The Civil Rights Movement

The movement sought to end Jim Crow segregation in schools, transportation, and public accommodations; to secure the right to vote promised by the Fifteenth Amendment; to win equal access to jobs; and, in King’s phrase, to build a “beloved community.”

Litigation. NAACP lawyers led by Thurgood Marshall chipped away at segregation in court, culminating in Brown in 1954.

Mass protest. The thirteen-month Montgomery bus boycott (1955–1956), sparked by Rosa Parks’s arrest, showed the power of nonviolent mass action and made King a national leader; ministers then founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. In 1960 four Black students sat in at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, setting off sit-ins across the South; that April, students organized SNCC with Ella Baker’s encouragement. In 1961 CORE’s interracial Freedom Riders tested a Supreme Court ruling against segregated interstate travel and were attacked by mobs in Alabama.

Confrontation and voting. In Birmingham in 1963, police turned fire hoses and dogs on child marchers, and televised images caused international outrage. In 1964 Freedom Summer volunteers registered voters and ran schools in Mississippi. The 1965 campaign in Selma, and the beating of marchers on “Bloody Sunday,” led directly to the Voting Rights Act.

White Southerners resisted with defiance of school desegregation, mass arrests, and terror. Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi in 1955, and an all-white jury acquitted his killers. Governors Orval Faubus of Arkansas and George Wallace of Alabama defied federal authority. Civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in 1963, and three CORE workers — James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman — were murdered in Mississippi in 1964.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation in public accommodations and discrimination in employment. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned literacy tests and sent federal examiners to the South; by the end of 1965 a quarter of a million new Black voters were registered. The movement also inspired other campaigns for equality — by Chicanos, Native Americans, women, and gay Americans.

Legal victories did not end economic inequality, housing segregation, or police brutality. Days after the Voting Rights Act, rioting broke out in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, and riots followed in many cities, including Newark and Detroit in 1967. Many activists embraced the more militant Black Power movement. King turned to poverty and opposition to the Vietnam War before he was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968.