The Civil Rights Movement

What began as a legal movement to end segregation shifted by the early 1960s into a revolution. In 1957, members of the Black church, led by the charismatic Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to direct boycotts and other acts of civil disobedience to protest continued segregation throughout the South. In 1960, younger Black activists in North Carolina founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to organize “sit-ins” at segregated lunch counters. These groups effectively used the tactics of nonviolent resistance to illicit sympathy from northern whites and to pressure politicians to enact more expansive change. Two key pieces of legislation came as the direct result of these protest movements: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial discrimination generally, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited discrimination in voting.  

Yet the movement began to wane after these successes. In 1968, a white supremacist assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, followed by rioting in every major American city. His killing led some in the movement to question King's tactics of nonviolent resistance. Some became attracted to the ideologies of Malcolm X (who was himself assassinated in 1965) and the Black Panthers, who contended that the Black community should stop trying to make peace with whites, and should instead defend themselves when necessary. Still, these later radical movements never gained the traction of the earlier ones and white America (along with the national media) seemed increasingly fatigued by the protest movements of the sixties.  

This section contains sources with a national perspective on the protests of the 1960s and beyond. Of particular note here are again the oral histories, which give incredibly detailed and personal accounts of activists in the Civil Rights Movement.

African Americans -- Civil rights.

Black Panther Party.

Congress of Racial Equality.

King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929-1968.

Montgomery Bus Boycott, Montgomery, Ala., 1955-1956.

Race relations.

Segregation in transportation.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (U.S.).