Civil Rights Movement

The civil rights movement was a mass popular movement to secure for African Americans equal access to and opportunities for the basic privileges and rights of U.S. citizenship. Although the roots of the movement go back to the 19th century, it peaked in the 1950s and 1960s. African American men and women, along with whites, organized and led the movement at national and local levels. They pursued their goals through legal means, negotiations, petitions, and nonviolent protest demonstrations. The civil rights movement was largest social movement of the 20th century in the United States. It influenced the modern women's rights movement and the student movement of the 1960s.

The 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas ushered in a new era in the struggle for civil rights. This landmark decision outlawed racial segregation in public schools. Whites around the country condemned the decision. In the South such white supremacist groups as the Ku Klux Klan and the Citizens' Council organized to resist desegregation, sometimes resorting to violence. A primary target of supremacist groups was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Over the course of decades the NAACP had filed a succession of court cases, including Brown, and had assumed the lead in the national struggle against segregated education. The oldest established national civil rights organization, the NAACP also played an important role at the local level; blacks across the South organized branches to combat discrimination in their communities.

One of the first attempts to comply with the Brown decision came in Arkansas's capital city, Little Rock, in 1957. It was prompted in part by the work of the Arkansas NAACP and its president, Daisy Bates. When the local school board admitted nine black students to the city's previously all-white Central High School, white protests escalated into violence. As a result, President Dwight D. Eisenhower dispatched federal troops to protect the black students. A later high-profile case involved Alabama governor George Wallace. In 1963 he attempted to block black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama.

The nation's focus then turned to Birmingham, Ala. King came in the spring of 1963 and led nonviolent demonstrations. The use of police dogs and fire hoses against protesters, an act that remains infamous, helped awaken President John Kennedy's administration to the need for civil rights legislation.

Following Kennedy's assassination, President Lyndon Johnson maneuvered the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress. Representing a major victory for African Americans, the 1964 legislation outlawed segregation in public places and prohibited racial and gender discrimination in employment practices.

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