In the 1950s and 1960s, how did the Civil Rights movement move the country toward
living up to its ideas of equality? In answering this question, keep including a
discussion of changing the behavior of governments and businesses. Cite specific
people, laws, protests, etc. to illustrate your points.
Under Kennedy’s leadership, the civil rights bill had passed the House of Representatives
but was stalled in the Senate by a filibuster. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the most
far-reaching civil rights act yet passed by Congress, banned discrimination in public
accommodations, sought to aid schools in efforts to desegregate, and prohibited federal
funding of programs that permitted racial segregation. Further, it barred discrimination in
employment on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, or gender, and established
an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Protecting African Americans’ right to vote was as important as ending racial inequality in the
United States. In January 1964, the Twenty-Fourth Amendment, prohibiting the imposition of
poll taxes on voters, was finally ratified. Other challenges remained, however.
In February 1960, four sophomores at the North Carolina Agricultural & Technical
College—named Ezell Blair, Jr., Joseph McNeil, David Richmond, and Franklin
McCain—entered the local Woolworth’s and sat at the lunch counter. The lunch counter was
segregated, and they were refused service as they knew they would be. Over the next few
days, more protesters joined the four sophomores. Within two months, the sit-in movement
had spread to fifty-four cities in nine states.
Students also took part in the 1961 “freedom rides” sponsored by the Congress of Racial
Equality (CORE) and SNCC. The volunteers headed south on buses that challenged the
seating order of Jim Crow segregation. White riders would stay in the back,
African-Americans would sit in the front, and on other occasions, riders of different races
would share the same bench seat. The Freedom Riders encountered little difficulty until they
reached South Carolina, where a mob severely beat John Lewis, who later became
chairman of SNCC. The danger increased as the riders continued through Georgia into
Alabama, where one of the two buses was firebombed outside the town of Anniston. The
second group continued to Birmingham, where the riders were attacked by the Ku Klux Klan.
The remaining volunteers continued to Mississippi, where they were arrested when they
attempted to desegregate the waiting rooms in the Jackson bus terminal.
The grassroots efforts of people like the Freedom Riders to change discriminatory laws and
long standing racist traditions grew more widely known in the mid-1960s. As African
Americans increased their calls for full rights for all Americans, many civil rights groups
changed their tactics to reflect this new urgency.
In Cambridge, hospital and school segregation led to severe health issues and limited
educational advancement. To bring about change, local activists Gloria Richardson and Inez
Grubb launched the only affiliate of the SNCC that was not led by students, the Cambridge
Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC). They began protests against local businesses that
refused to hire Black workers, and conducted sit-ins at restaurants and other venues that
would not serve Black people.
The most famous of the civil rights-era demonstrations was the March on Washington for
Jobs and Freedom, held in August 1963, on the one hundredth anniversary of Abraham
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Its purpose was to pressure President Kennedy to act
on his promises regarding civil rights. As the crowd gathered outside the Lincoln Memorial
and spilled across the National Mall, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his most famous
speech. In “I Have a Dream,” King called for an end to racial injustice in the United States
and envisioned a harmonious, integrated society.
Other gatherings of civil rights activists ended tragically, and some demonstrations were
intended to provoke a hostile response from White people and thus reveal the inhumanity of
the Jim Crow laws and their supporters.
The vision of White people and African Americans working together peacefully to end racial
injustice suffered a blow with the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.. On April 4, King was shot
and killed while standing on the balcony of his motel.
The late 1960s delivered what many felt was an overdue correction to racist and intrusive
laws. Until then, many states still had anti-miscegenation laws on the books, which
prohibited interracial marriages. Over the preceding two decades, fourteen other states had
either repealed similar laws or had them invalidated by court cases.