BACKGROUND
The Civil Rights Movement or 1960s Civil Rights Movement (sometimes referred to as the "African-American Civil Rights Movement" although the term "African American" was not widely used in the 1950s and '60s) encompasses social movements in the United States whose goals were to end racial segregation and discrimination against African Americans and to secure legal recognition and federal protection of the citizenship rights enumerated in the Constitution and federal law. While black Americans had been fighting for their rights and liberties since the time of slavery, the 1950s and 1960s witnessed critical accomplishments in their civil rights struggle.
CIVIL RESISTANCE
The movement was characterized by major campaigns of civil resistance. Between 1955 and 1968, acts of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience produced crisis situations between activists and government authorities. Federal, state, and local governments, businesses, and communities often had to respond immediately to these situations that highlighted the discrimination faced by African Americans. Forms of protest or civil disobedience included boycotts such as the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama; "sit-ins" such as the influential Greensboro sit-ins; marches, such as the Selma to Montgomery marches in Alabama or the march on Washington as well as a wide range of other nonviolent activities .
The Montgomery bus boycott was a political and social protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the public transit system of Montgomery, Alabama. The campaign lasted from December 5, 1955—when Rosa Parks, an African American woman, was arrested for refusing to surrender her seat to a white person—to December 20, 1956, when a federal ruling, Browder v. Gayle, took effect, and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws requiring segregated buses to be unconstitutional. Many important figures in the Civil Rights Movement took part in the boycott, including Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ralph Abernathy.
The Greensboro sit-ins were a series of nonviolent protests in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960, which led to the Woolworth department store chain removing its policy of racial segregation in the Southern United States. While not the first sit-in of the Civil Rights Movement, the Greensboro sit-ins were an instrumental action, and also the most well-known sit-ins of the Civil Rights Movement. These sit-ins led to increased national sentiment at a crucial period in US history. The primary event took place at the Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth store, now the International Civil Rights Center and Museum.
The March on Washington was one of the largest political rallies for human rights in United States history and demanded civil and economic rights for African Americans. It took place in Washington, D.C. Thousands of Americans headed to Washington on Tuesday August 27, 1963. On Wednesday, August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech in which he called for an end to racism.
The three Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965 were part of the voting rights movement underway in Selma, Alabama. By highlighting racial injustice in the South, they contributed to passage that year of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark federal achievement of the Civil Rights Movement. Activists publicized the three protest marches to walk the 54-mile (87 km) highway from Selma to the Alabama state capital of Montgomery as showing the desire of African-American citizens to exercise their constitutional right to vote, in defiance of segregationist repression.
March on Washington
This United States Information Agency photograph of the March on Washington, August 28, 1963, shows civil rights and union leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., Joseph L. Rauh Jr., Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, and Walter Reuther.
LEGISLATION
A critical Supreme Court decision of this phase of the Civil Rights Movement was the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education. In the spring of 1951, black students in Virginia protested their unequal status in the state's segregated educational system. Students at Moton High School protested the overcrowded conditions and failing facility. Some local leaders of the NAACP had tried to persuade the students to back down from their protest against the Jim Crow laws of school segregation. When the students did not budge, the NAACP joined their battle against school segregation. The NAACP proceeded with five cases challenging the school systems; these were later combined under what is known today as Brown v. Board of Education.
On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that mandating, or even permitting, public schools to be segregated by race was unconstitutional. However, the new law raised controversy. As late as 1957, three years after the decision, a crisis erupted in Little Rock, Arkansas when Governor of Arkansas Orval Faubus called out the National Guard on September 4 to prevent entry to the nine African-American students who had sued for the right to attend an integrated school, Little Rock Central High School. The nine students had been chosen to attend Central High because of their excellent grades. Faubus' resistance received the attention of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was determined to enforce the orders of the Federal courts. Critics had charged he was lukewarm, at best, on the goal of desegregation of public schools. However, Eisenhower federalized the National Guard in Arkansas and ordered them to return to their barracks. He deployed elements of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to protect the students.
Other noted legislative achievements during this critical phase of the civil rights movement were:
- The passage of Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination based on "race, color, religion, or national origin" in employment practices and public accommodations. It ended unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public (known as "public accommodations").
- The Voting Rights Act of 1965, which restored and protected voting rights. Designed to enforce the voting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the Act secured voting rights for racial minorities throughout the country, especially in the South. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Act is considered to be the most effective piece of civil rights legislation ever enacted in the country.
- The Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965, which dramatically opened entry to the U.S. to immigrants other than traditional European groups;
- The Fair Housing Act of 1968 (known also as the Civil Rights Act of 1968), which banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.
BLACK POWER MOVEMENT
During the Freedom Summer campaign of 1964, numerous tensions within the Civil Rights Movement came to the forefront. Many black Americans in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC; one of the major organizations of the movement) developed concerns that white activists from the North were taking over the movement. The massive presence of white students was also not reducing the amount of violence that SNCC suffered, but seemed to be increasing it. Additionally, there was profound disillusionment at Lyndon Johnson's denial of voting status for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Meanwhile, during the Congress of Racial Equality's (CORE) work in Louisiana that summer, that group found the federal government would not respond to requests to enforce the provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or to protect the lives of activists who challenged segregation. For the Louisiana campaign to survive it had to rely on a local African-American militia called the Deacons for Defense and Justice, who used arms to repel white supremacist violence and police repression. CORE's collaboration with the Deacons was effective against breaking Jim Crow in numerous Louisiana areas.
In 1965, SNCC helped organize an independent political party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), in the heart of Alabama Klan territory, and permitted its black leaders to openly promote the use of armed self-defense. Meanwhile, the Deacons for Defense and Justice expanded into Mississippi and assisted Charles Evers' NAACP chapter with a successful campaign in Natchez. The same year, the Watts Rebellion took place in Los Angeles, and seemed to show that most black youth were now committed to the use of violence to protest inequality and oppression.
During the March Against Fear in 1966, SNCC and CORE fully embraced the slogan of "black power" to describe these trends towards militancy and self-reliance. In Mississippi, Stokely Carmichael, one of SNCC's leaders, declared, "I'm not going to beg the white man for anything that I deserve, I'm going to take it. We need power." Black Power was made most public, however, by the Black Panther Party, which was founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California, in 1966. This group followed the ideology of Malcolm X, a former member of the Nation of Islam, using a "by-any-means necessary" approach to stopping inequality. They sought to rid African American neighborhoods of police brutality and created a ten-point plan among other things.
A wave of inner city riots in black communities from 1964 through 1970 undercut support from the white community. The emergence of the Black Power movement, which lasted from about 1966 to 1975, challenged the established black leadership for its cooperative attitude and its nonviolence, and instead demanded political and economic self-sufficiency.
Many popular representations of the movement are centered on the leadership and philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., who won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the movement. However, historians note that the movement was too diverse to be credited to one person, organization, or strategy.
Civil Rights Leaders Meet with President Johnson
President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Civil Rights leaders Martin Luther King, Jr., Whitney Young, and James Farmer on January 18, 1964.