civil rights movement

The national effort made by black people and their supporters in the 1950s and 1960s to eliminate segregation and gain equal rights. The first large episode in the movement, a boycott of the city buses in Montgomery, Alabama , was touched off by the refusal of one black woman, Rosa Parks , to give up her seat on a bus to a white person. A number of sit-ins and similar demonstrations followed. A high point of the civil rights movement was a rally by hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C. , in 1963, at which a leader of the movement, Martin Luther King , Jr., gave his “ I have a dream ” speech. The federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 authorized federal action against segregation in public accommodations, public facilities, and employment. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed after large demonstrations in Selma , Alabama, which drew some violent responses. The Fair Housing Act, prohibiting discrimination by race in housing, was passed in 1968. After such legislative victories, the civil rights movement shifted emphasis toward education and changing the attitudes of white people. Some civil rights supporters turned toward militant movements ( see Black Power ), and several riots erupted in the late 1960s over racial questions ( see Watts riots ). The Bakke decisionof 1978 guardedly endorsed affirmative action .

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And yet while I felt distinctly ill at ease, shaken by what I had seen at the museum and memorial, within hours I began to feel powerful for the part I had played once upon a time as an activist in the Civil Rights Movement.

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The very brutality of Bull Connor, seen across the country and the world on the TV news, generated tremendous support for the civil rights movement.

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That's the immigration regime he was referring to, and which changed after the Civil Rights Movement.

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It's not as if it's the same forces or the same people, but I think in the United States, we do have competing traditions of interracial democracy — bequeathed by the abolitionists, by the Civil Rights Movement, by the experiment in interracial democracy in the south during Reconstruction — but we also have a traditional reaction against it, whether it was the pro-slavery, anti-democratic traditions of southern slaveholders.

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In the U.S., where there was no such dramatic loss of power for a dominant population but enough anxiety generated by the reforms of the Civil Rights Movement to foster white resentment, white supremacists were able to point to something concrete—cases of violence overseas—to try to provoke racial anxieties closer to home.

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Civil Rights Act of 1964 civils

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