civil rights movement failures essay

Essay: The Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement sought to win the American promise of liberty and equality during the twentieth century. From the early struggles of the 1940s to the crowning successes of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts that changed the legal status of African-Americans in the United States, the Civil Rights Movement firmly grounded its appeals for liberty and equality in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Rather than rejecting an America that discriminated against a particular race, the movement fought for America to fulfill its own universal promise that “all men are created equal.” It worked for American principles within American institutions rather than against them.

African-Americans endured racial prejudice that compelled them to fight racism in World War II while fighting in segregated units. It was particularly hard to accept because the war was fought against the racist Nazis who were attempting to eradicate the Jews grounded in racially-based totalitarianism. For black soldiers, the stark contradiction with American wartime ideals was as repulsive as their daily condition of fighting separately. Many black units—most famously the Tuskegee Airmen—fought just as courageously as their white counterparts. Fighting for the “Double V” for victory over totalitarianism and racism, returning black veterans were not keen on returning to the Jim Crow South with legal (de jure) segregation nor to a North with informal (de facto) segregation.

On the national level, African-Americans sought to overturn segregation with legal challenges up to the Supreme Court, pressuring presidents to enforce equality, and lobbying Congress for changes in the law of the land.

In the postwar years, civil rights leaders prepared a dual strategy of attacking all discrimination throughout American society. On the national level, African-Americans sought to overturn segregation with legal challenges up to the Supreme Court, pressuring presidents to enforce equality, and lobbying Congress for changes in the law of the land. On the local level, marches were held to demonstrate the fundamental immorality and violence of segregation and to change local laws.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was established by W.E.B. DuBois and other black and white, male and female reformers in 1909 to struggle for civil rights, helped lead the legal battle in the courts. The NAACP legal team, led by Thurgood Marshall, who would later become the first black justice on the Supreme Court, scored the first major success of the Civil Rights Movement with  Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) decision that indirectly overturned Plessy v. Ferguson  (1896), which had set the precedent for legalizing segregation. New Chief Justice Earl Warren persuaded his fellow justices to issue a unanimous 9-0 decision for the moral force to overcome expected white southern resistance. The outcome was a landmark for black equality that initiated the Civil Rights Movement.

The good outcome led many to overlook the questionable legal reasoning employed in the decision. The Supreme Court shockingly admitted white and black schools were equal despite evidence to the contrary. Moreover, the Court stated that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment had “inconclusive” origins related to segregated schools and doubted whether it could be applied to this case. Instead, the Court turned to social science as the basis for its decision. It referred to experiments in which black children played with dolls of different races. Members of the Court misread the evidence because the results of the studies actually showed that the segregated black children chose to play with black dolls. The Court mistakenly reported that the black children played more with the white dolls and had a “feeling of inferiority.”

The Court settled for declaring the edict that segregated schools were “inherently unequal” based on dubious social science and missed an opportunity for a constitutionally-grounded precedent banning all racial discrimination.

In Plessy v. Ferguson , Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote this powerful dissent: “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of our civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” (John Marshall Harlan, Plessy v. Ferguson Dissenting Opinion, 1896).

By ignoring Harlan’s understanding of the equality principle in the Constitution and settling for the use of social science, Chief Justice Warren diminished the constitutional force of the decision, which, if read narrowly, did not exactly overturn  Plessy .

Even with the unanimous decision that Chief Justice Warren sought, the case encountered opposition, and it took more than a decade of direct action by African-Americans and others to win equality. In 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott initiated a decade of local demonstrations against segregation in the South. In December 1955, Rosa Parks courageously refused to give up her bus seat to a white man because she was tired of being treated like a second-class citizen. African-Americans applied economic pressure for more than one year to force concessions for desegregation at the local level, and a charismatic young Baptist minister, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., provided vision and leadership for the emerging movement at Montgomery.

As a result of the  Brown  decision, many white politicians and ordinary citizens engaged in what they called “massive resistance” to oppose desegregation. In 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus refused to use the state National Guard to protect black children at Little Rock High School. President Dwight Eisenhower sent in troops from the 101st Airborne Division to compel local desegregation and protect the nine black students while federalizing the Arkansas National Guard to block Faubus. The Little Rock Nine attended school under the watchful eye of federal troops. The principles of equality and constitutional federalism came into conflict during this incident because the national government used the military to impose integration at the local level.

In 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus refused to use the state National Guard to protect black children at Little Rock High School. President Dwight Eisenhower sent in troops from the 101st Airborne Division to compel local desegregation and protect the nine black students while federalizing the Arkansas National Guard to block Faubus.

In the early 1960s, African-Americans continued to press for equality at the local and national levels. In 1960, black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina started a wave of “sit-ins” in which they took seats reserved for whites at segregated lunch counters. The sit-ins led to applying the economic pressure of a boycott that successfully desegregated the local lunch counters.

In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. used his moral vision and rhetoric to achieve the greatest successes of the movement for black equality and the end of segregation. King helped to organize marches in Birmingham, Alabama, where police dogs and fire hoses were turned on the Birmingham marchers and caused shock and outrage across the nation when the violence was televised. King and hundreds of others were arrested for demonstrating without a permit.

From his jail cell, King wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” defending the civil rights demonstrations by quoting the great Christian authority St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.” Employing the principles of America’s Founders, King explained that a just law is a “man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God.” King posited that just laws uplift the human person while unjust laws “distort the soul” (Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963).

He argued that just laws are rooted in human equality, while unjust laws give a false sense of superiority and inferiority. Moreover, segregation laws had been inflicted upon a minority who had no say in making the laws and thereby passed without consent, violating American principles of republican self-government.

King closed the letter by asserting that the Civil Rights Movement was “standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence” (Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963).

On June 11, 1963, President Kennedy responded and addressed the nation on television. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution,” he told the nation. For Kennedy, the question was “whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities” (John F. Kennedy, “Civil Rights Address,” June 11, 1963).

Kennedy was mindful of the historical significance of the year when he appealed to Lincoln’s Proclamation freeing the slaves: “One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free…And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free” (John F. Kennedy, “Civil Rights Address,” June 11, 1963).

On August 28, 1963, the greatest event of the Civil Rights Movement occurred with the March on Washington. More than 250,000 blacks and whites, young and old, clergy and laity, descended upon the capital in support of the proposed civil rights bill. From the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King evoked great documents of freedom when he said “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation” (Martin Luther King, Jr. “I Have A Dream,” August 28, 1963). The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves one hundred years before on January 1, 1863. Simultaneously, he also subtly referred to the other great document of 1863, Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address,” which was inscribed in the wall of the memorial, and begins, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” (Abraham Lincoln, “Gettysburg Address,” November 19, 1863).

King offered high praise for the “architects of our republic” who wrote the “magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” King began his evocative peroration “I Have a Dream” by declaring that his dream is “deeply rooted in the American dream.” “One day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal’” (Martin Luther King, Jr. “I Have A Dream,” August 28, 1963).

African-Americans won the fruits of their decades of struggle for civil rights when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Civil Rights Act legally ended segregation in all public facilities. The act had to overcome a Southern filibuster in the Senate and the fears of conservatives in both parties that it was an unconstitutional intrusion of the federal government upon the rights of the states and into local affairs and private businesses.

Although the Fifteenth Amendment had been ratified a hundred years before, African Americans still voted at low rates, especially in the Deep South. A number of devices—literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses that prevented descendants of slaves from voting—severely curtailed black suffrage. Violence and intimidation were the main vehicles of preventing African-Americans from voting in the mid-1960s.

In March 1965, Martin Luther King and other leaders organized marches in Selma, Alabama, for voting rights. After enduring beatings by club-wielding mounted police officers on “Bloody Sunday,” the marchers eventually set out again several days later and reached Montgomery under the watchful eye of federal troops. Congress soon passed the Voting Rights of 1965, banning abridgment of the right to vote on account of race.

Yet in the wake of the great legislative triumphs for social and voting equality the summer of 1965 (and successive summers) witnessed the explosion of racial violence and rioting by black citizens in American cities. Despite gaining rights of equal opportunity African-Americans still lived under obvious economic disparities with whites. The passage of federal laws securing equal opportunity led to rising expectations of immediate equality, which did not happen. Young “Black Power” advocates also began advocating self-reliance as a race, a celebration of African heritage, and a rejection of white society. Forming groups like the Black Panthers, a minority of young African-Americans spoke in passionate terms advocating violence, leading to confrontations with police. Many white Americans were shocked and confused at the urban riots occurring just after legal equality for African-Americans had been achieved.

In the 1970s and 1980s, plans of “affirmative action” were introduced in college admissions and in hiring for public and private jobs that soon became controversial. Intended to remedy the historic wrongs of slavery and segregation, affirmative action policies established preference or quotas for the number of African-Americans (and soon women and other minorities) who would be admitted or hired. Its proponents sought to achieve an equality of outcome in society rather than merely equal opportunity in American society. Some whites complained that this was “reverse discrimination” against whites that tolerated lower standards for the benefited groups. The most notable Supreme Court case addressing the issue was the  Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) decision, in which racial preferences, but not racial quotas, were upheld.

The Supreme Court essentially agreed with the supporters of affirmative action who argued that “discrimination against members of the white ‘majority’ cannot be suspect if its purpose can be characterized as ‘benign’” (Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., Regents of the University of California v. Bakke , Opinion, 1978)

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The Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement sought to win the American promise of liberty and equality during the twentieth-century. From the early struggles of the 1940s to the crowning successes of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts that changed the legal status of African-Americans in the United States, the Civil Rights Movement firmly grounded its appeals for liberty and equality in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Rather than rejecting an America that discriminated against a particular race, the movement fought for America to fulfill its own universal promise that “all men are created equal.” The Civil Rights Movement worked for American principles within American institutions rather than against them.

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Civil Rights Movement

By: History.com Editors

Updated: May 14, 2024 | Original: October 27, 2009

The civil rights movement was a struggle for social justice that took place mainly during the 1950s and 1960s for Black Americans to gain equal rights under the law in the United States. The Civil War officially abolished slavery , but it didn’t end discrimination against Black people—they continued to endure the devastating effects of racism, especially in the South. By the mid-20th century, Black Americans, along with many other Americans, mobilized and began an unprecedented fight for equality that spanned two decades.

Jim Crow Laws

During Reconstruction , Black people took on leadership roles like never before. They held public office and sought legislative changes for equality and the right to vote.

In 1868, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution gave Black people equal protection under the law. In 1870, the 15th Amendment granted Black American men the right to vote. Still, many white Americans, especially those in the South, were unhappy that people they’d once enslaved were now on a more-or-less equal playing field.

To marginalize Black people, keep them separate from white people and erase the progress they’d made during Reconstruction, “ Jim Crow ” laws were established in the South beginning in the late 19th century. Black people couldn’t use the same public facilities as white people, live in many of the same towns or go to the same schools. Interracial marriage was illegal, and most Black people couldn’t vote because they were unable to pass voter literacy tests.

Jim Crow laws weren’t adopted in northern states; however, Black people still experienced discrimination at their jobs or when they tried to buy a house or get an education. To make matters worse, laws were passed in some states to limit voting rights for Black Americans.

Moreover, southern segregation gained ground in 1896 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Plessy v. Ferguson that facilities for Black and white people could be “separate but equal."

World War II and Civil Rights

Prior to World War II , most Black people worked as low-wage farmers, factory workers, domestics or servants. By the early 1940s, war-related work was booming, but most Black Americans weren’t given better-paying jobs. They were also discouraged from joining the military.

After thousands of Black people threatened to march on Washington to demand equal employment rights, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941. It opened national defense jobs and other government jobs to all Americans regardless of race, creed, color or national origin.

Black men and women served heroically in World War II, despite suffering segregation and discrimination during their deployment. The Tuskegee Airmen broke the racial barrier to become the first Black military aviators in the U.S. Army Air Corps and earned more than 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses. Yet many Black veterans were met with prejudice and scorn upon returning home. This was a stark contrast to why America had entered the war to begin with—to defend freedom and democracy in the world.

As the Cold War began, President Harry Truman initiated a civil rights agenda, and in 1948 issued Executive Order 9981 to end discrimination in the military. These events helped set the stage for grass-roots initiatives to enact racial equality legislation and incite the civil rights movement.

On December 1, 1955, a 42-year-old woman named Rosa Parks found a seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus after work. Segregation laws at the time stated Black passengers must sit in designated seats at the back of the bus, and Parks complied.

When a white man got on the bus and couldn’t find a seat in the white section at the front of the bus, the bus driver instructed Parks and three other Black passengers to give up their seats. Parks refused and was arrested.

As word of her arrest ignited outrage and support, Parks unwittingly became the “mother of the modern-day civil rights movement.” Black community leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) led by Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr ., a role which would place him front and center in the fight for civil rights.

Parks’ courage incited the MIA to stage a boycott of the Montgomery bus system . The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted 381 days. On November 14, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled segregated seating was unconstitutional. 

Little Rock Nine

In 1954, the civil rights movement gained momentum when the United States Supreme Court made segregation illegal in public schools in the case of Brown v. Board of Education . In 1957, Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas asked for volunteers from all-Black high schools to attend the formerly segregated school.

On September 4, 1957, nine Black students, known as the Little Rock Nine , arrived at Central High School to begin classes but were instead met by the Arkansas National Guard (on order of Governor Orval Faubus) and a screaming, threatening mob. The Little Rock Nine tried again a couple of weeks later and made it inside, but had to be removed for their safety when violence ensued.

Finally, President Dwight D. Eisenhower intervened and ordered federal troops to escort the Little Rock Nine to and from classes at Central High. Still, the students faced continual harassment and prejudice.

Their efforts, however, brought much-needed attention to the issue of desegregation and fueled protests on both sides of the issue.

Civil Rights Act of 1957

Even though all Americans had gained the right to vote, many southern states made it difficult for Black citizens. They often required prospective voters of color to take literacy tests that were confusing, misleading and nearly impossible to pass.

Wanting to show a commitment to the civil rights movement and minimize racial tensions in the South, the Eisenhower administration pressured Congress to consider new civil rights legislation.

On September 9, 1957, President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 into law, the first major civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. It allowed federal prosecution of anyone who tried to prevent someone from voting. It also created a commission to investigate voter fraud.

Sit-In at Woolworth's Lunch Counter

Despite making some gains, Black Americans still experienced blatant prejudice in their daily lives. On February 1, 1960, four college students took a stand against segregation in Greensboro, North Carolina when they refused to leave a Woolworth’s lunch counter without being served.

Over the next several days, hundreds of people joined their cause in what became known as the Greensboro sit-ins. After some were arrested and charged with trespassing, protesters launched a boycott of all segregated lunch counters until the owners caved and the original four students were finally served at the Woolworth’s lunch counter where they’d first stood their ground.

Their efforts spearheaded peaceful sit-ins and demonstrations in dozens of cities and helped launch the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to encourage all students to get involved in the civil rights movement. It also caught the eye of young college graduate Stokely Carmichael , who joined the SNCC during the Freedom Summer of 1964 to register Black voters in Mississippi. In 1966, Carmichael became the chair of the SNCC, giving his famous speech in which he originated the phrase "Black power.”

Freedom Riders

On May 4, 1961, 13 “ Freedom Riders ”—seven Black and six white activists–mounted a Greyhound bus in Washington, D.C. , embarking on a bus tour of the American south to protest segregated bus terminals. They were testing the 1960 decision by the Supreme Court in Boynton v. Virginia that declared the segregation of interstate transportation facilities unconstitutional.

Facing violence from both police officers and white protesters, the Freedom Rides drew international attention. On Mother’s Day 1961, the bus reached Anniston, Alabama, where a mob mounted the bus and threw a bomb into it. The Freedom Riders escaped the burning bus but were badly beaten. Photos of the bus engulfed in flames were widely circulated, and the group could not find a bus driver to take them further. U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (brother to President John F. Kennedy ) negotiated with Alabama Governor John Patterson to find a suitable driver, and the Freedom Riders resumed their journey under police escort on May 20. But the officers left the group once they reached Montgomery, where a white mob brutally attacked the bus. Attorney General Kennedy responded to the riders—and a call from Martin Luther King Jr.—by sending federal marshals to Montgomery.

On May 24, 1961, a group of Freedom Riders reached Jackson, Mississippi. Though met with hundreds of supporters, the group was arrested for trespassing in a “whites-only” facility and sentenced to 30 days in jail. Attorneys for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP ) brought the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court, which reversed the convictions. Hundreds of new Freedom Riders were drawn to the cause, and the rides continued.

In the fall of 1961, under pressure from the Kennedy administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued regulations prohibiting segregation in interstate transit terminals

March on Washington

Arguably one of the most famous events of the civil rights movement took place on August 28, 1963: the March on Washington . It was organized and attended by civil rights leaders such as A. Philip Randolph , Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr.

More than 200,000 people of all races congregated in Washington, D. C. for the peaceful march with the main purpose of forcing civil rights legislation and establishing job equality for everyone. The highlight of the march was King’s speech in which he continually stated, “I have a dream…”

King’s “ I Have a Dream” speech galvanized the national civil rights movement and became a slogan for equality and freedom.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 —legislation initiated by President John F. Kennedy before his assassination —into law on July 2 of that year.

King and other civil rights activists witnessed the signing. The law guaranteed equal employment for all, limited the use of voter literacy tests and allowed federal authorities to ensure public facilities were integrated.

Bloody Sunday

On March 7, 1965, the civil rights movement in Alabama took an especially violent turn as 600 peaceful demonstrators participated in the Selma to Montgomery march to protest the killing of Black civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson by a white police officer and to encourage legislation to enforce the 15th amendment.

As the protesters neared the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were blocked by Alabama state and local police sent by Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, a vocal opponent of desegregation. Refusing to stand down, protesters moved forward and were viciously beaten and teargassed by police and dozens of protesters were hospitalized.

The entire incident was televised and became known as “ Bloody Sunday .” Some activists wanted to retaliate with violence, but King pushed for nonviolent protests and eventually gained federal protection for another march.

Voting Rights Act of 1965

When President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965, he took the Civil Rights Act of 1964 several steps further. The new law banned all voter literacy tests and provided federal examiners in certain voting jurisdictions. 

It also allowed the attorney general to contest state and local poll taxes. As a result, poll taxes were later declared unconstitutional in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections in 1966.

Part of the Act was walked back decades later, in 2013, when a Supreme Court decision ruled that Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional, holding that the constraints placed on certain states and federal review of states' voting procedures were outdated.

Civil Rights Leaders Assassinated

The civil rights movement had tragic consequences for two of its leaders in the late 1960s. On February 21, 1965, former Nation of Islam leader and Organization of Afro-American Unity founder Malcolm X was assassinated at a rally.

On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on his hotel room's balcony. Emotionally-charged looting and riots followed, putting even more pressure on the Johnson administration to push through additional civil rights laws.

Fair Housing Act of 1968

The Fair Housing Act became law on April 11, 1968, just days after King’s assassination. It prevented housing discrimination based on race, sex, national origin and religion. It was also the last legislation enacted during the civil rights era.

The civil rights movement was an empowering yet precarious time for Black Americans. The efforts of civil rights activists and countless protesters of all races brought about legislation to end segregation, Black voter suppression and discriminatory employment and housing practices.

Six Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement

Though their stories are sometimes overlooked, these women were instrumental in the fight for equal rights for African‑Americans.

How the Black Power Movement Influenced the Civil Rights Movement

With a focus on racial pride and self‑determination, leaders of the Black Power movement argued that civil rights activism did not go far enough.

8 Key Laws That Advanced Civil Rights

Since the abolishment of slavery, the U.S. government has passed several laws to address discrimination and racism against African Americans.

A Brief History of Jim Crow. Constitutional Rights Foundation. Civil Rights Act of 1957. Civil Rights Digital Library. Document for June 25th: Executive Order 8802: Prohibition of Discrimination in the Defense Industry. National Archives. Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-In. African American Odyssey. Little Rock School Desegregation (1957).  The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute Stanford . Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Global Freedom Struggle. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute Stanford . Rosa Marie Parks Biography. Rosa and Raymond Parks. Selma, Alabama, (Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965). BlackPast.org. The Civil Rights Movement (1919-1960s). National Humanities Center. The Little Rock Nine. National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior: Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site. Turning Point: World War II. Virginia Historical Society.

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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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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.

Brown V. Board of Education: a Landmark in The Struggle for Equality

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Freedom Summer: a Pivotal Moment in The American Civil Rights Movement

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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

Martin luther king jr: influential figure in the civil rights movement, how martin luther king jr, rosa parks and malcolm x organized the civil rights movement, the role of the media in ushering the civil rights movement, development of racial tendencies in the united states, the civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s, a deeper look at the civil rights movement in america, generation of the civil rights movement, black lives matter in the civil rights movement, the civil rights movement about african american people, the civil rights movement and african american discriminations, a report on the events that helped martin luther king jr.'s prominence in america to push the civil rights movement, the civil rights movement about national indentify, the influence of jazz musicians on the civil rights movement, rosa parks and the civil rights movement, the contribution of local grass-roots activists to the civil rights movement, rosa parks: the lady of the civil rights, brown vs board of education, the way rosa parks leadership style changed the history, rosa parks: how one bold decision made a world leader.

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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Abolitionism to Jim Crow

• Du Bois to Brown
• Montgomery bus boycott to the Voting Rights Act
• From Black power to the assassination of Martin Luther King
• Into the 21st century
• Black Lives Matter and Shelby County v. Holder

When did the American civil rights movement start?

• What did Martin Luther King, Jr., do?
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The American civil rights movement started in the mid-1950s. A major catalyst in the push for civil rights was in December 1955, when NAACP activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man.

Who were some key figures of the American civil rights movement?

Martin Luther King, Jr. , was an important leader of the civil rights movement. Rosa Parks , who refused to give up her seat on a public bus to a white customer, was also important. John Lewis , a civil rights leader and politician, helped plan the March on Washington .

What did the American civil rights movement accomplish?

The American civil rights movement broke the entrenched system of racial segregation in the South and achieved crucial equal-rights legislation.

What were some major events during the American civil rights movement?

The Montgomery bus boycott , sparked by activist Rosa Parks , was an important catalyst for the civil rights movement. Other important protests and demonstrations included the Greensboro sit-in and the Freedom Rides .

What are some examples of civil rights?

Examples of civil rights include the right to vote, the right to a fair trial, the right to government services, the right to a public education, and the right to use public facilities.

Recent News

American civil rights movement , mass protest movement against racial segregation and discrimination in the southern United States that came to national prominence during the mid-1950s. This movement had its roots in the centuries-long efforts of enslaved Africans and their descendants to resist racial oppression and abolish the institution of slavery . Although enslaved people were emancipated as a result of the American Civil War and were then granted basic civil rights through the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution , struggles to secure federal protection of these rights continued during the next century. Through nonviolent protest, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s broke the pattern of public facilities’ being segregated by “race” in the South and achieved the most important breakthrough in equal-rights legislation for African Americans since the Reconstruction period (1865–77). Although the passage in 1964 and 1965 of major civil rights legislation was victorious for the movement, by then militant Black activists had begun to see their struggle as a freedom or liberation movement not just seeking civil rights reforms but instead confronting the enduring economic, political, and cultural consequences of past racial oppression.

(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Britannica essay on “Monuments of Hope.”)

American history has been marked by persistent and determined efforts to expand the scope and inclusiveness of civil rights. Although equal rights for all were affirmed in the founding documents of the United States, many of the new country’s inhabitants were denied essential rights. Enslaved Africans and indentured servants did not have the inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that British colonists asserted to justify their Declaration of Independence . Nor were they included among the “People of the United States” who established the Constitution in order to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Instead, the Constitution protected slavery by allowing the importation of enslaved persons until 1808 and providing for the return of enslaved people who had escaped to other states.

As the United States expanded its boundaries, Native American peoples resisted conquest and absorption. Individual states, which determined most of the rights of American citizens , generally limited voting rights to white property-owning males, and other rights—such as the right to own land or serve on juries—were often denied on the basis of racial or gender distinctions. A small proportion of Black Americans lived outside the slave system, but those so-called “free Blacks” endured racial discrimination and enforced segregation . Although some enslaved persons violently rebelled against their enslavement ( see slave rebellions ), African Americans and other subordinated groups mainly used nonviolent means—protests, legal challenges, pleas and petitions addressed to government officials, as well as sustained and massive civil rights movements—to achieve gradual improvements in their status.

During the first half of the 19th century, movements to extend voting rights to non-property-owning white male labourers resulted in the elimination of most property qualifications for voting, but this expansion of suffrage was accompanied by brutal suppression of American Indians and increasing restrictions on free Blacks. Owners of enslaved people in the South reacted to the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia by passing laws to discourage antislavery activism and prevent the teaching of enslaved people to read and write. Despite this repression, a growing number of Black Americans freed themselves from slavery by escaping or negotiating agreements to purchase their freedom through wage labour. By the 1830s, free Black communities in the Northern states had become sufficiently large and organized to hold regular national conventions, where Black leaders gathered to discuss alternative strategies of racial advancement. In 1833 a small minority of whites joined with Black antislavery activists to form the American Anti-Slavery Society under the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison .

Frederick Douglass became the most famous of the formerly enslaved persons who joined the abolition movement . His autobiography—one of many slave narratives —and his stirring orations heightened public awareness of the horrors of slavery. Although Black leaders became increasingly militant in their attacks against slavery and other forms of racial oppression, their efforts to secure equal rights received a major setback in 1857, when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected African American citizenship claims. The Dred Scott decision stated that the country’s founders had viewed Blacks as so inferior that they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” This ruling—by declaring unconstitutional the Missouri Compromise (1820), through which Congress had limited the expansion of slavery into western territories—ironically strengthened the antislavery movement, because it angered many whites who did not hold enslaved people. The inability of the country’s political leaders to resolve that dispute fueled the successful presidential campaign of Abraham Lincoln , the candidate of the antislavery Republican Party . Lincoln’s victory in turn prompted the Southern slave states to secede and form the Confederate States of America in 1860–61.

Although Lincoln did not initially seek to abolish slavery, his determination to punish the rebellious states and his increasing reliance on Black soldiers in the Union army prompted him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) to deprive the Confederacy of its enslaved property . After the American Civil War ended, Republican leaders cemented the Union victory by gaining the ratification of constitutional amendments to abolish slavery ( Thirteenth Amendment ) and to protect the legal equality of formerly enslaved persons ( Fourteenth Amendment ) and the voting rights of male ex-slaves ( Fifteenth Amendment ). Despite those constitutional guarantees of rights, almost a century of civil rights agitation and litigation would be required to bring about consistent federal enforcement of those rights in the former Confederate states. Moreover, after federal military forces were removed from the South at the end of Reconstruction , white leaders in the region enacted new laws to strengthen the “ Jim Crow ” system of racial segregation and discrimination. In its Plessy v. Ferguson decision (1896), the Supreme Court ruled that “ separate but equal ” facilities for African Americans did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment , ignoring evidence that the facilities for Blacks were inferior to those intended for whites.

The Southern system of white supremacy was accompanied by the expansion of European and American imperial control over nonwhite people in Africa and Asia as well as in island countries of the Pacific and Caribbean regions. Like African Americans, most nonwhite people throughout the world were colonized or economically exploited and denied basic rights, such as the right to vote . With few exceptions, women of all races everywhere were also denied suffrage rights ( see woman suffrage ).

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In many respects, the civil rights movement was a great success. Successive, targeted campaigns of non-violent direct action chipped away at the racist power structures that proliferated across the southern United States. Newsworthy protests captured media attention and elicited sympathy across the nation. Though Martin Luther King Jr.’s charismatic leadership was important, we should not forget that the civil rights cause depended on a mass movement. As the former SNCC member Diane Nash recalled, it was a ‘people’s movement’, fuelled by grass-roots activism (Nash, 1985). Recognising a change in the public mood, Lyndon Johnson swiftly addressed many of the racial inequalities highlighted by the civil rights movement. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 led to meaningful change in the lives of many Black Americans, dismantling systems of segregation and black disenfranchisement.

In other respects, the civil rights movement was less revolutionary. It did not fundamentally restructure American society, nor did it end racial discrimination. In the economic sphere, in particular, there was still much work to be done. Across the nation, and especially in northern cities, stark racial inequalities were commonplace, especially in terms of access to jobs and housing. As civil rights activists became frustrated by their lack of progress in these areas, the movement began to splinter towards the end of the 1960s, with many Black activists embracing violent methods. Over the subsequent decades, racial inequalities have persisted, and in recent years police brutality against Black Americans, in particular, has become an urgent issue. As the protests triggered by the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 have demonstrated, many of the battles of the 1960s are still being fought.

Though King and other members of the civil rights movement failed to achieve their broader goals, there can be no doubting their radical ambitions. As Wornie Reed, who worked on the Poor People’s Campaign, explains in this interview, King was undoubtedly a ‘radical’ activist, even if the civil rights movement itself never resulted in a far-reaching social revolution.

Transcript: Video 4: Wornie Reed

This free course is an adapted extract from the Open University course A113 Revolutions [ Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. ( Hide tip ) ] . It is one of four OpenLearn courses exploring the notion of the Sixties as a ‘revolutionary’ period. Learn more about these OpenLearn courses here .

Kenneth R. Janken
Professor, Department of African and Afro-American Studies and
Director of Experiential Education, Office of Undergraduate Curricula
University of North Carolina
National Humanities Center Fellow
©National Humanities Center

When most Americans think of the Civil Rights Movement, they have in mind a span of time beginning with the 1954 Supreme Court’s decision in , which outlawed segregated education, or the Montgomery Bus Boycott and culminated in the late 1960s or early 1970s. The movement encompassed both ad hoc local groups and established organizations like the

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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Civility Is Overrated

The gravest danger to American democracy isn’t an excess of vitriol—it’s the false promise of civility.

Image above: William Howard Taft and a succession of other Republican presidents privileged restoring relations with the South over protecting black Americans’ rights.

J oe Biden has fond memories of negotiating with James Eastland, the senator from Mississippi who once declared, “I am of the opinion that we should have segregation in all the States of the United States by law. What the people of this country must realize is that the white race is a superior race, and the Negro race is an inferior race.”

Recalling in June his debates with segregationists like Eastland, Biden lamented, “At least there was some civility,” compared with today. “We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today, you look at the other side and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition; the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.”

Biden later apologized for his wistfulness. But yearning for an ostensibly more genteel era of American politics wasn’t a gaffe. Such nostalgia is central to Biden’s appeal as an antidote to the vitriol that has marked the presidency of Donald Trump.

Nor is Biden alone in selling the idea that rancor threatens the American republic. This September, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, who owes his seat to Senate Republicans depriving a Democratic president of his authority to fill a vacancy on the high court, published a book that argued, “In a very real way, self-governance turns on our treating each other as equals—as persons, with the courtesy and respect each person deserves—even when we vigorously disagree.”

Trump himself, a man whose rallies regularly descend into ritual denunciations of his enemies, declared in October 2018, as Americans were preparing to vote in the midterm elections, that “everyone will benefit if we can end the politics of personal destruction.” The president helpfully explained exactly what he meant: “Constant unfair coverage, deep hostility, and negative attacks … only serve to drive people apart and to undermine healthy debate.” Civility, in other words, is treating Trump how Trump wants to be treated, while he treats you however he pleases. It was a more honest description of how the concept of civility is applied today than either Biden or Gorsuch offered.

There are two definitions of civility. The first is not being an asshole. The second is “I can do what I want and you can shut up.” The latter definition currently dominates American political discourse.

The country is indeed divided today, and there is nothing wrong with wishing that Americans could all get along. But while nonviolence is essential to democracy, civility is optional, and today’s preoccupation with politesse both exaggerates the country’s divisions and papers over the fundamental issues that are causing the divisions in the first place. The idea that we’re currently experiencing something like the nadir of American civility ignores the turmoil that has traditionally characterized the nation’s politics, and the comparatively low level of political violence today despite the animosity of the moment.

Paeans to a more civil past also ignore the price of that civility. It’s not an unfortunate coincidence that the men Joe Biden worked with so amicably were segregationists. The civility he longs for was the result of excluding historically marginalized groups from the polity, which allowed men like James Eastland to wield tremendous power in Congress without regard for the rights or dignity of their disenfranchised constituents.

The true cause of American political discord is the lingering resistance of those who have traditionally held power to sharing it with those who until recently have only experienced its serrated edge. And the resistance does linger. Just this fall, a current Democratic senator from Delaware, Chris Coons, told a panel at the University of Notre Dame Law School that he hoped “a more diverse Senate that includes women’s voices, and voices of people of color, and voices of people who were not professionals but, you know, who grew up working-class” would not produce “irreconcilable discord.”

In his “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. famously lamented the “white moderate” who “prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” He also acknowledged the importance of tension to achieving justice. “I have earnestly opposed violent tension,” King wrote, “but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.” Americans should not fear that form of tension. They should fear its absence.

At their most frenzied , calls for civility stoke the fear that the United States might be on the precipice of armed conflict. Once confined to right-wing fever swamps, where radicals wrote fan fiction about taking up arms in response to “liberal tyranny,” the notion has gained currency in conservative media in the Trump era. In response to calls for gun-buyback programs, Tucker Carlson said on Fox News, “What you are calling for is civil war.” The president himself has warned that removing him from office, through the constitutionally provided-for mechanism of impeachment, might lead to civil war.

Civil war is not an imminent prospect. The impulse to conjure its specter overlooks how bitter and fierce American politics has often been. In the early days of the republic, as Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace wrote in their 1970 book, American Violence , the country witnessed Election Day riots, in which “one faction often tried violently to prevent another from voting.” In the 1850s, the nativist Know-Nothings fielded gangs to intimidate immigrant voters. Abolitionists urged defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act, and lived by their words, running slave catchers out of town and breaking captured black people out of custody. Frederick Douglass said that the best way to make the act a “dead letter” was “to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers.”

During the Gilded Age, state militias turned guns on striking workers. From 1882 to 1968, nearly 5,000 people, mostly black Americans, were lynched nationwide. From January 1969 to April 1970, more than 4,000 bombings occurred across the country, according to a Senate investigation. As Hofstadter wrote, “Violence has been used repeatedly in our past, often quite purposefully, and a full reckoning with the fact is a necessary ingredient in any realistic national self-image.”

The absence of this realistic national self-image has contributed to the sense of despair that characterizes American politics today. The reality, however, is that political violence is less common in the present than it has been at many points in American history, despite the ancient plague of white supremacy, the lingering scourge of jihadism, and the influence of a president who revels in winking justifications of violence against his political opponents and immigrants. Many Americans can’t stand one another right now. But apart from a few deranged fanatics, they do not want to slaughter one another en masse.

The more pertinent historical analogue is not the fractious antebellum period right-wing partisans seem so eager to relive but the tragic failures of Reconstruction, when the comforts of comity were privileged over the difficult work of building a multiracial democracy. The danger of our own political moment is not that Americans will again descend into a bloody conflagration. It is that the fundamental rights of marginalized people will again become bargaining chips political leaders trade for an empty reconciliation.

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The Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution should have settled once and for all the question of whether America was a white man’s country or a nation for all its citizens. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment established that anyone could be a citizen regardless of race, and the Fifteenth Amendment barred racial discrimination in voting. But by 1876, Republicans had paid a high political price for their advocacy of rights for black people, losing control of the House and nearly losing the presidency to the party associated with a violent rebellion in defense of slavery. Democrats agreed to hand Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops in the South, effectively ending the region’s brief experiment in multiracial governance. Witnessing the first stirrings of reunion, Douglass, the great abolitionist, wondered aloud, “In what position will this stupendous reconciliation leave the colored people?” He was right to worry.

One state government after another fell to campaigns of murder and terror carried out by Democratic paramilitaries. With its black constituency in the South disempowered, the Republican Party grew reliant on its corporate patrons, and adjusted its approach to maximize support from white voters. As for those emancipated after a devastating war, the party of abolition abandoned them to the despotism of their former masters. Writing in 1902, the political scientist and white supremacist John W. Burgess observed, “The white men of the South need now have no further fear that the Republican party, or Republican Administrations, will ever again give themselves over to the vain imagination of the political equality of man.”

The capitulation of Republicans restored civility between the major parties, but the political truce masked a horrendous spike in violence against freedmen. “While the parties clearly move back from confrontation with each other, you have the unleashing of massive white-supremacist violence in the South against African Americans and a systematic campaign to disenfranchise, a systematic campaign of racial terror in the South,” Manisha Sinha, a history professor at the University of Connecticut and the author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition , told me. “This is an era when white supremacy becomes virtually a national ideology.”

This was the fruit of prizing reconciliation over justice, order over equality, civility over truth. Republicans’ acquiescence laid the foundation for the reimposition of forced labor on the emancipated, the establishment of the Jim Crow system, and the state and extrajudicial terror that preserved white supremacy in the South for another century.

The day William Howard Taft was inaugurated, in March 1909, was frigid—a storm dropped more than half a foot of snow on Washington, D.C. But Taft’s inaugural address was filled with warm feeling, particularly about the reconciliation of North and South, and the full and just resolution of what was then known as the “Negro problem.”

“I look forward,” the party of Lincoln’s latest president said , “to an increased feeling on the part of all the people in the South that this Government is their Government, and that its officers in their states are their officers.” He assured Americans, “I have not the slightest race prejudice or feeling, and recognition of its existence only awakens in my heart a deeper sympathy for those who have to bear it or suffer from it, and I question the wisdom of a policy which is likely to increase it.”

To that end, he explained, black people should abandon their ambitions toward enfranchisement. In fact, Taft praised the various measures white Southerners had devised to exclude poor white and black Americans—“an ignorant, irresponsible element”—from the polity.

Writing in The Crisis two years later, W. E. B. Du Bois bitterly described Taft’s betrayal of black Americans. “In the face of a record of murder, lynching and burning in this country which has appalled the civilized world and loosened the tongue of many a man long since dumb on the race problem, in spite of this, Mr. Taft has blandly informed a deputation of colored men that any action on his part is quite outside his power, if not his interest.”

The first volume of David Levering Lewis’s biography of Du Bois shows him in particular anguish over what he called the “Taft Doctrine” of acquiescence to Jim Crow, which, in Lewis’s words, “had virtually nullified what remained of Republican Party interest in civil rights.” Taft’s Republican successors generally followed suit, culminating in Herbert Hoover, who in 1928 “accelerated the policy of whitening the GOP below the Mason-Dixon Line in order to bring about a major political realignment,” as Lewis put it in the second volume of his Du Bois biography. Taft, who was now the chief justice of the Supreme Court, described the strategy as an attempt “to break up the solid South and to drive the Negroes out of Republican politics.”

Taft couldn’t have predicted exactly how this realignment would take place, but he was right about the result. Despite the best efforts of Southern Democrats to segregate the benefits of the New Deal, the policies devised by Franklin D. Roosevelt to lift America out of the Great Depression alleviated black poverty, reinvigorating black participation in politics and helping transform the Democratic Party. “Government became immediate, its impact tangible, its activities relevant,” wrote the historian Nancy Weiss Malkiel in her 1983 book, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln . “As a result, blacks, like other Americans, found themselves drawn into the political process.”

The New Deal’s modest, albeit inadvertent, erosion of racial apartheid turned Southern Democrats against it. Thus began a period of ideological heterodoxy within the parties born of the unresolved race question. Whatever their other differences, significant factions in both parties could agree on the imperative to further marginalize black Americans.

Some of the worst violence in American history occurred during the period of low partisan polarization stretching from the late Progressive era to the late 1970s—the moment for which Joe Biden waxed nostalgic. In Ivy League debate rooms and the Senate cloakroom, white men could discuss the most divisive issues of the day with all the politeness befitting what was for them a low-stakes conflict. Outside, the people whose rights were actually at stake were fighting and dying to have those rights recognized.

In 1955, the lynching of Emmett Till—and the sight of his mutilated body in his casket—helped spark the modern civil-rights movement. Lionized today for their disciplined, nonviolent protest, civil-rights demonstrators were seen by American political elites as unruly and impolite. In April 1965, about a month after police attacked civil-rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, with billy clubs and tear gas, National Review published a cover story opposing the Voting Rights Act. Titled “Must We Repeal the Constitution to Give the Negro the Vote?,” the article, written by James Jackson Kilpatrick, began by lamenting the uncompromising meanness of the law’s supporters. Opposing the enfranchisement of black people, Kilpatrick complained, meant being dismissed as “a bigot, a racist, a violator of the rights of man, a mute accomplice to the murder of a mother-of-five.”

The fact that National Review ’s founder, William F. Buckley Jr., had editorialized that “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically” went unmentioned by Kilpatrick. Both civility and democracy were marred by the inclusion of black people in politics because in the view of Kilpatrick, Buckley, and many of their contemporaries, black people had no business participating in the first place.

Since the 1970s, American politics has grown more polarized, as the realignment Taft foresaw moved toward its conclusion and the parties became more ideologically distinct. In recent years, the differences between Republicans and Democrats have come to be defined as much by identity as by ideology. If you are white and Christian, you are very likely to be a Republican; if you are not, you are more likely to be a Democrat. At the same time, Americans have now sorted themselves geographically and socially such that they rarely encounter people who hold opposing views.

It’s a recipe for acrimony. As the parties become more homogeneous and more alien to each other, “we are more capable of dehumanizing the other side or distancing ourselves from them on a moral basis,” Lilliana Mason, a political scientist and the author of Uncivil Agreement , told me. “So it becomes easier for us to say things like ‘People on the other side are not just wrong; they’re evil’ or ‘People on the other side, they should be treated like animals.’ ”

Ideological and demographic uniformity has not been realized equally in both parties, however. The Democratic Party remains a heterogeneous entity, full of believers and atheists, nurses and college professors, black people and white people. This has made the party more hospitable to multiracial democracy.

The Republican Party, by contrast, has grown more racially and religiously homogeneous, and its politics more dependent on manufacturing threats to the status of white Christians. This is why Trump frequently and falsely implies that Americans were afraid to say “Merry Christmas” before he was elected, and why Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham warn Fox News viewers that nonwhite immigrants are stealing America. For both the Republican Party and conservative media, wielding power and influence depends on making white Americans feel threatened by the growing political influence of those who are different from them.

In stoking such fears, anger is a powerful weapon. In his book Anger and Racial Politics , the University of Maryland professor Antoine J. Banks argues that “anger is the dominant emotional underpinning of contemporary racism.” Anger and racism are so linked, in fact, that politicians need not use overtly racist language to provoke racial resentment. Anger alone, Banks writes, can activate prejudiced views, even when a given issue would seem to have little to do with race: “Anger operates as a switch that amplifies (or turns on) racist thinking—exacerbating America’s racial problem. It pushes prejudiced whites to oppose policies and candidates perceived as alleviating racial inequality.” This is true for politicians on both sides of the political divide—but the right has far more to gain from sowing discord than from mending fences.

Trumpists lamenting civility’s decline do not fear fractiousness; on the contrary, they happily practice it to their own ends. What they really fear is the cultural, political, and economic shifts that occur when historically marginalized groups begin to exert power in a system that was once defined by their exclusion. Social mores that had been acceptable become offensive; attitudes that had been widely held are condemned.

Whether the American political system today can endure without fracturing further may depend on the choices of the center-right, Yoni Appelbaum writes.

Societies are constantly renegotiating the boundaries of respect and decency. This process can be disorienting; to the once dominant group, it can even feel like oppression. (It is not.) Many of the same people who extol the sanctity of civility when their prerogatives are questioned are prone to convulsions over the possibility of respecting those they consider beneath them, a form of civility they deride as “political correctness.”

In a different political system, the tide would pull the Republican Party toward the center. But the GOP’s structural advantage in the Electoral College and the Senate, and its success in gerrymandering congressional and state legislative districts all over the country, allow it to wield power while continuing to appeal solely to a diminishing conservative minority encouraged to regard its fellow Americans as an existential threat.

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The Trump administration’s attempt to use the census to enhance the power of white voters was foiled by a single vote on the Supreme Court on the basis of a technicality; it will not be the last time this incarnation of the Republican Party seeks to rig democracy to its advantage on racial terms. Even before Trump, the party was focused not only on maximizing the influence of white voters but on disenfranchising minority voters, barely bothering to update its rationale since Taft praised Jim Crow–era voting restrictions for banishing the “ignorant” from the polity.

The end of polarization in America matters less than the terms on which it ends. It is possible that, in the aftermath of a Trump defeat in 2020, Republicans will move to the political center. But it is also possible that Trump will win a second term, and the devastation of the defeat will lead the Democrats to court conservative white people, whose geographic distribution grants them a disproportionate influence over American politics. Like the Republicans during Reconstruction, the Democrats may bargain away the rights of their other constituencies in the process.

The true threat to America is not an excess of vitriol, but that elites will come together in a consensus that cripples democracy and acquiesces to the dictatorship of a shrinking number of Americans who treat this nation as their exclusive birthright because of their race and religion. This is the false peace of dominance, not the true peace of justice. Until Americans’ current dispute over the nature of our republic is settled in favor of the latter, the dispute must continue.

In the aftermath of a terrible war, Americans once purchased an illusion of reconciliation, peace, and civility through a restoration of white rule. They should never again make such a bargain.

Support for this article was provided by a fellowship from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights. It appears in the December 2019 print edition with the headline “Against Reconciliation.”

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The modern civil rights movement, 1954-1964.

In the greatest mass movement in modern American history, black demonstrations swept the country seeking constitutional equality at the national level, as well as an end to Massive Resistance (state and local government-supported opposition to school desegregation) in the South. Presidential executive orders, the passage of two Civil Rights Acts, and the federal government's first military enforcement of civil rights brought an end to de jure segregation. The success of this movement inspired other minorities to employ similar tactics.

Pivotal Moments in the Modern Civil Rights Movement

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116 Civil Rights Movement Essay Topics & Examples

Trying to write a successful civil rights movement essay? Questions about the subject may flood your brain, but we can help!

📃 8 Tips for Writing a Civil Rights Movement Essay

🏆 best civil rights movement topic ideas & essay examples, 🎓 most interesting civil rights movement topics to write about, 📌 good civil rights research topics, 👍 interesting civil rights essay topics, ❓ civil rights movement essay questions.

As a student, you can explore anything from civil disobedience to the work of Martin Luther King Jr in your paper. And we are here to help! Our experts have gathered civil rights movement essay topics for different assignments. In the article below, see research and paper ideas along with tips on writing. Besides, check civil rights essay examples via the links.

A civil rights movement essay is an essential assignment because it helps students to reflect on historical events that molded the contemporary American society. Read this post to find some useful tips that will help you score an A on your paper on the civil rights movement.

Tip 1: Read the instructions carefully. Check all of the documents provided by your tutor, including the grading rubric, example papers, and civil rights movement essay questions. When you know what is expected of you, it will be much easier to proceed with the assignment and achieve a high mark on it.

Tip 2: Browse sample papers on the topic. If you are not sure of what to write about in particular, you can see what other students included in their essays. While reading civil rights movement essay examples, take notes about the content, sources used, and other relevant points. This might give you some ideas on what to include in your paper and how to enhance it to meet the requirements.

Tip 3: Collect high-quality material to support your essay. The best sources are scholarly articles and books. However, there are also some credible websites and news articles that offer unbiased information on the civil rights movements. If the instructions don’t prevent you from using these, you could include a wide array of resources, thus making your essay more detailed.

Tip 4: Offer some context on the civil rights movement. The 20th century was instrumental to the history of America because there were many political and social events, including World War II and the subsequent Cold War. While some events may not relate to the history of the civil rights movement, they are important for the readers to understand the context in which the movement took place.

Tip 5: Consider the broader history of discrimination in the American society. Discrimination is the key focus of most civil rights movement essay topics. For the black population, the movement was instrumental in reducing prejudice and improving social position. However, there were many other populations that faced discrimination throughout the American history, such as women, Native Americans, and people from the LGBT community. Can you see any similarities in how these groups fought for equal rights?

Tip 6: Reflect on the sources of the civil rights movement. The story of racial discrimination and oppression in America spanned for over 400 years, so there is a lot of history behind the civil rights movement. Here, you could talk about slavery and segregation policies, as well as how the black communities responded to the struggle. For instance, you could consider the Harlem Renaissance and its influence on the Black identity or about other examples or cultural movements that originated in the black community.

Tip 7: If relevant, include a personal reflection. You can write about what the civil rights movement means for you and how it impacted the life of your family. You can also explore racial discrimination in contemporary society to show that some issues still remain unsolved.

Tip 8: Maintain a good essay structure. Ensure that every paragraph serves its purpose. A civil rights movement essay introduction should define the movement and state your main argument clearly. Follow it with several main body paragraphs, each one exploring a certain idea that relates to the key argument. In conclusion, address all the points you’ve made and demonstrate how they relate to your thesis.

With these few tips, you will be able to write an excellent paper on the civil rights movement. Check the rest of our website for essay titles, topics, and more writing advice!

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• The Role and Importance of the Grassroot Organizers on the Civil Rights Movement
• The Effect of Society on the World of Doubt and the Effects of the Civil Rights Movement
• The Importance and Impact of the Civil Rights Movement to the Public Policy
• The New York Times and The Civil Rights Movement
• Understanding the Civil Rights Movement: America Vs. Australia
• The Laws in the Reconstruction Era and the Civil Rights Movement
• How Effective Was the Early Civil Rights Movement in Advancing Black Civil Rights in 1880-1990?
• What Role Did Jews Play in the American Civil Rights Movement?
• How Did the African American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s?
• Did Minority Rights Campaigners Copy the Tactics of the Black American Civil Rights Movement?
• What is the NAACP’s Impact on the Civil Rights Movement in the US?
• How Did Gandhi Influence the Civil Rights Movement?
• To What Extent Can the 1950’s Be Viewed as a Great Success for the Civil Rights Movement?
• How Far Was the Effectiveness of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s Limited by Internal Divisions?
• How the Cold War Promoted the Civil Rights Movement in America, and How It Promoted Change?
• How Far Was Martin Luther King Responsible for the Civil Rights Movement?
• How Was Civil Disobedience Used in the Civil Rights Movement?
• How Did the Civil Rights Movement Change America?
• How Successful Had the Civil Rights Movement Been by the Late 1960s?
• Did Black Power Groups Cause Harm to the Civil Rights Movement in America?
• To What Extent Was Grass Roots Activism a Significant Reason to Why the Civil Rights Movement Grew in the 1950s and 1960s?
• How Did Kennedy and His Administration Effect the Civil Rights Movement?
• Did the Black Power Movement Help or Hinder the Civil Rights Movement?
• How the Civil Rights Movement Influenced the Women?
• What Are the Results of the Effort of the Civil Rights Movement?
• How Did Martin Luther King Affect the Civil Rights Movement?
• Are the Problems Faced by the Feminist and Sexual Emancipation Movements Similar to Those Faced by Civil Rights Movement, or Are There Major Differences?
• Was the Civil Rights Movement Successful?
• Has America Really Changed Since the Civil Rights Movement?
• Why Was the Civil Rights Movement Successful by 1965?
• How Did Religion Influence Martin Luther King, Jr as He Led the Civil Rights Movement?
• How Significant Was Martin Luther King Jr. to the Black Civil Rights Movement?
• How Did Martin Luther Kings Jr Death Affect the Civil Rights Movement?
• How Important Was Martin Luther King to the Civil Rights Movement?
• Does the Civil Rights Movement Have an Effect on the Way Minorities Are Treated by Authorities?
• Was the Civil Rights Movement a Success or Failure?
• Malcolm X Questions
• Equality Topics
• Cuban Revolution Ideas
• Great Depression Research Topics
• Martin Luther King Titles
• Freedom Topics
• Children’s Rights Research Ideas
• Women’s Suffrage Essay Ideas
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Civil Rights in the United States

Civil rights movement, government materials related to the civil rights era, primary sources: general.

• Seminal Documents

(Also see Africana Studies Primary Sources )

• History Vault: Civil Rights and the Black Freedom Struggle This link opens in a new window Manuscript and archival collections focusing on civil rights and the Black Freedom Movement of the 20th Century. Contains records of four of the most important civil rights organizations of the 1950s and 1960s: NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, and CORE.
• Black Life in America This link opens in a new window The experience and impact of African Americans, as recorded by the news media.
• The Black Panther (Newspaper) The newspaper of the Black Panther Party. Twenty issues of the Black Panther Party newspaper from between 1968-1973. The papers are posted on Libcom.org.
• Civil Rights (National Archives)
• The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Library of Congress) Exhibition commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the history that led up to it, and its immediate impact.
• Civil Rights Digital Library: Topics (Digital Library of Georgia) Select a topic to see archival collections and reference resources, many of which are available online.
• Civil Rights History Project (Library of Congress) Oral interviews and collections of people who participated in the Civil Rights movement.
• FBI Records: The Vault - Civil Rights FBI records included in the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) Library.
• Freedom Summer Collection (Wisconsin Historical Society) Manuscript collections documents the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964
• Hispanic Life in America This link opens in a new window The experience and impact of Hispanic Americans, as recorded by the news media.
• Historical Publications of the United States Commission on Civil Rights Documents from this commission, which have been at the forefront of federal and state efforts for civil rights.
• Jim Crow and Segregation (Library of Congress) Set of primary sources that reflects popular views of and causes and affects of racial segregation.
• The Krueger-Scott Oral History Project The Krueger-Scott oral histories is the largest collection of oral history interviews conducted with African-American residents of Newark who came to the city during the Great Migration, as well as those whose local roots stretch back generations. The faculty, staff and graduate students at Rutgers University-Newark who have worked on the collection in collaboration with local cultural institutions are proud to have helped preserve, archive, and make public these remarkable oral narratives that describe an as yet unwritten history of 20th-century African-American life. (source: website)
• Land of (Unequal) Opportunity: Documenting the Civil Rights Struggle in Arkansas From the University of Arkansas
• The NAACP: A Century in the Fight for Freedom The story of America's oldest and largest civil rights organization, told through letters, photographs, maps, and more. Part of the Library of Congress Primary Source sets.
• National Archives Civil Rights Records
• National Museum of African American History & Culture: Collections (Smithsonian) The National Museum of African American History and Culture is the only national museum devoted exclusively to the documentation of African American life, history, and culture.
• Voices of Civil Rights (Library of Congress) Exhibition that includes personal accounts and oral hstories. A collaboration of AARP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and the Library of Congress.
• Seminal Documents of the Civil Rights Movement

Civil Rights Data Collection

From the U.S. Department of Education

Illustrates that Civil Rights is not a historical phenomenon but an ongoing issue in the United States.

Library of Congress: Civil Rights Resource Guide

Links to over forty sites related to civil rights, library of congress: american memory, an important site from the library of congress. use the search box to find matches to terms such as civil rights, jim crow, martin luther king, etc., national museum of african american history and culture, a comprehensive smithsonian museum website.

In history and the humanities a primary source is a item produced from the time you are researching. Examples include a photograph, a letter, a newspaper article, and government documents.  Looking at actual sources from a specific time helps you get a firsthand account of what was happening then.

These resources will help you locate relevant primary sources. (See Primary Source Research for more guidance.)

Archives of searchable historical primary source materials. Note: This content has moved to the History Commons platform, but still contains the Accessible Archives collections subscribed to by Rowan University.

• African American Newspapers, Series 1 This link opens in a new window African American newspapers published in the U.S. from 1827-1998. more... less... Provides access to U.S. newspapers chronicling a century and a half of the African American experience.
• Archives Unbound This link opens in a new window Digital collection of historical documents from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. more... less... Collections cover a broad range of topics from the Middle Ages forward-from Witchcraft to World War II to twentieth-century political history.
• Historic Documents This link opens in a new window Primary source documents from 1972 forward in U.S. government and politics.

National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)

New york public library digital collections.

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Collection Civil Rights History Project

Women in the civil rights movement.

Many women played important roles in the Civil Rights Movement, from leading local civil rights organizations to serving as lawyers on school segregation lawsuits. Their efforts to lead the movement were often overshadowed by men, who still get more attention and credit for its successes in popular historical narratives and commemorations.  Many women experienced gender discrimination and sexual harassment within the movement and later turned towards the feminist movement in the 1970s.  The Civil Rights History Project interviews with participants in the struggle include both expressions of pride in women’s achievements and also candid assessments about the difficulties they faced within the movement.

Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and one of three women chosen to be a field director for the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project.  She discusses the difficulties she faced in this position and notes that gender equality was not a given, but had to be fought for:  “I often had to struggle around issues related to a woman being a project director.  We had to fight for the resources, you know.  We had to fight to get a good car because the guys would get first dibs on everything, and that wasn’t fair…it was a struggle to be taken seriously by the leadership, as well as by your male colleagues.” She continues, “One of the things that we often don’t talk about, but there was sexual harassment that often happened toward the women.  And so, that was one of the things that, you know, I took a stand on, that ‘This was not – we’re not going to get a consensus on this.  There is not going to be sexual harassment of any of the women on this project or any of the women in this community.  And you will be put out if you do it.’”

Lonnie King was an activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Atlanta. He remembers meeting other students from the Nashville movement when SNCC became a nationwide organization in 1960. He recalls his surprise that Diane Nash was not elected to be the representative from Nashville, and echoes Simmons’ criticisms about male privilege and domination: “Diane Nash, in my view, was the Nashville movement and by that I mean this:  Others were there, but they weren’t Diane Nash. Diane was articulate; she was a beautiful woman, very photogenic, very committed. And very intelligent and had a following. I never did understand how, except maybe for sexism, I never understood how [James] Bevel, Marion [Barry], and for that matter, John Lewis, kind of leapfrogged over her. I never understood that because she was in fact the leader in Nashville. It was Diane. The others were followers of her… I so never understood that to be honest with you. She’s an unsung... a real unsung hero of the movement in Nashville, in my opinion.”

Ekwueme Michael Thewell was a student at Howard University and a leader of the Nonviolent Action Group, an organization that eventually joined with SNCC. He reflects on the sacrifices that women college students at Howard made in joining the struggle, and remarks on the constraints they faced after doing so: “It is only in retrospect that I recognize the extraordinary price that our sisters paid for being as devoted to the struggle as they were. It meant that they weren’t into homecoming queen kind of activities. That they weren’t into the accepted behavior of a Howard lady. That they weren't into the trivia of fashion and dressing up. Though they were attractive women and they took care of themselves, but they weren’t the kind of trophy wives for the med school students and they weren’t—some of them might have been members of the Greek letter organizations, but most of them I suspect weren’t. So that they occupied a place outside the conventional social norms of the whole university student body. So did the men. But with men, I think, we can just say, ‘Kiss my black ass’ and go on about our business. It wasn’t so clear to me that a woman could do the same thing.”

Older interviewees emphasize the opportunities that were available to an earlier generation of women. Mildred Bond Roxborough , a long-time secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, discusses the importance of women leaders in local branches: “Well, actually when you think about women's contributions to the NAACP, without the women we wouldn't have an NAACP.  The person who was responsible for generating the organizing meeting was a woman.  Of course, ever since then we've had women in key roles--not in the majority, but in the very key roles which were responsible for the evolution of the NAACP.  I think in terms of people like Daisy Lampkin, who was a member of our national board from Pittsburgh; she traveled around the country garnering memberships and helping to organize branches.  That was back in the '30s and '40s before it became fashionable or popular for women to travel.  You have women who subsequently held positions in the NAACP nationally as program directors and as leaders of various divisions.” She goes on to discuss the contributions of many women to the success of the NAACP.

Doris Adelaide Derby , another SNCC activist, remembers that the challenge and urgency of the freedom struggle was a formative experience for young activist women, who had to learn resourcefulness on the job:   “I always did what I wanted to do.  I had my own inner drive.  And I found that when I came up with ideas and I was ready to work to see it through, and I think that happened with a lot of women in SNCC.  We needed all hands on deck, and so, when we found ourselves in situations, we had to rely on whoever was around.  And if somebody had XYZ skills, and somebody only had ABC, we had to come together. We used to joke about that, but in reality, the women, you know, were strong.  In the struggle, the women were strong.”

Ruby Nell Sales , who later overcame psychological traumas from the racial violence she witnessed in the movement, encourages us to look beyond the simplistic story of Rosa Parks refusing to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery. As she explains, Parks was a long-time activist who had sought justice for African American women who were frequently assaulted—both verbally and physically-- in their daily lives: “…When we look at Rosa Parks, people often think that she was – she did that because of her civil rights and wanting to sit down on the bus.  But she also did that – it was a rebellion of maids, a rebellion of working class women, who were tired of boarding the buses in Montgomery, the public space, and being assaulted and called out-of-there names and abused by white bus drivers. And that’s why that Movement could hold so long.  If it had just been merely a protest about riding the bus, it might have shattered.  But it went to the very heart of black womanhood, and black women played a major role in sustaining that movement.”

The Civil Rights History Project includes interviews with over 50 women who came from a wide range of backgrounds and were involved in the movement in a myriad of ways. Their stories deepen our understanding of the movement as a whole, and provide us with concrete examples of how vital they were to the gains of the Civil Rights Movement.

What were the failures of the Civil Rights Movement?

I do not believe that there were major failures within the movement itself...there were failures in the P.R., in that we did not get our message out clearly enough. There were failures in the leadership of the movement, because we had different groups taking charge, SNCC, CORE, NAACP, Southern Christian Leadership, and all were well meaning but confusing to the members of the movement. Finally, when SNCC insisted upon whites leaving the movement, it did not help but hurt in general. When Doctor King was murdered, many of us felt abandoned by the rest of the leadership.

Looking at the failures should also take into account the great progress of the movement (concrete victories, improving lives, giving confidence for future struggles in civil rights and other justice struggles at the time and today, and more). Failures can mean many different things — mistakes, better choices that could have been made, weaknesses that mean we fall short of our dreams, as well as some failures that undermine the on-going progress of the movement. Some are things we could not do very much about (reflecting the forces arrayed against us). Some reflect judgments we made ourselves. We shouldn't blame the movement for the failures of the society. Here are three failures we can learn from. We did not go far enough. While every area of civil rights struggles need much more progress, economic, education, elections, and more, greater progress is evident in some areas than in others. The movement did not have the power to move for economic justice at the same level as it did for political power and so ended up with less than was needed of each. In the Taylor Branch books on Dr. King, he mentions that there was an agreement raised by Kennedy (I believe) that he would support the struggle for voting rights if the movement's focus on housing and economic issues was not treated as the same kind of priority. While there has been progress on voting rights (though even this is being terribly eroded!) there has been far less progress on economic justice. This largely reflects the financial power arrayed against us. Without economic equality (good paying jobs — not only for a few, but for large numbers, access to credit/housing, strong unions committed to equal rights to defend working people on the job), it is hard to have equality in other areas. We fell victim to factional fighting that drove many away. There are always questions about strategy —  do we accept a compromise or hold out for something closer to our vision? How do we ensure Black leadership in a movement for civil rights and have a role for supportive whites (without them dominating)? Do we emphasize our militancy or do we view that as a tactic in the struggle for greater impact? Often these and other questions led to division and diminished our numbers. Of course, this was aided by government and other agent provocateurs seeking to sow division. But a movement is built by addition, not subtraction. There were times we focused on who had the right answer, rather than the way to recruit more people and build majorities. We need political majorities to create the basis for greater progress. In the face of terror and stalled progress, we did not continue the push to organize. The movement improved skills at inside politics, gaining many big city mayoral and other elected positions. It was good at mobilization with demonstrations. But in the face of endless attacks, the on-going work of organizing was hard to sustain.

Some thoughts on CRM "failures." I'd like to distinguish between failures, defeats, and impossibilities: The murder of MLK was a defeat. 100 cities burned in the aftermath. SNCC had already dissolved. Coherent leadership became impossible It was never our intent to change the hearts and minds of white racists, but to make them obey the law. In the latter, we were substantially successful. The betrayal of the MFDP [by the Democratic Party elite at the Atlantic City convention] was a defeat. We were not just abandoned, but opposed by our supposed liberal friends. It was impossible for the movement to provide a way out of economic deprivation and discrimination during the short historical period allowed us. Not reaching the lives of urban black people was part failure and part impossibility. We couldn't export a Southern movement into the North. The attempt tore us apart.

So as far as I am concerned, the Civil Rights Movement was a success. There was a battle about who would define America. On one side the white supremacists wanted to maintain the status quo that existed in the U.S. after Reconstruction. The determination of the World War II veterans with the Double-V program and the Freedom Movement prevailed. Therefore, I think questions and answers that focus on failures are misleading to the most important issue. However, as I see it, the major failure of the Movement was accepting the concept of demonstrations as a method of " speaking truth to power ." While the demonstrations were at their height and America was fighting for global dominance the Freedom Movement assumed that the temporary federal and state government programs that were put in place during the 1970's were designed to benefit the Black community. In fact, the programs were designed to distract and pacify the Black community. After the energy was dissipated and contained, the beginnings what we see today started to take shape.

Failure #1: We underestimated Racism: We relied on organizing, education and leglslation to lead to equality. We were blind to the embedded racism that continues to dominate our electoral and judicial systems. I once believed if the good people were elected and economic equity laws passed that segregation and racial hatred would just melt away. Failure #2: We misunderstood the Role of Whites in the Movement: We loved being accepted by Black youth and adults in the South. There was little cooler than being invited to a SNCC get together. When we whites were told "honky go home" most of us let our hurt feelings block us from finding other ways to support the African American Freedom Fight. It wasn't until many years later I began to do "anti-racism" work. Failure #3: We didn't sustain successful projects: While some of the SNCC Freedom Schools and SCLC Citizenship Education Programs persevered for a few years, those organizing, education and action programs needed to be embedded, embraced and led by local communities for much longer. Hosea Williams envisioned the Summer Community Organizing and Political Education (SCOPE) project that I worked with as a summer program to which we would return every summer. When I first visited my assigned county 39 years later, people told me it would have made a big difference if we had been able to come back to support, strategize and fundraise for their ongoing efforts to secure jobs, housing, employment and equal rights. Maria Gitin, SCLC, SNCC Summer 1965 Author, " This Bright Light of Ours: Stories from the Voting Rights Fight ."

The biggest failure of the Civil Rights Movement was in the related areas of poverty and economic discrimination. Despite the laws we got passed, there is still widespread discrimination in employment and housing. Businesses owned by people of color are still denied equal access to markets, financing, and capital. Centuries of economic deprivation, and the problems stemming from it, remain largely un- addressed. We broke down the barriers that denied people access to public and commercial facilities based on their race, but the income barriers to even the most basic necessities such as food, shelter, clothing, and health care still remain in full force. If they have the money a Black family can now join the country club, but huge sectors of society cannot afford health coverage for themselves or their children. We integrated the schools, but not the neighborhoods on which school districts are drawn. So today, inner-city schools composed of predominantly non-white students are marginalized and under-funded. We opened the doors to the Univeristy of Alabama, but have slammed them shut on students who come from failing K-12 schools.

We made no dent on economic disparity and in part inadvertently contributed to a growing chasm between black middle class and black poor. Personally, I was chastized as a racist for being a lead counsel to have a school district to take into account black English dialect of isolated black students; I never was criticized by any black poor person to my knowledge; I was criticized by Roy Wilkins, Benjamin Hooks, and my white colleagues at the time.

The Civil Rights Movement had many failures as do all social movements. But its strengths outweighed the mistakes it made and its legacy as a whole is a positive one. It was an INCLUSIVE movement — it included everyone who believed in justice and that was its lasting legacy.

The largest failure was the breakdown between Black & White activists. I have always thought that agents provocateurs (perhaps the FBI, which played a lot of "dirty tricks") stirred up animosity & resentment in the Movement. There had always been an undercurrent of resentment of Whites by Black activists. It may have come to a head at the Waveland Meeting at the end of 1964, but it had been simmering since the beginning. Then the rift widened, until whites were told to go organize in the white community. (Sam Shirah & SSOC were already trying.) The news media focused on the whites who came down for Freedom Summer, ignoring the Black activists who were being killed & beaten for years. You couldn't get any coverage unless whites were beaten up. But people gave in to their own biases.

By "Civil Rights Movement" (CRM) I mean the 1955-1966 period, and the national Big Four organizations down to independent local community organizations exemplified by FIGHT in Rochester, NY. Failures must be placed in the context of tremendous successes ending the South's " slavery by another name ," and breaking many barriers of prejudice and discrimination in the North. First was insufficient recognition of, and strategy based on, the close and interdependent relationship of class and race. To break the racist system that is able to play one against another both must be addressed. The country's vast majority of Black people were working class, under-class, or unemployed. The CRM played a "zero-sum" game: its gains were perceived as losses by poor and working class whites. Complicating matters, there were no real white partners. The 1963 March On Washington's program included full employment; the March was endorsed by major labor unions; SNCC initiated a "poor whites" organizing project in the south. These were never elaborated. Second, and related: seduction by "community-" and "economic-development," and "community control" that coopted Movement organizations in program administration rather than building "mass-based" people power. The guideline, " Power Precedes Program " was lost; "community-based" programs substituted for people-based power. Third, "The Movement" substituted rhetoric and tactical excesses for real power. It proclaimed "Black Power" but only sporadically built it. Most exceptions succumbed to the seduction of foundation and government funding and became "community-based nonprofits". Mike Miller, Field Secretary, SNCC, 1962-1966. (See Mike Miller's writings on this and related subjects.

The goals of the Civil Rights Movement were, in my estimation, limited. To a large degree, those goals were achieved, on the surface: integrating public facilities. You can ride from one end of the country to the other now without worrying about being hassled too much. But the bigger picture, I think the Civil Rights Movement could not achieve the changing of the hearts, because we were strictly using the law, the Constitution of the United States, that which was already legal but had not been enforced. Although they made new laws to bring some change about, but they already had good laws on the book. They just weren't being enforced. If I say we failed in any area, I'd say we might have failed in articulating to the population of this country what our goals were. I never thought that what we were doing would achieve the complete picture of what needed to be. But it would be a start. So I can't say we failed in what were trying to achieve.

The local leader of the CRM in Demopolis said that the goal of the Movement was to give African-Americans a chance to have "decent houses, decent cars, and decent jobs." Our ghettos are evidence that if its object was the one he expressed, the movement won a few battles but lost the war.

Bottom line: I take issue with the concept of, or use of, the word, "failure". I think it is unfair, and placing much too huge a burden on the shoulders of the civil rights movement, to expect it to have solved all the issues bedeviling the black communities in the U.S. The civil rights movement started out, and concentrated on, aspects of overt segregation that could be tackled directly. In other words, a problem could be defined (e.g., segregated lunch counters, voter registration requirements that deliberately excluded blacks, etc), direct, nonviolent action could be taken against those wrongs, and hopefully that would cause change. Which, in many cases, is exactly what happened. Was underlying racism in American society eradicated? No, but it was exposed to daylight (much as endemic antisemitism is being uncovered and exposed today [March 2024].) Were the underlying causes of poverty addressed? Only tangentially. Again, that wasn't the goal. Is society more aware of those causes now? I think so. There's only so much we could do in the civil rights movement, and to blame us for not solving all of society's ills as they relate to blacks by calling up "failures" is grossly unfair. In fact, the very so-called "failures" of the civil rights movements are actually successes in the sense that they brought to light some very deep-seated wrongs in American society and the economy. That these have not yet been resolved is only a reflection of historical time — it will take many years for these injustices to be corrected, but now that they are in the bright light of day and not hiding in the shadows progress should prevail.

I think the Movement missed an important opportunity by failing to follow Dr. King's lead in identifying poverty as as big a challenge to full citizenship as the denial of voting rights. Income and wealth inquality based on race remain the fundamental causes of the country's most serious social problems. Understandably, King's murder and other events of the late '60s and early '70s created great turmoil that made it hard for us all to understand the necessity for priortizing a sustained campaign to rectify economic injustice. Fortunately, today, many more activists understand this problem, so there is hope the work can be carried on. Many of us (at least many of us white allies in the Movement) also failed to understand how deeply entrenched racism was/is in America. I used to think, for instance, that one of the achievments of the Movement was that black men were no longer killed with impunity, but, of course, the events of the past few years have demolished that delusion. And the fact that the candidacy and election of Donald Trump have freed the restraints on expressions of violent racism only confirms how deep racism is rooted in the American psyche. We'll never eliminate racism, but I hope there will be a day when its expression is socially unacceptable and that those expessions that are made are

I think that one of the places where we failed is that we weren't developing any kind of mechanism for the movement to perpetuate itself. We didn't try to work towards setting up some kind of system where we could perpetuate ourselves.

Well, we didn't finish. There was a solid movement base in the South. The organizations were under enormous pressure to move to the North, that's why King went to Cicero. Some of us like myself really just had to get out of the South, at least for a breather. By then there were huge questions about the economics of oppression and so forth, and those had always been discussions, but that's where I thought the movement in the South would be heading. Very few people did stay for the long haul. While I understand it, I think, I thought then and I think now, that that was a mistake, because I think we could have had a really good base for continued organizing, continued critiquing of the society.

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Successes And Failures Of Civil Rights Movement

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: civil right , civil rights movement , rights movement

Successes and Failures of Civil Rights Movement The Civil Rights movement was being based on the idea of equality between people of different racial affiliation and between genders. Even though that the roots of this movement can be traced back to twenties, it only started to gain momentum after the end of World War 2. It is not by mere accident that the beginning of Civil Rights movement is strongly associated with America. This is because the legacy of Black slavery in America is traditionally considered to be stronger than in any other country. Even at the beginning of fifties, American society could be referred to as truly multicultural. Yet, at the same time it was repressive towards the racial minorities.

This situation could not continue on forever. All multicultural societies undergo the period of social tribulation, when ethnic minorities demand more rights and privileges. But the crisis goes away after these minorities gain more rights than the representatives of host nation. The promoters of equality used to stress out that it is unfair to treat people differently, because of the color of their skin. Later in time, the Lesbian and Gay movements also began to consider themselves as the integral part of Civil Rights movement. Since not long ago, the Animal Rights activists began referring to their cause as such that is directly relates to the issue of promoting diversity and tolerance.

Also, many students that were being expelled from colleges for excessive usage of drugs and academic inadequacy consider their civil rights to be violated, because they think that their teachers were being racially biased towards them. Let us analyze failures and successes of Civil Rights movement. Failures The main idea of Civil Rights movement was the elimination of discrimination. But from the present prospective it appears that this movement has failed to achieve its main objective. This is because the equality does not come as the result of law that prohibits discrimination. There is no equality between people of the same race, how can we suggest that the equality exists between races? This can be considered as movements main failure, because it did not result in establishing the true social equality, within the society, as it originally intended. The main reason for this was the fact that movements proponents tried to combat inequality with the mean of introducing more laws, without understanding that the essence of inequality is purely biological.

The Essay on Womens Movement Towards Equality

The Women??s Movement Towards Equality For centuries, all over the world, women have been forced to stand in the shadow of man because they were seen as weak individuals not worthy of equality. And for centuries, all over the world, women have fought to prove them wrong. In early 15th century Venice, young girls were only give three options for the pathways of their lives when they reached ...

George Orwell, in his brilliant novel Animal Farm shows the cheer stupidity of the concept of equality, which disregards the laws of nature. At the same time, he shows that the democracy will inevitably turn into tyranny, if the principle of equality applied universally. The motto of his communist farm, where animals ruled themselves without being exploited by man was All animals are equal but pigs are more equal than others. This goes to show that the true equality, and consequentially democracy, can only exist among truly equal. There are two questions that Civil Rights movement has failed to effectively address: 1) If people are equal, why there is no even a slightest practical proof of it, throughout the history? 2) The assumption of people’s equality contradicts the most basic laws of natural selection, upon which modern biology is based. Therefore, we can talk of equality, as rather highly abstract concept, which has nothing to do with the realities of everyday life.

After having realized the whole futility of their attempts to elevate status of racial and cultural minorities, Civil Rights activists simply decided to press for the enforcement of social equality. It is them who were behind the creation of political correctness. The most negative effect of Civil Rights movement was introduction of affirmative action, which has nothing to do with promoting equality; in fact, it contradicts the very idea, upon which Civil Rights movement was being based. The principle of affirmative action was designed by Whites to help racial minorities to stand up for their rights, when it comes to dealing with Whites. So, in its core, its racist, because it is based on the assertion that the ethnic minorities are not capable to match wits with Whites in fair competition, so they need to be helped up. By nineties, universities, large companies and government institutions were being forced to report racial dynamics within its bodies. If representation of minorities was found to be inadequate, it would result in repressions against these institutions.

The Essay on Walt Whitman Equal People Death

Walt Whiteman though himself out to be the poet of American democracy. His poetry described an america where the future had already begun. Whitman believed every individual had as much dignity, and importance as anyone else. No job was considered to small or insubordinate. He believed that in order to reach their full potential, people had to break down the barriers that separated them from others ...

Many people consider Civil Rights movement as something idealistic and pure, deprived of any imperfectness, yet they fail to understand that this movement has a direct relation to the present socio-political reality. Nobody can deny that discrimination still exists in our society, even though that sometimes it assumes a reverse form. Therefore, Civil Rights movement can be considered as having failed in accomplishing its most immediate goal. Successes Despite the fact that many Civil Rights movements ideas were being wrong in principle, it nevertheless was able to break many social taboos. For example, because of this movement, the racial segregation was being eliminated in American public schools. This, in its turn, resulted in creation of many private schools, where parents would send their children, without the fear of them getting hooked on drugs. Also, the sexual minorities were finally being allowed to openly promote its perversity. Because of this, our society became more open minded and tolerant.

Even though that, as recent as thirty years ago, it being considered as socially inappropriate to openly express ones mental sickness, in form of homosexuality or lesbianism, now it became a social norm. In fact, it is being considered as fashionable. The public schools have also adopted a more liberal approach towards this issue, when psychologically normal children are being told that sexual perversity cannot be criticized, because it would be politically incorrect. One of the most obvious successes of Civil Rights movement is related to the issue of equality, during the process of employment. It is not a secret that people of diverse ethnical backgrounds used to be looked upon with the suspicion, by the potential employers. But thanks to the Civil Rights movement, the situation has changed drastically.

The Essay on Civil Rights and African American Life

So how did African-Americans get looked down on? Well it was in 1619 when Africans were brought to America as slaves for the white settlement. While slavery was eradicated after the Civil war the racism and segregation side of it still occurred. During the 20th century the fight for equality for African-Americans led to massive civil rights campaigns.While many of you may have heard of Martin ...

No more the ugly legacy of racism is allowed to play part, when it comes to the issue of employment. The real progress was being achieved by eliminating the consideration of professional adequacy, during the process of employment. It is no more necessary to posses a good education and social reputation, in order to get hired, especially when it comes to applying for the governments job. All it takes now is to be ethnically diverse. The policy of affirmative action will guarantee such potential candidate getting a job, even if his duties will only include sitting in the office, without having to do anything, so that the employer could be considered as being progressive. Another Civil Rights movements accomplishment is that it helped to shape the new concept of history, which is being taught in American schools and universities. According to it, the role of White people in historical process was being grossly overestimated.

Also, Civil Rights movements activists taught us that the traditional understanding of cultural finesse is racially biased. For example, the cultural value of Michelangelos sculptures is equal to the primitive figurines that were being carved out of wood in Africa, around the same time. This helped us to be more open-minded and think of other cultures as being equal, even when we see otherwise. Conclusion When put aside the sarcasm, it will appear that Civil Rights movement could never succeed in bringing more justice and equality. This is because the rights are never demanded or asked for they are taken. Malcolm X did much more for the progress of African Americans, because he never associated himself with Civil Rights movement. Unlike Martin Luther King, he never whined as mass gatherings about inequality, he simply called for the Black people to get familiarized with weapons, so that they could take their rights.

This is why Civil Rights movement is associated more with whining and complaining that with the accomplishment of any real progress.

Bibliography:

Altbach, Peter The Racial Dilemma in American Higher Education. New York: State University of New York Press. 1991. Dye, Thomas Politics in America, Brief Texas Edition. New York: Prentice Hall College, 2001. Herrnstein, Richard and Murray, Charles.

The Essay on African American Progress

Robert Francis Kennedy or “Bobby” was a well known and well liked politician during the Civil Rights Movement. He was one of a few white people who worked closely with African Americans to improve conditions and work towards equality. As Attorney General, RFK worked diligently in order to ensure that Civil Rights laws were upheld. The life and political career of RFK is captured in a film bearing ...

Bell Curve New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1994. Orwell, George Animal Farm. Afterword by Erich Fromm. New York: Signet, 1992. Williams, Walter Racial Diversity at the Expense of Intellectual Diversity. November 4, 2006.

Capitalism Magazine. December 15, 2006. http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4842 Williams, Walter Discrimination, Prejudice and Preferences. October 3, 2006. Capitalism Magazine. December 15, 2006. http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4799.

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Who Are the Far-Right Groups Behind the U.K. Riots?

After a deadly stabbing at a children’s event in northwestern England, an array of online influencers, anti-Muslim extremists and fascist groups have stoked unrest, experts say.

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By Esther Bintliff and Eve Sampson

Esther Bintliff reported from London, and Eve Sampson from New York.

Violent unrest has erupted in several towns and cities in Britain in recent days, and further disorder broke out on Saturday as far-right agitators gathered in demonstrations around the country.

The violence has been driven by online disinformation and extremist right-wing groups intent on creating disorder after a deadly knife attack on a children’s event in northwestern England, experts said.

A range of far-right factions and individuals, including neo-Nazis, violent soccer fans and anti-Muslim campaigners, have promoted and taken part in the unrest, which has also been stoked by online influencers .

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has vowed to deploy additional police officers to crack down on the disorder. “This is not a protest that has got out of hand,” he said on Thursday. “It is a group of individuals who are absolutely bent on violence.”

Here is what we know about the unrest and some of those involved.

Where have riots taken place?

The first riot took place on Tuesday evening in Southport, a town in northwestern England, after a deadly stabbing attack the previous day at a children’s dance and yoga class. Three girls died of their injuries, and eight other children and two adults were wounded.

The suspect, Axel Rudakubana , was born in Britain, but in the hours after the attack, disinformation about his identity — including the false claim that he was an undocumented migrant — spread rapidly online . Far-right activists used messaging apps including Telegram and X to urge people to take to the streets.

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