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 © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 1 of 77 Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement 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) © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 2 of 77 Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement 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) © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 3 of 77 Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement 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 © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 4 of 77 Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement 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 © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 5 of 77 Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement 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. © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 6 of 77 Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement 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 © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 7 of 77 Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement 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 © 2020 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 8 of 77 Britannica LaunchPacks | The American Civil Rights Movement Black Panther Party national chairman Bobby Seale (left) and defense minister Huey Newton. AP 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.