The civil rights movement
Black Americans, organised through churches, students and lawyers, overturn legal segregation and win the vote through nonviolent protest at enormous personal risk.
- Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 — Taylor Branch, Simon & Schuster (1988)
- Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 — James T. Patterson, Oxford University Press (1996)
- America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s — Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, Oxford University Press (2000)
- I Have a Dream (address at the March on Washington, 28 August 1963) — Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University (1963)
By the 1950s, segregation was the law across the South and a fact of life in much of the North. Black Southerners were kept from voting by poll taxes, rigged literacy tests and violence; the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi, and his mother’s decision to hold an open-casket funeral, shocked the nation.
- Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 — Taylor Branch, Simon & Schuster (1988)
- Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 — James T. Patterson, Oxford University Press (1996)
The legal breakthrough
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), with lawyer Thurgood Marshall, had spent decades challenging segregation in court. In Brown v. Board of Education (1954) the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, overturning “separate but equal”. Southern officials vowed “massive resistance”; in 1957 President Eisenhower had to send troops to escort nine Black students into Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
- Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 — James T. Patterson, Oxford University Press (1996)
- Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 — Taylor Branch, Simon & Schuster (1988)
The movement
In December 1955 Rosa Parks, a seamstress and NAACP activist, refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama. The 381-day bus boycott that followed brought a young Baptist minister, Martin Luther King Jr., to national prominence. The movement drew its strength from Black churches, its songs (“We Shall Overcome”) and its discipline of nonviolence.
- Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 — Taylor Branch, Simon & Schuster (1988)
Students led sit-ins at segregated lunch counters from 1960; interracial Freedom Riders challenged segregated buses in 1961 and were beaten by mobs. In Birmingham in 1963, televised images of police turning fire hoses and dogs on children swung national opinion. That August, about 250,000 people joined the March on Washington, where King spoke of his dream that his children would “one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”.
- Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 — Taylor Branch, Simon & Schuster (1988)
- I Have a Dream (address at the March on Washington, 28 August 1963) — Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University (1963)
Victory and cost
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned segregation in public places and discrimination in employment. After state troopers attacked marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on “Bloody Sunday” in March 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which within a few years transformed Black voter registration in the South.
- Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 — James T. Patterson, Oxford University Press (1996)
- America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s — Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, Oxford University Press (2000)
The price was high. Activists including Medgar Evers and three young Freedom Summer workers in Mississippi were murdered; four girls died in the bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963. Malcolm X, who had challenged nonviolence and spoken for Black self-defence and pride, was assassinated in 1965, and King was shot dead in Memphis on 4 April 1968, setting off riots in over a hundred cities.
- Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 — Taylor Branch, Simon & Schuster (1988)
- America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s — Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, Oxford University Press (2000)
Afterwards
The movement inspired women’s, Latino (Chicano), Native American and gay rights movements, and the 1965 immigration reform was passed in its spirit. It also reshaped party politics: as national Democrats embraced civil rights, white Southern voters began a long shift to the Republican Party. Legal equality was won; whether real equality has followed is still argued over.
- America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s — Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, Oxford University Press (2000)
- Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 — James T. Patterson, Oxford University Press (1996)
Many Americans, especially conservatives, see the movement as having won its central aims, legal equality and the vote, and believe the country should now be "colour-blind", as they read King's dream of a nation judging people by "the content of their character".
- Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 — James T. Patterson, Oxford University Press (1996)
Many Black Americans and progressives stress that King also campaigned against poverty and the Vietnam War, was deeply unpopular in his lifetime, and that big gaps in wealth, schooling, health and treatment by police show the struggle continues.
- Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 — Taylor Branch, Simon & Schuster (1988)
- America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s — Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, Oxford University Press (2000)
The movement was a religious revival as much as a political campaign, rooted in the Exodus story and the conviction that every person is made in God's image. King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" was addressed to white clergy who urged patience.
- The Black Church in the African American Experience — C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, Duke University Press (1990)
- Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 — Taylor Branch, Simon & Schuster (1988)
Why it matters today
The movement is the closest thing modern America has to a shared moral story: Martin Luther King Jr. has a national holiday, and its methods inspire protest movements of every kind. But Americans disagree sharply over whether its work is finished, from voting rules to policing, as the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 showed.
The movement was led from Black Protestant churches: its leaders were mostly Baptist and Methodist preachers, its meetings were held in sanctuaries, and its songs came from the spirituals and gospel music. For many Protestants it is the clearest modern example of the Bible's call to justice, and a standing rebuke to the white churches that stayed silent or resisted.