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"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

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Important sections:
Original jurisdictions: Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia. Also, subdivisions, mostly counties, in Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho and North Carolina.

Jurisdictions are made based on a formula containing two elements: If less than 50% of the voting age population is registered to vote by November 1, 1964, or if less that 50% voted in the 1964 presidential election. It also guarantees the right to register and vote to citizens with "limited English proficiency."

Section 2: States the right to vote cannot be denied on the basis of race or color.

Section 3: Upholds the ability to enforce the 15th Amendment.

Section 5: This section "freezes (new) election practices or procedures in certain states until the new procedures have been subjected to review." Review can only be done by the US Attorney General or by filing a lawsuit before the US District Court for the District of Columbia. Yet Section 5 is basically unenforceable as there is no longer a preclearance requirement in Section 4.

Timeline:
March 7, 1965 - Bloody Sunday - About 600 non-violent voting rights marchers heading to Montgomery, Alabama's state capital, are attacked by state troopers in Selma.

March 15, 1965 - President Lyndon Johnson, in a speech before a joint session of Congress says: "There is no constitutional issue here. The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong, deadly wrong, to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country."

August 6, 1965 - Is signed into law by President Johnson to protect and enforce the 15th Amendment.

1970 - Congress extends provisions for five years, changing the formula in Section 4 to reflect 1968 (instead of 1964). Coverage is added in jurisdictions within 10 more states: Alaska, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Idaho, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Wyoming. Connecticut, Idaho, Maine, Massachusetts and Wyoming win "bailout" lawsuits.

1975 - Congress extends provisions for seven years, changes the formula to 1972 and broadens the discrimination description as also encompassing American Indians, Asian Americans, Alaskan Natives or people of Spanish heritage. This addition to the formula essentially covers Alaska, Arizona and Texas, and includes parts of California, Florida, Michigan, New York, North Carolina and South Dakota.

1982 - Congress extends the special provisions in Section 4 for 25 years, but makes no changes.

2006 - Congress renews special provisions and extends the act until 2031.

June 25, 2013 - The US Supreme Court decides (5-4) that formulated jurisdictions under Section 5 no longer have to have new voting laws pre-cleared by the attorney general or the federal district court in the District of Columbia. Chief Justice John Roberts explains that "our country has changed" and the formula "no longer characterize(s) voting in the covered jurisdictions."

February 11, 2015 - An amendment to the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1964 is introduced to the House of Representatives. The Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2015 is focused on updating a portion of the law after the US Supreme Court struck down an "outdated" portion of VRA that protected racial discrimination in voting.

March 7, 2015 - President Barack Obama signs legislation awarding the Congressional Gold Medal "to the Foot Soldiers who participated in the Bloody Sunday, Turnaround Tuesday, or the final Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights March in March of 1965, which served as a catalyst for the Voting Rights Act."

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Important sections: Original jurisdictions: Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia. Also, subdivisions, mostly counties, in Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho and North Carolina. Jurisdictions are made based on a formula containing two elements: If less than 50% of the voting age population is registered to vote by November 1, 1964, or if less that 50% voted in the 1964 presidential election.

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The Civil Rights Act Of 1964 Explained | This Day Forward | msnbc

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The Civil Rights Movement:
1919-1960s

Kenneth R. Janken
Professor, Department of African and Afro-American Studies and
Director of Experiential Education, Office of Undergraduate Curricula
University of North Carolina
National Humanities Center Fellow
©National Humanities Center
Overview
When most Americans think of the Civil Rights Movement, they have in mind a span of time beginning with the 1954 Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed segregated education, or the Montgomery Bus Boycott and culminated in the late 1960s or early 1970s. The movement encompassed both ad hoc local groups and established organizations like the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Despite the fact that they were not always united around strategy and tactics and drew members from different classes and backgrounds, the movement nevertheless cohered around the aim of eliminating the system of Jim Crow segregation and the reform of some of the worst aspects of racism in American institutions and life.
Much of our memory of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s is embodied in dramatic photographs, newsreels, and recorded speeches, which America encountered in daily papers and the nightly news. As the movement rolled across the nation, Americans absorbed images of hopeful, disciplined, and dedicated young people shaping their destinies. They were met with hostility,
federal ambivalence and indifference, as well as mob and police violence. African Americans fought back with direct action protests and keen political organizing, such as voter registration drives and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The crowning achievements were the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The images are alternately angering and inspiring, powerful, iconic even. However, by themselves they cannot tell the history of the Civil Rights Movement. They need to be contextualized.
The drama of the mid-twentieth century emerged on a foundation of earlier struggles. Two are particularly notable: the NAACP's campaign against lynching, and the NAACP's legal campaign against segregated education, which culminated in the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision.

The NAACP's anti-lynching campaign of the 1930s combined widespread publicity about the causes and costs of lynching, a successful drive to defeat Supreme Court nominee John J. Parker for his white supremacist and anti-union views and then defeat senators who voted for confirmation, and a skillful effort to lobby Congress and the Roosevelt administration to pass a federal anti-lynching law. Southern senators filibustered, but they could not prevent the formation of a national consensus against lynching; by 1938 the number of lynchings declined steeply. Other organizations, such as the left-wing National Negro Congress, fought lynching, too, but the NAACP emerged from the campaign as the most influential civil rights organization in national politics and maintained that position through the mid-1950s.
The campaign for desegregated education was part of a larger struggle to reshape the contours of America-in terms of race, but also in the ways political and economic power is exercised in this country. Plans for the legal campaign that culminated with Brown were sketched in 1929 by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Charles Hamilton Houston, the black attorney most responsible for developing the legal theory underpinning Brown, focused on segregated education because he believed that it was the concentrated expression of all the inequalities blacks endured.
Houston was unabashed: lawyers were either social engineers or they were parasites. He desired equal access to education, but he also was concerned with the type of society blacks were trying to integrate. He was among those who surveyed American society and saw racial inequality and the ruling powers that promoted racism to divide black workers from white workers. Because he believed that racial violence in Depression-era America was so pervasive as to make mass direct action untenable, he emphasized the redress of grievances through the courts.

The designers of the Brown strategy developed a potent combination of gradualism in legal matters and advocacy of far-reaching change in other political arenas. Through the 1930s and much of the 1940s, the NAACP initiated suits that dismantled aspects of the edifice of segregated education, each building on the precedent of the previous one. Not until the late 1940s did the NAACP believe it politically feasible to challenge directly the constitutionality of "separate but equal" education itself. Concurrently, civil rights organizations backed efforts to radically alter the balance of power between employers and workers in the United States. They paid special attention to forming an alliance with organized labor, whose history of racial exclusion angered blacks. In the 1930s, the National Negro Congress brought blacks into the newly formed United Steel Workers, and the union paid attention to the particular demands of African Americans. The NAACP assisted the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the largest black labor organization of its day. In the 1940s, the United Auto Workers, with NAACP encouragement, made overtures to black workers. The NAACP's successful fight against the Democratic white primary in the South was more than a bid for inclusion; it was a stiff challenge to what was in fact a regional one-party dictatorship. Recognizing the interdependence of domestic and foreign affairs, the NAACP's program in the 1920s and 1930s promoted solidarity with Haitians who were trying to end the American military occupation and with colonized blacks elsewhere in the Caribbean and in Africa. African Americans' support for WWII and the battle against the Master Race ideology abroad was matched by equal determination to eradicate it in America, too. In the post-war years blacks supported the decolonization of Africa and Asia.
Gradualism was a smart legal strategy, but Charles Houston also knew that it was a mistake to trim political demands to suit the nation's leaders' ideas of propriety. He supported Henry Wallace's Progressive Party presidential bid in 1948. Wallace called racism the nation's and the South's "number one enemy." He promised to defuse the Cold War, promote working class political participation, and limit the influence of corporations in American civil life. Houston saw school desegregation not as an end in itself, not to promote some amorphous "inclusion," but as a major way to revolutionize American society.
The Cold War and McCarthyism put a hold on such expansive conceptions of civil/human rights. Critics of our domestic and foreign policies who exceeded narrowly defined boundaries were labeled un-American and thus sequestered from Americans' consciousness. In a supreme irony, the Supreme Court rendered the Brown decision and then the government suppressed the very critique of American society that animated many of Brown 's architects.

White southern resistance to Brown was formidable and the slow pace of change stimulated impatience especially among younger African Americans as the 1960s began. They concluded that they could not wait for change-they had to make it. And the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted the entire year of 1956, had demonstrated that mass direct action could indeed work. The four college students from Greensboro who sat at the Woolworth lunch counter set off a decade of activity and organizing that would kill Jim Crow.

Elimination of segregation in public accommodations and the removal of "Whites Only" and "Colored Only" signs was no mean feat. Yet from the very first sit-in, Ella Baker, the grassroots leader whose activism dated from the 1930s and who was advisor to the students who founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), pointed out that the struggle was "concerned with something much bigger than a hamburger or even a giant-sized Coke." Far more was at stake for these activists than changing the hearts of whites. When the sit-ins swept Atlanta in 1960, protesters' demands included jobs, health care, reform of the police and criminal justice system, education, and the vote. (See: "An Appeal for Human Rights.") Demonstrations in Birmingham in 1963 under the leadership of Fred Shuttlesworth's Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, which was affiliated with the SCLC, demanded not only an end to segregation in downtown stores but also jobs for African Americans in those businesses and municipal government. The 1963 March on Washington, most often remembered as the event at which Dr. King proclaimed his dream, was a demonstration for "Jobs and Justice."

Movement activists from SNCC and CORE asked sharp questions about the exclusive nature of American democracy and advocated solutions to the disfranchisement and violation of the human rights of African Americans, including Dr. King's nonviolent populism, Robert Williams' "armed self-reliance," and Malcolm X's incisive critiques of worldwide white supremacy, among others. (See: Dr. King, "Where Do We Go from Here?"; Robert F. Williams, "Negroes with Guns"; and Malcolm X, "Not just an American problem, but a world problem.") What they proposed was breathtakingly radical, especially in light of today's political discourse and the simplistic ways it prefers to remember the freedom struggle. King called for a guaranteed annual income, redistribution of the national wealth to meet human needs, and an end to a war to colonize the Vietnamese. Malcolm X proposed to internationalize the black American freedom struggle and to link it with liberation movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Thus the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s was not concerned exclusively with interracial cooperation or segregation and discrimination as a character issue. Rather, as in earlier decades, the prize was a redefinition of American society and a redistribution of social and economic power.

Guiding Student Discussion
Students discussing the Civil Rights Movement will often direct their attention to individuals' motives. For example, they will question whether President Kennedy sincerely believed in racial equality when he supported civil rights or only did so out of political expediency. Or they may ask how whites could be so cruel as to attack peaceful and dignified demonstrators. They may also express awe at Martin Luther King's forbearance and calls for integration while showing discomfort with Black Power's separatism and proclamations of self-defense. But a focus on the character and moral fiber of leading individuals overlooks the movement's attempts to change the ways in which political, social, and economic power are exercised. Leading productive discussions that consider broader issues will likely have to involve debunking some conventional wisdom about the Civil Rights Movement. Guiding students to discuss the extent to which nonviolence and racial integration were considered within the movement to be hallowed goals can lead them to greater insights.

Nonviolence and passive resistance were prominent tactics of protesters and organizations. (See: SNCC Statement of Purpose and Jo Ann Gibson Robinson's memoir, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It.) But they were not the only ones, and the number of protesters who were ideologically committed to them was relatively small. Although the name of one of the important civil rights organizations was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, its members soon concluded that advocating nonviolence as a principle was irrelevant to most African Americans they were trying to reach. Movement participants in Mississippi, for example, did not decide beforehand to engage in violence, but self-defense was simply considered common sense. If some SNCC members in Mississippi were convinced pacifists in the face of escalating violence, they nevertheless enjoyed the protection of local people who shared their goals but were not yet ready to beat their swords into ploughshares.

Armed self-defense had been an essential component of the black freedom struggle, and it was not confined to the fringe. Returning soldiers fought back against white mobs during the Red Summer of 1919. In 1946, World War Two veterans likewise protected black communities in places like Columbia, Tennessee, the site of a bloody race riot. Their self-defense undoubtedly brought national attention to the oppressive conditions of African Americans; the NAACP's nationwide campaign prompted President Truman to appoint a civil rights commission that produced To Secure These Rights, a landmark report that called for the elimination of segregation. Army veteran Robert F. Williams, who was a proponent of what he called "armed self-reliance," headed a thriving branch of the NAACP in Monroe, North Carolina, in the early 1950s. The poet Claude McKay's "If We Must Die" dramatically captures the spirit of self-defense and violence.

Often, deciding whether violence is "good" or "bad," necessary or ill-conceived depends on one's perspective and which point of view runs through history books. Students should be encouraged to consider why activists may have considered violence a necessary part of their work and what role it played in their overall programs. Are violence and nonviolence necessarily antithetical, or can they be complementary? For example the Black Panther Party may be best remembered by images of members clad in leather and carrying rifles, but they also challenged widespread police brutality, advocated reform of the criminal justice system, and established community survival programs, including medical clinics, schools, and their signature breakfast program. One question that can lead to an extended discussion is to ask students what the difference is between people who rioted in the 1960s and advocated violence and the participants in the Boston Tea Party at the outset of the American Revolution. Both groups wanted out from oppression, both saw that violence could be efficacious, and both were excoriated by the rulers of their day. Teachers and students can then explore reasons why those Boston hooligans are celebrated in American history and whether the same standards should be applied to those who used arms in the 1960s.

An important goal of the Civil Rights Movement was the elimination of segregation. But if students, who are now a generation or more removed from Jim Crow, are asked to define segregation, they are likely to point out examples of individual racial separation such as blacks and whites eating at different cafeteria tables and the existence of black and white houses of worship. Like most of our political leaders and public opinion, they place King's injunction to judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin exclusively in the context of personal relationships and interactions. Yet segregation was a social, political, and economic system that placed African Americans in an inferior position, disfranchised them, and was enforced by custom, law, and official and vigilante violence.

The discussion of segregation should be expanded beyond expressions of personal preferences. One way to do this is to distinguish between black and white students hanging out in different parts of a school and a law mandating racially separate schools, or between black and white students eating separately and a laws or customs excluding African Americans from restaurants and other public facilities. Put another way, the civil rights movement was not fought merely to ensure that students of different backgrounds could become acquainted with each other. The goal of an integrated and multicultural America is not achieved simply by proximity. Schools, the economy, and other social institutions needed to be reformed to meet the needs for all. This was the larger and widely understood meaning of the goal of ending Jim Crow, and it is argued forcefully by James Farmer in "Integration or Desegregation."

A guided discussion should point out that many of the approaches to ending segregation did not embrace integration or assimilation, and students should become aware of the appeal of separatism. W. E. B. Du Bois believed in what is today called multiculturalism. But by the mid-1930s he concluded that the Great Depression, virulent racism, and the unreliability of white progressive reformers who had previously expressed sympathy for civil rights rendered an integrated America a distant dream. In an important article, "Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?" Du Bois argued for the strengthening of black pride and the fortification of separate black schools and other important institutions. Black communities across the country were in severe distress; it was counterproductive, he argued, to sacrifice black schoolchildren at the altar of integration and to get them into previously all-white schools, where they would be shunned and worse. It was far better to invest in strengthening black-controlled education to meet black communities' needs. If, in the future, integration became a possibility, African Americans would be positioned to enter that new arrangement on equal terms. Du Bois' argument found echoes in the 1960s writing of Stokely Carmichael ( "Toward Black Liberation") and Malcolm X ( "The Ballot or the Bullet").

Scholars Debate
Any brief discussion of historical literature on the Civil Rights Movement is bound to be incomplete. The books offered-a biography, a study of the black freedom struggle in Memphis, a brief study of the Brown decision, and a debate over the unfolding of the movement-were selected for their accessibility variety, and usefulness to teaching, as well as the soundness of their scholarship.

Walter White: Mr. NAACP, by Kenneth Robert Janken, is a biography of one of the most well known civil rights figure of the first half of the twentieth century. White made a name for himself as the NAACP's risk-taking investigator of lynchings, riots, and other racial violence in the years after World War I. He was a formidable persuader and was influential in the halls of power, counting Eleanor Roosevelt, senators, representatives, cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices, union leaders, Hollywood moguls, and diplomats among his circle of friends. His style of work depended upon rallying enlightened elites, and he favored a placing effort into developing a civil rights bureaucracy over local and mass-oriented organizations. Walter White was an expert in the practice of "brokerage politics": During decades when the majority of African Americans were legally disfranchised, White led the organization that gave them an effective voice, representing them and interpreting their demands and desires (as he understood them) to those in power. Two examples of this were highlighted in the first part of this essay: the anti-lynching crusade, and the lobbying of President Truman, which resulted in To Secure These Rights. A third example is his essential role in producing Marian Anderson's iconic 1939 Easter Sunday concert at the Lincoln Memorial, which drew the avid support of President Roosevelt and members of his administration, the Congress, and the Supreme Court. His style of leadership was, before the emergence of direct mass action in the years after White's death in 1955, the dominant one in the Civil Rights Movement.

There are many excellent books that study the development of the Civil Rights Movement in one locality or state. An excellent addition to the collection of local studies is Battling the Plantation Mentality, by Laurie B. Green, which focuses on Memphis and the surrounding rural areas of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi between the late 1930s and 1968, when Martin Luther King was assassinated there. Like the best of the local studies, this book presents an expanded definition of civil rights that encompasses not only desegregation of public facilities and the attainment of legal rights but also economic and political equality. Central to this were efforts by African Americans to define themselves and shake off the cultural impositions and mores of Jim Crow. During WWII, unionized black men went on strike in the defense industry to upgrade their job classifications. Part of their grievances revolved around wages and working conditions, but black workers took issue, too, with employers' and the government's reasoning that only low status jobs were open to blacks because they were less intelligent and capable. In 1955, six black female employees at a white-owned restaurant objected to the owner's new method of attracting customers as degrading and redolent of the plantation: placing one of them outside dressed as a mammy doll to ring a dinner bell. When the workers tried to walk off the job, the owner had them arrested, which gave rise to local protest. In 1960, black Memphis activists helped support black sharecroppers in surrounding counties who were evicted from their homes when they initiated voter registration drives. The 1968 sanitation workers strike mushroomed into a mass community protest both because of wage issues and the strikers' determination to break the perception of their being dependent, epitomized in their slogan "I Am a Man." This book also shows that not everyone was able to cast off the plantation mentality, as black workers and energetic students at LeMoyne College confronted established black leaders whose positions and status depended on white elites' sufferance.

Brown v. Board of Education: A Brief History with Documents, edited by Waldo E. Martin, Jr., contains an insightful 40-page essay that places both the NAACP's legal strategy and 1954 Brown decision in multiple contexts, including alternate approaches to incorporating African American citizens into the American nation, and the impact of World War II and the Cold War on the road to Brown. The accompanying documents affirm the longstanding black freedom struggle, including demands for integrated schools in Boston in 1849, continuing with protests against the separate but equal ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson of 1896, and important items from the NAACP's cases leading up to Brown. The documents are prefaced by detailed head notes and provocative discussion questions.

Debating the Civil Rights Movement, by Steven F. Lawson and Charles Payne, is likewise focused on instruction and discussion. This essay has largely focused on the development of the Civil Rights Movement from the standpoint of African American resistance to segregation and the formation organizations to fight for racial, economic, social, and political equality. One area it does not explore is how the federal government helped to shape the movement. Steven Lawson traces the federal response to African Americans' demands for civil rights and concludes that it was legislation, judicial decisions, and executive actions between 1945 and 1968 that was most responsible for the nation's advance toward racial equality. Charles Payne vigorously disagrees, focusing instead on the protracted grassroots organizing as the motive force for whatever incomplete change occurred during those years. Each essay runs about forty pages, followed by smart selections of documents that support their cases.

Kenneth R. Janken is Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and Director of Experiential Education, Office of Undergraduate Curricula at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP and Rayford W. Logan and the Dilemma of the African American Intellectual. He was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2000-01.

To cite this essay:
Janken, Kenneth R. "The Civil Rights Movement: 1919-1960s." Freedom's Story, TeacherServe©. National Humanities Center. DATE YOU ACCESSED ESSAY.
<http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/freedom/1917beyond/essays/crm.htm>

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The Civil Rights Movement: 1919-1960s, Freedom's Story, TeacherServe®, National Humanities Center

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The Civil Rights Movement:1919-1960s Kenneth R. Janken Professor, Department of African and Afro-American Studies andDirector of Experiential Education, Office of Undergraduate Curricula University of North Carolina National Humanities Center Fellow ©National Humanities Center Overview When most Americans think of the Civil Rights Movement, they have in mind a span of time beginning with the 1954 Supreme Court's decision in Brown v.

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The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965

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Learn about the civil rights legislation that outlawed discrimination in jobs, education, housing, public accommodations, and voting.

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Civil Rights Movement | Free Middle School Teaching Resources

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The civil rights movement changed America forever. Who were the leaders of the civil rights movement? What were the major events in the movement?

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Davarian L. Baldwin - Trinity College

At the midpoint of the twentieth century, African Americans once again answered the call to transform the world. The social and economic ravages of Jim Crow era racism were all-encompassing and deep-rooted. Yet like a phoenix rising from the ashes of lynch mobs, debt peonage, residential and labor discrimination, and rape, the black freedom movement raised a collective call of "No More"!

The maintenance of white power had been pervasive and even innovative, and hence those fighting to get out from under its veil had to be equally unrelenting and improvisational in strategies and tactics. What is normally understood as the Civil Rights movement was in fact a grand struggle for freedom extending far beyond the valiant aims of legal rights and protection. From direct-action protests and boycotts to armed self-defense, from court cases to popular culture, freedom was in the air in ways that challenged white authority and even contested established black ways of doing things in moments of crisis.

Dixie and Beyond

By the middle of the twentieth century, black people had long endured a physical and social landscape of white supremacy, embedded in policy, social codes, and both intimate and spectacular forms of racial restriction and violence. The social and political order of Jim Crow-the segregation of public facilities-meant schools, modes of transportation, rest rooms, and even gravesites were separate and unequal.

Yet the catch-all phrase "Jim Crow" hardly accounts for the extralegal dictates of black professionals working cotton fields, landholders thrown off their property, black women fending off sexual assault and rape, and the constant threats of public humiliation and the lynch rope. All of these day-to-day constraints were justified by myths about inferior black character and intelligence, reproduced in films, books, radio programs, and magazine ads. Jim Crow violence and racial restriction are often thought be specific to Dixie. However Jim Crow cut across the boundaries of North and South. Between 1940 and 1960 the Great Migration brought over six million African Americans to industrial centers in the urban North and West, where migrants were met with new forms of racial containment. They were often restricted to domestic and retail service work. Those who found industrial employment were kept out of labor unions.

Further, African Americans did not have the freedom to choose where and how to live due to the effects of state-sponsored restrictive covenants-legally binding contracts making it illegal to rent, sell, or lease housing to black people (in some regions it included other "nonwhites"). These restrictions were placed on both private real-estate sales and public housing provisions. Ultimately, the absence of a "free" housing market found black residents earning the lowest wages and paying the highest prices for the worst housing stock.

The crystallization of black ghettos left residents to the politics of gerrymandering. Voting districts cut through black neighborhoods to undermine the possibility of political power. At the same time, neighborhood school districts were redrawn in unorthodox ways so that white students could have the best facilities and keep them all white.

The "Double V"

World War II helped to lift the nation out the Great Depression. Yet African Americans found themselves on the margins of wartime prosperity. Federal defense spending did not desegregate jobs, public housing, or the armed forces. The United States entered the wartime world as the self-professed face of democracy, but African Americans began to make links between Nazi racism, European imperialism, and American white supremacy.

Veteran activist and president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) A. Philip Randolph threatened to lead a 100,000-person March on Washington Movement (MOWM) in November 1941 if wartime production was not desegregated. President Roosevelt responded by signing Executive Order 8802 that summer. This mandate for fair employment did not desegregate the defense industries but did create a Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC). Randolph called off the march, but black activists pressed on.

Two months after the United States entered the war, the African-American Pittsburgh Courier newspaper announced a "Double V" campaign for victory against fascism abroad and racism at home. The emerging black working class grew frustrated with its marginal position in a time of prosperity. Black leaders made considerable strides by employing a largely legal approach. The NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund, whose members included Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley, waged battles against all-white voting primaries (Smith v. Allwright) and segregated transportation (Morgan v. Virginia), housing (Shelley v. Kraemer), and education (Brown v. Board of Education). Yet legal protection was gradual and did not address growing economic concerns.

Across the country black organizations, including the National Negro Congress, the MOWM, and the BCSP joined forces with labor unions and politicians. They fought racism within the labor movement, brought economic concerns to the statehouse, and demanded equal access to New Deal social welfare benefits. At the same time, James Farmer and Bayard Rustin helped form the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1942. CORE used a decentralized and nonviolent, direct-action approach to politics, enacting Freedom Rides in the South to challenge segregated interstate transportation and sit-ins to protest northern discrimination.

President Roosevelt had proclaimed the Four Freedoms (want, fear, worship, and speech) yet black activists made clear that ghettos were in Berlin and also in Boston. Between 1942 and 1945 industrial centers, military camps, and port cities, including Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles, exploded with race riots. Ongoing white civilian, military, and police attempts to constrain black life erupted in violent riots in more than forty cities.

American citizenship provided little security. In 1947 W. E. B. Du Bois placed the grievances of African Americans before the newly formed United Nations in his famous "Appeal to the World" address. The United States held itself up as a beacon in a sea of totalitarianism, and black people seized the opportunity to realign democracy with anti-racism instead of white supremacy.

Cold War Civil Rights

The African-American experience remained a central component of the geopolitical struggle during the Cold War. The Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.) continually challenged America's self-proclaimed "Leader of the Free World" status by highlighting anti-black racism in the United States. In response, the United States both publicly endorsed gradual integration and fostered a stifling climate of anti-communism.

Following Du Bois, singer and activist Paul Robeson signed a U.S.S.R. petition to the United Nations, "We Charge Genocide," documenting a series of human rights abuses against African Americans. Communist activist Claudia Jones organized in Harlem for jobs, housing, and humane immigration policies. Both Robeson's and Du Bois's passports were revoked until 1958 while the Trinidadian Jones was deported to Britain. In the Cold War context, black struggles for freedom were largely denounced as un-American.

The segregation of black children in inferior schools, however, brought special criticism. Worldwide charges of American hypocrisy certainly played some part in the Brown decision. But the climate of anti-communism largely constrained most political battles to the legal arena while displacing the larger calls for freedom that included jobs, housing, land, and wealth. At the same time, courtroom success was quickly followed by waves of "massive resistance" by whites. Less than a year after the Brown decision, fourteen-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till was found murdered in Mississippi's Tallahatchie River. He had been shot and his body mutilated because he allegedly whistled at a white woman. Yet his death was simply the most spectacular manifestation of white terror and racial containment.

White citizens councils organized in Mississippi, using tax dollars from both blacks and whites to support their intimidation and harassment strategies. Southern states shifted the populations of public housing from all-white to all-black and in segregated neighborhoods to stem the tide of Brown. At the same time, federally subsidized suburban developments were built with racial restrictive covenants written into their foundation, helping cement the stark contrast between impoverished "Chocolate Cities" and prosperous "Vanilla Suburbs."

During the Cold War the federal government funded both white prosperity and black containment. Yet African Americans kept on pushing with organized political strategies and social protest movements.

"Nobody Turn Me Around"

At least since Plessy v Ferguson (1896), public transportation was a vital site of struggle over racial justice. Black paying customers were relegated to the back of city buses, and black women in particular endured assault, humiliation, and even gunplay at the hands of white bus drivers and customers. But blacks found ways to respond to the shoving and pushing of white passengers: they boldly sat next to white women, refused to pay fares, and rang the bell for every stop with no one getting off. These subversive acts provided the infrastructure for more formal kinds of political action. As early as 1953, black church and social organizations had organized a bus boycott in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Students at the all-black Alabama State University briefly organized a boycott in the spring of 1954. Then in December 1955, the Women's Political Council in Montgomery, Alabama, seized on the arrest of Rosa Parks to ignite a full-blown, citywide boycott of the buses. This was not even Parks's first violation of racial seating laws. Her calculated act was part of a burgeoning black social protest movement. She was the wife of gun-toting NAACP activist Ray Parks and had been trained in nonviolent direct action. Together they had long fought racial injustices in Alabama.

A one-day boycott of buses turned into a protest that lasted more than one year. The Women's Political Council urged everyone to attend a mass meeting at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to hear the words of a very young and politically ambivalent Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Leaders, including peace activist Bayard Rustin, E. D. Nixon of the BSCP, clergy members, and radical organizer Ella Baker offered key strategies, but the protest's full effect was achieved through the feet and resiliency of riders and fellow travelers, who organized carpools and walked miles to work. Even with threats of job loss and violence, the largely poor black masses effectively crippled a bus system that received 65 percent of its revenue from black riders.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 helped push toward the desegregation of buses all over the South while thrusting King into the rough-and-tumble world of political organizing. Nonviolent direct action had won the day and became the dominant mode of resistance for the movement. Moreover, the boycott took place the same year as the Bandung Conference of newly liberated African and Asian nations, situating Montgomery within a worldwide moment of freedom struggles.

"Flow Like a Mighty River"

In 1957 King was urged to create the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) to help coordinate local efforts among church, student, and community organizations and train them in the strategies of nonviolent protest. While the SCLC worked with all groups, its strategy highlighted a changing tide. The NAACP resented the attention and resources taken away from what it deemed more effective court cases to defend and support protesters.

While Brown had desegregated the schools on the law books, it would take more to make integrated schools a lived reality. In 1957 Arkansas governor Orval Faubus used National Guard troops outside Little Rock's Central High School to prevent nine black youth from entering the building. President Eisenhower uttered not a word. The advent of television helped transport images of racial violence against black children into living rooms around the globe, visually demonstrating the racial terms of American democracy. After Faubus removed the troops and left the children vulnerable to the whims of an angry and violent adult white mob, Eisenhower placed the National Guard under the authority of federal troops ordered to protect black students.

Black protest seemed to stoke the fires of white bloodlust and callousness directed against adults and children alike. Black residents were sentenced to prison and murdered, and homes were firebombed all across the South if the owners dared assert their constitutional rights. Racial violence escalated, and the NAACP was not the only organization that grew frustrated with nonviolent direct-action politics.

Robert F. Williams was president of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the NAACP. But his frustration with nonviolent protest stemmed not from a preference for courtroom battles. He advocated armed self-defense, responding to white violence with bullets and barricades. Williams looked out over America's social landscape and saw little recourse in nonviolent protest or legal statutes. As a case in point, the federal government passed the first Civil Rights Act in 1957, but it was hardly enforced. Williams was part of a growing body of activists from within traditional organizations who were critical of both nonviolence and top-down leadership approaches from the start. Their presence reveals that the meaning of civil rights activism was not set in stone but constantly contested and reconstructed.

Sit In to Stand Up

In 1959 and 1960 black students in Nashville, Tennessee, and Greensboro, North Carolina, valiantly defied Jim Crow by "sitting in" at all-white lunch counters. Students were influenced by images of Montgomery and Little Rock, going on to inspire sit-ins at restaurants, churches, libraries, and waiting rooms across the South. Many were yelled at, kicked, burned with cigarettes, and yet they stood firm.

The early 1960s saw civil rights veterans and union organizers joining students to both train people in the discipline of nonviolence and reproduce sit-ins across the country. Under the inspiration of Ella Baker, the SCLC sponsored the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1961 members of SNCC and CORE joined forces to reignite Freedom Rides in the South as a way to test the 1955 Browder decision that officially outlawed segregated interstate transportation. Students faced an overwhelming flourish of violent attacks by whites. Activists were beaten, riders were caught in burning buses, and it was all broadcast across the world. Freedom Riders had achieved success, but white resistance was resilient.

James Meredith defiantly enrolled at the University of Mississippi in 1962, provoking a vital power struggle between states rights and federal power. Governor Ross Barnett flaunted the dictates of federal law until President Kennedy was pushed to mount a federal military occupation of 31,000 troops to enforce the law. The movement pushed forward and began to focus on the important terrain of voter registration in 1961 and 1962. Harvard graduate student Robert Moses, local volunteer Henry Lee, executive director of the Mississippi NAACP, local activist Fannie Lou Hamer, and Medgar Evers, who pushed to enroll Meredith at the university and investigated the death of Till, played significant roles in voter registration. For their efforts both Lee and Evers were murdered and Hammer and her husband were beaten and lost their jobs, but a voting campaign had been established.

In 1963 SCLC turned its attention to the notorious stronghold of white power, Birmingham, Alabama, to inaugurate the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. The city was known as "Bombingham" because more than fifty bombings afflicted the black community between World War II and 1965. When SCLC members organized a series of mass protests, marchers were attacked and jailed and many local ministers called for an end to the demonstrations. While in jail, King penned his famous "Letter from Birmingham City Jail," to respond to his critics. In a controversial decision, arrested adults were replaced on the streets with young children. Images of small children attacked by dogs and police clubs and knocked off their feet by fire hoses shocked the world.

"Oh, Freedom over me!"

The day after W. E. B. Du Bois died in Ghana, 250,000 people descended on the nation's capital, where King's "I Have a Dream" speech took on mythic proportions. Not a month later, white supremacists bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, leaving four little girls dead. Central Intelligence Agency director J. Edgar Hoover identified the attackers but disliked the Civil Rights movement, so he did nothing.

Robert Moses and Amzie Moore offered their own response in 1964 by inviting northern white students to Mississippi for a "Freedom Summer" to register black workers and set up "Freedom Schools." Black Mississippian James Chaney and white northerners Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered. Unlike the countless murders of local black people, these killings received international attention.

The real triumph of that summer was the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). Eighty-three delegates were elected, but they were denied access to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. Fannie Lou Hamer told cameras that they were the true democratically elected representatives of the state, not those sponsored by all-white state elections. The convention seated the white elected delegates, while the MFDP rejected the offer of two at-large seats.

Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, fought hard to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This was the most far-reaching and comprehensive civil rights legislation Congress had ever passed. It banned discrimination in public accommodations and the workplace but did not address police brutality or racist voting tests. To fight against black voter discrimination, the SCLC organized a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. The six hundred protestors reached the Pettus Bridge but were pushed back by police violence and tear gas. The attack was dubbed Bloody Sunday. President Johnson was ultimately forced into action, calling on Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Yet race riots in Harlem (1964) and Watts (1965) reminded people of the sage insights of World War II activists: it was one thing to sit at the counter but another to be able to afford a meal. Racism had excluded black people from the accumulation of wealth and resources, a historical reality that could not be addressed by legal protection in the present. In fact, the federal government did turn its attention to the economic question with a limited "war on poverty." What became the Economic Opportunity Act of 1965 included Head Start, work-study funding for college students, an end to the largely whites-only access to Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and Community Action Programs (CAPs) that, in theory, transferred the power of policymaking from experts to the poor themselves. These programs were radical in their reach but radically underfunded and undermined by black and white resistance from the start.

Black Power South

The link between race and class, however, could not be severed, especially during a Vietnam War that sent largely poor people of color to its bloody front lines. Even Martin Luther King began to see the links between unfettered funding for the war machine and the sea of poverty washing over America's domestic landscape. These insights set the stage for King's infamous "Time to Break Silence" speech of 1967 and his bridging of the gap between civil rights and economic justice.

At the same time, SNCC supported black draft evaders and grew critical of the rights-based approach to black freedom that seemed to be the terms on which white support was offered. In 1966 James Meredith was shot during his one-man March Against Fear, and SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael joined others in Mississippi to complete the march. It was in Mississippi where Carmichael, frustrated with the continued violence and the limits of legal protection, popularized the slogan "Black Power." He explained its meaning by referring to SNCC's organizing experiences in Lowndes County, Alabama, where voter fraud and intimidation guaranteed the total exclusion of black people from the franchise and where, by 1965, more whites were registered to vote than the 1,900 who were eligible. Local blacks began a voter drive that caught the attention of SNCC and together they formed a third party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO).

The LCFO was dubbed the Black Panther Party because its state-required ballot symbol was a black panther, a direct retort to the white rooster of the state's Democratic Party and its logo of "white supremacy." From the start, the LCFO went beyond voting and advocated political education, deemphasized the focus on political expertise over lived experience, and fought for the redistribution of wealth through major tax reform, all in the face of constant violence.

The battle waged in "Bloody Lowndes" was lost, but the efforts of a grassroots southern movement for Black Power speaks to the full range of experiences that encompassed the fight for freedom. The movement fought southern Jim Crow and northern ghetto formation. Led by charismatic individuals and grassroots collectivities, its members turned to nonviolent action and armed self-defense, waging battle in courtrooms and on the streets. Understood in their full depth and scope, visions of the black freedom movement have yet to be fully realized.

Bibliography

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.

Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Collier-Thomas, Bettye, and V. P. Franklin, eds. Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

Dudziak, Mary. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Gilmore, Glenda. Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.

Payne, Charles. I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Singh, Nikhil. Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Theoharis, Jean, and Komozi Woodward, eds. Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940-1980. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Tyson, Timothy. Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

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At the midpoint of the twentieth century, African Americans once again answered the call to transform the world. The social and economic ravages of Jim Crow era racism were all-encompassing and deep-rooted. Yet like a phoenix rising from the ashes of lynch mobs, debt peonage, residential and labor discrimination, and rape, the black freedom movement raised a collective call of "No More"!

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Called "the mother of the civil rights movement," Rosa Parks invigorated the struggle for racial equality when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks' arrest on December 1, 1955 launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott by 17,000 black citizens. A Supreme Court ruling and declining revenues forced the city to desegregate its buses thirteen months later. Parks became an instant icon, but her resistance was a natural extension of a lifelong commitment to activism. Over the years, she had repeatedly disobeyed bus segregation regulations. Once, she even had been put off a bus for her defiance.

Rosa Louise McCauley spent the first years of her life on a small farm with her mother, grandparents and brother. She witnessed night rides by the Kus Klux Klan and listened in fear as lynchings occurred near her home. The family moved to Montgomery; Rosa went to school and became a seamstress. She married barber Raymond Parks in 1932, and the couple joined the Montgomery National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). When she inspired the bus boycott, Parks had been the secretary of the local NAACP for twelve years (1943-1956). Parks founded the Montgomery NAACP Youth Council in the early 1940s. Later, as secretary of the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, she traveled throughout the state interviewing victims of discrimination and witnesses to lynchings.

In the wake of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Parks lost her tailoring job and received death threats. She and her family moved to Detroit, Michigan in 1957. However, she remained an active member of the NAACP and worked for Congressman John Conyers (1965-1988) helping the homeless find housing. The Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute Of Self-Development was established in 1987 to offer job training for black youth. In 1999, Parks received the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, the highest honor a civilian can receive in the United States. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) also sponsors an annual Rosa Parks Freedom Award.

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International Civil Rights: Walk of Fame - Rosa Parks

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Called "the mother of the civil rights movement," Rosa Parks invigorated the struggle for racial equality when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks' arrest on December 1, 1955 launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott by 17,000 black citizens.

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On Sunday, 15th September, 1963, a white man was seen getting out of a white and turquoise Chevrolet car and placing a box under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Soon afterwards, at 10.22 a.m., the bomb exploded killing Denise McNair (11), Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Robertson (14) and Cynthia Wesley (14).

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Civil Rights History

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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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Civil Rights Act of 1964 - Black History - HISTORY.com

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Find out more about the history of Civil Rights Act of 1964, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com

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In one of his more bizarre Oval Office confidences, Lyndon Johnson said that he didn't want to "follow Hitler" but that Hitler had the right idea: "Just take a simple thing and repeat it often enough, even if it wasn't true, why, people accept it." Johnson was speaking by telephone to Martin Luther King, Jr., in Selma, Alabama, about how to convince Southern whites that Southern blacks deserved the franchise. The curious political-science tutorial came on the afternoon of January 15, 1965, King's thirty-sixth birthday. Whatever he may have thought of Johnson's inaccurate analogy, King had already begun repeating, on television, in the press, and from church pulpits, the moral necessity of a guaranteed vote for every American, regardless of color. Two weeks earlier, King had publicly announced that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the alliance of Baptist preachers he led, would launch voter-registration protests in Selma, where fourteen thousand four hundred whites had, by legal ruse and naked force, limited fifteen thousand blacks to one per cent of the registration rolls.

Johnson, as recorded by the secret Oval Office taping system, both commended and cautioned King on his Selma strategy. He was, he said, committed to getting federal voting legislation enacted, but he implied that King's timing and his tactics were dangerously precipitate. Johnson's Great Society programs for Medicare, Medicaid, education, and poverty were pending, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had already depleted congressional good will. King was by then expert at telling Johnson what Johnson wanted to hear, and managed to interrupt the Presidential monologue long enough to tell Johnson what he felt Johnson needed to know. He pointed out that, in the five Southern states that Johnson lost to Goldwater in 1964, fewer than forty per cent of eligible African-Americans were registered to vote. A voting-rights act would produce a coalition of blacks and white moderates, changing the electoral map of the South. Johnson liked that. It could be his greatest achievement, he said-"It will do things that even that '64 Act couldn't do."

"At Canaan's Edge" (Simon & Schuster; $35), the third and final volume of Taylor Branch's monumental chronicle, "America in the King Years," covers the period from 1965 to 1968, and charts civil-rights history as the parallel biographies of two tragic titans-Martin Luther King, Jr., the modern Moses, and Lyndon Baines Johnson, the would-be Lincoln. The tape of Johnson's phone call to King has inspired speculation about their collusion in the design and execution of the Selma-Montgomery campaign; one student of the period recently called it the Johnson-King voting-rights "pas de deux." Branch doesn't go this far, but he briskly relates how Johnson moved from annoyed doubt about Selma to outright collaboration within a matter of weeks. He urged King to expose the worst of voting conditions in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana, but he could hardly have had in mind the brutal reaction of Selma's sheriff, Jim Clark. For King's purposes, however, Clark and his deputies were ideal-studio-cast thugs guaranteed to provoke national outrage and instigate federal intervention.

The march from Selma to Montgomery is one of America's grandest sagas, a racial, regional, and constitutional crisis whose flash points illuminate the country's path to social democracy. In his earlier volumes, Branch followed King's first steps along that path. "Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63" went from the Montgomery bus boycott to the March on Washington. After Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger aboard a city bus, King's friend and fellow Baptist pastor Ralph David Abernathy proposed a bus boycott, and King assumed the leadership of what soon became the victorious Montgomery Improvement Association. King and Abernathy moved to pastorates in Atlanta and formed the S.C.L.C., in order to capitalize on the gathering civil-rights momentum. After King made a visit to Gandhi's disciples in India, he developed a philosophy of nonviolent passive resistance out of what had been, back in Montgomery, a commonsense tactic. But it was the March on Washington, on August 28, 1963, that projected King indelibly into the national consciousness.

"Parting the Waters" ended with King at the head of a civil-rights movement that had long been dominated by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League, and faced with a pending civil-rights bill that Congress seemed unlikely to pass. But John F. Kennedy's assassination assured its passage, and it became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Branch's second volume, "Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65," followed the civil-rights path through an arena of white-supremacist violence in Birmingham, Alabama, and in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer, and culminated in King's receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. On January 18, 1965, he registered as a guest at the Hotel Albert, in Selma, the first black man ever to enter the front door of this antebellum replica of the Doge's Palace, in Venice. The civil-rights bill behind him, Martin Luther King had gone to Selma to launch a voter-registration drive. It escalated into a virtual replay of Reconstruction.

In the engrossing narration of Branch's final volume, events seem to unfold almost in real time. On a late January morning, in two proud waves, more than a hundred teachers, the backbone of Selma's black middle class, shook off more than two generations of diffidence and gathered at the county courthouse, demanding to be registered, while Jim Clark barked orders to disperse them. Two weeks later, he arrested King and Abernathy as they led a demonstration of more than seven hundred local citizens. National newspapers carried pictures of scores of black youngsters being pursued by police cars and pickup trucks with electric cattle prods dangling from the windows.

On March 1st, King preached at the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, in Selma, and proclaimed, "We are going to bring a voting bill into being in the streets of Selma." These challenging words raised the stakes for a procrastinating Administration, as did the events at the Edmund Pettus Bridge the following Sunday. Branch's description of Bloody Sunday, one of this book's many effective set pieces, vividly captures the exact hour when the political order of the Deep South finally invalidated itself in the eyes of mainstream America. The carnage inflicted by municipal and state police at the bridge and along the marchers' route of retreat accomplished for voting rights what song, prayer, and marching had not. That evening, ABC was broadcasting the television première of "Judgment at Nuremberg." Suddenly, forty-eight million Americans who had been watching an elderly German couple protesting their innocence of the Holocaust were confronted with scenes of people choking on tear gas, snarling dogs tearing at flesh, baton-wielding troopers on horseback, and bruised and traumatized men, women, and children. The activist Hosea Williams, a war veteran, bellowed that not even the Nazis had been more savage. Branch says, "The Nuremberg interruption struck with the force of instant historical icon."

King and Abernathy were not at the Pettus Bridge on March 7th; they were preaching to their respective congregations in Atlanta, something that Branch is more prepared to excuse than other commentators have been. Two days later, King led a second attempt to march across the bridge, but with dangerously equivocal results. Governor George Wallace, segregation's last best hope, ordered Alabama officials to hold the line at all costs while he and King sought injunctions against each other. Forbidden to conduct a second march toward Montgomery, King faced an unprecedented dilemma: defy a federal court order and jeopardize Presidential good will, or cancel the march across Pettus Bridge, demoralize thousands of ordinary men and women, and risk vindicating the deep mistrust of the movement's more radical factions, such as the Student Nonviolent Coördinating Committee. Branch calls this chapter "Devil's Choice." King, having promised the Brown Chapel audience that he would "rather die on the highways of Alabama than make a butchery of my conscience," ended up doing the latter in the eyes of young militants. He ordered a retreat from the bridge just as the blocking phalanx of Alabama troopers stepped aside.

Still, it was probably the right choice for history. Eight days after Pettus Bridge, Lyndon Johnson delivered his "We Shall Overcome" speech to Congress, an example of Presidential oratory arguably unsurpassed in idealism and emotional impact. The reworked phrases of the speechwriter Richard Goodwin fell upon a hushed chamber. Speaking that night "for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy," the President pledged the Administration to secure "the full blessings of American life" for the country's Negroes. "Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we-shall-overcome." Liberal whites were electrified; whites in the Deep South were stupefied. Johnson was indeed on the verge of altering the South's political landscape, but not in the way that he and King had discussed on the phone. The withdrawal of Southern whites' allegiance from the Democrats-the Great White Switch, as it has been called-gathered speed soon after Johnson's speech. On the other side-for instance, in the SNCC leader James Forman's sneering comment "That cracker was talkin' shit"-was the voice of rising black nationalism.

Branch's panoptic approach exposes telling juxtapositions: we see Johnson approving the reluctant recommendation of Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach for a public declaration on voting rights, and then ordering his ever-sanguine Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, to "go ahead tonight" and commence bombing Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson's tragedy, as Branch painstakingly (and perhaps too sympathetically) documents, is that his visionary domestic agenda was destroyed by the bombing of Vietnam.

Within a week of Johnson's stunning performance came the Selma-Montgomery march-a parade of citizens, film and other entertainment celebrities, national organizations, and religious delegations that rivalled the March on Washington, if not in numbers then at least in symbolism and spirit. George Wallace, having been alternately mauled and massaged into acquiescence during a three-hour Oval Office session, surrendered Alabama to Martin Luther King for five extraordinary days and nights. Three miles outside Montgomery-on a black Catholic academy's athletic field, where every famous name in America, from Belafonte and Bernstein to Odetta and Shelley Winters, seemed to be singing, playing, and speaking-twelve thousand pilgrims were exhilarated by King's preaching. His sermon was a stem-winder, beginning with an encapsulation of Reconstruction history and ending in a riff of magnificent call and response. "How long will justice be crucified and truth buried?" he asked, and went on to provide the answer: " Not long!" Branch writes, "Already shouts echoed and anticipated his refrain at a driving pace, above cries of encouragement and a low roar of anticipation." King continued, "How long? Not long! Because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. How long? Not long! Because mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

The voting-rights bill became law on the sixth day of August, 1965, with Rosa Parks and King and the other principal civil-rights leaders present for the signing ceremony, at the Capitol. Almost from that moment, in Branch's telling, the reader has the sensation of watching history escape the control of the book's two main characters. The principal story lines (better balanced between the two men than in the second volume) are Johnson's sinking fast into the Vietnam quagmire, and King's increasing isolation as his mission expands to challenge America's fundamental social inequalities. The effect is like watching two bio-pics simultaneously. And, thanks to F.B.I. wiretaps and Oval Office tapes, the reader is at all times aware of each man's calculations about the other.

Before the end of 1965, Johnson had approved General William Westmoreland's request for more than a hundred thousand troops to supplement those already engaged in propping up the Saigon regime. In the course of Branch's book, the agonizing in the Oval Office, as the President alternately rails at and pleads with his advisers about the unwinnable Vietnam dilemma, starts to seem more farcical than tragic. "The North Vietnamese just said, 'fuck you,' " he tells a sympathetic U.S. senator. "They're winning-why would they want to talk?" George Ball, the UnderSecretary of State, tells the President in a secret memo that "humiliation would be more likely" than achieving U.S. objectives on the battlefield, while the historian and Presidential adviser Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., publicly warns of the terrible consequences of "either enlargement or withdrawal." Bewildered and bellicose, Johnson dreaded being seen as a President too indecisive to win a war. He put a determined face on the State of the Union address in January, 1966, and vowed to continue the Great Society "while we fight in Vietnam." Still, he confided to one of his generals that he felt "a good deal of ice cracking" under his feet.

All these developments stoked the growing radicalism in SNCC, which was soon beyond the reach even of King's persuasive powers. He could only grimace when James Forman or Stokely Carmichael provided the media with inflammatory sound bites. "We're going to tear this county up," Carmichael told one gathering. King and the S.C.L.C. had hardly begun to plan the next chapter in nonviolent racial progress when the nation was confronted by the spectacle of the Watts riots, which began just five days after the Voting Rights Act was signed. Ten days after the signing, King risked his first public criticism of the Vietnam War. "Reporters bolted for telephones," Branch notes, after King, in an address to the S.C.L.C.'s annual convention in Birmingham, announced his intention to write personal appeals for peace negotiations to world leaders, including Ho Chi Minh. A month later, at the President's insistence, King and Arthur Goldberg, the Ambassador to the United Nations, engaged in a frank seventy-minute give-and-take on the issue of Vietnam. Speaking afterward to the U.N. press corps, King outlined his "unthinkable" proposals-a halt to bombing, negotiations with the Vietcong, and U.N. recognition of Communist China. The fury of the Administration at this and the disdain of the media nearly matched the negative reaction of the African-American leadership class. F.B.I. agents, listening in on a conference call between King and his advisers, heard a beleaguered King say, with a sigh, that he had to find a way to "gracefully pull out."

Both Vietnam and civil rights began to play poorly with much of the electorate as the midterm congressional elections approached. Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Strom Thurmond, and other Republicans blamed Johnson for not conducting the war vigorously enough. At the polls, liberals signalled their lack of support for the war, and the congressional Democrats lost badly. In early March of 1967, Robert F. Kennedy suggested that the heavy bombing of Vietnam be suspended. Within twenty-four hours, headlines carried news of Kennedy's involvement in a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. Branch sets out the facts, and the reader is left to connect the dots running from an avenging Oval Office to an obliging F.B.I. headquarters.

J. Edgar Hoover looms unforgettably in these pages. No reader who has digested the Church Committee reports will be surprised by Branch's evidence of F.B.I. transgressions against King and anyone else Hoover deemed un-American. Referring to King as "the burr head," Hoover provided Johnson with spurious reports of Communists at the center of the S.C.L.C. and with copious evidence of King's prolific extramarital calisthenics. Worse, he kept intelligence of assassination plots from King and barred F.B.I. agents from providing covert protection.

No longer primarily a Southern pastor fighting regional racism, Martin Luther King, as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, had acquired an emboldened sense of mission. The Voting Rights Act addressed political disenfranchisement; it was now time to address economic disenfranchisement, or so he had told an increasingly wary and distracted Johnson. King believed that, just as marching in Alabama had caused Johnson to embrace an accelerated voting-rights timetable, so marches exposing slums, unemployment, and inferior public schools in particular Northern cities would force the Administration and Congress to pass remedial legislation. However, he seriously underestimated the difference between targeting parochial Southern hierarchies and espousing a truly redistributive program that called into question the way of life of most middle-class white Americans.

King also found it bitterly hard to gain any credence for his evolving social prescriptions either from the stodgy N.A.A.C.P. and Urban League leadership or from the emergent inner-city activists of SNCC. SNCC officers, with the notable exception of John Lewis, dismissed him as too cautious. But a clear majority of the S.C.L.C. board felt that King was becoming too outspoken. For them, his antiwar pronouncements undermined the core mission of ongoing registration in the South.

Late in January, 1966, King surprised America by taking up residency in a tenement apartment in Chicago-a city that was home to the world's largest public-housing complex and to two of the poorest census tracts in the country. After six months of bruising marches through ethnic neighborhoods, fruitless exchanges with Chicago's real-estate and education boards, and much shadow-boxing with the nimble mayor, Richard Daley, King was ill and starting to realize that the political terrain here was rougher than in the South. Then, Branch writes, he heard that "his latest staff prodigy," the young Jesse Jackson, "had committed him impulsively to a suicidal march." Jackson had shouted, "I'm going to Cicero!" The prospect of Jackson attempting to desegregate Cicero, one of the city's most entrenched white working-class suburbs, was terrible enough to bring King, Daley, Archbishop John Cody, the veteran community leader Al Raby, and seventy-five contending parties swiftly to the negotiating table.

At times, Branch serves up more content than interpretation, assuming that facts speak for themselves. The Chicago Summit Agreement on open-housing and employment objectives, we read, glossed over details, in fine language intended to "minimize potential ridicule" resulting from the fact that little had been accomplished. One wishes that Branch had attempted to assess more closely the damage that the Chicago campaign did to King's national standing and to the prospects of Johnson's Great Society. Three weeks after the Summit Agreement, the Civil Rights Act of 1966, containing open-housing provisions that Illinois's Senator Everett Dirksen called "a package of mischief for the country," failed to pass in the Senate. After the congressional Democrats' midterm disaster that fall, a brooding Johnson insisted that he hadn't "lost that election"; rather, "the Negroes lost it."

King had no illusions about what happened in Chicago, but, in his view, a worse failure-a failure of judgment-was his participation in the Meredith march across Mississippi: a "terrible mistake." Consulting no one, James Meredith had started a two-hundred-and-twenty-mile walk from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi, to establish the right of black men to walk in the Deep South unmolested. When, one day into his walk, he was shot by a sniper at the Mississippi state line, King lent his name to an improvised, hyperbolic manifesto, then walked with three hundred and fifty student radicals to the Greenwood courthouse, where Stokely Carmichael shouted "Black power!" for the first time. This provocative slogan established Carmichael as a media phenomenon, and one who made Martin Luther King appear ineffective and dated. In January, 1967, a year after launching the Chicago campaign, King was no longer among the Gallup Poll's ten most admired personalities in America. "Whites have ceased to believe in him, or really care," a lengthy dismissal in The New York Review of Books alleged. "The blacks hardly listen."

King had begun to perceive that society tends to confine its indignation to injustices that can be attenuated without imperilling fundamental economic relationships. He was working in an era when the controversial Moynihan Report, which blamed black matriarchs and absent fathers for black poverty, rather than absent jobs, was widely accepted, whereas the prophetic Kerner Commission, indicting white society as "deeply implicated in the ghetto," was ignored. Near the end of Branch's fourteen-year saga of a nation alternately affirming and denying the centrality of race, there is a telling moment. Late one evening, while his advisers and lieutenants debated the S.C.L.C.'s next move after the disappointing 1966 Chicago campaign, King momentarily gave way to pressure. Branch writes:

King literally howled against the paralyzed debate. "I don't want to do this any more!" he shouted alone. "I want to go back to my little church!" He banged around and yelled, which summoned anxious friends outside his room until Young and Abernathy gently removed his whiskey and talked him to bed.

In the determination to omit nothing relevant, "At Canaan's Edge" seems to keep the entire era in view at all times-immigration reform, media coverage of civil rights, education, the work of NASA, the Six-Day War, campus unrest, and much else. Such perspective yields fine insights. While narrating the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Branch weaves in an extended discussion of the Immigration Reform Act of 1965. Then he vaults forward to remind us that, although neither politicians nor the press grasped the Immigration Act's significance at the time, it "rightfully joined the two great civil rights laws as a third enduring pillar of the freedom movement." Thirty-six years later, he mentions, the students at J. E. B. Stuart, a suburban Washington high school named after a Confederate cavalry general, came from seventy countries.

When Johnson and King met at the White House for the last time, in late April, 1966, their civil-rights pas de deux was over. At Johnson's behest, Katzenbach had unleashed Hoover to uncover politically compromising information about King. (To some, the L.B.J.-M.L.K. relationship may have resembled that of Henry II and Thomas à Becket.) By the following spring, both men were set on irreversible and opposing courses. King's splendid antiwar speech in Manhattan's Riverside Church, on April 4, 1967, in which he called his government the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," placed him in the vanguard of the peace movement. For Johnson, there was the public-opinion disaster of the Tet Offensive, which began in January, 1968, followed by Democratic primary challenges from Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy. For King, there was the public-opinion disaster of the riots surrounding the Memphis garbage strike, which occurred in the midst of another controversy, concerning the Poor People's Campaign. And, on April 4, 1968, there was the fatal rifle shot on the Lorraine Motel balcony, fired by an assassin about whom this book says little more.

Martin Luther King, Jr., survived for a time the machinations of an unscrupulous national police force. He rose above the particularism of his own people in an almost quixotic and ultimately tragic attempt to deliver the entire country from racism, war, and greed. Taylor Branch, with his concluding volume, walks with the prophet and the President toward the promised land at the head of an interracial throng pledged to a new American covenant of social and economic justice. He leaves us there, pensive and remorseful, at Canaan's edge-King, his people, and all of us who were once inspired and then deceived by a great dream of a nation rising up to "live out the true meaning of its creed." ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated the April date on which King gave his antiwar speech at Riverside Church in New York City.

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In one of his more bizarre Oval Office confidences, Lyndon Johnson said that he didn't want to "follow Hitler" but that Hitler had the right idea: "Just take a simple thing and repeat it often enough, even if it wasn't true, why, people accept it."

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The civil rights movement was a struggle for social justice that took place mainly during the 1950s and 1960s for Black Americans to gain equal rights under the law in the United States. The Civil War had officially abolished slavery, but it didn't end discrimination against Black people-they continued to endure the devastating effects of racism, especially in the South. By the mid-20th century, Black Americans had had more than enough of prejudice and violence against them. They, along with many white Americans, mobilized and began an unprecedented fight for equality that spanned two decades.
WATCH: The Civil Rights Movement on HISTORY Vault
Jim Crow Laws

During Reconstruction, Black people took on leadership roles like never before. They held public office and sought legislative changes for equality and the right to vote.

In 1868, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution gave Black people equal protection under the law. In 1870, the 15th Amendment granted Black American men the right to vote. Still, many white Americans, especially those in the South, were unhappy that people they'd once enslaved were now on a more-or-less equal playing field.

To marginalize Black people, keep them separate from white people and erase the progress they'd made during Reconstruction, " Jim Crow " laws were established in the South beginning in the late 19th century. Black people couldn't use the same public facilities as white people, live in many of the same towns or go to the same schools. Interracial marriage was illegal, and most Black people couldn't vote because they were unable to pass voter literacy tests.
READ MORE: How Jim Crows Limited African American Progress
Jim Crow laws weren't adopted in northern states; however, Black people still experienced discrimination at their jobs or when they tried to buy a house or get an education. To make matters worse, laws were passed in some states to limit voting rights for Black Americans.

Moreover, southern segregation gained ground in 1896 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Plessy v. Ferguson that facilities for Black and white people could be "separate but equal."
READ MORE: When Did African Americans Get the Right to Vote?
World War II and Civil Rights

Prior to World War II, most Black people worked as low-wage farmers, factory workers, domestics or servants. By the early 1940s, war-related work was booming, but most Black Americans weren't given the better paying jobs. They were also discouraged from joining the military.

After thousands of Black people threatened to march on Washington to demand equal employment rights, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941. It opened national defense jobs and other government jobs to all Americans regardless of race, creed, color or national origin.

Black men and women served heroically in World War II, despite suffering segregation and discrimination during their deployment. The Tuskegee Airmen broke the racial barrier to become the first Black military aviators in the U.S. Army Air Corps and earned more than 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses. Yet many Black veterans were met with prejudice and scorn upon returning home. This was a stark contrast to why America had entered the war to begin with-to defend freedom and democracy in the world.

As the Cold War began, President Harry Truman initiated a civil rights agenda, and in 1948 issued Executive Order 9981 to end discrimination in the military. These events helped set the stage for grass-roots initiatives to enact racial equality legislation and incite the civil rights movement.
READ MORE: Why Harry Truman Ended Segregation in the US Military
Rosa Parks

On December 1, 1955, a 42-year-old woman named Rosa Parks found a seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus after work. Segregation laws at the time stated Black passengers must sit in designated seats at the back of the bus, and Parks had complied.

When a white man got on the bus and couldn't find a seat in the white section at the front of the bus, the bus driver instructed Parks and three other Black passengers to give up their seats. Parks refused and was arrested.

As word of her arrest ignited outrage and support, Parks unwittingly became the "mother of the modern day civil rights movement." Black community leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) led by Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr., a role which would place him front and center in the fight for civil rights.

Parks' courage incited the MIA to stage a boycott of the Montgomery bus system. The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted 381 days. On November 14, 1956 the Supreme Court ruled segregated seating was unconstitutional.

Little Rock Nine

In 1954, the civil rights movement gained momentum when the United States Supreme Court made segregation illegal in public schools in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. In 1957, Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas asked for volunteers from all-Black high schools to attend the formerly segregated school.

On September 3, 1957, nine Black students, known as the Little Rock Nine, arrived at Central High School to begin classes but were instead met by the Arkansas National Guard (on order of Governor Orval Faubus) and a screaming, threatening mob. The Little Rock Nine tried again a couple of weeks later and made it inside, but had to be removed for their safety when violence ensued.

Finally, President Dwight D. Eisenhower intervened and ordered federal troops to escort the Little Rock Nine to and from classes at Central High. Still, the students faced continual harassment and prejudice.

Their efforts, however, brought much-needed attention to the issue of desegregation and fueled protests on both sides of the issue.
READ MORE: Why Eisenhower Sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock After Brown v. Board
Civil Rights Act of 1957

Even though all Americans had gained the right to vote, many southern states made it difficult for Black citizens. They often required prospective voters of color to take literacy tests that were confusing, misleading and nearly impossible to pass.

Wanting to show a commitment to the civil rights movement and minimize racial tensions in the South, the Eisenhower administration pressured Congress to consider new civil rights legislation.

On September 9, 1957, President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 into law, the first major civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. It allowed federal prosecution of anyone who tried to prevent someone from voting. It also created a commission to investigate voter fraud.

Woolworth's Lunch Counter

Despite making some gains, Black Americans still experienced blatant prejudice in their daily lives. On February 1, 1960, four college students took a stand against segregation in Greensboro, North Carolina when they refused to leave a Woolworth's lunch counter without being served.

Over the next several days, hundreds of people joined their cause in what became known as the Greensboro sit-ins. After some were arrested and charged with trespassing, protesters launched a boycott of all segregated lunch counters until the owners caved and the original four students were finally served at the Woolworth's lunch counter where they'd first stood their ground.

Their efforts spearheaded peaceful sit-ins and demonstrations in dozens of cities and helped launch the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to encourage all students to get involved in the civil rights movement. It also caught the eye of young college graduate Stokely Carmichael, who joined the SNCC during the Freedom Summer of 1964 to register Black voters in Mississippi. In 1966, Carmichael became the chair of the SNCC, giving his famous speech in which he originated the phrase "Black power."
READ MORE: How the Greensboro Four Sit-In Sparked a Movement
Freedom Riders

On May 4, 1961, 13 " Freedom Riders"-seven Black and six white activists-mounted a Greyhound bus in Washington, D.C., embarking on a bus tour of the American south to protest segregated bus terminals. They were testing the 1960 decision by the Supreme Court in Boynton v. Virginia that declared the segregation of interstate transportation facilities unconstitutional.

Facing violence from both police officers and white protesters, the Freedom Rides drew international attention. On Mother's Day 1961, the bus reached Anniston, Alabama, where a mob mounted the bus and threw a bomb into it. The Freedom Riders escaped the burning bus, but were badly beaten. Photos of the bus engulfed in flames were widely circulated, and the group could not find a bus driver to take them further. U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (brother to President John F. Kennedy) negotiated with Alabama Governor John Patterson to find a suitable driver, and the Freedom Riders resumed their journey under police escort on May 20. But the officers left the group once they reached Montgomery, where a white mob brutally attacked the bus. Attorney General Kennedy responded to the riders-and a call from Martin Luther King Jr.-by sending federal marshals to Montgomery.

On May 24, 1961, a group of Freedom Riders reached Jackson, Mississippi. Though met with hundreds of supporters, the group was arrested for trespassing in a "whites-only" facility and sentenced to 30 days in jail. Attorneys for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP) brought the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court, who reversed the convictions. Hundreds of new Freedom Riders were drawn to the cause, and the rides continued.

In the fall of 1961, under pressure from the Kennedy administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued regulations prohibiting segregation in interstate transit terminals
HISTORY and Google Earth: Follow the Freedom Riders' Journey Against Segregation During the Civil Rights Era
March on Washington

Arguably one of the most famous events of the civil rights movement took place on August 28, 1963: the March on Washington. It was organized and attended by civil rights leaders such as A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr.

More than 200,000 people of all races congregated in Washington, D. C. for the peaceful march with the main purpose of forcing civil rights legislation and establishing job equality for everyone. The highlight of the march was King's speech in which he continually stated, "I have a dream..."

King's " I Have a Dream" speech galvanized the national civil rights movement and became a slogan for equality and freedom.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964-legislation initiated by President John F. Kennedy before his assassination -into law on July 2 of that year.

King and other civil rights activists witnessed the signing. The law guaranteed equal employment for all, limited the use of voter literacy tests and allowed federal authorities to ensure public facilities were integrated.
READ MORE: 8 Steps That Paved the Way to the Civil Rights Act of 1964
Bloody Sunday

On March 7, 1965, the civil rights movement in Alabama took an especially violent turn as 600 peaceful demonstrators participated in the Selma to Montgomery march to protest the killing of Black civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson by a white police officer and to encourage legislation to enforce the 15th amendment.

As the protesters neared the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were blocked by Alabama state and local police sent by Alabama governor George C. Wallace, a vocal opponent of desegregation. Refusing to stand down, protesters moved forward and were viciously beaten and teargassed by police and dozens of protesters were hospitalized.

The entire incident was televised and became known as " Bloody Sunday." Some activists wanted to retaliate with violence, but King pushed for nonviolent protests and eventually gained federal protection for another march.

Voting Rights Act of 1965

When President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965, he took the Civil Rights Act of 1964 several steps further. The new law banned all voter literacy tests and provided federal examiners in certain voting jurisdictions.

It also allowed the attorney general to contest state and local poll taxes. As a result, poll taxes were later declared unconstitutional in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections in 1966.

Part of the Act was walked back decades later, in 2013, when a Supreme Court decision ruled that Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional, holding that the constraints placed on certain states and federal review of states' voting procedures were outdated.

Civil Rights Leaders Assassinated

The civil rights movement had tragic consequences for two of its leaders in the late 1960s. On February 21, 1965, former Nation of Islam leader and Organization of Afro-American Unity founder Malcolm X was assassinated at a rally.

On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on his hotel room's balcony. Emotionally-charged looting and riots followed, putting even more pressure on the Johnson administration to push through additional civil rights laws.
READ MORE: Why People Rioted After Martin Luther King Jr.'s Assassination
Fair Housing Act of 1968

The Fair Housing Act became law on April 11, 1968, just days after King's assassination. It prevented housing discrimination based on race, sex, national origin and religion. It was also the last legislation enacted during the civil rights era.

The civil rights movement was an empowering yet precarious time for Black Americans. The efforts of civil rights activists and countless protesters of all races brought about legislation to end segregation, Black voter suppression and discriminatory employment and housing practices.
READ MORE: Civil Rights Movement Timeline
Six Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement
10 Things You May Not Know About Martin Luther King Jr.

Sources

A Brief History of Jim Crow. Constitutional Rights Foundation.
Civil Rights Act of 1957. Civil Rights Digital Library.
Document for June 25th: Executive Order 8802: Prohibition of Discrimination in the Defense Industry. National Archives.
Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-In. African American Odyssey.
Little Rock School Desegregation (1957). The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute Stanford.
Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Global Freedom Struggle. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute Stanford.
Rosa Marie Parks Biography. Rosa and Raymond Parks.
Selma, Alabama, (Bloody Sunday March 7, 1965). BlackPast.org.
The Civil Rights Movement (1919-1960s). National Humanities Center.
The Little Rock Nine. National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior: Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site.
Turning Point: World War II. Virginia Historical Society.

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The civil rights movement was a struggle for justice and equality for African Americans that took place mainly in the 1950s and 1960s. Among its leaders were Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, the Little Rock Nine, Rosa Parks and many others.