The American Civil Rights Movement

Home , Alberta Williams King, Black Cabinet, National Negro Committee, Stride Toward Freedom

Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement

The American Civil Rights Movement For Grades 6-8

This Pack contains:

7 ARTICLES 2 PRIMARY SOURCES 4 IMAGES 1 VIDEO

civil rights movement

The mass movement for racial equality in the United States known as the civil rights movement started in the late 1950s. Through nonviolent protest actions, it broke through the pattern of racial segregation, the practice in the South through which Black Americans were not allowed to use the same schools, churches, restaurants, buses, and other facilities as white Americans. The movement also achieved the passage of landmark equal- rights laws in the mid-1960s intended to end discrimination against people because of their race (seeracism). This article provides an overview of some of the main events of the civil rights movement. To read about the movement in greater depth in its historical context, seeBlack Americans.

Civil rights supporters carry placards at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Warren K. Leffler (digital file: cph ppmsca 03128)

Martin Luther King, Jr., addresses the crowd during the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. More …

AP Images

A Black man stands beneath a sign designating the “colored waiting room” at a bus station in Durham, …

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-ppmsc-00199)

The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) to the Constitution of the United States formally abolished slavery.

NARA

When the United States first became a country, the majority of the Black people who lived there were enslaved. They were not considered citizens and so were not granted the basic rights of citizens in the U.S. Constitution, which was ratified in 1788. This was changed several decades later with three amendments to the Constitution. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) granted citizenship to people who had formerly been enslaved. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) gave Blacks the same voting rights as whites (in other words, the men could vote but the women could not). In the South, however, new laws were passed to effectively prevent Blacks from voting and to reinforce segregation practices (seeReconstruction Period). In addition, the U.S. Supreme Court sanctioned racial segregation by allowing “separate but equal” facilities for Blacks and whites, in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). (See alsoBlack codes; poll tax.)

The central figure in the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial in Richmond is Barbara Johns. In 1951…

Frank Tozier/Alamy

In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was illegal.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

African American students walk to school in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. Troops sent by the…

CSU Archive/Everett Collection/age fotostock

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, lawyers for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) argued a series of desegregation cases before the Supreme Court. They culminated in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (Kansas). In that case, the court ruled on May 17, 1954, that having separate schools for Blacks made the schools inherently unequal and was thus unconstitutional. This historic decision inspired a mass movement by Blacks and sympathetic whites to end racial segregation and inequality. Many whites, especially in the South, however, strongly resisted this movement. (See alsoLittle Rock Nine.)

Rosa Parks sits on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956.

Underwood Archives/UIG/REX/Shutterstock.com

On December 1, 1955, a Black woman named Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. This sparked a major protest, the Montgomery bus boycott, which helped ignite the civil rights movement. Two local Baptist ministers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ralph Abernathy, led a long, nonviolent boycott of the bus system that eventually forced the bus company to desegregate its

buses. Similar protest actions soon spread to other communities in the South. King became the leading voice of the civil rights movement. In 1957 he founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to coordinate and lead this massive resistance movement.

A student holds a sit-in at a drugstore lunch counter in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. The use of…

AP Imagers

In 1960 a group of Black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, insisted on being served a meal at a segregated lunch counter (seeGreensboro sit-in). This was one of the first of the movement’s many prominent civil rights sit-ins, a form of nonviolent protest in which participants enter a business or public place and remain seated until they are forcibly removed or their grievances are addressed. The sit-in movement was largely led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and its techniques were patterned on the nonviolent civil disobedience methods of the Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi. As the movement spread across the United States, it forced the desegregation of department stores, supermarkets, libraries, and movie theaters.

Freedom Riders prepare to board a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on May 24, 1961.

Perry Aycock/AP Images

In May 1961 the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), under the leadership of James Farmer, began sending participants on nonviolent Freedom Rides on buses and trains throughout the South and elsewhere. The purpose of the rides was to test and break down segregation practices on interstate transportation. By September of that year, some 70,000 students, both Black and white, were thought to have participated in the movement. Roughly 3,600 of the participants were arrested for their participation. All together, they traveled to more than 20 states.

Martin Luther King, Jr. (center), and other civil rights supporters participate in the March on…

AP Images

The movement reached its climax on August 28, 1963, in the March on Washington, a massive demonstration in Washington, D.C., to protest racial discrimination and to demonstrate support for civil rights laws then being considered in Congress. The highlight of the march, which attracted more than 200,000 Black and white participants, was King’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech, which rallied civil rights advocates throughout the country.

U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act as Martin Luther King, Jr., and others…

Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum; photograph, Cecil Stoughton

In the years that followed, the civil rights movement won several important legal victories. On July 2, 1964, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. One of the most comprehensive civil rights laws to be enacted by Congress, the act outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin in public accommodations, employment, and federal programs. It also regulated literacy tests and other registration requirements for voting to ensure they were not biased against Blacks. A year later, Johnson enacted

the Voting Rights Act. The enforcement of this act ended the tactics that had been used in the South to prevent Blacks from voting, and it led to great increases in the numbers of Blacks who registered to vote.

Plow mules pull the farm wagon bearing the casket of Martin Luther King, Jr., along the funeral…

AP/REX/Shutterstock.com

The progress of the period was accompanied by violence against Blacks and civil rights workers, however. On June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers, the field secretary of the Mississippi branch of the NAACP, was killed near his home in Jackson. During the summer of 1964, members of the SNCC and other civil rights workers who were attempting to register voters in Mississippi were routinely beaten and jailed. In mid-June three of the workers were arrested and killed by local law officials in Philadelphia, Mississippi. On April 4, 1968, the civil rights movement suffered a devastating blow when King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.

Police use dogs to attack a civil rights demonstrator during a march in Birmingham, Alabama, on May…

Bill Hudson/AP Images

Black Panther Party national chairman Bobby Seale (left) and defense minister Huey Newton.

Even before the death of King, some Blacks, particularly residents of poor urban areas, had begun to look for new leadership. Many urban residents had grown increasingly impatient with the slow progress of the nonviolence movement and the failure of recently enacted civil rights legislation to make significant changes in their lives. In 1965 nearly one half of American Blacks lived below the poverty level, and the majority still experienced discrimination or violence daily. In the mid-1960s this frustration erupted into race riots, including a major disturbance in the Watts area of Los Angeles, California, in 1965 (seeWatts Riots of 1965).

In this period the civil rights movement as a unified effort disintegrated, with civil rights leaders advocating different approaches and varying degrees of militancy. The growing militancy of Black activists was inspired in part by Black nationalist Malcolm X, who had been assassinated in 1965. Increasingly, African Americans sought to achieve political power and cultural autonomy by building Black-controlled institutions. The more militant Black power movement split off from the civil rights movement. Black nationalist organizations such as the Black Panthers were established, and the SNCC adopted a more radical stance.

A moving tribute to the African American struggle for dignity and equality, the Civil Rights…

Carol M. Highsmith Archive/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. LC-DIG-highsm-04786)

In the decades that followed, many civil rights leaders sought to achieve greater direct political power by being elected to political office. They also sought to improve employment and educational opportunities for Blacks through affirmative-action programs, which give preference to minorities in job hiring and college admissions decisions.

Citation (MLA style):

"Civil rights movement." Britannica LaunchPacks: The American Civil Rights Movement, Encyclopædia Britannica, 31 Aug. 2020. packs.eb.com. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021.

While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.

Black Americans, or African Americans

Britannica Note:

Learn about this topic by reading the section "The Civil Rights Movement."

Black people make up one of the largest of the many racial and ethnic groups in the United States. The Black people of the United States are mainly of African ancestry, but many have non-Black ancestors as well.

Barack Obama, the first African American to be elected president of the United States, waves to the…

Learn how the work of Frederick Douglass can inspire young people today, with Dr. Noelle Trent of…

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

American Blacks are largely the descendants of enslaved people—people who were brought from their African homelands by force to work as slaves for whites in the New World. Their rights were severely limited, and they were long denied a rightful share in the economic, social, and political progress of the United States. Nevertheless, African Americans have made basic and lasting contributions to American history and culture.

The Du Sable Museum of African American History, in Chicago, Illinois, is named after the Black…

Great Museums Television

In 2010 more than half of the country’s 42 million African Americans lived in the South. Ten Southern states had Black populations exceeding 1 million each. Blacks were concentrated in the country’s largest cities, with more than 2.2 million living in New York, New York, and more than 900,000 in Chicago, Illinois. Cities that each had a Black population between 500,000 and 700,000 were Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Detroit, Michigan; and Houston, Texas. (See alsoAfrican American history at a glance and African American history timeline.) Names and Labels

As Americans of African descent have reached each new plateau in their struggle for equality, they have reevaluated their identity. During the period of slavery, white people used the labels black and negro (Spanish for the color black) to describe the enslaved peoples. These slaveholding terms were offensive, so Americans of African descent chose the term colored for themselves when they were freed. Capitalized, Negro became acceptable in the early 20th century during the migration to the North for factory jobs. Later, civil rights activists adopted the term Afro-American to express pride in their ancestral homeland. However, black—as a symbol of power and revolution—proved more popular. All these terms are still reflected in the names of dozens of organizations. To reestablish “cultural integrity” in the late 1980s, Jesse Jackson proposed African American, which—unlike a color label—proclaims kinship with a historical land base. In the 21st century the terms black and African American both were widely used. Over time, many people began capitalizing the B in Black as a sign of respect for the shared history, culture, and identity of Black Americans.

The Early History of Blacks in the Americas

Black Africans assisted the Spanish and the Portuguese during their early exploration of the Americas. In the 16th century, some Black explorers settled in the Mississippi River valley and in the areas that became South Carolina and New Mexico. The most-celebrated Black explorer of the Americas was the Estéban, an enslaved person who traveled through the Southwest in the 1530s.

The uninterrupted history of Blacks in the United States began in 1619, when 20 Africans were landed in the English colony of Virginia. They had been carried on a Portuguese slave ship sailing from Angola to Mexico that was attacked off the coast of Virginia. The two attacking ships captured about 50 enslaved Black Africans—men, women, and children—and brought them to outposts of Jamestown. More than 20 of the enslaved Africans were purchased there. Records concerning these first African Americans are very limited. They were likely put to work on the tobacco harvest. English law at this time did not recognize hereditary slavery. The Africans may have been treated at first not as slaves but as indentured servants—persons bound to an employer for a limited number of years—as were many of the white settlers. In any case, however, the Africans were forced into servitude. Over time, more Africans were captured, brought to the English colonies, and forced to become indentured servants. Eventually, many of them did complete their period of servitude and were freed.

By the 1660s large numbers of Africans were being brought to the English colonies. In 1790 Blacks numbered almost 760,000 and made up nearly one-fifth of the population of the United States.

Meanwhile, white colonists sought a permanent labor source. Attempts to hold servants beyond the normal term of indenture resulted in the legal establishment of Black slavery in the English colonies, beginning with Massachusetts in 1641. The shift from indentured servitude to slavery happened gradually, with a series of laws and court decisions. In Virginia a Black indentured servant named John Punch was sentenced to slavery for life in 1640 as punishment for trying to escape his labor contract. The two white indentured servants with whom he had fled did not receive this punishment. In 1655 a civil court in Virginia ruled that another Black indentured servant, John Casor, was enslaved for life. Black slavery in general became encoded in law in Virginia in 1661 and by 1750 had been legalized in all the 13 colonies. Black people were easily distinguished by their color from the rest of the population, making them highly visible targets for enslavement. Moreover, the racist belief that they were an “inferior race” with a “heathen” culture made it easier for whites to rationalize Black slavery. The enslaved Blacks were put to work clearing and cultivating the farmlands of the New World.

Most of the millions of Africans captured for the slave trade were taken from western Africa. They…

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Of an estimated 10 million Africans brought to the Americas by the slave trade, about 430,000 came to the territory of what is now the United States. The overwhelming majority were taken from the area of western Africa stretching from present-day Senegal to Angola, where political and social organization as well as art, music, and dance were highly advanced. On or near the African coast had emerged the major kingdoms of Oyo, Ashanti, Benin, Dahomey, and Kongo. In the Sudanese interior had arisen the empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai; the Hausa states; and Kanem-Bornu. Such African cities as Djenné and Timbuktu, both now in Mali, were at one time major commercial and educational centers.

Slave traders used shackles to restrain captured Africans on ships crossing the Atlantic to the…

Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C. (object no. 2008.10.4)

The slave trade was highly profitable for European traders. Some Africans themselves sold captives to the European slave traders. The captured Africans were generally marched in chains to the coast and crowded into the holds of European slave ships for the dreaded Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean, usually to the West Indies. Shock, disease, and suicide killed off large numbers of the enslaved Africans during the crossing. In the West Indies the survivors were “seasoned”—taught the rudiments of English and drilled in the routines and discipline of plantation life. Black Slavery in the United States

Enslaved Black people played a major, though unwilling and generally unrewarded, role in laying the economic foundations of the United States—especially in the South. Blacks also played a leading role in the development of Southern speech, folklore, music, dancing, and food, blending the cultural traits of their African homelands with those of Europe. During the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Black people worked mainly on the tobacco, rice, and indigo plantations of the Southern seaboard. Eventually, slavery became rooted in the South’s huge cotton and sugarplantations. Although Northern businessmen made great fortunes from the slave trade and from investments in Southern plantations, slavery was never widespread in the North.

Crispus Attucks.

James Armistead (right), an enslaved Black man, served as a spy for the marquis de Lafayette (left)…

Iberfoto/SuperStock

Crispus Attucks, a former slave killed in the Boston Massacre of 1770, was the first martyr to the cause of American independence from Great Britain. During the American Revolution, some 5,000 Black soldiers and sailors fought on the American side. After the Revolution, some slaves—particularly former soldiers—were freed, and the Northern states abolished slavery. But with the ratification of the United States Constitution, in 1788, slavery became more firmly entrenched than ever in the South. The Constitution counted a slave as three-fifths of a person for purposes of taxation and representation in Congress. It also extended the African slave trade for 20 years and provided for the return to their owners of enslaved people who tried to escape.

An illustration from Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin depicts a slave trader…

The official end of the African slave trade in 1808 spurred the growth of the domestic slave trade in the United States, especially as a source of labor for the new cotton lands in the Southern interior. Increasingly, the supply of slaves came to be supplemented by the practice of “slave breeding,” in which enslaved women were encouraged—or forced—to conceive as early as 13 years of age and to give birth as often as possible.

Laws known as the slave codes regulated the slave system to promote absolute control by the master and complete submission by the slave. Under these laws the enslaved person was treated as chattel—a piece of property and a source of labor that could be bought and sold like an animal. Enslaved people were allowed no stable family life and little privacy. They were prohibited by law from learning to read or write. The “meek slave” received tokens of favor from the master; the “rebellious slave” provoked brutal punishment. A social hierarchy among the plantation slaves helped keep them divided. At the top were the house slaves; next in rank were the skilled artisans; and at the bottom were the vast majority of field hands, who bore the brunt of the harsh plantation life.

The title page of The Confessions of Nat Turner (1832), an account of a slave rebellion, as told to…

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. 3b05966u)

Because of this tight control, there were few successful slave revolts. Slave plots were invariably betrayed and were brutally put down. The New York slave rebellion of 1712 led to the enactment of harsher slave codes. In 1739 some 60 enslaved Black people rebelled near the Stono River in South Carolina, killing more than 20 white people. Most of the enslaved people involved in the uprising were eventually caught and executed. An alleged slave revolt in New York City in 1741 caused mass hysteria and heavy property damage. About 30 Black people and 4 white people were executed for their supposed involvement in the conspiracy, though modern historians doubt there actually was a revolt. Some slave revolts, such as those of Gabriel in Richmond, Virginia, in 1800 and Denmark Vesey in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822, were elaborately planned. The slave revolt that was perhaps most frightening to whites was the one led by Nat Turner in Southampton, Virginia, in 1831. Before Turner and his coconspirators were captured, they had killed about 60 whites.

Individual resistance by enslaved people took such forms as mothers killing their newborn children to save them from slavery, the poisoning of slave owners, destruction of machinery and crops, arson, malingering, and running away. Thousands of runaway slaves were led to freedom in the North and in Canada by Black and white abolitionists who organized a network of secret routes and hiding places that came to be known as the Underground Railroad. One of the greatest heroes of the Underground Railroad was Harriet Tubman, who had herself been enslaved. On numerous trips to the South, she helped hundreds of enslaved people escape to freedom.

Free Blacks and Abolitionism

A tin carrying case holds a document from 1852 certifying that Joseph Trammell, a Black man, was…

Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.; gift of Elaine E. Thompson, in memory of

Joseph Trammell, on behalf of his direct descendants (object no. 2014.25)

During the period of slavery, free Blacks made up about one-tenth of the entire Black population. In 1860 there were almost 500,000 free Blacks—half in the South and half in the North. The free Black population originated with former indentured servants and their descendants. It was augmented by free Black immigrants from the West Indies and by Blacks freed by individual slave owners.

But free Blacks were only technically free. In the South, where they posed a threat to the institution of slavery, they suffered both in law and by custom many of the restrictions imposed on slaves. In the North, free Blacks were discriminated against in such rights as voting, property ownership, and freedom of movement, though they had some access to education and could organize. Free Blacks also faced the danger of being kidnapped and enslaved.

Richard Allen.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. 03643u)

The earliest leaders among African Americans emerged among the free Blacks of the North, particularly those of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Boston, Massachusetts; and New York City. The free Blacks of the North established their own institutions—churches, schools, and mutual aid societies. One of the first of these organizations was the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, formed in 1816 and led by Bishop Richard Allen of Philadelphia. Among other noted free Blacks was the astronomer and mathematician Benjamin Banneker.

Frederick Douglass, about 1850.

National Park Service

Free Blacks were among the first abolitionists. They included John B. Russwurm and Samuel E. Cornish, who in 1827 founded Freedom’s Journal, the first African American-run newspaper in the United States. Black support also permitted the founding and survival of the Liberator, a journal begun in 1831 by the white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Probably the most-celebrated of all African American journals was the North Star, founded in 1847 by Frederick Douglass, who had been formerly enslaved. He argued that the antislavery movement must be led by Black people.

Henry Highland Garnet.

Prints and Photographs Division/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. LC-DIG-pga-02252)

Beginning in 1830, Black leaders began meeting regularly in national and state conventions. But they differed on the best strategies to use in the struggle against slavery and discrimination. Some, such as David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet, called on enslaved people to revolt and overthrow their masters. Others, such as Russwurm and Paul Cuffe, proposed that a major modern Black nation be established in Africa. Supported by the white American Colonization Society, Black Americans founded Liberia in West Africa in 1822. Their ideas foreshadowed the development of Pan-African nationalism under the leadership of AME Bishop Henry M. Turner a half century later. However, most Black leaders then and later regarded themselves as Americans and felt that the problems of their people could be solved only by a continuing struggle at home. The Civil War Era

Maps show the compromises over the extension of slavery into the territories: the areas affected by…

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The extension of slavery to new territories had been a subject of national political controversy since the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery in the area now known as the Midwest. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 began a policy of admitting an equal number of slave and free states into the Union. But

the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857 opened all the territories to slavery.

In an advertisement from 1854, a slave owner offers a reward for the return of an enslaved person…

Printed Ephemera Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (call no. Portfolio 186, Folder 43)

By the end of the 1850s, the North feared complete control of the country by slaveholding interests, and the white South believed that the North was determined to destroy its way of life. White Southerners had been embittered by Northern defiance of the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The act provided for the capture and return of enslaved people who tried to escape to freedom. In 1859 white Southerners had been alarmed by the raid at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, led by the white abolitionist John Brown. After Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860 on the antislavery platform of the new Republican Party, the Southern states seceded from the Union and formed the Confederacy.

Overview of African American soldiers' involvement in the American Civil War.

More than 37,000 Black soldiers lost their lives during the American Civil War, many while leading…

Kurz & Allison/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-pga-01949)

The Civil War, which liberated the country’s enslaved people, began in 1861. But preservation of the Union, not the abolition of slavery, was the initial objective of President Lincoln. Lincoln believed in gradual emancipation, or freeing people from slavery, with the federal government compensating the slaveholders for the loss of their “property.” But in September 1862 he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that all enslaved people residing in states in rebellion against the United States as of January 1, 1863, were to be free. Thus, the Civil War became in effect a war to end slavery.

Martin Robinson Delany was an influential Black abolitionist, physician, and editor. During the…

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Black leaders such as the author William Wells Brown, the physician Martin R. Delany, and Frederick Douglass vigorously recruited Blacks into the Union armed forces. Douglass declared in the North Star, “Who would be free themselves must strike the blow.” By the end of the Civil War more than 186,000 Black men were in the Union army. They performed heroically despite discrimination in pay, rations, equipment, and assignments and the unrelenting hostility of the Confederate troops. The Confederacy used enslaved people as a labor force, but thousands of them dropped their tools and escaped to the Union lines.

Reconstruction and After

A group of people who had been freed from slavery pose for a photograph in Richmond, Virginia.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

After the Civil War, the United States went through a period of rebuilding known as Reconstruction. As a result of the Union victory in the war and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution (1865), nearly four million enslaved Black people were freed. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) granted Blacks citizenship, and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) guaranteed their right to vote. Yet the Reconstruction period was one of disappointment and frustration for Black people, for these new provisions of the Constitution were often ignored, particularly in the South.

After the Civil War, the people who had formerly been enslaved, known then as freedmen, were thrown largely on their own meager resources. Landless and uprooted, they moved about in search of work. They generally lacked adequate food, clothing, and shelter. The Southern states enacted laws resembling the slave codes of slave times. These laws were known as the Black codes. They restricted the movement of the Black people who had been enslaved in an effort to force them to work as plantation laborers—often for their former masters—at absurdly low wages.

In 1865 Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau to assist people who had been freed from slavery. It distributed food and helped people find jobs and homes. The bureau established hospitals and schools, including such institutions of higher learning as Fisk University and Hampton Institute (now Hampton University). Northern philanthropic agencies, such as the American Missionary Association, also aided people who had formerly been enslaved. (See alsohistorically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).)

Hiram Rhoades Revels.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

During the Reconstruction period, Blacks wielded political power in the South for the first time. Their leaders were largely clergymen, lawyers, and teachers who had been educated in the North and abroad. Among the ablest were Robert B. Elliott of South Carolina and John R. Lynch of Mississippi. Both were speakers of their respective state House of Representatives and were members of the U.S. Congress. Pinckney B.S. Pinchback was elected lieutenant governor of Louisiana and served briefly as the state’s acting governor. Jonathan Gibbs served as Florida’s secretary of state and superintendent of education. Between 1869 and 1901, 20 Black representatives and 2 Black senators—Hiram R. Revels and Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi—sat in the U.S. Congress.

But Black political power was short-lived. Northern politicians grew increasingly conciliatory to the white South, so that by 1872 virtually all leaders of the Confederacy had been pardoned and were able to vote and hold office. By means of economic pressure and the terrorist activities of violent anti-Black groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, most Blacks were kept away from the polls. By 1877, with the withdrawal of the last federal troops from the South, Southern whites were again in full control. Blacks were disfranchised, or deprived of the right to vote, by the provisions of new state constitutions such as those adopted by Mississippi in 1890 and by South Carolina and Louisiana in 1895. These constitutions included voting requirements that were designed to be difficult for Black people to meet or that would be enforced only when Black people tried to vote. Among the requirements were literacy tests and the poll tax, or a fee one had to pay in order to vote. Only a few Southern Black elected officials lingered on. No Black person was to serve in the U.S. Congress for three decades after the departure of George H. White of North Carolina in 1901.

A cafe in Durham, North Carolina, has separate entrances for white and Black people.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (reproduction no. LC-USF33-020513-M2)

A sign at a Greyhound bus terminal in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1943 designates a waiting room for…

Esther Bubley, FSI/OWI, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (reproduction no. LC-DIG-fsa-8d33399)

The rebirth of white supremacy in the South was accompanied by the growth of enforced racial separation. Starting with Tennessee in 1870, all the Southern states reenacted laws prohibiting racial intermarriage. They also passed Jim Crow lawssegregating Blacks and whites in almost all public places. By 1885 most Southern states had officially segregated their public schools.

In the post-Reconstruction years, Blacks received only a small share of the increasing number of industrial jobs in Southern cities. And relatively few rural Blacks in the South owned their own farms, most remaining poor sharecroppers heavily in debt to white landlords. The largely urban Northern Blacks fared little better. The jobs they sought were given to white European immigrants. In search of improvement, many Blacks migrated westward.

African American military men known as buffalo soldiers protected travel routes and fought American…

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Some people who had been freed from slavery went to Texas, which offered higher wages for agricultural work. Others went to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) or Kansas to seek land to farm. In Kansas and later Oklahoma territory, Blacks as well as whites could become homesteaders, pioneers who received essentially free land from the government if they settled it and cultivated it for a set period. Many Blacks believed that Kansas, which had been the site of much antislavery activity, would provide the greatest opportunities for political, social, and economic equality. The Southern Blacks who moved to Kansas to become homesteaders were called Exodusters. Some Black men, known as buffalo soldiers, joined the U.S. Army, fighting Indians on the frontier.

Learn why Frederick Douglass was the most photographed American man of the 19th century, with Dr.…

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

During and after the Reconstruction period, Blacks in the cities organized historical, literary, and musical societies. The literary achievements of Blacks included the historical writings of T. Thomas Fortune and George Washington Williams. The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) became an autobiographical classic. Blacks also began to make a major impact on American mass culture through the popularity of such groups as the Fisk Jubilee Singers.

The Age of Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

From 1895 until his death in 1915, Booker T. Washington was the country’s dominant Black leader. Washington, who had formerly been enslaved, built Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Alabama into a major center of industrial training for Black youths. He urged whites to employ the masses of Black laborers. He called on Blacks to cease agitating for political and social rights and to concentrate instead on working to improve their economic conditions. Washington felt that excessive stress had been placed on liberal arts education for Blacks. He believed that their need to earn a living called instead for training in crafts and trades. In an effort to spur the growth of Black business enterprise, Washington also organized the National Negro Business League in 1900. But Black businesspeople were handicapped by insufficient capital and by the competition of white-owned big businesses.

Illinois state militia helped restore order in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908 after a mob of white…

Sangamon Valley Digital Collection/Lincoln Library, Springfield, Illinois

Washington was highly successful in winning influential white support. He became the most powerful Black man in the country’s history to that time. But his program of vocational training did not meet the changing needs of industry, and the harsh reality of discrimination prevented most of his Tuskegee Institute graduates from using their skills. The period of Washington’s leadership proved to be one of repeated setbacks for Black Americans. More Blacks lost the right to vote. Segregation became more deeply entrenched. Anti-Black violence increased. Between 1900 and 1914 there were more than 1,000 known lynchings. Anti-Black riots raged in both the South and the North, the most sensational taking place in Brownsville, Texas, in1906), in Atlanta in 1906, and in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908.

The Crisis is the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored…

The New York Public Library

Meanwhile, Black leaders opposed to Washington began to emerge. The historian and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois criticized Washington’s accommodationist philosophy in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Others were William Monroe Trotter, the militant editor of the Boston Guardian, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a journalist and a crusader against lynching. They insisted that Blacks should demand their full civil rights and that a liberal education was necessary for the development of Black leadership. At a meeting in Niagara Falls, Ontario, in 1905, Du Bois and other Black leaders who shared his views founded the Niagara Movement. Members of the Niagara group joined with concerned liberal and radical whites in 1909 to organize what became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The NAACP magazine The Crisis, edited by Du Bois, became an effective outlet for the promotion of Black rights. The NAACP won its first major legal case in 1915, when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the “grandfather clause,” a constitutional device used in the South to disfranchise Blacks (seepoll tax).

Black contributions to scholarship and literature continued to mount. Historical scholarship was encouraged by the American Negro Academy, whose leading figures were Du Bois and the theologians Alexander Crummell and Francis Grimké. Charles W. Chesnutt was widely acclaimed for his short stories. Paul Laurence Dunbar became famous as a lyric poet. Washington’s autobiography Up from Slavery (1901) won international acclaim. Black Migration to the North and World War I

The Great Migration significantly altered the distribution of the African American population.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

In New York City during World War I the NAACP led a march protesting brutality against African…

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

When slavery was abolished in 1865, Blacks were an overwhelmingly rural people. In the years that followed, there was a slow but steady migration of Blacks to the cities, mainly in the South. Migration to the North was

relatively small. Nearly eight million Blacks—about 90 percent of the total Black population of the United States— were still living in the South in 1900. But between 1910 and 1920, crop damage caused by floods and by insects—mainly the boll weevil—deepened an already severe economic depression in Southern agriculture. Destitute Blacks swarmed to the North in 1915 and 1916, as thousands of new jobs opened up in industries supplying goods to Europe, then embroiled in World War I. Between 1910 and 1920, an estimated 500,000 Blacks left the South, in what became known as the Great Migration.

Southern Blacks who migrated northward to escape repression and to find jobs settled in the big…

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library

The Blacks who fled from the South soon found that they had not escaped segregation and discrimination. They were confined mainly to overcrowded and dilapidated housing, and they were largely restricted to poorly paid, menial jobs. Again there were anti-Black riots, such as that in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917. But in the Northern cities the economic and educational opportunities for Blacks were immeasurably greater than they had been in the rural South. In addition, they were helped by various organizations, such as the National Urban League, founded in 1910.

A series of maps show the percentage of African Americans in each state.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Some Blacks opposed involvement in World War I. The Black socialists A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen argued that the fight for democracy at home should precede the fight for it abroad. But when the United States entered World War I in April 1917, most Blacks supported the step. During the war about 1,400 Black officers

were commissioned. Some 200,000 Blacks served abroad, though most were restricted to labor battalions and service regiments. (See alsoHarlem Hellfighters.) The Garvey Movement and the Harlem Renaissance

Blacks became disillusioned following World War I. The jobs that they had acquired during the war all but evaporated in the postwar recession, which hit Blacks first and hardest. The Ku Klux Klan, which had been revived during the war, unleashed a new wave of terror against Blacks. Mounting competition for jobs and housing often erupted into bloody race riots such as those that spread over the United States in the “Red Summer” of 1919.

In the face of such difficulties, a “new Negro” developed during the 1920s—the proud, creative product of the American city. The growth of racial pride among Blacks was greatly stimulated by the Black nationalist ideas of Marcus Garvey. Born in Jamaica, he had founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association there in 1914. He came to the United States in 1917 and established a branch of the association in the Harlem district of New York City. By 1919 the association had become the largest mass movement of American Blacks in the country’s history, with a membership of several hundred thousand.

The Garvey movement was characterized by colorful pageantry and appeals for the rediscovery of the Black African heritage. Its goal was to establish an independent Africa through the return of a revolutionary vanguard of Black Americans. Garvey’s great attraction among poor Blacks was not matched, however, among the Black middle class, which resented his flamboyance and his scorn of their leadership. Indeed, one of Garvey’s sharpest critics was Du Bois. Du Bois shared Garvey’s basic goals and organized a series of small but largely ineffectual Pan-African conferences during the 1920s. The Garvey movement declined after Garvey was jailed for mail fraud in 1925 and was deported to Jamaica in 1927.

Cover of Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, June 1925.

Photographs and Prints Division; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; The New York Public Library; Astor, Lenox and Tilden

Foundations

The flowering of African American creative talent in literature, music, and the arts in the 1920s was centered in New York and became known as the Harlem Renaissance. Like the Garvey movement, it was based on a rise in race consciousness among Blacks. The principal contributors to the Harlem Renaissance included not only well- established literary figures such as Du Bois and the poet James Weldon Johnson but also new young writers such as Claude McKay. McKay’s militant poem If We Must Die is perhaps the most-quoted Black literary work of this period. Other outstanding writers of the Harlem Renaissance were the novelist Jean Toomer and the poets Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. During the 1920s the artists Henry Ossawa Tanner and Aaron Douglas and the performers Paul Robeson, Florence Mills, Ethel Waters, and Roland Hayes were also becoming prominent. The Black cultural movement of the 1920s was greatly stimulated by Black journals, which published short pieces by promising writers. These journals included the NAACP’s The Crisis and the National Urban League’ s Opportunity. The movement was popularized by Black philosopher Alain Locke in The New Negro, published in 1925, and by the Black historian Carter G. Woodson. Woodson was the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro (now African American) Life and History and the editor of the Journal of Negro History. Blacks in the Great Depression and the New Deal

Workers, many of them migrants, grade beans at a canning plant in Florida in 1937. The economic…

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Arthur Rothstein (neg. no. LC-USF34-005788-D)

TheGreat Depression of the 1930s worsened the already bleak economic situation of Black Americans. Again the first to be laid off from their jobs, they suffered from an unemployment rate two to three times that of whites. In early public assistance programs, Blacks often received substantially less aid than whites, and some charitable organizations even excluded Blacks from their soup kitchens.

Their intensified economic plight sparked major political developments among Black Americans. Beginning in 1929, the St. Louis Urban League launched a national “jobs for Negroes” movement by boycotting chain stores that had mostly Black customers but hired only white employees. Efforts to unify Black organizations and youth groups later led to the founding of the National Negro Congress in 1936 and the Southern Negro Youth Congress in 1937.

Virtually ignored by the Republican administrations of the 1920s, Black voters drifted to the Democratic Party, especially in the Northern cities. In the presidential election of 1928, Blacks voted in large numbers for the Democrats for the first time. In 1930 Republican President Herbert Hoover nominated John J. Parker, a man of pronounced anti-Black views, to the U.S. Supreme Court. The NAACP successfully opposed the nomination. In the

1932 presidential race, Blacks overwhelmingly supported the successful Democratic candidate, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Mary McLeod Bethune.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Gordon Parks, photographer (LC-USW3- 013518-C)

The Roosevelt administration’s accessibility to Black leaders and the New Deal reforms strengthened Black support for the Democratic Party. Many Black leaders, members of a so-called “Black cabinet,” were advisers to Roosevelt. Among them were the educator Mary McLeod Bethune, who served as the National Youth Administration’s director of Negro affairs, and William H. Hastie, who in 1937 became the first Black federal judge. Others of these advisers included Eugene K. Jones, executive secretary of the National Urban League; Robert Vann, editor of the Pittsburgh Courier; and the economist Robert C. Weaver.

Blacks benefited greatly from New Deal programs, though discrimination by local administrators was common. Low-cost public housing was made available to Black families. The National Youth Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps enabled Black youths to continue their education. The Work Progress Administration gave jobs to many Blacks, and its Federal Writers’ Project supported the work of many authors, among them Zora Neale Hurston, Arna Bontemps, Waters Turpin, and Melvin B. Tolson.

The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), established in the mid-1930s, organized large numbers of Black workers into labor unions for the first time. By 1940 there were more than 200,000 Blacks in the CIO, many of them officers of union locals.

World War II

Poster of a member of the Tuskegee Airmen promoting war bonds during World War II.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The industrial boom that began with the outbreak of World War II in Europe in 1939 ended the depression. However, unemployed whites were generally the first to be given jobs. Discrimination against Blacks in hiring impelled A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, to threaten a mass protest march on Washington. To forestall the march, scheduled for June 25, 1941, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 banning “discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government” and establishing a Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to investigate violations. Although discrimination remained widespread, during the war Blacks secured more jobs at better wages in a greater range of occupations than ever before.

An African American woman inspects artillery cartridge cases at her job at Frankford Arsenal in…

National Archives, Washington, D.C.

In World War II as in World War I, there was a mass migration of Blacks from the rural South. Some 1.5 million Blacks left the South during the 1940s, mainly for the industrial cities of the North. Once again, serious housing shortages and job competition led to increased racial tension. Race riots broke out, the worst being the Detroit Race Riot of 1943.

The United States had entered World War II in December 1941. During the war, a large proportion of Black soldiers overseas were in service units, and combat troops remained segregated. In the course of the war, however, the army introduced integrated officer training, and Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., became its first Black brigadier general. He organized and commanded the Tuskegee Airmen, the first African American flying unit in the U.S. military. In 1949, four years after the end of World War II, the armed services finally adopted a policy of integration. During the Korean War, in the early 1950s, Blacks for the first time fought side by side with whites in fully integrated units. The Civil Rights Movement

A moving tribute to the African American struggle for dignity and equality, the Civil Rights…

Carol M. Highsmith Archive/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. LC-DIG-highsm-04786)

At the end of World War II, Black Americans were poised to make far-reaching demands to end racism. They were unwilling to give up the minimal gains that had been made during the war.

African American students walk to school in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. Troops sent by the…

CSU Archive/Everett Collection/age fotostock

The campaign for Black rights went forward in the 1940s and 1950s in persistent and deliberate steps. In the courts, the NAACP successfully attacked racially restrictive practices in housing, segregation in interstate transportation, and discrimination in public recreational facilities. In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court issued one of its most significant rulings. In the case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (Kansas), the court overturned the “separate but equal” ruling of 1896. It thus outlawed segregation in U.S. school systems. White citizens’ councils in the South fought back with legal maneuvers, economic pressure, and even violence. Rioting by white mobs temporarily closed Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, when nine Black students were admitted to it in 1957 (seeLittle Rock Nine).

Rosa Parks sits on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956.

Underwood Archives/UIG/REX/Shutterstock.com

Direct nonviolent action by Blacks achieved its first major success in the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955–56. It was led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. This protest was prompted by the quiet but defiant act of a Black woman, Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger on December 1, 1955. Parks was arrested for that act. Black residents then boycotted, or refused to ride, the city buses until the buses were desegregated, so that people of any race could sit anywhere on the buses. Resistance to their demand was finally overcome when the Supreme Court ruled in November 1956 that the segregation of public transportation facilities was unconstitutional. To coordinate further civil rights action, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was established in 1957 under King’s leadership.

Within 15 years after the Supreme Court outlawed all-white primary elections in 1944, the registered Black electorate in the South increased more than fivefold, reaching 1,250,000 in 1958. The Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first federal civil rights legislation to be passed since 1875, authorized the federal government to take legal measures to prevent a citizen from being denied voting rights.

A student holds a sit-in at a drugstore lunch counter in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. The use of…

AP Imagers

Beginning in February 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina, student protests called sit-ins forced lunch counters in drug and variety stores throughout the South to allow Black customers to sit down to eat, as white customers could. A sit-in is a form of nonviolent protest. It involves protesters sitting down inside a business and remaining seated until their grievances are answered or until they are removed by force. In April 1960 leaders of the sit-in movement organized the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

In the spring of 1961 activists carried out a series of nonviolent protests called the Freedom Rides to defy segregation on interstate buses. Group of Blacks and whites rode buses together through the South, where they were often met with violence. The Freedom Rides were organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) under its national director James Farmer.

Medgar Evers was an organizer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored…

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, and CORE cooperated on a number of local projects, such as the drive to register Black voters in Mississippi, launched in 1961. In April 1964 they worked together to help found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which later that year challenged the seating of an all-white Mississippi delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Police use dogs to attack a civil rights demonstrator during a march in Birmingham, Alabama, on May…

Bill Hudson/AP Images

Blacks adopted “Freedom now” as their slogan to recognize the Emancipation Proclamation centennial in 1963. National attention in the spring of 1963 was focused on Birmingham, Alabama, where King was leading a civil rights drive. The Birmingham authorities used dogs and fire hoses to quell civil rights demonstrators, and there were mass arrests. In September 1963 four Black girls were killed by a bomb thrown into a Birmingham church ( see16th Street Baptist Church bombing).

A participant of the 1963 March on Washington shares photographs and memories.

Civil rights activities in 1963 culminated in the March on Washington, organized by A. Philip Randolph and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. King addressed the throng of more than 200,000 demonstrators. The march helped secure the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbade discrimination in voting, public accommodations, and employment. The act further permitted the attorney general of the United States to deny federal funds to local agencies that practiced discrimination. Efforts to increase the Black vote were also helped by the ratification in 1964 of the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which banned the poll tax.

Martin Luther King, Jr., and Coretta Scott King (center right) lead the Selma to Montgomery,…

Maurice Sorrell—Ebony Collection/AP Images

Selma March.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc./Kenny Chmielewski

The difficulties in registering Black voters in the South were dramatized in 1965 by events in Selma, Alabama. Civil rights demonstrators there were attacked by police who used tear gas, whips, and clubs. Thousands of demonstrators were arrested. As a result, however, their cause won national sympathy and support. Two weeks later, led by King and by John Lewis of SNCC, some 25,000 protesters from all over the country marched from Selma to Montgomery, the Alabama state capital, in what became known as the Selma March. Congress then passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which eliminated all discriminatory qualifying tests for voter registrants and provided for the appointment of federal registrars. (See alsocivil rights movement.)

The Black Revolt

A confrontation takes place between police officers and African Americans amid a riot in Brooklyn,…

Stanley Wolfson—New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-

DIG-ds-08067)

During the 1960s, the country’s inner cities, which were home to many Blacks, were swept by violent outbreaks. Their basic causes were long-standing grievances—police insensitivity and brutality, inadequate educational and recreational facilities, high unemployment, poor housing, high prices. Yet the outbreaks were mostly unplanned. Unlike the race riots of earlier decades, the outbreaks of the 1960s involved the looting and burning of white- owned property in Black neighborhoods. The fighting that took place was mainly between Black youths and the police. Hundreds of lives were lost, and tens of millions of dollars’ worth of property was destroyed. The most serious disturbances occurred in the Watts area of Los Angeles, California, in July 1965 and in Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit, Michigan, in July 1967.

The Black Panther Party displays a banner on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.,…

Prints and Photographs Division/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. LC-USZ62-128087)

During the 1960s, militant Black nationalist and Marxist-oriented Black organizations were created. Among them were the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Deacons for Defense, and the Black Panther Party. Under such leaders as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, SNCC adopted more radical policies. Some of the militant Black leaders were arrested, and others fled the country. This loss of leadership seriously weakened some of the organizations.

The slogan Black power became popular in the late 1960s. It was first used by Carmichael in June 1966 during a civil rights march in Mississippi. However, the concept of Black power predated the slogan. Essentially, it refers to all the attempts by Black Americans to maximize their political and economic power.

Malcolm X, about 1964.

Eddie Adams/AP Images

Among the outstanding modern advocates of Black power was Malcolm X. He rose to national prominence in the early 1960s as a minister in the Nation of Islam, or Black Muslim movement. Malcolm broke with the leader of the Black Muslims, Elijah Muhammad, and founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity before he was assassinated in February 1965.

The Black power movement was stimulated by the growing pride of Black Americans in their African heritage. This pride was symbolized most strikingly by the Afro hair style and the African garments worn by many young Blacks. Black pride was also manifested in student demands for Black studies programs, Black teachers, and separate facilities and in an upsurge in African American culture and creativity. The new slogan—updated from Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes—was “Black is beautiful.”

People march for the Poor People's Campaign, a civil rights group, in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1968.

U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-ppmsca-04302)

During the Vietnam War, Black soldiers participated in disproportionately high numbers. The war tended to divide the Black leadership and divert white liberals from the civil rights movement. Some NAACP and National Urban League leaders minimized the war’s impact on the Black home front. A tougher view—that U.S. participation had become a racist intrusion in a nonwhite country’s affairs—was shared by other Black leaders,

including King. He organized the Poor People’s Campaign, a protest march on Washington, D.C., before he was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968. Anger and frustration over his assassination by a white drifter set off more disturbances in the inner cities. (James Earl Ray was tried and convicted of the murder.) A New Direction

An African American works at a construction job in Chicago, Illinois, in 1973.

John White/U.S. National Archives (412-DA-13734)

Graduates of Morehouse College, a historically Black college for men in Atlanta, Georgia, sing the…

Erik S. Lesser/Getty Images

The civil rights movement underwent a marked shift in emphasis after 1970. Legislative goals had largely been achieved. And even more significant than some of the civil rights laws was President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program. Established as the War on Poverty, it greatly expanded welfare programs. One goal of the Great Society was to help realize some of the intentions of civil rights legislation. This could only be done by opening up opportunities for Blacks in schooling, housing, and the labor force. Thus, a new emphasis emerged: affirmative action programs tried to remedy the effects of historical discrimination by assuring present opportunities. Sometimes it became necessary to resort to quota systems in school admission and job hiring, a policy that was denounced by some non-Blacks as reverse discrimination. Affirmative action programs helped Blacks achieve notable gains in education and allowed some Black families to rise into the middle and upper- middle class.

Police and Black activists confront each other in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2015, a year after the…

Jeff Roberson/AP Images

Congregation members hold up photographs of the nine people who were shot and killed at the Emanuel…

Win McNamee/Getty Images

Nevertheless, many Blacks continued to face difficult social and economic challenges, especially in the inner cities. Racism and police brutality remained serious problems. A reminder of the ongoing troubles in impoverished city neighborhoods came in 1992, when four white police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King, an African American motorist, in Los Angeles, California. Hours after the acquittal, the city erupted in riots in which more than 50 people were killed (seeLos Angeles Riots of 1992). Smaller riots broke out in other U.S. cities. Political Progress

The voter registration drives that intensified during the 1960s began to show results by the end of the decade. In 1960 only about 28 percent of the Black voting-age population in the South was registered, and there were perhaps 100 Black elected officials. By 1969, with the number of registrants more than doubled, up to 1,185 Blacks had been elected to state and local offices.

Some of the electoral gains were spectacular. The first Black chief executive of a major city was an appointee— Walter E. Washington, who became the commissioner of Washington, D.C., in 1967. But other Blacks were elected mayor—Carl Stokes in Cleveland, Ohio, and Richard Hatcher in Gary, Indiana, in 1967; Kenneth Gibson in Newark, New Jersey, in 1969; Tom Bradley in Los Angeles, California,Coleman A. Young in Detroit, Michigan, and Maynard Jackson in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1973; Ernest N. Morial in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1977; Richard Arrington in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1979; Wilson Goode in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Harold Washington in Chicago, Illinois, in 1983; and Kurt L. Schmoke in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1987. Also in 1987, Carrie Saxon Perry of Hartford, Connecticut, became the first Black woman to be elected mayor of a large city.

An African American became mayor of the largest city in the United States in 1989 when David Dinkins won the general election after a stunning primary defeat of New York City’s incumbent mayor. Tom Bradley’s attempt to become the country’s first elected Black governor failed in 1982, but seven years later L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia reached that milestone.

Black politicians made gains on the national level as well. The first Black senator since the Reconstruction period was Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts, who served from 1967 to 1979. In 1992 Illinois voters elected Carol Moseley Braun to be the first African American woman in the U.S. Senate. The first African American named to the Supreme Court was Thurgood Marshall, in 1967. When Marshall retired in 1991, he was succeeded by another Black associate justice, Clarence Thomas.

The first Black member of a presidential cabinet was Robert C. Weaver, secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD; 1966). Another secretary of HUD, Patricia Roberts Harris, was the first Black woman in the cabinet (1977). Andrew Young was named ambassador to the United Nations in 1977. In 1989 Colin Powell, a four-star general in the U.S. Army, was chosen to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—the country’s highest military post. In 2001 Powell also became the first African American secretary of state. In 2005 he was succeeded as secretary of state by Condoleezza Rice, the first Black woman to hold the post.

Barack Obama.

Lance Cpl. Michael J. Ayotte—U.S. Marine Corps/Department of Defense

African Americans reached the pinnacle of U.S. politics when Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. The son of a Black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas, Obama was a first-term U.S. senator from Illinois when the Democrats selected him as their presidential candidate. His ascent to the presidency was lauded as a great leap forward for race relations in the United States.

Other Contributions to American Life

Ralph Ellison in 1952.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s novel of alienation and the blues, won the National Book Award for 1953. Like its nameless, faceless narrator, many Blacks in the 1940s searched for identity in a white-dominated society. Their concerns were ignored or neglected. Their accomplishments, except as entertainers, went unrecognized. They were excluded from restaurants, theaters, hotels, and clubs.

In protesting the abuse of human rights, the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Black power movement brought high visibility to African Americans. In the 1960s the media made celebrities of some Black activists—for example, Black Panther supporter Angela Davis and SNCC’s Julian Bond, who at age 28 in 1968 was put forward for the Democratic vice presidential nomination. In the forefront of the civil rights marches were author James Baldwin, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, folksingers Harry Belafonte and Odetta, and comedian Dick Gregory.

Television and Film

Redd Foxx, 1974.

Moneta Sleet, Jr.—Ebony Collection/AP Images

Nat King Cole was the first Black entertainer with a network television series (1956–57), but, despite the singer’s great talent, his variety show did not attract sponsors. In the decades following Cole’s death, many situation comedies were marketed with predominantly Black casts, and the large acting ensembles in dramatic series were often integrated. Redd Foxx and Demond Wilson starred in the popular series Sanford and Son in 1972–77. One of the most-acclaimed weekly shows ever produced was The Cosby Show (1984–92), starring comedian Bill Cosby. Keenen Ivory Wayans, star of the long-running satirical comedy show In Living Color, won an Emmy Award for his work in 1990. The Bernie Mac Show, a sitcom starring comedian Bernie Mac, won a Peabody Award in 2001.

Alex Haley, 1974.

AP Images

One of television’s most-watched dramatic telecasts was Roots, an eight-part miniseries first shown in 1977. A sequel, the seven-part Roots: The Next Generations, appeared in 1979. Based on Alex Haley’s real-life quest to trace his African ancestry, the shows made other African Americans more aware of their rich cultural heritage.

Oprah Winfrey.

Evan Agostini/Getty Images

In network news, Ed Bradley became one of the 60 Minutes interviewers in 1981, and Bryant Gumbel became cohost of The Today Show in 1982. Charlayne Hunter-Gault appeared regularly on the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour . Jennifer Lawson was a vice president of the Public Broadcasting Service. A former anchor on a local news desk, Oprah Winfrey started a popular daytime talk show in the 1980s. Soon she established her own television and film production companies. Her media entertainment empire made her one of the richest and most influential women in the United States.

Spike Lee.

Chris Jackson/Getty Images

Black students at a high school in Detroit, Michigan, react to news that they will see Black Panther …

Paul Sancya—AP/Shutterstock.com

“Blaxploitation” films like Superfly drew huge audiences in the 1970s, but they did not deal with the real Black experience. From the 1950s, Academy Award winner Sidney Poitier appeared in genuine dramatic roles. By the 1980s, other actors were cast in roles that had not been written with a specific color line—for example, Louis Gossett, Jr., in An Officer and a Gentleman (1983 Academy Award). “Buddy pictures” paired Black and white actors, including such stars as Eddie Murphy, Danny Glover, Richard Pryor, and Gregory Hines, who was also a dazzling tap dancer. In 2002 Halle Berry became the first African American woman to win an Academy Award for best actress, for her role in Monster’s Ball (2001). Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, and Will Smith were among the most popular and acclaimed actors of the early 21st century. A completely original talent, director- writer-actor Spike Lee had total control over his productions, which examined contemporary African American life. Other prominent Black directors were John Singleton (Boyz N the Hood, 1991), Matty Rich (Straight Out of Brooklyn, 1990), and Ava DuVernay (Selma, 2014).

Literature

Toni Morrison.

Kathy Willens—AP/Shutterstock.com

The poet Gwendolyn Brooks was the first Black person to win a Pulitzer Prize, for Annie Allen in 1950. Charles Gordone in 1970 became the first African American playwright to win the Pulitzer, with his depiction of a Black hustler-poet in No Place to Be Somebody. The Color Purple, a best-selling novel by Alice Walker, won a Pulitzer in 1983. Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved took the Pulitzer for fiction in 1988, and in 1993 Morrison became the first African American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The most-accomplished African American dramatist in the second half of the 20th century was August Wilson, a two-time Pulitzer prizewinner. Between 1984 and 2005 Wilson chronicled Black American life in a series of 10 plays, one set in each decade of the 20th century. (See alsoAmerican literature; drama.)

Music

Almost all of America’s popular music—including jazz, blues, rock, soul, and hip-hop—has its origins in Black culture. Thomas A. Dorsey was the “Father of Gospel Music,” and Harry T. Burleigh arranged spirituals for the concert stage. Marian Anderson was the first Black person to sing at the Metropolitan Opera House, in 1955. Other African American opera stars were Leontyne Price, La Julia Rhea, Grace Bumbry, Shirley Verrett, Jessye Norman, and Kathleen Battle. Arthur Mitchell, Alvin Ailey, and Bill T. Jones led outstanding dance troupes. Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis emerged as one of the great trumpeters of the late 20th century, winning Grammy Awards for both jazz and classical works. His brother, Branford, was music director for television’s popular The Tonight Show from 1992 to 1995. Top-selling popular recording artists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries included Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Prince, Whitney Houston, Mary J. Blige, Beyoncé, Alicia Keys, and Usher. The hip-hop movement, which originated among African Americans in the South Bronx section of New York City in the late 1970s, produced many rap superstars.

Sports

During his basketball career, Michael Jordan of the Chicago Bulls was hailed as one of the world's…

The whites-only barrier was broken in major league baseball by Jackie Robinson in 1947. Today African American athletes dominate most of the professional team sports. Some of the many outstanding African American basketball players were Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’ Neal, Kobe Bryant, and LeBron James. In football Walter Payton, Jim Brown, Jerry Rice, Jim Marshall, and Emmitt Smith set records. Hank Aaron held baseball’s career home run record from 1974 until 2007, when he was surpassed by another African American, Barry Bonds. Rickey Henderson broke baseball’s stolen-base record in 1991 and set a record for the most career runs scored in 2001. Since Joe Louis became the heavyweight boxing champion in the 1930s, Black Americans have been among the world’s top heavyweight fighters. Arthur Ashe, Althea Gibson, Venus Williams, and Serena Williams were at the top of the game of tennis. Since Jesse Owens won four Olympic gold medals in 1936, African Americans have excelled in track and field sports. In 1960 Wilma Rudolph became the first American woman to win three track gold medals in a single Olympics. Florence Griffith Joyner and Jackie Joyner-Kersee won medals at the 1988 Olympics. Carl Lewis, Butch Reynolds, Edwin Moses, Bob Beamon, Michael Johnson, and Gail Devers also set track records. In 1997 Tiger Woods, the son of an African American father and a Thai mother, became the first golfer of either African American or Asian descent to win the prestigious Masters Tournament. Additional Reading

BELL, G.S. In the Black: A History of African Americans on Wall Street (Wiley, 2002). BOWER, A.L., ED. African

American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture (Univ. of Ill. Press, 2009). BROWN, T.L., AND OTHERS. African

American Fraternities and Sororities: The Legacy and the Vision (Univ. Press of Kent., 2005). COVEY, H.C. African

American Slave Medicine: Herbal and Non-Herbal Treatments (Lexington, 2008). DALEY, JAMES, ED. Great Speeches

by African Americans (Dover, 2006). DOBSON, HOWARD, AND DIOUF, S.A., COMPS. AND EDS. In Motion: The African-

American Migration Experience (National Geographic, 2004). ELAM, H.J., JR., AND KRASNER, DAVID, EDS. African-

American Performance and Theater History (Oxford Univ. Press, 2001). GAY, KATHLYN. African-American Holidays,

Festivals, and Celebrations (Omnigraphics, 2007). GLASS, B.S. African American Dance (McFarland, 2007). HANSEN,

JOYCE. Women of Hope: African Americans Who Made a Difference (Scholastic, 2007). HINE, D.C., AND OTHERS.

African Americans, 3rd ed. (Prentice, 2009). HORTON, J.O., AND HORTON, L.E. Slavery and the Making of America

(Oxford Univ. Press, 2006). LAIRD, ROLAND, AND LAIRD, T.N. Still I Rise: A Graphic History of African Americans

(Sterling, 2009). LEWIS, SAMELLA. African American Art and Artists, 3rd ed. (Univ. of Calif. Press, 2003). MCNEESE,

TIM. The Civil Rights Movement: Striving for Justice (Chelsea House, 2008). NEWKIRK, PAMELA, ED. Letters from Black

America (Farrar, 2009). PAINTER, N.I. Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619

to the Present (Oxford Univ. Press, 2007). PERETTI, B.W. Lift Every Voice: The History of African American Music

(Rowman, 2009). RABOTEAU, A.J. Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans (Oxford Univ. Press, 2001).

REDIKER, MARCUS. The Slave Ship: A Human History (Penguin, 2007). RICKFORD, J.R., AND RICKFORD, R.J. Spoken Soul:

The Story of Black English (Wiley, 2000). SAMUELS, W.D. Encyclopedia of African-American Literature (Facts on File,

2007). WAHLMAN, M.S. Signs & Symbols: African Images in African American Quilts, rev. and updated (Tinwood,

2001). WALDREP, CHRISTOPHER. African Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resistance from the Civil War to

the Civil Rights Era (Rowman, 2009). WEIR, WILLIAM. The Encyclopedia of African American Military History

(Prometheus, 2004). WIGGINS, D.K., ED. Out of the Shadows: A Biographical History of African American Athletes

(Univ. of Ark. Press, 2006). WOODSON, C.G. The Mis-Education of the Negro (Wilder, 2008; orig. pub. 1933).

Citation (MLA style):

"Black Americans, or African Americans." Britannica LaunchPacks: The American Civil Rights Movement, Encyclopædia Britannica, 23 Apr. 2021. packs.eb.com. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021.

While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.

Emmett Till

(1941–55). African American teenager Emmett Till was murdered while visiting the South in the 1950s. His death helped to bring about the civil rights movement in the U.S.

Emmett Till.

Everett Collection/age fotostock

Emmett Louis Till was born on July 25, 1941, in Chicago, Illinois. In 1955, when he was 14 years old, he took a trip to rural Mississippi to spend the summer with relatives. Till had been warned by his mother that whites in the South might not tolerate behavior that was accepted in the North. Black-white relations in the South were especially volatile since the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine established in 1896 that allowed racial segregation in public facilities.

Till arrived in Money, Mississippi, on August 21, 1955. He stayed with his great-uncle, Moses Wright, and he spent his days helping with the cotton harvest. On August 24, Till and a group of other teens went to a local grocery store. Accounts of what happened thereafter vary. Some witnesses stated that one of the other boys dared Till to talk to the store’s cashier, Carolyn Bryant, a white woman. It was reported that Till then whistled at, touched the hand or waist of, or flirted with the woman as he was leaving the store. Early on August 28, Roy Bryant, the cashier’s husband, and J.W. Milam, Bryant’s half brother, forced their way into Wright’s home and abducted Till at gunpoint. Bryant and Milam severely beat the boy then took him to the banks of the Tallahatchie River, where they shot him and dumped his body into the river. Wright reported the kidnapping to the police, and Bryant and Milam were arrested the following day.

On August 31, 1955, Till’s body was discovered in the river. On September 2 the train bearing his remains arrived back in Chicago. Till’s mother kept her son’s casket open, choosing to show the brutality of the

murderers. The appalling images of Till’s body in the casket appeared in the pages of Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender newspaper, and his murder became a rallying point for the civil rights movement.

The trial of Till’s killers began on September 19, 1955, and during the proceedings Wright identified the men who had kidnapped Till. After four days of testimony and a little more than an hour of deliberation, an all-white, all-male jury (at the time, Blacks and women were not allowed to serve as jurors in Mississippi) acquitted Bryant and Milam of all charges. The two men subsequently related the circumstances of Till’s kidnapping and murder to a reporter, and the story was published in a 1956 article for Look magazine.

In 2004 the Federal Bureau of Investigation reopened the case. Although Bryant and Milam had died years before, agents sought to obtain a conclusive account of Till’s final hours. The three-year investigation did not lead to the filing of additional criminal charges, but it did uncover a deathbed confession by Milam’s brother Leslie, who admitted his own involvement in the kidnapping and murder. During the investigation Till’s body was exhumed and then reburied in a new casket. In 2009 the original casket was donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

Citation (MLA style):

"Emmett Till." Britannica LaunchPacks: The American Civil Rights Movement, Encyclopædia Britannica, 9 Sep. 2020. packs.eb.com. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021.

While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.

Fannie Lou Hamer

(1917–77). American civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer’s headstone bears her famous saying, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Hamer’s anger about the poverty and racism that she and fellow African Americans suffered led her to dedicate her life to improving their plight.

Fannie Lou Hamer, 1964.

AP Images

She was born Fannie Lou Townsend on October 6, 1917, in Montgomery county, Mississippi. The youngest of 20 children born to sharecropper parents, she herself began working the fields by age 6 and left school in the sixth grade to help out further. When the family had finally saved enough money to do some independent farming, a white neighbor poisoned their animals. Her sorrow at this injustice began stirring her interest in civil rights.

Hamer attended a rally organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1962 and volunteered to assist African Americans who sought to become registered voters. Tough requirements for applicants and the threat of racist violence discouraged many Blacks from trying to register. Hamer passed the required literacy test on her third try but suffered personal consequences—the landowner forced her off the plantation where she had lived and worked since the 1940s and later dismissed her husband, Perry, and their adopted daughters. When friends took Hamer in, their house was subjected to gunfire. Undeterred, Hamer became a field worker for SNCC and helped others learn how to pass the literacy test. More tragedy awaited, however. Following a civil rights workshop in South Carolina, Hamer and a busload of people stopped in Winona, Mississippi, to eat. The terminal had a practice of serving only whites, and the prospective diners were arrested by state troopers. While they served jail time, white guards forced two Black inmates to beat Hamer with a sack of metal, leaving her with many serious injuries.

Hamer and others founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party (MFDP) in 1964 when the state’s regular party excluded African Americans. Hamer, the group’s vice-chairperson, served as its spokesperson for the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. She told the convention’s credentials committee that the Mississippi delegation did not properly represent the state because most Blacks were not allowed to vote and asked that the 68-member MFDP delegation be seated. The committee tried to appease them by offering two seats, but the group demanded all or nothing. Although they left without being seated, the act drew national attention and contributed to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Hamer unsuccessfully ran for the United States Congress in 1964 and for the Mississippi State Senate in 1971, but her attempts helped pave the way for other African Americans to win public offices.

On a local level, Hamer tried to help her fellow Mississippians by working for low-cost housing and daycare, establishing nonprofit business cooperatives, and lobbying for school desegregation. Her feminist interests prompted her to cofound the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971; however, later she often felt that white members did not understand her concerns.

Hamer died on March 14, 1977, from complications from cancer and other medical conditions. She was elected to the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1993. Additional Reading

COLMAN, PENNY. Fannie Lou Hamer and the Fight for the Vote (Millbrook, 1993). KLING, SUSAN. Fannie Lou Hamer, A

Biography (Women for Racial and Economic Equality, 1979). MILLS, KAY. This Little Light of Mine: The Life of

Fannie Lou Hamer (Dutton, 1993). RUBEL, DAVID. Fannie Lou Hamer: From Sharecropping to Politics (Silver Burdett, 1990).

Citation (MLA style):

"Fannie Lou Hamer." Britannica LaunchPacks: The American Civil Rights Movement, Encyclopædia Britannica, 16 Jul. 2021. packs.eb.com. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021.

While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

(1929–68). Martin Luther King, Jr., was an American Baptist minister and social activist. Inspired by the belief that love and peaceful protest could eliminate social injustice, he led the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. King organized mass protests against racial discrimination and spoke out against poverty and war. A champion of nonviolent resistance to oppression, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Julian Wasser

Martin Luther King, Jr., delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington, on…

AP/REX/Shutterstock.com

King’s leadership was a key factor in the success of the civil rights movement. Before the movement, it was legal and common for African Americans in the South and other parts of the United States to be banned from using the same public facilities as whites. Blacks in those areas generally could not go to the same schools, restaurants, or public bathrooms as whites, for example. On buses and trains, they could ride only in certain sections. King led many protests against such forced racial separation, or segregation. One of the major achievements of the civil rights movement was making segregation illegal. Another was the passage of new laws prohibiting discrimination.

Early Life

Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on January 15, 1929. His father, Martin, Sr., was the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, a Black congregation. His mother, Alberta Williams King, was a schoolteacher. Martin had an older sister, Christine, and a younger brother, Alfred Daniel.

King encountered racism at an early age. When he was six, his friendship with two white playmates was cut short by their parents. King never forgot this incident.

A bright student, King was admitted to Morehouse College at age 15, without having completed high school. Before beginning college, however, King spent the summer on a tobacco farm in Connecticut. He was shocked by how peacefully the races mixed in the North. He wrote to his parents about how Blacks and whites attended the same churches and restaurants, noting “I never [thought] that a person of my race could eat anywhere.” This experience deepened King’s growing hatred of racial segregation.

King decided to become a minister and at age 18 was ordained in his father’s church. After graduating from Morehouse in 1948, he entered Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania. Renowned for his public speaking skills, King was elected president of Crozer’s student body, which was composed almost entirely of white students. He was the valedictorian of his class in 1951 and won a graduate fellowship. At Boston University he received a Ph.D. in theology in 1955.

Martin Luther King, Jr., and Coretta Scott King, 1964.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-USZ62-116775)

In Boston, King met Coretta Scott. They were married in 1953 and had four children: Yolanda Denise, Martin Luther III, Dexter Scott, and Bernice Albertine. Civil Rights Efforts

Martin Luther King, Jr., was inspired by the example of Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi to use…

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

King had been impressed by the teachings of Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhi on nonviolent resistance. King wrote, “I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.” He became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954.

Montgomery Bus Boycott

In December 1955 King was chosen to head the Montgomery Improvement Association, formed by the Black community to lead a boycott of the segregated city buses. The boycott came about after a Black woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man. That action was against local law, and Parks was arrested. In response, King led the Montgomery bus boycott. During the boycott, people protested against segregation by refusing to ride the city buses. The campaign lasted more than a year. During that time King’s home was bombed. Nevertheless, he persuaded his followers to remain nonviolent despite threats to their lives and property. Late in 1956 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation on buses was unconstitutional. As a result, the buses were desegregated.

The success in Montgomery inspired other African American communities in the South to protest racial discrimination. King believed that the boycott proved that “there is a new Negro in the South, with a new sense of dignity and destiny.” For his role in leading the boycott, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) awarded him the Spingarn Medal in 1957.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference

In 1957 King and other activists, notably Bayard Rustin, established a group later known as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). It was formed to help local organizations carry out civil rights activities in the South. As leader of the SCLC, King inspired Blacks throughout the South to hold peaceful sit-ins and other protests against segregation.

A visit to India in 1959 gave King a long-awaited opportunity to study Gandhi’s techniques of nonviolent protest. In 1960 King became co-pastor of his father’s church in Atlanta. The next year he led a “nonviolent army” to protest discrimination in Albany, Georgia.

“Letter from Birmingham Jail”

King was jailed in 1963 during a successful campaign to achieve the desegregation of many public facilities in Birmingham, Alabama. In a moving appeal, known as the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” he replied to several white clergymen who felt that his efforts were ill timed. King argued that Asian and African countries were fast achieving political independence while “we still creep at a horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.” In the letter, he spelled out his philosophy of nonviolence:You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.

March on Washington

Martin Luther King, Jr., addresses the crowd during the March on Washington on August 28, 1963.

AP Images

Near the end of the Birmingham campaign, King joined other civil rights leaders in organizing the historic March on Washington. More than 200,000 people participated in the demonstration, which took place on August 28, 1963. They gathered peaceably near the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington, D.C., to demand equal justice for all citizens under the law. Prominent civil rights leaders made speeches, and most memorable was King’s. The crowd was uplifted by his now-famous “I Have a Dream” speech. In it, he expressed his faith that all men, someday, would be brothers. He linked African Americans’ hopes for equal rights with traditional American political values. He said that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution comprised “a promissory note” guaranteeing all Americans “the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., talks with U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson in the White House in 1963.

Yoichi Okamoto/Lyndon B. Johnson Library Photo

Martin Luther King, Jr., speaks at a press conference in 1964.

Marion S. Trikosko, News & World Report, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (reproduction no. LC-DIG-ppmsc-01269)

One of the aims of the March on Washington was to show and inspire support for major civil rights legislation being considered in Congress. As King had hoped, the march had a strong effect on national opinion and resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act outlawed many kinds of discrimination, including in publicly owned facilities and in employment. Later in 1964 King became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize to that date. He regarded it not only as a personal honor but also as an international tribute to the nonviolent civil rights movement.

Final Years

Selma March.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc./Kenny Chmielewski

In 1965 King led a drive to register Black voters in Selma, Alabama. The drive met with violent resistance. In protest of this treatment, thousands of demonstrators conducted a five-day march from Selma to the capitol in Montgomery.

King was disappointed that the progress of civil rights in the South had not been matched by improvements in the lives of Northern Blacks. In response to the riots in poverty-stricken Black urban neighborhoods in 1965, he was determined to focus the country’s attention on the living conditions of Blacks in Northern cities. In 1966 he established a headquarters in a Chicago, Illinois, slum apartment. From this base he organized protests against the city’s discrimination in housing and employment.

King combined his civil rights campaigns with a strong stand against the Vietnam War. He believed that the money and effort spent on war could be used to combat poverty and discrimination. He felt that he would be a hypocrite if he protested racial violence without also condemning the violence of war. Militant Black leaders began to attack his appeals for nonviolence. They accused him of being influenced too much by whites. Government officials criticized his stand on Vietnam. Some Black leaders felt that King’s statements against war diverted public attention from civil rights.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot and killed on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Soldiers stand guard in Washington, D.C., during the riots that followed the assassination of Martin …

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. 04301u)

King inspired and planned the Poor People’s Campaign, a march on Washington, D.C., in 1968 to dramatize the relationship of poverty to urban violence. But he did not live to take part in it. Early in 1968 he traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, to support a strike of poorly paid sanitation workers. There, on April 4, he was assassinated by a sniper, James Earl Ray. King’s death shocked the country and precipitated rioting by Blacks in many cities. He was buried in Atlanta under a monument inscribed with the final words of his “I Have a Dream” address. Taken from an old slave song, the inscription read: “Free at Last,/ Free at Last,/ Thank God Almighty,/ I’ m Free at Last.”

King’s brief career greatly advanced the cause of civil rights in the United States. His efforts spurred the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. His energetic personality and persuasive oratory helped unite many Blacks in a search for peaceful solutions to racial oppression. Although King’s views were challenged by Blacks who had lost faith in nonviolence, his belief in the power of nonviolent protest remained strong. His writings include Stride Toward Freedom: the Montgomery Story (1958); Strength to Love (1963); Why We Can’t Wait (1964); and Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967).

The Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial, in Washington, D.C., features a stone statue of King.

Charles Dharapak/AP

In 1977 King was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his battle against prejudice. In 1983 the U.S. Congress established a national holiday, Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, in his honor, to be celebrated annually on the third Monday in January. The holiday was first observed in 1986. A national memorial honoring King opened in Washington, D.C., in 2011. Additional Reading

BAUSUM, ANN. Marching to the Mountaintop: How Poverty, Labor Fights, and Civil Rights Set the Stage for Martin

Luther King, Jr.’s Final Hours (National Geographic, 2012). BOLDEN, TONYA. M.L.K.: Journey of a King (Abrams,

2007). CALKHOVEN, LAURIE. Martin Luther King, Jr. (DK, 2019). DUNCAN, ALICE FAYE. Memphis, Martin, and the

Mountaintop: The Sanitation Strike of 1968 (Calkins Creek, 2018). FARRIS, CHRISTINE KING. March On!: The Day My

Brother Martin Changed the World (Scholastic, 2008). KING, MARTIN LUTHER, JR., AND NELSON, KADIR (ILLUSTRATOR). I

Have a Dream (Schwartz & Wade, 2012). PINKNEY, ANDREA DAVIS, AND PINKNEY, BRIAN (ILLUSTRATOR). Martin Rising: Requiem for a King (Scholastic, 2018).

Citation (MLA style):

"Martin Luther King, Jr.." Britannica LaunchPacks: The American Civil Rights Movement, Encyclopædia Britannica, 25 Aug. 2020. packs.eb.com. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021.

While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

Founded in 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was created to oppose racial discrimination and to safeguard the constitutional rights of African Americans. In 1905 the African American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois and others established the Niagara Movement to attack the social platform of the educator Booker T. Washington. Washington advocated that African Americans accommodate themselves to the discriminatory social practices of the time and aspire to win the respect of whites through hard work and economic success. Members of the Niagara Movement believed that such accommodation would only perpetuate the oppression of African Americans, which they opposed through social activism. Although the Niagara Movement never gained widespread support, it was the forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP was founded by a group of Niagara members and white liberals following a deadly race riot in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908. Founding members, who initially called themselves the National Negro Committee, included Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Mary White Ovington. In 1910 Du Bois founded the new organization’s monthly magazine, The Crisis, which he also edited until 1934.

In New York during World War I the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People…

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The NAACP often has exerted pressure at the national level to combat racial injustice. In 1918, for example, the group helped persuade President Woodrow Wilson to publicly denounce lynching. In 1922 it placed advertisements condemning lynching in major newspapers throughout the United States. The NAACP also has supported Civil Rights legislation and has itself litigated, through its Legal Defense and Education Fund, cases involving discrimination, including Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), which struck down racial segregation in public schools. The organization has attracted popular support for its positions through programs of education and public information.

The NAACP achieved national prominence during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. The 1963 murder of Medgar Evers, a NAACP field director in Jackson, Mississippi, who was involved in organizing voter- registration drives in the South, was probably a contributing factor in the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. With its national standing, the organization in the 1980s was able to stimulate widespread public opposition in the United States to apartheid, or racial segregation, in South Africa. In 1991 the NAACP organized a massive voter-registration drive among African Americans that helped bring about the defeat of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke in the U.S. Senate race in Louisiana. From the 1990s the organization was active in opposing the rollback of affirmative action laws, in supporting economic enterprise among African Americans, and in campaigns against youth violence.

In 1986 the NAACP transferred its headquarters from New York City to Baltimore, Maryland. It operates a bureau in Washington, D.C., and has branch offices in many U.S. cities. Each year since 1914 the organization has recognized an outstanding African American with the award of the Spingarn Medal, named for Joel Elias Spingarn, who served several terms as chairman of the board of the NAACP in the early 20th century.

Citation (MLA style):

"National Association for the Advancement of Colored People." Britannica LaunchPacks: The American Civil Rights Movement, Encyclopædia Britannica, 9 Sep. 2020. packs.eb.com. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021.

While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.

W.E.B. Du Bois

Britannica Note:

The most important leader in the early years of the civil rights movement was W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1909 he and others formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

(1868–1963). For more than 50 years W.E.B. Du Bois, an African American editor, historian, and sociologist, was a leader of the civil rights movement in the United States. He helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and was its outstanding spokesman in the first decades of its existence.

W.E.B. Du Bois.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

W.E.B. Du Bois, 1918.

Courtesy of Atlanta University

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. His parents, Alfred and Mary Burghardt Du Bois, were of African and European ancestry. An excellent student, Du Bois graduated from Fisk University in 1888 and from Harvard College in 1890. He traveled in Europe and studied at the University of Berlin. In 1895 he received a Ph.D. from Harvard. His dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870, was published in 1896 as the first volume of the Harvard Historical Studies.

After teaching Greek and Latin at Wilberforce University from 1894 to 1896, Du Bois studied Philadelphia’s slums. In The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899, a pioneering sociological study, he hoped to dispel the ignorance of whites about Blacks, which he believed was a cause of racial prejudice. Du Bois taught at Atlanta University from 1897 to 1910 and from 1897 until 1914 directed its annual studies of Black life.

In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois declared that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” He criticized the famous Black educator Booker T. Washington for accepting racial discrimination and minimizing the value of college training for Blacks. Du Bois felt that Blacks needed higher education for leadership. In his essay “The Talented Tenth” he wrote, “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.”

The split between Washington and Du Bois reflected a bitter division of opinion among Black leaders. In 1905, at Niagara Falls, Canada, Du Bois joined the more militant leaders to demand equal voting rights and educational opportunities for Blacks and an end to racial discrimination. But the Niagara Movement declined within a few years, and he then helped form another group, which in 1909 became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (initially called the National Negro Committee). He edited the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis, in which he often wrote that Blacks should develop farms, industries, and businesses separate from the white economy. NAACP officials, who desired integration, criticized this opinion, and he resigned as editor in 1934. He returned to Atlanta University, and in 1940 he launched Phylon, a new magazine about Blacks’ lives.

Du Bois was interested in African Blacks and led several Pan-African congresses. He was awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1920 for his efforts to foster Black racial solidarity. Although he clashed with Marcus Garvey, the leader of a “back to Africa” movement, and attacked his scheme for an African empire, he lauded Garvey’s racial pride.

In his later years Du Bois came to believe that the United States could not solve its racial problems and that the only world power opposed to racial discrimination was the Soviet Union. He was awarded the communist- sponsored International Peace prize in 1952 and the Soviet Lenin Peace prize in 1958. Du Bois joined the Communist Party of the United States in 1961 and emigrated to Ghana, where he became a citizen, in 1963. He died there on August 27, 1963. He had been married twice, to Nina Gomer and to Shirley Graham, and had two children.

Du Bois was brilliant, proud, and aloof. He once wrote: “My leadership was a leadership of ideas. I never was, nor ever will be, personally popular.” Du Bois wrestled with his conflicting desires for both integration and Black nationalism. His Pan-African and communist views removed him from the mainstream of the United States civil rights movement. But he never wavered in his efforts to teach Blacks their rights as human beings and pride in their heritage. Among his writings are Black Reconstruction (published in 1935) and Dusk of Dawn (1940).

Citation (MLA style):

"W.E.B. Du Bois." Britannica LaunchPacks: The American Civil Rights Movement, Encyclopædia Britannica, 9 Sep. 2020. packs.eb.com. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021.

While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.

Britannica Note:

The civil rights movement in the United States reached its climax on Aug. 28, 1963, in the March on Washington, a massive demonstration in Washington, D.C. The highlight of the march, which attracted more than 200,000 black and white participants, was the historic "I Have a Dream" speech delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr.

Britannica Online Encyclopædia and Project Gutenberg Consortia Center, bringing the world's eBook Collections together. I Have a Dream

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Delivered on the steps at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of captivity.

But one hundred years later, we must face the tragic fact that the Negro is still not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition.

In a sense we have come to our nation"s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check -- a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God"s children. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment and to underestimate the determination of the Negro. This sweltering summer of the Negro"s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro"s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, 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 and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor"s lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God"s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, "tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim"s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God"s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

Citation: No citation is available for this resource

Britannica Note:

Malcolm X: Advice to the Youth of Mississippi (1964)

On December 31, 1964, a month and a half before he was assassinated, African American militant Malcolm X made the remarks from which this selection is taken to a group of thirty-seven teenagers from McComb, Mississippi. They had come to New York City on a trip sponsored by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Early in 1964 Malcolm had left the Black Muslims, with whom he had been affiliated since 1952; he started the Organization of Afro-American Unity in June 1964.

One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself. Then you can come to an intelligent decision for yourself. If you form the habit of going by what you hear others say about someone, or going by what others think about someone, instead of searching that thing out for yourself and seeing for yourself, you will be walking west when you think you"re going east, and you will be walking east when you think you"re going west. This generation, especially of our people, has a burden, more so than any other time in history. The most important thing that we can learn to do today is think for ourselves.

It's good to keep wide-open ears and listen to what everybody else has to say, but when you come to make a decision, you have to weigh all of what you've heard on its own, and place it where it belongs, and come to a decision for yourself; you'll never regret it. But if you form the habit of taking what someone else says about a thing without checking it out for yourself, you'll find that other people will have you hating your friends and loving your enemies. This is one of the things that our people are beginning to learn today--that it is very important to think out a situation for yourself. If you don't do it, you'll always be maneuvered into a situation where you are never fighting your actual enemies, where you will find yourself fighting your own self.

I think our people in this country are the best examples of that. Many of us want to be nonviolent and we talk very loudly, you know, about being nonviolent. Here in Harlem, where there are probably more black people concentrated than any place in the world, some talk that nonviolent talk too. But we find that they aren't nonviolent with each other. You can go out to Harlem Hospital, where there are more black patients than any hospital in the world, and see them going in there all cut up and shot up and busted up where they got violent with each other.

My experience has been that in many instances where you find Negroes talking about nonviolence, they are not nonviolent with each other, and they"re not loving with each other or forgiving with each other. Usually when they say they"re nonviolent, they mean they"re nonviolent with somebody else. I think you understand what I mean. They are nonviolent with the enemy. A person can come to your home, and if he's white and wants to heap some kind of brutality on you, you"re nonviolent; or he can come to take your father and put a rope around his neck, and you"re nonviolent. But if another Negro just stomps his foot, you'll rumble with him in a minute. Which shows you that there's an inconsistency there.

I myself would go for nonviolence if it was consistent, if everybody was going to be nonviolent all the time. I"d say, okay, let's get with it, we'll all be nonviolent. But I don't go along with any kind of nonviolence unless everybody's going to be nonviolent. If they make the Ku Klux Klan nonviolent, I'll be nonviolent. If they make the White Citizens Council nonviolent, I'll be nonviolent. But as long as you've got somebody else not being nonviolent, I don't want anybody coming to me talking any nonviolent talk. I don't think it is fair to tell our people to be nonviolent unless someone is out there making the Klan and the Citizens Council and these other groups also be nonviolent. . . .

I think in 1965, whether you like it, or I like it, or they like it, or not, you will see that there is a generation of black people becoming mature to the point where they feel that they have no more business being asked to take a peaceful approach than anybody else takes, unless everybody's going to take a peaceful approach.

So we here in the Organization of Afro-American Unity are with the struggle in Mississippi 1,000 percent. We"re with the efforts to register our people in Mississippi to vote 1,000 percent. But we do not go along with anybody telling us to help nonviolently. We think that if the government says that Negroes have a right to vote, and then some Negroes come out to vote, and some kind of Ku Klux Klan is going to put them in the river, and the government doesn't do anything about it, it's time for us to organize and band together and equip ourselves and qualify ourselves to protect ourselves. And once you can protect yourself, you don't have to worry about being hurt. . . .

If you don't have enough people down there to do it, we'll come down there and help you do it. Because we"re tired of this old runaround that our people have been given in this country. For a long time they accused me of not getting involved in politics. They should've been glad I didn't get involved in politics, because anything I get in, I"m in it all the way. If they say we don't take part in the Mississippi struggle, we will organize brothers here in New York who know how to handle these kind of affairs, and they'll slip into Mississippi like Jesus slipped into Jerusalem. That doesn't mean we"re against white people, but we sure are against the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Councils; and anything that looks like it's against us, we"re against it.

Excuse me for raising my voice, but this thing, you know, gets me upset. Imagine that--a country that's supposed to be a democracy, supposed to be for freedom and all of that kind of stuff when they want to draft you and put you in the army and send you to Saigon to fight for them--and then you've got to turn around and all night long discuss how you"re going to just get a right to register and vote without being murdered. Why, that's the most hypocritical government since the world began! . . .

I hope you don't think I"m trying to incite you. Just look here: Look at yourselves. Some of you are teen-agers, students. How do you think I feel--and I belong to a generation ahead of you--how do you think I feel to have to tell you, “We, my generation, sat around like a knot on a wall while the whole world was fighting for its human rights--and you've got to be born into a society where you still have the same fight.” What did we do, who preceded you? I'll tell you what we did: Nothing. And don't you make the same mistake we made. . . .

You get freedom by letting your enemy know that you'll do anything to get your freedom; then you'll get it. It's the only way you'll get it. When you get that kind of attitude, they'll label you as a “crazy Negro,” or they'll call you a “crazy nigger”--they don't say Negro. Or they'll call you an extremist or a subversive, or seditious, or a red, or a radical. But when you stay radical long enough, and get enough people to be like you, you'll get your freedom. . . .

So don't you run around here trying to make friends with somebody who's depriving you of your rights. They"re not your friends, no, they"re your enemies. Treat them like that and fight them, and you'll get your freedom; and after you get your freedom, your enemy will respect you. And we'll respect you. And I say that with no hate. I don't have hate in me. I have no hate at all. I don't have any hate. I've got some sense. I"m not going to let anybody who hates me tell me to love him. I"m not that way-out. And you, young as you are, and because you start thinking, you"re not going to do it either. The only time you"re going to get in that bag is if somebody puts you there. Somebody else, who doesn't have your welfare at heart. . . .

I want to thank all of you for taking the time to come to Harlem and especially here. I hope that you've gotten a better understanding about me. I put it to you just as plain as I know how to put it; there's no interpretation necessary. And I want you to know that we"re not in any way trying to advocate any kind of indiscriminate, unintelligent action. Any kind of action that you are ever involved in that's designed to protect the lives and property of our mistreated people in this country, we"re with you 1,000 percent. And if you don't feel you"re qualified to do it, we have some brothers who will slip in, as I said earlier, and help train you and show you how to equip yourself and let you know how to deal with the man who deals with you.

Source: Malcolm X Speaks, George Breitman, ed., New York, 1965, pp. 137-146.

Citation: No citation is available for this resource

Selma March

Selma March.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc./Kenny Chmielewski

Citation (MLA style):

Selma March. Image. Britannica LaunchPacks: The American Civil Rights Movement, Encyclopædia Britannica, 19 Feb. 2021. packs.eb.com. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021.

While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.

Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks sits on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956.

Underwood Archives/UIG/REX/Shutterstock.com

Citation (MLA style):

Rosa Parks. Image. Britannica LaunchPacks: The American Civil Rights Movement, Encyclopædia Britannica, 19 Feb. 2021. packs.eb.com. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021.

While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.

civil rights movement: Greensboro sit-in

Students holding a sit-in at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, 1960.

Jack Moebes/Reprinted with permission from the News & Record of Greensboro

Citation (MLA style):

Civil rights movement: Greensboro sit-in. Image. Britannica LaunchPacks: The American Civil Rights Movement, Encyclopædia Britannica, 19 Feb. 2021. packs.eb.com. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021.

While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.

Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X

Martin Luther King, Jr. (centre), and Malcolm X (right), 1964.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. 3d01847u)

Citation (MLA style):

Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Image. Britannica LaunchPacks: The American Civil Rights Movement, Encyclopædia Britannica, 19 Feb. 2021. packs.eb.com. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021.

While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.

Ruby Bridges

Britannica Note:

At age six, Ruby Bridges was the youngest of a group of African American students to integrate schools in the American South. She became a symbol of the civil rights movement.

Video Transcript

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I think it's fair to say that if it hadn't been for you guys, I might not be here and we wouldn't be looking at this together. So... RUBY BRIDGES: Just having him say that meant a lot to me, and it always has. But to be standing shoulder to shoulder with history and viewing history is just once in a lifetime. The painting depicts my walk into William Frantz school, integrating the public school systems in 1960. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Can you still put your head back into... RUBY BRIDGES: Oh, can I? Absolutely. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: So you can still kinda go back there? RUBY BRIDGES: Definitely, yes, and I do, every day. The girl in that painting—at six years old—knew absolutely nothing about racism. I was going to school that day. But the lesson that I took away that year in an empty school building was that none of us know anything about disliking one another when we come into the world. It is something that's passed on to us. So every time I see that, I think about the fact that I was an innocent child that knew absolutely nothing about what was happening that day but that I learned a very valuable lesson, and that is—is that we should never look at a person and judge them by the color of their skin. That's the lesson that I learned in first grade.

Ruby Bridges speaks with U.S. President Barack Obama at the White House in 2011 about a Norman Rockwell painting, The Problem We All Live With. The painting depicts Bridges in 1960, at age six, walking to school under the protection of federal marshals in New Orleans, Louisiana. She was the first African American child to attend her otherwise all-white school, and she faced considerable racism.

Norman Rockwell, The Problem We All Live With, 1963. Oil on canvas, 91.44 cm × 147.32 cm. Story illustration for Look, January 14, 1964; Norman Rockwell Museum Collections. © NRELC: Niles, IL. Official White House Video

Citation (MLA style):

Ruby Bridges. Video. Britannica LaunchPacks: The American Civil Rights Movement, Encyclopædia Britannica, 19 Feb. 2021. packs.eb.com. Accessed 9 Aug. 2021.

While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.