This article traces the chronological development of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, from its legal and organizational antecedents in the nineteenth century through the major legislative achievements of the 1960s and the movement's subsequent fragmentation. For interpretive debates about causes, significance, and legacy, see Civil Rights Movement - Debate. For the state of scholarly agreement on key claims, see Civil Rights Movement - Historical Consensus.

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The legal framework contested by the Civil Rights Movement was substantially constructed during and after Reconstruction. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) extended citizenship and equal protection of the laws to persons born or naturalized in the United States. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) prohibited denial of the right to vote on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Federal enforcement of these amendments was active during Reconstruction (1865-1877), during which federal troops occupied former Confederate states and black men voted and held elected office across the South. The withdrawal of federal troops following the Compromise of 1877 marked the end of active enforcement. Southern states subsequently enacted a body of laws - collectively known as Jim Crow laws - mandating racial segregation in public accommodations, transportation, schools, and other facilities.

In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the United States Supreme Court upheld a Louisiana statute requiring separate railway cars for black and white passengers. The Court's majority held that separate facilities were constitutional so long as they were equal, establishing the “separate but equal” doctrine that would govern federal jurisprudence on racial segregation for the next six decades. Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented alone, arguing that the Constitution was color-blind and that the decision would prove as pernicious as Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857).

The period also saw the systematic disenfranchisement of black voters through poll taxes, literacy tests administered selectively, grandfather clauses, and white primaries. Lynching continued as extrajudicial violence; the Tuskegee Institute recorded 3,446 black victims of lynching between 1882 and 1968.

Booker T. Washington, principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, articulated an influential strategy of economic self-improvement and vocational education, accepting temporary social separation while building black economic capacity. His 1895 address at the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition - later called the “Atlanta Compromise” - proposed that black southerners would accept social separation in exchange for economic opportunity and basic civil peace.

W.E.B. Du Bois, a sociologist and historian, published The Souls of Black Folk (1903), which criticized Washington's accommodation strategy directly. Du Bois argued for full civil and political rights and insisted on the importance of higher education for what he called the “talented tenth” of black Americans who would lead the community's advancement.

In 1905, Du Bois and a group of black intellectuals met near Niagara Falls, Ontario, and issued the “Declaration of Principles” demanding full civil liberties, an end to discrimination, and recognition of human brotherhood. This Niagara Movement dissolved within several years but was a direct organizational predecessor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

The NAACP was founded in 1909, following race riots in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908. Its founding members included Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, and several white progressives including Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. The organization committed to legal challenges to segregation and disenfranchisement as its primary strategy.

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The Great Migration brought approximately 1.6 million black Americans from the rural South to northern and midwestern cities between 1910 and 1930. Economic opportunity in northern industry - particularly after World War I reduced immigration from Europe - and flight from Jim Crow violence were primary drivers. Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia saw substantial increases in black population, producing new political constituencies outside the South.

Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant, founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in New York in 1917. Garvey promoted black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and economic self-sufficiency, attracting a mass following - estimates of membership ranged from tens of thousands to over a million. His “Back to Africa” program and his Black Star shipping line represented the most ambitious black nationalist organizing of the period. The federal government prosecuted Garvey for mail fraud in 1923; he was convicted, imprisoned, and ultimately deported to Jamaica in 1927.

The NAACP pursued a litigation strategy through the interwar decades. Charles Hamilton Houston, dean of Howard University Law School from 1929, developed a systematic legal theory for dismantling Plessy and trained a generation of civil rights lawyers, including Thurgood Marshall. Houston identified segregated graduate and professional education as the weakest point in the “separate but equal” doctrine, since southern states had made minimal provision for graduate education for black students.

The Urban League, founded in 1910 and reorganized in the 1920s, focused on economic opportunity and social welfare for black migrants in northern cities.

World War I produced both participation and frustration: approximately 380,000 black Americans served in the military, largely in segregated units. Returning veterans, having served abroad in societies with different racial arrangements, were met in several cities with race riots in the “Red Summer” of 1919. Race riots occurred in Chicago, Washington D.C., Knoxville, Omaha, and elsewhere; the Elaine, Arkansas massacre resulted in the deaths of an estimated 100 to 237 black sharecroppers and five white men.

A. Philip Randolph organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters beginning in 1925, ultimately winning recognition from the Pullman Company in 1937 after a twelve-year campaign. The union represented one of the most significant labor organizing achievements in black American history and established Randolph as a major figure in both labor and civil rights.

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A. Philip Randolph threatened a march on Washington in 1941 to protest discrimination in defense industry hiring and the military. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, seeking to avoid the demonstration, issued Executive Order 8802, prohibiting discrimination in federal agencies and defense industries receiving federal contracts, and establishing the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC). The march was called off; the FEPC had limited enforcement capacity but represented the first federal action against employment discrimination since Reconstruction.

Approximately one million black Americans served in World War II in segregated units. The 332nd Fighter Group and 477th Bombardment Group (the “Tuskegee Airmen”) served in the Mediterranean and European theaters. The contradiction between fighting fascism abroad while experiencing segregation at home generated rhetorical pressure - the “Double V” campaign, promoted by the Pittsburgh Courier, called for victory against fascism overseas and victory against racism at home.

The NAACP's Legal Defense Fund, directed by Thurgood Marshall, won Smith v. Allwright (1944), in which the Supreme Court ruled that white primaries - Democratic Party primaries in southern states that excluded black voters - were unconstitutional as state action.

Veterans returning from World War II faced continued violence; Medgar Evers, Amzie Moore, and others who would become movement figures were veterans. In 1946, Sergeant Isaac Woodard was blinded by a South Carolina police chief hours after receiving his honorable discharge.

President Harry Truman's Committee on Civil Rights published To Secure These Rights in 1947, documenting racial violence and discrimination and recommending federal legislation. Truman issued Executive Order 9981 in 1948, directing desegregation of the armed forces. Full desegregation proceeded slowly through the Korean War; the Army formally ended segregated units in 1954.

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The NAACP Legal Defense Fund's campaign against graduate school segregation succeeded in Sweatt v. Painter (1950) and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950), in which the Supreme Court ruled that segregated professional and graduate programs failed the “separate but equal” standard.

Charles Hamilton Houston died in 1950; Thurgood Marshall continued the legal campaign at the elementary and secondary school level. The Legal Defense Fund consolidated five separate cases from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and the District of Columbia under the Kansas case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren issued its unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education on May 17, 1954, holding that racially segregated public schools were inherently unequal and thus violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision explicitly overruled Plessy v. Ferguson as applied to public education. The following year, Brown II (1955) directed desegregation proceed “with all deliberate speed,” a formulation that became the subject of extended litigation as southern school districts resisted compliance.

In March 1956, 101 southern members of Congress signed the “Southern Manifesto,” formally titled “Declaration of Constitutional Principles,” condemning the Brown decision as a “clear abuse of judicial power” and pledging to reverse it by lawful means.

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Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago visiting relatives in Mississippi, was abducted, beaten, and murdered in August 1955 after an accusation by a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, that he had made advances toward her. His killers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, were acquitted by an all-white jury. Till's mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted on an open casket funeral in Chicago; photographs of his body were published in Jet magazine. The case drew national and international attention to racial violence in the South.

Rosa Parks, secretary of the Montgomery, Alabama chapter of the NAACP, was arrested on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery city bus, in violation of city segregation ordinance. The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) was formed to organize a boycott of the city bus system; the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, was elected its president.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted 381 days. Black residents, who constituted the majority of the bus system's ridership, walked, carpooled, or used other transportation. The boycott caused significant financial strain on the bus company. In Browder v. Gayle (1956), the federal district court ruled Montgomery's bus segregation unconstitutional; the Supreme Court affirmed. Montgomery buses were desegregated in December 1956.

Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and other southern black ministers founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Atlanta in January 1957, with King as its first president. The organization would serve as a coordinating body for direct action campaigns across the South.

The Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first federal civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, established the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and created the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Its voting rights provisions were weakened by Senate amendments; enforcement was limited.

In September 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine black students - the “Little Rock Nine” - from integrating Central High School in Little Rock, pursuant to a federal court order. President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and deployed the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the court order. The nine students completed the school year under military escort.

Student sit-ins began on February 1, 1960, when four black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University - Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair Jr., and David Richmond - sat at the whites-only lunch counter at a Woolworth's store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and requested service. The sit-in tactic spread rapidly across the South; within weeks, sit-ins were occurring in dozens of cities.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded in April 1960 at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, with the support of Ella Baker, executive director of the SCLC. SNCC would operate with a more decentralized, participatory structure than the SCLC.

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The Supreme Court had ruled in Boynton v. Virginia (1960) that segregation in interstate bus terminal facilities was unlawful. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded in 1942, organized “Freedom Rides” to test compliance with this ruling. Mixed-race groups of riders departed Washington, D.C. by Greyhound and Trailways bus on May 4, 1961.

In Anniston, Alabama, one bus was firebombed; riders were beaten as they fled the burning vehicle. In Birmingham, riders were beaten by a mob while local police, reportedly coordinating with the Ku Klux Klan, absented themselves. In Montgomery, riders were again beaten; John Lewis, a SNCC leader and Freedom Rider, was among those injured. Attorney General Robert Kennedy negotiated a reluctant agreement with Mississippi officials; subsequent riders were arrested and jailed in Mississippi rather than attacked by mobs. Ultimately several hundred Freedom Riders were jailed at Parchman Farm in Mississippi.

The Kennedy administration pressed the Interstate Commerce Commission to issue regulations prohibiting segregation in interstate transportation facilities; the ICC did so in September 1961, effective November 1.

The Albany Movement, a broad coalition in Albany, Georgia, organized protests and marches beginning in November 1961. SNCC organizers had been working in Albany; the SCLC joined and King came to Albany in December. Protesters filled the jails. Albany Police Chief Laurie Pritchett studied King's methods and responded with mass arrests without the public violence that had generated national attention elsewhere. The Albany campaign ended in 1962 without achieving its stated goals; it was widely assessed as the SCLC's first major campaign failure.

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The SCLC launched “Project C” (for Confrontation) in Birmingham, Alabama, in April 1963. Birmingham was among the most thoroughly segregated cities in the South; its Public Safety Commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, was known for hostility to civil rights organizing. The campaign targeted downtown businesses with sit-ins and marches.

Connor responded with fire hoses and police dogs against demonstrators, including children - the “Children's Crusade” had students as young as six years old marching. Photographs and television footage of the response were published and broadcast nationally and internationally. Movement leaders were jailed; King wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in the margins of a newspaper and on scraps of paper smuggled in and out of the facility, responding to a public statement by eight white Alabama clergymen urging the movement to wait for change through the courts.

Medgar Evers, NAACP field secretary in Mississippi, was shot and killed in the driveway of his Jackson home on June 12, 1963, the night President Kennedy delivered a national television address on civil rights. Byron De La Beckwith was tried twice by all-white juries in 1964 with both resulting in mistrials; he was convicted in a third trial in 1994.

President Kennedy submitted a comprehensive civil rights bill to Congress on June 19, 1963.

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place on August 28, 1963, drawing an estimated 250,000 participants to the National Mall. Organized by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, the march was the largest political demonstration in Washington to that point. King delivered his “I Have a Dream” address from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. John Lewis, speaking for SNCC, delivered a speech that was modified from its original draft at the request of other march organizers who found it too confrontational; the original text criticized the Kennedy civil rights bill as “too little, too late.”

The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was bombed on September 15, 1963, killing four girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair.

President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

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President Lyndon Johnson, in his first address to Congress after Kennedy's death, called for passage of the civil rights bill as a memorial to the slain president. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law on July 2, 1964. The Act prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in employment and public accommodations; established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; and authorized the federal government to withhold funds from programs practicing discrimination.

The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was organized in 1964 as an alternative to the all-white regular Mississippi Democratic Party. At the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in August 1964, the MFDP sought to be seated as the legitimate Mississippi delegation. Fannie Lou Hamer testified before the credentials committee about beatings she had suffered for attempting to register to vote. President Johnson, seeking to prevent a floor fight, offered the MFDP two at-large non-voting delegate seats; the MFDP rejected the compromise.

Freedom Summer - a voter registration campaign in Mississippi organized by SNCC, CORE, and other groups - brought hundreds of student volunteers, predominantly white and from the North, to Mississippi in the summer of 1964. James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner - two white New Yorkers and one black Mississippian - were murdered by Klan members with the participation of local law enforcement in Neshoba County, Mississippi, on June 21. Their bodies were found after 44 days; the FBI investigation led to convictions of several participants in federal civil rights charges in 1967.

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SNCC had been organizing in Selma, Alabama, and Dallas County since 1963. The SCLC joined the campaign in January 1965; King was arrested during a march. On February 18, state troopers shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, a young deacon, during a nighttime march in Marion, Alabama; he died eight days later.

On March 7, 1965 - subsequently called “Bloody Sunday” - approximately 600 marchers attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on their way to Montgomery. State troopers and county deputies, under the direction of Colonel Al Lingo and Sheriff Jim Clark, attacked the marchers with clubs and tear gas on the far side of the bridge. John Lewis suffered a fractured skull. Television footage of the attack was broadcast nationally, interrupting network programming.

A second march attempt on March 9, led by King, turned back at the bridge to comply with a federal court injunction. Unitarian minister James Reeb was beaten by white men that evening and died two days later. A federal judge authorized the march to proceed; the third march began March 21 and reached Montgomery on March 25, with 25,000 participants. Viola Liuzzo, a white Detroit housewife who had traveled to Selma, was shot and killed by Klan members while driving marchers back to Selma that evening.

President Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress on March 15, calling for voting rights legislation and invoking the words “we shall overcome.” The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed on August 6. The Act prohibited voting practices designed to discriminate on the basis of race; Section 5 required jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to obtain federal “preclearance” before changing voting laws or procedures.

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The Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles experienced a six-day uprising beginning August 11, 1965, five days after the signing of the Voting Rights Act. Thirty-four people were killed, over a thousand injured, and approximately $40 million in property was destroyed. The National Guard was deployed. Uprisings occurred in Newark and Detroit in the summer of 1967; the Detroit uprising resulted in 43 deaths and required the deployment of federal troops and the National Guard. The Kerner Commission, formally the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, issued its report in February 1968, attributing urban unrest primarily to white racism, poverty, and police practices.

SNCC elected Stokely Carmichael as its chairman in May 1966. During a march in Mississippi following the shooting of James Meredith, Carmichael used the phrase “black power” in a speech in Greenwood, Mississippi. The phrase became a flashpoint of debate within and about the movement. The NAACP and Urban League distanced themselves from the term; King expressed ambivalence. SNCC and later CORE moved toward black nationalist orientations.

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in Oakland, California, in October 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. The organization combined community programs - including free breakfast for children - with armed patrols monitoring police activity. The FBI's COINTELPRO program targeted the Black Panthers; FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the organization “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”

King and the SCLC launched the Poor People's Campaign in late 1967, planning a multiracial encampment in Washington to demand economic legislation. King traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, to support a sanitation workers' strike. He was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968. James Earl Ray was arrested two months later; he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 99 years. Riots occurred in more than 100 American cities following King's death.

The Fair Housing Act was signed on April 11, 1968, one week after King's assassination. The Act prohibited discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing.

Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, hours after winning the California Democratic presidential primary.

The Poor People's Campaign proceeded without King; Coretta Scott King and Ralph Abernathy led the effort. Thousands camped in “Resurrection City” on the National Mall in May and June 1968 before the encampment was cleared by authorities.

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Some historians argue that the internal divisions between the SCLC, SNCC, CORE, and the NAACP were as determinative of campaign outcomes as white resistance; see Civil Rights Movement - Organizational Strategy Debate.

The relative weight of legal strategy versus mass direct action in producing the legislative achievements of 1964 and 1965 is disputed; see Civil Rights Movement - Legal vs. Direct Action Debate.

Whether federal intervention in campaigns such as Birmingham and Selma reflected genuine commitment to civil rights or primarily concern for Cold War optics and domestic political order is contested; see Civil Rights Movement - Federal Motivation Debate.

The causes of the shift from integrationist to black nationalist orientations within SNCC and CORE between 1964 and 1967 - including the relative roles of MFDP rejection, internal generational conflict, FBI disruption, and ideological development - are debated; see Civil Rights Movement - Black Power Transition Debate.

Whether “Bloody Sunday” was the proximate cause of the Voting Rights Act or whether legislation was already moving through Congress is disputed; see Civil Rights Movement - Selma and Legislation Debate.

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1. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).
2. Tuskegee Institute. Lynching, Whites & Negroes, 1882-1968. Tuskegee, AL: Tuskegee Institute, 1969.
3. Washington, Booker T. “Atlanta Exposition Address.” September 18, 1895. In Up From Slavery (1901). New York: Doubleday, Page & Co.
4. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903.
5. Meier, August, and Elliott Rudwick. CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942-1968. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
6. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
7. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (Brown II), 349 U.S. 294 (1955).
8. “Declaration of Constitutional Principles” (Southern Manifesto). Congressional Record, 84th Congress, 2nd Session (March 12, 1956), 4459-4460.
9. Parks, Rosa, with Jim Haskins. Rosa Parks: My Story. New York: Dial Books, 1992.
10. King, Martin Luther Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” April 16, 1963. In Why We Can't Wait. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.
11. Lewis, John, with Michael D'Orso. Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.
12. Civil Rights Act of 1964, Pub. L. 88-352, 78 Stat. 241 (July 2, 1964).
13. Voting Rights Act of 1965, Pub. L. 89-110, 79 Stat. 437 (August 6, 1965).
14. National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968.
15. Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: William Morrow, 1986.
16. Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.
17. Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.
18. Branch, Taylor. At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.
19. Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
20. Fairclough, Adam. To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987.
21. Fair Housing Act of 1968, Pub. L. 90-284, 82 Stat. 73 (April 11, 1968).
22. Williams, Juan. Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965. New York: Viking, 1987.