Civil Rights Movement

The civil rights movement describes a period in U.S. history when large numbers of ordinary people and organizations mobilized to destroy the legal segregation and second-class citizenship of African Americans, Latinos/as, Asian Americans, and indigenous peoples encoded in federal and state laws and enforced by the proliferation of violence at all levels of society and in every region of the country. The purpose of the civil rights movement was to secure economic and political equality, empowerment, and democracy.

While resistance to discrimination and racism has existed since the very first contact among Europeans, Africans, and indigenous peoples in the 15th century, the modern civil rights movement often is thought of beginning with the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision banning school segregation and ending with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act or the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The civil rights movement is interconnected with the historical and ongoing human call for justice worldwide. In the 20th century alone, the civil rights movement was connected with the anti-lynching movement, Spanish Civil War resistance, the labor movement, tenant farmer organizing, Roosevelt's New Deal, Mohandas Gandhi and India's independence, the desegregation of U.S. military forces, anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia, the American Indian Movement, the Chicano movement, the Asian Pacific Islander movement, the farmworkers' movement, the women's movement, the anti-war movement, the anti-apartheid movement, the Solidarity movement, liberation theology, the Sanctuary movement, gay liberation, environmental justice, and, even, some would argue, the tactics used in the anti-abortion and religious fundamentalist movements.

The civil rights movement can best be understood within the larger context of the Reconstruction Era (1865–1877), an attempt to reconstruct the U.S. economy and expand political democracy following the end of the Civil War in 1865. For more than 250 years, Africans were enslaved, and land was stolen from indigenous peoples and Mexico to create the United States. By 1865, more than 4 million formerly enslaved people were expected to transform themselves into free laborers and equal citizens with no land, no money, and no laws to protect their rights. They worked extremely hard and successfully to create their own societies and economies in a hostile environment.

In addition, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (known as the Freedmen's Bureau) was an agency of the U.S. government formed to help freedmen gain a basic education, an opportunity to work for pay, and voting rights. By 1877, 18 African Americans had been elected to state governments, 16 had been elected to the U. S. Congress, and [Page 343]more than 1,000 schools were established for African Americans. Yet, the process of amending the U.S. Constitution and providing federal resources to the freedmen angered many white women suffragists, southern landowners, white-dominated labor unions, and poor whites. Repressive state laws and violence against African Americans often resulted. In the meantime, the federal government continued its campaigns to appropriate Indian land, deny citizenship to Asian immigrants, and oppress Mexicans.

The Reconstruction Era ended when federal troops abruptly left the South in 1877. By 1895, the white citizenry succeeded in enforcing domination over people of color, most notably through a U.S. Supreme Court decision—Plessy v. Ferguson—which stated that separate but equal public accommodations did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. States flagrantly disregarded the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed voting rights regardless of race and ethnicity. This backlash to Reconstruction (often called the Jim Crow Era) institutionalized racism in schools, banks, churches, the workplace, real estate agencies, law enforcement, the judicial system, and other institutions that governed daily life, with the purpose of exploiting people of color and preserving white privilege. Mob and police violence were used systematically and frequently—against both whites and people of color—to enforce racism.

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