The Civil Rights Movement

The Vietnam disaster, economic troubles, and assassination of President Kennedy led to the social unrest and a number of movements for civil rights in the 1960–1970s. The most significant of these movements was fighting of African-Americans for equality. Its roots were in the post-war years when black leaders began to speak about their people's second-class citizenship and poverty.

After World War II, in the South the blacks still lived in a segregated society, with separate schools, theaters and even bus seats for black and white people. Many southerners argued that segregation at schools was constitutional if facilities were "separate but equal". But the black people started fighting for their rights.

Segregation was challenged in court by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) while in every-day life black students practiced boycotts and sit-ins (sit-in demonstrations) – they moved into public places for white people only and refused to leave.

In 1954, NAACP won a historic victory against segregation – in the Brown v. Board of Education ofTopeka case the Supreme Court decided that the doctrine "separate but equal" should not take place in public education. A year later the Court demanded the desegregation of schools.

The wave of black protests reached Alabama, where in December 1955, a black woman Rosa Parks refused to give her seat to a white passenger on a public bus. After Mrs. Parks was arrested, the blacks started a yearlong boycott of the city's bus system. The boycott was inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr. – a black Baptist minister, who later became a leader of the Civil Rights Movement. "This is not a war between the white and the Negro", he said, "but a conflict between justice and injustice". The blacks won – in 1956, the Supreme Court announced bus segregation unconstitutional.

Another strategy used across the country was sit-in demonstrations. By the end of 1961, more than 70,000 people had taken part in them. Next year civil rights workers started organizing "freedom rides," in which blacks and whites boarded buses heading south toward segregated terminals and started protests there to attract attention of mass media to the issue of segregation.

In August 1963, 250,000 Americans (both black and white) marched to Washington, D.C. to demand equal rights to African-Americans. There Martin Luther King, Jr. made his famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial. "I have a dream," he said, "That my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

As a result, in 1964 Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and other laws that guaranteed equal civil rights to blacks. The same year Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. won the Nobel Prize for his civil rights work.

However, many black people felt that the civil rights movement had only altered, not revolutionized race relations – for most people conditions were improving very slowly. This disappointment was expressed in the "Black Power" – an ideology suggested by Malcolm X – a former drug dealer. He urged African-Americans to be proud of their roots, and "to see themselves with their own eyes not white man's".

Malcolm X's teaching gave rise to all-black groups advocating racial separatism and Black Power. Though Black Power gained wide popularity, many blacks continued to support traditional civil rights groups. Both these movements helped to organize community self-help groups, to establish black studies programs at colleges and to encourage African-Americans to see that "black is beautiful". Step by step African-Americans began to take pride in their identity.