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Civil Rights Movement By: History.com Editors Updated: October 12, 2023 | Original: October 27, 2009 Table of Contents The civil rights movement was a struggle for social justice that took place mainly during the 1950s and 1960s for Black Americans to gain equal rights under the law in the United States. Bloody Sunday On March 7, 1965, the civil rights movement in Alabama took an especially violent turn as 600 peaceful demonstrators participated in the Selma to Montgomery march to protest the killing of Black civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson by a white police officer and to encourage legislation to enforce the 15th amendment. In the fall of 1961, under pressure from the Kennedy administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued regulations prohibiting segregation in interstate transit terminals March on Washington Arguably one of the most famous events of the civil rights movement took place on August 28, 1963: the March on Washington. In 1966, Carmichael became the chair of the SNCC, giving his famous speech in which he originated the phrase "Black power.” Freedom Riders On May 4, 1961, 13 “Freedom Riders”—seven Black and six white activists–mounted a Greyhound bus in Washington, D.C., embarking on a bus tour of the American south to protest segregated bus terminals. When a white man got on the bus and couldn’t find a seat in the white section at the front of the bus, the bus driver instructed Parks and three other Black passengers to give up their seats.

In the mid-1950s, the modern civil rights movement arose out of the desire of African Americans to win the equality and freedom from discrimination that continued to elude them nearly a century after slavery was abolished in the United States. The Greensboro Four Sit at a Woolworth Lunch Counter Another key moment in the civil rights movement began on February 1, 1960, when four Black students at the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina (now North Carolina A&T State University), sat down at a “whites-only” lunch counter inside a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, N.C. and refused to leave when they were denied service. With images of “Bloody Sunday” broadcast across the world, the marchers drew wide public sympathy—and the support of President Johnson, who federalized the Alabama National Guard to protect the marchers along the way. Meanwhile, television and newspaper coverage of the events in Little Rock drew international attention to the issue of school segregation, the battle over federal and state power and the growing civil rights movement. Recognizing that lack of fair housing was a crucial component of racial injustice in the United States, King took a leading role in the Chicago Freedom Movement, a campaign of marches and demonstrations calling for open housing in that city beginning in 1965.

Timeline of the American Civil Rights Movement The civil rights movement came to national prominence in the United States during the mid-1950s and continued to challenge racial segregation and discrimination through the 1960s. The case was decided nine years after Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, a woman of mixed African American and Native American ancestry, had pleaded guilty to having violated Virginia state law prohibiting a white person and a “colored” person from leaving the state to be married and returning to live as man and wife. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for a unanimous court that the freedom to marry was a basic civil right and that to deny that freedom based on the groundless classifications outlined in Virginia state’s law was “to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law.” In the spring of 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the SCLC launched a campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, with local Pastor Fred Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) to undermine the city’s system of racial segregation. The McCone Commission later investigated the causes of the riots and concluded that they were not the work of gangs or the Black Muslim movement, as the media had previously suggested.