Between 1954 and 1968, a nonviolent social and political movement known as the civil rights movement spread across the United States with the aim of eradicating institutionalized, legally mandated racial segregation, discrimination, and racial disenfranchisement.
The movement’s origins can be found in the Reconstruction era of the late 19th century, but it wasn’t until the 1960s, after years of direct actions and protests from the bottom up, that it saw its greatest legislative triumph.
The social movement led significant civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance actions that ultimately succeeded in establishing new federal protections for all Americans’ civil rights.
After the American Civil War and the subsequent abolition of slavery in the 1860s, all African Americans, the majority of whom had previously been enslaved, were awarded emancipation and constitutional rights of citizenship thanks to the Reconstruction Amendments to the United States Constitution.
For a limited time, African American men could vote and run for office; however, as time went on, they were more and more denied civil rights, frequently because of the oppressive Jim Crow laws, and they encountered prejudice and persistent violence from white supremacists in the South.
Who was the voice of the civil rights movement?
Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 and his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize the following year come to mind when most people think of the American Civil Rights Movement.
However, “the Movement” was able to achieve its greatest successes—the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act—because of the conflicting plans and objectives of various people.
