essay about african american civil rights

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Course: US history   >   Unit 8

Introduction to the civil rights movement.

• African American veterans and the Civil Rights Movement
• Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
• Emmett Till
• The Montgomery Bus Boycott
• "Massive Resistance" and the Little Rock Nine
• The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
• The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965
• SNCC and CORE

Black Power

• The Civil Rights Movement
• The Civil Rights Movement is an umbrella term for the many varieties of activism that sought to secure full political, social, and economic rights for African Americans in the period from 1946 to 1968.
• Civil rights activism involved a diversity of approaches, from bringing lawsuits in court, to lobbying the federal government, to mass direct action, to black power.
• The efforts of civil rights activists resulted in many substantial victories, but also met with the fierce opposition of white supremacists .

The emergence of the Civil Rights Movement

Civil rights and the supreme court, nonviolent protest and civil disobedience, the unfinished business of the civil rights movement, what do you think.

• See Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
• See C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955).
• See Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
• See Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State during World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Stephen Tuck,  Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
• See Michael J. Klarman, Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
• See Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006).
• See Michael Eric Dyson, The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016).
• See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010).
• See Tavis Smiley, ed., The Covenant with Black America: Ten Years Later (Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, Inc., 2016).

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The Civil Rights Movement: 7 Key Moments That Led to Change

By: Sarah Pruitt

Updated: January 30, 2024 | Original: February 1, 2024

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.

To confront the widespread segregation, disenfranchisement and violence faced by Black people on a daily basis, activists used different types of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience to win public sympathy to their cause and bring about meaningful legislative change.

From a bus boycott to Freedom Rides to the fight for fair housing, here are seven pivotal moments in the civil rights movement. 

1. Nine Black Students Arrive at Central High School in Little Rock

Though the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), state and local officials in a number of Southern states continued to block integration of their schools.

In 1957, the NAACP resolved to challenge these policies, enlisted nine Black students who agreed to register at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. When the students showed up for the first day of classes on September 4, they confronted a furious mob of white students and others, as well as 250 Arkansas National Guard officers sent by Governor Orval Faubus to prevent them from entering.

After a standoff that lasted several weeks, President Dwight Eisenhower issued an executive order that put the state National Guard under federal authority and sent U.S. troops to enforce the federal desegregation order . Escorted by members of the 101st Airborne Division, the “ Little Rock Nine '' were finally able to enter Central High, though they faced continued physical and verbal attacks during their time there.

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.

2. Rosa Parks Refuses to Give Up Her Seat

Black activists in Montgomery, Alabama had challenged the city’s bus segregation before, but something different happened after December 1, 1955, when seamstress and local NAACP chapter secretary Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on the bus to a white passenger. In response to Parks’ arrest, the Montgomery Improvement Association and its young president, Martin Luther King Jr. led some 90 percent of the city’s Black residents in a boycott of the city’s buses.

Despite efforts by city officials and white citizens to thwart them, the boycotters stayed firm, organizing carpools or walking miles to work every day to continue their protest.

In June 1956, a federal district court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that Alabama’s segregation of buses was unconstitutional; the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that decision in November. On December 20, King called for an end to the bus boycott after 382 days. “We came to see that, in the long run, it is more honorable to walk in dignity than ride in humiliation,” he said.

The success of the Montgomery bus boycott demonstrated the effectiveness of nonviolent civil disobedience, and prompted its leaders to form a new civil rights organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, with King as its president. 

3. 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.

They stayed seated until closing time, and the following day returned with around 20 other Black students; hundreds more had joined by the end of that week.  

Fueled by media coverage, word spread quickly about the events precipitated by the “ Greensboro Four ,” sparking a wider sit-in movement in cities across the country organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

As a result of such coordinated resistance, dining establishments throughout the South were forced to integrate, including, by July 1960, the original Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro.

Like the bus boycott in Montgomery, the sit-in movement provided an early and potent example of how nonviolent civil disobedience could effect change in the civil rights movement.

4. The Freedom Riders Travel South

After the U.S. Supreme Court banned segregation in interstate bus travel in 1946, activists from the Congress of Racial Equality and the Fellowship of Reconciliation tested the verdict with an interracial bus ride through the upper South they called the Journey of Reconciliation. In 1960, when the Court extended the ban to include bus terminals, restrooms and other facilities, CORE decided to resurrect the idea of “ Freedom Rides ” to ensure that states were enforcing the rulings.

On May 4, 1961, seven Black and white activists boarded two buses bound from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans. As they traveled deeper into the South, the riders faced increased violence, culminating on May 14, when a mob of some 100 people met the buses upon their arrival in Anniston, Alabama. One bus was firebombed, and the riders beaten by the assembled crowd, which included members of the Ku Klux Klan who had been permitted by local authorities to attack the riders without fear of arrest.

A new band of Freedom Riders soon took up the charge. Even as hundreds of riders were arrested throughout the South, coverage of their treatment by local authorities and citizens galvanized public opinion in support of their cause. In the fall of 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission bowed to pressure from the Kennedy administration, issuing regulations that enforced the Court’s bans on segregation on interstate buses, terminals and other facilities.

5. The March on Washington Showcases Support for Civil Rights

A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters , first called for a march on Washington in 1941 to demand jobs for African Americans in the booming wartime economy. Plans were canceled after President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to issue an executive order banning discrimination by defense industries.

Flash forward two decades, with President John F. Kennedy ’s proposed civil rights legislation stalled in Congress, Randolph joined a group of leaders calling for a march to speed the progress toward racial and economic equality.

On August 28, 1963, some 250,000 people marched from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. in a show of unity and support for the civil rights bill.

In addition to speeches by Randolph and other leaders, the assembled crowd enjoyed performances by music legends Mahalia Jackson, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.

Last to speak was King, who delivered a 16-minute speech that would become one of the most famous orations in history . After the march, King and other march organizers met with Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House to discuss the need for bipartisan support for civil rights legislation.

Though Kennedy was assassinated that November, Johnson would sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964 —the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction—into law less than a year after the March on Washington .

6. Police Beat Protestors in Selma on ‘Bloody Sunday’

Though the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protected voting rights for African Americans, efforts to register Black voters in southern states continued to meet with fierce resistance after its passage.

In early 1965, King and other civil rights leaders decided to wage a voting rights campaign centered in Selma, Alabama, where only 2 percent of Black residents had been able to get on the voting rolls. After an Alabama state trooper fatally shot a young demonstrator, Jimmie Lee Jackson, civil rights leaders planned a protest march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery , some 54 miles away.

On Sunday, March 7, Alabama state troopers wielding night sticks, tear gas and other weapons rushed the group of some 600 marchers as they crossed the  Edmund Pettis Bridge, beating them back to Selma.

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.

On March 21, some 3,500 marchers left Selma for Montgomery, arriving on March 25, when King delivered another iconic oration, known as his “How Long, Not Long” speech, on the steps of the state capitol. Less than five months later, Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965 , which guaranteed the right to vote to all African Americans. 

7. MLK Joins Marches for Fair Housing in Chicago

By the mid-1960s, despite Supreme Court decisions outlawing the exclusion of African Americans from certain areas of cities, racial discrimination in the rental and sale of housing remained widespread across the country.

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.

In August 1966, the movement won two important victories, when the Chicago Housing Authority agreed to build public housing in predominantly white areas and the Mortgage Bankers Association pledged to end discriminatory lending practices. 

On April 4, 1968, with proposed federal fair housing legislation stalled in Congress, King was assassinated in Memphis. Just one week later, in King’s honor, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act , which became the final major legislative achievement of the civil rights movement.

The law protected buyers or renters of housing from discrimination, making it unlawful for sellers, landlords and financial institutions to refuse to sell, rent or provide financing for a dwelling based on factors other than an individual’s financial resources—including race, religion or national origin.

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The drama of the mid-twentieth century emerged on a foundation of earlier struggles. Two are particularly notable: the NAACP’s campaign against lynching, and the NAACP’s legal campaign against segregated education, which culminated in the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision.

The NAACP’s anti-lynching campaign of the 1930s combined widespread publicity about the causes and costs of lynching, a successful drive to defeat Supreme Court nominee John J. Parker for his white supremacist and anti-union views and then defeat senators who voted for confirmation, and a skillful effort to lobby Congress and the Roosevelt administration to pass a federal anti-lynching law. Southern senators filibustered, but they could not prevent the formation of a national consensus against lynching; by 1938 the number of lynchings declined steeply. Other organizations, such as the left-wing National Negro Congress, fought lynching, too, but the NAACP emerged from the campaign as the most influential civil rights organization in national politics and maintained that position through the mid-1950s.

Houston was unabashed: lawyers were either social engineers or they were parasites. He desired equal access to education, but he also was concerned with the type of society blacks were trying to integrate. He was among those who surveyed American society and saw racial inequality and the ruling powers that promoted racism to divide black workers from white workers. Because he believed that racial violence in Depression-era America was so pervasive as to make mass direct action untenable, he emphasized the redress of grievances through the courts.

The designers of the Brown strategy developed a potent combination of gradualism in legal matters and advocacy of far-reaching change in other political arenas. Through the 1930s and much of the 1940s, the NAACP initiated suits that dismantled aspects of the edifice of segregated education, each building on the precedent of the previous one. Not until the late 1940s did the NAACP believe it politically feasible to challenge directly the constitutionality of “separate but equal” education itself. Concurrently, civil rights organizations backed efforts to radically alter the balance of power between employers and workers in the United States. They paid special attention to forming an alliance with organized labor, whose history of racial exclusion angered blacks. In the 1930s, the National Negro Congress brought blacks into the newly formed United Steel Workers, and the union paid attention to the particular demands of African Americans. The NAACP assisted the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the largest black labor organization of its day. In the 1940s, the United Auto Workers, with NAACP encouragement, made overtures to black workers. The NAACP’s successful fight against the Democratic white primary in the South was more than a bid for inclusion; it was a stiff challenge to what was in fact a regional one-party dictatorship. Recognizing the interdependence of domestic and foreign affairs, the NAACP’s program in the 1920s and 1930s promoted solidarity with Haitians who were trying to end the American military occupation and with colonized blacks elsewhere in the Caribbean and in Africa. African Americans’ support for WWII and the battle against the Master Race ideology abroad was matched by equal determination to eradicate it in America, too. In the post-war years blacks supported the decolonization of Africa and Asia.

The Cold War and McCarthyism put a hold on such expansive conceptions of civil/human rights. Critics of our domestic and foreign policies who exceeded narrowly defined boundaries were labeled un-American and thus sequestered from Americans’ consciousness. In a supreme irony, the Supreme Court rendered the Brown decision and then the government suppressed the very critique of American society that animated many of Brown ’s architects.

White southern resistance to Brown was formidable and the slow pace of change stimulated impatience especially among younger African Americans as the 1960s began. They concluded that they could not wait for change—they had to make it. And the Montgomery Bus Boycott , which lasted the entire year of 1956, had demonstrated that mass direct action could indeed work. The four college students from Greensboro who sat at the Woolworth lunch counter set off a decade of activity and organizing that would kill Jim Crow.

Elimination of segregation in public accommodations and the removal of “Whites Only” and “Colored Only” signs was no mean feat. Yet from the very first sit-in, Ella Baker , the grassroots leader whose activism dated from the 1930s and who was advisor to the students who founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), pointed out that the struggle was “concerned with something much bigger than a hamburger or even a giant-sized Coke.” Far more was at stake for these activists than changing the hearts of whites. When the sit-ins swept Atlanta in 1960, protesters’ demands included jobs, health care, reform of the police and criminal justice system, education, and the vote. (See: “An Appeal for Human Rights.” ) Demonstrations in Birmingham in 1963 under the leadership of Fred Shuttlesworth’s Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, which was affiliated with the SCLC, demanded not only an end to segregation in downtown stores but also jobs for African Americans in those businesses and municipal government. The 1963 March on Washington, most often remembered as the event at which Dr. King proclaimed his dream, was a demonstration for “Jobs and Justice.”

Movement activists from SNCC and CORE asked sharp questions about the exclusive nature of American democracy and advocated solutions to the disfranchisement and violation of the human rights of African Americans, including Dr. King’s nonviolent populism, Robert Williams’ “armed self-reliance,” and Malcolm X’s incisive critiques of worldwide white supremacy, among others. (See: Dr. King, “Where Do We Go from Here?” ; Robert F. Williams, “Negroes with Guns” ; and Malcolm X, “Not just an American problem, but a world problem.” ) What they proposed was breathtakingly radical, especially in light of today’s political discourse and the simplistic ways it prefers to remember the freedom struggle. King called for a guaranteed annual income, redistribution of the national wealth to meet human needs, and an end to a war to colonize the Vietnamese. Malcolm X proposed to internationalize the black American freedom struggle and to link it with liberation movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Thus the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s was not concerned exclusively with interracial cooperation or segregation and discrimination as a character issue. Rather, as in earlier decades, the prize was a redefinition of American society and a redistribution of social and economic power.

Guiding Student Discussion

Students discussing the Civil Rights Movement will often direct their attention to individuals’ motives. For example, they will question whether President Kennedy sincerely believed in racial equality when he supported civil rights or only did so out of political expediency. Or they may ask how whites could be so cruel as to attack peaceful and dignified demonstrators. They may also express awe at Martin Luther King’s forbearance and calls for integration while showing discomfort with Black Power’s separatism and proclamations of self-defense. But a focus on the character and moral fiber of leading individuals overlooks the movement’s attempts to change the ways in which political, social, and economic power are exercised. Leading productive discussions that consider broader issues will likely have to involve debunking some conventional wisdom about the Civil Rights Movement. Guiding students to discuss the extent to which nonviolence and racial integration were considered within the movement to be hallowed goals can lead them to greater insights.

Nonviolence and passive resistance were prominent tactics of protesters and organizations. (See: SNCC Statement of Purpose and Jo Ann Gibson Robinson’s memoir, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It. ) But they were not the only ones, and the number of protesters who were ideologically committed to them was relatively small. Although the name of one of the important civil rights organizations was the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, its members soon concluded that advocating nonviolence as a principle was irrelevant to most African Americans they were trying to reach. Movement participants in Mississippi, for example, did not decide beforehand to engage in violence, but self-defense was simply considered common sense. If some SNCC members in Mississippi were convinced pacifists in the face of escalating violence, they nevertheless enjoyed the protection of local people who shared their goals but were not yet ready to beat their swords into ploughshares.

Armed self-defense had been an essential component of the black freedom struggle, and it was not confined to the fringe. Returning soldiers fought back against white mobs during the Red Summer of 1919. In 1946, World War Two veterans likewise protected black communities in places like Columbia, Tennessee, the site of a bloody race riot. Their self-defense undoubtedly brought national attention to the oppressive conditions of African Americans; the NAACP’s nationwide campaign prompted President Truman to appoint a civil rights commission that produced To Secure These Rights , a landmark report that called for the elimination of segregation. Army veteran Robert F. Williams, who was a proponent of what he called “armed self-reliance,” headed a thriving branch of the NAACP in Monroe, North Carolina, in the early 1950s. The poet Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die” dramatically captures the spirit of self-defense and violence.

Often, deciding whether violence is “good” or “bad,” necessary or ill-conceived depends on one’s perspective and which point of view runs through history books. Students should be encouraged to consider why activists may have considered violence a necessary part of their work and what role it played in their overall programs. Are violence and nonviolence necessarily antithetical, or can they be complementary? For example the Black Panther Party may be best remembered by images of members clad in leather and carrying rifles, but they also challenged widespread police brutality, advocated reform of the criminal justice system, and established community survival programs, including medical clinics, schools, and their signature breakfast program. One question that can lead to an extended discussion is to ask students what the difference is between people who rioted in the 1960s and advocated violence and the participants in the Boston Tea Party at the outset of the American Revolution. Both groups wanted out from oppression, both saw that violence could be efficacious, and both were excoriated by the rulers of their day. Teachers and students can then explore reasons why those Boston hooligans are celebrated in American history and whether the same standards should be applied to those who used arms in the 1960s.

An important goal of the Civil Rights Movement was the elimination of segregation. But if students, who are now a generation or more removed from Jim Crow, are asked to define segregation, they are likely to point out examples of individual racial separation such as blacks and whites eating at different cafeteria tables and the existence of black and white houses of worship. Like most of our political leaders and public opinion, they place King’s injunction to judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin exclusively in the context of personal relationships and interactions. Yet segregation was a social, political, and economic system that placed African Americans in an inferior position, disfranchised them, and was enforced by custom, law, and official and vigilante violence.

The discussion of segregation should be expanded beyond expressions of personal preferences. One way to do this is to distinguish between black and white students hanging out in different parts of a school and a law mandating racially separate schools, or between black and white students eating separately and a laws or customs excluding African Americans from restaurants and other public facilities. Put another way, the civil rights movement was not fought merely to ensure that students of different backgrounds could become acquainted with each other. The goal of an integrated and multicultural America is not achieved simply by proximity. Schools, the economy, and other social institutions needed to be reformed to meet the needs for all. This was the larger and widely understood meaning of the goal of ending Jim Crow, and it is argued forcefully by James Farmer in “Integration or Desegregation.”

A guided discussion should point out that many of the approaches to ending segregation did not embrace integration or assimilation, and students should become aware of the appeal of separatism. W. E. B. Du Bois believed in what is today called multiculturalism. But by the mid-1930s he concluded that the Great Depression, virulent racism, and the unreliability of white progressive reformers who had previously expressed sympathy for civil rights rendered an integrated America a distant dream. In an important article, “Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?” Du Bois argued for the strengthening of black pride and the fortification of separate black schools and other important institutions. Black communities across the country were in severe distress; it was counterproductive, he argued, to sacrifice black schoolchildren at the altar of integration and to get them into previously all-white schools, where they would be shunned and worse. It was far better to invest in strengthening black-controlled education to meet black communities’ needs. If, in the future, integration became a possibility, African Americans would be positioned to enter that new arrangement on equal terms. Du Bois’ argument found echoes in the 1960s writing of Stokely Carmichael ( “Toward Black Liberation” ) and Malcolm X ( “The Ballot or the Bullet” ).

Scholars Debate

Any brief discussion of historical literature on the Civil Rights Movement is bound to be incomplete. The books offered—a biography, a study of the black freedom struggle in Memphis, a brief study of the Brown decision, and a debate over the unfolding of the movement—were selected for their accessibility variety, and usefulness to teaching, as well as the soundness of their scholarship.

Walter White: Mr. NAACP , by Kenneth Robert Janken, is a biography of one of the most well known civil rights figure of the first half of the twentieth century. White made a name for himself as the NAACP’s risk-taking investigator of lynchings, riots, and other racial violence in the years after World War I. He was a formidable persuader and was influential in the halls of power, counting Eleanor Roosevelt, senators, representatives, cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices, union leaders, Hollywood moguls, and diplomats among his circle of friends. His style of work depended upon rallying enlightened elites, and he favored a placing effort into developing a civil rights bureaucracy over local and mass-oriented organizations. Walter White was an expert in the practice of “brokerage politics”: During decades when the majority of African Americans were legally disfranchised, White led the organization that gave them an effective voice, representing them and interpreting their demands and desires (as he understood them) to those in power. Two examples of this were highlighted in the first part of this essay: the anti-lynching crusade, and the lobbying of President Truman, which resulted in To Secure These Rights . A third example is his essential role in producing Marian Anderson’s iconic 1939 Easter Sunday concert at the Lincoln Memorial, which drew the avid support of President Roosevelt and members of his administration, the Congress, and the Supreme Court. His style of leadership was, before the emergence of direct mass action in the years after White’s death in 1955, the dominant one in the Civil Rights Movement.

There are many excellent books that study the development of the Civil Rights Movement in one locality or state. An excellent addition to the collection of local studies is Battling the Plantation Mentality , by Laurie B. Green, which focuses on Memphis and the surrounding rural areas of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi between the late 1930s and 1968, when Martin Luther King was assassinated there. Like the best of the local studies, this book presents an expanded definition of civil rights that encompasses not only desegregation of public facilities and the attainment of legal rights but also economic and political equality. Central to this were efforts by African Americans to define themselves and shake off the cultural impositions and mores of Jim Crow. During WWII, unionized black men went on strike in the defense industry to upgrade their job classifications. Part of their grievances revolved around wages and working conditions, but black workers took issue, too, with employers’ and the government’s reasoning that only low status jobs were open to blacks because they were less intelligent and capable. In 1955, six black female employees at a white-owned restaurant objected to the owner’s new method of attracting customers as degrading and redolent of the plantation: placing one of them outside dressed as a mammy doll to ring a dinner bell. When the workers tried to walk off the job, the owner had them arrested, which gave rise to local protest. In 1960, black Memphis activists helped support black sharecroppers in surrounding counties who were evicted from their homes when they initiated voter registration drives. The 1968 sanitation workers strike mushroomed into a mass community protest both because of wage issues and the strikers’ determination to break the perception of their being dependent, epitomized in their slogan “I Am a Man.” This book also shows that not everyone was able to cast off the plantation mentality, as black workers and energetic students at LeMoyne College confronted established black leaders whose positions and status depended on white elites’ sufferance.

Brown v. Board of Education: A Brief History with Documents , edited by Waldo E. Martin, Jr., contains an insightful 40-page essay that places both the NAACP’s legal strategy and 1954 Brown decision in multiple contexts, including alternate approaches to incorporating African American citizens into the American nation, and the impact of World War II and the Cold War on the road to Brown . The accompanying documents affirm the longstanding black freedom struggle, including demands for integrated schools in Boston in 1849, continuing with protests against the separate but equal ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson of 1896, and important items from the NAACP’s cases leading up to Brown . The documents are prefaced by detailed head notes and provocative discussion questions.

Debating the Civil Rights Movement , by Steven F. Lawson and Charles Payne, is likewise focused on instruction and discussion. This essay has largely focused on the development of the Civil Rights Movement from the standpoint of African American resistance to segregation and the formation organizations to fight for racial, economic, social, and political equality. One area it does not explore is how the federal government helped to shape the movement. Steven Lawson traces the federal response to African Americans’ demands for civil rights and concludes that it was legislation, judicial decisions, and executive actions between 1945 and 1968 that was most responsible for the nation’s advance toward racial equality. Charles Payne vigorously disagrees, focusing instead on the protracted grassroots organizing as the motive force for whatever incomplete change occurred during those years. Each essay runs about forty pages, followed by smart selections of documents that support their cases.

Kenneth R. Janken is Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and Director of Experiential Education, Office of Undergraduate Curricula at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP and Rayford W. Logan and the Dilemma of the African American Intellectual . He was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2000-01.

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To cite this essay: Janken, Kenneth R. “The Civil Rights Movement: 1919-1960s.” Freedom’s Story, TeacherServe©. National Humanities Center. DATE YOU ACCESSED ESSAY. <https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/freedom/1917beyond/essays/crm.htm>

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Home — Essay Samples — History — History of the United States — Civil Rights Movement

Essays on Civil Rights Movement

Hook examples for civil rights movement essays, anecdotal hook.

Imagine standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, listening to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his iconic "I Have a Dream" speech. This moment in history epitomized the Civil Rights Movement's power and importance.

Question Hook

What does it mean to fight for civil rights? Explore the complex history, key figures, and lasting impact of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

Quotation Hook

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. How did civil rights activists like King refuse to stay silent and ignite change?

Statistical or Factual Hook

Did you know that in 1964, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin? Dive into the facts and milestones of the Civil Rights Movement.

Definition Hook

What defines a civil rights movement? Explore the principles, goals, and strategies that distinguish civil rights movements from other social justice movements.

Rhetorical Question Hook

Was the Civil Rights Movement solely about racial equality, or did it pave the way for broader social change and justice? Examine the movement's multifaceted impact.

Historical Hook

Travel back in time to the mid-20th century and uncover the roots of the Civil Rights Movement, from the Jim Crow era to the landmark Supreme Court decisions.

Contrast Hook

Contrast the injustices and systemic racism faced by African Americans prior to the Civil Rights Movement with the progress made through protests, legislation, and activism.

Narrative Hook

Meet Rosa Parks, a seamstress who refused to give up her bus seat, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Follow her courageous journey and the ripple effect it had on the Civil Rights Movement.

Controversial Statement Hook

Prepare to explore the controversies within the Civil Rights Movement, such as differing strategies among activists and debates over nonviolence versus militancy.

Warriors Don't Cry: The Courage of The Little Rock Nine

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Jackie Robinson: a Legacy of Accomplishments

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Civil Rights Movement and The Struggles of African Americans During Those Times

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How The Civil Rights Movement Helped African Americans Achieve Their Rights

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United States

Racism, segregation, disenfranchisement, Jim Crow laws, socioeconomic inequality

W.E.B. Du Bois, Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Henry MacNeal Turner, John Oliver Killens

Civil rights movement was a struggle of African Americans and their like-minded allies for social justice in United States that came to national prominence during the mid-1950s. The purpose was to end legalized racial discrimination, disenfranchisement and racial segregation in the United States.

“Jim Crow” laws were established in the South beginning in the late 19th century with a purpose to separate Black people from white people. Black people couldn’t use the same public facilities as white people or go to the same schools. Although, Jim Crow laws weren’t adopted in northern states, Black people still experienced discrimination.

Forms of protest and civil disobedience included boycotts, such as the most successful Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956) that lasted for 381 days in Alabama; mass marches, such as the Children's Crusade in Birmingham in 1963 and Selma to Montgomery marches (1965) in Alabama; "sit-ins" such as the Greensboro sit-ins (1960) in North Carolina and Nashville sit-ins (1960) in Tennessee.

The Great March on Washington was held in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963. The purpose was to advocate for the civil and economic rights of African Americans. It was organized and attended by civil rights leaders such as A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King, Jr., who delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech.

On July 2, 1964, President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, and later sexual orientation and gender identity. The act "remains one of the most significant legislative achievements in American history".

The civil rights movement had tragic consequences for two of its leaders. On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated at a rally and Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on his hotel room’s balcony on April 4, 1968.

The Civil Rights Act of 1968 was signed into law by United States President Lyndon B. Johnson during the King assassination riots. It prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, and national origin.

The 20th-century civil rights movement produced an enduring transformation of the legal status of African Americans and other victims of discrimination.

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Handout A: Background Essay: African Americans in the Gilded Age

Background Essay: African Americans in the Gilded Age

Directions: Read the essay and answer the review questions at the end.

In the late nineteenth century, the promise of emancipation and Reconstruction went largely unfulfilled and was even reversed in the lives of African Americans. Southern blacks suffered from horrific violence, political disfranchisement, economic discrimination, and legal segregation. Ironically, the new wave of racial discrimination that was introduced was part of an attempt to bring harmony between the races and order to American society.

Constitutional amendments were ratified during and after the war to protect the natural and civil rights of African Americans. The Thirteenth Amendment forever banned slavery from the United States, the Fourteenth Amendment protected black citizenship, and the Fifteenth Amendment granted the right to vote to African-American males. In addition, a Freedmen’s Bureau was established to help the economic condition of former slaves, and Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1875.

Roadblocks to Equality

Despite these legal protections, the economic condition of African Americans significantly worsened in the last few decades of the nineteenth century. Poor southern black farmers were generally forced into sharecropping whereby they borrowed money to plant a year’s crop, using the future crop as collateral on the loan. Often, they owed so much of the resulting crop that they fell into debt for the following year and eventually into a state of debt peonage. Since 90 percent of African Americans lived in the rural South, most were sharecroppers. The story was not much different as African Americans moved to southern and northern cities. Black women found work as domestic servants and men in urban factories, but they were usually in menial, low-paying jobs because white employers discriminated against African Americans in hiring. Black workers also faced a great deal of racism at the hands of labor unions which severely limited their ability to secure high-paying, skilled jobs. While the Knights of Labor and United Mine Workers were open to blacks, the largest skilled-worker union, the American Federation of Labor, curtailed black membership, thereby limiting them to menial labor.

African Americans throughout the country suffered from violence and intimidation. The most infamous examples of violence were brutal lynchings, or executions without due process, by angry white mobs. These travesties resulted in hangings, burnings, shootings, and mutilations for between 100 and 200 blacks—especially black men falsely accused of raping white women—annually. Race riots broke out in southern and northern cities from New Orleans and Atlanta to New York and Evansville, Indiana, causing dozens of deaths and property damage.

Although African Americans were elected to Congress and state legislatures during Reconstruction, and enjoyed the constitutional right to vote, black civil rights were systematically stripped away in a campaign of disfranchisement. One method was to charge a poll tax to vote, which precious few black sharecroppers could afford to pay. Another strategy was the literacy test which few former slaves could pass. Furthermore, the white clerks at courthouses had already decided that any black applicant would fail, regardless of his true reading ability. Since both of those devices at times excluded poor whites as well, grandfather clauses were introduced to exempt from the literacy test anyone whose father or grandfather had the right to vote before the Civil War. Moreover, the Supreme Court declared the 1875 Civil Rights Act guaranteeing equal access to public facilities and transportation to be unconstitutional in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) because the law regulated the private discriminatory conduct of individuals rather than government discrimination.

Segregation

One of the most pervasive and visible signs of racism was the rise of informal and legal segregation, or separation of the races. In a wholesale violation of liberty and equality, southern state legislatures passed “Jim Crow” segregation laws that denied African Americans equal access to public facilities such as hotels, restaurants, parks, and swimming pools. Southern schools and public transportation had vastly inferior “separate but equal” facilities that left the black minority subject to unjust majority rule. Housing covenants and other devices kept blacks in separate neighborhoods from whites. African Americans in the North also suffered informal residential segregation and economic discrimination in jobs.

In one of its more infamous decisions, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation statutes were legal in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). In Plessy, the Court decided that “separate, but equal” public facilities did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or imply the inferiority of African Americans. Justice John Marshall Harlan was one of the two dissenters who wrote, “Our constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.”

Progressive and Race Relations

One of the great ironies of the series of reforms instituted in the early twentieth century known as the Progressive Era was that segregation and racism were deeply enshrined in the movement. Progressives were a group of reformers who believed that the industrialized, urbanized United States of the nineteenth century had outgrown its eighteenth-century Constitution. That Constitution did not give government, especially the federal government, enough power to deal with unprecedented problems. Many Progressives embraced Social Darwinism and eugenics which was part of the most advanced science and social science taught in universities and scientific circles. Social Darwinism ranked various groups, which its proponents considered “races,” according to certain characteristics and labelled Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic peoples as superior and Southeastern Europeans, Jews, Asians, Hispanics, and Africans as inferior races. Therefore, there was a supposed scientific basis for segregation as the “higher” races ruled the “lower.” Moreover, Progressives generally endorsed segregation as a means of achieving their central goal of social order and harmony between the races. There were notable exceptions, such as Jane Addams, black Progressives such as W.E.B. DuBois, and the Progressives of both races who founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), but Progressive ideology contributed to the growth of segregation.

Progressive Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson generally supported the segregationist order. While Roosevelt courageously invited African-American leader Booker T. Washington to dinner in the White House and condemned lynching, he discharged 170 black soldiers because of a race riot in Brownsville, Texas in 1906. Wilson had perhaps a worse record on civil rights as his administration fired many black federal employees and segregated federal departments.

Black Leadership

Several black leaders advanced the cause of black civil rights and helped organize African Americans to defend their interests through self help. The highly-educated journalist, Ida B. Wells, launched a crusade against lynching by exposing the savage practice. She also challenged segregation by refusing to change her seat on a train because it was in an area reserved for white women. Other African Americans unsuccessfully boycotted segregated streetcars in urban areas but utilized a method that would prove successful in the mid-twentieth century.

A debate took shape between two African-American leaders, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. Washington was a former slave who founded the Tuskegee Institute for blacks in the 1880s and wrote Up from Slavery. He advocated that African Americans achieve racial equality slowly by patience and accommodation. Washington thought that blacks should be trained in industrial education and demonstrate the character virtues of hard work, thrift, and self-respect. They would therefore prove that they deserved equal rights and equal opportunity for social mobility. At the 1895 Atlanta Exposition, Washington delivered an address that posited, “In the long run it is the race or individual that exercises the most patience, forbearance, and self-control in the midst of trying conditions that wins…the respect of the world.”

DuBois, on the other hand, was a Harvard and Berlin-educated intellectual who believed that African Americans should win equality through a liberal arts education and fighting for political and civil equality. He wrote the Souls of Black Folk and laid out a vision whereby the “talented tenth” among African Americans would receive an excellent education and become the teachers and other professionals who would uplift fellow members of their race. He and other black leaders organized the Niagara Movement that fought segregation, lynching, and disfranchisement. In 1909 the movement’s leaders founded the NAACP, which fought for black equality and initiated a decades-long legal struggle to end segregation. DuBois edited its journal named The Crisis and wrote about issues affecting African Americans. He had the simple wish to “make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.”

Wartime Changes

American participation in the Spanish-American War and World War I initiated a dramatic change in the lives of African Americans and in the demography of American society. In both wars, black soldiers were relegated to segregated units and generally assigned to menial jobs rather than front-line combat. However, black soldiers had opportunities to fight in the charges against the Spanish in Cuba and against the Germans in the trenches of France. They demonstrated that they were just as courageous as white men even as they fought for a country that excluded them from its democracy. Moreover, travel to the North and overseas showed thousands of African Americans the possibility of freedom and equality that would be reinforced in World War II while fighting tyranny abroad.

Wartime America witnessed rapid change in the lives of African Americans especially in the rural South. Hundreds of thousands left southern farms to migrate to cities in the South such as Birmingham or Atlanta, or to northern cities in a mass movement called the Great Migration. This internal migration greatly increased the number of African Americans living in American cities. As a result, tensions grew with whites over jobs and housing that led to deadly race riots during and immediately after the war. However, a thriving black culture in the North also resulted in the Harlem Renaissance and the celebration of black artists.

The Great Migration eventually led to over six million African Americans following these migration patterns and laying the foundation for the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-twentieth century. Blacks resisted segregation when it was instituted and continued to organize to challenge its threat to liberty and equality in America.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

• What constitutional protections did the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments give African Americans?
• What economic conditions did African Americans face in the south and north in the late nineteenth century?
• What kinds of violence did African Americans suffer during the late nineteenth century?
• Despite the amendments to the Constitution protecting the rights of African Americans, what discriminatory devices systematically took away these rights?
• What was the ruling in the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) case? Did the case result in the advance or reversal of the rights of African Americans? Explain your answer.
• Did African Americans make gains or suffer setbacks to their rights during the Progressive Era? Explain your answer.
• Compare and contrast the means and goals of achieving black equality for Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois.
• How did World War I and the Great Migration change the lives of African Americans?

Civil Rights (African American)

By James Wolfinger and Stanley Keith Arnold | Reader-Nominated Topic

Black Philadelphians have fought for civil rights since the nineteenth century and even before. Early demands focused on the abolition of slavery and desegregation of public accommodations. The movement gained greater power as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth and the World War I-era Great Migration brought tens of thousands of African Americans to the Philadelphia region. This exponential growth in the African American population gave Black Philadelphians the numbers and resources necessary to effect political change. Such efforts were never limited to the ballot box, access to which had been legally gained by constitutional amendment, but were instead linked to community needs for adequate housing, economic opportunity, and social and educational services. As African Americans gained greater rights, especially in the post-World War II period, Black Philadelphians shifted more to emphasizing the need to achieve results based on their legal equality. The struggle to maintain civil rights and translate those rights into concrete results extended beyond the classic period of the 1960s and continued to shape Philadelphia into the twenty-first century.

Civil rights activists in the nineteenth century focused on the abolition of slavery, securing voting rights, and gaining equal access to public accommodations. Richard Allen (1760-1831), who was born into slavery and became a prominent minister, founded the Free African Society that pushed for the abolition of slavery. Octavius Catto (1839-71) helped raise troops to fight in the Civil War and afterward led the campaign for voting rights, until he was assassinated while trying to exercise the franchise in 1871. Catto also worked with William Still (1821-1902) to desegregate the city’s streetcars, which led the Pennsylvania state legislature to pass a law in 1867 requiring streetcar companies to carry passengers regardless of color. Such activism helped lead to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which declared African Americans were entitled to equal treatment in public accommodations. Reverend Fields Cook (1817-97) tested the law and won a case against Philadelphia’s Bingham House Hotel when he was denied a room in 1876.

The civil rights movement gained greater momentum in the early twentieth century with the Great Migration. The Black population in Philadelphia surged from some 63,000 in 1900 to over 134,000 twenty years later. New arrivals lent their energy to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, and the city’s Black newspaper, the Philadelphia Tribune , (published by E. Washington Rhodes [1895-1970], established 1884). Through these organizations, they demanded greater access to jobs and adequate housing. Yet a brutal race riot over housing desegregation in 1918 that left two people dead and dozens injured demonstrated that Philadelphia was not the land of hope that many prayed they had found.

Expanding Residential Access

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, African Americans deepened their commitment to securing civil rights. In the 1920s, they expanded their access to residential areas in North, South, and West Philadelphia. They also supported a flowering of Black culture with authors such as Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961) from Fredricksville in Camden County, New Jersey, and venues such as the Dunbar Theater at Broad and Lombard in Philadelphia, giving Philadelphia a smaller version of the Harlem Renaissance. The Great Depression devastated African American efforts to secure more housing and create a vibrant community, and in the process, radicalized Black political activism. In the early 1930s, African American unemployment crested at 61 percent, and tens of thousands of people lost their homes. In response, Black Philadelphians joined the Democratic Party, the National Negro Congress , and the Communist Party. They engaged in “Don’t buy where you can’t work” campaigns to pressure employers to end discrimination. And they demanded that political leaders meet a number of pressing needs: public housing to make up for the lack of decent and affordable housing, access to government-funded jobs, and an Equal Rights Bill (passed by the state legislature in 1935) to once again guarantee access to public accommodations.

Demands for civil rights in the area of jobs, housing, and political recognition continued into World War II. As the federal government poured billions of dollars into Philadelphia industries, African Americans flocked to the city. The Black population grew from some 250,000 in 1940 to 376,000 by the end of the war decade, and many of these residents supported the national Double V campaign that called for victory over fascism abroad and over Jim Crow at home. A presidential executive order, prompted by A. Philip Randolph ’s (1889-1979) March on Washington Movement, prohibited discrimination in hiring at industries receiving defense contracts and was a reminder that the federal government could be an ally in pushing for civil rights. Nonetheless, many companies tried to maintain a segmented system that confined Black workers to specific jobs. Employment practices at the Philadelphia Transportation Company, for example, led to a campaign promoted by the NAACP and its leader Carolyn D. Moore (1916-1998) (who had started in the organization in Norristown , Pennsylvania) to secure driving jobs for African Americans. When the federal government ordered the desegregation of the workforce in August 1944, white workers staged one of the largest hate strikes of World War II, shutting down the city for nearly a week. African Americans also had to continue their struggle in the city’s neighborhoods, where redlining and other discriminatory loan policies restricted African Americans to the most dilapidated communities. Federal Housing Administration policies as well as violence perpetrated by some white Philadelphians kept new public housing segregated as well.

The experience of World War II transformed civil rights in Philadelphia as the concerted efforts of the NAACP and local interracial organizations energized the Black community. Although there were fears that interracial strife would grow after the war, a strong economy and the diligence of the civil rights community prevented the rise of racial violence. Economic concerns took particular precedence in this era, as African Americans who had been hired in defense-related industries feared they would lose their jobs. Civil rights activists such as the Reverend E. Luther Cunningham (1909-1964) seized the moment and in 1948 secured passage of a municipal Fair Employment Practices ordinance that the state later adopted in similar form. New Jersey already had such a law on the books (passed in 1945), and Delaware added its own version of the law in 1960. Black Philadelphians also helped elect Democrat Joseph Clark (1901-90) as mayor in 1951, which cemented the political reorientation of the city and led to the implementation of the Home Rule Charter that provided for a Commission on Human Relations, one of the first agencies in the nation dedicated to preventing discrimination.

Decades of Job Losses

Although the new Democratic administration paid greater attention to African American rights and increased civil service opportunities, deindustrialization and persistent housing segregation showed the need for continued civil rights agitation. Philadelphia lost some 250,000 industrial jobs between the 1950s and the 1980s, and as workplace opportunities evaporated many African Americans were disproportionately affected because they could not follow the jobs to the suburbs. Many white Philadelphians moved to suburban developments such as Levittown , Pennsylvania. Suburbanization freed up housing stock for some middle-class Black residents to move into city neighborhoods that had previously been off limits, but racist lending practices and white violence meant most suburban housing excluded Black settlement. In 1957, a race riot broke out when white homeowners protested the arrival of the Myers family in Levittown.

White intransigence sharpened Black Philadelphians’ commitment to a civil rights movement that transformed Philadelphia in the 1960s. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-68) had been introduced to Satyagraha (Mahatma Gandhi’s movement based on passive political resistance) at Philadelphia’s Fellowship House, an interracial organization in the late 1940s. King studied at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, and lived in Camden, New Jersey, from 1949 to 1951. As a result, King was well acquainted with Philadelphia’s civil rights community. Local civil rights activists provided moral and material support to King, who visited the city several times in the 1960s. Inspired by the national movement, local civil rights leaders such as the Reverend Leon Sullivan (1922-2001) and NAACP branch president Cecil B. Moore employed new tactics. In 1960, Sullivan and other Black ministers launched a boycott of Tasty Baking Company, one of the city’s largest businesses, over its refusal to hire Black workers. The success of the boycott influenced Moore to initiate street protests against racial discrimination in the construction industry and in food markets that did not hire Black employees. This activism drew greater power with the passage of federal affirmative action legislation and found support from white allies in the Northern Student Movement, Fellowship House, and other area organizations.

While increasing protests contributed to a rising level of consciousness among Black Philadelphians, they were unable to stem the tide of frustration in the city’s poorest communities, especially in North Philadelphia. In the early 1960s, North Philadelphia had the city’s highest poverty and unemployment rates and tense relations with the police. On August 28, 1964, rioting broke out after an altercation between two Black motorists and two police officers. Hundreds were arrested and injured, and the uprising indicated the emergence of a new militancy among many Black Philadelphians. Some activists turned to more militant organizations such as the Nation of Islam, the Black Panthers, and the Black People’s Unity Movement in Camden. Although the Philadelphia area had a long history of interracial civil rights organizing, an increasing number of activists influenced by Black Power ideology criticized the role of whites in the movement.

The Black Power Movement

By the late 1960s, the Black Power movement had significant influence in the civil rights community. Both traditional civil rights activists and younger Black militants coalesced around the issue of education. Thousands protested the exclusion of African Americans from an all-white private school, Girard College , located in North Philadelphia. The movement against educational racism involved parents (mainly African American women), educators, and students. In addition to enduring inferior schools, Black students criticized dress codes that excluded traditional African garb and demanded a curriculum that included Black history. In late 1967, Black students launched a major protest at Board of Education headquarters and were attacked by police. The clash exemplified persistent tensions between the Black community and the police.

While street protests continued in the late 1960s, an increasing number of civil rights activists sought public office. Buoyed by the passage of significant federal civil rights legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, these activists believed that they could considerably influence the political process. C. Delores Tucker (1927-2005) became the first Black Pennsylvanian appointed to the office of secretary of state. David P. Richardson (1948-1995) was elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in 1972. In 1984, W. Wilson Goode (b. 1938) became Philadelphia’s first Black mayor. Although this new generation of political leaders had its roots in activism, their different power bases reflected an increasing maturation of the movement. Tucker had been active in the mainstream civil rights struggle and the rapidly emerging feminist movement. Richardson began his activism as a community organizer, while Goode’s rise was propelled by his support among the city’s Black religious establishment. Goode’s success was in part fueled by the work of the city’s first Black deputy mayor, Charles W. Bowser (1930-2010), who had run unsuccessfully for mayor in the 1970s. In turn, Goode’s administration paved the way for future Black mayors John Street (b. 1943) and Michael Nutter (b. 1957). While Black officials took power at a more formal level, a growing number of community based organizations recognized the limits of their offices. The Kensington Welfare Rights Union, for example, articulated the demands of poor and working-class people of all races beyond what was provided in legislation.

Although the election of President Barack Obama (b. 1961) demonstrated the gains made by civil rights activists, Black Philadelphians recognized the many problems they still faced. In the 2000s, Philadelphia’s civil rights movement witnessed the emergence of organizations that addressed crime, joblessness, education, and immigration among other issues. In all, the changing demographics and economic environment of the Philadelphia region represented new challenges and extensions of old ones for the next generation of civil rights activists. Yet despite these challenges, the history of Philadelphia’s civil rights movement demonstrated the gains African Americans made.

James Wolfinger is Professor of History and Education at DePaul University. He is the author of Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love and Running the Rails: Capital and Labor in the Philadelphia Transit Industry . (Author information current at time of publication.)

Stanley Keith Arnold is associate professor of history at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of Building the Beloved Community: Philadelphia Interracial Civil Rights Organizations and Race Relations, 1930-1970. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Copyright 2017, Rutgers University

Octavius Catto, 1839-1871

Library of Congress

Octavius Catto was born free on February 22, 1839, in South Carolina. Catto, the son of a preacher, attended many segregated schools before finishing his education at the Institute for Colored Youth. After graduating, Catto began teaching at his alma mater in 1859, using his role as an educator to improve the African American community. Catto’s activism took shape after the Civil War when he served as secretary of the Pennsylvania Equal Rights League and vice president of the State Convention of Colored People in 1865.

Through his activism, Catto sought increased African American voting rights, desegregated educational institutions, and improved public services. After asking the mayor of Philadelphia, Daniel Fox, to consider greater protection for African American voters who were being harassed and intimidated at the polls, Catto was murdered on Election Day, October 10, 1871. He was shot by a white man, later identified as Frank Kelly. Although there were numerous witnesses to the shooting, Kelly was not convicted of a crime.

W.E.B. DuBois, 1868-1963

W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt) DuBois, was born on February 23, 1868, in Massachusetts. After becoming the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University, DuBois completed his classic sociological study of the conditions of African Americans living in the Seventh Ward of Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Negro. In 1905 DuBois founded the Niagara Movement, and then the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1910. Both organizations pursued civil rights and equality for African Americans. DuBois served as editor of The Crisis and used the monthly magazine to help spread the message of the NAACP. The publication was critical of the treatment African Americans received in the United States while serving as a source of information for the community. After a lifelong career dedicated to civil rights and advocacy for African Americans, DuBois became a permanent resident of Ghana. One day after his death on August 28, 1963, hundreds of thousands of protesters marched on Washington, D.C., and held a moment of silence for one of the earliest civil rights leaders in the African American community.

March on Washington

Riding the wave of influential campaigns for civil rights in Birmingham, Alabama, as well as mass demonstrations throughout the country, organizers coordinated the March on Washington to call for jobs and freedom. The march took place on August 28, 1963, with around 300,000 protesters converging on Washington, D.C., where they heard one of the most famous speeches delivered, the “I Have a Dream” address by Martin Luther King Jr. Attending were some of the most prominent civil rights activists in the country, such as Philadelphia’s Cecil B. Moore.

Martin Luther King Jr. Day March, January 19, 2015

These demonstrators turned out on Martin Luther King Jr. Day on January 19, 2015, here heading south on Broad Street toward City Hall. Many protesters carried signs with messages reflecting social issues such as police brutality, a raise of minimum wage, the need for jobs, and the fight against racism. Many of the issues represented at the march were the same as the issues spotlighted at the 1963 March on Washington where King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. (Photograph by Donald D. Groff for the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia)

Protestors outside Girard College

National Archives

Established in 1848 by the bequest of wealthy merchant Stephen Girard, Girard College was intended for white male orphans. After numerous attempts in the 1950s to desegregate the school through the courts, African Americans began organizing civic demonstrations outside the school, as in this photograph from 1965. The call for civil rights included access to quality education, leading to struggles to desegregate schools all over the country. By 1968, African American males began attending Girard College; girls were not admitted until 1984.

Protests Against Discriminatory Hiring Practices

Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries

Protesters gather outside of a school construction site at Thirty-First and Dauphin Streets in Philadelphia’s Strawberry Mansion neighborhood in May 1963. Neighborhood residents joined with civil rights activists to draw attention to discriminatory hiring practices in the building trades and demand inclusion of African Americans.

Cecil B. Moore

Temple University Libraries, Special Collection Research Center

Cecil B. Moore (center, to the left of Martin Luther King Jr.) was a prominent figure in Philadelphia's civil rights movement at a time when the African American population of Philadelphia was steadily growing but racially discriminatory practices still prevailed. Born in West Virginia in 1915, Moore moved to Philadelphia after serving in World War II to study law at Temple University. After graduating in 1953, Moore became a defense attorney who specialized in helping working class African American clients. The number of working-class African Americans in Philadelphia grew steadily in the post-World War II period, but an economic downturn beginning in the 1950s made it difficult for working-class individuals to find jobs or afford any services beyond the necessities. Moore's confrontational and direct approach in the courtroom continued when he entered the public sphere to combat social injustice.

African Americans made up roughly one-third of Philadelphia's population by the 1970s, but racially discriminatory practices routinely affected their lives. Moore's confrontational approach to fighting for the African American community was powerful but controversial. He did not opt for private negotiations or compromises for what he felt was the right course of action. While president of the Philadelphia branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1963 to 1967, he encouraged African Americans to picket and protest for the right to join labor unions, de-segregate businesses, and receive better public education. He complemented these tactics with programs aimed at getting the growing African American community to vote and become more involved with local politics. Moore also restarted the fight to desegregate Girard College in 1964 and acted as the main attorney on the case until 1968, when the Supreme Court ruled that Girard College's attendance policy was unconstitutional. Some criticized Moore's tactics as too aggressive, but they achieved results and acknowledgement of national civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. This photograph of Moore and King was taken during the struggle to desegregate Girard College in 1965.

Moore died from cardiac arrest at age 63 in 1979, but his legacy as a civil rights leader has lived on in numerous acknowledgements around Philadelphia. A section of Columbia Street between Front and Thirty-Third Street was renamed Cecil B. Moore Avenue in 1987, and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) rededicated the Broad Street line subway station on Cecil B. Moore Avenue as the Cecil B. Moore Station.

Bayard Rustin

Bayard Rustin was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and became one of its most famous natives as a prominent activist during the civil rights era of the 1960s. Rustin worked closely with Mahatma Gandhi in India and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., eventually becoming one of his key advisers. As a pacifist, Rustin organized several nonviolent protests, including the 1963 march on Washington. As an openly gay man, Rustin also fought for equal rights for homosexuals in New York during the 1980s. Rustin died in August 1987. In November 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U.S. government’s highest civilian award.

Related Topics

• Philadelphia and the Nation
• Cradle of Liberty

Time Periods

• Twenty-First Century
• Twentieth Century after 1945
• Twentieth Century to 1945
• Nineteenth Century after 1854
• Nineteenth Century to 1854
• North Philadelphia
• Abolitionism
• African American Migration
• American Friends Service Committee
• Appeal of Forty Thousand Citizens
• Armstrong Association of Philadelphia
• Baseball: Negro Leagues
• Black Power
• Civil Rights (LGBT)
• Colonization Movement (Africa)
• Columbia Avenue Riot
• Educational Reform
• Fair Housing
• Free African Society
• Free Black Communities
• Girard’s Bequest
• International Peace Mission Movement and Father Divine
• Lawnside, New Jersey
• Martin Luther King Jr. Day
• Mayors (Philadelphia)
• Mother Bethel AME Church: Congregation and Community
• Murder of Octavius Catto
• National Freedom Day
• National Colored Convention Movement
• Opportunities Industrialization Center (OIC)
• Philadelphia Plan
• Public Housing
• Sullivan Principles
• Underground Railroad
• United States Colored Troops
• American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
• Salem (City), New Jersey
• Memorial Day
• Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
• African American Museum in Philadelphia
• Popular Music
• Civil Rights (Persons With Disabilities)
• Black Lives Matter
• Episcopal Church

Related Reading

Arnold, Stanley. Building the Beloved Community: Philadelphia’s Interracial Civil Rights Organizations and Race Relations, 1930-1970 . Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014.

Bauman, John. Public Housing, Race, and Renewal: Urban Planning in Philadelphia, 1920-1974 . Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987.

Canton, David . Raymond Pace Alexander: A New Negro Lawyer Fights for Civil Rights in Philadelphia . Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.

Countryman, Matthew. Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

Levenstein, Lisa. A Movement without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

McKee, Guian. The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Myers, Daisy D. Sticks ’n Stones: The Myers Family in Levittown . York, Pa.: York County Heritage Trust, 2005.

Perkiss, Abigail . Making Good Neighbors: Civil Rights, Liberalism, and Integration in Postwar Philadelphia . Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2014.

Wolfinger, James. Philadelphia Divided: Race and Politics in the City of Brotherly Love . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Related Collections

• Evening Bulletin Clippings Collection Urban Archives Temple University, Philadelphia.
• Fellowship Commission Papers Urban Archives Temple University, Philadelphia.
• Philadelphia Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Records Urban Archives Temple University, Philadelphia.
• Philadelphia Urban League Records Urban Archives Temple University, Philadelphia.

Related Places

• Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection
• Girard College
• Philadelphia Tribune

Backgrounders

Connecting Headlines with History

• Girard College names interim president (WHYY, June 8, 2012)
• Black History Month youth essay contest doubles as way to honor Germantown's 'Unsung Heroes' (WHYY, February 17, 2014)
• Thousands march to 'Reclaim MLK' in Philly (WHYY, January 19, 2015)
• Activists relate to King's shift from dreamer to radical (WHYY, January 16, 2017)
• Civil Rights in a Northern City (Temple University)
• Civil Rights Resources (Historical Society of Pennsylvania)
• Civil Rights: A Movement is Born in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: The Great Experiment)
• Octavius Catto Historical Marker (ExplorePAHistory.com)
• Legacy of Courage: W.E.B. DuBois and the Philadelphia Negro
• African American Baseball in Philadelphia Historical Marker (ExplorePAHistory.com)

Connecting the Past with the Present, Building Community, Creating a Legacy

African American Studies: Civil Rights

• Starting Research
• Journals & Databases
• Books, eBooks & Interlibrary Loan (ILL)
• Primary Sources & Data Resources
• Civil Rights
• Gender & Sexuality
• Social Justice

On This Page

On this page you will find the following Civil Rights Movement resources: 

• Helpful Websites
• Documentary Examples

WPI Database Examples

Book examples, website examples.

Explore the following websites to learn more about the Civil Rights Movement. Adapted from the Library of Congress.

• Civil Rights in America: A Resource Guide This guide provides access to selected Library of Congress digital and print resources as well as links to external websites on civil rights.
• National Archives: Civil Rights View photographs and graphic work of the Civil Rights Movement stored by the National Archives.
• United States Civil Rights Trail Chart the course of the Civil Rights Movement through the Civil Rights Trail and see firsthand the struggle for equity and the power of equality.
• Civil Rights Digital Library The Civil Rights Digital Library brings together more than 200 libraries, archives, and museums to provide free online access to historical materials documenting the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.
• Additional Civil Rights Movements Websites Click on this link to access the Library of Congress' collection of links to external websites exploring the Civil Rights Movement.

Documentary Collections & Examples

There are several media resources available that document the Civil Rights Movement that can be found via the library's databases or internet searching using terms such as "Civil Rights Movement AND documentary." Below are some examples of documentaries and documentary collections of the Civil Rights Movement. 

• PBS American Experience Film Series: Civil Rights Movement This collection documents "pivotal moments in the 20th century civil rights movement— along with articles, digital shorts and original features exploring America’s continued struggle with race, democracy and justice."
• Untold. Civil Rights Movement: The Fight for Equality The untold story of the people who campaigned for a fairer America.
• The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement Academy Award-nominated 'The Barber of Birmingham' movingly portrays the unsung "foot soldiers" of the civil rights movement through the personal story of 85-year-old barber James Armstrong, who carried the American flag in the epic 1965 "Bloody Sunday" Selma voting rights march, and spearheaded efforts to integrate public schools in Alabama.
• Untold. Buyard Rustin The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was the biggest protest America had ever seen. It culminated in Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr's iconic 'I Have A Dream' speech. But the man who made it all possible, chief organiser Bayard Rustin, was almost written out of history not because he was black, but because he was gay.

Explore your research topic through WPI's Database Collection . Below are examples of databases that include coverage of civil rights and social science topics. 

Academic Video Online makes video material available with curricular relevance: documentaries, interviews, performances, news programs and newsreels, and more. Search for award-winning films including Academy®, Emmy®, and Peabody® winners and access content from PBS, BBC, 60 MINUTES, National Geographic, Annenberg Learner, BroadwayHD™, A+E Networks’ HISTORY® and more.  Academic Video Online: Premium covers all disciplines and subject areas, with specific strengths in: Anthropology; Counseling & Therapy; Art, Fashion & Design; Business & Economics; Diversity Studies; Documentary Film; Feature Film; Education; History; Music & Dance; News & Current Events; Theatre & Drama. It also provides content in nursing; allied health; criminal justice; engineering; and science.

Historical abstracts of North American and global history research journals, covering 1450 to the present.

America History & Life: Coverage: 1954- Full Text: No Titles Indexed Historical Abstracts: Coverage: 1886- Full Text: No

HeinOnline’s Civil Rights and Social Justice database brings together a diverse offering of publications covering civil rights in the United States as their legal protections and definitions are expanded to cover more and more Americans. Containing links to more than 500 scholarly articles*, hearings and committee prints, legislative histories on the landmark legislation, CRS and GAO reports, briefs from major Supreme Court cases, and publications from the Commission on Civil Rights, this database allows users to educate themselves on the ways our civil rights have been strengthened and expanded over time, as well as how these legal protections can go further still. Also includes a varied collection of books on many civil rights topics and a list of prominent civil rights organizations.

An essential set of scholarly journals and cultural interest titles.     This resource is provided by the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners (MBLC) in partnership with the Massachusetts Library System (MLS). The purchase is supported by funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Data, charts, and statistics on topics such as population, work and welfare, economy, governance and international relations.

Coverage: 1600- Full Text: Yes

Search full text and images 1851-2020 including news, illustrations, editorials, and advertisements.

Coverage: 1851-2020 Full Text: Yes Search Tips

Political Science Database gives users access to hundreds of leading political science, public policy, and international relations journals. It also includes thousands of recent full-text doctoral dissertations on political science topics, together with working papers, conference proceedings, country reports, policy papers and other sources.

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African-American Women and the Civil Rights Movement Essay

Without doubt, Paul Hendrickson, Bernice McNair Barnett and Danielle L. McGuire assert that Black women made noteworthy contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. As Barnett (163) notes, Black women were at the forefront of formulating tactics and strategies, initiating protests and securing resources such as communication networks, money and personnel that necessitated the success of collective action.

These included distinctive women such as Aurelia Browder, Jo Ann Gibson and Viola White among others. Such women formulated strategies and tactics such as declining to ride buses to work to boycott against the segregation laws, “I had stopped riding because I wanted better treatment” (Hendrickson 290).

They also refused to give seats to White passengers in buses, “I am not going to move out of my seat…I got the privilege to sit here like anybody” (Hendrickson 294) as a way of initiating protests. In addition, Black women with fair skin also used the sneering strategy; reminding the Whites who thought and treated them as Whites that they were not different from Blacks, “was a member of the darker race” (Hendrickson 293).

Conspicuously, Black women such as Mrs. Gilmore formed clubs that sought money to finance the movement (Barnett 168). In addition, they sought after the personnel that the movement required. For instance, the Albany Movement had a woman leader who organized young people to attend demonstrations and meetings (Barnett 168).

However, despite their paramount contributions, sometimes more than men “and it was women more than men” (Hendrickson 289), Black women remained invisible in reference to their recognition as leaders in the movement, except for a few such as Rosa Parks. Evidently, Black women were not under any male leaders’ directives, including the most influential male, Martin Luther King, a clear indication that they deserved recognition on their own.

The Black women took their own initiatives. This is because they “shared a common desire for freedom from oppression” (Barnet 163) that made them have the courage to start their initiatives without relying on men directives. They were angered by the unjust segregation laws that made them victims of racialism, and unjust treatment by officers and in the public (McGuire 59). Hence, they took their own initiatives because they “wanted better treatment” (290) which they would get if they cooperated with the Black people in the movement.

The key factors that left the Black women unrecognized or led to recognition of just a few of them as leaders are class, race and gender biases (Barnet 163). In terms of gender bias, focus on Civil Rights Movement research was on the elite Black male professionals such as Martin Luther King and ministers, not the women.

In addition, women were negatively stereotyped as poor, illegitimate and female-headed, thus making them unworthy of recognition as leaders. In reference to race, Feminist scholarship’s focus was on White women activism. In terms of class, there was a middle-class orientation ignoring and excluding the working-class and poor Black women experiences in the civil movement. This yielded the perception that Black women were politically passive, organizers or followers, not leaders.

In reference to the discussion above, it is crucial to talk about Black women’s contribution to the movement. While focusing on individuals would explore key women leaders in the movement, other women, the invisible, would be left out. Hence, it warrants that Black women be explored using an all- inclusive framework.

This demand exploring the sex-specific ways that Black women contributed to the movement because they collectively have a “history of their own” (Barnet 165), a reflection of their own role, concerns and values as women and Afro-Americans.

Works Cited

Barnett, Bernice McNair. “Invisible Southern Black Women Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement: The Triple Constraints of Gender, Race, and Class”. Gender and Society , 7.2 (1993):162-182. Print.

Hendrickson, Paul, “1944-The Ladies Before Rosa: Let Us Now Praise Unfamous Women”. Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8. 2 (2005): 287-298. Print.

McGuire, Danielle L. “At the Dark End of the Street”. Black Women, Rape, and Resistance- A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. 40-67. Print.

• Chicago (A-D)
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IvyPanda. (2019, May 13). African-American Women and the Civil Rights Movement. https://ivypanda.com/essays/african-american-women-and-the-civil-rights-movement-essay/

"African-American Women and the Civil Rights Movement." IvyPanda , 13 May 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/african-american-women-and-the-civil-rights-movement-essay/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'African-American Women and the Civil Rights Movement'. 13 May.

IvyPanda . 2019. "African-American Women and the Civil Rights Movement." May 13, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/african-american-women-and-the-civil-rights-movement-essay/.

1. IvyPanda . "African-American Women and the Civil Rights Movement." May 13, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/african-american-women-and-the-civil-rights-movement-essay/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "African-American Women and the Civil Rights Movement." May 13, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/african-american-women-and-the-civil-rights-movement-essay/.

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