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The culmination of civil rights efforts to promote gender, racial, and ethnic equality resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 1964, Congress passed Public Law 88-352 (78 Stat. 241). The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Provisions of this civil rights act forbade discrimination on the basis of sex, as well as, race in hiring, promoting, and firing. It Its a benchmark in civil rights legislation, and continues to serve as a beacon of hope and as an example for contemporary social justice activists continuing the struggle for equality.

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In the 1960s, Americans who knew only the potential of "equal protection of the laws" expected the president, the Congress, and the courts to fulfill the promise of the 14th Amendment. In response, all three branches of the federal government--as well as the public at large--debated a fundamental constitutional question: Does the Constitution's prohibition of denying equal protection always ban the use of racial, ethnic, or gender criteria in an attempt to bring social justice and social benefits?

In June 1963, President John Kennedy asked Congress for a comprehensive civil rights bill, induced by massive resistance to desegregation and the murder of Medgar Evers. After Kennedy's assassination in November, President Lyndon Johnson pressed hard, with the support of Roy Wilkins and Clarence Mitchell, to secure the bill's passage the following year. In 1964, Congress passed Public Law 88-352 (78 Stat. 241). The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Provisions of this civil rights act forbade discrimination on the basis of sex, as well as, race in hiring, promoting, and firing. The Act prohibited discrimination in public accommodations and federally funded programs. It also strengthened the enforcement of voting rights and the desegregation of schools.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is the nation's benchmark civil rights legislation, and it continues to resonate in America. Passage of the Act ended the application of "Jim Crow" laws, which had been upheld by the Supreme Court in the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the Court held that racial segregation purported to be "separate but equal" was constitutional. The Civil Rights Act was eventually expanded by Congress to strengthen enforcement of these fundamental civil rights.

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Legal Highlight: The Civil Rights Act of 1964

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In the 1960s, Americans who knew only the potential of "equal protection of the laws" expected the president, the Congress, and the courts to fulfill the promise of the 14th Amendment.

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Signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on July 2, 1964, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination in public places, provided for the integration of schools and other public facilities, and made employment discrimination illegal. It was the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. While generally accepted, passing of the act was not an easy process. The House of Rules Committee prevented the act from initially passing in the House of Representatives. n the Senate, Southern Democratic opponents attempted to talk the bill to death in a filibuster. In early 1964, House supporters overcame the Rules Committee obstacle by threatening to send the bill to the floor without committee approval. Through convincing republicans to rally together to overcome the democrat opposition, the bill was passed 73 to 27.

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EnlargeDownload Link Citation: Civil Rights Act of 1964; 7/2/1964; Enrolled Acts and Resolutions of Congress, 1789 - 2011; General Records of the United States Government, Record Group 11; National Archives Building, Washington, DC. View All Pages in the National Archives Catalog View Transcript This act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on July 2, 1964, prohibited discrimination in public places, provided for the integration of schools and other public facilities, and made employment discrimination illegal. It was the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction.

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In 1961, seven black people boarded buses with six white people in Washington, D.C., and took the fight for civil rights to the Deep South. Organized by the Congress of Racial Equality, the riders met heavy resistance from mobs and politicians/police who enabled them, the freedom riders committed themselves to non violence.

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After six months of protests, arrests, and press conferences by the Freedom Riders, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) finally outlawed discriminatory seating practices on interstate bus transit and ordered the removal of "whites only" signs from interstate bus terminals by November 1. Activists vowed to step up the pressure to enforce the ruling. While pockets of racist resistance persisted for several years, even segregationist Birmingham, AL had conceded the issue by January 1962.

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The U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama ruled that based on the equal protection guaranteed citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment "the enforced segregation of black and white passengers on motor buses operating in the City of Montgomery violates the Constitution and laws of the United States." The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the District Court's ruling on November 13, 1956, and Montgomery's buses were desegregated.

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February 2019

U.S. Census Bureau History: Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement

On February 4, 1913, Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, AL. McCauley married Raymond Parks in 1932. She joined the Montgomery, AL, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1943, where she worked as the chapter's secretary under civil rights leader and union organizer E.D. Nixon.

On November 27, 1955, Rosa Parks attended a meeting at Montgomery's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church where she learned that the men who mutilated and killed Emmett Till-a Black teenager who supposedly whistled at a White woman-had been acquitted. She also learned the latest news about the recent murders of civil rights activists George W. Lee and Lamar Smith. Four days later, Parks left work, boarded a Montgomery public bus, paid her fare, and took a seat in the first row of the "colored" section. When the White section filled, the driver ordered Parks and three other Black passengers out of their seats. Parks later said that she recalled Emmett Till at that moment and refused to move.

The bus driver called the police who arrested Parks. Following her arrest, the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) urged the city's Black population to boycott public transportation on December 5, 1955-the date of Parks' trial for disorderly conducted and violating the city's segregation laws. The 1-day boycott proved so successful that the MIA agreed to continue the boycott to protest city and state segregation laws.

The MIA organized carpools and private taxis to assist bus patrons. The arrest and indictment of 89 of the boycott's organizers (including Martin Luther King, Jr. and 23 other ministers) brought national attention to the boycott and the city's segregation laws. While Parks and King appealed their convictions, a three-judge federal court ruled on another bus segregation lawsuit. The June 5, 1956, Browder v. Gayle ruling stated that any law requiring racially segregated seating on buses violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Despite the ruling, segregated seating and the bus boycott continued while attorneys for the City of Montgomery and Mayor W.A. Gayle appealed the decision.

In November 1956, the City of Montgomery, AL, sued in a state court for an injunction to forbid the MIA's carpool operation claiming it infringed on the bus company's exclusive franchise. Judge Eugene W. Carter granted the injunction on November 13, halting the carpools the following day. However, on November 14, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the lower federal court's June 5, 1956, ruling. Upon receiving official written notice of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling on December 20, 1956, Mayor Gayle ordered the buses desegregated and the 381-day boycott ended.

Parks left Montgomery, AL, in 1957, and eventually settled in Detroit, MI, where she remained active in the Civil Rights Movement and supported other causes throughout her life. She died at age 92 on October 24, 2005. In the days prior to her November 2 funeral, the City of Montgomery reserved the front row of seats aboard its public buses with a black ribbon to honor the life and courage of Rosa Parks.

You can learn more about Rosa Parks and Civil Rights Movement using census data and records. For example:

Rosa Parks was born in Tuskegee, AL, on February 4, 1913. At the time, Tuskegee's population was approximately 2,803. The city's population peaked at 13,327 in 1980. In 2010, 9,865 called Tuskegee home. Along with Rosa Parks, Tuskegee's other famous residents include George Washington Carver, Booker T. Washington, Lionel Richie, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Betty Shabazz (wife of Malcolm X), and one of the training sites of World War II's Tuskegee Airmen.

In July 1944, a Middlesex County, VA, sheriff arrested Irene Morgan Kirkaldy for refusing to give up her seat in the "White section" of a bus traveling between Virginia and Baltimore, MD. Following the arrest, her legal representatives William H. Hastie and Thurgood Marshall appealed her case (Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia ) to the U.S. Supreme Court. It ruled that Virginia's laws segregating interstate traffic were unconstitutional. Virginia and several other states ignored the ruling.

Five years after Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat, the 1960 Census collected its first commuter data. In that year, 5,323,000 urban and rural workers commuted to work by bus or streetcar. In 2016, the American Community Survey estimated that nearly 3.8 million workers (aged 16 years and older) commuted to work by bus.

Incidents of civil disobedience aboard public buses in Montgomery, AL, occurred before Rosa Park defied the city's segregation laws. For a number of reasons, civil rights leaders E. D. Nixon and Martin Luther King, Jr., and attorney Fred Gray chose to rally Montgomery's Black population around Rosa Parks following her December 1, 1955 arrest. Five women arrested before Parks (Claudette Colvin, Aurelia S. Browder, Susie McDonald, Jeanetta Reese, and Mary Louise Smith) became plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle which successfully challenged Montgomery's bus segregation laws. On June 13, 1956, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama ruled that based on the equal protection guaranteed citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment "the enforced segregation of black and white passengers on motor buses operating in the City of Montgomery violates the Constitution and laws of the United States." The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the District Court's ruling on November 13, 1956, and Montgomery's buses were desegregated by order of Mayor W.A. Gayle, the defendant in the Supreme Court Case, as of December 20, 1956.

Between 1950 and 1960, the population of Montgomery, AL, grew from 106,525 to 134,393-a 26 percent increase. In 2010, the city's population was 205,764, and in 2016, the American Community Survey estimated Montgomery's population was 200,022.

Between 1960 and 2016, the percentage of the Black population living in the South remained fairly stable. (The South consists of: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.) The 1960 Census reported that 59.9 percent of the nation's Black population lived in the South. By 2010, 55 percent of the Black population in the United States lived in the South.

When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that the total Black population of the United States was 20,671,914. In 2016, it estimated that 13.8 percent of the U.S. population was Black alone-or-in-combination-approximately 44.1 million.

Following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Census Bureau began collecting voting and registration data as a supplement to the Current Population Survey every 2 years to insure that elections are fair and open to all citizens regardless of race. In 1964, the Census Bureau reported that 69 percent of all voters aged 21 and older voted in the November 1964 presidential election that pitted Lyndon B. Johnson against Barry M. Goldwater. In 2016, 61.4 percent of registered voters aged 18 and older reported voting in the presidential election between Donald J. Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

This Month in Census History

In a February 1, 1953, episode of the popular television show, "The Cisco Kid," Cisco ( Duncan Renaldo) and sidekick Pancho ( Leo Carrillo) track outlaws posing as census takers.

Legitimate census takers always display their credentials during a visit. Learn more about how the Census Bureau protects your privacy at its Are You in a Survey Web page.

Did You Know?

On April 11, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968-also known as the Fair Housing Act.

The act provides equal housing opportunities regardless of race, religion, or national origin. Beginning in 1974, the law prohibits gender discrimination and since 1988, gives protection to the disabled and families with children.

Black homeownership rates rose from 34.5 percent in 1950 to 41.6 percent in 1970 (2 years after passage of the act). In 2017, the rate of Black homeownership (Black Alone) was about 43 percent.

Photo courtesy of Tompkins County, NY.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

On July 2, 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr. attended the White House ceremony during which President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination on the basis of race in public accommodations, in publicly-owned or -operated facilities, in employment and union membership, and in the registration of voters.

Photo courtesy of the National Parks Service.

Visit https://www.census.gov/history every month for the latest Census History Home Page!

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On February 4, 1913, Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, AL. McCauley married Raymond Parks in 1932. She joined the Montgomery, AL, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1943, where she worked as the chapter's secretary under civil rights leader and union organizer E.D.

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For refusing her seat aboard a Montgomery public bus, boycotts of the city by Black patrons ensued. This lasted for 13 months until the supreme court ruled that segregated buses are unconstitutional.

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This image is one of many examples of a segregated bus in 1950's Alabama, with white patrons sitting in the front and black patrons forced to sit in the back. These days, an image of a mandated racially segregated public space anywhere would be seen as barbaric and unethical, yet it was the reality for thousands in Jim Crow south just sixty years ago. Desegregating buses was the first step on a long march towards achieving similar equality throughout American socio-political complexes

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The aftermath of a firebombing attack on a greyhound bus used by the freedom riders in Alabama, 1961. The reality put forth by these images - that such acts could occur on American soil, motivated solely by racial hate - were instrumental in showing the American public the reality of racial tensions in the south, and the need for reform throughout social and political spheres across the U.S. to promote the fundamental principles of freedom, equality, and justice that are ingrained in our constitution.

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On Sunday, May 14, 1961-Mother's Day-scores of angry white people blocked a Greyhound bus carrying black and white passengers through rural Alabama. The attackers pelted the vehicle with rocks and bricks, slashed tires, smashed windows with pipes and axes and lobbed a firebomb through a broken window. As smoke and flames filled the bus, the mob barricaded the door. "Burn them alive," somebody cried out. "Fry the goddamn niggers." An exploding fuel tank and warning shots from arriving state troopers forced the rabble back and allowed the riders to escape the inferno. Even then some were pummeled with baseball bats as they fled.

A few hours later, black and white passengers on a Trailways bus were beaten bloody after they entered whites-only waiting rooms and restaurants at bus terminals in Birmingham and Anniston, Alabama.

The bus passengers assaulted that day were Freedom Riders, among the first of more than 400 volunteers who traveled throughout the South on regularly scheduled buses for seven months in 1961 to test a 1960 Supreme Court decision that declared segregated facilities for interstate passengers illegal.

After news stories and photographs of the burning bus and bloody attacks sped around the country, many more people came forward to risk their lives and challenge the racial status quo. Now Eric Etheridge, a veteran magazine editor, provides a visceral tribute to those road warriors in Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders. The book, a collection of Etheridge's recent portraits of 80 Freedom Riders juxtaposed with mug shots from their arrests in 1961, includes interviews with the activists re-flecting on their experiences.

Etheridge, who grew up in Carthage, Mississippi, focuses on Freedom Riders who boarded buses to Jackson, Mississippi, from late May to mid-September 1961. He was just 4 years old at the time and unaware of the seismic racial upheaval taking place around him. But he well remembers using one entrance to his doctor's office while African-Americans used another, and sitting in the orchestra of his local movie theater while blacks sat in the balcony.

"Looking back," Etheridge says, "I can identify with what the white South African photographer Jillian Edelstein has said: 'Growing up white in apartheid South Africa entitled one to massive and instant privilege.'"

A few years ago, Etheridge, who lives in New York City and has worked for Rolling Stone and Harper's, began looking for a project to engage his budding photographic skills. During a visit with his parents in Jackson in 2003, he was reminded that a lawsuit had forced the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an agency created in 1956 to resist desegregation, to open its archives. The agency files, put online in 2002, included more than 300 arrest photographs of Freedom Riders."The police camera caught something special," Etheridge says, adding that the collection is "an amazing addition to the visual history of the civil rights movement." Unwittingly, the segregationist commission had created an indelible homage to the activist riders.

Nearly 75 percent of them were between 18 and 30 years old. About half were black; a quarter, women. Their mug-shot expressions hint at their resolve, defiance, pride, vulnerability and fear. "I was captivated by these images and wanted to bring them to a wider audience," Etheridge writes. "I wanted to find the riders today, to look into their faces and photograph them again." Using the Internet and information in the arrest files, he tracked riders down, then called them cold. "My best icebreaker was: 'I have your mug shot from 1961. Have you ever seen it?' Even people who are prone to be cautious were tickled to even think that it still existed."

Most of the riders were college students; many, such as the Episcopal clergymen and contingents of Yale divinity students, had religious affiliations. Some were active in civil rights groups like the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which initiated the Freedom Rides and was founded in 1942 on Mahatma Gandhi's principle of nonviolent protest. The goal of the rides, CORE director James Farmer said as he launched the campaign, was "to create a crisis so that the federal government would be compelled to enforce the law."

The volunteers, from 40 states, received training in nonviolence tactics. Those who could not refrain from striking back when pushed, hit, spit on or doused with liquids while racial epithets rang in their ears were rejected.

As soon as he heard the call for riders, Robert Singleton remembers, he "was fired up and ready to go." He and his wife, Helen, had both been active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and they took 12 volunteers with them from California. "The spirit that permeated the air at that time was not unlike the feeling Barack Obama has rekindled among the youth of today," says Singleton, now 73 and an economics professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

Peter Ackerberg, a lawyer who now lives in Minneapolis, said that while he'd always talked a "big radical game," he had never acted on his convictions. "What am I going to tell my children when they ask me about this time?" he recalled thinking. Boarding a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, "I was pretty scared," he told Etheridge. "The black guys and girls were singing....They were so spirited and so unafraid. They were really prepared to risk their lives." Today, Ackerberg recalls acquiescing and saying "sir" to a jail official who was "pounding a blackjack." Soon after, "I could hear the blackjack strike [rider C.T. Vivian's] head and him shrieking; I don't think he ever said 'sir.'"

John Lewis, then 21 and already a veteran of sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters in Nashville, was the first Freedom Rider to be assaulted. While trying to enter a whites-only waiting room in Rock Hill, South Carolina, two men set upon him, battering his face and kicking him in the ribs. Less than two weeks later, he joined a ride bound for Jackson. "We were determined not to let any act of violence keep us from our goal," Lewis, a Georgia congressman since 1987 and a celebrated civil rights figure, said recently. "We knew our lives could be threatened, but we had made up our minds not to turn back."

As riders poured into the South, National Guardsmen were assigned to some buses to prevent violence. When activists arrived at the Jackson bus depot, police arrested blacks who refused to heed orders to stay out of white restrooms or vacate the white waiting room. And whites were arrested if they used "colored" facilities. Officials charged the riders with breach of peace, rather than breaking segregation laws. Freedom Riders responded with a strategy they called "jail, no bail"-a deliberate effort to clog the penal facilities. Most of the 300 riders in Jackson would endure six weeks in sweltering jail or prison cells rife with mice, insects, soiled mattresses and open toilets.

"The dehumanizing process started as soon as we got there," said Hank Thomas, a Marriott hotel franchise owner in Atlanta, who was then a sophomore at Howard University in Washington, D.C. "We were told to strip naked and then walked down this long corridor.... I'll never forget [CORE director] Jim Farmer, a very dignified man ...walking down this long corridor naked...that is dehumanizing. And that was the whole point."

Jean Thompson, then a 19-year-old CORE worker, said she was one of the riders slapped by a penal official for failing to call him "sir." An FBI investigation into the incident concluded that "no one was beaten," she told Etheridge. "That said a lot to me about what actually happens in this country. It was eye-opening." When prisoners were transferred from one facility to another, unexplained stops on remote dirt roads or the sight of curious onlookers peering into the transport trucks heightened fears. "We imagined every horror including an ambush by the KKK," rider Carol Silver told Etheridge. To keep up their spirits, the prisoners sang freedom songs.

None of the riders Etheridge spoke with expressed regrets, even though some would be entangled for years in legal appeals that went all the way to the Supreme Court (which issued a ruling in 1965 that led to a reversal of the breach of peace convictions). "It's the right thing to do, to oppose an oppressive state where wrongs are being done to people," said William Leons, a University of Toledo professor of anthropology whose father had been killed in an Austrian concentration camp and whose mother hid refugees during World War II. "I was aware very much of my parents' involvement in the Nazi resistance," he said of his 39-day incarceration as a rider. "[I was] doing what they would have done."

More than two dozen of the riders Etheridge interviewed went on to become teachers or professors, and there are eight ministers as well as lawyers, Peace Corps workers, journalists and politicians. Like Lewis, Bob Filner, of California, is a congressman. And few former Freedom Riders still practice civil disobedience. Joan Pleune, 70, of New York City, is a member of the Granny Peace Brigade; she was arrested two years ago at an anti-Iraq War protest in Washington, D.C. while "reading the names of the war dead," she says. Theresa Walker, 80, was arrested in New York City in 2000 during a protest over the police killing there the year before of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed immigrant from Guinea.

Though the Freedom Rides dramatically demonstrated that some Southern states were ignoring the U.S. Supreme Court's mandate to desegregate bus terminals, it would take a petition from U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy to spur the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to issue tough new regulations, backed by fines up to $500, that would eventually end segregated bus facilities. Even after the order went into effect, on November 1, 1961, hard-core segregation persisted; still, the "white" and "colored" signs in bus stations across the South be- gan to come down. The New York Times, which had earlier criticized the Freedom Riders' "incitement and provocation," acknowledged that they "started the chain of events which resulted in the new I.C.C. order."

The legacy of the rides "could not have been more poetic," says Robert Singleton, who connects those events to the election of Barack Obama as president. Obama was born in August 1961, Singleton notes, just when the riders were languishing in Mississippi jails and prisons, trying to "break the back of segregation for all people, but especially for the children. We put ourselves in harm's way for a child, at the very time he came into this world, who would become our first black president."

Marian Smith Holmes is an associate editor.
Photographer Eric Etheridge maintains a Web site, breachofpeace.com, that publishes information about the Freedom Riders.

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Fighting racial segregation in the South, these activists were beaten and arrested. Where are they now, nearly fifty years later?

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Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964, accompanied by members of his cabinet and civil rights leaders (most notably, Martin Luther King, Jr.). The image of civil rights leaders meeting with politicians within the Nation's Capital, is extremely empowering. It demonstrates that change is possible, and nonviolent protest is an extremely effective means of passing favorable legislation. It took the hard work and dedication of thousands in order to make this happen, from the initial bus boycotts to the freedom rides, and everything in between.

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Table of Contents

What did the Civil Rights Act of 1964 do?

Who signed the Civil Rights Act into law?

Who had proposed the Civil Rights Act?

This article was most recently revised and updated by

Civil Rights Act, (1964), comprehensive U.S. legislation intended to end discrimination based on race, colour, religion, or national origin. It is often called the most important U.S. law on civil rights since Reconstruction (1865-77) and is a hallmark of the American civil rights movement. Title I of the act guarantees equal voting rights by removing registration requirements and procedures biased against minorities and the underprivileged. Title II prohibits segregation or discrimination in places of public accommodation involved in interstate commerce. Title VII bans discrimination by trade unions, schools, or employers involved in interstate commerce or doing business with the federal government. The latter section also applies to discrimination on the basis of sex and established a government agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), to enforce these provisions. In 2020 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that firing an employee for being gay, lesbian, or transgender is illegal under Title VII's prohibition of sex discrimination (Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia). The act also calls for the desegregation of public schools (Title IV), broadens the duties of the Civil Rights Commission (Title V), and assures nondiscrimination in the distribution of funds under federally assisted programs (Title VI).

The Civil Rights Act was a highly controversial issue in the United States as soon as it was proposed by Pres. John F. Kennedy in 1963. Although Kennedy was unable to secure passage of the bill in Congress, a stronger version was eventually passed with the urging of his successor, Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed the bill into law on July 2, 1964, following one of the longest debates in Senate history. White groups opposed to integration with African Americans responded to the act with a significant backlash that took the form of protests, increased support for pro-segregation candidates for public office, and some racial violence. The constitutionality of the act was immediately challenged and was upheld by the Supreme Court in the test case Heart of Atlanta Motel v. U.S. (1964). The act gave federal law enforcement agencies the power to prevent racial discrimination in employment, voting, and the use of public facilities.

American civil rights movement Events

The 50th anniversary of the act was celebrated in April 2014 with an event at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas. Speakers included U.S. Pres. Barack Obama and former presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. The U.S. Congress marked the anniversary by posthumously awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to civil rights leaders Martin Luther King, Jr., and Coretta Scott King.

Adam Augustyn.

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Civil Rights Act | Summary, Facts, President, & History

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Civil Rights Act, (1964), comprehensive U.S. legislation intended to end discrimination based on race, colour, religion, or national origin. It is often called the most important U.S. law on civil rights since Reconstruction (1865-77) and is a hallmark of the American civil rights movement.

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This article gives a good rundown on the freedom rides of 1961, and exactly how their activism affected the systems they were trying toi bring down. They learned of the psychological power of nonviolent protest from the example of Ghandi, and would opt out of fines to instead spend time in prison to drain the system of resources.

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Fifty years ago, seven black people boarded buses with six white people in Washington, D.C., and took the fight for civil rights to the Deep South. Their trip became known as the Freedom Rides.

In Freedom Riders, a new documentary that airs this month on PBS, filmmaker Stanley Nelson talks with the people who witnessed the rides, which were organized by the Congress of Racial Equality.

"The first group of Freedom Riders didn't really know what to expect," Nelson tells NPR's Neal Conan.

They encountered angry mobs in the Jim Crow South but remained steadfast in their commitment to nonviolence.

In Birmingham, for example, Alabama politician Eugene "Bull" Connor ordered police to stay away from the bus station, giving the assembled mob 15 minutes to do whatever they wanted to arriving Freedom Riders.

According to Nelson, one witness recalled Connor telling the mob, "I don't give a goddamn if you kill them. You got 15 minutes and nobody's going to get arrested."

Prior to the rides, the Supreme Court had twice outlawed segregation in interstate commerce, which applied to interstate bus travel, yet Southern bus stations and buses remained segregated.

Ernest "Ripp" Patton took part in the May 24, 1961, Greyhound Freedom Ride from Nashville, Tenn. to Jackson, Miss. Because it was one of the later Freedom Rides, Patton tells Neal Conan, he had a better idea of what he was getting into.

By the time he boarded the bus, Patton says, "They had had the mob attacks in Anniston, Birmingham and Montgomery."

But he still went to Nashville and from there to Jackson, where he was ultimately put in jail.

According to Patton, Freedom Riders opted for jail time over fines.

"The fine might be a $50 fine and the sentence might be 31 days, but we would choose the 31 days," he explains. "It makes it hard on the system to have to feed and take care of a lot of students that they really didn't expect to do that with."

Patton, who served some of his time at Mississippi's Parchman State Prison Farm, says it was a technique they learned from Gandhi.

"I think I remember one time listening and they said, 'What are you going to do this summer?' " Patton says. " 'Well, I can flip burgers or I can go to Parchman.' "

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Remembering The 'Freedom Riders,' 50 Years Later

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Fifty years ago, seven black people boarded buses with six white people in Washington, D.C., and took the fight for civil rights to the Deep South. Their trip became known as the Freedom Rides, and a new documentary by Stanley Nelson talks with the people who witnessed the rides firsthand.