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The Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s became one of the most significant chapters in America’s history, striving to end segregation and discrimination against African Americans. This movement arose as a response to the injustices that African Americans experienced daily, particularly in the southern states, where Jim Crow laws enforced segregation and denied Black people access to basic rights in areas like education, employment, housing, and voting. While the fight for equality had been ongoing since the end of slavery, World War II marked a new chapter. Many Black veterans returned home with a stronger resolve to demand the rights they’d fought for abroad.The movement’s key goal was to challenge and dismantle unjust laws and segregation through peaceful protests and legal action. Figures such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Malcolm X became leaders, along with groups like the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Activists used a variety of methods—including boycotts, sit-ins, marches, and court cases—to capture attention and drive change.The movement tackled issues like unequal voting rights, racial violence, segregation in schools and public spaces, and workplace discrimination. Key achievements included the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which ended segregation in public schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination on multiple fronts; and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which sought to protect African Americans’ voting rights. These accomplishments made profound progress toward justice and equality, leaving a legacy that would inspire social justice movements worldwide.

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American civil rights movement, mass protest movement against racial segregation and discrimination in the southern United States that came to national prominence during the mid-1950s. This movement had its roots in the centuries-long efforts of enslaved Africans and their descendants to resist racial oppression and abolish the institution of slavery. Although enslaved people were emancipated as a result of the American Civil War and were then granted basic civil rights through the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, struggles to secure federal protection of these rights continued during the next century. Through nonviolent protest, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s broke the pattern of public facilities' being segregated by "race" in the South and achieved the most important breakthrough in equal-rights legislation for African Americans since the Reconstruction period (1865-77). Although the passage in 1964 and 1965 of major civil rights legislation was victorious for the movement, by then militant Black activists had begun to see their struggle as a freedom or liberation movement not just seeking civil rights reforms but instead confronting the enduring economic, political, and cultural consequences of past racial oppression.
(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Britannica essay on "Monuments of Hope.")

Abolitionism to Jim Crow

American history has been marked by persistent and determined efforts to expand the scope and inclusiveness of civil rights. Although equal rights for all were affirmed in the founding documents of the United States, many of the new country's inhabitants were denied essential rights. Enslaved Africans and indentured servants did not have the inalienable right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" that British colonists asserted to justify their Declaration of Independence. Nor were they included among the "People of the United States" who established the Constitution in order to "promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." Instead, the Constitution protected slavery by allowing the importation of enslaved persons until 1808 and providing for the return of enslaved people who had escaped to other states.

As the United States expanded its boundaries, Native American peoples resisted conquest and absorption. Individual states, which determined most of the rights of American citizens, generally limited voting rights to white property-owning males, and other rights-such as the right to own land or serve on juries-were often denied on the basis of racial or gender distinctions. A small proportion of Black Americans lived outside the slave system, but those so-called "free Blacks" endured racial discrimination and enforced segregation. Although some enslaved persons violently rebelled against their enslavement ( see slave rebellions), African Americans and other subordinated groups mainly used nonviolent means-protests, legal challenges, pleas and petitions addressed to government officials, as well as sustained and massive civil rights movements-to achieve gradual improvements in their status.

During the first half of the 19th century, movements to extend voting rights to non-property-owning white male labourers resulted in the elimination of most property qualifications for voting, but this expansion of suffrage was accompanied by brutal suppression of American Indians and increasing restrictions on free Blacks. Owners of enslaved people in the South reacted to the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia by passing laws to discourage antislavery activism and prevent the teaching of enslaved people to read and write. Despite this repression, a growing number of Black Americans freed themselves from slavery by escaping or negotiating agreements to purchase their freedom through wage labour. By the 1830s, free Black communities in the Northern states had become sufficiently large and organized to hold regular national conventions, where Black leaders gathered to discuss alternative strategies of racial advancement. In 1833 a small minority of whites joined with Black antislavery activists to form the American Anti-Slavery Society under the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison.

Frederick Douglass became the most famous of the formerly enslaved persons who joined the abolition movement. His autobiography-one of many slave narratives-and his stirring orations heightened public awareness of the horrors of slavery. Although Black leaders became increasingly militant in their attacks against slavery and other forms of racial oppression, their efforts to secure equal rights received a major setback in 1857, when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected African American citizenship claims. The Dred Scott decision stated that the country's founders had viewed Blacks as so inferior that they had "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." This ruling-by declaring unconstitutional the Missouri Compromise (1820), through which Congress had limited the expansion of slavery into western territories-ironically strengthened the antislavery movement, because it angered many whites who did not hold enslaved people. The inability of the country's political leaders to resolve that dispute fueled the successful presidential campaign of Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the antislavery Republican Party. Lincoln's victory in turn prompted the Southern slave states to secede and form the Confederate States of America in 1860-61.

Although Lincoln did not initially seek to abolish slavery, his determination to punish the rebellious states and his increasing reliance on Black soldiers in the Union army prompted him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) to deprive the Confederacy of its enslaved property. After the American Civil War ended, Republican leaders cemented the Union victory by gaining the ratification of constitutional amendments to abolish slavery ( Thirteenth Amendment) and to protect the legal equality of formerly enslaved persons ( Fourteenth Amendment) and the voting rights of male ex-slaves ( Fifteenth Amendment). Despite those constitutional guarantees of rights, almost a century of civil rights agitation and litigation would be required to bring about consistent federal enforcement of those rights in the former Confederate states. Moreover, after federal military forces were removed from the South at the end of Reconstruction, white leaders in the region enacted new laws to strengthen the " Jim Crow" system of racial segregation and discrimination. In its Plessy v. Ferguson decision (1896), the Supreme Court ruled that " separate but equal" facilities for African Americans did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, ignoring evidence that the facilities for Blacks were inferior to those intended for whites.

The Southern system of white supremacy was accompanied by the expansion of European and American imperial control over nonwhite people in Africa and Asia as well as in island countries of the Pacific and Caribbean regions. Like African Americans, most nonwhite people throughout the world were colonized or economically exploited and denied basic rights, such as the right to vote. With few exceptions, women of all races everywhere were also denied suffrage rights ( see woman suffrage).

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American civil rights movement | Definition, Protests, Activists, & Facts

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American civil rights movement, mass protest against racial segregation and discrimination in the southern U.S. that came to national prominence during the mid-1950s. Its roots were in the centuries-long efforts of enslaved Africans and their descendants to abolish slavery and resist racial oppression.

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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The Museum and the Library of Congress have produced an invaluable look at the Civil Rights Movement through the Civil Rights History Project (CRHP).

Over the course of five years, the personal histories and testimonials of unsung activists of the 1950s and 1960s, were captured, and now, this unique collection of stories is available to all.

The CHRP provides faces and voices to many of the previously unknown individuals who made valuable contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. These members of The Freedom Movement were committed to eliminating racial segregation and inequality in the United States, sometimes at a great cost to themselves, their families, and their community. By organizing voter registration drives, providing, housing, food, and money among many other duties, they worked to transform America and make it a better place. These interviews bear witness to those efforts.

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The Museum and the Library of Congress have produced an invaluable look at the Civil Rights Movement through the Civil Rights History Project (CRHP). Over the course of five years, the personal histories and testimonials of unsung activists of the 1950s and 1960s, were captured, and now, this unique collection of stories is available to all.

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Frederick Douglass: This man went from being an enslaved individual to rising in position and authority, becoming one of the strongest voices for the abolitionist movement. Freedom came for him in 1838. Using his writing and speaking capabilities, he showed most poignantly the brutal truths of the farce known as slavery, which compelled the kindling of interest for the abolitionist cause in most. During the Civil War, Douglass urged Black soldiers to join the Union Army, often counseling President Lincoln on how to make abolition a war goal. His work brought foundation stones for both the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement and the struggle for racial equality in America.

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Frederick Douglass
Library of Congress

From the Peninsula to Maryland: Douglass' role in the summer of 1862

Frederick Douglass was born into a life of slavery on Maryland's Eastern Shore as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in February, 1818. He was mistakenly taught to ready at an early age, and by his mid-teens was educating other slaves.

After one failed escape attempt at age 15, Douglass escaped to New York on September 3, 1838, where he declared himself a free man and turned his efforts to helping those still held in bondage. As an anti-slavery speaker, he caught the attention of William Lloyd Garrison, one of America's most prominent abolitionists, who soon had Douglass touring the country speaking against slavery on behalf of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.

Douglass was such an impressive speaker that many people doubted he was truly a fugitive slave. Douglass responded with his first autobiography, the wildly successful The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in which he revealed his original name, his owner's names, and where he was born. However, with his identity known and in danger of being returned to slavery, he fled to Great Britain.

Douglass so impressed his supporters in Britain that they purchased his freedom, allowing him to return to the United States two years later a legally free man. He settled in Rochester, New York, where he bought a printing press and began publishing The North Star, which became the nation's preeminent anti-slavery newspaper.

In 1861 tensions over slavery erupted into civil war, which Douglass argued was about more than union and state's rights. He saw the conflict as the seismic event needed to end slavery in America. Douglass knew that this new freedom had to be won both on and off the battlefield. He recruited African Americans to fight in the Union army, including two of his sons, and he continued to write and speak against slavery, arguing for a higher purpose to the war. He met with Abraham Lincoln to advocate for African American troops and to encourage Lincoln to see the war as a chance to transform the war aims to include emancipation of the nation's four million slaves.

Following the end of the Civil War, Douglass moved from Rochester to Washington, D.C., eventually buying his home at Cedar Hill. He served as the U.S. Marshall for the District of Columbia, the District's Registrar of Deeds, and the U.S. Minister to Haiti and Charge d'Affairs to the Dominican Republic, and he continued to work to expand civil rights in the United States country until his death in 1895.

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Frederick Douglass and the Civil War (U.S. National Park Service)

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From the Peninsula to Maryland: Douglass' role in the summer of 1862 Frederick Douglass was born into a life of slavery on Maryland's Eastern Shore as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in February, 1818. He was mistakenly taught to ready at an early age, and by his mid-teens was educating other slaves.

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The passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865 met the key goals of the Civil War and the abolitionist movement, being the end of slavery. This constituted a monumental success with the legal dissolution of the institution of slavery within the United States-a very important step toward racial equality. Yet, there were major limitations to the movement as true equality far from materialized. Though slavery was now ended, discrimination, disenfranchisement, and segregation would continue legally through so-called Jim Crow laws for nearly a century beyond this war. The battle for civil rights was far from over.

Then again, the abolitionist movement provided the mantle upon which the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s stood, focusing on changes regarding racial segregation and inequality. This brought about key policies such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, an endpoint that came from the long arc of struggle for Black equality begun in the abolitionist era.

Today, the legacy of the movement is observed in continued discussions of racial justice, equality, and systemic reform in the U.S. Besides, it influenced the cultural narrative on inspiring art, literature, and education pertaining to freedom, resilience, and justice. Movements like Black Lives Matter today are informed by the abolitionists' struggle against systemic oppression and carry on with the work of social and racial equity. The continuing consciousness of the abolitionist era has meant that human rights and anti-racism are perennial concerns in American society.

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Epilogue - The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom | Exhibitions - Library of Congress

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The Civil Rights Act of 1964 hastened the end of legal Jim Crow. The civil rights struggle served as a blueprint and inspiration for many other groups seeking equality and access. The act and its enforcement continue to prompt new debates about what equality means, what government can do to promote it, and how ordinary Americans can continue to achieve it.