Brown’s school ruling lit a decade of nonviolent mass protest
The U.S. civil rights movement of 1954–1968 sought to end legal segregation, discrimination, and Black disenfranchisement, with roots in Reconstruction’s unfinished promises. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) struck down school segregation; Montgomery’s bus boycott and campaigns led by Martin Luther King Jr. followed.
After the Civil War of 1861 to 1865, three Reconstruction Amendments ended slavery and made African Americans citizens, and for a time Black men in the South voted and held office. After 1877 those gains were stripped away by Jim Crow laws that segregated schools, banned interracial marriage and imposed literacy tests on voters, backed by white supremacist violence. The Supreme Court endorsed separate but equal in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, and Black families who moved north in the Great Migration met barriers in jobs and housing. Figures like W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington made scant headway before 1945; in 1948 President Truman ended discrimination in the armed forces.
The modern movement, running from 1954 to 1968, also drew on Gandhi's nonviolent campaign in India. In 1954 Brown v. Board of Education struck down state laws segregating public schools. Martin Luther King Jr. and fellow organisers went on to lead a year-long bus boycott in Montgomery from 1955, student lunch-counter protests in Greensboro and Nashville in 1960, the 1963 Birmingham push with its youth marches, and the 1965 walk from Selma to Montgomery. Coverage of the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955, and of fire hoses and dogs turned on marchers in Birmingham, swung public opinion.
About 250,000 people joined the 1963 March on Washington, after which President Kennedy asked Congress for legislation. Lyndon Johnson overcame southern opposition to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing discrimination by race, colour, religion, sex or national origin in employment and public accommodations; the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which put election rules in areas with a record of suppression under federal oversight; and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The courts added Browder v. Gayle in 1956, ending bus segregation, and Loving v. Virginia in 1967, striking down bans on interracial marriage.
Most legal discrimination ended, but informal racism did not. By the mid-1960s the Black power movement, shaped by Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party, attacked mainstream leaders as too gradual. Unrest in Black communities from 1964 to 1969, peaking in 1967 and after King's assassination in 1968, cost the movement support among white moderates, and gaps in income, housing, education and justice persist.
Source: Civil rights movement
