Nearly 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans in Southern states still inhabited a starkly unequal world of disenfranchisement, segregation and various forms of oppression, including race-inspired violence. “Jim Crow” laws at the local and state levels barred them from classrooms and bathrooms, from theaters and train cars, from juries and legislatures. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine that formed the basis for state-sanctioned discrimination, drawing national and international attention to African Americans’ plight. In the turbulent decade and a half that followed, civil rights activists used nonviolent protest and civil disobedience to bring about change, and the federal government made legislative headway with initiatives such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Many leaders from within the African American community and beyond rose to prominence during the Civil Rights era, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Andrew Goodman and others. They risked—and sometimes lost—their lives in the name of freedom and equality.
- The Civil Rights Movement
- Thurgood Marshall
- Rosa Parks
- Daisy Bates
- Martin Luther King Jr.
- Malcom X
- Myrlie Evers-Williams
- Jesse Jackson
- Roy Wilkins
- The Little Rock Nine
- Ralph Abernathy
- Susan B. Anthony
- Ella Baker
- James Bevel
- Claude Black
- Julian Bond
- Lucy Burns
- Cesar Chavez
- Claudette Colvin
- Marvel Cooke
- Dorothy Cotton
- Eugene Debs
- Stokely Carmichael
- W.E.B. Du Bois
- Charles Evers
- Medgar Evers
- James Farmer
- Louis Farrakhan
- Marie Foster
- Betty Friedan
- Lou Fannie Hamer
- Myles Horton
- T.R.M. Howard
- Dolores Huerta
- Lucy Stone
- Withney Moore Young Jr.