The civil rights movement was the campaign, usually dated 1954 to 1968, to end legal racial segregation, discrimination and the denial of voting rights to African Americans in the United States. Through court cases, boycotts, sit-ins, marches and voter registration drives, often met with violence, it won the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Its methods drew on Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent resistance in India, and it in turn inspired movements elsewhere.
Roots
After the Civil War, the Reconstruction amendments abolished slavery and made African Americans citizens, and Black men voted and held office in the South. After 1877, however, Southern states imposed "Jim Crow" laws that segregated schools and public places, used literacy tests to strip Black citizens of the vote, and tolerated lynching. The Supreme Court upheld "separate but equal" in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Progress was slow until after the Second World War; in 1948 President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981, ending segregation in the armed forces.
From the courts to the buses, 1954–1957
In Brown v. Board of Education on 17 May 1954 the Supreme Court ruled segregated public schools unconstitutional. The murder in Mississippi in 1955 of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old from Chicago, shocked the nation. On 1 December 1955 Rosa Parks, secretary of the local NAACP, was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her bus seat, months after the teenager Claudette Colvin had done the same. The Montgomery bus boycott that followed lasted 381 days and brought Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence. In 1957 federal troops had to escort nine Black students into Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas.
Sit-ins and Freedom Rides, 1960–1962
On 1 February 1960 four students from North Carolina A&T sat at the whites-only lunch counter of a Woolworth's store in Greensboro and asked to be served. Sit-ins spread across the South, and a student conference that spring led to the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). From 4 May 1961 the Congress of Racial Equality sent Freedom Riders on interstate buses into the South to test a Supreme Court ban on segregated interstate travel, and the riders were beaten by mobs in Alabama, where one bus was firebombed at Anniston. Voter registration drives in the rural Deep South met fierce resistance.
Birmingham and Washington, 1963
In spring 1963 King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference targeted segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. Police commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor turned fire hoses and dogs on demonstrators, including more than a thousand schoolchildren who joined the marches in May, and the images won the movement wide sympathy. President John F. Kennedy proposed a civil rights bill, which Southern senators blocked. On 28 August 1963 an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 people joined the March on Washington, where King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech.
The great laws, 1964–1968
After Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon B. Johnson pushed the bill through a 54-day Senate filibuster and signed the Civil Rights Act on 2 July 1964, banning discrimination in employment and public accommodations. That summer nearly 1,000 volunteers, mostly Northern white students, joined local activists in Mississippi to register Black voters and run "Freedom Schools". On 7 March 1965 state troopers beat some 600 marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge at the start of the Selma to Montgomery marches; Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on 6 August. King was assassinated in Memphis on 4 April 1968, and the Fair Housing Act followed that year.
Change and legacy
From the mid-1960s the Black Power movement, influenced by Malcolm X and later the Black Panther Party, criticised the movement's gradualism, and urban unrest between 1964 and 1969 cost it support among white moderates. The new laws ended most legal discrimination, though informal racism and wide racial gaps persisted. Activists abroad borrowed its methods; in Northern Ireland, marchers modelled a protest walk from Belfast to Derry on Selma and sang "We Shall Overcome".
On our maps
Our 1945, 1960 and 1985 maps show the United States before, during and after the movement's main years.
From the atlas
Civil rights movement in time and on the map
Civil rights movement lasted from 1954 to 1968. Borders of Time has one world map from those years: 1960. The nearest maps from before and after are 1945 and 1985; compare them side by side.
Living through it, among others on this site: Anwar Sadat (1918–1981), Augusto Pinochet (1915–2006), Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970), Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997), Desmond Tutu (1931–2021), Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) and Elizabeth II (1926–2022).
Other events of the same years: Satsuma Rebellion (1877–2005), Nahda (1900–2000), Great Migration (1916–1970), Cold War (1945–1991), Decolonisation of Africa (1950–1975), Mau Mau rebellion (1952–1960), Cuban Revolution (1953–1959), Algerian War (1954–1962), Battle of Dien Bien Phu (1954) and Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
Next to it in time on this site: before, Schuman Declaration (1950) and Iranian coup of 1953 (1953); after, Bandung Conference (1955) and Dirty War (1955–1989).
Quick answers
- When did Civil rights movement happen?
- It began in 1954 and ended in 1968, lasting 14 years.
- Where did Civil rights movement take place?
- United States.
- How did the map change?
- Compare the atlas’s maps of 1945 and 1985 side by side.