The civil rights movement, also known as the American civil rights movement, was a decades-long
struggle by African Americans and their like-minded allies to end institutionalized racial discrimination,
disenfranchisement, and racial segregation in the United States.
The movement has its origins in the Reconstruction era during the late 19th century.
However, the movement achieved its largest legislative gains in the mid-1960s after years
of direct actions and grassroots protests.
The social movement's major nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience campaigns eventually
secured new protections in federal law for the human rights of all Americans.
After the American Civil War and the subsequent abolition of slavery in the 1860s, the Reconstruction
Amendments to the United States Constitution granted emancipation and constitutional rights
of citizenship to all African Americans, most of whom had recently been enslaved.
For a short period of time, African Americans voted and held political office, but they
were increasingly deprived of civil rights, often under the so-called Jim Crow laws, and
subjected to discrimination and sustained violence by white supremacists in the South.
Over the following century, various efforts were made by African Americans to secure their
legal and civil rights.
In 1954, the separate but equal policy, which aided the enforcement of Jim Crow laws, was
substantially weakened and eventually dismantled with the United States Supreme Court's Brown
v. Board of Education ruling and other subsequent rulings that followed.
Between 1955 and 1968, nonviolent mass protests and civil disobedience produced crisis situations
and productive dialogues between activists and government authorities.
Federal, state, and local governments, businesses, and communities often had to immediately respond
to these situations, highlighting the inequities faced by African Americans across the country.
The lynching of Chicago teenager Emmett Till in Mississippi, and the outrage generated
by seeing how he had been abused when his mother decided to have an open-casket funeral,
galvanized the African-American community nationwide.
Forms of protest and/or civil disobedience included boycotts, such as the successful
Montgomery bus boycott (1955–56) in Alabama, "sit-ins" such as the Greensboro sit-ins (1960)
in North Carolina and successful Nashville sit-ins in Tennessee, mass marches, such as
the 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade and 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches (1965) in
Alabama, and a wide range of other nonviolent activities and resistance.
At the culmination of a legal strategy pursued by African Americans, the U.S. Supreme Court
in 1954 under the leadership of Earl Warren struck down many of the laws that had allowed
racial segregation and discrimination to be legal in the United States as unconstitutional.
The Warren Court made a series of landmark rulings against racist discrimination, such
as Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States (1964),
and Loving v. Virginia (1967) which banned segregation in public schools and public accommodations,
and struck down all state laws banning interracial marriage.
The rulings also played a crucial role in bringing an end to the segregationist Jim
Crow laws prevalent in the Southern states.
In the 1960s, moderates in the movement worked with the United States Congress to achieve
several significant pieces of federal legislation that overturned discriminatory laws and practices
and authorized oversight and enforcement by the federal government.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in Heart of Atlanta Motel,
Inc. v. United States (1964), explicitly banned all discrimination based on race, color, religion,
sex, or national origin in employment practices, ended unequal application of voter registration
requirements, and prohibited racial segregation in schools, at the workplace, and in public accommodations
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 restored and protected voting rights for minorities by
authorizing federal oversight of registration and elections in areas with historical under-representation
of minorities as voters.
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.
African Americans re-entered politics in the South, and young people across the country
were inspired to take action.
From 1964 through 1970, a wave of inner-city riots and protests in black communities dampened
support from the white middle class, but increased support from private foundations.
The emergence of the Black Power movement, which lasted from 1965 to 1975, challenged
the established black leadership for its cooperative attitude and constant legalism and non-violence.
Instead, its leaders demanded that, in addition to the new laws gained through the nonviolent
movement, political and economic self-sufficiency had to be developed in the black community.
Many popular representations of the movement are centered on the charismatic leadership
and philosophy of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize
for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance.
However, some scholars note that the movement was too diverse to be credited to any particular
person, organization, or strategy.
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