because due to the racial segregation. That's how the whole Civil rights started

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Civil Rights Movement_ An Overview _ Scholastic

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The civil rights movement ended when Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed, and the days that followed when the struggle ended.

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I Have a Dream Speech (Original Document)

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I Have a Dream Speech (Original Document)

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(source: archives.gov)

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On December 1st, 1955, an African American woman named Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to go to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

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The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

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A silly question, right? I thought so, too, until I learned that in the year 2010, only 2 percent of 12th graders received full credit in identifying the following quote on the National Assessment of Educational Progress U.S. History Exam: " ... Separate education facilities are inherently unequal." The 12,000 students tested didn't need to come up with the name Brown v. Board of Education, mind you - just know it had something to do with 1.) segregation 2.) in the nation's schools - yet a stunning 73 percent either skipped it or received an "inappropriate" score.

"What's going on?" I asked myself, thinking about the refrain of Marvin Gaye's canonical song that captured so brilliantly the sense of frustration and angst that so many of us felt in those years following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as the Black Panthers and the Cultural Nationalists seemed to be doing their best to annihilate each other, while the FBI was doing its best to annihilate them both!

Brown v. Board of Education was not only a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case for black people; it's arguably the most important case in American legal history and one that, more than any other, affected all Americans by making de jure segregation illegal, and integration the goal of our ever more multicultural society.

Like I said, I had no idea (or had I wished it away?), until Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, reminded an audience on Martha's Vineyard two weeks ago of a report that the Southern Poverty Law Center had issued in 2011. Its title: Teaching the Movement: The State of Civil Rights Education in the United States Since 2011. I can boil its 108 pages of solid facts down to one sentence: The situation is "dismal." The American school system is inexcusably treating the civil rights movement, essentially, as if it never happened, part of a collective, general amnesia about African-American history as a whole. And we cannot allow this to continue.

This month, countless Americans will gather in front of televisions and computer screens across the land - or even go to the Mall - to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the emotional highpoint of the civil rights movement, the March on Washington. Yet as the SPLC's report reveals, where it really matters, where it counts most, in our nation's public schools, far too many educators (and curriculum writers) view the movement "mainly as African-American or regional history." In other words, while we may pause - some of us even weep - in claiming the "I Have a Dream" speech (pdf) Martin Luther King Jr. delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963 as our speech, one of the greatest in our history, what's really going on is that those overseeing the education of the next generation of dreamers conceive of the civil rights movement as niche history. They see it as being for and about black people, who, for the most part, reside in cities and/or in the South. As some of them might say: Aren't MLK Day and Black History Month enough?

Why are the schools so important in preserving the historical memory of crucial events in black history, such as the march? Because it is in our schools that we shape, almost unconsciously, the shared sense of identity that makes us all citizens of a common republic. It is in the schools, from kindergarten on, that students imbibe the stories that the country tells itself about itself, about its history, its purpose, its raison d'être.

Want a meaningful "conversation about race"? That conversation, to be effective and to last, to become part of the fabric of the national American narrative, must start in elementary school, and continue all the way through graduation from high school. It must do this in the same way that the story of the Mayflower, the Pilgrims, the Puritans, the " City Upon a Hill" and the key, shaping stories and myths about ourselves that each American shares at the deepest level about what America is, was and continues to mean, was formulated for us through the school curriculum - from classroom content to participation in rituals such as reciting daily the Pledge of Allegiance and singing "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." Unless our story becomes part and parcel of the common content of these rituals and teaching lessons, the stories of black ancestors' sacrifices and accomplishments will not become part of the national narrative, not part of that "more perfect union."

The Southern Poverty Law Center's Report

Sensing the urgency of this crisis, the SPLC took a three-step approach in reviewing all 50 states' standards for the school year 2011-2012. Through its Teaching Tolerance project, it established a benchmark for the "generally accepted core knowledge" any student should have about the civil rights movement, based on leading textbooks and historians. It scored each state with a letter grade, A through F. And it compared them. Let's just say that the students who missed the Brown quote in 2010 weren't alone.

While I hope all concerned will read the report's thorough breakdown (especially of your state), here's a top view: A whopping 35 states received an F grade, which, according to the report, means they cover "less than 20 percent - or, in many cases none - of the recommended content." In fact, 16 states require nothing "at all." Check out the report (pdf) to see which ones.

As of 2011-2012, only 19 states specifically require teaching Brown v. Board of Education, while 18 states require coverage of MLK; 12, Rosa Parks; 11, the March on Washington; and six, Jim Crow segregation policies. It gets better, though, right? Actually, only three states in the report earned an A grade - Alabama (70 percent), New York (65 percent) and Florida (64 percent). Three other states, Georgia, Illinois and South Carolina, received B's. And there were six C's handed out (Lousiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia) and three D's (Arizona, Arkansas, Massachusetts), which was also the score Washington, D.C., the site of the March, received. Want an even bigger shock? Nine out of the 12 highest scorers were former Confederate states; the other three, Illinois, New York and Maryland, have large black populations.

Going behind the numbers, we learn that, as of 2011-2012, only 19 states specifically require teaching Brown v. Board of Education, while 18 states require coverage of MLK; 12, Rosa Parks; 11, the March on Washington; and six, Jim Crow segregation policies. Only one, Arkansas, covers one of the chief obstacles to the civil rights movement: the Ku Klux Klan. Yet open up a recent American newspaper and you'll see that some states are actually clamoring for change in the opposite direction. In 2010, according to the New York Times,the Texas Board of Education voted in edits to its history textbooks that promoted a decidedly more Christian view of the nation's founders (none of whom owned slaves, right?) while playing up the Black Panthers' "violent philosophy" and emphasizing Republicans' role in voting for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. If it gets its way, the Tea Party in Tennessee will do much of the same, apparently, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Whatever the reason for the SPLC's findings - not enough instructional time because of No Child Left Behind, poor teacher preparation in schools of education or too low expectations - the civil rights movement and, more generally, African-American history, are being left out, and it's not only black students who are suffering. You can't have a "conversation about race" only among black people! This is American history, after all.

While I commend states like New Jersey, New York and Illinois for passing legislation establishing Amistad Commissions to ensure the interweaving of black history throughout their social studies curriculums, I must also note that other cities, like Philadelphia (pdf) and Chicago, feel they have no better option than to mandate stand-alone courses for their high school students. I wish more school systems would offer the same, just as we do in college.

And while these are very positive steps - most of us, after all, learned African-American history in these sort of classes - not even separate stand-alone courses can have the larger and more lasting effect of integrating and interweaving our ancestors' stories into the common core of knowledge that every school child imbibes from the very first day of kindergarten. Teaching naturalizes history; the content that is taught in our schools makes knowledge second nature. And until the contributions of African Americans become second-nature to all American school children, desperate calls for one more "conversation about race" are destined to repeat themselves, in an endless cycle, following the next race-based hate crime.

"This will be the day," Dr. King dreamed 50 years ago this August, "when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, 'My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.' " Dr. King was a careful student of history, keenly aware of the presence of the past in the present. (I think part of his strength as a leader of the movement was the depth of the historical knowledge he brought to the task of slaying Jim Crow.) Yet how many school students today could even name the tune to which he was referring, or sing its words, let alone place it in context or communicate the power behind Marian Anderson's decision to change "of thee I sing" to "of thee we sing," when she sang it so defiantly during her 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial, after the Daughters of the American Revolution had refused her manager's request to have her perform at Constitution Hall?

It's not enough to spotlight one leader's clarion call for moral action at one moment in history - however magical - because the nature of the movement today, and the nature of the problems confronting the black community (and therefore America) today, are so much more complex than they were even then.

It's a small example, I know, but shared knowledge like this is what I mean when I refer to the "common culture" that Americans should share, and which public schooling forges. And that is where "the content of the character" (to paraphrase Dr. King) of black history is being left out of the schools, and therefore of our larger society. For what place is "race" currently given in the curriculum, except for the acknowledgement of Kwanzaa (an African-American invention by Maulana Karenga) and homages to heroes such as Dr. King on his birthday and Rosa Parks during Black History Month?

Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the March

Like just about everybody else in America at the time, I watched Dr. King give his "Dream" speech on a black-and-white television set, sitting with my mother and father in our living room, back home in West Virginia. I'll commemorate the 50th anniversary by participating in a march on August 24. And this August 28, I plan on listening to it again, which I can't seem to do without tearing up.

But listening to Dr. King's mellifluous tones isn't enough. It's not enough to spotlight one leader's clarion call for moral action at one moment in history - however magical - because the nature of the movement today, and the nature of the problems confronting the black community (and therefore America) today, are so much more complex than they were even then.

The civil rights movement was, as the SPLC reminds us, a series of events, leaders, groups, strategies and tactics, legislative acts, court cases and obstacles overcome - through decades in numerous jurisdictions - which was why Dr. King was so insistent on beginning his "Dream" speech with a reference to history. In his case, it was the history that had begun in Washington, at the Executive Mansion, with President Abraham Lincoln's execution of the Emancipation Proclamation 100 years before King arrived at the podium. "Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation," Dr. King reminded his listeners, only to add, "But 100 years later, the Negro still is not free."

Basic Literacy About the Negro

In conceiving of this series, a tribute to the black journalist Joel A. Rogers, a witness to the civil rights movement who died in 1966 at age 85, I had no intention of covering the most outdated of his 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro, curious "facts" such as these:

No. 1: "The white population of New York is a third more illiterate than the Negro one."

No. 19: "The peoples of Southern Europe, including Italy, and most of those of Eastern Europe, including Russia, are more illiterate than the Negroes of the United States. In seventy years Negro illiteracy has fallen off about 80 percent. In 1870 it was 82 per cent; in 1930, 16.3."

No. 20: Though "Aframerican illiteracy [sic] is three times higher than the white one," New York, Minnesota, Oregon and South Dakota "Negroes are less illiterate than Mississippi Whites." And when you throw in California, Nevada and Washington; they're "less illiterate by 100 to 400 per cent than the foreign-born Whites of all the States, save one." And -

No. 21: "In the United States Army Intelligence tests during World War I, the Negroes of [Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, and Ohio] led the Whites of [Mississippi, Kentucky, Arkansas and Georgia] by from one to seven per cent."

I understood Rogers' pre- Brown v. Board of Ed. reasons, of course, to prove with facts that African Americans were worthy of equal citizenship rights, but to me they no longer seemed relevant to readers in our time, especially when we now have an African-American former Constitution law professor sitting in the White House with degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law School. But now I know there is a different burden to shoulder, a relevancy to convey with no less urgency: basic literacy for all Americans about a truly American history, reflecting its various intellectual complexions.

I know - math and science education is critical if we are going to compete with other advancing nations. But, remember, America isn't exceptional only because of its capacity to lead the free world, but because it was conceived as an experiment meant to prove that ordinary people could govern themselves. At least that's what I learned in school, and a similar spirit animated the broader civil rights movement itself five decades ago, as ordinary black and white citizens of goodwill struggled together to extend the founders' aspiration to the descendants of their slaves - and, through them, to all people, "through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall," as President Obama summed it up in his second inaugural address.

Just ask anyone fighting for marriage equality today and, chances are, he or she will know something of the significance of Brown v. Board of Education. While I applaud California for becoming the first state to mandate the teaching of LGBT history in its schools, I also hope it and the 34 other states that received F's in the SPLC study will redouble their efforts to narrow the gap between the suggestions they make and the requirements they implement for teaching the civil rights movement that has inspired so many others.

In this 50th anniversary season of the assassination of Medgar Evers, the March on Washington and the Birmingham Four, I will try to contribute to this basic literacy in my next two columns: the first on the march's organizing genius, Bayard Rustin, a man who straddles both black and LGBT history, and the second on the "Dream" speech itself and its historical setting, the Lincoln Memorial.

The March Ahead

Want to honor the people who gave their lives and risked so much during the movement? Ask your school leaders to improve their design for teaching the history of the civil rights movement and for interweaving the sweep of African-American history into your child's social studies curriculum. If that history teaches us anything, it is that it takes a movement to "bend" "the arc of the moral universe ... toward justice." And to appreciate everything about that quote, you'd have to have taken a history class or read a history book (or at least clicked around online) and imagined it applying to past, present and future causes. I'm certain that's what Dr. King did in riffing off the 19th-century abolitionist Theodore Parker, and what we can do by teaching our kids about the movements both men helped lead, the movements that were bigger than them or any individuals - so big, in fact, they encompassed a nation and, in the face of violence and fear, summoned its "better angels" for a better future.
Fifty of the 100 Amazing Facts will be published on The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross website. Read all 100 Facts on The Root.

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What was the Civil Rights Movement? Many Students Don't Know | African American History Blog | The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

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A silly question, right? I thought so, too, until I learned that in the year 2010, only 2 percent of 12th graders received full credit in identifying the following quote on the National Assessment of Educational Progress U.S. History Exam: " ... Separate education facilities are inherently unequal."

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Literacy Basics of African-American During the Civil Rights Movements

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Literacy Basics of African-American During the Civil Rights Movements

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A tribute to the black journalist Joel A. Rogers
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“The white population of New York is a third more illiterate than the Negro one.”

“In the United States Army Intelligence tests during World War I, the Negroes of Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, and Ohio led the Whites of Mississippi, Kentucky, Arkansas and Georgia by from one to seven per cent.”

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In the beginning of 20th century "Negros" were banned in school, parks, waiting room,rest rooms, hospital and more.

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by James T. Patterson

From the earliest years of European settlement in North America, whites enslaved and oppressed black people. Although the Civil War finally brought about the abolition of slavery, a harsh system of white supremacy persisted thereafter. In the early twentieth century, African Americans in the South and in many parts of nearby border states were banned from associating with whites in a host of institutions and public accommodations-schools, hospitals, old folks' homes, rest rooms, waiting rooms, railroad cars, hotels, restaurants, lunch counters, parks and beaches, swimming pools, libraries, concert halls, and movie theaters. Some recreational areas posted signs, "Negroes and Dogs Not Allowed." Racial discrimination deprived Southern blacks of decent jobs and schools and of elementary rights of citizenship, including voting. White intimidation and violence, including lynching, remained an ever-present threat. Outside of the South, blacks had legal rights, but they suffered from widespread discrimination and from de facto residential and school segregation.

Black and white liberal reformers struggled to ameliorate these oppressive practices, forming groups like the NAACP in 1909 and the National Urban League in 1911. South Carolina's Septima Clark established Citizenship Schools for civil rights across the South, and North Carolina's Ella Baker worked to improve conditions in the South. Their efforts remind us that civil rights activism has a considerable history predating the 1940s and that it featured largely unsung grassroots workers.

The 1940s brought renewed efforts, however. In 1941, A. Philip Randolph threatened to stage an all-black March on Washington unless President Franklin D. Roosevelt acted to end racial discrimination in employment and racial segregation of the armed forces. Roosevelt agreed to a Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to investigate employment practices. Although the FEPC had no real power, Randolph's highly visible advocacy of large-scale, direct-action protest was a sign of militant tactics to come.

Other developments of the war years promoted pressure for civil rights. One was massive movement of black Americans out of the rural South in order to take defense-related jobs in northern and western cities. This migration continued in the 1950s and 1960s, and greatly increased black voting strength and the potential for black community organization. Black soldiers, serving abroad in World War II, witnessed a less oppressive world of race relations than they had known in the South. Many returned home determined to fight racism.

After the war, civil rights advocates welcomed further signs of liberal change. President Harry S. Truman, waging a Cold War against Communism, recognized that racism at home contradicted American claims to lead the "free world" against oppression. Hoping to woo black votes in the 1948 election, Truman ordered the desegregation of the armed forces and called for federal laws to advance civil rights. Congress rejected his appeals for legislation, but Truman's moves were noteworthy: No American president since Reconstruction had made such an effort.

Activists operated on the local, grassroots level as well, pressing for an end to school segregation. These bold protestors risked not only their jobs but also their lives. Homes and churches were burned, and attempts were made to kill African American organizers. Often the goal was equality between black and white schools, rather than racial integration, for many blacks were anxious to maintain their own black-run schools. By 1950, the NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund, led by Thurgood Marshall, decided to battle racial segregation through the courts. The Fund's efforts led to the landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Marshall exclaimed after the decision, "I was so happy I was numb."

Many historians have identified the Brown case as the pivotal moment in the history of American race relations and the beginning of a broad civil rights movement that escalated in the 1960s. In December 1955, grassroots activists in Montgomery, Alabama-NAACP members E. D. Nixon and Rosa Parks chief among them-sparked what soon became a large-scale boycott of buses and of white-owned businesses in Montgomery. The boycott began after a white bus driver had Parks arrested for refusing to obey rules that required blacks to move to the back of buses when no seats were available for whites. The Montgomery movement catapulted the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. to leadership in the Civil Rights Movement. By 1957, King had created his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to carry on the struggle.

Two visible developments in 1957 also encouraged advocates of civil rights. One was passage of a Civil Rights Act, the first to be approved by Congress since Reconstruction. It created a Civil Rights Division within the Department of Justice as well as a federal Civil Rights Commission that was authorized to investigate racial problems and recommend solutions. The other was President Dwight D. Eisenhower's decision, arrived at reluctantly, to send federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, in order to establish order and enforce a token desegregation plan admitting nine black students to the city's all-white Central High School.

Yet segregated social patterns did not vanish. The Court's ruling that "all deliberate speed" should be used to enforce the Brown decision offered little guidance to federal courts in the South and encouraged white opponents of desegregation to develop delaying tactics. In 1964, ten years after Brown, only one percent of southern black children attended public schools with whites.

Escalating white violence in the South disheartened proponents of racial justice during the 1950s. Many black people, especially young people, became impatient with the slow process of legal cases. To them, the federal government was both remote and unhelpful, and organizations like the NAACP seemed too legalistic and conservative. Local people, they decided, must take direct action to change racial patterns in their communities. Beginning in February 1960, with the Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-ins at the Woolworth lunch counter, the sit-in tactics spread like wildfire throughout the South. These tactics initiated the most powerful phase of America's Civil Rights Movement, which peaked over the next five tumultuous years. The restless young people had been essentially correct: Direct-action protest, especially if it provoked violence by white extremists, was the most productive means of civil rights activity.

The shift in tactics revived older civil rights organizations like the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and prompted the formation of new ones such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), all dedicated to direct action such as sit-ins and demonstrations. By May 1961, the first interracial freedom rides from Washington, DC, to New Orleans were underway, designed to force southern officials to honor a recent Supreme Court decision that had called for the ending of racial segregation in interstate bus terminals. Violence quickly followed, as one bus was firebombed in Alabama and its riders were injured. The Kennedy administration sent federal marshals to Alabama to restore order, but the bloodshed did not end until the governor, anxious to rid his state of both the freedom riders and the federal marshals, brought in state troops to end the fighting. Attorney General Robert Kennedy then struck a deal with Mississippi officials that resulted in the riders being arrested (without violence) in Jackson, the next stop.

These bloody confrontations attracted considerable public attention. They also revealed that the Kennedy administration, concerned mainly with Cold War issues, was reluctant to jeopardize its political strength among whites in the South and southerners in the Congress. Kennedy was slow to recognize the moral passion of civil rights demonstrators or to employ force in order to stem the implacable resistance and rage of many southern white people, police, and politicians. It took two deaths and almost 400 injuries at Ole Miss before Kennedy sent in federal marshals to end the violence on the campus.

In early 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. organized protests in Birmingham, Alabama. Eugene "Bull" Connor, the local police chief, ordered his men to fire blasts of water against demonstrators and unleashed vicious dogs on the resisters. Television captured a host of striking scenes, some of them showing assaults and arrests of black children, and relayed those images to a stunned national audience. As a result, many northerners became aware of the plight of African Americans in the South. As much as any single event in the history of the modern Civil Rights Movement, the violence of whites in Birmingham forced the American people to consider serious federal action promoting civil rights.

In June 1963, following Alabama Governor George Wallace's show of resistance to desegregation of the state university, Kennedy addressed a national television audience to call for a federal civil rights law, which would mainly prohibit racial segregation in public accommodations. Only a few hours later, the widely respected Mississippi NAACP activist Medgar Evers was killed.

When Kennedy was assassinated in November, his civil rights bill seemed stalled on Capitol Hill. But Lyndon Johnson of Texas, who succeeded Kennedy in the White House, proved to be both a masterful strategist and a dedicated champion of a strong bill. In June 1964, President Johnson signed into law a bill that not only included a job-discrimination title but also authorized creation of a new agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Though school segregation remained pervasive until the early 1970s, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a landmark measure by any standard, ending segregation in a host of public accommodations.

Civil rights activists now turned to voting rights as a goal. Their Freedom Summer in Mississippi brought some 700 volunteers to the state to promote citizenship-training workshops and voter registration. When two white workers, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, and one black volunteer, James Chaney, were killed, the FBI reluctantly infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan and ultimately cracked the case.

The focus on voting rights in Selma, Alabama, led to further attacks on civil rights activists in 1965. The violence against the men and women who joined the fifty-mile march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery was widely televised and President Johnson won increased support for strong reforms. That August, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act. A high point of the Civil Rights Movement, the law supplemented the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and further guaranteed black legal equality. Passage of the law also encouraged Johnson, King, and other advocates to think seriously about tackling other pressing issues-notably of social and economic inequality-that badly divided Americans along racial lines. But support for federal social programs did not prove as strong as Johnson had hoped.

By 1965, the Civil Rights Movement was growing fragmented, less interracial, and less committed to nonviolence. Only five days after LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act, looting and burning began in the black neighborhood of Los Angeles known as Watts. Other urban riots followed. These outbreaks exposed the rage of blacks outside the South, but many Americans were appalled by them, blaming them on lawless radicals and revolutionaries. Equally harmful to the movement was its rapid splintering along racial lines. In 1966, black militants, led by Stokely Carmichael, advanced calls for Black Power. "The only way we gonna stop them white men from whippin' us," Carmichael insisted, "is to take over." Carmichael and others soon forced whites from positions of responsibility in CORE and SNCC. They also distanced themselves from the emphasis on nonviolence that King had championed. New groups, notably the Black Panthers, adopted militaristic poses that alarmed whites. Other blacks, including members of the Nation of Islam, rejected integration entirely. The decline of interracialism and the turn away from strict adherence to nonviolence cost CORE and SNCC dearly: No longer did they hold high moral ground. White financial support for these groups, which had been vital, dried up. By 1968, both organizations had collapsed.

The Vietnam War also damaged the political coalition that had enabled the President to secure a host of other landmark legislative victories-Medicare, Medicaid, and federal aid to public education among them-in 1965. Political conservatives, who had been routed by LBJ in the election of 1964, grew increasingly powerful by 1968. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, was another significant blow to the Civil Rights Movement.

Assessing the movement is difficult. It produced unexpected policies, such as the establishment of affirmative action, especially in the areas of employment and higher education admissions. It benefited blacks in other ways, too. As they acquired confidence in their ability to organize and to effect political change, they gained greater pride in their cultural strengths and accomplishments, notably (but not only) in the fields of music, dance, film, and sports. The work of black artists, such as photographer Gordon Parks, painter Jacob Lawrence, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and novelist Toni Morrison, received widespread notice and critical praise. In popular culture-films, television shows, ads-ugly stereotyping of black people and black culture became far less widespread. The movement also helped to increase the numbers and percentages of African Americans in middle-class jobs, and the armed forces took steps to end discriminatory recruitment and promotion procedures and to develop integrated forces.

Yet the Civil Rights Movement did not achieve as much as dreamers had hoped for in the mid-1960s. The desegregation of schools, which moved ahead in the 1970s and 1980s, has fallen back, and gaps in educational test scores between black and white students, always high, have widened. In the early 2000s, rates of poverty and unemployment among African Americans remain roughly twice as high as those of whites. For a variety of reasons, including relatively low levels of access to health care, the longevity of African Americans is less than that of whites. Black median income is approximately 70 percent of white income; black median wealth is a tiny fraction of white wealth. Many black inner-city areas feature very high rates of students dropping out of high school, violent crime, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, family breakups, and drug addiction. Rates of arrests and imprisonment of African American men far exceed those of white men. And the Civil Rights Movement, still suffering from the blows that afflicted it in the late 1960s, lacks power. In 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Johnson hoped that America, having rallied around effective civil rights acts that promoted legal equality, could move on to tackle serious social and economic inequality-but in the early twenty-first century, that goal still seems out of reach.

James T. Patterson is the Ford Foundation Professor of history emeritus at Brown University and the author of Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (1997) and Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1968 (2006).

Suggested Sources

Books and Printed Materials

Parris, Guichard, and Lester Brooks. Blacks in the City: A History of the National Urban League. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971.

Weiss, Nancy J. The National Urban League, 1910-1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

Pfeffer, Paula F. A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990.

On Brown vs. Board of Education and the Eisenhower era:
Ball, Howard. A Defiant Life: Thurgood Marshall and the Persistence of Racism in America. New York: Crown Publishers, 1998.

Burk, Robert Fredrick. The Eisenhower Administration and Black Civil Rights. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984.

Williams, Juan. Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary. New York: Times Books, 1998.

Fairclough, Adam. To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.

Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: W. Morrow, 1986.

Kohl, Herbert R. She Would Not Be Moved: How We Tell the Story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. New York: New Press, 2005.

Peake, Thomas R. Keeping the Dream Alive: A History of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from King to the Nineteen Eighties. New York: P. Lang, 1987.

Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn, ed. A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998.

Meier, August, and Elliott Rudwick. CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942-1968. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975.

Wolff, Miles. Lunch at the Five and Ten, The Greensboro Sit-Ins: A Contemporary History. New York: Stein and Day, 1970.

Zinn, Howard. SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2002.

Brauer, Carl M. John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.

Niven, David. The Politics of Injustice: The Kennedys, the Freedom Rides, and the Electoral Consequences of a Moral Compromise. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003.

Stern, Mark. Calculating Visions: Kennedy, Johnson, and Civil Rights. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992

Cagin, Seth, and Philip Dray. We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi. New York: Macmillan Pub. Co., 1988.

Morris, Willie. The Ghosts of Medgar Evers: A Tale of Race, Murder, Mississippi, and Hollywood. New York: Random House, 1998.

Nossiter, Adam. Of Long Memory: Mississippi and the Murder of Medgar Evers. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994.

Loevy, Robert D., ed. The Civil Rights Act of 1964: The Passage of the Law That Ended Racial Segregation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.

Rosenberg, Jonathan. Kennedy, Johnson, and the Quest for Justice: The Civil Rights Tapes. New York: Norton, 2003.

McWhorter, Diane. Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.

Ogbar, Jeffrey Ogbonna Green. Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

Audiovisual Materials

Walk a Mile in My Shoes: The 90-Year Journey of the NAACP. Videorecording. Co-executive producer/director, Gene A. Davis: co-produced by Gene Davis Group, Inc. & D.R. Lynes, Inc. Morris Plains, NJ: Lucerne Media, 2000.

Thurgood Marshall: Portrait of an American Hero. Videorecording. Columbia Video Productions. Alexandria, VA: PBS Video, 1985.

Internet Resources

Landmark Cases of the U.S. Supreme Court, a project of Street Law, Inc. and the Supreme Court Historical Society, provides extensive materials on Brown v. Board of Education as well as the repercussions of Brown in political cartoons, the Little Rock desegregation crisis, and the success and failures of school desegregation in the fifty years since Brown:
http://www.streetlaw.org//en/Case.6.aspx

The Eisenhower Presidential Library provides materials for classroom use on Brown vs. Board of Education:
http://eisenhower.archives.gov/research/online_documents/civil_rights_brown_v_boe.html

The Kennedy Library and Museum has a website on the integration of "Ole Miss" for classroom use:
http://www.jfklibrary.org/meredith/index.htm

The Johnson Presidential Library provides an educational web component on LBJ for Kids with a section on civil rights issues during the administration of this president:
http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/lbjforkids/civil.shtm

The SNCC 1960-1966 website, part of the ibiblio.org project at the University of North Carolina, has brief articles and links for further exploration of SNCC's short but fascinating history:
http://www.ibiblio.org/sncc/

The PBS Kids website has suggestions for classroom use of the experiences of children who broke the color barrier in desegregating their southern schools in the 1950s and 1960s:
http://pbskids.org/wayback/civilrights/tp.html

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The Civil Rights Movement: Major Events and Legacies

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by James T. Patterson From the earliest years of European settlement in North America, whites enslaved and oppressed black people. Although the Civil War finally brought about the abolition of slavery, a harsh system of white supremacy persisted thereafter.

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Most important case in US legal history. It was landmark U.S. Supreme Court case for black people.