The Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement

Post-Holocaust American Judaism Collections

2015

Moshe Kornfield, Scott Meyer, Elias Sacks, Stephanie Yuhas, Andrew Violet, Jane Thaler

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English

THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT In the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s philosophy, early civil rights campaigns—such as the Montgomery bus boycott, sit-ins that sought to achieve equal access to public spaces, freedom rides, marches, and voter registration drives—used nonviolent tactics. These efforts resulted in a number of tangible achievements including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Acts of 1965, and the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which was passed one week after King’s assassination. By the mid-1960s, activists who favored a more militant approach challenged King’s nonviolence. The Civil Rights Movement included a series of civil disobedience and legal campaigns to end segregation and to achieve legal equality for African-Americans, primarily in the South. The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case, which declared segregated schools unconstitutional, and the lynching of Emmett Till, an African-American teenager on vacation in Mississippi, were key moments in the early history of this movement.