essay for civil rights movement

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.

A Great and Mighty Walk Analysis

I have a dream rhetorical analysis, made-to-order essay as fast as you need it.

Each essay is customized to cater to your unique preferences

+ experts online

Letter from Birmingham Jail - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The history of the civil rights movement in the united states of america, the civil rights movement: a struggle for equality, history of the civil rights movement in america, let us write you an essay from scratch.

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Civil Rights Movement and The Struggles of African Americans During Those Times

The impact of martin luther king on civil rights movements, the contradicting outcome of the civil rights movement in america, the role of martin luther king jr. and malcolm x in civil rights movement, get a personalized essay in under 3 hours.

Expert-written essays crafted with your exact needs in mind

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.

Relevant topics

• Great Depression
• Industrial Revolution
• Pearl Harbor
• Westward Expansion
• Manifest Destiny
• American Revolution
• Imperialism
• Frederick Douglass

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

• History Classics
• Your Profile
• Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window)
• This Day In History
• History Podcasts
• History Vault

Civil Rights Movement

By: History.com Editors

Updated: January 22, 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.

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.

Photo Galleries

Sign up for Inside History

Get HISTORY’s most fascinating stories delivered to your inbox three times a week.

By submitting your information, you agree to receive emails from HISTORY and A+E Networks. You can opt out at any time. You must be 16 years or older and a resident of the United States.

More details : Privacy Notice | Terms of Use | Contact Us

If you're seeing this message, it means we're having trouble loading external resources on our website.

If you're behind a web filter, please make sure that the domains *.kastatic.org and *.kasandbox.org are unblocked.

To log in and use all the features of Khan Academy, please enable JavaScript in your browser.

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).

Want to join the conversation?

• Upvote Button navigates to signup page
• Downvote Button navigates to signup page
• Flag Button navigates to signup page

Introductory Essay: Continuing the Heroic Struggle for Equality: The Civil Rights Movement

To what extent did Founding principles of liberty, equality, and justice become a reality for African Americans during the civil rights movement?

• I can explain the importance of local and federal actions in the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
• I can compare the goals and methods of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLS), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Malcolm X and Black Nationalism, and Black Power.
• I can explain challenges African Americans continued to face despite victories for equality and justice during the civil rights movement.

Essential Vocabulary

Continuing the heroic struggle for equality: the civil rights movement.

The struggle to make the promises of the Declaration of Independence a reality for Black Americans reached a climax after World War II. The activists of the civil rights movement directly confronted segregation and demanded equal civil rights at the local level with physical and moral courage and perseverance. They simultaneously pursued a national strategy of systematically filing lawsuits in federal courts, lobbying Congress, and pressuring presidents to change the laws. The civil rights movement encountered significant resistance, however, and suffered violence in the quest for equality.

During the middle of the twentieth century, several Black writers grappled with the central contradictions between the nation’s ideals and its realities, and the place of Black Americans in their country. Richard Wright explored a raw confrontation with racism in Native Son (1940), while Ralph Ellison led readers through a search for identity beyond a racialized category in his novel Invisible Man (1952), as part of the Black quest for identity. The novel also offered hope in the power of the sacred principles of the Founding documents. Playwright Lorraine Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun , first performed in 1959, about the dreams deferred for Black Americans and questions about assimilation. Novelist and essayist James Baldwin described Blacks’ estrangement from U.S. society and themselves while caught in a racial nightmare of injustice in The Fire Next Time (1963) and other works.

World War II wrought great changes in U.S. society. Black soldiers fought for a “double V for victory,” hoping to triumph over fascism abroad and racism at home. Many received a hostile reception, such as Medgar Evers who was blocked from voting at gunpoint by five armed whites. Blacks continued the Great Migration to southern and northern cities for wartime industrial work. After the war, in 1947, Jackie Robinson endured racial taunts on the field and segregation off it as he broke the color barrier in professional baseball and began a Hall of Fame career. The following year, President Harry Truman issued executive orders desegregating the military and banning discrimination in the civil service. Meanwhile, Thurgood Marshall and his legal team at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) meticulously prepared legal challenges to discrimination, continuing a decades-long effort.

The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund brought lawsuits against segregated schools in different states that were consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka , 1954. The Supreme Court unanimously decided that “separate but equal” was “inherently unequal.” Brown II followed a year after, as the court ordered that the integration of schools should be pursued “with all deliberate speed.” Throughout the South, angry whites responded with a campaign of “massive resistance” and refused to comply with the order, while many parents sent their children to all-white private schools. Middle-class whites who opposed integration joined local chapters of citizens’ councils and used propaganda, economic pressure, and even violence to achieve their ends.

A wave of violence and intimidation followed. In 1955, teenager Emmett Till was visiting relatives in Mississippi when he was lynched after being falsely accused of whistling at a white woman. Though an all-white jury quickly acquitted the two men accused of killing him, Till’s murder was reported nationally and raised awareness of the injustices taking place in Mississippi.

In Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks (who was a secretary of the Montgomery NAACP) was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus. Her willingness to confront segregation led to a direct-action movement for equality. The local Women’s Political Council organized the city’s Black residents into a boycott of the bus system, which was then led by the Montgomery Improvement Association. Black churches and ministers, including Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rev. Ralph Abernathy, provided a source of strength. Despite arrests, armed mobs, and church bombings, the boycott lasted until a federal court desegregated the city buses. In the wake of the boycott, the leading ministers formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) , which became a key civil rights organization.

Rosa Parks is shown here in 1955 with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the background. The Montgomery bus boycott was an important victory in the civil rights movement.

In 1957, nine Black families decided to send their children to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to prevent their entry, and one student, Elizabeth Eckford, faced an angry crowd of whites alone and barely escaped. President Eisenhower was compelled to respond and sent in 1,200 paratroops from the 101st Airborne to protect the Black students. They continued to be harassed, but most finished the school year and integrated the school.

That year, Congress passed a Civil Rights Act that created a civil rights division in the Justice Department and provided minimal protections for the right to vote. The bill had been watered down because of an expected filibuster by southern senators, who had recently signed the Southern Manifesto, a document pledging their resistance to Supreme Court decisions such as Brown .

In 1960, four Black college students were refused lunch service at a local Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, and they spontaneously staged a “sit-in” the following day. Their resistance to the indignities of segregation was copied by thousands of others of young Blacks across the South, launching another wave of direct, nonviolent confrontation with segregation. Ella Baker invited several participants to a Raleigh conference where they formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and issued a Statement of Purpose. The group represented a more youthful and daring effort that later broke with King and his strategy of nonviolence.

In contrast, Malcolm X became a leading spokesperson for the Nation of Islam (NOI) who represented Black separatism as an alternative to integration, which he deemed an unworthy goal. He advocated revolutionary violence as a means of Black self-defense and rejected nonviolence. He later changed his views, breaking with the NOI and embracing a Black nationalism that had more common ground with King’s nonviolent views. Malcolm X had reached out to establish ties with other Black activists before being gunned down by assassins who were members of the NOI later in 1965.

In 1961, members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) rode segregated buses in order to integrate interstate travel. These Black and white Freedom Riders traveled into the Deep South, where mobs beat them with bats and pipes in bus stations and firebombed their buses. A cautious Kennedy administration reluctantly intervened to protect the Freedom Riders with federal marshals, who were also victimized by violent white mobs.

Malcolm X was a charismatic speaker and gifted organizer. He argued that Black pride, identity, and independence were more important than integration with whites.

King was moved to act. He confronted segregation with the hope of exposing injustice and brutality against nonviolent protestors and arousing the conscience of the nation to achieve a just rule of law. The first planned civil rights campaign was initiated by SNCC and taken over mid-campaign by King and SCLC. It failed because Albany, Georgia’s Police Chief Laurie Pritchett studied King’s tactics and responded to the demonstrations with restraint. In 1963, King shifted the movement to Birmingham, Alabama, where Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor unleashed his officers to attack civil rights protestors with fire hoses and police dogs. Authorities arrested thousands, including many young people who joined the marches. King wrote “Letter from Birmingham Jail” after his own arrest and provided the moral justification for the movement to break unjust laws. National and international audiences were shocked by the violent images shown in newspapers and on the television news. President Kennedy addressed the nation and asked, “whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities . . . [If a Black person]cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?” The president then submitted a civil rights bill to Congress.

In late August 1963, more than 250,000 people joined the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in solidarity for equal rights. From the Lincoln Memorial steps, King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. He stated, “I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”

After Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, President Lyndon Johnson pushed his agenda through Congress. In the early summer of 1964, a 3-month filibuster by southern senators was finally defeated, and both houses passed the historical civil rights bill. President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, banning segregation in public accommodations.

Activists in the civil rights movement then focused on campaigns for the right to vote. During the summer of 1964, several civil rights organizations combined their efforts during the “ Freedom Summer ” to register Blacks to vote with the help of young white college students. They endured terror and intimidation as dozens of churches and homes were burned and workers were killed, including an incident in which Black advocate James Chaney and two white students, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were murdered in Mississippi.

In August 1963, peaceful protesters gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial to draw attention to the inequalities and indignities African Americans suffered 100 years after emancipation. Leaders of the march are shown in the image on the bottom, with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the center.

That summer, Fannie Lou Hamer helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) as civil rights delegates to replace the rival white delegation opposed to civil rights at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. Hamer was a veteran of attempts to register other Blacks to vote and endured severe beatings for her efforts. A proposed compromise of giving two seats to the MFDP satisfied neither those delegates nor the white delegation, which walked out. Cracks were opening up in the Democratic electoral coalition over civil rights, especially in the South.

Fannie Lou Hamer testified about the violence she and others endured when trying to register to vote at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Her televised testimony exposed the realities of continued violence against Blacks trying to exercise their constitutional rights.

In early 1965, the SCLC and SNCC joined forces to register voters in Selma and draw attention to the fight for Black suffrage. On March 7, marchers planned to walk peacefully from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery. However, mounted state troopers and police blocked the Edmund Pettus Bridge and then rampaged through the marchers, indiscriminately beating them. SNCC leader John Lewis suffered a fractured skull, and 5 women were clubbed unconscious. Seventy people were hospitalized for injuries during “Bloody Sunday.” The scenes again shocked television viewers and newspaper readers.

The images of state troopers, local police, and local people brutally attacking peaceful protestors on “Bloody Sunday” shocked people across the country and world. Two weeks later, protestors of all ages and races continued the protest. By the time they reached the state capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, their ranks had swelled to about 25,000 people.

Two days later, King led a symbolic march to the bridge but then turned around. Many younger and more militant activists were alienated and felt that King had sold out to white authorities. The tension revealed the widening division between older civil rights advocates and those younger, more radical supporters who were frustrated at the slow pace of change and the routine violence inflicted upon peaceful protesters. Nevertheless, starting on March 21, with the help of a federal judge who refused Governor George Wallace’s request to ban the march, Blacks triumphantly walked to Montgomery. On August 6, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act protecting the rights to register and vote after a Senate filibuster ended and the bill passed Congress.

The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act did not alter the fact that most Black Americans still suffered racism, were denied equal economic opportunities, and lived in segregated neighborhoods. While King and other leaders did seek to raise their issues among northerners, frustrations often boiled over into urban riots during the mid-1960s. Police brutality and other racial incidents often triggered days of violence in which hundreds were injured or killed. There were mass arrests and widespread property damage from arson and looting in Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, Cleveland, Chicago, and dozens of other cities. A presidential National Advisory Commission of Civil Disorders issued the Kerner Report, which analyzed the causes of urban unrest, noting the impact of racism on the inequalities and injustices suffered by Black Americans.

Frustration among young Black Americans led to the rise of a more militant strain of advocacy. In 1966, activist James Meredith was on a solo march in Mississippi to raise awareness about Black voter registration when he was shot and wounded. Though Meredith recovered, this event typified the violence that led some young Black Americans to espouse a more military strain of advocacy. On June 16, SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael and members of the Black Panther Party continued Meredith’s march while he recovered from his wounds, chanting, “We want Black Power .” Black Power leaders and members of the Black Panther Party offered a different vision for equality and justice. They advocated self-reliance and self-empowerment, a celebration of Black culture, and armed self-defense. They used aggressive rhetoric to project a more radical strategy for racial progress, including sympathy for revolutionary socialism and rejection of capitalism. While its legacy is debated, the Black Power movement raised many important questions about the place of Black Americans in the United States, beyond the civil rights movement.

After World War II, Black Americans confronted the iniquities and indignities of segregation to end almost a century of Jim Crow. Undeterred, they turned the public’s eyes to the injustice they faced and called on the country to live up to the promises of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and to continue the fight against inequality and discrimination.

Reading Comprehension Questions

• What factors helped to create the modern civil rights movement?
• How was the quest for civil rights a combination of federal and local actions?
• What were the goals and methods of different activists and groups of the civil rights movement? Complete the table below to reference throughout your analysis of the primary source documents.

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.

Illustration credits

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>

NHC Home   |   TeacherServe   |   Divining America   |   Nature Transformed   |   Freedom’s Story About Us   |   Site Guide   |   Contact   |   Search

TeacherServe® Home Page National Humanities Center 7 Alexander Drive, P.O. Box 12256 Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 27709 Phone: (919) 549-0661 Fax: (919) 990-8535 Copyright © National Humanities Center. All rights reserved. Revised: April 2010 nationalhumanitiescenter.org

The American Civil Right Movement Reflective Essay

Works cited.

The African-American Civil Rights Movement refers to a group of activists in the United States targeted at banishing the racial discrimination against Black-Americans and reinstating voting rights mainly in Southern states. It covers the duration of the movement in the early 60s especially in S. America.

By the year 1966, the rise of the Black Power Movement, which took place between1966 and1975, widened the aims of the Civil Rights Movement into racial honor, economic and political satisfaction, and freedom from the hardships by white Americans (Purdan, 2001).

This particular has heavily influenced my personal life, career choice, and the global community, especially the African American community in the United States and other non-African nations

During theCivil Rights Movement, there were numerous instances of civil unrest. During this season, acts of peaceful protests and civil disobedience generated crises between activists and government power.

The federal government, state, the congress, local traders, and communities had to react fast to bring the situation under control. This event laid bare the discriminations faced by blacks in the United States.

There was a remarkable legislative achievement during this period of the Civil Rights Movement, including the passage of Civil Rights Act of 1964 which had a huge impact on black rights in the US. Both racial and religion stigma were the major resultant factors of this party when it came to public employment exercises and acquiring accommodation facilities.

The second significant outcome of this movement was the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which restored and protected voting rights. The third result was the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965, which instantly allowed entry to the United States for immigrants.

The fourth act was the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which banned discriminations in the right to sale or rent a house. African- Americans resumed politics in South America, and later, this political culture inspired the younger generation across the states (Beito & Beito, 2009).

This Civil Right Movement deprived the Southern Americans of their legal rights to vote, a situation that persisted until a national civil rights legislation was enacted in mid-1960s. When the Democrats took over, they enacted legislation that controlled the voter registration process and this limited the number of African American voters in the polls.

Black voters had no option than be left out of participating in the voting rolls. The number of African American voters reduced drastically making them unable to elect representatives of present our needs in the national meetings and local governments.

The Republican Party, which had all along represented African American interests, reduced in power as voter registration among African Americans was stifled. During this same period when African Americans were denied their rights, the white Democrats forced racial separation by law.

Violence against blacks rose to a situation that left the Southern region unstable socially, economically and politically. The system of dictatorship sanctioned governance, racial discrimination and oppression known as the “Jim Crow” system left many people jobless.

This situation led to the death a number of people who sided with this reform. During this period of civil unrest and violations in the south, African Americans in other regions of the US also received harsh treatment since they exhibited allegiance to the civil rights movement (Frost, 2002).

This event also had a big negative impact on my education career influence and my choice of career path due to the racial segregation. The law of the day led to the separation of government services and social amenities into two: white and colored. Those in the colored domains did not receive enough funding and were always of lesser quality.

There was a rise in the exploitation of the African-Americans with hash economic experiences to the blacks, Latinos, and Asians. We were denied economic opportunities and discriminated during public employment exercises. There existed also individual, military police, organizational, and racial violence against blacks. Many people in the region died while others left homeless and jobless.

The situation for blacks within the South region was worse and pathetic. In most states, they could not afford to vote and have their children educated. Good Schools and Universities were set for the whites leaving the Black Americans with poor learning institutions.

Due to the massive resistance in the south by proponents of racial segregation and voter suppression, the Diasporas increasingly rejected these rules and gradually implemented legalistic methods as the major tool to bring about racism separation. In protest, blacks adopted a combined formula of diverse action with peaceful resistance to overcome this situation.

Racial discrimination is an act of civil right disobedience that offensively denies citizens their rights to serve freely and fairly in the development of the states and the globe at large. Had the Whites give their citizens equal rights to serve in the states then a relatively stable political system could have been achieved.

This stable political system gives citizens equal rights by law to freely mingle and use public resources without any discrimination or racism. People could freely interact between different states without necessarily having a passport as a travel requirement.

Beito, David T., and Beito, Linda R. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power , 3 rd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.

Frost, Mervyn . Global Civil Society and the Society of Democratic States , NY: Routledge, 2002.

Purdan, Robert. A Journey Through the Sixties , 6 th ed. California: Shire Press, 2001.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, November 24). The American Civil Right Movement. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-american-civil-right-movement/

"The American Civil Right Movement." IvyPanda , 24 Nov. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/the-american-civil-right-movement/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'The American Civil Right Movement'. 24 November.

IvyPanda . 2023. "The American Civil Right Movement." November 24, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-american-civil-right-movement/.

1. IvyPanda . "The American Civil Right Movement." November 24, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-american-civil-right-movement/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The American Civil Right Movement." November 24, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-american-civil-right-movement/.

• Should Jobless Immigrants Leave Britain?
• Jobless Youth Joining the Military
• Benefits Run Out for Spain's Jobless: Theories of Unemployment
• "Jobless Claims Flat Indicators Signal Slow Growth"
• America's jobless recovery - Not again
• Registration as Voters for College Students
• Concept of Civil Disobedience
• Obedience and Disobedience to Authority
• Rights to Civil Disobedience
• Legal Mexican Immigration Wave Since 1965
• Martin Luther King's “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”
• “Why We Can’t Wait” a Historical Document by Martin Luther King Jr.
• Black Americans in the Revolutionary Era
• The history of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent
• Papyrus: Its Invention and Impact on the World

What the Civil Rights Movement Can Teach Us About Corporate Culture Wars

T he latest front in the culture wars is corporate America. It’s hard to date precisely when the culture war came for big business, but the sources of it are clear. Protestors who filled the streets after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 demanded a response from major corporations, many of whom pledged money and lent their voices to the Black Lives Matter movement. And in recent years, climate activists finally got the ear of some major investors and business leaders when they called for action on carbon emissions.

But the apparently bright dawn of conscientious capitalism proved short lived. Corporate support for diversity measures and environmental, social, and corporate governance standards (ESG) has met an intense backlash. Last year, brands such as Target and Bud Light unexpectedly found themselves embroiled in costly boycotts for their LGBTQ marketing. 18 states have passed sweeping laws aimed at limiting ESG investing and House Republicans have subpoenaed activist groups and asset managers in their investigation into whether efforts to mitigate climate change violate US antitrust law.

Culture wars have a way of shaking up old coalitions, and the corporate culture war is no different. This election season, many prominent GOP politicians have struck a decidedly unconventional pose: advocating for regulations of business and calling out by name enemies on Wall Street and in corporate America. Isn’t this the kind of thing the left wing of the Democratic Party does? Critics can’t resist pointing out the hypocrisy. But, strangely enough, progressives find themselves in the similarly unusual position of defending executives and investors. From this perspective, corporate support for Pride Month or the green energy transition isn’t woke capitalism—it’s just how you do business in a world that is changing culturally and environmentally.

“It’s just business” is a tempting line of reasoning. For one thing, it offers a strategic retreat from the culture war game to safer, apparently fact-based territory. For that reason, it is also a familiar gambit in a political culture shaped by the rise of fact-checking journalism. But as we know, there are limits to the effectiveness of fact-checking. For similar reasons—and in the face of powerful political and moral backlash—appeals to the neutrality of profit-seeking are likely to come up short.

This isn’t the first time that business leaders have found themselves caught between different and opposed visions of how to balance public good and private profit. In my book, Taming the Octopus: The Long Battle for the Soul of the Corporation , I write about the corporate protests of the late 1960s and 1970s. And this history is important for understanding our own moment.

Propelled by civil rights activists and a growing chorus of social movements, the corporate protests targeted primarily annual shareholders’ meetings—those annual meetings that corporations have in the spring that are usually boring and predictable, except when they’re not. Time reported in 1970 that the protests “shattered the old tranquility” of the annual meetings. They became dramatic sites of conflict between activists and management over matters of civil rights, gender equality, consumer safety, environmental pollution, workers’ rights, and many other things. AT&T, Boeing, Bank of America, and many others were besieged. Activists used a range of tactics: not only disruptions at annual meetings and the use of shareholder resolutions for purposes of social and political interests but also picketing, sit-ins, and demonstrations at corporate offices.

As management groups fought to keep control of their companies, they began to make concessions. Large corporations created formal organizational structures for dealing with environmental, consumer safety, and social issues. One study in 1975 found that 60 percent of more than 200 of the largest firms had a high-level executive or committee whose job was to direct social programs such as the employment and training of disadvantaged workers or the mitigation of air and water pollution. Just a few years after the corporate protests began, 90 percent of publicly traded companies included social responsibility disclosures in their annual reports.

The rise of modern corporate social responsibility provoked opposition from conservatives. In 1970, economist Milton Friedman wrote a now-famous essay in New York Times Magazine called “A Friedman Doctrine—The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.” Although Friedman did not mention the corporate protests specifically, the context was made clear by the editors, who framed the article with photos of activists and executives at the annual meeting of General Motors that year. According to Friedman, corporate social responsibility was a fundamentally flawed project because it conflated economic action with political action, leading the way to conflicts and, worse, to socialism. In short, it forced business leaders to choose social responsibility over profits. Friedman reserved his greatest opprobrium for liberal business leaders who failed to stand firm against the corporate protesters and who gave heartfelt speeches on corporate citizenship. “This may gain them kudos in the short run,” he wrote, “but it helps to strengthen the already too prevalent view that the pursuit of profits is wicked and immoral and must be curbed and controlled by external forces.”

Many of the activists who pressured big business to become more socially responsible tended to agree with Friedman, at least in one respect: sometimes there are genuine tradeoffs between seeking profit and doing what is right. Not always, but sometimes. And if the choice is between seeking profit and hiring disadvantaged workers or cleaning up pollution, the choice was clear to them. They appealed to the moral language of democracy and justice—and, sometimes, righteousness—in their demands to business leaders and investors.

But as the heat of movement organizing waned, this moral answer to the profitability problem faded to the background. Idealistic young activists with expertise in finance believed that social responsibility would be more successful if more plainly wedded to profit-seeking. The basic idea was that socially responsible investments could and would naturally be profitable—even more profitable than conventional stocks. “Public accountability on the part of corporations,” said Alice Tepper, a young securities analyst and pioneer of social investing, “will lead to an increased awareness of the need to be socially responsible for the simple reason that it will be good business.” Socially responsible investing offered a tantalizing way out of the profitability problem: clearing away questions of political power and moral judgment with market solutions.

Like today’s ESG investing, the social investing of the 1970s was particularly vulnerable to conservative critics: a promise that ethical business and socially responsible leadership would consistently be profitable—capitalism without tradeoffs, in short. And similar to today’s strategies, these commitments proved difficult to sustain. While some “peace portfolios” and social issues-focused funds survived as a niche form of investing, corporate America’s interest in social responsibility collapsed. Social disclosures in annual reports declined in the 1980s. And one 1990 study of 250 of the largest American corporations showed that not a single one had published a report on their social activities in the previous decade.

Are we watching a similar collapse? With American public opinion about big business at an all-time low, executives are distancing themselves from controversial issues and trying to figure out how to be social leaders without saying anything in public that will get them into trouble. But in a world facing overlapping environmental and social crises, “it’s just business” sidesteps the insight of the civil rights movement. In their own moment of crisis those activists did not call for deferrals to Wall Street but for genuine leadership and accountability to workers, consumers, and other stakeholders. That is the sort of moral realism that can help us see what’s at stake in the latest front of the culture war.

More Must-Reads From TIME

• Jane Fonda Champions Climate Action for Every Generation
• Biden’s Campaign Is In Trouble. Will the Turnaround Plan Work?
• Why We're Spending So Much Money Now
• The Financial Influencers Women Actually Want to Listen To
• Breaker Sunny Choi Is Heading to Paris
• Why TV Can’t Stop Making Silly Shows About Lady Journalists
• The Case for Wearing Shoes in the House
• Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time

Contact us at [email protected]

You May Also Like

• CSUN Portal
• Course Catalog
• Campus Maps

Search Library Website

The Library's Garden Level (Lower Level) is currently closed due to storm flooding. More about garden-level closure . (Posted on: 03/08/2024 03:24pm)

You are here

Civil rights in los angeles, california.

If it were not for the photographic collection at the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center , evidence of Los Angeles’s support for the modern civil rights movement in the South may have quietly slipped into the past. The beginning of the civil rights movement is often associated with three events: Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), the killing of Emmett Till (1955), and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955). Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is often acknowledged as the leader or figurehead of the civil rights movement, starting in 1955 as the leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and lasting until his assassination in 1968. The African American photographic collection in the Bradley Center documents this era in the works of three photographers: Charles Williams , Harry Adams , and Guy Crowder . There are several hundred images of/or related to Dr. King, his many visits to Southern California, and other freedom fighters involved in the struggle. Charles Williams begin photographing Dr. King in Los Angeles as early as 1956. And Guy Crowder documented Dr. King’s eulogy at Morehouse College in 1968. In between those years Harry Adams documented the legacy of Dr. King and the civil rights movement in Los Angeles.

The photographers of Black Los Angeles contributions to the civil rights movement is of great historical significance. They not only document nationally and internationally recognized participants of the movement who visited LA but also local leaders who supported the South and broke down racial barriers in Los Angeles. Some of these Black photographers may or may not have had hopes for full-time employment in mainstream organizations. But unknown to them at the time working as independent photographers proved to be a blessing for the generations that follow them. Today students, faculty, scholars, and the community all have access to Black Los Angeles from the 1940s-2000s thanks to these photographers.

If you are interested in learning more about Los Angeles's connection to the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King Jr. check out CSUN’s own Dr. Karin Stanford’s StoryMap:  The Enduring Spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. in Los Angeles .  

Read more Peek in the Stacks blog entries

• Admissions & Aid
• Beyond Campus
• Student Life

Students Travel to the Heart of the Civil Rights Movement

Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

Mission, Values & Vision

Eleven Emmanuel College students participated in the third annual Social Justice Trip over spring break, embarking on an impactful, emotional journey through Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, the heart of the Civil Rights Movement.

Inspired by their commitment to social justice and empowered by the legacy of Civil Rights heroes, students experienced history and gained a deeper understanding of the struggles and triumphs that have shaped our nation.

The March trip, organized by  Center of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion , included a walk across the iconic Edmund Pettus Bridge, the site where Civil Rights marchers were brutally attacked by state police in March 1965 in what is known as Bloody Sunday. 

“Walking across the bridge was a surreal experience because I had seen so many photographs and interviews from Bloody Sunday before attending the trip,” said Brooke White ‘25. “Standing on the very ground where history unfolded added an entirely new dimension to my understanding of the event.” 

At both the Legacy Museum and Civil Rights Museum, the students were confronted with the harsh realities of America's history of racial injustice. Through powerful exhibits, artifacts, and interactive displays, they gained insight into the impact of slavery, segregation, lynchings, and mass incarceration on communities of color.

“The multimedia exhibits, memorials, and the amazing artwork were visually stunning and moving,” said Lola Adebayo '24. “Standing in the same place where Black American history was made and learning about it at the same time helped to put history into perspective and gave me a deeper connection to history.

The group also visited the Tuskegee Airmen Museum and Tuskegee University, where they learned about the extraordinary contributions of African American aviators during World War II. Impressed by the bravery and perseverance of these trailblazers, students were reminded of the power of resilience in the face of adversity.

“Learning about the Airmen and how they were able to overcome such adversity while they were fighting for the country was fascinating,” said Isaiah Etienne ‘27. “I was awed and inspired that even though they faced challenges, the 332nd Fighter Group is one of the best in history.”

In addition to these renowned institutions, the students also had the opportunity to visit the Rosa Parks Museum and the Mothers of Gynecology Monument, where they learned about the courageous actions of individuals who challenged the status quo and paved the way for progress.

Reflecting on their experience, Fillette Lovaincy, the Director of the Center of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, expressed gratitude for the opportunity to delve deeper into our nation's history. “Students were greatly appreciative to be on the trip. Many found themselves often saying how they never knew about these things or were taught the short version of history. They were happy to learn more than the surface level.”

“Prior to this journey, my knowledge of the Civil Rights movement in U.S. history was not deep. However, stepping foot in the very places where some of the most pivotal moments occurred provided a profound opportunity to delve into history,” said Gloria Anzures ‘25. “It was a truly impactful experience to witness firsthand the sites where courageous individuals stood up against injustice and to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the struggles and triumphs that have shaped our nation.”

The trip was more than a mere educational excursion—it was a catalyst for personal and collective transformation. As the students immersed themselves in the rich tapestry of Selma and Montgomery, they gained an appreciation for the importance of social justice education.

"This trip was truly a transformative experience for our students, one that aligns with the mission of the college," Lovaincy said. "Knowing how across the nation, DEI education and opportunities are under attack, yet here we are ensuring students are maintaining that education in and outside of the classroom. The students enjoyed it and were soaking in every bit of it."

Students returned to campus with a renewed sense of purpose and a commitment to building a more inclusive and equitable future for all.

Listen up, Louisville. Mattie Jones has advice for today's racial justice leaders.

Mattie Jones wants you to know that she may be done marching, but that doesn’t mean she’s finished helping. America's racial justice fight is not finished.

Jones turns 91 on March 28, and the Louisville Civil Rights icon says she’s passing the baton to the next generation of civil rights activists. In doing so she has some advice.

I listened as Jones' shared her story during a Listen, Learn, Act racial justice class at the Earth and Spirit Center earlier this month, which invites Black leaders, who are experts on racial issues that plague our city, to speak to the community. Jones is a precious intellectual resource. We must take the time to listen and intentionally carry her baton forward with a true understanding of Louisville's racial equity challenges.

The advice that changed Mattie Jones' life

Jones' advice doesn't look much different from the advice she received from her mother as a young college student. Her mother's guidance helped launch Jones into seven decades of activism.

The University of Louisville wouldn't hire Jones for a work-study program because she was Black. Jones could type 75 words per minute and she knew shorthand. She remembers the man who interviewed her recognizing her competence, even complimenting her penmanship, only to point to the white ladies who worked in the office and say, “They won’t work with you.”

“I was burning up with anger,” Jones said.

She was so upset she walked home that day instead of riding the streetcar back across town. At home, she said her mother sat her down for a reality check, telling her racism would be something she would deal so as long as she had a Black face. 

Jones' said her mother told her, “you're not gonna win this battle by yourself. You've got to join in … say your prayers and ask for help.”

She would spend the rest of her life joining in.

Jones joined the Black Workers Coalition and handled employment complaints. She marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She protested in Louisville against segregation in public schools and for open housing. Jones is a founding member of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and she also fought for the Justice Resource Center in Louisville alongside the late Rev. Louis Coleman .

Now, Jones is a treasured resource to Louisville’s next generation of Civil Rights leaders. Her home is called “the community house” for a reason. You don't need an appointment to stop by or to pick up the phone. She is there for you. ”My role should be leading these young people that are wanting to become leaders,” she said. “I will work with you and do everything possible, but march or protest... [My] legs and feet and age won’t let me.”

Community members seeking to enact change must not squander her generous offer. Drink in all of her advice. Louisville is not finished fighting, and Kentucky's legislators are not finished chipping away at the gains Jones' generation of social justice leaders fought long and hard to obtain.

Mattie Jones wants Louisville to be better prepared

Jones said she did not protest when Louisville Metro Police Department officers killed Breonna Taylor because the protests turned violent. Instead, she spoke to leaders, telling them that violence was not the way. She watched the protests of 2020 unfold and said she that Louisville was caught unprepared. “[Protestors] just got out there and acted," she said, "I don’t criticize them, it was all well and good.” But when so many people showed up from all over, she said it added chaos and fueled some of violence that took place.

Jones said she’s never thrown a rock or acted out during protests and she credits the coaching she received. “Dr. King did not let us hit the streets unless we had some training,” she said. She went to the Highlander Folk School in Grundy County, Tennessee, like many other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. “We were trained how to act and react, not just when crisis hit us.”  

When you organize, she said you always have to be looking for the ones who are going to come in and be disruptive, “That's why you need old timers like us to try to steer you.” 

Jones is one of the Civil Rights Leaders who paved those first pathways of the movement. The ones who championed and obtained open housing so Black people could live where they wanted. The ones who fought for the simple ability to go shopping and try on clothing in department stores alongside white people. But Jones fears the movement relaxed too much in the wake of those wins. “We did not carry the message to this next generation," she said, "African American children today don't know the struggle that we went through.”

Though Jones saw disorganization during the 2020 protests, she also saw hope. She said she saw the community, white and Black, coming together and it gives her deep satisfaction within. “Here is a change that has been made,” she said.

First, you have to set yourself free

Like so many other things in life, Jones' said that social justice work has to start from inside you, the work truly begins with setting yourself free. 

Jones explained that you feel free after something changes deep within you. For her, it was that day U of L denied her the work-study program.

From there, she says it takes strong, trusted leaders, who are accessible and available to those looking for guidance. Like Jones' mother was there to help guide her. Jones is adamant that you have to be able to talk to someone to help you deal with what is happening around you along with the emotions that bubble up as a result. She said you must be able to express yourself. Jones wants to be that person for Louisville's next generation of leaders and activists. ”We have to talk to people,” she says, “We have to show them the way.” 

Everyone’s path to inner freedom looks different but Jones says one thing is for certain: If you don't free yourself, then you remain afraid to speak out. And if you don't speak out about what is right, then you continue to uphold what is wrong.

More about Listen, Learn, Act

The day I attended, Mattie Jones was the only person of color in the room. Mostly retired white people gathered with the intent of learning how to become better allies in our community. Di Kerrigan and Deborah LaPorte began Listen, Learn, Act racial justice classes at the Earth and Spirit Center with much of that same energy. They wanted to educate themselves and others as an intentional response to the police killing of Breonna Taylor. In anger and despair, they felt the need to show up and push for justice in response to this horrific incident. Rev. Joe Phelps has long been active in Louisville social justice and facilitated the conversation with Mattie Jones who said with affection that she was only there because Phelps had asked. 

Bonnie Jean Feldkamp is the opinion editor for The Louisville Courier Journal. She can be reached via email at [email protected] or on social media  @WriterBonnie .

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Martin Luther King Jr. Biographer Wins American History Prize

The New-York Historical Society honor goes to Jonathan Eig, whose “King: A Life” presents the civil rights leader as a brilliant, flawed 20th-century “founding father.”

By Jennifer Schuessler

Jonathan Eig, the author of “King: A Life,” has been named the winner of the New-York Historical Society’s 2024 Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize, which is awarded annually for the best work of American history or biography.

Billed as the first major biography of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in decades, Eig’s book draws on recently declassified government records and other new sources to take a panoramic yet intimate look at Dr. King. The book places him in the context of the many figures, inside and outside the civil rights movement, who shaped his thinking and actions.

The biography, almost 700 pages long, shows a young King struggling to establish himself in the shadow of his father, a prominent Baptist preacher and community leader in Atlanta. As King and his movement grew, Eig shows him in a complicated dance with white leaders like President Lyndon B. Johnson, who sometimes supported and sometimes hampered him, and with more radical Black activists who increasingly saw him as dedicated to an outmoded form of “ respectability politics .”

While hailing King as “one of America’s founding fathers,” Eig doesn’t stint on his personal struggles and flaws, including his marital infidelities and posthumous revelations of plagiarism in his doctoral dissertation. Reviewing the biography last year in The New York Times, Dwight Garner called it “a very human, and quite humane, portrait” that is “worthy of its subject.”

The historical society’s prize, which comes with a cash reward of $50,000, honors books that are accessible to a general readership. It generally focuses on works of political history that keep founders, presidents and other prominent figures at the center of the frame, if not always in a celebratory way. Last year’s winner was “G-Man,” Beverly Gage’s biography of J. Edgar Hoover, who as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation worked to undermine Dr. King , authorizing wiretaps of his home and office and planting bugs in his hotel rooms.

In a statement, the historical society’s board chair, Agnes Hsu-Tang, called Eig’s biography of Dr. King “a deft, multidimensional portrayal” that avoids hagiography, showing how “America — and its many founders — can be both heroic and imperfect.”

Other past winners of the prize include Alan Taylor , Drew Gilpin Faust and Jill Lepore.

Jennifer Schuessler is a culture reporter covering intellectual life and the world of ideas. She is based in New York. More about Jennifer Schuessler