Civil Rights Movement - Chronological

John Lewis

(b. 1940) John Lewis was on the front lines of nearly every major effort of the 1960s civil rights movement. He was a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and, in 1961, one of the first to volunteer as a Freedom Rider. As the head of SNCC, Lewis was a leader of the 1963 March on Washington. In 1964, he organized a campaign to register black voters during Mississippi Freedom Summer. And in 1965, as he led an attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to secure voting rights for African Americans, he and the other marchers were clubbed and beaten by Alabama state troopers. But two weeks later Lewis and three thousand people marched again, this time guarded by federal troops. "It was like a holy crusage, like Gandhi's march to the sea," he reflected. "It was more than an ordinary march....It was the sense of community moving there."

W.E.B. DuBois

(1868-1963) W.E.B. DuBois died the night before the March on Washington. "At the dawn of the twentieth century," announced NAACP head Roy Wilkins, "his was the voice calling you to gather here today in this cause." Born three years after the end of the Civil War and slavery, DuBois was a brilliant scholar, sociologist, educator, and novelist whose work revealed the damage wrought by poverty and racism and established an objective, yet empathetic, understanding of what it meant to be black in the United States. A founder of the NAACP in 1909, he was creator and editor of its magazine, The Crisis. In its pages he demanded equality, justice, and respect for people of color and galvanized African Americans who had been lulled by Booker T. Washington's post-Reconstruction policy of accomodation to white America. The foremost leader of the Pan African Movement, DuBois emigrated to Ghana two years before he died.

A. Philip Randolph

(1889-1979) In 1941, A. Philip Randolph had a vision: a march on Washington, D.C., to demand an end to racial discrimination in the defense industries. The march never took place - the threat of it persuaded President Franklin Roosevelt to sign an executive order prohibiting such discrimination. In 1948, Randolph's influence also helped to end segregation in the armed forces. Randolph first achieved prominence for organizing the all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in 1925. In 1937, after twelve years of struggle with the Pullman Company, who owned the sleeping-car service on long-distance trains, he negotiated the first labor agreement be a black union with a major corporation. A lifelong civil rights worker and labor activist, Randolph realized his vision of two decades earlier when he organized and led the 1963 March on Washington. He received the Medal of Freedom from President Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Charles Houston

(1895-1950) Charles Houston left his deanship at Howard University's School of Law to work full-time for the NAACP in 1935. The same year the Amherst honors graduate, who had been on of the few black officers in World War I, toured South Carolina with a 16mm movie camera, documenting the disparities between schools for white children and for African Americans. His work supported the NAACP's legal challenge to the South's "separate but eqaul" doctrine established by the Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, used to justify segregation throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Because most states did not provide separate - let alone equal - balck graduate and professional schools, he sued on behalf of applicants to white law, medical, and other graduate programs. His legal successes, founded on the principles of constitutional law and social justice, were the first cracks in the "separate but equal" doctrine and the stone wall of segregation.

Septima Clark

(1898-1987) In 1960, Septima Clark recruited African Americans to participate in the Southern Christian Leadership COnference's Citizenship Education Program she headed in McIntosh, Georgia. There, "busloads of folk" were taught basic literacy to prepare them for voter registration, an idea Clark had pioneered at the Highlander Folk School in the 1950s - "I just thought that you couldn't get people to register and vote ubntil you could teach them to read and write." Clark had already campaigned successfully to allow African Americans to teach in the city of Charleston, and for equal pay for black and white teachers. But in 1956, after forty years in the South Carolina school system, she was fired for refusing to give up her NAACP membership. Clark then commenced her "second:" career: through her efforts, 897 citizenship schools teaching literacy and voter education "in people's kitchens, in beauty parlors, under trees," were organized from 1957 to 1970.

E.D. Nixon

(1899-1987) When Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, the first person Parks's mother called was E.D. Nixon. Leader of the Montgomery, Alabama, NAACP, the Progressive Democratic Association, and the local chapter of the Bortherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Nixon had worked with Parks at the NAACP for many years. After bailing her out of jail, he asked if they could use her case to challenge the segregation laws. She agreed. The next morning, Nixon called together Montgomery's black clergy - including twenty-six-year-old Martin Luther King Jr. - to plan a bus boycott protesting Parks's arrest. He served on the executive board of the group that guided the boycott, telling a mass meeting in 1955 of his twenty-odd-year fight for the future equality of black children: "Well, hell, I changed my mind tonight....I decided that I wanted to enjoy some of this freedom myself."

Roy Wilkins

(1901-1981) "The only master race is the human race, and we are all, by the grace of God, members of it," wrote Roy Wilkins in a Kansas City newspaper editorial, before he left his job as a journalist in 1931 to join the New York office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1934, he became editor of the NAACP magazine, The Crisis, at the same time campaigning for a federal law that would make lynching illegal throughout the United States. Wilkins became executive secretary of the NAACP in 1955, a position he held until 1977, working tirelessly against segregation in schools and other public facilities and for voting rights. He called May 17, 1954, the day of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, "one of life's sweetest days." As NAACP chief, WIlkins was one of the leaders of the 1963 March on Washington.

Ella Baker

(1903-1986) In 1960, Ella Baker called for a student conference to organize the spontaneous sit-ins spreading through the South. Those who gathered formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); Baker was both the organization's mentor and its fervent supporter, calling their purpose "bigger than a hamburger...[to end segregation] not only at the lunch counters but in every aspect of life." In her long career as a civil rights activist, Baker had already served as the NAACP's director of branches. At Martin Luthers King's request, she established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's national office and was its first executive director. As an advisor to SNCC, she helped to organize voter registration projects and was pivotal in forming the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964. Fiercly independent, Baker believed in democratic, grassroots activism that stressed the role of many ordinary people, not of individual leaders, in achieving social and political change.

Thurgood Marshall

(1908-1993) Attorney, civil rights activist, and Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall understood the need for an "understanding of the Constitution's defects, and its promising evolution...the true miracle was not the birth of the Constitution, but its life...nurtured through two turbulent centuries of our own making, and...embodying much good fortune that was not." Marshall began taking cases for the NAACP in 1934 and in 1939 became director of its newly formed Legal Defense Fund. His early victories opened up segregated graduate and professional schools to African Americans. In 1954 the Supreme Court, in Brown v. the Board of Education, granted Marshall his most momentous victory, declaring that all segregated schools were inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional. Marshall was appointed to a federal judgeship in 1962. In 1967, he became the first African American justice on the Supreme Court, where he served for twenty-four years.

Bayard Rustin

(1910-1987) Fourteen years before the 1961 Freedom Rides - and eight years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott - Bayard Rustin (with George Houser) led fourteen men on a "Journey of Reconciliation" through four southern states to test adherence to the federally mandated integration of interstate buses. Rustin was arrested eighteen times; two years later, in 1949, he served time on a North Carolina chain gang for refusing to abide by the Jim Crow laws. So Rustin was no newcomer to civil rights activism when he arrived in Montgomery, Alabama, to meet Martin Luther King Jr. He became King's confidant and mentor, encouraging his commitment to nonviolence and bringing his outstanding organizational talents to guide and structure the bus boycott. Rustin was named deputy director of the 1963 March on Washington, where he organized a brilliantly orchestrated demonstration. "What made the march," he said later, "was that black people voted that day with their feet."

Jo Ann Gibson Robinson

(1912-1992) In May 1954, Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, an English professor at Alabama State College and president of the Women's Political Council (WPC) of Montgomery, Alabama, wrote the mayor that a black boycott of the city's buses might occur if abusive drivers were not controlled and segregated seating practices improved. Almost nineteen months later, hearing immediately of Rosa Parks's arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, Robinson surreptitiously mimeographed 35,000 flyers in the dead of night, requesting all African Americans to boycott the buses on the day of Park's trial. The next morning she delivered flyers to WPC workers, who distributed them throughout Montgomery. Robinson became a quiet but essential player in the Montgomery Improvement Association, which directed the boycott. Subjected to threats and violence, she described years later her acid-damaged Chrysler with pride: "It had become the most beautiful car in the world to me."

Ruby Hurley

(1913-1980) Ruby Hurley opened the first permanent NAACP office in the deep South in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1951. The first professional civil rights worker in the South encountered rigid segregation: "Negroes and whites could not play checkers together," she recalled. Hurley began her NAACP career in 1939 when she organized a youth council in Washington, D.C., becoming national youth secretary in 1943. In Birmingham she daily placed her life at rish by investigating the lynching of several African Americans and by supporting Autherine Lucy in her bid to enter the all-white University of Alabama. As a result, "I could be riding down the street and white men would drive by and say, 'We gon' get you,'" said Hurley. "Bombs were thrown at my home." In 1956, when the state of Alabama closed down the NAACP office, Hurley went to Atlanta, where she continued the struggle for civil rights.

Rosa Parks

(1913-2005) When she courageously refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks secured her place in history. Her subsequent arrest resulted in a mass boycott of city buses and brought the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence. Parks, who grew up under segregation in Alabama, was refused when she tried to register to vote in 1943. She soon became secretary of the Montgomery branch of the NAACP, and in 1949, adviser to the NAACP Youth Council. She attended the Highlander Folk School, a training center for labor and civil rights leadership, just months before her arrest. Parks was fined $10 for violating Montgomery's segregation laws. Harassed and fired from her job, she moved to Detroit, where she later cofounded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development to work with young people.

Fannie Lou Hamer

(1917-1977) The television cameras rolled as Fannie Lou Hamer recounted an arrest as a civil rights activist when she was beaten with a blackjack. She was addressing the Credentials Committee of the 1964 Democratic National Convention as a leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which challenged the right of the all-white delegates of the Democratic Party to represent the state, since African Americans had been excluded from choosing them. The youngest of twenty children born to sharecroppers and a sharecropper herself, Hamer was forced to leave her home for attempting to register to vote. She worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, dedicating herself to voter registration. When asked by a reporter is she were trying to be equal with the white man, she replied: "I don't want to go down that low. I want the true democracy that'll raise me and that white man up...raise America up."

James Farmer

(1920-1999) Long before the 1960 Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch counter sit-in ignited a national movement, James Farmer gathered friends to sit in at a coffee shop in Chicago, successfully ending their segregation policy. A founder of the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942, Farmer served as its director during the early 1960s, when he organized the Freedom Rides to test a Supreme Court ruling prohibiting segregation in interstate bus terminals. Farmer himself was arrested as a Freedom Rider in Jackson, Mississippi: "I made the decision...if Mississippi had jail cells, we had the bodies to fill them. We stayed in jail forty days, and all the while new Freedom Riders were coming...." Farmer fialed to take his place in the 1963 March on Washington because he was again in jail for leading a demonstration in Louisiana. In 1998 he received the Medal of Freedom for his lifelong commitment to civil rights.

Whitney Young Jr.

(1921-1971) Whitney Young Jr. invoked the future at the 1963 March on Washington. African Americans "must march from the rat-infested, overcrowded ghettos to decent....unrestricted residential areas....They must march from the congested, ill-equipped schools....they must march from a present feeling of despair and hopelessness...to renewed faith and confidence." Young's speech focused on the poverty, descrimination, and lack of opportunity that plagued African Americans throughout the United States, and which would become the major civil rights issue as legal segregation ended in the South. He spoke from his experience as executive director of the National Urban League, which had campaigned for equitable economic and social conditions for African Americans since 1911. A leader of the March on Washington, Young advised presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson on civil rights issues.

Daisy Bates

(1922-1999) From her own experiences with racism, Daisy Bates was determined to change a society which allowed segregation to exist. She and her husband owned the Arkansas State Press, a weekly newspaper which spoke out against racial discrimination, police brutality, and other injustices. As president of the Arkansas NAACP, she organized and protected the "Little Rock Nine," African American students who desegregated the city's Central High School in 1957. Bates endured constant harassment - a rock was thrown through her window with the words "Stone this time. Dynamite next" scribbled on a piece of paper; later that year, her home was bombed. She and the students received the Spingarn Medal, the highest NAACP award, for their courage in the crisis, but because of her involvement, her newspaper suffered economically and was forced to close. In 1985, the Arkansas State Press was revived, and Bates resumed her role as publisher.

Mamie Till-Mobley

(1922-2003) Chicagoan Mamie Till Bradley (later Mamie Till-Mobley) was thirty-three when her fourteen-year-old son, Emmett, was murdered in 1955 for mildly flirting with a white woman during a visit to the Mississippi Delta. When Till-Mobley saw his disfigured body, she insisted that "the whole world...see what I had seen." Determined to expose the horrors of lynching in the South, she held an open-casket funeral. The press picked up the story, broadcasting the trial of the two white men accused of the murder, who were acquitted. Till-Mobley could have become discouraged and bitter; instead, she courageously transformed the tragedy of her son's death into a force for change, touring the country on behalf of the NAACP. In 1973 she trained the first of the Emmett Till Players, a youth performance group, and she directed the Emmett Till Foundation, providing scholarships to young people.

Fred Shuttlesworth

(1922-2011) Minister Fred Shuttlesworth had already survived two bombings of his home when, in 1957, he tried to enroll his children in a white high school. He was attacked and beaten by a mob that nearly killed him. When Alabama's attorney general secured a court order against the NAACP, Shuttlesworth formed the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights to continue his fight against segregation. Known among civil rights activists for his fearlessness even in the most violent confrontations, he led a caravan to rescue the Freedom Riders who were assaulted in Anniston, Alabama. He believed that action, not patience, would end segregation. "Ball teams don't strike themselves out," he advised. "You got to put them out." Shuttlesworth inaugurated the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, campaign to desegregate public facilities, a turning point in the civil rights movement when images of nonviolent demonstrators being firehosed and attacked by dogs were broadcast throughout the world.

Medgar Evers

(1925-1963) Medgar Evers served in the U.S. armed forces during World War II, yet when he returned to his native Mississippi, like veterans all over the segregated South, he was forced to reenter a world of injustice and inequality. He began work for the NAACP in 1954, becoming Mississippi's first field secretary. Evers lived not only with daily harassment but with terrorist threats as he traveled throughout the state, trying to recruit NAACP members and to gather eveidence against those who murdered black people. When James Meredith became the first African American admitted to the University of Mississippi under federal protection in 1962, Evers visited him frequently. This victory for school integration prompted him to attack segregation in his hometown, Jackson. Ever's campaign began on May 28 with sit-ins at Woolworth's. Just two weeks later he was shot to death outside his home. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Malcolm X

(1925-1965) Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little) was serving a prison term when he embraced the Nation of Islam and altered the course of his life. His powerful, charismatic voice brought the Nation to prominence in the 1960s, as he spoke with startling candor about white racism and articulated the anger of balck people who had endured it. Some African Americans were attracted to the Nation's religion, but many more to the militant demand for racial justice and the idea of building a strong, independent, separate black nation. Malcolm X broke with the Nation in 1964 and traveled to Mecca, where he met Muslims of all races. He changed his perspective that all white people were enemies and came to believe in the need for all people to work for human rights. A few months after he founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity, he was assassinated on February 21, 1965. Malcolm X is shown here after he was shot while speaking in New York City, surrounded by supporters.

Viola Liuzzo

(1926-1965) Mother of five children and wife of a Detroit Teamster official, Viola Liuzzo might have appeared to be a "typical" homemaker, but as a part-time student at Wayne State University she had already participated in civil rights protests. In 1965, she saw the televised attack by state troopers on the peaceful marchers heading from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to petition for African American voting rights. Liuzzo felt compelled to drive her green Oldsmobile for three straight days to join the demonstration. On March 25, as a new group of marchers reached Montgomery and she was ferrying demonstrators back to Selma, she was chased at nearly 100 mph by Ku Klux Klansmen who shot her twice in the face. "My wife died for a sacred battle, the rights of humanity," her husband said. "She took a quote from Abraham Lincoln that all men are created equal and that's the way she believed."

Ralph Abernathy

(1926-1990) "You may as well get ready and fasten your seltbelts," Ralph Abernathy told a Selma, Alabama, crowd. "They are against us because we are black. They are against us because they don't want us to vote." Then he spoke to a police microphone attached to the pulpit. "I want you, doohickey, to tell 'em.... You go places we can't go!.... will you tell the good white folk of Selma, Alabama, that we are not afraid?" Abernathy was an engaging and persuasive spokesman, his earthly humor a good contrast to his friend Martin Luther King Jr.'s serious and philosophical style. He was a key organizer of the Montgomery bus boycott and a founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was also King's closest confidant, assuming the presidency of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference after King's death and leading the 1968 Poor People's Campaign that the two had planned.

Julian Bond

(1940-2015) Julian Bond was at Morehouse College in Atlanta when four North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College students sat in at a Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch counter. Within days, he joined other Atlantastudents to form the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights, sitting in on March 15, when he was arrested. The Atlanta movement grew to be one of the largest in the country. "At one time we had almost fifteen hundred people on a picket line," he recalled. "We were hell." Bond was a founding member and communications director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. His persistent, persuasive efforts to ublicize the desperate situation of African Americans in states like Mississippi - and the role of SNCC in fighting the frontline battles - contributed to documentation of the civil rights movement and a recognition of its importance. Bond continued to champion civil rights and served as NAACP Chairman of the Board from 1998 to 2009.

Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)

(1941-1998) In 1966, Stokely Carmichael, the new chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, addressed a crowd of civil rights marchers: "This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested, and I ain't going to jail no more!...We been saying freedom for six years, and we ain't got nothin'. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!" Although the phrase "Black Power" was not new, Carmichael's speech brought it into popular use. It symbolized a major force in the late 1960s civil rights movement. Carmichael himself embodied this shift, and the anger and passion of young African Americans who were disillusioned with the ability of nonviolent protest to effect change. In 1967, he coauthored "Black Power and the Politics of Liberation", which defined the concept of Black Power and its potential for correcting racial injustice. Carmichael emigrated to Guinea in 1968, where he took the name Kwame Ture.

James Meredith

(b. 1933) On September 26, 1962, sixteen days after the Supreme Court upheld James Meredith's right to attend the all-white University of Mississippi, Meredith drew up his will. "The price of progress is indeed high," he wrote, "but the price of holding it back is much higher." A U.S. Air Force veteran, Meredith filed suit through the NAACP when "Ole Miss" denied him admission. After the Supreme Court decree, some five hundred federal officials accompanied Meredith on campus. A white mob of more than two thousand rioted, injuring more than a hundred and fifty officials and killing two white bystanders. Nevertheless, Meredith not only registered, but, after enduring perpetual harassment, graduated on August 18, 1963. Three years later he began a march from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, to encourage voter registration. He was shot but later rejoined the march, which resulted in thousands of African Americans registering to vote in Mississippi.

Bob Moses

(b. 1935) A native of Harlem, New York, with a master's degree in philosophy from Harvard, Bob Moses was willing to challenge the fear and violence that characterized Mississippi, the toughest of the segregated states. He produced a plan for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to register black voters (only 5 percent of Mississippi blacks were registered to vote), beginning his project in McComb; little more than a year later, it had six offices with twenty field secretaries. In 1963, Moses was instrumental in organizing the Freedom Vote, a mock election that garnered 85,000 ballots from unregistered African Americans who got their first taste of the political process. And in 1964, he directed Mississippi Freedom Summer, a program that recruited one thousand northern students to run "freedom schools" providing basic literacy and political education and to help build support for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the all-white delegation to the Democratic National Convention.

Diane Nash

(b. 1938) In 1962, Diane Nash, convicted for "contributing to the deliquency of minors" when she recruited teenagers for civil rights demonstrations, decided that she would have her baby in jail. "This will be a black baby born in Mississippi, and thus wherever he is born, he will be in prison," she told the judge. She was released without serving a sentence. Known for her integrity and coolness under fire, Nash (second from right) had been a leader of the sit-ins that resulted in the desegregation of lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee. A founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Nash organized the continuation of the 1961 Freedom Rides after two buses were attacked in Alabama. As an organizer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, she was instrumental in conceiving the long-term strategy that led to the 1963 March on Washington and the Selma, Alabama, voting rights campaign.

Danny Lyon

(b.1942) Danny Lyon was a University of Chicago student when he saw a photograph of a civil rights activist being clubbed in Mississippi: "I was...a photographer, a history student, and an admirer of Mathew Brady, 'the historian with a camera.'" He hitchhiked south and became the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's first paid staff photographer, capturing indelible images that transformed the country's perception of segregation's violence and immorality. Lyon and other photographers inside the movement documented and publicized those unheralded events, unsung activists, and couregous ordinary people who confronted segregation's brutal realities - just as media coverage of such events as the Birmingham Campaign and the March on Washington garnered national support for change. SNCC leader John Lewis applauded those photographers, like Lyon, who put themselves at risk: "They went after the truth and showed America what was really happening....[Without them the movement] would have been like birds without wings."

Marian Wright Edelman

..(b. 1939) In 1967, senators Robert Kennedy and Joseph Clark toured the Mississippi Delta to witness the poverty of the rural population. Marian Wright Edelman, a young African American lawyer for the Child Development Group of Mississippi, had persuaded them to see the desperate situation for themselves. As a result of this tour, the federal government began issuing free food stamps - a step forward in the fight against hunger and a victory for Edelman, a human rights activist since her days at Spelman College, when she was arrested for sitting in at a segregated cafeteria. After graduating from Yale Law School, Edelman became the first African American woman to pass the bar in Mississippi, working to defend civil rights advocates and to integrate schools. As founder and leader of the Children's Defense Fund, she has served as a passionate advocate, policy shaper, and lobbyist for child and teen welfare for more than twenty-five years.

Segregation 1

Almost as soon as the Civil War ended, southern state legislatures passed "black codes," which, for example, limited the kinds of work black people could do and their freedom of assembly, or regulated their speech toward white people. African Americans exercised basic rights under Reconstruction, but when that period ended, southern states began revising their constitutions and passing new laws that eventually established the system of segregation: separation of white and black Americans in nearly every aspect of life. Schools, housing, libraries, restaurants, parks and beaches, transportation, and theaters like the one shown here were segregated, and African Americans were required to use "colored" toilets, water fountains, and waiting rooms in public places. They did not receive equal protection under the law, were often tried and convicted without representation by a lawyer, and rarely served on juries. Black voting rights were severely restricted by poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and discriminatory tests.

Segregation 2

Although legal segregation was confined to the eleven states of the former Confederacy, as well as Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia, segregation was also practiced by the federal government. During World War I, the armed forces were segregated; black soldiers held service positions, rather than leadership or combat positions. But in World War II, African Americans were no longer willing to accept segregated or discriminatory conditions. A threatened march on Washington in 1941 led to Franklin Roosevelt's executive order prohibiting discrimination in the defense industries; in 1948, the armed forces were desegregated. Moreover, African American service and sacrifice in the war effort heightened resistance to segregation once the war ended, when blacks returned to civilian life to find that they still could not buy a Coca-Cola at a machine such as the one in this photograph because of the color of their skin.

Mississippi Freedom Summer

Although the 1964 Civil Rights Act reaffirmed the right to vote, southern states continued to use poll taxes and other obstructive tactics. In repsonse, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organized "Freedom Summer" in 1964 to educate and register black voters in Mississippi, provide health care and legal aid, and build support for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which challenged the state's all-white Democratic party. SNCC recruited a thousand students, mostly from the North; amond them were Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, members of the Congress of Racial Equality. In June, the three disappeared. The search for them went on until August, when their bodies were found in an earthen dam. This photograph shows a flyer for a meeting honoring the three civil rights workers. Despite the fear and sorrow surrounding their deaths, thousands of blacks attended the freedom schools, and eighty thousand African Americans joined the MFDP.

Early Protests

Although there was no mass civil rights movement between World War I and the end of World War II, as there was in the 1950s and 1960s, organizations and individuals led public protests and lobbying efforts during this period. For example, in 1919, the NAACP published a report, "Thirty Years of Lunching, 1889-1919;" in 1921, the organization opened an office in Washington, D.C., to lobby for an antilynching bill. In 1934, Howard University students, wearing noises around their necks, pocketed the National Crime Conference when the conference leaders refused to discuss lynching as a national crime. A decade later, African Americans lobbied for legislation to end the poll tax. This photograph, taken in 1944, shows "pallbearer" with a casket signaling the end of Jim Crow, marching in the NAACP's Detroit, Michigan, "Parade for Victory." Such relatively modest steps for racial equality presaged a movement that would profoundly change the United States.

School Desegregation 2

As part of the NAACP's strategy to desegregate white graduate and professional schools, Thurgood Marshall sued for George McLaurin to attend the University of Oklahoma doctoral program in education. Marshall chose to argue McLaruin's case because "The Dixiecrats and the others said [the integration of graduate schools] was horrible. The only thing Negroes were trying to do, they said, was to get social equality.... there would be intermarriage, they said...We had eight people who...were eligible to be plaintiffs, but we deliberately picked Professor McLaurin because he was sixty-eight years old and we didn't think he was going to marry or intermarry - they could not bring that one on us, anyhow." Although the university was forced to accept a court ruling in McLaruin's favor, they made him sit separately in classes, the cafeteria, and the library. Marshall appealed against these conditions to the Supreme Court, which ruled in McLaurin's favor.

Student Movement/Black Power

As the 1960s progressed, there was a growing sense of frustration among African Americans impatient with the country's slow pace of change. The end of legal segregation in the South had not meant equality for black people, and many continued to suffer from poverty and discrimination. Civil rights workers shifted their focus from segregation to the broader issues of education, health care, job opportunities, and housing, with an emphasis on black power rather than nonviolent protest. At the same time, African Americans who had been taught to think of themselves as inferior to whites now expressed pride in themselves and their culture. The idea of black power swept college campuses. Students demanded classes in African and African American history, culture, and achievements; and demonstrators, such as these at Washington, D.C.'s Howard University, called for more black teachers, black studies programs, and a voice in setting school policy.

Huey P. Newton & Bobby Seale

Huey P. Newton (1942-1989), Bobby Seale (b. 1937) They wore black leather, carried weapons, and declaimed their intention to use any means necessary to defend themselves and their urban African American communities: they were the Black Panthers, founded in 1966 in Oakland, California, by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. Newton and Seale were advisory board members of a neighborhood antipoverty center when they formed the Panthers. Their image and rhetoric exemplified the most militant expression of black power, yet their goals were the same as those of the civil rights movement - justice, freedom, dignity, and self-determination. Although the media emphasized their militancy and the Panthers themselves emphasized their constitutional right to bear arms, they ran several programs valuable to poor communities, providing free breakfasts for children, clothing, and education in basic legal rights and African American history. Rarely mentioned by the press, this work brought self-help and self-respect to neighborhoods frustrated and alienated by decades of neglect.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

In 1960, Ella Baker called for national student conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, to organize the spontaneous sit-ins spreading throughout the South. Three hundred students formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and, following Baker's advice, maintained their independence from the established civil rights groups. SNCC formed the fron lines of nonviolent confrontation. Julian Bond, then SNCC communications director, characterized these student "shock troops" as "the band of brothers and circle of trust....The young people who worked for SNCC described themselves as organizers. They didn't register voters - they organized the unregistered to register themselves. They didn't integrate lunch counters - they organized a protest that forced the seats open." This photograph shows SNCC activists Bob Zellner, Bernice Reagon, Cordell Reagon, Dottie Miller Zellner, and Avon Rollins in Danville, Virginia, where demonstrators were clubbed and firehosed as they prayed at city hall in June 1963.

Selma Campaign

In January 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders targeted Selma, Alabama - where only one in every eight hundred eligible black voters were registered - for a campaign to secure voting rights. Demonstrators begam marching to the courthouse several times, then decided to march to the state capital, Montgomery. On March 7, when King was out of town, six hundred marchers led by Hosea Williams and John Lewis tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside of Selma when they were attacked by helmeted Alabama state troopers on horseback. On March 21, the marchers returned, guarded by federal troops, to make the four-day, fifty-four-mile walk to Montgomery, King and Ralph Abernathy (right) lead marchers in this photography. Nearly thirty thousand people joined in for the final three-mile stretch. The Selma campaingn focused national attention on the issue of voting rights in the South, leading to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

School Desegregation 1

In the 1930s, NAACP lawyers pursued a strategy to overturn segregation in education by attacking Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision declaring separate accomodations for African Americans legal as long as they were equal. They sued for admission to white graduate and professional schools, since most states did not have separate law, medical, or other graduate schools for blacks. In 1935, Charles Houston (shown here, right) and Thurgood Marshall (standing) represented Donald Gaines Murray (center), who was rejected by the University of Maryland's law school. They argued that without a black law program, Murray had the right to attend the white school, and that giving him financial aid to study in another state would not provide an equal edcuation, since he intended to practice law in Maryland. Houston and Marshall won their case in Baltimore city court, a landmark victory foreshadowing the breakdown of a legal defense for segregation.

Birmingham Campaign

Minister Fred Shuttlesworth invited Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to begin a campaign against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Birmingham was targeted because it was one of the most segregated cities in the South, with violence against blacks so prevalent that it was nicknamed "Bombingham." Eugene "Bull" Connor, the city safety commissioner, responded to the first protestors with arrests (King himself was jailed), and soon with police dogs and high-pressure fire hoses, as in this photograph. So many young people demonstrated that the Birmingham campaign became known as the Children's Crusade. The nation was shocked to see schoolchildren as young as six being hauled into paddy wagons or sprayed with water forceful enough to topple an adult. As television broadcast such scenes, a wide audience had their first look at the violence underlying segregation. Birmingham became a turning point in support for the movement.

Sit-ins

On February 1, 1960, four black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College - Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, David Richmond, and Ezell Blair Jr. - sat down at a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, where they were refused service. Nonetheless, they did not leave. The next day Ronald Martin, Robert Patterson, and Mark Martin, shown in this photograph, sat in at the lunch counter for the entire day. Within weeks, there were lunch counter sit-ins throughout the southern states, soon followed by "knell-ins" at all-white churches, "wade-ins" at swimming pools, and picket lines in front of movie theatres and department stores. Many of the participants were students trained in noviolent strategy who learned to sit patiently while white crowds harassed them, sometimes pelting them with food or pulling them from their seats. Although earlier sit-ins had not brought about widespread emulation, after Greensboro they became a staple of the civil rights movement.

Brown v. Board of Education

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court announced its historic Brown v. the Board of Education decision, declaring segregation of public schools unconstitutional. Not only did the court reject the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which ruled separate facilities legal is they were equal, but it also concluded that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." In 1955, the court issued the "Brown II" decision, charging communities to desegregate their schools "with all deliberate speed," but it set no timetables and left specific decisions up to lower courts. In most communities, strong local opposition to integration produced long delays and bitter conflict. By the fall of 1957, when this photography of Dorothy Counts was taken in Charlotte, North Carolina, only 684 of 3,000 affected southern school districts had even begun to desegregate their schools. Those young people, like Counts, who integrated all-white schools were often taunted, harassed, and threatened with violence.

Freedom Rides

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), led by James Farmer, organized th Freedom Rides in 1961 to test whether southern state were obeying a federal order that prohibited segregation of interstate buses, bus stations, and restaurants. The first two buses left Washington, D.C., on May 4, hoping to arrive in New Orleans for the anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. In Anniston, Alabama, a white mob set fire to the bus shown here and attacked the passengers. Another mob beat the Freedom Riders from the second bus as police looked on. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) quickly organized to replace these riders. At one point, National Guardsmen were called in to escort the buses. Despite violence and arrests, hundreds of CORE and SNCC volunteers rode the Freedom buses throughout the summer; that fall the federal government upheld the ruling against segregation in interstate buses and terminals.

Montgomery, Alabama, Bus Boycott

The modern civil rights movement is often said to have begun in 1955 with the boycott of segregated bus service by African Americans in Montgomery, Alabama, after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Jo Ann Robinson of Montgomery's Women's Political Council and E.D. Nixon, of the NAACP, saw Park's arrest as an opportunity to call for the boycott and demand changes in the bus company's segregation policy. They enlisted church leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., to spread the word. This photograph shows King addressing one of the mass meetings that rallied Montgomery's black citizens, who stayed off the buses for more than a year. At such meetings, King articulated a strategy of nonviolent protest that dominated the civil rights movement for the next ten years. The boycott ended when a 1956 Supreme Court ruling banned segregated seating on buses.

Martin Luther King Jr.

(1929-1968) In 1963, Martin Luther Jr. wrote a letter from jail in Birmingham, Alabama, to those who urged patience with segregation. "When you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters," King declared, "when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro...then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait." A believer in noviolent protest, King first fame to prominence during the 1955-1956 Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott and as the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. His "I Have a Dream" speech at the 1963 March on Washington riveted Americans with its moral fervor, and the demonstrations he organized in Selma, Alabama, led to a law gaurenteeing African American voting rights. King's tragic assassination in 1968 ended his life, but could not dim the truth of his message.

March on Washington

Longtime activist A. Philip Randolph proposed a march on Washington in 1963 to demand equal employment opportunities and training for African Americans. Civil rights leaders soon expanded the demands to include passage of a strong civil rights law and the integration of public schools within a year. The march, held on August 28, 1963, drew an estimated 250,000 people, the largest demostration up to that time in the United States. Although the majority of marchers were African American, an estimated 20 to 25 percent were white. Participants came from all parts of the country and from around the world, and transportation included thirty special trains and two thousand chartered buses. President John Kennedy had tried to persuade civil rights leaders not to march, fearing violence. In fact, the march was orderly and peaceful, impressive in its dignity and determination. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, ending legal segregation of public accomodations, the following year.

Little Rock, Arkansas, Desegregates

Little Rock, Arkansas, was a relatively liberal community; its school board had been the first in the South to agree to desegregate its schools in compliance with the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. However, just before school opened in 1957, Arkansas governor Orval Fausbus announced that he would call out the Arkansas National Guard to "maintain order" in case of "forcible integration." White mobs prevented the nine black students chosen to integrate Central High School from entering. President Dwight Eisenhower was finally forced to send in federal troops to protect the "Little Rock Nine" and to ensure they could attend classes. National Guardsmen, like the one in this photograph, remained at Central High throughout the school year. In the spring, Ernest Green became the first African American to graduate from Central, but Governor Faubus closed the Little Rock schools for the next two years, rather than integrate them.