Portal:Civil rights movement

The civil rights movement portal

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 in the United States from 1954 to 1968 which aimed to abolish legalized racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement in the country, which most commonly affected African Americans. The movement had origins in the Reconstruction era in the late 19th century, and modern roots in the 1940s. After years of nonviolent protests and civil disobedience campaigns, the civil rights movement achieved many of its legislative goals in the 1960s, during which it secured new protections in federal law for the civil rights of all Americans.

Following the American Civil War (1861–1865), the three Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery and granted citizenship to all African Americans, the majority of whom had recently been enslaved in the southern states. During Reconstruction, African-American men in the South voted and held political office, but after 1877 they were increasingly deprived of civil rights under racist Jim Crow laws (which for example banned interracial marriage, introduced literacy tests for voters, and segregated schools) and were subjected to violence from white supremacists during the nadir of American race relations. African Americans who moved to the North in order to improve their prospects in the Great Migration also faced barriers in employment and housing. Legal racial discrimination was upheld by the Supreme Court in its 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which established the doctrine of "separate but equal". The movement for civil rights, led by figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, achieved few gains until after World War II. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman issued an executive order abolishing discrimination in the armed forces.

In 1954, the Supreme Court struck down state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education. A mass movement for civil rights, led by Martin Luther King Jr. and others, began a campaign of nonviolent protests and civil disobedience including the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955–1956, "sit-ins" in Greensboro and Nashville in 1960, the Birmingham campaign in 1963, and a march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. Press coverage of events such as the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 and the use of fire hoses and dogs against protesters in Birmingham increased public support for the civil rights movement. In 1963, about 250,000 people participated in the March on Washington, after which President John F. Kennedy asked Congress to pass civil rights legislation. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, overcame the opposition of southern politicians to pass three major laws: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in public accommodations, employment, and federally assisted programs; the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed discriminatory voting laws and authorized federal oversight of election law in areas with a history of voter suppression; and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which banned housing discrimination. The Supreme Court made further pro–civil rights rulings in cases including Browder v. Gayle (1956) and Loving v. Virginia (1967), banning segregation in public transport and striking down laws against interracial marriage. (Full article...)

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Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal". The decision legitimized the many state "Jim Crow laws" re-establishing racial segregation that had been passed in the American South after the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877. Such legally enforced segregation in the South lasted into the 1960s.

The underlying case began in 1892 when Homer Plessy, a mixed-race man, deliberately boarded a whites-only train car in New Orleans. By boarding the whites-only car, Plessy violated Louisiana's Separate Car Act of 1890, which required "equal, but separate" railroad accommodations for white and black passengers. Plessy was charged under the Act, and at his trial his lawyers argued that judge John Howard Ferguson should dismiss the charges on the grounds that the Act was unconstitutional. Ferguson denied the request, and the Louisiana Supreme Court upheld Ferguson's ruling on appeal. Plessy then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In May 1896, the Supreme Court issued a 7–1 decision against Plessy, ruling that the Louisiana law did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and stating that although the Fourteenth Amendment established the legal equality of whites and blacks, it did not and could not require the elimination of all "distinctions based upon color". The Court rejected Plessy's lawyers' arguments that the Louisiana law inherently implied that black people were inferior, and gave great deference to American state legislatures' inherent power to make laws regulating health, safety, and morals—the "police power"—and to determine the reasonableness of the laws they passed. Justice John Marshall Harlan was the lone dissenter from the Court's decision, writing that the U.S. Constitution "is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens", and so the laws distinguishing races should have been found unconstitutional. (Full article...)

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

Image 1"A Man Was Lynched Yesterday" flag, hanging at the Library of Congress (from Civil rights movement (1896–1954))
Image 2One of the many churches involved in aiding members of the sit-movement. (from Sit-in movement)
Image 3Executive 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 4Freedmen voting in New Orleans, 1867 (from Civil rights movement (1865–1896))
Image 5Charlton Heston, James Baldwin, Marlon Brando, and Harry Belafonte (from March on Washington)
Image 6Joan Baez and Bob Dylan performing at the March on Washington (from March on Washington)
Image 7Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, AME leader in Georgia. (from Civil rights movement (1865–1896))
Image 8Montgomery Improvement Association poster announcing desegrated seating on buses (New York Public Library) (from Montgomery bus boycott)
Image 9Image of workers guarding a entrance to the Fischer Body Plant in Flint, Michigan (1937) (from Sit-in movement)
Image 1050th Anniversary of the Civil Rights March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (from March on Washington)
Image 11Poster from Office of War Information. Domestic Operations Branch. News Bureau, 1943 (from Civil rights movement (1896–1954))
Image 12Kathleen Cleaver delivering a speech, 1971 (from African-American women in the civil rights movement)
Image 13First 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 14Fannie 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 15Juvenile African-American convicts working in the fields in a chain gang, photo taken c. 1903 (from Civil rights movement (1896–1954))
Image 16March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom program (from March on Washington)
Image 17Women marching for equal rights, integrated schools and decent housing (from African-American women in the civil rights movement)
Image 18Rosa Parks being fingerprinted by Deputy Sheriff D.H. Lackey after her arrest for boycotting public transportation (from Montgomery bus boycott)
Image 19Rosa 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 20Leaders gather for a portrait (from March on Washington)
Image 21Black people in Memphis under attack, Harper's Weekly, 26 May 1866 (from Civil rights movement (1865–1896))
Image 22Close up of some leaders of the March on Washington walking along Constitution Avenue. (from March on Washington)
Image 23Leaders of the March on Washington speak to the news media after meeting with President Kennedy at the White House. (from March on Washington)
Image 24Vocalists Peter, Paul, and Mary (from March on Washington)
Image 25Leaders 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)
Image 26Martin Luther King Jr. waving his hand to the crowd after delivering his "I Have a Dream" speech (from March on Washington)
Image 27Additional image of Civil Rights protestors executing a sit-in at a Woolworth's in Durham, North Carolina on February 10th of 1960. (from Sit-in movement)
Image 28Leaders arrived late and linked arms in front of marchers on Constitution Avenue. (from March on Washington)
Image 29African American women participate in Civil Rights protest in Tallahassee, Florida, 1963 (from African-American women in the civil rights movement)
Image 30Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibition "381 Days: The Montgomery Bus Boycott" at the Washington State History Museum (from Montgomery bus boycott)
Image 31Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte and Charlton Heston (from March on Washington)
Image 32John Lewis speaking in the Great Hall of the Library of Congress on the 50th anniversary, August 28, 2013 (from March on Washington)
Image 33Actor Ossie Davis (from March on Washington)
Image 34Kennedy 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)
Image 35A diagram showing where Rosa Parks sat in the unreserved section at the time of her arrest (from Montgomery bus boycott)

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Charlotte L. Brown (1839–?) was an American educator and civil rights activist who was one of the first to legally challenge racial segregation in the United States when she filed a successful lawsuit against a streetcar company in San Francisco in the 1860s after she was forcibly removed from a segregated streetcar. Brown's legal action and the precedent it created led to additional challenges to segregation in San Francisco and within 30 years, California enacted legislation to make such segregation on streetcars illegal statewide. (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?