Portal:Civil rights movement

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The 1963 March on Washington participants and leaders marching from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial

The civil rights movement was a social movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement in the country. The movement had its origins in the Reconstruction era during the late 19th century and had its modern roots in the 1940s, although the movement made its largest legislative gains in the 1960s after years of direct actions and grassroots protests. The social movement's major nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience campaigns eventually secured new protections in federal law for the civil rights of all Americans.

After the American Civil War and the subsequent abolition of slavery in the 1860s, the Reconstruction Amendments to the United States Constitution granted emancipation and constitutional rights of citizenship to all African Americans, most of whom had recently been enslaved. For a short period of time, African-American men voted and held political office, but as time went on Blacks were increasingly deprived of civil rights, often under the racist Jim Crow laws, and African Americans were subjected to discrimination and sustained violence by white supremacists in the South. Over the following century, various efforts were made by African Americans to secure their legal and civil rights, such as the civil rights movement (1865–1896) and the civil rights movement (1896–1954). The movement was characterized by nonviolent mass protests and civil disobedience following highly publicized events such as the lynching of Emmett Till. These included boycotts such as the Montgomery bus boycott, "sit-ins" in Greensboro and Nashville, a series of protests during the Birmingham campaign, and a march from Selma to Montgomery.

At the culmination of a legal strategy pursued by African Americans, in 1954 the Supreme Court struck down the underpinnings of laws that had allowed racial segregation and discrimination to be legal in the United States as unconstitutional. The Warren Court made a series of landmark rulings against racist discrimination, including the separate but equal doctrine, such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States (1964), and Loving v. Virginia (1967) which banned segregation in public schools and public accommodations, and struck down all state laws banning interracial marriage. The rulings played a crucial role in bringing an end to the segregationist Jim Crow laws prevalent in the Southern states. In the 1960s, moderates in the movement worked with the United States Congress to achieve the passage of several significant pieces of federal legislation that authorized oversight and enforcement of civil rights laws. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 explicitly banned all discrimination based on race, including racial segregation in schools, businesses, and in public accommodations. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 restored and protected voting rights by authorizing federal oversight of registration and elections in areas with historic under-representation of minority voters. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 banned discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. (Full article...)

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Alabama Highway Patrol troopers attack civil rights demonstrators outside Selma, Alabama, on Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965.

The Selma to Montgomery marches were three protest marches, held in 1965, along the 54-mile (87 km) highway from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery. The marches were organized by nonviolent activists to demonstrate the desire of African-American citizens to exercise their constitutional right to vote, in defiance of segregationist repression; they were part of a broader voting rights movement underway in Selma and throughout the American South. By highlighting racial injustice, they contributed to passage that year of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark federal achievement of the civil rights movement.

Since the late 19th century, Southern state legislatures had passed and maintained a series of Jim Crow laws that had disenfranchised the millions of African Americans across the South and enforced racial segregation. The initial voter registration drive, started in 1963 by the African-American Dallas County Voters League (DCVL) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) failed as local White officials arrested the organizers and otherwise harassed Blacks wishing to register to vote. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 legally ended segregation but the situation in Selma changed little. The DCVL then invited Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the activists of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to amplify the efforts, and these figures drew more prominent people to Alabama. Local and regional protests began in January 1965, with 3,000 people arrested by the end of February. On February 26, activist and deacon Jimmie Lee Jackson died after being shot several days earlier by state trooper James Bonard Fowler during a peaceful march in nearby Marion. To defuse and refocus the Black community's outrage, James Bevel, who was directing SCLC's Selma voting rights movement, called for a march of dramatic length, from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery, calling for an unhindered exercise of the right to vote.^{[page needed]}

The first march took place on March 7, 1965, led by figures including Bevel and Amelia Boynton, but was ended by state troopers and county possemen, who charged on about 600 unarmed protesters with batons and tear gas after they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the direction of Montgomery. The event became known as Bloody Sunday. Law enforcement beat Boynton unconscious, and the media publicized worldwide a picture of her lying wounded on the bridge. The second march took place two days later but King cut it short as a federal court issued a temporary injunction against further marches. That night, an anti-civil rights group murdered civil rights activist James Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston. The third march, which started on March 21, was escorted by the Alabama National Guard under federal control, the FBI and federal marshals (segregationist Governor George Wallace refused to protect the protesters). Thousands of marchers averaged 10 mi (16 km) a day along U.S. Route 80 (US 80), reaching Montgomery on March 24. The following day, 25,000 people staged a demonstration on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol. (Full article...)

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The following are images from various civil rights movement-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1A diagram showing where Rosa Parks sat in the unreserved section at the time of her arrest (from Montgomery bus boycott)
Image 2Charlton Heston, James Baldwin, Marlon Brando, and Harry Belafonte (from March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom)
Image 3Leaders of the march in front of the statue of Abraham Lincoln: (sitting L-R) Whitney Young, Cleveland Robinson, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., and Roy Wilkins; (standing L-R) Mathew Ahmann, Joachim Prinz, John Lewis, Eugene Carson Blake, Floyd McKissick, and Walter Reuther (from March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom)
Image 450th Anniversary of the Civil Rights March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (from March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom)
Image 5Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his "I Have a Dream" speech (from March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom)
Image 6Black people in Memphis under attack, Harper's Weekly, 26 May 1866 (from Civil rights movement (1865–1896))
Image 7Actor Ossie Davis (from March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom)
Image 8First Colored Senator and Representatives: Sen. Hiram Revels (R-MS), Rep. Benjamin Turner (R-AL), Robert DeLarge (R-SC), Josiah Walls (R-FL), Jefferson Long (R-GA), Joseph Rainey and Robert B. Elliott (R-SC), 1872 (from Civil rights movement (1865–1896))
Image 9Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, AME leader in Georgia. (from Civil rights movement (1865–1896))
Image 10Juvenile African-American convicts working in the fields in a chain gang, photo taken c. 1903 (from Civil rights movement (1896–1954))
Image 11John Lewis speaking in the Great Hall of the Library of Congress on the 50th anniversary, August 28, 2013 (from March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom)
Image 12Joan Baez and Bob Dylan performing at the March on Washington (from March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom)
Image 13Freedmen voting in New Orleans, 1867 (from Civil rights movement (1865–1896))
Image 14March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom program (from March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom)
Image 15Vocalists Peter, Paul, and Mary (from March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom)
Image 16Leaders gather for a portrait (from March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom)
Image 17Leaders arrived late and linked arms in front of marchers on Constitution Avenue. (from March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom)
Image 18Fannie Lou Hamer founded Freedom Farm Cooperative, an operation meant to alleviate Black sharecropper poverty in the South. (from African-American women in the civil rights movement)
Image 19African American women participate in Civil Rights protest in Tallahassee, Florida, 1963 (from African-American women in the civil rights movement)
Image 20Rosa Parks being fingerprinted by Deputy Sheriff D.H. Lackey after her arrest for boycotting public transportation (from Montgomery bus boycott)
Image 21Leaders of the March on Washington speak to the news media after meeting with President Kennedy at the White House. (from March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom)
Image 22Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibition "381 Days: The Montgomery Bus Boycott" at the Washington State History Museum (from Montgomery bus boycott)
Image 23Rosa Parks being fingerprinted by Deputy Sheriff D.H. Lackey after being arrested on February 22, 1956, during the Montgomery bus boycott. (from African-American women in the civil rights movement)
Image 24Executive Committee of the National Negro Business League, c. 1910. NNBL founder Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) is seated, second from the left. (from Civil rights movement (1896–1954))
Image 25Kathleen Cleaver delivering a speech, 1971 (from African-American women in the civil rights movement)
Image 26Women marching for equal rights, integrated schools and decent housing (from African-American women in the civil rights movement)
Image 27Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte and Charlton Heston (from March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom)
Image 28"A Man Was Lynched Yesterday" flag, hanging at the Library of Congress (from Civil rights movement (1896–1954))
Image 29Close up of some leaders of the March on Washington walking along Constitution Avenue. (from March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom)
Image 30Poster from Office of War Information. Domestic Operations Branch. News Bureau, 1943 (from Civil rights movement (1896–1954))
Image 31Kennedy meets with march leaders. Left to Right – Willard Wirtz, Matthew Ahmann, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Rabbi Joachin Prinz, Eugene Carson Blake, A. Philip Randolph, President John F. Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Walter Reuther, Whitney Young, Floyd McKissick, Roy Wilkins (not in order) (from March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom)

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Portrait by Carl Van Vechten, 1949

Mary Jane McLeod Bethune (née McLeod; July 10, 1875 – May 18, 1955) was an American educator, philanthropist, humanitarian, womanist, and civil rights activist. Bethune founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935, established the organization's flagship journal Aframerican Women's Journal, and presided as president or leader for a myriad of African American women's organizations including the National Association for Colored Women and the National Youth Administration's Negro Division.

She also was appointed as a national advisor to president Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom she worked with to create the Federal Council on Colored Affairs, also known as the Black Cabinet. She is well-known for starting a private school for African-American students in Daytona Beach, Florida. It later continued to develop as Bethune-Cookman University. She was the sole African American woman officially a part of the US delegation that created the United Nations charter, and she held a leadership position for the American Women's Voluntary Services founded by Alice Throckmorton McLean. For her lifetime of activism, she was deemed "acknowledged First Lady of Negro America" by Ebony magazine in April 1949 and was known by the Black Press as the "Female Booker T. Washington". She was known as "The First Lady of The Struggle" because of her commitment to promote better lives for African Americans. (Full article...)

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A. Philip Randolph and other civil rights leaders on their way to Congress during the March on Washington, 1963.

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Did you know?

... that Sammy Younge Jr. was the first black college student to be murdered for participating in the civil rights movement?
... that civil rights activist Unita Blackwell was the first African-American woman to be elected mayor in the state of Mississippi?
... that civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer was brutally beaten at the orders of police in Mississippi, US for standing up against racial segregation?
... that after J. Charles Jones led an anti-segregation sit-in with hundreds of activists at a counter in a Woolworth in Charlotte, NC, the store closed its counter to prevent further integration?
... that in 1955, a white supremacist organization claimed the racial integration of schools in the United States was a plot devised in Moscow to "mongrelize" White Americans?