essay of the civil rights movement

The Long Civil Rights Movement

The “master narrative” of civil rights in the United States obscures the history of a more radical civil rights movement that stretches to the 1930s.

“ Remembrance is always a form of forgetting ,” writes Jacquelyn Dowd Hall in her influential exploration of the “long civil rights movement” that began not in the mid-1950s but earlier, in the “liberal and radical milieu of the late 1930s.”

“The dominant narrative of the civil rights movement—distilled from history and memory, twisted by ideology and political contestation, and embedded in heritage tours, museums, public rituals, textbooks, and various artifacts of mass culture—distorts and suppresses as much as it reveals,” she writes.

For it is the short civil rights that has been canonized. The period between the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision declaring segregated public schools unconstitutional and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 , has become what Hall calls the “master narrative” of civil rights.

The longer, more radical movement—“I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic” wrote Martin Luther King. Jr. in 1952; in the year of his assassination, he told the New York Times “in a sense, you could say we are engaged in a class struggle”—has been intentionally obscured. Hall makes the case that the history of the civil rights movement has been “distorted” by those forces arrayed against it.

In the short version, the civil rights movement lasts a decade and is a victory of “moral clarity” followed by a period of decline amidst anti-war protest and urban riots, stagflation and malaise. Conservatives who had opposed civil rights now touted the ahistorical and anti-historical idea of colorblindness as a cure-all…even as they pushed white backlash against “student rebellion, [B]lack militancy, feminism, busing, affirmative action,” Hall writes. Even the Democratic presidents since have been part of the reaction: Jimmy Carter was Reaganite before Reagan ; Bill Clinton went further than Reagan in dismembering welfare; and as a freshman Senator from Delaware in the 1970s, Joe Biden worked to maintain the segregation of white suburbs .

“By confining the civil rights struggle to the South, to bowdlerized heroes, to a single halcyon decade, and to limited, noneconomic objectives, the master narrative simultaneously elevates and diminishes the movement,” writes Hall. “It ensures the status of the classical phase as a triumphant moment in a larger American progress narrative, yet it undermines its gravitas . It prevents one of the most remarkable mass movements in American history from speaking effectively to the challenges of our time.”

The 1963 March on Washington, which featured King’s frequently (and selectively) quoted “I Have a Dream ” speech, was fully titled, after all, a march “for jobs and freedom.” Movement leaders realized that economic justice and racial justice were intertwined. That was the heritage of the long civil rights movement, which other historians have rooted in what they call the “Black Popular Front” and “civil rights unionism” of the 1930s and 1940s. It was, after all, veterans of those earlier labor/left struggles like E.D. Nixon , Ella Baker , Anne Braden , Bayard Rustin , and Francis Pauley , who were the teachers and mentors of the 1950s and 1960s generation.

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While the New Deal denied programs and benefits to more than half of all Black workers and most (87 percent) Black women wage-earners, the booming economy of World War II gave hope that the benefits of the state-subsidized middle class (essentially affirmative action for suburban whites) would be shared. But Cold War reaction empowered northern business leaders and southern elites to use a “mass-based but elite-manipulated anticommunist crusade” to “roll back labor’s wartime gains, protect the South’s cheap labor supply, and halt the expansion of the New Deal.”

Hall describes six major threads braiding together during the long civil rights movement. First, racism was a national problem, not one simply confined to the South. Second, racial justice and economic justice, race and class, civil rights and workers’ rights, were inseparable. Third, “women’s activism and gender dynamics were central to both the freedom movement and the backlash against it.” Fourth, civil rights struggles outside the South beginning in the mid-1960s included the turn to Black nationalism . Fifth, the gains of the 1960s were the basis of efforts in 1970s to expand social and economic rights. Sixth, the resistance to all this and the consequent backlash against it have an equally long history.

For Hall, this longer history works to make civil rights “harder to celebrate as a natural progression of American values. Harder to cast as a satisfying morality tale. Most of all, harder to simplify, appropriate, and contain.”

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Civil Rights Movement

By: History.com Editors

Updated: May 14, 2024 | Original: October 27, 2009

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 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, along with many other Americans, mobilized and began an unprecedented fight for equality that spanned two decades.

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.

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."

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 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.

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 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 4, 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.

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.

Sit-In at 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.”

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, which 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

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.

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.

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.

Six Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement

Though their stories are sometimes overlooked, these women were instrumental in the fight for equal rights for African‑Americans.

How the Black Power Movement Influenced the Civil Rights Movement

With a focus on racial pride and self‑determination, leaders of the Black Power movement argued that civil rights activism did not go far enough.

8 Key Laws That Advanced Civil Rights

Since the abolishment of slavery, the U.S. government has passed several laws to address discrimination and racism against African Americans.

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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Intro Essay: The Civil Rights Movement

To what extent did founding principles of liberty, equality, and justice become a reality for african americans during the civil rights movement.

• I can explain the importance of local and federal actions in the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
• I can compare the goals and methods of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLS), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Malcolm X and Black Nationalism, and Black Power.
• I can explain challenges African Americans continued to face despite victories for equality and justice during the civil rights movement.

Essential Vocabulary

Continuing the Heroic Struggle for Equality: The Civil Rights Movement

The struggle to make the promises of the Declaration of Independence a reality for Black Americans reached a climax after World War II. The activists of the civil rights movement directly confronted segregation and demanded equal civil rights at the local level with physical and moral courage and perseverance. They simultaneously pursued a national strategy of systematically filing lawsuits in federal courts, lobbying Congress, and pressuring presidents to change the laws. The civil rights movement encountered significant resistance, however, and suffered violence in the quest for equality.

During the middle of the twentieth century, several Black writers grappled with the central contradictions between the nation’s ideals and its realities, and the place of Black Americans in their country. Richard Wright explored a raw confrontation with racism in Native Son (1940), while Ralph Ellison led readers through a search for identity beyond a racialized category in his novel Invisible Man (1952), as part of the Black quest for identity. The novel also offered hope in the power of the sacred principles of the Founding documents. Playwright Lorraine Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun , first performed in 1959, about the dreams deferred for Black Americans and questions about assimilation. Novelist and essayist James Baldwin described Blacks’ estrangement from U.S. society and themselves while caught in a racial nightmare of injustice in The Fire Next Time (1963) and other works.

World War II wrought great changes in U.S. society. Black soldiers fought for a “double V for victory,” hoping to triumph over fascism abroad and racism at home. Many received a hostile reception, such as Medgar Evers who was blocked from voting at gunpoint by five armed whites. Blacks continued the Great Migration to southern and northern cities for wartime industrial work. After the war, in 1947, Jackie Robinson endured racial taunts on the field and segregation off it as he broke the color barrier in professional baseball and began a Hall of Fame career. The following year, President Harry Truman issued executive orders desegregating the military and banning discrimination in the civil service. Meanwhile, Thurgood Marshall and his legal team at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) meticulously prepared legal challenges to discrimination, continuing a decades-long effort.

The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund brought lawsuits against segregated schools in different states that were consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka , 1954. The Supreme Court unanimously decided that “separate but equal” was “inherently unequal.” Brown II followed a year after, as the court ordered that the integration of schools should be pursued “with all deliberate speed.” Throughout the South, angry whites responded with a campaign of “massive resistance” and refused to comply with the order, while many parents sent their children to all-white private schools. Middle-class whites who opposed integration joined local chapters of citizens’ councils and used propaganda, economic pressure, and even violence to achieve their ends.

A wave of violence and intimidation followed. In 1955, teenager Emmett Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi when he was lynched after being falsely accused of whistling at a white woman. Though an all-white jury quickly acquitted the two men accused of killing him, Till’s murder was reported nationally and raised awareness of the injustices taking place in Mississippi.

In Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks (who was a secretary of the Montgomery NAACP) was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus. Her willingness to confront segregation led to a direct-action movement for equality. The local Women’s Political Council organized the city’s Black residents into a boycott of the bus system, which was then led by the Montgomery Improvement Association. Black churches and ministers, including Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rev. Ralph Abernathy, provided a source of strength. Despite arrests, armed mobs, and church bombings, the boycott lasted until a federal court desegregated the city buses. In the wake of the boycott, the leading ministers formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) , which became a key civil rights organization.

Rosa Parks is shown here in 1955 with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the background. The Montgomery bus boycott was an important victory in the civil rights movement.

In 1957, nine Black families decided to send their children to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to prevent their entry, and one student, Elizabeth Eckford, faced an angry crowd of whites alone and barely escaped. President Eisenhower was compelled to respond and sent in 1,200 paratroops from the 101st Airborne to protect the Black students. They continued to be harassed, but most finished the school year and integrated the school.

That year, Congress passed a Civil Rights Act that created a civil rights division in the Justice Department and provided minimal protections for the right to vote. The bill had been watered down because of an expected filibuster by southern senators, who had recently signed the Southern Manifesto, a document pledging their resistance to Supreme Court decisions such as Brown .

In 1960, four Black college students were refused lunch service at a local Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, and they spontaneously staged a “sit-in” the following day. Their resistance to the indignities of segregation was copied by thousands of others of young Blacks across the South, launching another wave of direct, nonviolent confrontation with segregation. Ella Baker invited several participants to a Raleigh conference where they formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and issued a Statement of Purpose. The group represented a more youthful and daring effort that later broke with King and his strategy of nonviolence.

In contrast, Malcolm X became a leading spokesperson for the Nation of Islam (NOI) who represented Black separatism as an alternative to integration, which he deemed an unworthy goal. He advocated revolutionary violence as a means of Black self-defense and rejected nonviolence. He later changed his views, breaking with the NOI and embracing a Black nationalism that had more common ground with King’s nonviolent views. Malcolm X had reached out to establish ties with other Black activists before being gunned down by assassins who were members of the NOI later in 1965.

In 1961, members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) rode segregated buses in order to integrate interstate travel. These Black and white Freedom Riders traveled into the Deep South, where mobs beat them with bats and pipes in bus stations and firebombed their buses. A cautious Kennedy administration reluctantly intervened to protect the Freedom Riders with federal marshals, who were also victimized by violent white mobs.

Malcolm X was a charismatic speaker and gifted organizer. He argued that Black pride, identity, and independence were more important than integration with whites.

King was moved to act. He confronted segregation with the hope of exposing injustice and brutality against nonviolent protestors and arousing the conscience of the nation to achieve a just rule of law. The first planned civil rights campaign was initiated by SNCC and taken over mid-campaign by King and SCLC. It failed because Albany, Georgia’s Police Chief Laurie Pritchett studied King’s tactics and responded to the demonstrations with restraint. In 1963, King shifted the movement to Birmingham, Alabama, where Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor unleashed his officers to attack civil rights protestors with fire hoses and police dogs. Authorities arrested thousands, including many young people who joined the marches. King wrote “Letter from Birmingham Jail” after his own arrest and provided the moral justification for the movement to break unjust laws. National and international audiences were shocked by the violent images shown in newspapers and on the television news. President Kennedy addressed the nation and asked, “whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities . . . [If a Black person]cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?” The president then submitted a civil rights bill to Congress.

In late August 1963, more than 250,000 people joined the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in solidarity for equal rights. From the Lincoln Memorial steps, King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. He stated, “I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”

After Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, President Lyndon Johnson pushed his agenda through Congress. In the early summer of 1964, a 3-month filibuster by southern senators was finally defeated, and both houses passed the historical civil rights bill. President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, banning segregation in public accommodations.

Activists in the civil rights movement then focused on campaigns for the right to vote. During the summer of 1964, several civil rights organizations combined their efforts during the “ Freedom Summer ” to register Blacks to vote with the help of young white college students. They endured terror and intimidation as dozens of churches and homes were burned and workers were killed, including an incident in which Black advocate James Chaney and two white students, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered in Mississippi.

In August 1963, peaceful protesters gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial to draw attention to the inequalities and indignities African Americans suffered 100 years after emancipation. Leaders of the march are shown in the image on the bottom, with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the center.

That summer, Fannie Lou Hamer helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) as civil rights delegates to replace the rival white delegation opposed to civil rights at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. Hamer was a veteran of attempts to register other Blacks to vote and endured severe beatings for her efforts. A proposed compromise of giving two seats to the MFDP satisfied neither those delegates nor the white delegation, which walked out. Cracks were opening up in the Democratic electoral coalition over civil rights, especially in the South.

Fannie Lou Hamer testified about the violence she and others endured when trying to register to vote at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Her televised testimony exposed the realities of continued violence against Blacks trying to exercise their constitutional rights.

In early 1965, the SCLC and SNCC joined forces to register voters in Selma and draw attention to the fight for Black suffrage. On March 7, marchers planned to walk peacefully from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery. However, mounted state troopers and police blocked the Edmund Pettus Bridge and then rampaged through the marchers, indiscriminately beating them. SNCC leader John Lewis suffered a fractured skull, and 5 women were clubbed unconscious. Seventy people were hospitalized for injuries during “Bloody Sunday.” The scenes again shocked television viewers and newspaper readers.

The images of state troopers, local police, and local people brutally attacking peaceful protestors on “Bloody Sunday” shocked people across the country and world. Two weeks later, protestors of all ages and races continued the protest. By the time they reached the state capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, their ranks had swelled to about 25,000 people.

Two days later, King led a symbolic march to the bridge but then turned around. Many younger and more militant activists were alienated and felt that King had sold out to white authorities. The tension revealed the widening division between older civil rights advocates and those younger, more radical supporters who were frustrated at the slow pace of change and the routine violence inflicted upon peaceful protesters. Nevertheless, starting on March 21, with the help of a federal judge who refused Governor George Wallace’s request to ban the march, Blacks triumphantly walked to Montgomery. On August 6, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act protecting the rights to register and vote after a Senate filibuster ended and the bill passed Congress.

The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act did not alter the fact that most Black Americans still suffered racism, were denied equal economic opportunities, and lived in segregated neighborhoods. While King and other leaders did seek to raise their issues among northerners, frustrations often boiled over into urban riots during the mid-1960s. Police brutality and other racial incidents often triggered days of violence in which hundreds were injured or killed. There were mass arrests and widespread property damage from arson and looting in Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, Cleveland, Chicago, and dozens of other cities. A presidential National Advisory Commission of Civil Disorders issued the Kerner Report, which analyzed the causes of urban unrest, noting the impact of racism on the inequalities and injustices suffered by Black Americans.

Frustration among young Black Americans led to the rise of a more militant strain of advocacy. In 1966, activist James Meredith was on a solo march in Mississippi to raise awareness about Black voter registration when he was shot and wounded. Though Meredith recovered, this event typified the violence that led some young Black Americans to espouse a more military strain of advocacy. On June 16, SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael and members of the Black Panther Party continued Meredith’s march while he recovered from his wounds, chanting, “We want Black Power .” Black Power leaders and members of the Black Panther Party offered a different vision for equality and justice. They advocated self-reliance and self-empowerment, a celebration of Black culture, and armed self-defense. They used aggressive rhetoric to project a more radical strategy for racial progress, including sympathy for revolutionary socialism and rejection of capitalism. While its legacy is debated, the Black Power movement raised many important questions about the place of Black Americans in the United States, beyond the civil rights movement.

After World War II, Black Americans confronted the iniquities and indignities of segregation to end almost a century of Jim Crow. Undeterred, they turned the public’s eyes to the injustice they faced and called on the country to live up to the promises of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and to continue the fight against inequality and discrimination.

Reading Comprehension Questions

• What factors helped to create the modern civil rights movement?
• How was the quest for civil rights a combination of federal and local actions?
• What were the goals and methods of different activists and groups of the civil rights movement? Complete the table below to reference throughout your analysis of the primary source documents.

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The Civil Rights Movement

• CommonLit is a nonprofit that has everything teachers and schools need for top-notch literacy instruction: a full-year ELA curriculum, benchmark assessments, and formative data. Browse Content Who We Are About

Kenneth R. Janken
Professor, Department of African and Afro-American Studies and
Director of Experiential Education, Office of Undergraduate Curricula
University of North Carolina
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©National Humanities Center

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 , 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

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.

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.

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.

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In many respects, the civil rights movement was a great success. Successive, targeted campaigns of non-violent direct action chipped away at the racist power structures that proliferated across the southern United States. Newsworthy protests captured media attention and elicited sympathy across the nation. Though Martin Luther King Jr.’s charismatic leadership was important, we should not forget that the civil rights cause depended on a mass movement. As the former SNCC member Diane Nash recalled, it was a ‘people’s movement’, fuelled by grass-roots activism (Nash, 1985). Recognising a change in the public mood, Lyndon Johnson swiftly addressed many of the racial inequalities highlighted by the civil rights movement. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 led to meaningful change in the lives of many Black Americans, dismantling systems of segregation and black disenfranchisement.

In other respects, the civil rights movement was less revolutionary. It did not fundamentally restructure American society, nor did it end racial discrimination. In the economic sphere, in particular, there was still much work to be done. Across the nation, and especially in northern cities, stark racial inequalities were commonplace, especially in terms of access to jobs and housing. As civil rights activists became frustrated by their lack of progress in these areas, the movement began to splinter towards the end of the 1960s, with many Black activists embracing violent methods. Over the subsequent decades, racial inequalities have persisted, and in recent years police brutality against Black Americans, in particular, has become an urgent issue. As the protests triggered by the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 have demonstrated, many of the battles of the 1960s are still being fought.

Though King and other members of the civil rights movement failed to achieve their broader goals, there can be no doubting their radical ambitions. As Wornie Reed, who worked on the Poor People’s Campaign, explains in this interview, King was undoubtedly a ‘radical’ activist, even if the civil rights movement itself never resulted in a far-reaching social revolution.

Transcript: Video 4: Wornie Reed

This free course is an adapted extract from the Open University course A113 Revolutions [ Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. ( Hide tip ) ] . It is one of four OpenLearn courses exploring the notion of the Sixties as a ‘revolutionary’ period. Learn more about these OpenLearn courses here .

Narratives of the Civil Rights Movement

Ohio State University history professor Hasan Kwame Jeffries discussed historical narratives of the Civil Rights Movement and modern underst… read more

Ohio State University history professor Hasan Kwame Jeffries discussed historical narratives of the Civil Rights Movement and modern understandings of victories, defeats, and what the movement was trying to achieve. Professor Jeffries is the brother of House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY). This lecture was part of a symposium hosted by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. close

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The History of The Civil Rights Movement in The United States of America

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The Civil Rights Movement in the United States Essay

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The “I Have a Dream” speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is a powerful message that remains relevant to both the United States and the world even today. The speech is full of outrage, contains allusions to the Bible and the US Declaration of Independence. It is considered one of the best in the history of mankind. The main theses of King’s political speeches were not only the equalization of the rights of Whites and Blacks, but also a more global idea – world peace for the sake of the prosperity of humanity. According to Corbett et al. (2017), King’s speech became the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, legitimizing its goals.

The March was organized by Philip Randolph and Bayard Ruston to advocate for the civil and economic rights of the blacks in the United States. In the United States, the 1960s was characterized by the rise of Civil Rights Movements, the aim of which was to suppress and end discrimination and racial segregation against African Americans.

It was during the 1960s that the African Americans began realizing accomplishments in their struggle for civil rights, and using them as a base for fighting further. Galvin (2020) states that “the basic narrative of justice is of a brutally oppressed people who took the initiative, defined their own needs, and demanded freedom” (p. 1). The most used strategies by the Civil Rights Movement included freedom rides, boycotts, voter registration drives, marches, and sit-ins. This article seeks to discuss the impact of the 1960s Civil Rights Movements on the nation and minority groups and whether the ideas of the 1960s still have relevance today.

The Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s did not effectively change the nation. Some might argue that African Americans did not benefit that much from the new regulations brought by the movement. According to Bloom and Hatcher (2019), “the Civil Rights Movement confronted the denial of political rights to Blacks, forced segregation, and the degradation of Blacks to second-grade class citizenship” (p. 5). However, the White people were still significantly more privileged than the Black Americans, remaining on top of society. The biggest failure of the Civil Rights Movement was in relation to poverty and economic discrimination.

There was still a high prevalence of discrimination in employment and housing despite the laws being passed. Further, the business owned by minority groups were still denied equality in regards to access to financing, markets, and capital. As a result, many African Americans and other minority groups remained poor and further frustrated by never-ending police harassment, discrimination, and low standards of living. From these, many boycott groups arose, such as, for example, Black Panthers.

The Civil Rights Act had a large impact on the minority groups across the continent. The action initiated a greater federal role in protecting the rights of the minorities by increasing the protection of their voting rights. The Jim Crow laws ended with the establishment of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Moreover, federal penalties for those who violated the civil rights of people, especially working class, were established by the Civil Rights Act of 1968. It further outlawed discrimination of minorities in the sale and rental of about eighty percent of housing in the United States.

The tactics and strategies that were used in the 1960s by civil rights activists would not apply to today’s racial and ethnic conflicts. As stated earlier, some of the popular strategies adopted by the Civil Rights Movement in their fight against racial and ethnic conflicts were based on the notion of non-violent civil disobedience. Pineda (2021) claims that “the Civil Rights Movement is not only a powerful example of civil disobedience, but also a horizon of judgement of all civil disobedience” (p. 1). These methods of protests included freedom rides, boycotts, sit-ins, voter registration drives, and marches. As we are aware by now, these strategies by Civil Rights Movements were not effective in regards to implementation. Therefore, since it was not successfully implemented in the 1960s, then there are higher chances that it may not be effective in solving the racial and ethnic conflicts of today.

It is worth mentioning that racial and ethnic conflicts are on the rise today in the United States and other parts of the world. In order to effectively reduce the racial and ethnic prejudice experienced today, the strategies to be applied needs to address both institutional and individual sources of prejudice. Further, the strategies should receive the support and active participation of those with authority and power in any given setting. In addition, these strategies need to examine similarities and differences across and within racial and ethnic groups. This includes differences related to gender, social class, and language.

The ideas of the 1960s still have relevance in the current era despite the tremendous progress witnessed in the United States since then. For example, African-American students still experience racial discrimination in the field of education even today. According to the U.S Department of Education’s Civil Rights office, there is still opportunity gaps existing in public schools across the United States. In addition, there are some discriminatory policies and practices that still exist in schools that prevent students of color from accessing quality education. In addition, racial inequality and poverty among African Americans are still prevalent.

One relevant example is that Hurricane Katrina mainly affected the African Americans who were concentrated in poor neighborhoods, as was still the case in the 1960s. There have been activities in the current era which have been inspired by the Civil Rights Movements, including the immigrant rights demonstrations and the formation of various Latino civil rights and women’s rights movements.

Although this historical event happened a long time ago, the general idea of the Civil Rights Movement is modern and relevant to this day. As stated by Martin Luther King, it is impossible to win by responding with violence to violence. Martin Luther King’s insistent calls for unity and nonviolent action in response to oppression and brutality are worthy of deep respect and long memory. His speeches have become key moments in American history in the struggle for racial justice. The Civil Rights Movement can also have a major impact on diversity in America today. Civil rights vary greatly over time, culture, and form of government.

Therefore, they tend to follow societal trends that condemn particular types of discrimination. For example, the LGBTQ+ community, which has been actively advocating for the rights of all queer people for the last fifty years. Aside from fighting against discrimination in the LGBTQ society, the Civil Rights Movement can help fight the discrimination against Arab Americans, which rose after the terror attacks of the 11th of September, 2001, otherwise known as 9/11.

Bloom, J. M., & Hatcher, R. G. (2019). Class, race, and the Civil Rights Movement . Indiana University Press.

Corbett, P. S., Janssen, V., Lund, J. M., Pfannestiel, T. J., & Vickery, P. S. (2017). U.S. history. OpenStax, Rice University.

Galvin, R. (2020). “ Let justice roll down like waters”: Reconnecting Energy Justice to its roots in the Civil Rights Movement . Energy Research & Social Science , 62 , 101385. Web.

Pineda, E. R. (2021). Seeing like an activist: Civil disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement . Oxford University Press.

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IvyPanda. (2022, December 8). The Civil Rights Movement in the United States. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-civil-rights-movement-in-the-united-states/

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IvyPanda . 2022. "The Civil Rights Movement in the United States." December 8, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-civil-rights-movement-in-the-united-states/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Civil Rights Movement in the United States." December 8, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-civil-rights-movement-in-the-united-states/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Civil Rights Movement in the United States." December 8, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-civil-rights-movement-in-the-united-states/.

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• Introduction

Ralph David Abernathy

Julian bond, ruby bridges, stokely carmichael (later kwame ture), septima poinsette clark, claudette colvin, medgar evers, james farmer, freedom riders, greensboro four, fannie lou hamer, jesse jackson, martin luther king, jr., little rock nine, thurgood marshall, james meredith, mamie till-mobley, pauli murray, a. philip randolph, bayard rustin, fred shuttlesworth, roy wilkins, andrew young, whitney young.

• What are civil rights?
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• What was the civil rights movement in the U.S.?

list of key figures in the American civil rights movement

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• Table Of Contents

The American civil rights movement was a nationwide struggle for justice and equality for Black Americans during the 1950s and ’60s. While the names of some activists— Martin Luther King, Jr. , Rosa Parks , and Thurgood Marshall —and their contributions are well known, those figures are just a few of the men and women whose collective efforts and tireless commitment to equal rights and opportunity reshaped the political and social landscape of the United States . Following is a list of some of the key figures of the American civil rights movement.

• Biographical information: born March 11, 1926, Linden, Alabama, U.S.—died April 17, 1990, Atlanta, Georgia
• Organizations and activities: Montgomery bus boycott ; Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); Poor People’s Campaign and March

Ralph Abernathy was a pastor and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s chief aide and closest associate during the 1950s and ’60s. King, Abernathy, and others founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957 (with King as president and Abernathy as secretary-treasurer) to organize the nonviolent struggle against segregation throughout the South. Following King’s assassination in 1968, Abernathy became president of the SCLC, took over the organization of the Poor People’s Campaign, and led the Poor People’s March on Washington, D.C.

• Biographical information: born December 13, 1903, Norfolk, Virginia, U.S.—died December 13, 1986, New York, New York
• Organizations and activities: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP)

An organizer with the NAACP since 1938 (first as an assistant field secretary and later as director of branches), activist Ella Baker was among those who founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957 to coordinate reform efforts throughout the South, and she served as the SCLC’s first director. Baker left the SCLC in 1960 to help student leaders of college activist groups organize the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1964 she served as an adviser to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP).

• Biographical information: born January 14, 1940, Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.—died August 15, 2015, Fort Walton Beach, Florida
• Organizations and activities: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); Georgia state legislature; Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC); National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

Julian Bond was a student activist who went on to cofound and later serve as the communications director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1965 he won a seat in the Georgia state legislature, but the body refused to seat him because of his endorsement of SNCC’s opposition to U.S. involvement in the  Vietnam War . In December 1966 the U.S. Supreme Court  ruled the exclusion unconstitutional. Bond went on to serve 8 years in the Georgia House of Representatives (1967–75) and 12 years in the Georgia Senate (1975–87).

• Biographical information: born September 8, 1954, Tylertown, Mississippi, U.S.
• Organizations and activities: school desegregation

Ruby Bridges is an American activist who became a symbol of the civil rights movement. In 1960 at the age of six, she integrated the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans . Bridges was the youngest of a group of African American students to integrate schools in the American South.

• Biographical information: born June 29, 1941, Port of Spain, Trinidad—died November 15, 1998, Conakry, Guinea
• Organizations and activities: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); Freedom Rides , Black Panther Party

Stokely Carmichael was a West Indian-born civil rights activist, a leader of  Black nationalism , and the originator of the rallying slogan “Black Power.” Carmichael embodied the controversial split of the civil rights movement between Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ideology of nonviolence and racial integration and the Black Power movement’s espousal of self-defense tactics, self-determination, political and economic power, and racial pride.

(To learn about other prominent members of the Black Panther Party, see Britannica’s “ Black Panther Party: 7 Notable Figures .”)

• Biographical information: born May 3, 1898, Charleston, South Carolina, U.S.—died December 15, 1987, Johns Island, South Carolina
• Organizations and activities: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Highlander Folk School ; citizenship schools; Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); Voter Education Project

Septima Poinsette Clark was an American educator, activist, and organizer who helped found Tennessee citizenship schools and served as the director of workshops at the Highlander Folk School beginning in the late 1950s. Clark joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1961 as director of education and teaching. In 1962 the SCLC joined with other organizations to form the Voter Education Project, which trained teachers for citizenship schools and assisted in increasing voter registration among  African Americans .

• Biographical information: born September 5, 1939, Birmingham, Alabama, U.S.
• Organizations and activities: desegregation of public transportation

Claudette Colvin was only 15 years old when she was arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white woman. Her protest was one of several by Black women challenging segregation on buses in the months before Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat. In 1956 Colvin and four other African American women participated in the class action lawsuit  Browder  v.  Gayle , which reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Later that year the Court ruled in favor of the women, making segregation on buses illegal.

• Biographical information: born July 2, 1925, Decatur, Mississippi, U.S.—died June 12, 1963, Jackson, Mississippi
• Organizations and activities: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

In 1954 activist Medgar Evers moved to Jackson,  Mississippi , to become the NAACP’s first field secretary in that state. He traveled throughout Mississippi, recruiting members and organizing voter registration drives and economic  boycotts . Evers was shot and killed in an ambush in front of his home. White segregationist Byron de La Beckwith was charged with the crime shortly thereafter but was not convicted until 1994.

• Biographical information: born January 12, 1920, Marshall, Texas, U.S.—died July 9, 1999, Fredericksburg, Virginia
• Organizations and activities: Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR); Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); Freedom Rides

In 1942 James Farmer cofounded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an interracial American organization established to improve race relations and end discriminatory policies through direct-action projects. CORE originated the Freedom Rides—integrated bus trips through the South to challenge local efforts to block the desegregation of interstate busing. Farmer, who sought racial justice by means of nonviolence, was often a target of racial violence himself.

• Organizations and activities: desegregation of public spaces

The original Freedom Riders were a group of seven African Americans and six white people who boarded two buses bound for New Orleans on May 4, 1961. Testing the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in  Boynton  v.  Virginia  (1960), which extended an earlier decision banning segregated interstate bus travel (1946) to include bus terminals and restrooms, the Freedom Riders used facilities for the opposite race as their buses made stops along the way. Confronted with violence, the original riders were replaced by a second group, this time of 10 riders. As riders were either arrested or beaten, more groups of Freedom Riders would take their place.

• Members: Ezell Blair, Jr. (later Jibreel Khazan), Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond

On February 1, 1960, a group of four African American students from the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina (now North Carolina A&T State University ), a historically Black college , organized the movement’s first sit-in, at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro . Their actions inspired and galvanized other Black university students, and the sit-in movement spread throughout the segregated South, leading to the integration of dining facilities across the region.

• Biographical information: born October 6, 1917, Ruleville, Mississippi, U.S.—died March 14, 1977, Mound Bayou, Mississippi
• Organizations and activities: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP); Freedom Summer; Democratic National Committee for Mississippi; Policy Council of the  National Women’s Political Caucus

A leader in the voting rights movement, Fannie Lou Hamer cofounded and became vice-chair of the  Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party  (MFDP), a political party established in 1964 after unsuccessful attempts by African Americans to work with the all-white and pro-segregation Mississippi Democratic Party. While the MFDP was unsuccessful in its attempt to unseat the regular Mississippi Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention (DNC), it had success at the 1968 DNC , where Hamer was a member of Mississippi’s first integrated delegation.

• Biographical information: born October 8, 1941, Greenville, South Carolina, U.S.
• Organizations and activities: Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); Operation Breadbasket ; Rainbow/PUSH Coalition

An American civil rights leader, Baptist minister, and politician, Jesse Jackson marched and worked with Martin Luther King, Jr., in the SCLC and was with King the night he was assassinated in Memphis , Tennessee, on April 4, 1968. Jackson went on to form a number of Chicago -based civil rights organizations. He unsuccessfully ran to be the Democratic Party ’s nominee for president in 1984 and 1988.

• Biographical information: born January 15, 1929, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.—died April 4, 1968, Memphis, Tennessee
• Organizations and activities: Montgomery bus boycott; Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); March on Washington ; Selma to Montgomery March ; Poor People’s Campaign and March

The American civil rights movement’s most prominent leader, Martin Luther King, Jr., was a  Baptist  minister and social activist who led the movement from the mid-1950s until his death by  assassination in 1968 . King rose to national prominence as a founder and head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which promoted nonviolent tactics and staged countless marches and boycotts .

• Biographical information: born February 21, 1940, near Troy, Alabama, U.S.—died July 17, 2020, Atlanta, Georgia
• Organizations and activities: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); Freedom Rides; March on Washington; Selma to Montgomery March

John Lewis was a civil rights leader, devotee of nonviolent participation, and politician best known for his chairmanship of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and for leading the march that was halted by police violence on the  Edmund Pettus Bridge  in  Selma , Alabama, in 1965—a landmark event in the history of the civil rights movement that became known as “Bloody Sunday.” Called the “conscience of Congress,” Lewis served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1987 to 2020.

• Members: Melba Pattillo, Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Minnijean Brown, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls, Jefferson Thomas, Gloria Ray, and Thelma Mothershed

The Little Rock Nine were a group of African American high-school students who challenged racial segregation in the public schools of Little Rock, Arkansas, during the 1957–58 school year. Their actions became the center of the struggle to desegregate public schools in the United States.

• Biographical information: born May 19, 1925, Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.—died February 21, 1965, New York, New York
• Organizations and activities: Nation of Islam; Black Power advocacy

Malcolm X was a leader in the  Nation of Islam  who articulated concepts of race pride and Black nationalism in the early 1960s. He criticized the mainstream civil rights movement, challenging Martin Luther King, Jr.’s central notions of integration and nonviolence. Malcolm argued that more was at stake than the civil right to sit in a restaurant or even to vote: the most important issues were Black identity, integrity, and independence.

• Biographical information: born July 2, 1908, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.—died January 24, 1993, Bethesda, Maryland

Thurgood Marshall was a lawyer and civil rights activist who successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court the case of  Brown  v.  Board of Education of Topeka (1954), which declared racial segregation in American public schools unconstitutional. In 1967 U.S. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court, making him the Court’s first Black justice.

• Biographical information: born June 25, 1933, Kosciusko, Mississippi, U.S.

James Meredith is an American civil rights activist who gained national renown at a key juncture in the civil rights movement in 1962 when he became the first African American student at the  University of Mississippi . State officials, initially refusing a U.S. Supreme Court order to integrate the school, blocked Meredith’s entrance, but, following large campus riots that left two people dead, Meredith was admitted to the university under the protection of federal marshals.

• Biographical information: born November 23, 1921, near Webb, Mississippi, U.S.—died January 6, 2003, Chicago, Illinois

An American educator and activist, Mamie Till helped galvanize the emerging civil rights movement with her decision to hold an open-casket funeral and allow the publication of photographs of her brutalized son,  Emmett Till , after he was murdered in 1955 for allegedly flirting with a white grocery store clerk in Mississippi.

• Biographical information: born November 20, 1910, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.—died July 1, 1985, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
• Organizations and activities: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); National Organization for Women (NOW); American Civil Liberties Union  (ACLU)

Pauli Murray was an activist and lawyer who helped define the intellectual foundations of the 20th-century civil rights and  women’s rights movements. Her legal analysis formed the basis of the argument against the “ separate but equal ” doctrine in the case of  Brown  v.  Board of Education .

• Biographical information: born May 15, 1938, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
• Organizations and activities: lunch counter and facility desegregation; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); Freedom Rides; Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); March on Washington; Birmingham Children’s Crusade

One of the founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Diane Nash is an American civil rights activist who was a leading figure in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, especially known for her involvement in sit-ins and the Freedom Rides.

• Biographical information: born February 4, 1913, Tuskegee, Alabama, U.S.—died October 24, 2005, Detroit, Michigan
• Organizations and activities: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Montgomery bus boycott

Known as the “mother of the civil rights movement,” Rosa Parks was an American civil rights activist whose refusal to relinquish her seat on a public bus precipitated the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama , which became the spark that ignited the civil rights movement in the United States.

• Biographical information: born April 15, 1889, Crescent City, Florida, U.S.—died May 16, 1979, New York, New York
• Organizations and activities: Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters ; Negro American Labor Council; March on Washington; A. Philip Randolph Institute

A. Philip Randolph was a trade unionist and civil rights leader who was an influential figure in the struggle for justice and equality for African Americans. A generation older than many of the core activists of the 1950s and ’60s, Randolph lent his wisdom to younger organizers. Martin Luther King, Jr., referred to him as “the Dean of Negro leaders.”

• Biographical information: born March 17, 1912, West Chester, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died August 24, 1987, New York, New York
• Organizations and activities: Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); March on Washington; A. Philip Randolph Institute

Bayard Rustin was an American civil rights activist, an adviser to Martin Luther King, Jr., and one of the movement’s most important behind-the-scenes leaders. Rustin was the main organizer of the March on Washington in 1963.

• Biographical information: born March 18, 1922, Mount Meigs, Alabama, U.S.—died October 5, 2011, Birmingham, Alabama
• Organizations and activities: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); Freedom Rides; Birmingham Campaign; Selma to Montgomery March

An American minister and activist, Fred Shuttlesworth was a founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). An advocate of confrontation and civil disobedience , Shuttlesworth was the architect of the Birmingham Campaign, a protest action to end segregation in Birmingham , Alabama, that would inspire James Bevel, the organizer of the Birmingham Children’s Crusade , a nonviolent protest against segregation held by Black children on May 2–10, 1963. The mass arrest of, and police violence against, schoolchildren is credited with causing a major shift in Americans’ attitudes toward segregation and with persuading Pres.  John F. Kennedy  to publicly support federal civil rights legislation.

• Biographical information: born August 30, 1901, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.—died September 8, 1981, New York, New York
• Organizations and activities: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); March on Washington

Roy Wilkins was an American civil rights leader who served as the executive director (1955–77) of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Wilkins, who helped organize the March on Washington, was often referred to as the senior statesman of the American civil rights movement.

• Biographical information: born March 12, 1932, New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.
• Organizations and activities: Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)

Andrew Young is an American politician, civil rights leader, and clergyman. A close associate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Young traveled with King to Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking workers during the Memphis sanitation strike and was with King when he was fatally shot at the Lorraine Motel. Young went on to serve in the  U.S. House of Representatives  (1973–77) and later was mayor of  Atlanta  (1982–90).

• Biographical information: born July 31, 1921, Lincoln Ridge, Kentucky, U.S.—died March 11, 1971, Lagos, Nigeria
• Organizations and activities: National Urban League ; March on Washington

Whitney Young was an American civil rights leader who, as head of the National Urban League from 1961 to 1971, helped bridge the gap between white political and business leaders on the one hand and disadvantaged Black Americans and those advocating for their rights on the other. He served as a consultant to both the John F. Kennedy and the Lyndon B. Johnson administrations.

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The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom Civil Rights Era (1950–1963)

The Day They Changed Their Minds . New York: NAACP, March, 1960. Pamphlet. NAACP Records, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (107.00.00) Courtesy of the NAACP

The NAACP’s legal strategy against segregated education culminated in the 1954 Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. African Americans gained the formal, if not the practical, right to study alongside their white peers in primary and secondary schools. The decision fueled an intransigent, violent resistance during which Southern states used a variety of tactics to evade the law.

In the summer of 1955, a surge of anti-black violence included the kidnapping and brutal murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, a crime that provoked widespread and assertive protests from black and white Americans. By December 1955, the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott led by Martin Luther King, Jr., began a protracted campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience to protest segregation that attracted national and international attention.

During 1956, a group of Southern senators and congressmen signed the “Southern Manifesto,” vowing resistance to racial integration by all “lawful means.” Resistance heightened in 1957–1958 during the crisis over integration at Little Rock’s Central High School. At the same time, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights led a successful drive for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and continued to press for even stronger legislation. NAACP Youth Council chapters staged sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters, sparking a movement against segregation in public accommodations throughout the South in 1960. Nonviolent direct action increased during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, beginning with the 1961 Freedom Rides.

Hundreds of demonstrations erupted in cities and towns across the nation. National and international media coverage of the use of fire hoses and attack dogs against child protesters precipitated a crisis in the Kennedy administration, which it could not ignore. The bombings and riots in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 11, 1963, compelled Kennedy to call in federal troops.

On June 19, 1963, the president sent a comprehensive civil rights bill to Congress. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28 roused public support for the pending bill. After the president’s assassination on November 22, the fate of Kennedy’s bill was in the hands of his vice president and successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, and the United States Congress.

See timeline for this period

Roy Wilkins NAACP’s Longest Serving Leader

Roy Wilkins (1901−1981) was born in St. Louis, the son of a minister. While attending the University of Minnesota he served as secretary of the local NAACP. After graduation he began work as the editor of the Kansas City Call , a black weekly. The headline coverage Wilkins gave the NAACP in the Call attracted the attention of Walter White, who hired him as NAACP assistant secretary in 1931.

From 1934 to 1949, Wilkins served concurrently as editor of The Crisis , the NAACP’s quarterly journal. In 1950 he became NAACP administrator and cofounded the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. He succeeded Walter White as executive secretary of the NAACP in 1955. Under his leadership the NAACP achieved school desegregation, major civil rights legislation, and its peak membership. Wilkins retired in 1977 as the longest serving NAACP leader.

Roy Wilkins . New York: M. Smith Studio, between 1940 and 1950. NAACP Records, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (078.00.00) Courtesy of the NAACP

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A Fact Sheet on Cloture

In February 1952 the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) held a meeting in Washington to discuss Senate Rule XXII on cloture, a procedure that Southern senators utilized to block civil rights bills in debate by filibuster. In 1952, Rule XXII required a two-thirds vote of the entire Senate to invoke cloture to break a filibuster. Senators had also liberalized Rule XXII by subjecting “any measure, motion, or other matter” to cloture. At the start of each new Congress the LCCR lobbied for a revision of Rule XXII to lessen the obstacles to passage of civil rights bills. Joseph Rauh was the chief strategist for the LCCR’s Rule XXII campaigns.

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Fact Sheet on Cloture. Typescript, ca. 1951. //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0079p1_enlarge.jpg ">Page 2 - //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0079p2_enlarge.jpg ">Page 3 - //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0079p3_enlarge.jpg ">Page 4 . NAACP Records, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (079.00.00) Courtesy of the NAACP

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Educator and Civil Rights Activist Harry Tyson Moore

Educator and civil rights activist Harry Tyson Moore was one of the earliest leaders to be assassinated during the modern phase of the civil rights movement. Moore was a leader in voter registration efforts and worked as a statewide organizer for the NAACP in Florida and concentrated on establishing branches in rural areas. He began his career teaching in the public school system in Brevard County, Florida, first in an elementary school and later as principal of Mims Elementary School. He and his wife, Harriette, who also taught school, joined the NAACP in 1933. They organized a local chapter in Brevard and filed a lawsuit in 1937 challenging the unequal salaries of black and white teachers, the first of its kind in the South. In 1951, Moore and his wife were the victims of Ku Klux Klan terror, when a bomb exploded in their home.

Harry T. Moore . Photograph, ca. 1950. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (249.00.00)

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Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

“I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”

Writer Ralph Waldo Ellison completed only one novel during his lifetime, the critically acclaimed Invisible Man , published in 1952. It is recognized as one of the most influential masterpieces of the twentieth century, earning honors and awards for Ellison. In the novel Ellison addresses what it means to be an African American in a world hostile to the rights of a minority, on the cusp of the emerging civil rights movement.

Gordon Parks (1912–2006). Ralph Ellison . Photograph, ca. 1950. Ralph Ellison Papers, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (081.00.00)

Ralph Waldo Ellison (1914–1994). Draft page of Invisible Man . Invisible Man . Transcript, 1952. Ralph Ellison Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (080.00.00) //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0080p1_enlarge.jpg ">Page 2 . Transcript, 1952. Ralph Ellison Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (080.00.00)

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Work with African Freedom Movements

In 1952, Bayard Rustin joined A. Philip Randolph, George Houser, William Sutherland, and others to form Americans for South African Resistance, the first organized effort in the U.S. on behalf of the liberation struggle in Africa. Later that year, Rustin traveled to West Africa under the auspices of the American Friends Service Community and Fellowship of Reconciliation to assist African leaders Kwame Nkrumah and Nnamdi Azikiwe with organizing nonviolent campaigns against colonialism. In 1953, Rustin became executive secretary of the War Resisters League. In this letter Rustin reports on William Sutherland’s work with African freedom movements cosponsored by the League.

Bayard Rustin to supporters of the War Resisters League, December 1, 1953. Bayard Rustin Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (117.00.00) Courtesy of Walter Naegle

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Supplemental Brief in the Brown Cases

Brown v. Board of Education was a watershed moment for American civil rights law. The Supreme Court of the United States held that Jim Crow laws that segregated public school students on the basis of race were unconstitutional, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Brown explicitly overturned the court’s prior decision in Plessy v. Ferguson , where it had held that segregated public facilities were constitutional, provided they were separate but substantially equal. This event was the culmination of the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund’s campaign against segregation in schools. Despite this landmark decision, desegregation of public schools was often met with delays or outright opposition.

Supplemental Brief for the United States on Reargument in the Cases of Brown v. Board of Education: Oliver Brown, et al. v. Board of Education, Kansas et al., 1953 . NAACP Records, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (082.00.00) Courtesy of the NAACP

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Attorneys for Brown v. Board of Education

The Supreme Court bundled Brown v. Board of Education with four related cases and scheduled a hearing for December 9, 1952. A rehearing was convened on December 7, 1953, and a decision rendered on May 17, 1954. Three lawyers, Thurgood Marshall ( center ), chief counsel for the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund and lead attorney on the Briggs case, with George E. C. Hayes ( left ) and James M. Nabrit ( right ), attorneys for the Bolling case, are shown standing on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court congratulating each other after the court’s decision declaring segregation unconstitutional.

George E. C. Hayes, Thurgood Marshall, and James M. Nabrit congratulating each other on the Brown decision , May 17, 1954. Photograph. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (083.00.00)

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NAACP Secretary Mildred Bond Roxborough Interviewed by Julian Bond in 2010

Longtime secretary of the NAACP Mildred Bond Roxborough (b. 1926) discusses the achievements of the organization in an interview conducted by Julian Bond (b. 1940) for the Civil Rights History Project in 2010.

Civil Rights History Project Collection (AFC 2010/039), American Folklife Center

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Warren’s Reading Copy of the Brown Opinion, 1954

Chief Justice Earl Warren’s reading copy of Brown is annotated in his hand. Warren announced the opinion in the names of each justice, an unprecedented occurrence. The drama was heightened by the widespread prediction that the Court would be divided on the issue. Warren reminded himself to emphasize the decision’s unanimity with a marginal notation, “unanimously,” which departed from the printed reading copy to declare, “Therefore, we unanimously hold. . . .” In his memoirs, Warren recalled the moment with genuine warmth. “When the word ‘unanimously’ was spoken, a wave of emotion swept the room; no words or intentional movement, yet a distinct emotional manifestation that defies description.” “Unanimously” was not incorporated into the published version of the opinion, and thus exists only in this manuscript.

Earl Warren’s reading copy of Brown opinion, May 17, 1954. Earl Warren Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (084.00.00)

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"A Great Day for America"

Oliver Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) was a triumphant moment for Civil Rights and underscored Chief Justice Earl Warren’s effectiveness in leading the Court. Chief Justice Warren recognized the importance of issuing Brown v. Board as a unanimous decision, ensuring opponents of the decision would not be emboldened by a dissenting opinion. Associate Justice Harold H. Burton sent this note to Chief Justice Warren on the day that the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board was announced. He said, “Today I believe has been a great day for America and the Court. . . . I cherish the privilege of sharing in this.” In a tribute to Warren’s judicial statesmanship, Burton added, “To you goes the credit for the character of the opinions which produced the all important unanimity. Congratulations.”

Harold H. Burton to Earl Warren, May 17, 1954. Holograph letter. Earl Warren Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (84.01.00)

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Two Reactions to the Brown v. Board U.S. Supreme Court Decision

In this live television discussion, broadcast on May 23, 1954, Illinois Senator Paul Douglas (1892–1976) and Texas Senator Price Daniel (1910–1988) answer questions about the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision handed down six days earlier. In response to Brown v. Board , Daniel, along with 100 other lawmakers, signed the Southern Manifesto two years later, protesting the Supreme Court’s “abuse of judicial power.” This excerpt is from American Forum of the Air: The Supreme Court’s Desegregation Decision , broadcast on NBC.

Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. Courtesy of NBC News

NAACP lawyer Benjamin Hooks interviewed by Renee Poussaint in 2003

NAACP lawyer and minister Benjamin Hooks (1925–2010) explains the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case in an interview conducted by Renee Poussaint for the National Visionary Leadership Project in 2003.

National Visionary Leadership Collection (AFC 2004/007), American Folklife Center

Six Years after Brown , Atlanta Citizens Discuss Their Schools

In response to the Brown v. Board decision, Georgia passed legislation requiring the closing of public schools that had been forced to integrate by court orders and their conversion to private schools. After a federal judge ordered the Atlanta School Board to submit a desegregation plan, Governor Ernest Vandiver established a committee to hold public forums on the issue. The March 1960 hearings in Atlanta, portions of which were broadcast nationally in CBS Reports: Who Speaks for the South? on May 27, 1960, drew a large crowd and speakers with diverse opinions. In 1961, the Georgia legislature revoked its school segregation law. A court-ordered desegregation plan did not take effect, however, for another decade.

Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division . Courtesy of CBS News

“I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”

The song “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” was composed by jazz pianist and educator Dr. Billy Taylor (1921−2010). Although penned in 1954, the piece did not enjoy popularity until the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and became notable in the 1960s with a recording of the song by singer Nina Simone. The title expresses one of the fundamental themes of the movement—the wish to live free with dignity in America.

Billy Taylor. “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.” Holograph manuscript, 1954. //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0085p1_enlarge.jpg ">Page 2 . Billy Taylor Papers, Music Division , Library of Congress (085.00.00)

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Paul Robeson’s Telegram about the Till Trial

Singer, actor, and civil liberties advocate Paul Robeson (1898–1976) sent this telegram in response to an all-white jury acquittal of two white men accused of the murder of Emmett Till, a black teenager from Chicago, who went to visit relatives in Leflore County, Mississippi, in the summer of 1955. The verdict stirred the nation to outrage. A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and elder statesman of the civil rights movement, called for a mass demonstration.

Paul Robeson to A. Philip Randolph, September 24, 1955. Telegram. Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Records, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (087.00.00) Courtesy of the A. Philip Randolph Institute

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The Murder of Teenager Emmett Till

Emmett Till was brutally murdered on August 28, 1955, at the age of fourteen, for allegedly whistling at a white woman while visiting in Money, Mississippi, with friends. The woman’s husband and his friends kidnapped Till, beat and shot him, and tossed his body into the Tallahatchie River where it was discovered three days later. He could only be identified by a ring on his finger. The decision by Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Bradley, to have his body returned to their home in Chicago and her insistence in having an open casket resulted in bringing national attention to social conditions within the country. Published photos of Till created a global uproar for change and an end to discrimination and white supremacy.

Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Bradley . Photograph, ca. 1950. NAACP Records, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (086.00.00)

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Civil Rights Activist Joyce Ladner Interviewed by Joseph Mosnier in 2011

Civil rights activist Joyce Ladner (b. 1943) discusses post-war Southern black youth in the movement in an interview conducted by Joseph Mosnier (b. 1962) for the Civil Rights History Project in 2011.

NAACP Field Secretary Medgar W. Evers

Medgar W. Evers (1925–1963), the son of a farmer, was born in Decatur, Mississippi. After graduating from Alcorn Agriculture and Mechanical College in 1952, he went to work for a black insurance company in the Mississippi Delta. At the same time Evers began organizing for the NAACP. In 1954 he became the NAACP’s first field secretary in the state. His main duties were recruiting new members and investigating incidents of racial violence. Evers also led voter registration drives and mass protests, organized boycotts, fought segregation, and helped James Meredith enter the University of Mississippi. In May 1963 his home was bombed after he stepped up protests in Jackson, Mississippi. On June 11, he was murdered in his driveway.

Medgar W. Evers . Photograph, between 1950 and 1963. NAACP Records, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (088.00.00)

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Medgar Evers and the Jackson Movement: “Until Freedom Comes”

NAACP field secretary in Mississippi Medgar Evers (1925–1963) was assassinated at his home in Jackson, Mississippi, a few hours after President Kennedy made a nationally televised speech in which he announced he soon would ask Congress to enact civil rights legislation. A portion of a speech by Evers during a direct action campaign to desegregate Jackson was featured in this excerpt from NBC’s The American Revolution of ’63 , broadcast September 2, 1963, which also includes footage of sit-ins, beatings, and arrests of protesters in Jackson.

Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division . Courtesy of NBC News

The NAACP’s Report on the Emmett Till Murder

In the fall of 1955, NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers, Southeast Regional Director Ruby Hurley, and Amzie Moore, president of the Bolivar County branch in Mississippi initiated an investigation of Emmett Till’s lynching and secured key witnesses. In his annual report, Evers included an account of Till’s kidnapping, lynching, and the trial of his killers.

Medgar W. Evers. Annual Report Mississippi State Office National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1955. Typescript. NAACP Records, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (089.00.00, //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0089p1_enlarge.jpg ">089.01.00 )

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Rosa Parks Arrested and Fingerprinted

Rosa Parks was a leader in the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, which demonstrated that segregation would be contested in many social settings. A federal district court decided that segregation on publicly operated buses was unconstitutional and concluded that “in the Brown case, Plessy v. Ferguson has been implied, though not explicitly, overruled.” The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the judgment of the district court without opinion, a common procedure it followed in the interim between 1954 and 1958.

Rosa Parks’ arrest record, December 5, 1955. //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0091p1_enlarge.jpg ">Page 2 . Frank Johnson Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (091.00.00)

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Civil Rights Activist Ruby Sales Interviewed by Joseph Mosnier in 2011

Civil rights activist Ruby Sales (b. 1948) describes the central role and importance of Rosa Parks and other working women for the freedom struggle in an interview conducted by Joseph Mosnier for the Civil Rights History Project in 2011.

Rosa Parks Being Fingerprinted

On December 1, 1955, forty-three-year-old Rosa Parks was arrested for disorderly conduct for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. Her arrest and fourteen-dollar fine for violating a city ordinance led African American bus riders and others to boycott Montgomery, Alabama, city buses. It also helped to establish the Montgomery Improvement Association led by a then unknown young minister from the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King, Jr. The boycott lasted for one year and brought the civil rights movement and Dr. King to the attention of the world.

Mrs. Rosa Parks being fingerprinted in Montgomery, Alabama . Photograph, 1956. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (090.00.00)

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Rosa Parks’ Instructions for Bus Boycott

The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was formed in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 5, 1955, to direct the black boycott of the city’s segregated buses. Martin Luther King, Jr., was elected its president and Rosa Parks served on the executive board of directors. Parks also worked briefly as a dispatcher for the MIA Transportation Committee. In this capacity, she was responsible for connecting people who needed rides with drivers of private cars and church owned station wagons. In these notes, Parks describes the creation of this volunteer transportation system and offers detailed instructions to riders and drivers to resolve "Transportation Problems."

Rosa Parks’ notes concerning the early days of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, [1955]. Autograph notes. //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0277p1_enlarge.jpg ">Page 2 - //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0277p2_enlarge.jpg ">Page 3 . Rosa Parks Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (277.00.00, 277.00.01) Courtesy of the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development

Montgomery Fair date book with Rosa Parks’ notes concerning the Montgomery Bus Boycott, 1955–1956. Rosa Parks Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (322.00.00) Courtesy of the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development

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Rosa Parks’ Travels on Behalf of the Boycott

In 1956 Rosa Parks traveled across the U.S. making appearances on behalf of the bus boycott and the NAACP. In the spring she flew to Detroit, Seattle, Los Angeles, Oakland, Chicago, and Indianapolis, before spending two weeks in New York. There she addressed a civil rights rally and fundraiser at Madison Square Garden and met Roy Wilkins, Thurgood Marshall, and A. Philip Randolph. She left New York to address the annual NAACP Convention in San Francisco. After a summer respite in Montgomery, Parks resumed her tour as the featured speaker at a September mass meeting in Baltimore organized by Lillie Jackson, the NAACP branch president and mother-in-law of Clarence Mitchell.

NAACP Baltimore Branch flyer advertising a lecture by Rosa Parks at the Sharp Street Methodist Church, September 23, 1956. Rosa Parks Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (321.00.00) Courtesy of the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development

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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., (1929–1968) was a Southern Baptist minister who followed in the footsteps of his father by embracing a pacifist philosophy. One of his first roles as a civil rights leader was with the Montgomery bus boycott, inspired by the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat. At the end of the year-long boycott, King emerged as a central figure in the struggle for civil rights by using his considerable oratorical skills to take his message on the road in speaking engagements across the country.

King led nonviolent protest marches in one of the South’s most segregated states—Alabama. As the founder and leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), he was approached to join with the five key civil rights groups to support the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where he delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech, solidifying his place in the history of the civil rights movement. King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. The next year, he began the Selma Voting Rights movement and in 1966, began his “northern campaign” in Chicago.

Associated Press Photo. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr . Photograph, 1964. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (092.00.00)

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Martin Luther King, Jr., on Nonviolence

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., (1929–1968) discusses the tactic and philosophy of nonviolence in excerpts from an interview conducted by Martin Agronsky at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where Dr. King was the pastor. The interview was broadcast on October 27, 1957, in the NBC television Look Here series.

Civil Rights Activist Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth on Bombings and Beatings in 1950s Birmingham

In an interview broadcast May 18, 1961, on CBS Reports: Who Speaks for Birmingham? Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth (1922–2011), one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the leading civil rights figure in Birmingham, Alabama, discusses the violence he suffered in 1955 and 1957 (shown in archival footage).

International Outreach

The original English language comic book, published by the Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1957, was discovered by Egyptian activist Dalia Ziada in 2006. Determining that a nonviolent protest should be the preferred method for reform, Ziada translated the comic book into Arabic, received approval from the government censors, and published the work in 2008. It is credited with helping to inspire the Egyptian Arab Spring protests at Cairo’s Tahrir Square that led to President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation on February 11, 2011.

Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story , Arabic edition, 2008. Comic Book Collection, Serial and Government Publications Division , Library of Congress (093.00.00)

Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story , 1957. Comic Book Collection, Serial and Government Publications Division , Library of Congress (093.01.00)

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Southern Negro Leaders Conference

In the fall of 1956, Bayard Rustin discussed with Martin Luther King, Jr., the need for an organization larger than the Montgomery Improvement Association that could sustain protest in the South. With contributions from civil rights activists Ella Baker and Stanley Levison, Rustin drafted seven working papers for a workshop on nonviolent social change. After studying the papers, King called a conference at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in January 1957. There he discussed with more than sixty ministers their common problems of the Southern struggle. The group voted unanimously to form a permanent organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

Bayard Rustin. Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Non-Violent Integration, Working Paper # 1, [1956]. Bayard Rustin Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (096.00.00) Courtesy of Walter Naegle

Bayard Rustin. Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Non-Violent Integration, Working Paper # 7, [1956]. Bayard Rustin Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (096.01.00)

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Attorney Clarence Mitchell

Baltimore native Clarence Mitchell attended the University of Maryland Law School. He began his career as a reporter. During World War II he served on the War Manpower Commission and the Fair Employment Practices Committee. In 1946 Mitchell joined the NAACP as its first labor secretary. From 1950 to 1978, he served concurrently as director of the NAACP Washington Bureau, the NAACP’s chief lobbyist, and legislative chairman of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. Mitchell waged a tireless campaign on Capitol Hill to secure the passage of a comprehensive series of civil rights laws—the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the 1960 Civil Rights Act, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr., (1911–1984), director of the NAACP Washington Bureau , February 28, 1957. Reproduction. NAACP Records, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (098.00.00) Courtesy of NAACP

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Prayer Pilgrimage, 1957

In 1957, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Roy Wilkins cosponsored the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom to demand federal action on school desegregation and demonstrate support for the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Held at the Lincoln Memorial on May 17, the third anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education , the Pilgrimage attracted a crowd of about 25,000. The turnout was smaller than the organizers had predicted but was still the largest civil rights demonstration to date. The Pilgrimage launched the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and helped establish Martin Luther King, Jr., as a national leader.

Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom . Program, 1957. NAACP Records, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (099.00.00) Courtesy of the NAACP

Seated on speakers’ platform at May 17 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom in Washington, D.C. ( left to right ): Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, Rev. Thomas Kilgore, Jr., and Martin Luther King, Jr., May 17, 1957 . Gelatin silver print. NAACP Records, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (099.01.00)

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Lyndon B. Johnson

Lyndon Johnson (1908–1973) grew up in Texas ranch country. After graduating from Southwest State Teachers College in 1930, he taught high school. His political career began in 1937, when he won a congressional seat. In 1948, he was elected to the Senate. In 1960, he was elected vice president on the Democratic ticket with John F. Kennedy. When Kennedy was assassinated, he was sworn in as president and, in 1964, he was elected for a full term. The Great Society became his agenda for Congress in January 1965. The program included aid to education, Medicare, expansion of the war on poverty, and enforcement of civil rights. During his presidency, Johnson sent three landmark civil rights bills to Congress: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

Thomas J. O’Halloran. Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, Senate majority leader . Reproduction, September, 1955. U.S. News and World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (100.00.00)

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Civil Rights Act of 1957

In 1957 Clarence Mitchell marshalled bipartisan support in Congress for a civil rights bill, the first passed since Reconstruction. Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson opposed Part III, a provision authorizing the attorney general to file civil injunction suits in civil rights cases, where local police denied rights of peaceable assembly by jailing, beating, or orchestrating economic reprisals against citizens attempting to register to vote or protest segregation. The part was omitted as a concession to Southern Democratic senators. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 created a new Commission on Civil Rights to investigate civil rights violations and expanded a small Civil Rights Section into its own Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice headed by an assistant attorney general.

U.S. Congress. Public Law 85-315, 85th Congress, H.R. 6127 (Civil Rights Act of 1957), September 9, 1957. Printed document. Public Law 85-315, 85th Congress, H.R. 6127 (Civil Rights Act of 1957), September 9, 1957. Printed document. Page 2. NAACP Records, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (101.00.00) Courtesy of NAACP //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0101p1_enlarge.jpg ">Page 2 . NAACP Records, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (101.00.00) Courtesy of NAACP

Herblock. “ Listen—I got a good mind to walk out again .” October 21, 1957. Reproduction. Herbert L. Block Collection, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (280.01.00)

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Ghana Diplomat Refused Service on U.S. Visit

Komla Agbeli Gbedemah, the finance minister of the new African nation of Ghana, visited the United States on official business in October 1957. On October 9, Gbedemah dined with labor arbitrator Theodore Kheel and Roy Wilkins at the Waldorf Astoria. The next day he was refused service at a Howard Johnson’s Restaurant in Dover, Delaware, en route from New York to Washington, D.C. President Eisenhower later invited Gbedemah to breakfast at the White House to make amends. This incident was one of many involving dark-skinned diplomats and Jim Crow.

Theodore W. Kheel to NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins, September 25, 1957. Typed letter. NAACP Records, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (102.00.00) Courtesy of the NAACP

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Ella Baker Cofounder of the Southern Christian leadership Conference

Ella Baker (1903−1986) was reared in Littleton, North Carolina, and educated at Shaw University in Raleigh. During the 1930s she worked as a community organizer in New York. She joined the NAACP staff in 1940 as a field secretary and served as director of branches from 1943 to 1946. Baker traveled throughout the South recruiting new members and registering voters.

Baker was an advisor for the Montgomery bus boycott; and, in 1957, she cofounded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As executive director of SCLC, she organized the 1960 conference that created the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Baker remained a key advisor, helping SNCC organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged Mississippi’s all-white delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Ella Baker . Photograph, between 1942 and 1946. NAACP Records, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (097.00.00) Courtesy of the NAACP

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Civil Rights Activist Chuck McDew Interviewed by Joseph Mosnier in 2011

Civil rights activist Chuck McDew (b. 1938) recounts the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and disagreements about nonviolent philosophy in an interview conducted by Joseph Mosnier (b. 1962) for the Civil Rights History Project in 2011.

Daisy Bates Reports on Little Rock Students’ Progress

Daisy Bates, publisher of The Arkansas State Press and president of the Arkansas State Conference of NAACP Branches, led the NAACP’s campaign to desegregate the public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. Thurgood Marshall served as chief counsel. The Little Rock school board approved the admission of nine black teenagers to Central High School. The decision outraged many white citizens including Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus. He ordered the Arkansas National Guard to surround Central High School on the pretext of preserving law and order, and the black students were repeatedly blocked by the guardsmen and angry white mobs. President Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock to uphold the Supreme Court’s ruling on September 25, 1957, to safely escort the students into Central High School. In the midst of the crisis, Daisy Bates wrote this letter.

Daisy Bates to NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins, December 17, 1957. Typed letter. //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0103p1_enlarge.jpg ">Page 2 . NAACP Collection, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (103.00.00) Courtesy of the NAACP

Cecil Layne. Little Rock Nine and Daisy Bates posed in living room . Photograph, ca. 1957. NAACP Records, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (104.00.00) Courtesy of Barbara Layne-Hicks

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Youth March for Integrated Schools

In August 1958, A. Philip Randolph proposed a Youth March for Integrated Schools to take place on October 25. Bayard Rustin chiefly organized the event with the help of his protégés Rachelle Horowitz and Tom Kahn. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Roy Wilkins served as honorary chairmen. On September 20, King was stabbed by a woman at a Harlem department store while autographing copies of his book, Stride Towards Freedom . On the day of the march, a crowd of 10,000 massed at the Lincoln Memorial. Coretta Scott King delivered her husband’s speech. A second youth march on April 18, 1959, drew a crowd of 40,000.

Youth March for Integrated Schools , Washington, D.C., October 25, 1958. Program. Bayard Rustin Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (105.00.00) Courtesy of Walter Naegle

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Tom Mboya of Kenya: “A World Struggle, A Human Struggle”

On April 18, 1959, Kenyan labor leader Tom Mboya (1930–1969) addressed a crowd of more than 20,000 who had marched to the Washington Monument to urge implementation of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board decision. The Youth March for Integrated Schools was organized by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. Other speakers included Martin Luther King, Jr., (1929–1968) Roy Wilkins (1901–1981), and Harry Belafonte (b. 1927). Mboya, later a government official after Kenya achieved independence, was assassinated in 1969. He had been a mentor to the father of President Barack Obama. This excerpt is from the film Integration: Report 1 , produced in 1960 by Andover Productions, Inc.

Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division . Courtesy of Madeline Anderson and Icarus Films - http://icarusfilms.com/ (external link)

“Fables of Faubus”

“Fables of Faubus” by composer and bassist Charles Mingus (1922−1979) was composed as a satirical protest against Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus who, in 1957, had deployed Arkansas National Guard soldiers to Little Rock Central High School to prevent the integration of African American students. The original 1959 recording on the album Mingus Ah Um did not include lyrics due to objections by executives at Columbia Records.

Charles Mingus. “Fables of Faubus.” Holograph Manuscript, 1959. //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0106p1_enlarge.jpg ">Page 2 . Charles Mingus Collection, Music Division , Library of Congress (106.00.00) Courtesy of Sue Mingus

Charles Mingus. Mingus Ah Um . New York: Columbia, 1959. Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division , Library of Congress (268.00.00) Courtesy of Sue Mingus

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The Day They Changed Their Minds

On February 1, 1960, four students from North Carolina A & T College sat down at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. All were members of NAACP youth councils. Within weeks, similar demonstrations by white and black students spread across the South. Many students were arrested. The NAACP provided attorneys and raised money for fines or bail bonds. At a conference at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, in April 1960, the students formed their own organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. This pamphlet recounts the beginning of the student sit-in movement organized by NAACP youth councils.

The Day They Changed Their Minds . New York: NAACP, March, 1960. Pamphlet. The Day They Changed Their Minds . New York: NAACP, March, 1960. Pamphlet. NAACP Records, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (107.00.00) Courtesy of the NAACP //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0107p1_enlarge.jpg ">Page 2 . NAACP Records, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (107.00.00) Courtesy of the NAACP

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Oklahoma City Sit-ins

History teacher Clara Luper (1923–2011) and the NAACP Youth Council in Oklahoma City that she advised initiated some of the first sit-ins in the civil rights movement, beginning in 1958. The efforts of Luper and the Youth Council succeeded in desegregating lunch counters at all the stores of a major drug store chain in four states and nearly all the restaurants in Oklahoma City. In this excerpt from NBC’s The American Revolution of ’63 , broadcast September 2, 1963, Luper challenges the opinion of the owner of a segregated amusement park that Oklahoma City is not ready for integration.

Sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee

Shortly after the Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-in began on February 1, 1960, Nashville students, who had initiated “test sit-ins” in 1959, followed suit. Despite beatings, arrests, jailing of protesters, and a bombing, six stores agreed in May to desegregate their lunch counters. Martin Luther King, Jr., (1929–1968) called the Nashville movement “the best organized and most disciplined in the Southland.” In this excerpt from NBC White Paper: Sit-In , broadcast December 20, 1960, protesters, including John Lewis (b. 1940), describe the experience.

Nashville—Confrontation at City Hall

Diane Nash (b. 1938), one of the unofficial leaders of the Nashville sit-ins, and Mayor Ben West (1911–1974) describe a confrontation occurring on April 19, 1960, on the steps of City Hall that was captured by television cameras and broadcast December 20, 1960, as part of the documentary NBC White Paper: Sit-In . Many believed this incident to be a turning point that led to the desegregation of six lunch counters in Nashville stores a few weeks later.

Civil Rights Activist Marilyn Luper Interviewed by Joseph Mosnier in 2011

Civil rights activist Marilyn Luper (b. 1947) discusses her mother Clara's leadership in the NAACP Youth Group in Oklahoma City in an interview conducted by Joseph Mosnier (b. 1962) for the Civil Rights History Project in 2011.

Civil Rights History Project Collection (AFC 2010/039), American Folklife Cente r

“Freedom Now Suite”

“We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite” is a multi-part, music composition depicting African American history from slavery to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The world premiere took place on January 15, 1961, at a benefit for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The title is derived from a quote by civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph, “Youth and idealism are unfurling. Masses of Negroes are marching onto the stage of history and demanding their freedom now!”

Max Roach (1924−2007). “We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite.” Holograph manuscript score, 1960. Max Roach Papers, Music Division , Library of Congress (109.00.00)

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The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed in April 1960 to coordinate the widespread student protests initiated by the Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-in. In the spring of 1961, SNCC emerged as a major force in the civil rights movement through its involvement in the Freedom Rides and other nonviolent protests across the South. In the fall, SNCC shifted its focus to long-term voter registration campaigns in the Deep South and joined the Voter Education Project (VEP). In 1964, the SNCC-led Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) sponsored Freedom Summer, a massive voter education and registration drive in Mississippi. This project put enormous pressure on President Johnson to move toward what would later become the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Statement of Purpose, 1960. James Forman Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (108.00.00) Courtesy of the SNCC Legacy Project

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Meeting with Senator Lyndon Johnson

The Civil Rights Act of 1960 strengthened the provisions of the 1957 act for court enforcement of voting rights and required preservation of voting records. It also included limited criminal penalty provisions related to bombing and obstruction of federal court orders, aimed particularly at school desegregation. In this letter, Clarence Mitchell reports on his meeting with Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson to discuss the bill and the need for closer coordination on civil rights propositions between Johnson and Senate liberals.

Clarence Mitchell to Roy Wilkins, March 2, 1960. Typed letter. //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0110p1_enlarge.jpg ">Page 2 . NAACP Records, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (110.00.00)

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President John F. Kennedy

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) was born in Brookline, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard College in 1940. After distinguished military service during World War II, he served as a U.S. representative (1947–1953) and then as senator from Massachusetts (1953–1960). As the Democratic candidate for president in 1960, Kennedy supported his party’s commitment to a strong civil rights program. He won 70 percent of the black vote in a tight election defeating opponent Richard Nixon.

As president, Kennedy appointed an unprecedented number of blacks to government posts and believed that executive action and executive orders would be the only effective tools to advance civil rights. However, Kennedy argued the issue of civil rights could divide the Democratic Party and cost him the chance to pass other vital legislation. The Birmingham crisis in the spring of 1963, which drew the world’s attention to racial segregation in the South, moved him to send a full and comprehensive civil rights bill to Congress.

President John F. Kennedy . Photograph, 1961. Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (111.00.00)

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NAACP Labor Secretary Herbert Hill

Born in Brooklyn, Herbert Hill studied at New York University and the New School for Social Research, then worked as an organizer for the United Steelworkers before joining the NAACP staff in 1948. He was named labor secretary in 1951. In this capacity, he filed hundreds of lawsuits against labor unions and industries that refused integration or fair employment practices. He also used picket lines and mass demonstrations as weapons. Recognized as a major authority on race and labor, Hill testified frequently on Capitol Hill and served as a consultant for the United Nations and the State of Israel. He left the NAACP in 1977 to accept a joint professorship in Afro-American studies and industrial relations at the University of Wisconsin, where he retired in 1997.

Herbert Hill . Photograph, between 1950 and 1960. NAACP Records, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (094.00.00)

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Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity

On March 6, 1961 President Kennedy issued Executive Order 10925 creating the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity to combat discrimination in government employment and in private employment stemming from government contracts. He made Lyndon Johnson chairman, and appointed Louis Martin to the committee’s advisory group. Unlike similar executive measures taken by Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower, this order mandated “affirmative action” to ensure that hiring and employment practices are free of racial, ethnic, or religious bias. In 1965 President Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 amended the order by adding sex to the list attributes.

Equal Employment Opportunity in Federal Government on Federal Contracts: Executive Order 10925 . . . . Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1963. Pamphlet. Herbert Hill Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (251.00.00)

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Report on President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity

A week after President Kennedy created the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation was awarded a $1 billion federal contract to build C-141 jets through the efforts of Richard Russell and House Armed Services chairman Carl Vinson. The NAACP, which had been investigating racial discrimination at Lockheed’s plant in Marietta, Georgia since 1956, filed a complaint against Lockheed the first day of the Committee’s operation. Vice President Johnson worked with the NAACP to remedy the discrimination. By the end of 1961 the plant had hired more than two-hundred black workers and promoted fifty-nine.

Report on President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity (Rough Draft), 1961. Typescript. Herbert Hill Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (95.00.00)Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (95.00.00)

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U.S. Representative Patsy T. Mink

Representative Patsy T. Mink (D-HI) (1927–2002) was the first woman of color to be elected to Congress. Mink, a third generation Japanese American was born and raised on Maui. She received her law degree from the University of Chicago Law School in 1951. Returning to Hawaii, Mink served in the State Senate when Hawaii became the fiftieth state and delivered a speech during the 1960 Democratic National Convention convincing the party to maintain its stance on civil rights. Mink was elected to Congress in 1964 and served a total of six consecutive terms. While in Congress she co-authored the Title IX Amendment of the Higher Education Act extending more of the 1964 act’s antidiscrimination protections to women.

“What greater weapon for peace do we have than our victory over bigotry and race hatred which for many centuries past have torn the world apart.”

Patsy T. Mink . Photograph, ca. 1960. Congressional Portrait Photographic Collection, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (113.00.00) Used with permission of Gwendolyn Mink.

Patsy T. Mink’s handwritten notes for speech given in support of the civil rights plank at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. Envelope, July 12, 1960. //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0114p1_enlarge.jpg ">Page 2 . Patsy T. Mink Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (114.00.00) Used with permission of Gwendolyn Mink.

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CORE’s Freedom Rides

In 1961 CORE organized Freedom Rides into the Deep South to test the 1960 Supreme Court’s decision in Boynton v. Virginia , which held that segregation in railway and bus terminal facilities serving interstate passengers was illegal. On May 4, 1961, thirteen black and white riders, including CORE’s National Director, James Farmer, departed Washington, D.C., by bus en route to New Orleans. On May 14, in Anniston, Alabama, one bus was firebombed and riders on another were assaulted. In this letter, Farmer asks A. Philip Randolph for help in raising money to support the Freedom Rides.

James Farmer to A. Philip Randolph, April 4, 1961. Typed letter. Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Records, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (116.00.00)

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Events Involving the Freedom Rides

After the incident in Anniston, Alabama, SNCC students from the Nashville freedom movement, led by Diane Nash, resumed the Freedom Rides to Mississippi. On May 20, a group of Freedom Riders boarded a Birmingham-to-Montgomery Greyhound bus. They were met in Montgomery by a riotous mob. Among the injured was John Seigenthaler (b. 1927), a Justice Department aide. Throughout the summer more than 300 Freedom Riders came by bus, plane, and train to Jackson, Mississippi, where they were arrested on breach of peace and jailed in Parchman Prison. This document chronicles events involving the Freedom Rides and corresponding actions taken by civil rights organizations and government agencies from May 21 to July 19, 1961.

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Chronology of Events Involving Freedom Rides/Actions of Organizations and Agencies [1961]. Typescript. //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0118p1_enlarge.jpg ">Page 2 - //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0118p2_enlarge.jpg ">Page 3 - //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0118p3_enlarge.jpg ">Page 4 . Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (118.00.00)

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Journalist Moses Newson Interviewed by Joseph Mosnier in 2011

Journalist Moses Newson (b. 1927) remembers the terror of taking part in the first bus ride of Freedom Riders in 1961 in an interview conducted by Joseph Mosnier (b. 1962) for the Civil Rights History Project in 2011.

Map of the Freedom Rides

The Freedom Riders of the early 1960s, organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), rode through the South seeking to integrate the bus, rail, and airport terminals. This Associated Press release includes a map and descriptive text ( not shown ) that illustrates the routes taken and the history behind the freedom rides.

Background Map: 1961 Freedom Rides . [New York]: Associated Press Newsfeature, ca. C E 1962. Printed map. Geography and Map Division , Library of Congress (119.00.00)

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Percy Sutton on the Freedom Rides

Prominent civil rights lawyer and activist Percy Sutton (1920–2009) describes psychological aspects of participating in the Freedom Rides in this television interview included in the documentary Walk in My Shoes , broadcast on September 19, 1961, over the ABC network in the Bell & Howell Close-Up! series.

Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division . Courtesy of ABC News VideoSource

Civil Rights Leader Whitney M. Young, Jr.

Whitney Young, Jr., (1921–1971) grew up in Lincoln Ridge, Kentucky. He graduated from Kentucky State College at the age of eighteen, and earned a master’s degree at University of Minnesota’s School of Social Work in 1947. The same year, he became director of industrial relations for the St. Paul Urban League and, in 1950, moved to Omaha to serve as executive secretary. In 1954 Young was named dean of the School of Social Work at Atlanta University. Under his leadership, Atlanta became one of the top social work schools in the South. In 1961 he became executive director of the National Urban League, and later he proposed a domestic recovery program to increase economic and educational opportunities for blacks. President Johnson incorporated some of Young’s ideas in his War on Poverty program.

Whitney M. Young, Jr., executive director, National Urban League. Photograph, n.d. Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Records, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (115.00.00)

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Robert F. Kennedy

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) was a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Virginia School of Law. During the 1950s Kennedy’s work, as counsel for two major Senate investigating committees, was paired with a deepening involvement in John F. Kennedy’s political career. He directed his brother’s 1960 presidential campaign and served as his most trusted advisor. Kennedy approved the most far-reaching civil rights plank ever adopted by the Democratic Party.

As Attorney General, Robert Kennedy built a strong Civil Rights Division, which included Burke Marshall and John Doar, and a greatly expanded staff of lawyers. The division aggressively pursued the prosecution of voting rights violations in the South and initiated suits to advance school desegregation. It was RFK who persuaded JFK to deliver his famous civil rights speech on June 11 and introduce civil rights legislation, crafted by the lawyers in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

Robert F. Kennedy . Photograph, n.d. Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (286.00.00)

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Civil Rights Activist Courtland Cox Interviewed by Joseph Mosnier in 2011

Activist Courtland Cox (b. 1941) remembers a 1962 protest with Stokely Carmichael at Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy's office in an interview conducted by Joseph Mosnier (b. 1962) for the Civil Rights History Project in 2011.

Civil Rights Activist Vernon Jordan Discusses Albany Movement

Vernon Jordan, a lawyer and civil rights activist, served as the NAACP’s Georgia field secretary from 1961 to 1963. This transcript provides an early history of the Albany Movement, which was founded by local activists, SNCC, and the NAACP on November 17, 1961, to challenge racial segregation in Albany, Georgia. Martin Luther King, Jr., and SCLC became involved in assisting the movement when King and Ralph Abernathy arrived in Albany on December 15, following the arrest of almost 500 protesters. The mass demonstrations in Albany continued for six years.

Transcript of telephone conversation between NAACP’s Georgia Field Secretary Vernon Jordan, and Director of Branches Gloster B. Current, December 14, 1961. Typescript. //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0121p1_enlarge.jpg ">Page 2 . NAACP Records, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (121.00.00) Courtesy of the NAACP

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The Albany Movement

The Albany Movement formed in 1961 in Albany, Georgia, as a collaboration between local activists, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). It became the first major initiative of the civil rights movement to try to desegregate an entire city. In this excerpt from CBS News Eyewitness: The Albany Movement , broadcast on August 3, 1962, teenage demonstrators are arrested for singing and praying in front of the public library—the SNCC Freedom Singers originated in this movement—and SCLC’s executive director, Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker (b. 1929), discusses the intent of nonviolent direct action.

The Freedom Singers

Organized by SNCC in 1962, The Freedom Singers were originally four black students, Cordell Reagon, Bernice Johnson, Charles Neblett, and Rutha Mae Harris. The group originated in Albany, Georgia, with the objective of educating communities about civil rights issues through performances and songs. The movement was closely connected to the church, and the use of both secular and spiritual songs served as the link that tied the two together for the cause of racial equality. The group gave more than 200 performances at college campuses, demonstrations, marches, and even jails. Singing provided a means for demonstrators to endure the pain and frustrations of assaults, dog attacks, fire hoses, and jail time.

Joe Alper. Freedom Singers . Photograph, February 1963. James Forman Papers, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (122.00.00)

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Activist Bernice Johnson’s Arrest Statement

Bernice Johnson joined SNCC in 1961, while a student at Albany State University. On December 10, 1961, a group of SNCC Freedom Riders and SNCC Executive Secretary James Forman were arrested for integrating the train station in Albany, Georgia. On December 12, the day of the SNCC trial, 267 students marching in peaceful protest were arrested. The following day, Bernice Johnson participated in a prayer protest led by Albany leader Slater King and a march at City Hall. She and 300 others were arrested and sent out to the Lee County Stockade. Johnson recounts her experience in this statement.

Statement of Bernice Johnson concerning her arrest and imprisonment for demonstrating in Albany, Georgia, on December 13, 1961. Typescript. //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0123p1_enlarge.jpg ">Page 2 . James Forman Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (123.00.00)

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Status Report on the Voter Education Project

In April 1962, the NAACP, CORE, SNCC, SCLC, and the National Urban League launched the Voter Education Project (VEP), a coordinated effort to register black voters in the South. Attorney General Robert Kennedy secured $870,000 from the Taconic Foundation and other private foundations to give VEP tax exempt status. He also offered federal protection to civil rights workers engaged in the project. VEP recorded a jump in Southern black adults who were registered to vote from twenty-five to forty percent between 1962 and 1964. The increase, however, was mainly in the urban and upper South. In Mississippi, where most of VEP’s money had been spent, the proportion rose from 5.3 to 6.7 percent.

First Status Report Voter Education Project, Copy No. 20, September 20, 1962. Typescript. //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0125p1_enlarge.jpg ">Page 2 . NAACP Records, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (125.00.00) Courtesy of the NAACP

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CORE Voter Registration in Louisiana

In July 1963, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sent a task force to Plaquemine, Louisiana, to initiate a voter registration drive, responding to the request of a local schoolteacher and activist for help. The summer drive was documented in Louisiana Diary , broadcast March 16, 1964, on National Educational Television. In these excerpts, Ronnie Moore, CORE’s field secretary for Louisiana, explains that through voter registration, they hope to achieve laws to protect African Americans from violence and ensure justice and fair law enforcement. CORE executive director James Farmer (1920–1999), who speaks to activists in one excerpt, arrived in Plaquemine in August for a mass march to City Hall after demands were ignored by officials. Farmer’s arrest at the march prevented him from attending the March on Washington.

Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. Courtesy Thirteen Productions LLC, WNET

NAACP Requests Assistance for James Meredith

In September 1962, a federal court ordered the University of Mississippi to accept James Meredith, a twenty-eight-year-old Air Force veteran, after a sixteen-month legal battle. Governor Ross Barnett (1898−1987) disavowed the decree and physically barred Meredith from enrolling. President Kennedy responded by federalizing the Mississippi National Guard and sending U.S. Army troops to protect Meredith. After days of violence and rioting by whites, Meredith, escorted by federal marshals, enrolled on October 1, 1962. Two men were killed in the turmoil and more than 300 were injured. Because he had earned credits in the military and at Jackson State College, Meredith was eligible to graduate the following August, which he did without incident.

John A. Morsell, assistant to NAACP executive secretary, to President John F. Kennedy requesting the assistance of the federal government, September 21, 1962. Typed letter. //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0p1_enlarge.jpg ">Page 2 . NAACP Records, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (126.00.00) Courtesy of the NAACP

Birmingham News , October 1, 1962. Serial and Government Publications Division , Library of Congress (127.00.00)

St. Louis Globe-Democrat (Missouri), October 1, 1962. Newspaper Section, Serial and Government Publications Division , Library of Congress (127.01.00)

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Civil Rights Activist James Forman

James Forman (1928–2005) graduated from Roosevelt University in Chicago. He received a master’s degree from Cornell University and a Ph.D. from Union Institute. A Chicago Defender assignment to cover the desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High School ignited Forman’s interest in the burgeoning civil rights movement. He became involved in CORE and the NAACP and, in 1961, became executive secretary of SNCC. From 1967 to 1969, Forman was director of SNCC’s International Affairs Commission and played a crucial role in coalescing SNCC’s activities with other civil rights organizations and elevating the organization to national and international prominence. Forman continued to devote the rest of his life to human rights issues.

Patricia Anna Johnson. James Forman, executive secretary, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Photograph, ca. 1962. James Forman Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (128.00.00)

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James Forman on Organizing in the Rural South

James Forman (1928–2005), the executive director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), describes to interviewer Kenneth Clark the goals, tactics, and dangers of SNCC voter registration drives in the rural South in this excerpt from the television documentary We Shall Overcome , broadcast August 14, 1963, on National Educational Television.

Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division . Courtesy Thirteen Productions LLC, WNET

Thurgood Marshall’s Goodwill Tour to East Africa

In July 1963, Thurgood Marshall was asked by the State Department to travel to East Africa as a representative of the Kennedy administration. Marshall toured the newly independent nations of Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda, conferring with African leaders and providing advice on civil rights and economic development. He was accompanied by Berl Bernhard, director of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. The trip particularly strengthened relations between the U.S. and Kenya. In 1960 Marshall had been involved in writing the Kenyan Constitution.

Thurgood Marshall to U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, November 19, 1963. Typed letter (carbon copy). //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0135p1_enlarge.jpg ">Page 2 . Thurgood Marshall Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (135.00.00)

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Journalist and Advisor Louis Martin

Louis Martin (1912–1997), a renowned journalist and newspaper publisher, served as the principal black advisor to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter, and as deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1961 to 1969. Martin kept this notebook to chronicle his travels and activities during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. In the passage shown here, he reports on the reaction at the White House to the 1963 Birmingham campaign.

“In the last few weeks Negro demonstrations in Birmingham and the South and North have intensified the race-relations dilemma and forced the attention of everyone from the President on down. Civil Rights’ items dominate all media and it the is the central theme of private and public discussion.”

Louis Martin. Civil Rights, Kennedy and Johnson administrations, April 1961–May 16, 1967. Autograph notebook. //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0136p1_enlarge.jpg ">Page 2 . Louis Martin Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (136.00.00) Courtesy of Gertrude Martin

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Civil Rights Leader Louis Martin

Louis Martin grew-up in Savannah, Georgia, the son of a Cuban–born physician. Educated at the University of Michigan, he began his career as a reporter for the Chicago Defender in 1936, and within a year became the editor and publisher of the Michigan Chronicle . In 1944 Martin took a leave of absence to work as assistant publicity director for President Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign. From 1947 to 1959 he served as editor-in-chief of the Defender , and in 1949 became founding president of the National Newspaper Publishers Association. Martin returned to politics in 1960 as a member of John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign team. He served as an advisor to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter, and as deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1961 to 1969. Dubbed “the godfather of black politics,” Martin helped to establish African Americans as a political power in the Democratic Party and promote them to high government posts. He aided the appointments of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court, Andrew Brimmer to the Federal Reserve Board, and Robert Weaver as secretary of Housing and Urban Development. In 1970 Martin cofounded the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a black think tank, serving as its first chairman for nine years.

Robert L. Khudsen. Louis E. Martin and President Kennedy, February 12, 1963. Photograph. Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (320.00.00)

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Civil Rights Activist Julian Bond

In this letter to A. Philip Randolph, Julian Bond (b. 1940) affirms SNCC’s participation in the March on Washington in the absence of “SNCC Chairman Charles McDew, who is presently in Greenwood, Mississippi where eight of our members—including our Executive Secretary, James Forman—are being held in the county jail.” SNCC launched a major voter registration drive in Greenwood in 1962. White segregationists retaliated with relentless acts of violence. Police arrested McDew, Forman, Robert Moses, and others SNCC workers on March 27, following a demonstration at the Leflore County Courthouse in Greenwood. SNCC activities in Greenwood were crucial to building the voting rights movement.

Julian Bond to A. Philip Randolph, April 1, 1963. Typed letter. Bayard Rustin Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (137.00.00)

Julian Bond and Stokely Carmichael conducting a news conference in the parking lot of a filling station in Atlanta . . . in support of Rep. Adam Clayton Powell . Gelatin silver print, January 9, 1967. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (138.01.00)

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Activism and Violence in Greenwood, Mississippi

In 1962, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) began a voter registration drive in Greenwood, Mississippi, the county seat of Leflore County, which was more than two-thirds black, but only five percent of the voting-age African American population was registered to vote. African American poverty in the area was widespread and threatened to intensify, which Bob Moses (b. 1935), the leader of SNCC in Mississippi, notes in this excerpt from the documentary The Streets of Greenwood (1964). SNCC organizers in Greenwood were shot and arrested, as the city was the state headquarters for the White Citizens’ Council, which Moses also discusses.

Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division . A film by Jack Willis, Fred Wardenburg, John Reavis

Professor Freeman Hrabowski Interviewed by Joseph Mosnier in 2011

Professor Freeman Hrabowski (b. 1950), President of UMBC, remembers joining the Birmingham Children's Crusade at the age of 12 in an interview conducted by Joseph Mosnier for the Civil Rights History Project in 2011.

Birmingham, Alabama, Protests

In May 1963, police in Birmingham, Alabama, responded to marching African American youth with fire hoses and police dogs to disperse the protesters, as the Birmingham jails already were filled to capacity with other civil rights protesters. Televised footage of the attacks shocked the nation, just as newspaper coverage shocked the world. This excerpt from CBS Eyewitness: Breakthrough in Birmingham , broadcast on May 10, 1963, includes televised footage seen by millions, as well as a brief interview with Martin Luther King, Jr., (1929–1968), one of the leaders of the movement in Birmingham, who discusses the importance of achieving success there.

Television and Birmingham

Ralph McGill (1898–1969), the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor and columnist of the Atlanta Constitution and supporter of the civil rights movement, discusses the momentous effect of televised coverage of police brutality during the Birmingham protests. The interview was included in NBC’s The American Revolution of ’63 , broadcast September 2, 1963. In the months following the protests in Birmingham, nearly 800 racial demonstrations occurred in cities throughout the U.S.

The Cambridge Movement

The Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC) formed in 1962 to target segregation and racial inequality in the Eastern Shore of Maryland city of Cambridge. This excerpt from NBC’s The American Revolution of ’63 , broadcast September 2, 1963, documents violent encounters that led in June 1963 to a declaration of martial law. Intervention by the Kennedy Administration to resolve the crisis with CNAC leader Gloria Richardson (b. 1922) resulted in what became known as the “Treaty of Cambridge,” but that failed to last, and conflicts continued in Cambridge for many years.

Courtesy of NBC News

Protesters and Desegregation in Alabama

Birmingham, Alabama, had the distinct record of being one of the last strongholds of discrimination, regardless of the many laws in place to prevent racial injustice. Images like this one of a fire hose being turned on peaceful protesters shocked the nation and awakened the conscience of the American people. Nine years after the Brown v. Broad of Education decision, the University of Alabama was forced to desegregate when three potential black students were identified. In a scene heavily reported in the press and covered on television and radio, Governor George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door, physically preventing their enrollment.

Warren K. Leffler. Governor George Wallace attempting to block integration of the University of Alabama . Photograph, June 11, 1963. U.S. News and World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (139.00.00)

Bruce Davidson. Birmingham, Alabama . Photograph, 1963. Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (130.00.00) © Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

Bruce Davidson. Civil rights demonstration in Birmingham, Alabama . Prayers outside municipal building. Photograph, 1963. Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (130.01.00) © Bruce Davidson/Magnum Photos

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President Kennedy’s Civil Rights Message

On June 11, following the standoff with Governor George Wallace (1919–1998) at the University of Alabama, President Kennedy appeared on national television at 8:00 p.m. to announce his plan to submit a civil rights bill to Congress. In an impromptu speech that was partially extemporaneous, he described civil rights as “a moral issue . . . as old as the Scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.” He highlighted the subjects of voting rights, public accommodations, school desegregation, and the high rate of black unemployment. Acknowledging the urgency of the moment, Kennedy warned, “The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South, where legal remedies are not at hand.” Later that evening NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers was murdered in front of his home in Jackson, Mississippi.

John F. Kennedy. President John F. Kennedy’s speech on civil rights, June 11, 1963. Pamphlet. //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0140p1_enlarge.jpg ">Page 2 . Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Records, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (140.00.00)

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President Kennedy Ponders Making a Major Civil Rights Address

On June 11, 1963, President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) delivered a major televised address to the nation announcing that he soon would ask Congress to enact civil rights legislation. Kennedy allowed documentary filmmaker Robert Drew unprecedented access to Oval Office discussions with his advisors, which were included in the film Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment , first broadcast October 21, 1963, on ABC, and rebroadcast in this re-edited version, Kennedy v. Wallace: A Crisis Up Close , twenty-five years later on the PBS series The American Experience , which included new interviews with participants.

Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division . Excerpt from "The American Experience: Kennedy v. Wallace: A Crisis Up Close," © 1998 Drew Associates. www.drewassociates.net (external)

President Kennedy’s Civil Rights Address

In his civil rights address of June 11, 1963, delivered to the nation over radio and television, President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) announced that he soon would ask Congress to enact landmark civil rights legislation. Martin Luther King, Jr., (1929–1968) called the speech “one of the most eloquent, profound, and unequivocal pleas for Justice and Freedom of all men ever made by any President.” This excerpt of the speech appeared in CBS News Eyewitness: The President Faces the Racial Crisis , broadcast June 14, 1963.

Divergent Views of President Kennedy’s Civil Rights Address

On the morning after President John F. Kennedy’s (1917–1963) June 11, 1963, televised address to the nation, announcing that he soon would ask Congress to enact landmark civil rights legislation, civil rights leaders discussed the speech in a panel moderated by Richard D. Heffner (1925–2013) for The American Experience, broadcast June 16, 1963, on Metromedia Broadcasting Television. The participants in this clip were Minister Malcolm X (1925–1965), a Nation of Islam leader; Allan Morrison (1916–1968), New York editor of Ebony magazine; and James Farmer (1920–1999), executive director of the Congress of Racial Equality. Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker (not shown in this clip), also participated in the discussion.

Kennedy Sends Civil Rights Bill to Congress

On June 19 President Kennedy sent a civil rights bill to Congress. The bill retained the voting rights provisions of the 1957 and 1960 acts (Title I); prohibited discrimination in public accommodations affecting interstate commerce (Title II); authorized the Justice Department to bring school desegregation suits (Title III); created the Community Relations Service (Title IV); extended the life of the Civil Rights Commission (Title V); cut off federal funds to state and local programs that discriminated (Title VI); and made permanent the President’s Committee on Equal Opportunity (Title VII). The bill was introduced in the House by Chairman Emanuel Celler of the House Judiciary Committee as H.R. 7152. Celler immediately referred the bill to his antitrust subcommittee, renamed Subcommittee No. 5, a panel favorable to civil rights.

U.S. Congress. 88th Congress, 1st Session, House of Representatives, Document No. 124, Civil Rights—Message from the President of the United States , June 19, 1963. Printed document. 88th Congress, 1st Session, House of Representatives, Document No. 124, Civil Rights—Message from the President of the United States , June 19, 1963. Printed document. Page 2. Emanuel Celler Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (141.00.00) //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0141p1_enlarge.jpg ">Page 2 . Emanuel Celler Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (141.00.00)

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The LCCR Considers Civil Rights Bill

On July 2, 1963, NAACP’s Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins called a meeting of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) at New York’s Roosevelt Hotel to consider President Kennedy’s civil rights bill. The LCCR agreed to support the bill but insisted on the addition of a FEPC provision that included private industry; a grant of authority to the attorney general to intervene in all civil rights cases (the old Part III stripped from the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960); coverage of all public accommodations; and extended voting protections for state and federal elections. The LCCR began pressing Subcommittee No. 5 for these additions. The NAACP followed by convening a National Civil Rights Legislative Conference in Washington, D.C., August 6–8, to lobby congressmen and senators.

Roy Wilkins to Branches, Youth Councils and State Conferences (Action Memo, No. 2—Civil Rights Bills), July 25, 1963. Memorandum. //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0133p1_enlarge.jpg ">Page 2 . NAACP Records, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (133.00.00)

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Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.

Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., was reared in New York City. After graduating from Colgate University in 1930, he studied for the ministry. During the Depression he established a reputation as a fiery civil rights leader in Harlem, N.Y. In 1937 he succeeded his father as the pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, one of the largest black congregations in the U.S. Powell was elected New York’s first black city councilman in 1941, and in 1944, the first black member of the House of Representatives from the Northeast, where he served for twenty-four years. As a freshman legislator, he introduced substantial civil rights measures and pushed for the desegregation of District of Columbia schools and federal buildings. With the support of the NAACP, in 1946 he began to routinely attach a provision known as the “Powell Amendment” to bills that called for the denial of federal funds to any project that discriminated. The principle was later enacted into law as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. From 1961 to 1969, Powell served as chairman of the powerful House Education and Labor Committee. He used his position to effectively pass antipoverty legislation.

James Kriegsmann. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr . (1908–1972). Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (273.00.00)

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Proposed Use of “Calendar Wednesday” for FEPC

In 1961 Representative Adam Clayton Powell (D-NY) became chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee and the highest ranking African American in Congress. In 1963 the committee had reported out a Fair Employment Practices Committee bill that was awaiting action in the House Rules Committee, chaired by Representative Howard W. Smith (D-VA), an avid segregationist. Powell proposed that the bill bypass the Rules Committee through the “Calendar Wednesday” procedure, whereby a committee chairman could bring a bill to the floor on a particular Wednesday without going through the Rules Committee. He later dropped the idea for fear that it would undermine President Kennedy’s pending civil rights bill.

Clarence Mitchell. Notes on conversation with Clarence Mitchell on Powell’s proposal to use Calendar Wednesday for FEPC and withholding of funds, July 29, 1963. Typescript. NAACP Records, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (132.00.00)

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The Preamble for the March on Washington

In December 1962, A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, proposed a mass march on Washington during the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, calling for jobs to reduce the high rate of black unemployment. Randolph asked his colleague, Bayard Rustin, to draft a blueprint for the march. Rustin delivered this outline to Randolph after conferring with Norman Hill, assistant program director of CORE, and Tom Kahn. Hill and Kahn had previously assisted Rustin with organizing the Youth Marches for Integrated Schools.

Bayard Rustin, Tom Kahn, and Norman Hill. Preamble [March on Washington], January, 1963. Typescript. Tom Kahn Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (142.00.00)

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Organizers Plan March Strategy

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was organized in New York City in a Harlem office building. A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King, Jr., decided in May 1963 that the March would be held in August while Congress was in session, and on a Wednesday so as not to conflict with religious services over a weekend. Bayard Rustin, a leading strategist with experience in organizing protest demonstrations, was put in charge of coordinating the massive undertaking. Shown are organizers A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Anna Arnold Hedgeman planning the route for the march.

In 1941 Hedgeman (1899−1990) joined A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement and became executive secretary of his National Council for a Permanent FEPC in 1944. Two years later she became Dean of Women at Howard University, and in 1949 assistant to the administrator of the Federal Security Agency. From 1954 to 1958, Hedgeman was an assistant to Mayor Robert F. Wagner, the first black female member of a New York City mayoral cabinet. During the 1960s Hedgeman advised the President’s Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW) appointed by John F. Kennedy. The PCSW also drew leadership and advice from Pauli Murray, Dorothy Height, Dollie L. Robinson, and other civil rights activists. These same women pushed to include sex discrimination in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and helped to found the National Organization for Women. Hedgeman was the only woman on the organizing committee of the 1963 March on Washington.

United Press International. Plan March Strategy . Gelatin silver print, August 3, 1963. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (134.00.00)

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Roy Wilkins at the March on Washington

Roy Wilkins (1901–1981), executive secretary of the NAACP, spoke about pending civil rights legislation at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963.

“I Have a Dream” Speech

A skilled and charismatic orator who delivered many speeches in support of African American civil rights, Martin Luther King, Jr., is perhaps best known for his remarks at the 1963 March on Washington. After reading a prepared text, he began to extemporize with the words, “I have a dream,” envisioning a time when blacks and whites would work, pray, and struggle together and when character rather than color would matter most. Quoting a line from “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” he called on the nation to “let freedom ring.” King’s oratory electrified the diverse crowd of 250,000 and captivated a vast television audience. More attention was given to King’s remarks than to those of any other speaker.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Copy of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech submitted for copyright registration, August 28, 1963. Typescript. Martin Luther King, Jr. Collection, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (146.00.00)

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The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

A pivotal point in the civil rights movement was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. More than 250,000 people from all walks of life gathered on the Mall in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963. The historic event helped to turn the tide for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by demonstrating to the nation and the world that it was time for change. The events of that day would echo across the world, through extensive media coverage, as others would take up the cry, “We Shall Overcome.” This photograph depicts how thousands came together and peacefully demonstrated, answering the call of the leaders of the March.

Fred Ward. Marching for Freedom . Color photographic print, August 28, 1963. White House News Photographers Association Collection, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (265.00.00) © Fred Ward

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Protestors and demonstrators participating in the civil rights events of the 1960s were conscious of the way they presented themselves during public gatherings. It was important to show through their attire they were deserving of the respect and dignity they were seeking. To that end, most organizers of events stressed proper presentation, although for this generation there was hardly the need. They were well aware of what was at stake and would not have jeopardized the end goals. Here Johnson has captured that feeling in this dignified image of a woman dressed in a hat and a fur trimmed jacket, closely holding her bible along with the “WE DEMAND” flyer.

David Johnson. We Demand . 1963. Gelatin silver print. Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (265.01.00) © David Johnson

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NAACP Lawyer Constance Baker Motley Interviewed by Renee Poussaint in 2002

NAACP lawyer Constance Baker Motley (1921–2005) discusses her surprise at crowds at the March on Washington and how it led to the passing of the Civil Rights Act in an interview conducted by Renee Poussaint for the National Visionary Leadership Project in 2002.

Support of Hollywood Entertainers at the March

Like so many others heeding the call to participate in the March on Washington in 1963, Hollywood stars lent support to the movement and participated in the march. They came as ordinary citizens, and many supported the movement financially. Seen here are photographs of Hollywood actors and entertainers Paul Newman, Sammy Davis, Jr., Sidney Poitier, Burt Lancaster, Charlton Heston, and Harry Belafonte.

Roosevelt Carter. Paul Newman, and Sammy Davis, Jr. ; Sidney Poitier and Burt Lancaster ; Charlton Heston, Harry Belafonte, Burt Lancaster, and Josephine Baker at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom , August 28, 1963. Facsimile of photographs. Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (270.00.00, //www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ppmsca.35379/ ">270.01.00 , //www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3f05807/ ">270.02.00 , //www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ppmsca.35388/ ">144.00.00 ) © Estate of Roosevelt H. Carter

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Civil Rights Leader John Lewis

At the age of twenty-three, John Lewis (b. 1940) was the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. As chairman of SNCC, John Lewis planned to deliver a speech denouncing the Kennedy civil rights bill as “too little and too late.” When copies of the speech were distributed on August 27, other chairs of the march insisted that it be revised. James Forman re-wrote Lewis’s speech on a portable typewriter in a small anteroom behind Lincoln’s statue during the program. SNCC’s initial assertion “we cannot support, wholeheartedly the [Kennedy] civil rights bill” was replaced with “We support it with great reservations.”

Bob Adelman. John Lewis, leader of Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) rises to speak at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom , August 28, 1963. Photograph. Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (257.00.00) © Bob Adelman

John Lewis and James Forman. Text of speech to be delivered by John Lewis, SNCC chairman, at the Lincoln Memorial, August 28, 1963 (original and revised). Typescript. //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0147p1_enlarge.jpg ">Page 2 - //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0147p2_enlarge.jpg ">Page 3 . James Forman Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (147.00.00)

John Lewis and James Forman. Text of speech to be delivered by John Lewis, SNCC chairman, at the Lincoln Memorial, August 28, 1963 (original and revised). Typescript. //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0148p1_enlarge.jpg ">Page 2 - //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0148p2_enlarge.jpg ">Page 3 - //www.loc.gov/exhibits/civil-rights-act/images/cr0148p3_enlarge.jpg ">Page 4 . James Forman Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (148.00.00)

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Civil Rights Leaders Meet President Kennedy

Immediately after the March on Washington, its leaders met with President Kennedy at the White House. They focused the conversation on the civil rights bill’s economic shortcomings. Whitney Young insisted that the bill was directed at the South whereas the major problems were in the North. A. Philip Randolph reiterated the need for job creation and training. Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, and Walter Reuther tried to persuade Kennedy to support an FEPC provision and Part III, which authorized the attorney general to intervene in all civil rights cases, many of which involved violent repression of peaceful protests.

Warren K. Leffler. Civil rights leaders meet with President John F. Kennedy in the oval office of the White House after the March on Washington, D.C. , August 28, 1963. Photograph. U.S. News and World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (150.00.00)

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White Citizens’ Council Head W. J. Simmons

For NBC’s The American Revolution of ’63 , broadcast September 2, 1963, white supremacist W. J. Simmons (1916–2007), head of the Citizens’ Council of America, headquartered in Jackson, Mississippi, gave his evaluation of the civil rights “revolution.”

The Bombing at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church

On Sunday, September 15, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed by white supremacists—a planned act of terrorism by men who were later identified as members of a Ku Klux Klan organization. The explosion killed four young African American girls—Addie Mae Collins (age fourteen), Denise McNair (age eleven), Carole Robertson (age fourteen), and Cynthia Wesley (age fourteen). There was a great public outcry for immediate justice nationally and internationally and the event marked a major turning point in the movement. It created urgency to usher the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

UPI. Casket with the body of 14-year-old Carole Robertson, one of four girls killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama . Photograph, 1963. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (152.00.00)

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Robert W. Kastenmeier (D-WI), William M. McCulloch (R-OH), and Robert Kennedy on the Subcommittee Bill

On September 15, 1963, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed, killing four African American girls during their Sunday school classes. In response to the attack and to the recent March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, liberal members of the House Judiciary subcommittee responsible for crafting the civil rights bill, strengthened the bill that the Kennedy Administration had sent to Congress in June to the displeasure of those who believed it now could not pass. In this excerpt from CBS Reports: Filibuster—Birth Struggle of a Law , broadcast March 18, 1964, Representatives Robert W. Kastenmeier (1924–2015), Democrat of Wisconsin and William M. McCulloch (1901–1980), Republican of Ohio, and Attorney General Robert Kennedy (1925–1968) discuss the revised bill.

Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division .

James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time , 1963

One of the most important books ever published on race relations, James Baldwin’s two-essay work comprises a letter written to his nephew on the role of race in U.S. history and a discussion of how religion and race influence one another. Baldwin’s angry prose is balanced by his overall belief that love and understanding can overcome strife. In the book, Baldwin predicted the political and social unrest that occurred after 1963.

James Baldwin (1924–1987). The Fire Next Time . New York: Dial, 1963. Rare Book and Special Collections Division , Library of Congress (154.00.00)

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James Baldwin in San Francisco

In May 1963, during the Birmingham, Alabama, protests, novelist, essayist, playwright, and poet James Baldwin (1924–1987) visited San Francisco to interview African American youth. The encounters, occurring a few months after the publication of The Fire Next Time , Baldwin’s foreboding analysis of race in America, were filmed for the documentary Take This Hammer , broadcast in January 1964 on National Educational Television.

White Backlash in the North

In this excerpt from the documentary Confronted , examining northern whites who felt personally confronted by African Americans demanding freedom, residents of a suburban town near Philadelphia react with violence when a black family moves into the neighborhood. Confronted was broadcast in December 1963 on National Educational Television.

Hubert Humphrey Pledges Support

As mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert Humphrey held membership in the National Urban League and assisted the League’s efforts to fight discrimination in Minneapolis and St. Paul. He first met Whitney Young, then director of industrial relations for the St. Paul Urban League, in 1947. In this letter then Senator Humphrey congratulates Young on the March on Washington and pledges his “total commitment to President Kennedy’s civil rights bill.” In 1964 Senate Democratic Majority Leader Mike Mansfield named Humphrey the Democratic floor leader for the bill.

Senator Hubert Humphrey to National Urban League Executive Director Whitney Young, September 5, 1963. Typed letter. National Urban League Records, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (155.00.00)

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Negotiations to Support a Bipartisan Compromise Bill

House Judiciary Subcommittee No. 5 held public hearings on the civil rights bill from May 8 to August 2, 1963. In September the subcommittee approved a draft of the bill that accommodated all the demands of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR). Attorney General Robert Kennedy appeared before the full Judiciary Committee on October 15 to ask for a “more reasonable” bill. The Kennedy administration was convinced that the subcommittee’s draft could not win enough Republican votes to pass the House. The NAACP and LCCR refused to yield. President Kennedy directly intervened by calling the House leadership of both parties to the White House on October 23. After five days of negotiations they agreed to support a bipartisan compromise bill. The Judiciary Committee officially reported out the bill on November 20.

Clarence Mitchell to the Honorable Emanuel Celler, Chairman, U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. Typed letter, October 18, 1963. Emanuel Celler papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (156.00.00)

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Condolences to Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy

On November 21, 1963, President Kennedy made a political trip to Texas to raise money for his reelection campaign and smooth over internal Democratic Party frictions between liberals and conservative Governor John Connally that were weakening the party in the state. While in a motorcade through downtown Dallas, he was fatally shot at 12:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963. A. Philip Randolph sent this letter of condolence to Jacqueline Kennedy later that afternoon.

A. Phillip Randolph to Jacqueline Kennedy, November 22, 1963. Typed letter. Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Records, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (157.00.00) Courtesy of the A. Philip Randolph Institute

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Louis Martin’s Statement on the Death of President Kennedy

Louis Martin was recruited by Sargent Shriver to work on the 1960 presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy. Martin persuaded Robert Kennedy, who ran the campaign, to intervene in the release of Martin Luther King, Jr., from an Atlanta jail in October. King endorsed John F. Kennedy for president in November, helping him win the black vote in the election. In 1961 Martin became an advisor to President Kennedy and deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Martin was en route to his office at the DNC when he learned of President Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963.

Louis Martin. Statement concerning the death of President John F. Kennedy, n.d. Typescript. Louis Martin Papers. Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (157.01.00) Courtesy of Gertrude Martin

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Long Shadow

Herblock depicted a darker world without the president and his vision. His drawing of a hooded figure of death casts a long pall over the future while clutching a funerary wreath for John F. Kennedy. Herblock mourned the loss of hope for the world, which Kennedy symbolized for him. This cartoon was published the day Kennedy was buried.

Herblock. Long Shadow . Published in the Washington Post, November 25, 1963. Graphite, India ink, and opaque white over graphite underdrawing. Herbert L. Block Collection, Prints and Photographs Division , Library of Congress (158.00.00)

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Securing Kennedy’s Civil Rights Bill

On November 27 President Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress to ask for the “earliest possible passage” of the civil rights bill as a tribute to President Kennedy. Two days later, he met with Roy Wilkins at the White House to ask Wilkins and other civil rights leaders to lobby forcefully and mobilize public support behind the bill. On December 8, Johnson invited Joseph Rauh, a persistent critic, aboard Air Force One to accompany him to the funeral of New York Senator Herbert Lehman. Shortly thereafter, they met at the White House to discuss the Judiciary Committee bill and strategy for the upcoming fights in Congress.

President Lyndon Johnson to Joseph Rauh concerning the Kennedy civil rights bill, December 11, 1963. Typed letter. Joseph Rauh Papers, Manuscript Division , Library of Congress (159.00.00)

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A just society: Why Black economic boycotts of the Civil Rights era still offer lessons for today

Posted by TheConversation | Sep 7, 2024

By Kevin A. Young, Associate Professor of History, UMass Amherst

Signed into law 60 years ago, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination in the U.S. based on “race, color, sex, religion, or national origin.”

Yet, as a historian who studies social movements and political change, I think the law’s most important lesson for today’s movements is not its content but rather how it was achieved.

As firsthand accounts from the era make clear, the movement won because it directly hurt the interests of white business owners. The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, the 1963 boycott of Birmingham businesses, and many lesser-known local boycotts inflicted major costs on local business owners and forced them to support integration.

THE CONVENTIONAL NARRATIVE

A view common among scholars, activists, and the general public holds that the Civil Rights Movement succeeded because violent attacks against peaceful Black protesters mobilized white public opinion in the movement’s favor.

One of the most famous incidents occurred in Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1963, when the city’s public safety commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, turned fire hoses and dogs on Black demonstrators.

The conventional wisdom is that Connor’s actions outraged Northern whites, and in response, the Kennedy administration sent federal troops to Birmingham and a civil rights bill to Congress.

But this view misunderstands the source of the movement’s power. For one thing, it overstates public sympathy for the Civil Rights Movement. Three months after the attacks against Black protesters in Birmingham, for instance, almost two-thirds of the public opposed the famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of August 1963.

Moreover, the Kennedy administration predicted that civil rights legislation would hurt the Democrats electorally. “The President never had any illusions about the political advantages of equal rights,” wrote Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger in his memoir “A Thousand Days.” “But he saw no alternative” given the movement’s actions.

SO WHAT WERE THOSE ACTIONS?

Black organizers aimed to inflict maximal disruption on the white power structure, particularly economic elites. As Martin Luther King Jr. later recounted, “The political power structure listens to the economic power structure.” By disrupting white businesses, often in a highly organized way, Black activists won social change.

A ‘DEVASTATINGLY EFFECTIVE’ WEAPON

Economic boycotts in Southern cities such as Birmingham and Nashville, Tennessee, played crucial roles during the civil rights era. A 20-month boycott by Black shoppers of downtown businesses in Greenwood, Mississippi, brought legal changes to the city’s hiring practices in 1964.

The most famous boycott occurred in 1955–56 in Montgomery, Alabama, where the nearly 13-month protest against segregated public transportation caused the city’s bus service to lose an estimated US$3,000 a day in fares.

Black people made up about 75% of public transportation riders. Instead of using city buses, they walked, formed car pools and used Black-owned taxi services. The boycott ended on Dec. 20, 1956, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that segregation on buses was unconstitutional.

By 1960, civil rights organizers were widely embracing this “economic weapon to fight segregation,” reported the national magazine Business Week.

Three years later, Time magazine wrote that boycotts had proved “devastatingly effective” in pushing white business owners and government officials to desegregate.

In Birmingham, for example, real estate tycoon Sidney Smyer led the elite push for integration. Smyer was a staunch racist, but he capitulated amid the boycott and related disruption.

“I’m still a segregationist,” he said in May 1963, but “I’m not a damn fool.”

During five weeks of boycotts, sit-ins and marches, Birmingham businesses had lost millions in sales.

Smyer and his fellow executives decided to cut their losses by integrating. They then dragged along the politicians, judges, school administrators and law enforcement officials. That had been civil rights strategists’ plan from the start.

According to civil rights organizer Abraham Woods, they hoped that business owners hurt by the boycott in Birmingham would “pressure the city” to integrate.

Andrew Young, an adviser to King, later said that “Bull Connor made the impact greater, but the dynamics would have taken effect without Bull Connor and the dogs. … When the demonstrations were so massive and the economic withdrawal program was so tight, literally, the town was paralyzed.”

CHANGING THE LAW AFTER BIRMINGHAM

The Birmingham victory inspired other Black people to rise up. Kennedy’s Department of Justice reported another 2,062 Black protests in 40 states by the end of 1963. It also led Kennedy – 28 months into his presidency – to propose a civil rights bill, in June 1963.

Even as he tried to dissuade Black leaders from marching on Washington, Kennedy admitted that the disruptive boycotts and protests “had made the executive branch act faster and were now forcing Congress to entertain legislation,” as Schlesinger reported in his book “A Thousand Days.”

Kennedy also feared the radicalization of Black consciousness after Birmingham. If the federal government did not deliver moderate reform, the “colored masses” might embrace “the mindless radicalism of the Negro militants,” as Schlesinger described the president’s logic.

Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963 meant the civil rights bill fell to his successor, Lyndon Johnson. After a heated battle in Congress, Johnson signed the bill into law on July 2, 1964.

By causing massive and sustained disruption to ruling-class interests, particularly businesses, Black organizers who were formally excluded from political power were able to force legal change.

The lesson is that major legislative reform requires mass disruption outside the electoral and legislative spheres. Without that disruption, it will be very difficult to win any law that negatively affects entrenched power-holders.

Kevin A. Young

Charles Kelly (AP) and Associated Press (File)

Originally published on The Conversation under a Creative Commons license as Black economic boycotts of the civil rights era still offer lessons on how to achieve a just society

Support evidence-based journalism with a tax-deductible donation today, make a contribution to The Conversation .

About The Author

Theconversation.

TheConversation is a nonprofit news agency that distributes independent articles with a focus on expert opinions, informed commentary, and debate on a range of issues affecting the world. This feature is published under the terms of their Creative Commons license.

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