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Civil Rights Movement
6 articles on Civil Rights Movement
Civil Rights Movement
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 7042 Includes: The Roots of the Movement. | The 1940s and 1950s. | Mass Protest and Voter Registration. | Radicalization and Demise. | Impact and Legacy. | Bibliography“Civil rights movement” is an umbrella term that refers to the various efforts of African American activists to gain full citizenship rights and to end racial discrimination in American society. Sustained civil rights organizing began in the early twentieth century, matured in the 1940s and 1950s, and culminated in the mass nonviolent protests of the 1960s. After securing civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s, the movement became more radical, increasingly rejecting nonviolent protest and advocating more fundamental change. Though the movement lost momentum in the late 1960s, militant Black Power activism and political organizing continued until the mid-1970s.After the Civil War, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments abolished slavery, made African Americans citizens of the United States, and ...
Read full articleCivil Rights, White Responses and Resistance To
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 3353 Includes: The Early Phases of White Resistance, 1946–1960. | Direct Action and Direct Counteraction, 1960–1964. | Resistance Redefined. | BibliographyShattered windows, bombed-out churches, white mobs jeering at black schoolchildren, southern governors defiantly proclaiming that their states would never integrate—these are, with good reason, the images of the white response to civil rights that remain seared into American public memory. Violence always underpinned the South's system of Jim Crow segregation and black disfranchisement, and a significant number of whites were prepared to suppress violently any African American challenge to the prevailing racial hierarchy. Yet the acts of terrorism against civil rights workers and the bombast of white-supremacist politicians, though important, do not capture the full spectrum of the white response to the African American freedom struggle of the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.The term commonly used ...
Read full articleCivil Rights Movement
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 10806 Includes: Reconstruction to World War I | New Deal and World War II | Postwar America | Civil Rights Struggle in the 1950s | Direct-Action Protests of the 1960s | Movement at High Tide | In the Aftermath | BibliographyCentury-long struggle against legally mandated structures of white supremacy that culminated with mass protests in the 1960s and secured the enactment of national civil rights legislation. The Civil Rights Movement had its roots in the constitutional amendments enacted during the Reconstruction era. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment expanded the guarantees of federally protected citizenship rights, and the Fifteenth Amendment barred voting restrictions based on race. The Reconstruction amendments were, as civil rights lawyer Oliver Hill observed, “a second Bill of Rights” for black Americans.Reconstruction radically altered social, political, and economic relationships in the South and in the nation. Former slaves participated in civic and political life throughout the South. Black elected ...
Read full articleCivil Rights Movements in Latin America and the Caribbean
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 24See Political Parties and Black Social Movements in Latin America and the Caribbean. ...
Read full articleCivil Rights Movement
Source: Black Women in America, Second Edition
Word Count: 10230 Includes: Fighting for the Race | The Depression Years | World War II and Beyond | Toward Brown v. Board of Education | Mass Action | Grassroots Leaders | Citizenship Schools | Student Activism | Freedom Rides | Diminishing Role | BibliographyWhen Rosa Parks in December 1955 refused to give her seat to a white man on a segregated city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, she was not a tired little old lady turning accidental hero, as many have perceived her. She was only forty-two years old and no more tired than usual after a day's work. More importantly, Parks was an experienced local civil rights activist who had defied bus segregation laws several times before 1955 . She had been an official in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which she had joined in 1943 . She had worked in voter registration campaigns. Parks did not just stumble into history. She already was an impo rtant, albeit not the most important, example ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 3093 Includes: Revolutionary Era through the Civil War. | Civil War through World War II. | World War II to 1968. | The Enduring Legacy.The American civil rights movement encompasses more than three centuries of struggle against racial discrimination, and is best understood in this broad context. The movement that culminated in the organized protests and civil rights legislation of the 1950s and 1960s drew upon the traditions and experiences of uncooperative and fugitive slaves, black and white abolitionists, and free blacks who resented second-class citizenship. During the second half of the eighteenth century, the egalitarian rhetoric of the American and French Revolutions and Quaker (Society of Friends) religious doctrines produced a nascent antislavery movement that led to wholesale emancipation in the North and doubts about the future of slavery in the South. The outlawing of American ...
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