Civil Rights Movement
What was life like before the Civil
Rights movement?
► Use the pictures in the following slides to make some statements describing
life in the U.S. before the Civil Rights movement.
The Civil Rights Movement:
Contents
Harlem Renaissance
Segregation
The Montgomery Bus Boycott
Sit-Ins
Freedom Riders
The March on Washington
Voter Registration
The End of the Movement
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Click on “Contents” on other pages
to return to this page.
Understanding: Discuss how the civil rights movement evolved
during the 1950s and 1960s and explain each of the three
developments.
For African Americans, the path from slavery to full civil rights was long
and difficult. Several developments during the 1950s and 1960s legally
guaranteed them full citizenship:
Montgomery Bus Development:
sit-ins
Boycott Protests
24th Amendment
Civil Rights
Development:
Development: for Johnson Presidency
Warren Court African
Americans
Brown v. Board of
Education Voting Rights Act of
Civil Rights Act of 1965
1964 9
Contents
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was an African American
cultural movement of the 1920s and early 1930s
centered around the Harlem neighborhood of New
York City.
Several factors laid the groundwork for the
movement.
During a phenomenon known as the Great Migration,
hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved from
the economically depressed rural South to the industrial
cities of the North, taking advantage of employment
opportunities created by World War I.
[Grocery store, Harlem, 1940] Library of
Congress Prints and Photographs Division
Washington, D.C.; LC-USZC4-4737
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Contents
Harlem Renaissance
Increased education and employment
opportunities following World War I led
to the development of an African
American middle class.
As more and more educated and socially
conscious African Americans settled in
New York’s neighborhood of Harlem, it
developed into the political and cultural
center of black America.
The Harlem Renaissance marked the first
time that African American arts attracted
significant attention from the nation at
large, and mainstream publishers and critics
took African American literature seriously.
Instead of more direct political means,
African American artists and writers used
culture to work for the goals of civil rights 11
and equality.
Contents
Harlem Renaissance
No common literary style or
political ideology defined the
Harlem Renaissance. What
united the participants was the
sense of taking part in a common
endeavor and their commitment
to giving artistic expression to
the African American experience.
Zora Neale Hurston An interest in the roots of the
twentieth- century African
American experience in Africa
and the American South were
common themes.
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Langston Hughes.
Contents
Harlem Renaissance
Jazz and blues music moved
with the African American
populations from the South
and Midwest into the bars and
cabarets of Harlem.
Diversity and experimentation Bessie Smith
also flourished in the
performing arts and were
reflected in blues by such
people as Bessie Smith and in
jazz by such people as Duke
Ellington and Fats Waller.
13 Fats Waller
Duke Ellington
Contents
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance pushed
open the door for many African
American authors to mainstream
white magazines and publishing
houses.
Harlem’s cabarets attracted both
Harlem residents and white New
Yorkers seeking out Harlem The Cotton Club in Harlem
nightlife.
Harlem’s famous Cotton Club
carried this to an extreme,
providing African American Poster for the 1984 Cotton
Club movie starring Richard
entertainment for exclusively white Gere, Gregory Hines, and
Diane
14 Lane.
audiences.
Contents
Segregation in the North
► De facto segregation: segregated by unwritten custom or tradition, face of
life
► Blacks were denied housing in many neighborhoods and faced discrimination
in employment (NORTH)