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Described as "One of the most courageous persons the Civil Rights Movement ever produced," John Lewis has dedicated his life to protecting human rights, securing personal dignity and building what he calls "The Beloved Community." He has displayed a sense of ethics and morality that has won him the admiration of many of his colleagues in the United States Congress. -
Throughout his short life, Medgar Evers heroically spoke out against racism in the deeply divided South. He fought against cruel Jim Crow laws, protested segregation in education, and launched an investigation into the Emmett Till lynching. In addition to playing a role in the civil rights movement, he served as the NAACP's first field officer in Mississippi. -
During the less than 13 years of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s leadership of the modern American Civil Rights Movement, from December 1955 until April 4, 1968, African Americans achieved more genuine progress toward racial equality in America than the previous 350 years had produced. Dr. King is widely regarded as America’s pre-eminent advocate of nonviolence and one of the greatest nonviolent leaders in world history. -
James Meredith, the first African American to integrate into the University of Mississippi in 1962, was a hero of the civil rights movement. He honored Meredith and others for their strong sense of purpose that allowed them to stand up to the hostility directed at them by opponents of civil rights. In 1966, King praised Meredith once again, after he was wounded on a 220-mile personal journey to encourage African American voter registration. -
As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Stokely Carmichael challenged the philosophy of nonviolence and interracial alliances that had come to define the modern civil rights movement, calling instead for “Black Power.” Although critical of the “Black Power” slogan, King acknowledged that “if Stokely Carmichael now says that nonviolence is irrelevant. -
The U.S. Justice Department told relatives of Emmett Till on Monday that it is ending its latest investigation into the 1955 lynching of the Black teenager from Chicago who was abducted, tortured, and killed after witnesses said he whistled at a white woman in Mississippi. A person familiar with the matter informed The Associated Press about the closure of the investigation and the meeting with Till's family. -
Founded in 1942 by an interracial group of students in Chicago, the Congress of Racial Equality pioneered the use of nonviolent direct action in America’s civil rights struggle. Along with its parent organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, CORE members provided advice and support to Martin Luther King during the Montgomery bus boycott. -
In 1940, African-Americans made up almost 10 percent of the total U.S. population (12.6 million people out of a total population of 131 million). During World War II, the Army had become the nation's largest minority employer. Of the 2.5 million African-American males who registered for the draft through December 31, 1945, more than one million were inducted into the armed forces. -
At the time of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birth in 1929, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was already the largest and most influential civil rights organization in the United States. King’s father, Martin Luther King, Sr., was on the executive committee of Atlanta’s NAACP branch; and in 1944, King, Jr., chaired the youth membership committee of the Atlanta NAACP Youth Council. -
Although the Declaration of Independence stated that "All men are created equal," due to the institution of slavery, this statement was not to be grounded in law in the United States until after the Civil War. In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified and finally put an end to slavery. -
Ruby Bridges was born in Tylertown, Mississippi on September 8, 1954. At the age of two, she moved to New Orleans with her parents, Abon and Lucille Bridges, to seek better opportunities for their family. When Ruby was in kindergarten, she was chosen to take a test to determine if she could attend an all-white school. This was due to the 1954 Supreme Court ruling of Brown vs. The Board of Education which ordered all schools to desegregate. -
Rosa Louise Parks was nationally recognized as the “mother of the modern-day civil rights movement” in America. Her refusal to surrender her seat to a white male passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, on December 1, 1955, triggered a wave of protest on December 5, 1955, that reverberated throughout the United States. Her quiet courageous act changed America, and its view of black people and redirected the course of history. -
Sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks on 1 December 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott was a 13-month mass protest that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional. The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) coordinated the boycott, and its president, Martin Luther King, Jr., became a prominent civil rights leader as international attention focused on Montgomery. -
In 1954, the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court decision outlawed segregation in public education. Little Rock School District Superintendent Virgil Blossom devised a plan of gradual integration that would begin at Central High School in 1957. The school board called for volunteers from all-black Dunbar Junior High and Horace Mann High School to attend Central. -
With the goal of redeeming “the soul of America” through nonviolent resistance, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was established in 1957 to coordinate the action of local protest groups throughout the South (King, “Beyond Vietnam,” 144). Under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., the organization drew on the power and independence of black churches to support its activities. -
In 1960 four freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro walked into the F. W. Woolworth store and quietly sat down at the lunch counter. They were refused service, but they stayed until closing time. The next morning they came with twenty-five more students. On the third day, sixty-three students joined the sit-in. -
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded in April 1960 by young people dedicated to nonviolent, direct action tactics. Although Martin Luther King, Jr. and others had hoped that SNCC would serve as the youth wing of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the students remained fiercely independent of King and SCLC, generating their own projects and strategies. -
During the spring of 1961, student activists from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) launched the Freedom Rides to challenge segregation on interstate buses and bus terminals. Traveling on buses from Washington, D.C., to Jackson, Mississippi, the riders met violent opposition in the Deep South, garnering extensive media attention and eventually forcing federal intervention from John F. Kennedy’s administration. -
In April 1963 King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) joined with Birmingham, Alabama’s existing local movement, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), in a massive direct action campaign to attack the city’s segregation system by putting pressure on Birmingham’s merchants during the Easter season, the second biggest shopping season of the year. -
On September 15, 1963, the congregation of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama greeted each other before the start of Sunday service. In the basement of the church, five young girls, two of them sisters, gathered in the ladies' room in their best dresses, happily chatting about the first days of the new school year. It was Youth Day and excitement filled the air, they were going to take part in the Sunday adult service. -
On 28 August 1963, more than 200,000 demonstrators took part in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in the nation’s capital. The march was successful in pressuring the administration of John F. Kennedy to initiate a strong federal civil rights bill in Congress. During this event, Martin Luther King delivered his memorable “I Have a Dream” speech. -
Although the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had labored for civil rights in rural Mississippi since 1961, the organization found that intense and often violent resistance by segregationists in rural areas of Mississippi would not allow for the kind of direct action campaigns that had been successful in urban areas such as Montgomery and Birmingham. -
To enforce the constitutional right to vote, to confer jurisdiction upon the district courts of the United States to provide injunctive relief against discrimination in public accommodations, to authorize the Attorney General to institute suits to protect constitutional rights in public facilities and public education, to extend the Commission on Civil Rights, to prevent discrimination in federally assisted programs, to establish a Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity. -
On 25 March 1965, Martin Luther King led thousands of nonviolent demonstrators to the steps of the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, after a 5-day, 54-mile march from Selma, Alabama, where local African Americans, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had been campaigning for voting rights. -
In 1964, numerous peaceful demonstrations were organized by Civil Rights leaders, and the considerable violence they were met with brought renewed attention to the issue of voting rights. The murder of voting-rights activists in Mississippi and the attack by white state troopers on peaceful marchers in Selma, Alabama, gained national attention and persuaded President Johnson and Congress to initiate meaningful and effective national voting rights legislation. -
The Watts Riot, which raged for six days and resulted in more than forty million dollars worth of property damage, was both the largest and costliest urban rebellion of the Civil Rights era. The riot spurred from an incident on August 11, 1965, when Marquette Frye, a young African American motorist, was pulled over and arrested by Lee W. Minikus, a white California Highway Patrolman, for suspicion of driving while intoxicated. -
When Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in 1966, they had been friends and political collaborators for almost five years. The two met like many friends meet: in college. Seale was 25 at the time, Newton 19. They had much in common besides the classes they were taking at Oakland's Merrit Community College. -
Founded in October 1966 by Huey Newton (1942-1989) and Bobby Seale (b. 1936), the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense became the most widely known black militant political organization of the late 1960s. The Black Panthers attracted widespread support among young urban blacks, who wore the group's distinctive black leather jackets and black berets and often openly displayed weapons. -
Martin Luther King announced the Poor People’s Campaign at a staff retreat for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in November 1967. Seeking a “middle ground between riots on the one hand and timid supplications for justice on the other,” King planned for an initial group of 2,000 poor people to descend on Washington, D.C., southern states, and northern cities to meet with government officials to demand jobs, unemployment insurance, a fair minimum wage. -
Thurgood Marshall was an influential leader of the civil rights movement whose tremendous legacy lives on in the pursuit of racial justice. Marshall founded LDF in 1940 and served as its first Director-Counsel. He was the architect of the legal strategy that ended the country’s official policy of segregation and was the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court. He served as Associate Justice from 1967-to 1991 after being nominated by President Johnson. -
At 6:05 P.M. on Thursday, 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King was shot dead while standing on a balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. News of King’s assassination prompted major outbreaks of racial violence, resulting in more than 40 deaths nationwide and extensive property damage in over 100 American cities. James Earl Ray, a 40-year-old escaped fugitive, later confessed to the crime and was sentenced to a 99-year prison term.