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Malcolm X
African-American leader and prominent figure in the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X articulated concepts of race pride and black nationalism in the 1950s and '60s. -
Emmett Till
Emmett Louis Till was an African-American teenager who was lynched to death in Mississippi at the age of 14 after reportedly flirting with a white woman. -
Montgomery Bus Boycott
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, refused to yield her seat to a white man on a bus. Four days later, The Montgomery bus boycott began. It was a 13-month mass protest that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional. -
Little Rock Nine
The Little Rock Nine was a group of nine African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School. Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas. -
Freedom Riders
A group of northern idealists active in the civil rights movement. The Freedom Riders, who included both blacks and whites, rode buses into the South in the early 1960s in order to challenge racial segregation. Freedom Riders were regularly attacked by mobs of angry whites and received often belated protection from federal officers. -
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Youth Movement: SNCC and Sit-Ins
The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), formed to give younger blacks more of a voice in the civil rights movement, became one of the movement’s more radical branches. In the wake of the early sit-ins at lunch counters closed to blacks, helped to set up the first meeting of what became SNCC. Those, who formed SNCC, were encouraged to look beyond integration to broader social change and to view King’s principle of nonviolence more as a political tactic than as a way of life. -
James Meredith and Ole Miss
An African-American man named James Meredith attempted to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Chaos briefly broke out on the Ole Miss campus, with riots ending in two dead, hundreds wounded and many others arrested, after the Kennedy administration called out some 31,000 National Guardsmen and other federal forces to enforce order. -
Project C and Children's March
In 1963, American civil rights advocates launched Project C (for Confrontation), better known as The Birmingham Campaign. It was a campaign of nonviolent direct actions against city segregation ordinances. The Children's March tells the story of how the young people of Birmingham braved arrest, fire hoses and brought segregation to its knees. -
The Philosophy of Non-Violence: Letters From a Birmingham Jail
In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: 1) collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive; 2) negotiation; 3) self-purification; and 4) direct action.
Letter From Birmingham Jail is an open letter written on April 16, 1963, by Martin Luther King, Jr. The letter defends the strategy of nonviolent resistance to racism. -
March on Washington
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963. Attended by some 250,000 people, it was the largest demonstration ever seen in the nation's capital, and one of the first to have extensive television coverage. This march culminated in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, a spirited call for racial justice and equality. -
Civil Rights Act
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a landmark piece of civil rights legislation in the United States that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. -
Freedom Summer
Freedom Summer was a 1964 voter registration project in Mississippi, part of a larger effort by civil rights groups such as the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to expand black voting in the South. -
Selma to Montgomery March
A march led by Martin Luther King, who led thousands of nonviolent demonstrators to the steps of the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, after a 5-day, 54-mile march from Selma, Alabama, where local African Americans, had been campaigning for voting rights -
Voting Rights Act
The Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, aimed to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote under the 15th Amendment (1870) to the Constitution of the United States.
