research questions civil rights movement

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The Civil Rights Movement

Doug McAdam is The Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Sociology at Stanford University and the former Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is the author or co-author of 15 books and some 75 articles in the area of political sociology, with a special emphasis on race in the U.S., American politics, and the study of social movements and “contentious politics.” Among his best known works are Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970 , a new edition of which was published in 1999 (University of Chicago Press), Freedom Summer (1988, Oxford University Press), which was awarded the 1990 C. Wright Mills Award as well as being a finalist for the American Sociological Association’s best book prize for 1991, and Dynamics of Contention (2001, Cambridge University Press) with Sid Tarrow and Charles Tilly. He is also the co-author of two new books, A Theory of Fields (with Neil Fligstein for Oxford University Press) and Divided America: Racial Politics and Social Movements in the Post-war Era , both from Oxford University Press. He was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003.

• Published: 07 March 2016
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This chapter offers a critical survey of extant scholarship on the civil rights movement. It highlights topics, organizations, and specific figures and campaigns that have been extensively studied, while also calling attention to other aspects of, or persons or groups in, the movement that have received much less scholarly attention. The piece ends with an extended section on what the author terms “silences, holes, and biases” in the literature on this most important of American social movements. More specifically the author calls for a temporal and geographic broadening of research on the African American freedom struggle, more attention to black activism within a host of institutions (e.g. schools, workplaces, cultural institutions), and increased research on the dynamics of white resistance to collective political action by African Americans.

It is commonplace to begin any encyclopedia or handbook entry with a definition or delimitation of the topic to be covered. This normative convention is even more important, however, when the topic is something as amorphous as the “civil rights movement.” How are we to understand this unruly term? Does it apply only to the period normally covered by popular narrative accounts of the civil rights era, say from the onset of Montgomery in 1955 through the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968? Or are we to take it as a stand-in for the more inclusive term, “African-American Freedom Struggle?” I prefer the latter concept, believing that the struggle for racial justice by, and on behalf of, African Americans has been a more or less continuous feature of the American (colonial and national) experience for some 400 years. And that singling out narrower periods for attention blinds us to critical continuities backward and forward in time. That said, with a limited number of pages to work with, I will opt for only a slight variant on the narrative convention. Here the “civil rights movement” will be temporally confined to the twenty-year period, 1955–75. While this is perhaps a bit longer than most popular histories normally allow, extending the period well into the 1970s is essential if one wants to call attention to two critically important but still understudied topics: black power/cultural nationalism on the one hand and the movement as it began its “long march” through America’s institutions.

Even confining ourselves to the period, 1955–75, the literature on the civil rights movement is massive. But as with most literatures, it is also wildly uneven in its treatment of specific topics. In the first section, I will focus attention on those for which there is reasonable coverage, turning in the second section to the arguably more important and interesting matter of holes, silences, and biases in the literature.

What We Know

In surveying the topics that have received the most attention, I want to differentiate work on the movement as a whole from research that has focused on particular figures, organizations, or locations in the struggle. I begin with the former.

The Overall Movement

At the broadest level, there are a number of historical narratives of the movement that seek to capture the overall arch and sweep of the modern civil rights struggle. None has received as much attention—some critical, mostly praiseworthy—as Taylor Branch’s magisterial three-volume history of the movement (1988, 1998, 2006), but others have trodden some of the same ground ( Brooks 1974 ; Woodward 1966 ; Bloom 1987 ; Marable 1991 ; Wofford 1992 ; Frederickson 2000 ). The broad origins of the movement have also come in for a fair amount of attention. The earliest work on the topic generally explored the domestic roots of the struggle. So, in my own account of the movement’s origins ( McAdam 1982 ), I stressed the critical importance of the following factors:

the decline of the cotton economy starting in the 1920s, which gradually undermined the economic underpinnings of Jim Crow;

the “great migration” set in motion by the decline of King Cotton and the resulting dramatic increase in the national importance of the “black vote;” and

the simultaneous rural to urban migration of blacks in the South between 1920–50 that greatly strengthened the three institutions—black church, black colleges, and local NAACP chapters—that would serve as the critical infrastructure within which the movement developed.

In recent years, however, a number of scholars have argued for the critical importance of international factors—most importantly the onset of the Cold War—in helping to set the movement in motion ( Plummer 1996 ; Skrentny 1998 ; McAdam 1999 ; Dudziak 2000 ; Layton 2000 ). Without discounting the role of domestic factors, these scholars contend that it was the need to put America’s racial house in order to successfully compete with the Soviet Union for influence around the globe that effectively “re-nationalized” the issue of race in the United States and granted critical leverage to civil rights forces.

If the broad causal origins of the movement have received considerable attention, the localized beginnings of the mass movement in 1955 in Montgomery have generated even more scholarship. Much of this work is inseparable from the voluminous literature on Martin Luther King, Jr. himself. Obviously central to the events in Montgomery, King’s numerous biographers have been de facto chroniclers of the bus boycott as well ( Lewis 1978 ; Garrow 1986 ; Albert and Hoffman 1990 ; Fairclough 1995 ; Lischer 1995 ; Dyson 2000 ; Ling 2002 ; Burns 1997 ; Jackson 2007 ). King himself has contributed to this literature not only directly via his widely read 1958 book, Stride Toward Freedom , but indirectly through the third volume of his papers (“ Birth of a New Age ”) which covers the years of the Boycott ( Carson, Burns, and Carson 1997 ). Though “MLK studies” tends to dominate the literature on Montgomery, a handful of other works seek a broader understanding of events there. These include useful edited collections by David Garrow (1989) and Stewart Burns (1997) , as well as a number of stand-alone studies of the local movement in Montgomery ( Millner 1981 ; Robinson 1987 ).

Taking a broader perspective than Montgomery are a small number of studies that emphasize the more general community dynamics and organizational infrastructure that gave rise to the movement. Here the tendency has been to stress the central role of the black church in the birth of the movement ( Morris 1984 ; McAdam 1999 ). By contrast, the critical importance of black colleges and local NAACP chapters in the origins of the struggle has been somewhat neglected. An exception to this is Aldon Morris’s important 1984 book, which depicts all three institutions as constituting loosely integrated “movement communities” that birthed the struggle in a host of southern towns and cities. Beyond these institutions, Christopher Parker’s important 2009 book highlights the important role that returning black World War II veterans played in helping to birth the struggle.

Although the popular narrative history of the struggle tends to depict the movement as continuous after Montgomery, scholars know better. As resistance to the movement—and to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board —stiffened among segregationists in the Deep South in the mid- to late 1950s, civil rights activity languished. The definitive book on “white resistance” during this period has not been written, but there is a small literature devoted to the topic ( Silver 1963 ; Bartley 1969 ; McMillen 1971 , 1989 ).

In truth, on the eve of the new decade, the mass civil rights movement was largely moribund. The 1960 sit-in movement changed all that, restarting the broader movement, broadening the struggle by sparking sympathy demonstrations in the North, and revitalizing the established civil rights organizations. It also led to the founding of a new organization, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was to raise the bar in terms of strategic daring and creativity during the movement’s heyday. Given the decisive importance of the sit-ins to the broad arc of the civil rights struggle, it is surprising how little has been written on the movement. To my knowledge, the only full-length monograph devoted to the topic is Martin Oppenheimer’s dissertation (1963) , which was republished as a book in 1989.

The heyday of the movement took place between 1960–65, defined and fueled by a series of innovative campaigns. In chronological order, these include the sit-in movement (1960), the Freedom Rides (1961–62), the movement in Albany, Georgia (1962), Birmingham (1963), the Mississippi Summer Project (1964), and Selma (1965). As with the sit-in movement, however, the literature on these key campaigns has been thin and decidedly uneven. While the campaigns initiated by King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)—Albany, Birmingham, and Selma—have received a good bit of attention by his biographers, the non-King events remain understudied. Only Belfrage (1965) and McAdam (1988) have written on Freedom Summer, while the high drama of the Freedom Rides has been almost totally ignored by movement scholars. Indeed, the only real account of the campaign is to be found in the autobiography of James Farmer (1985) , who, as Director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), orchestrated the Rides.

If the literature on the heyday of the movement is uneven, it is positively sparse when it comes to the period following Selma. There is one exception to this rule. The literature on the “urban disorders” of the mid- to late 1960s is substantial, even if much of the work consists of narrow statistical studies designed to explain variation in the incidence of riot ( Fogelson 1971 ; Eisinger 1973 ; Button 1978 ). By contrast, scholarship on later events such as the Chicago open-housing marches (1966), the Poor People’s Campaign (1969), and the black power movement is hard to find. I will have more to say about this glaring “hole” in the literature in the final section of this essay.

Finally, while some of the broad histories of the movement have offered general assessments of the impact of the struggle on American life, systematic studies of the effects of the movement are relatively few in number. In a series of innovative publications, Kenneth Andrews (1997 , 2001 , 2004 ) has documented the enduring impact of the movement on public policy and electoral politics in Mississippi. James Button tried to do much the same thing, but for a much larger geographic area, in his 1989 book Blacks and Social Change: Impact of the Civil Rights Movement in Southern Communities. Writing in a more narrative vein, John Skrentny (2002) offers a compelling account of how the movement indirectly spawned a broader “minority rights revolution” in the 1970s, directed primarily in top-down fashion by state officials, rather than grassroots movement groups. Taking advantage of the new legal precedents and policy initiatives secured by civil rights forces, this broader revolution powerfully affected groups as diverse as women, Native Americans, Latinos, gays and lesbians, and those with disabilities. Finally, a number of more focused efforts take the measure of specific tactics or forms of movement activity. These include books on the use of the courts by civil rights forces ( Rosenberg 1991 ), the 1968 Olympic Protests ( Hartmann 2003 ), and the impact of the riots on city politics ( Button 1978 ).

Specific Figures, Organizations, or Locations

Having surveyed works that focus on the broader movement, I turn now to scholarship that applies more narrowly to specific figures in the movement, civil rights/black power organizations, or towns or cities that were sites of significant civil rights activity.

Of course, no figure has received as much attention as has King. Helping to frame and shape all other scholarship on MLK is the Martin Luther King, Jr. papers project, directed by Clayborne Carson at Stanford University. To date the project has brought out seven of a planned thirteen volumes of King’s papers, covering the years 1929 through 1962. These volumes have greatly deepened our understanding of King and, in doing so, stand in stark contrast to the somewhat two-dimensional figure celebrated in popular narrative accounts of the movement. The same can be said for the large and growing collection of books that often highlight particular aspects of his thought or periods in his life. To date we have been offered books that focus on King’s stress on economic justice ( Jackson 2007 ), the theological roots of his oratory ( Miller 1992 ; Lischer 1995 ), a King/Malcolm X comparison ( Cone 1992 ), and the FBI’s campaign against King ( Garrow 1981 ).

Without discounting King’s undeniable importance to the struggle, the relative absence of serious scholarship on other significant figures in the movement threatens to reinforce the unfortunate image among the general public that King was the movement. To date only a handful of other figures have been the subject of serious biographies. These include books on Bayard Rustin ( Levine 2000 ; D’Emilio 2003 ), Fannie Lou Hamer ( Mills 1993 ), Ella Baker ( Ransby 2003 ), Fred Shuttlesworth ( Manis 1999 ), A. Philip Randolph ( Pfeffer 1990 ), and Whitney Young ( Weiss 1989 ). In addition, Ralph Abernathy (1990) , Andrew Young (1996) , John Lewis (and Michael D’Orso 1998 ), Rosa Parks (1992) , Malcolm X ( Haley and Malcolm X 1964 ) and Cleveland Sellars (with Robert Terrell 1973 ) have penned memoirs about their life in the movement. Despite these works, the imbalance between scholarship on King and other prominent leaders is all too obvious. So too is the tendency to equate leadership in the movement with the kind of formal positions normally held by males. To counter this tendency, a small but important literature on the critical role of women in the movement has begun to develop ( Curry et al. 2000 ; Ling and Monteith 2004 ; Robnett 1997 ; Olson 2001 ).

Civil Rights/Black Power Organizations

If popular narrative histories of movements/revolutions tend to anoint single figures as the guiding light of the struggle (think Mao, Lenin, Gandhi, Jesus, etc.), they also tend to downplay the role of organization in favor of these singular leaders. The civil rights movement is no exception in this regard. Besides the “first among equals” status assigned to King by movement historians, there are many times more books on figures in the movement than on civil rights/black power organizations. Only the Black Panthers ( Bloom and Martin 2012 ), CORE ( Meier and Rudwick 1973 ), and SNCC ( Zinn 1965 ; Carson 1981 ) have really come in for serious scholarly attention, though in fairness, Adam Fairclough’s 1987 book on King seeks to understand his actions within the context of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. To date, however, no serious single volumes have been written on The Urban League or more egregiously, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). While included in this first section of the entry, the relative absence of serious scholarship on the major civil rights organizations must be counted as one of the most significant silences in the literature on the struggle.

The Movement in Specific Locales

If the lack of serious research on movement organizations is one of the major “holes” in the literature, the many studies of local civil rights struggles should be counted as one of the richest veins of scholarship on the movement. The specific locales singled out for scholarly attention include Greenwood, Mississippi ( Payne 1995 ), Greensboro, North Carolina ( Chafe 1980 ), Richmond, Virginia ( Randolph and Tate 2003 ), New Orleans ( Rogers 1993 ), Birmingham, Alabama ( Eskew 1997 ), Bogalusa, Louisiana ( Honigsberg 2000 ), Hyde County, North Carolina ( Cecelski 1994 ), and the whole of Mississippi ( Dittmer 1995 ). The significance of these studies transcends the richness of the scholarship and the “local color” afforded by the research. The great contribution here is the lie it makes of the notion that the movement was a national struggle directed by Martin Luther King. In a very real sense the movement was less a coordinated national struggle than a collection of local movements with their own leaders, signature tactics, and landmark events. Without discounting King’s symbolic significance and strategic importance as a master tactician, the research on these local struggles reminds us that the movement drew its power and ultimate leverage from people in motion in countless locales and not simply from iconic struggles in Birmingham, Selma, or the halls of Congress.

While celebrating the richness and significance of this scholarship, it is also important to acknowledge the severe imbalance between research on local civil rights struggles in the South and North. Another of the fictions is that the movement was essentially a southern phenomenon, with only a few failed or violent, late sixties episodes in the North. Not so; there were any number of local struggles in the North in the 1940s and 1950s that achieved gains before the celebrated onset of the national struggle. From this perspective, Thomas Sugrue’s groundbreaking book, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North , is an important and welcome addition to the literature. I will have more to say on this particular silence toward the end of the next section.

What We Don’t Know: Silences, Holes, and Biases

In surveying the work that has been done on the movement, we have already touched on some significant silences in the extant literature. So, for example, we just noted the relative lack of scholarship on local civil rights struggles in the North in the 1940s, 1950s, and beyond. Earlier we called attention to the scant research on women in the movement, the lack of scholarship on some of the major civil rights organizations (e.g., NAACP) and campaigns (e.g., the Freedom Rides), and the general inattention to the critical role played by black colleges in the movement’s heyday. Here we want to build on this beginning with a more systematic discussion of the silences, holes, and biases in the literature.

Much of what we do not know stems from the temporal and geographic limits built into the standard definition of the civil rights movement. By defining the movement as the sustained period of heightened racial tension in the United States between the onset of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and some convenient end point in the late 1960s (e.g., King’s death in 1968, the election of Richard Nixon that same year), scholars have been discouraged from exploring racial contention either before or after the period in question or in places or sites not normally associated with the mainstream movement. So many of the holes in the literature owe to these temporal and geographic conventions that I have chosen to organize the section around them.

Temporal Silences

As a graduate student working on my dissertation, I had the great privilege of interviewing the civil rights activist Ella Baker about the origins of the movement. Relatively clueless on the topic myself, I opened the interview by peppering her with questions about events and trends in the early 1950s. She was very patient with me, but after 15–20 minutes, she gently suggested that if I really wanted to understand the origins of the mass movement in the 1950s, I would have to learn a lot more about the 1930s. She went on to give me a compelling crash course in the significance of that decade for what was to come later, emphasizing, among other things:

the symbolic importance of figures such as Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Joe Louis in communicating a new, if limited, sense of racial openness in American public life;

the faint stirrings of hope and political possibility embodied in FDRs “New Deal” for all Americans;

the radical vision of racial justice nurtured in certain corners of the labor movement, from the integrated Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union to the Union of Sleeping Car Porters, to the American Communist Party itself; and

the patient, strategic brilliance of Thurgood Marshall and others in the NAACP in devising the legal assault on “separate but equal” that would eventuate in the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board .

In truth there is research on all of these topics and, more generally, on the significance of the 1930s to prospects for racial change in the United States, but the vast majority of this work is disconnected from scholarship on the civil rights movement, more narrowly conceived. A reconsideration of the importance of the period for the full flowering of civil rights advocacy in the 1950s and 1960s is therefore very much in order.

An even more egregious temporal bias concerns the general failure of scholars to come to grips with the evolution of the movement following King’s death and especially during the critically important decade of the 1970s, when various forms of black activism—cultural as much as political—thrived and vied for attention. The canonical account of the movement as something that took place between Montgomery and King’s death ignores this later period, reflecting a safer, simpler, and altogether more acceptably idealized view of the civil rights struggle. In this account, the essential movement was the southern civil rights struggle, whose goals, tactics, and leaders most Americans are now prepared to comfortably embrace. But this account only works if we can credibly discount the later black power/nationalist movement as a relatively insignificant and ephemeral phenomenon that lasted but a few years and left no enduring legacy. But in an America marked—despite the election of an African-American president—by sharp and often antagonistic black/white cleavages in political and social views, aesthetic preferences, and stereotypes of the other, I would argue that the latter claim is demonstrably false. Indeed, in my view, the experience of race in the United States from, say, 1970 to the present bears the imprint, not so much of the ethos and aesthetic of the integrationist civil rights struggle, as the black power and cultural nationalist movements of the late 1960s/1970s.

The ignorance of this important period does not owe to a total lack of scholarship on the black power/cultural nationalist phase of the struggle. Though not large, there is a body of high quality research on the period ( Van Deburg 1992 ; Kelley 1994 ; Woodard 1999 ; Martin 2005 ). It is just that this scholarship has not received anywhere near as much attention as the canonical account sketched above. But if we are to ever fashion a complete account of the post-World War II African-American freedom struggle and its link to the contemporary black experience, we will have to remedy this imbalance.

Biases of Space, Place, and Geography

The standard account of the civil rights movement is as narrow and misleading with respect to the where of the struggle as the when. This account, as noted earlier, holds that the movement was for all intents and purposes a regional phenomenon, unfolding almost entirely in the states of the former Confederacy. And indeed, most of the iconic campaigns associated with the movement did occur there. That said, the sites of significant racial contention in this country are far more varied than the conventional account suggests. I want to call attention to three such sites that have been all but invisible in scholarship, each of which is critically important, in my view, to a full understanding of the African-American freedom struggle.

Racial Contention Outside the South

In the first section of this chapter, I noted the scant scholarship on civil rights activity outside of the South and called attention to Thomas Sugrue’s welcome book on what he terms “the forgotten struggle for civil rights in the North.” In his review of Sugrue’s book, Alan Wolfe (2008) underscores the importance of recovering this “forgotten” chapter in the history of the movement. As he writes, “Mention the civil rights movement and Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis spring to mind. Rarely do we recall Boston, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland. But there was a civil rights movement in the North … and it is impossible to understand race relations today without pondering what we can learn from it.” In truth, there are really two “forgotten” movements here. The first is the struggle for civil rights in the North between 1940–60. This spans the period from the landmark, but woefully understudied, “March on Washington Movement” in 1941 through the well-known, but also little researched, sympathy demonstrations that took place in northern cities in support of the southern lunch counter sit-ins in the spring of 1960. In between these two end dates, there were any number of forgotten local movements in countless northern locales protesting segregated schools, restrictive housing covenants, police practices, and segregated pools and beaches, among other discriminatory practices.

The second, only slightly less forgotten, northern movement is the one that developed after the major southern civil rights campaigns had occurred. This “movement” included the “urban disorders” of the late 1960s, but also King’s abortive 1966 open housing campaign in the Chicago suburbs (but see McKersie 2013 , the wrenching Ocean-Hill-Brownsville school controversy in Brooklyn in 1968, and CORE’s blockade of the Tri-Borough Bridge timed to snarl traffic and disrupt the opening of the 1964 New York World’s Fair). But more than any of these, at the time, well publicized events, the hallmark of this later movement was the rise and fall of countless local black groups vying for attention and influence in a fluid and dangerous time marked by riots, the decline of the traditional civil rights organizations, political assassinations, “law and order” repression, and the rhetorical excesses of proponents of black power and/or cultural nationalism. Relative to the heyday of the southern movement between 1960 and 1965, we know next to nothing about this later period of northern racial contention.

The Movement Within Institutions

Geography is only one of the ways we can characterize the locus of civil rights activism. Consequential episodes of racial contention have also occurred (and indeed, continue to occur) within a wide range of American institutions. For the most part, this “march through the institutions” took place after the mass movement phase of the struggle, as the major institutions of American society struggled with the specific implications of the “civil rights revolution” for them. That much is clear. Unfortunately, this institutional phase of the struggle has been the object of very little systematic scholarship. So, for example, while William Bowen and Derek Bok (1998) , have explored the long term effects—both societal and individual—that followed from the nearly forty-year commitment of elite colleges and universities to racial diversity in undergraduate admissions, there is precious little scholarship on the institutional debates and processes that led to the commitment in the first place. At the same time these universities were rethinking their admissions goals, they were also the sites of contentious curricular battles over the establishment of the first generation of Black or African American Studies programs. Systematic scholarship on the institutional struggles that spawned these programs is virtually non-existent.

Similarly, while Lauren Edelman (1992) has written insightfully about how employers have actively shaped the interpretation of civil rights law governing employment discrimination through the specific workplace practices they have put in place, to my knowledge, we have no good empirical accounts of this contested process at the firm level. The same could be said for the episodes of contention that have reduced discrimination in housing markets, professional sports, broadcasting, the military, and a host of other institutional realms.

The Movement in International Perspective

Finally, relative to the mountain of work that has been produced on the movement in the United States, we have only a trickle of scholarship that seeks to place the struggle in any kind of international context. There are two exceptions here. The first is the small, but growing body of work—already cited—that situates and partially accounts for the rise of the movement in relation to the Cold War. The second is the relatively modest, but rich body of comparative work that seeks to understand the American experience of race in relation to its formation and evolution in other countries such as Brazil ( Hanchard 1994 ; Marx 1998 ; Seidman 1994 ; Winant 1994 , 2001 ), South Africa ( Marx 1998 ; Seidman 1994 , 1999 ; Winant 2001 ), and Cuba ( Sawyer 2006 ).

In at least two other respects, however, the international perspective on the civil rights struggle is seriously underdeveloped. The first concerns the foreign influences on the ideas and strategic practices that informed the U.S. struggle. It is, of course, commonplace for scholars of the movement to note Martin Luther King’s debt to Gandhi and the important inspiration afforded civil rights activists here by anti-colonial struggles in Africa. Careful, systematic scholarship documenting these influences, however, is another matter. The only serious study of the fascinating and extensive history of contact between Indian pacifists and U.S. civil rights activists of which I am aware is Sudarshan Kapur’s 1992 book, Raising Up a Profit: The African-American Encounter with Gandhi . Similarly, Penny Von Eschen’s 1997 book, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937 – 1957 , stands out as the exemplary exception to the general neglect of the important civil rights/Africa connection.

Nor have scholars done any better job chronicling the singular impact that the African-American freedom struggle has exerted on other liberation struggles around the globe. During its civil rights heyday, the movement embodied an altogether conventional liberal, nineteenth-century notion of citizenship as that which is conferred by a sovereign nation-state. Initially black activists were merely petitioning the U.S. state for expanded rights as American citizens. By the late 1960s and ’70s, however, there were many within the movement who now rejected the legitimacy of American sovereignty, insisting that blacks—on the basis of shared racial identity—constituted a nation unto themselves. To say that such non-state based nationalist claims have become an important political force over the past thirty years is to state the obvious. And yet, the role of black nationalists in fashioning a basic template for articulating such claims has rarely been explored by scholars.

Miscellaneous Holes

While, to me, the most consequential silences in the study of the civil rights movement owe to the temporal and spatial/geographic limitations of the canonical account of the civil rights movement, there are a few other “holes” in the literature worth noting. In closing, I will touch on two.

White Resistance

I remain surprised by how little we know about white resistance to the civil rights movement, both in the South and elsewhere in the country. Of the major white supremacist groups only the Ku Klux Klan has come in for much study. And even this work has focused more on the zenith of Klan influence in the mid-1920s than the organization’s activities during the civil rights era ( McVeigh 2009 ; Chalmers 1987 ). And other than Neil McMillen’s 1971 book on the topic, we know next to nothing about the White Citizen Councils that sprang up in the wake of Brown v. Board to defend the southern way of life from the threat of the “second reconstruction.”

More important perhaps than the organizational face of white resistance are the community dynamics that sustained it. What was the range of southern white opinion on matters of race? Why did white moderates remain so resolutely silent during the heyday of the struggle? And when did their voices begin to compete with and ultimately drown out the more extreme racist views of the white supremacists? Sadly, no one has yet tried to answer these difficult but centrally important questions.

The Politics of Race

The final lacuna in the literature is the surprising lack of scholarship on what might be termed the institutional politics of race during the period in question. By this I mean research on the political battles—within the two parties, the White House, and especially Congress—that shaped the system’s response to the movement and led to this or that policy outcome. To be sure, scholars like Taylor Branch and David Garrow touch on these fights, but in general the volume of work on this topic pales in comparison to research on the movement itself. It is almost as if we credit the mass movement directly with the celebrated policy victories of the period. That the movement pressured presidents and congresses to act is undeniable, but how and why they acted owes to influences, interests, and personalities far beyond the movement. Alas, the institutional mediation of the struggle by politicians and policy makers remains largely unexplored. Among the exceptions to this generalization would be the books by Thomas and Mary Edsall (1991) , McAdam and Kloos (2014) , and Skrentny (2002) .

For all the work that has been done on the movement, then, there are no shortages of holes to be filled, silences to be addressed, and biases to be overcome. Indeed, the sheer volume of work on the movement is as much a threat to understanding as an aid. By constructing the movement as the peak period of mass activism between 1955 and 1968, the great bulk of scholarship to date has obscured the broader temporal and geographic continuities touched on here. If I could sketch a program of “revisionist” scholarship on the movement to remedy this, I would orient that work to:

Scholarship that explores the temporal continuities reflected in Hall’s (2005 , 1235) conception of the “‘long civil rights movement’ that took root in the liberal and radical milieu of the late 1930s, was intimately tied to the ‘rise and fall of the New Deal Order,’ accelerated during World War II … and in the 1960s and 1970s inspired [political and cultural] movements that ‘defy any narrative of collapse.’”

A dramatic broadening of the geographic focus of research on the civil rights struggle, from much more work on localized racial contention in the North in the 1940s, 1950s, and beyond, to scholarship on the complex, reciprocal influences between the movement and activists elsewhere in the world.

Much more attention to how the struggle has been waged and continues to be waged in a host of institutional settings, including schools, firms, and political institutions.

And finally, a significant increase in research on the dynamics of white resistance to the civil rights movement.

Let the conversation continue.

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Young, Andrew . 1996 . An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America . New York: HarperCollins.

Zinn, Howard . 1965 . SNCC, the New Abolitionists . Boston: Beacon Press.

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Civil Rights Movement (United States): Home

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• The Civil Rights Movement The Civil Rights Movement sought to win the American promise of liberty and equality during the twentieth century. From the early struggles of the 1940s to the crowning successes of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts that changed the legal status of African-Americans in the United States, the Civil Rights Movement firmly grounded its appeals for liberty and equality in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.
• Records of the FBI - Classification 44: Civil Rights Though this classification contains records predating 1924, it was established as "Civil Rights and Domestic Violence" in a January 1924 Hoover memorandum. The legislative bases for the investigations were the civil rights acts passed during the Reconstruction period, codified in Title 18, sections 241 and 242. These prohibit actions or conspiracies of two or more people to stop citizens in their free exercise of Federal rights secured by the Constitution and laws of the U.S. Section 242 is directed specifically towards law enforcement officers and state officials, "persons acting under the color of law," for the same offenses. Sections 243-245 of Title 18 and section 1973 of Title 42 are also now included in the classification; they derive from the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Civil Rights Act of 1968, and Voting Rights Act of 1975.
• Timeline: The Civil Rights Movement in America Complete timeline of the Civil Rights Movement in America.
• US Civil Rights Trail View an interactive Civil Rights Trail map and explore areas of interest.

African American Experience supports research and scholarship in the field of African American Studies with a full library of works analyzing the contributions and challenges of African Americans throughout history. This database includes more than 80 scholarly articles, 8,000 primary and secondary sources, and more than 1,000 biographies.

Learn more about The African American Experience using the resources below:

More Places to Search

Explore our History Research Guide for additional resources.  The Multicultural tab provides specific information on African American history.

Black Freedom Struggle in the United States is a unique database that covers aspects related to Black Freedom in the United States, including slavery, the abolitionist movement, Civil War, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and civil rights. You will find over 3,000 primary source documents focused on six different phases of African American freedom.

Learn more about Black Freedom Struggle in the United States using the resources below:

Primary Sources

View our Primary Sources tab on the History Research Guide for additional database options. 

At the River I Stand

Memphis, Spring 1968 marked the dramatic climax of the Civil Rights movement. AT THE RIVER I STAND skillfully reconstructs the two eventful months that transformed a strike by Memphis sanitation worker into a national conflagration, and disentangles the complex historical forces that came together with the inevitability of tragedy at the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Source: Kanopy

The Civil Rights Movement

The Supreme Court's decisions in the Brown case (1954) and the Montgomery bus boycott (1955-1956) inaugurated the activist phase of the civil rights movement. Disputes over busing and affirmative action clouded bitter political disagreements. The interracial civil rights coalition broke up in the face of militant Black Power.

Perspectives

At Canaan's Edge: American in the King Years, 1965-1968

These concluding years of the freedom era show King at the height of his powers even as his worldly prestige falls under withering attack. We witness non-violent advances for democracy in the face of growing factionalism and fear. We meet heroines and martyrs; enter a world battered by private doubts, public dreams, contagious inspiration, official harassment, and poisonous discord over the Vietnam War. The narrative begins with violence before the pivotal 1965 Selma march for the right to vote, a dangerous time. From landmark victory there, King's movement comes under threat from competing forces. Branch chronicles dramatic campaigns in Mississippi and Alabama, King's tormented alliance with Lyndon Johnson, his painful break with Stokey Carmichael over black power, and persecution by Hoover's FBI. Like PARTING THE WATERS and PILLAR OF FIRE, AT CANAAN'S EDGE is a magnificent achievement that brings the decades of the Civil Rights struggle alive and preserves the integrity of those who marched and died.

A More Beautiful and Terrible History

Praised by The New York Times; O, The Oprah Magazine; Bitch Magazine; Slate; Publishers Weekly; and more, this is "a bracing corrective to a national mythology" (New York Times) around the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement has become national legend, lauded by presidents from Reagan to Obama to Trump, as proof of the power of American democracy. This fable, featuring dreamy heroes and accidental heroines, has shuttered the movement firmly in the past, whitewashed the forces that stood in its way, and diminished its scope. And it is used perniciously in our own times to chastise present-day movements and obscure contemporary injustice. In A More Beautiful and Terrible History award-winning historian Jeanne Theoharis dissects this national myth-making, teasing apart the accepted stories to show them in a strikingly different light. We see Rosa Parks not simply as a bus lady but a lifelong criminal justice activist and radical; Martin Luther King, Jr. as not only challenging Southern sheriffs but Northern liberals, too; and Coretta Scott King not only as a "helpmate" but a lifelong economic justice and peace activist who pushed her husband's activism in these directions. Moving from "the histories we get" to "the histories we need," Theoharis challenges nine key aspects of the fable to reveal the diversity of people, especially women and young people, who led the movement; the work and disruption it took; the role of the media and "polite racism" in maintaining injustice; and the immense barriers and repression activists faced. Theoharis makes us reckon with the fact that far from being acceptable, passive or unified, the civil rights movement was unpopular, disruptive, and courageously persevering. Activists embraced an expansive vision of justice--which a majority of Americans opposed and which the federal government feared. By showing us the complex reality of the movement, the power of its organizing, and the beauty and scope of the vision, Theoharis proves that there was nothing natural or inevitable about the progress that occurred. A More Beautiful and Terrible History will change our historical frame, revealing the richness of our civil rights legacy, the uncomfortable mirror it holds to the nation, and the crucial work that remains to be done.

From Civil Rights to Human Rights

Martin Luther King, Jr., is widely celebrated as an American civil rights hero. Yet King's nonviolent opposition to racism, militarism, and economic injustice had deeper roots and more radical implications than is commonly appreciated, Thomas F. Jackson argues in this searching reinterpretation of King's public ministry. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, King was influenced by and in turn reshaped the political cultures of the black freedom movement and democratic left. His vision of unfettered human rights drew on the diverse tenets of the African American social gospel, socialism, left-New Deal liberalism, Gandhian philosophy, and Popular Front internationalism. King's early leadership reached beyond southern desegregation and voting rights. As the freedom movement of the 1950s and early 1960s confronted poverty and economic reprisals, King championed trade union rights, equal job opportunities, metropolitan integration, and full employment. When the civil rights and antipoverty policies of the Johnson administration failed to deliver on the movement's goals of economic freedom for all, King demanded that the federal government guarantee jobs, income, and local power for poor people. When the Vietnam war stalled domestic liberalism, King called on the nation to abandon imperialism and become a global force for multiracial democracy and economic justice. Drawing widely on published and unpublished archival sources, Jackson explains the contexts and meanings of King's increasingly open call for "a radical redistribution of political and economic power" in American cities, the nation, and the world. The mid-1960s ghetto uprisings were in fact revolts against unemployment, powerlessness, police violence, and institutionalized racism, King argued. His final dream, a Poor People's March on Washington, aimed to mobilize Americans across racial and class lines to reverse a national cycle of urban conflict, political backlash, and policy retrenchment. King's vision of economic democracy and international human rights remains a powerful inspiration for those committed to ending racism and poverty in our time.

Seventh-Day Adventists and the Civil Rights Movement

Seventh-day Adventists and the Civil Rights Movement is the first in-depth study of the denomination's participation in civil rights politics. It considers the extent to which the denomination's theology influenced how its members responded. This book explores why a brave few Adventists became social and political activists, and why a majority of the faithful eschewed the movement. Samuel G. London, Jr., provides a clear, yet critical understanding of the history and theology of the Seventh-day Adventist Church while highlighting the contributions of its members to political reform. Community awareness, the example of early Adventist pioneers, liberationist interpretations of the Bible, as well as various intellectual and theological justifications motivated the civil rights activities of some Adventists. For those who participated in the civil rights movement, these factors superseded the conservative ideology and theology that came to dominate the church after the passing of its founders. Covering the end of the 1800s through the 1970s, the book discusses how Christian fundamentalism, the curse of Ham, the philosophy of Booker T. Washington, pragmatism, the aversion to ecumenism and the Social Gospel, belief in the separation of church and state, and American individualism converged to impact Adventist sociopolitical thought.

Ripples of Hope: Great American Civil Rights Speeches

Including a never-before published speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., this is the first compilation of its kind, bringing together the most influential and important voices from two hundred years of America's struggle for civil rights, including essential speeches from leaders, both famous and obscure.

Freedom Facts and Firsts: 400 Years of the African American Civil Rights Experience

Spanning nearly 400 years from the early abolitionists to the present, this guide book profiles people, places, and events that have shaped the history of the black struggle for freedom.

The Race Beat

This is the story of how America awakened to its race problem, of how a nation that longed for unity after World War II came instead to see, hear, and learn about the shocking indignities and injustices of racial segregation in the South—and the brutality used to enforce it. It is the story of how the nation’s press, after decades of ignoring the problem, came to recognize the importance of the civil rights struggle and turn it into the most significant domestic news event of the twentieth century. Drawing on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews, veteran journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff go behind the headlines and datelines to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen—first black reporters, then liberal southern editors, then reporters and photographers from the national press and the broadcast media—revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings and propelled its citizens to act. We watch the black press move bravely into the front row of the confrontation, only to be attacked and kept away from the action. Following the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision striking down school segregation and the South’s mobilization against it, we see a growing number of white reporters venture South to cover the Emmett Till murder trial, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the integration of the University of Alabama. We witness some southern editors joining the call for massive resistance and working with segregationist organizations to thwart compliance. But we also see a handful of other southern editors write forcefully and daringly for obedience to federal mandates, signaling to the nation that moderate forces were prepared to push the region into the mainstream. The pace quickens in Little Rock, where reporters test the boundaries of journalistic integrity, then gain momentum as they cover shuttered schools in Virginia, sit-ins in North Carolina, mob-led riots in Mississippi, Freedom Ride buses being set afire, fire hoses and dogs in Birmingham, and long, tense marches through the rural South. For many journalists, the conditions they found, the fear they felt, and the violence they saw were transforming. Their growing disgust matched the mounting countrywide outrage asThe New York Times,Newsweek, NBC News, and other major news organizations, many of them headed by southerners, turned a regional story into a national drama. Meticulously researched and vividly rendered,The Race Beatis an unprecedented account of one of the most volatile periods in our nation’s history, as told by those who covered it.

Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights era

Pure Fire is a history of self-defense as it was debated and practiced during the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. Moving beyond the realm of organized protests and demonstrations, Christopher B. Strain reframes self-defense as a daily concern for many African Americans as they faced the continual menace of white aggression. In such circumstances, deciding to defend oneself and one's family was to assert a long-denied right and, consequently, to adopt a liberating new attitude. To grasp the subtleties of this activist approach to self-defense in the struggle for black equality, Strain says we must break down the dichotomies of the movement constructed by journalists, scholars, and even activists: pre-1965 versus post-1965 eras, nonviolence versus violence, integration versus segregation, Martin Luther King Jr. versus Malcolm X. These and other oversimplifications have led to a blurring of distinctions between the violence of racial animosity and the necessary force of self-defense and to the misinterpretation of nonviolence as passivity. Pure Fire looks anew at familiar figures like Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and Huey Newton and at such events and issues as gun ownership, the Watts riot of 1965 in Los Angeles, and the rise of the Black Panther Party. It also profiles Robert F. Williams of North Carolina, Charles Sims of the Louisiana-based Deacons for Defense and Justice, and other outspoken black advocates of armed self-defense. This provocative new study reveals how self-defense underpinned notions of personhood, black advancement, citizenship, and ""Americanness,"" holding deep implications for civil rights, civil liberties, and human rights.

Eyes on the Prize

Produced by Blackside, EYES ON THE PRIZE tells the definitive story of the civil rights era from the point of view of the ordinary men and women whose extraordinary actions launched a movement that changed the fabric of American life, and embodied a struggle whose reverberations continue to be felt today. Winner of numerous Emmy Awards, a George Foster Peabody Award, an International Documentary Award, and a Television Critics Association Award, Eyes on the Prize is the most critically acclaimed documentary on civil rights in America.

Watch on Kanopy>>

Civil Rights and the 1950s: Crash Course US History

In which John Green teaches you about the early days of the Civil Rights movement. By way of providing context for this, John also talks a bit about wider America in the 1950s. The 1950s are a deeply nostalgic period for many Americans, but there is more than a little idealizing going on here. The 1950s were a time of economic expansion, new technologies, and a growing middle class. America was becoming a suburban nation thanks to cookie-cutter housing developments like the Levittowns. While the white working class saw their wages and status improve, the proverbial rising tide wasn't lifting all proverbial ships. A lot of people were excluded from the prosperity of the 1950s. Segregation in housing and education made for some serious inequality for African Americans. As a result, the Civil Rights movement was born. John will talk about the early careers of Martin Luther King, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, and even Earl Warren. He'll teach you about Brown v Board of Education, and the lesser known Mendez vs Westminster, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and all kinds of other stuff.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S64zRnnn4Po

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Members of the “Washington Freedom Riders Committee,” en route to Washington, D.C., hang signs from bus windows to protest segregation, New York, 1961. Copyprint. New York World-Telegram and Sun Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. Digital ID # cph 3c25958

The Relocation of Japanese-Americans, 1942-1946. Crowd behind barbed wire fence at the Santa Anita Assembly Center in California, wave to friends on train departing for various relocation centers located throughout the United States, 1942. Photograph by Julian F. Fowlkes. Copyprint. U.S. Signal Corps, Wartime Civil Control Administration, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (3) Digital ID# cph 3b07599

One of the thousands of marchers who participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, in Washington, DC.  Source:  National Archives, Records of the U.S. Information Agency; Link: http://www.digitalvaults.org/record/1482.html?print=1

President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 while Dr. King and others look on. Photo from the Congress on Racial Equality's website: http://www.core-online.org/History/voting_rights.htm

Brown v. Board of Education, 1954. George E.C. Hayes, Thurgood Marshall, and James M. Nabrit, following Supreme Court decision ending segregation. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (9) Reproduction # LC-USZ62-111236 (b&w film copy neg.)

Community and human rights activist, Harvey Milk, was the first openly gay person elected to public office in 1977.

A telephone switchboard during World War II.  Source: National Archives, Records of the Women’s Bureau; Link:  http://www.digitalvaults.org/record/2786.html?print=1

Father James Groppi with protestors, at Wisconsin State Capital during welfare protests.  Wisconsin Historical Society, Father Groppi and Protestors, 4934. Viewed online at http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Content.aspx?dsNav=N:4294963828-4294955414&dsRecordDetails=R:IM4934

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Global Nonviolent Action Database

Media coverage of the Civil Rights Era

Naacp (proquest history vault), finding aids and microfilm collections.

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Archives Unbound   

Digital collections of historical material on many topics. Includes manuscripts, printed books and periodicals, and government documents. Material comes from the U.S. National Archives, the U.K. National Archives, and many other libraries and archives.  Click on the titles below to read more about individual collections. 

The CRDL features a collection of unedited news film from the WSB (Atlanta) and WALB (Albany, Ga.) television archives held by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia Libraries .

The Civil Rights History Project.   Survey of Collections and Repositories

The Civil Rights History Project Act was created by an act of Congress in 2009, sponsored in the U.S. House of Representatives by Representative Carolyn McCarthy (NY) and co-sponsored by Representatives Sanford D. Bishop (GA), William Lacy Clay (MO), John Lewis (GA) and Mike Quigley (IL). The law directs the Library of Congress (LOC) and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) to conduct a survey of existing oral history collections with relevance to the Civil Rights Movement (CRM), and to record new interviews with people who participated in the Movement.   There are 1308 collections are available in the database.

Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive

“ Mississippi was a focal point in the struggle for civil rights in America, and Hattiesburg, home of The University of Southern Mississippi, had the largest and most successful Freedom Summer project in 1964. The civil rights materials collected at the University document a local history with truly national significance. The Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive includes a selection of digitized photographs, letters, diaries, and other documents. Oral history transcripts are also available, as well as finding aids for manuscript collections.”

Civil Rights Movement and the Federal Government: Records of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, School Desegregation in the South, 1965-1966 .

This collection brings together a large number of documents on the implementation of "freedom of choice" school desegregation plans in the South and bordering states.

Federal records pertaining to Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) ,  compiled by Walter B. Hill, Jr. [and] Trichita M. Chestnut. 

"The database, which continues to grow, already includes 50 civil rights cases.   You'll find iconic campaigns like the Montgomery bus boycott and some that are less known, like the 1958-59 sit-ins in Kansas City, MO and the 1960 St. Paul's College student boycott of a segregated movie theater in Virginia. The database is sponsored by Swarthmore College with support from Tufts and Georgetown Universities."

Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Movement, 1854-1985

Life Magazine

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow

Television News of the Civil Rights Era,1950-1970

The NAACP Papers collection consists of 6 modules. The NAACP Papers collections contains internal memos, legal briefings, and direct action summaries from national, legal, and branch offices throughout the country. It charts the NAACP's work and delivers a first-hand view into crucial issues. With a timeline that runs from 1909 to 1972, the NAACP Papers document the realities of segregation in the early 20th century to the triumphs of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and beyond.The Black Freedom Struggle in the 20th Century consists of four modules: two modules of Federal Government Records, and two modules of Organizational Records and Personal Papers, offering unique documentation and a variety of perspectives on the 20th century fight for freedom. Major collections in these modules include Civil Rights records from the Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush presidencies; the Martin Luther King FBI File and FBI Files on locations of major civil rights demonstrations like Montgomery and Selma, Alabama or St. Augustine, Florida; and the records of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

NAACP Papers: Board of Directors, Annual Conferences, Major Speeches, and National Staff Files  

S earch this Module    Browse Collections

NAACP Papers: Branch Department, Branch Files, and Youth Department Files  

Search this Module    Browse Collections

NAACP Papers: Special Subjects   Search this Module    Browse Collections

NAACP Papers: The NAACP's Major Campaigns--Education, Voting, Housing, Employment, Armed Forces  

NAACP Papers: The NAACP's Major Campaigns--Legal Department Files   Search this Module    Browse Collections

NAACP Papers: The NAACP's Major Campaigns--Scottsboro, Anti-Lynching, Criminal Justice, Peonage, Labor,

and Segregation and Discrimination Complaints and Responses 

Printed guides to accompany microfilm sets are housed in Microform Services on A-floor in Firestone Library.

American Civil Liberties Union Archives, 1917-1950

MC001  Seeley G. Mudd Library           Finding Aid  

Consists of the records of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), documenting its activities in protecting individual rights under the leadership of Roger Baldwin. Its primary aims have been the defense of free speech and press, separation of church and state, free exercise of religion, due process of law, equal protection of the law, and privacy rights of all citizens. The collection contains primarily correspondence and clippings. Also included are the records of the ACLU’s predecessor organization, the National Civil Liberties Bureau (1917-1920) of the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM) and some material documenting a 1912 Industrial Workers of the World free speech trial.

American Civil Liberties Union Archives, 1950-1995

MC001 Seeley G. Mudd Library           Finding Aid  

Documents the activities of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in protecting individual rights between 1950 and 1995. The collection contains correspondence, clippings, court documents, memoranda, printed matter, minutes, reports, briefs, legal files, exhibit materials, and audio-visual materials. Also included are materials from ACLU affiliate organizations, the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee and national office legal department records (1945-1960).

Civil Rights and Social Activism in the South, Series 1-3

ReCap Microfilm 12030            Printed guide (FilmB) E185.6.C585 2007          104 reels

Online guide  to Series 1, Parts 1-2            Online guide  to Series 2

Series 1, Civil rights and social activism in Alabama. Part 1, The John L. LeFlore papers, 1926-1976 (15 reels); Part 2: Records of the Non-Partisan Voters League, 1956-1987 (29 reels) -- Series 2, The Legal Battle for Civil Rights in Alabama. Part 1, Vernon Z. Crawford reords, 1958-1978 (6 reels); Part 2: Selctions from the Blacksher, Menefee & Stein records (37 reels) -- Series 3: James A. Dombrowski and the Southern Conference Educational Fund (17 reels).

Civil Rights During the Bush administration: subject file of the White House Office of Records Management, 1989-1993

ReCap Microfilm 12460           Guide  (FilmB) E185.615 .B87 2008     23 reels

"Microfilmed from the holdings of the George Bush Presidential Library, College Station, Texas." “The documents reproduced in this publication are records of the Bush Administration, 1989-1993, in the custody of the National Archives."

Civil rights during the Carter administration, 1977-1981

ReCap Microfilm 12451           G uide  (FilmB) E185.615 .C3518 2006 

Part I, Sections A-D  

Reproduces document files collected by the office of Louis E. Martin, special assistant to the president, whose primary focus was on civil rights issues and minority affairs. Documents include internal White House memoranda, correspondence between White House and federal agency officials, government reports, invitation lists for major events, correspondence from individuals and organizations, and newspaper articles and editorials.

Civil Rights During the Eisenhower Administration

ReCap Microfilm 12450           G uide  (FilmB) E185.61.C483 2006          14 reels

Part 1. White House central files.  Series A, School desegregation.

Civil Rights During the Kennedy Administration, 1961-1963

ReCap Microfilm 05859            Guide  (FilmB) JC599.U5 C59                     47 reels

A collection from the holdings of the John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts. Part 1. The White House Central Files and Staff Files and the President’s office Files.  Part 2. The Papers of Burke Marshall, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights.

Civil Rights During the Johnson Administration, 1963-1969.

ReCap Microfilm 05445            G uide  (FilmB) JK1717.L38          69 reels

Part 1. White House Central Files.  Part 2. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Administrative History.  Part 3. Oral Histories.  Part 4. Records of the White House Conference on Civil Rights, 1965-1966.  Part 5. Records of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission).

Civil Rights During the Nixon Administration, 1969-1974 . 

ReCap Microfilm 09172             G uide  (FilmB) E185.615. C587          46 reels

Part 1. White House Central Files.

Detroit Urban League Papers, 1916-1950, at the University of Michigan

ReCap Microfilm 09607                      Printed guide (FilmB) F574.D49 N454          35 reels 

Fannie Lou Hamer  Papers, 1966-1978

ReCap Microfilm 11839                        Printed guide (Film B) E185.97.H35 A3 2005a          17 reels

Noted civil rights activist and co-chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. 

Franklin D. Roosevelt and Race Relations

ReCap ReCap Microfilm 12390                      Printed guide: (FilmB) E806 .F6917 2008          18 reels

This is a collection of essential materials for the study of the early development of the Civil Rights Movement--concerned with the issues of lynching, segregation, race riots, and employment discrimination.

Papers of the Civil Rights Congress

ReCap Microfilm 11925                      Printed guide (FilmB) E185.61.C59 1988          125 reels

Part 1. Case Files.  Part 2. Files of William Patterson and the National Office.  Part 3. Publications. Part 4. Communist Party USA files.  Part 5. Citizens Emergency Defense Conference.

“The Civil Rights Congress (CRC) was established in 1946, and fought for the protection of the civil rights and liberties of African Americans and suspected communists primarily through litigation, political agitation, and the mobilization of public sentiment.  African American lawyer and Communist leader William Patterson served as executive secretary of the organization throughout its existence.”

Papers of the Congress of Racial Equality, 1941-1967

ReCap Microfilm 04276            Printed guide (FilmB) Z1361.N39 M46 1980     49 reels

Founded in 1942 by a group of interracial pacifists, CORE was one of the most important national organizations of the African American freedom movement.

Papers of the Congress of Racial Equality: Addendum, 1944-1968

ReCap Microfilm 04562                      Printed Guide (FilmB) E185.61.P36

Papers of the NAACP

ReCap Microfilm 05354                       G uide  (FilmB) Z1361.N39 G84          1001+ reels

Organization records of America’s oldest and largest civil rights organization.

President Truman’s Commission on Civil Rights

ReCap Microfilm 05573                       G uide  (FilmB) E813.J84           10 reels

Records of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1954-1970

Microfilm 10096                  Printed guide (FilmB) E185.61.S687      61 reels

pt. 1. Records of the President’s office (21 reels) -- pt. 2. Records of the Executive Director and Treasurer (22 reels) -- pt. 3. Records of the Public Relations Dept. (10 reels) -- pt. 4. Records of the Program Dept. (29 reels).

Bayard Rustin Papers 

ReCap Microfilm 11662                Printed guide (Film B) E185.97.R93 B392    23 reels

Reproduces the papers of noted civil rights leader and political activist Bayard Rustin.  The originals are in the A. Philip Randolph Institute, New York N.Y., which were transferred from the Institute to the Library of Congress.

The Sixities: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives, 1960-1974  (Digital)

Contains letters, diaries, oral histories, posters, pamphlets, and audio and video materials documenting the key events, trends, and movements in 1960s America.

Southern Civil Rights Litigation Records for the 1960s

ReCap Microfilm 05448       Printed guide (FilmB) KF4756.A1 G84 or (SF) KF4756.A1 G84     170 reels

Contains the records of major civil rights cases from the archives of the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP, the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Lawyers Constitution Defense Committee, and individual attorneys.

William H. Hastie Papers.  Part 2. Civil Rights, Organizational, and Private Activities

ReCap Microfilm 11824                        Printed guide (FilmB) KF373.H38A25          42 reels

Attorney William Henry Hastie was the first African American appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit by President Truman in 1949.  Part 2 of the collection documents his activities as a civil rights lawyer, educator, and judge.  Part I, covering his opinions are available in the Federal Reporter in print, LexisNexis and Westlaw (online in both the academic and law school versions).

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The African American Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968): Home

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A Timeline of Major Events

1954 - The Supreme Court rules against the "Separate but Equal" doctrine in Brown v. Board of Education .

1955 - President Eisenhower signs Executive Order 10590, creating a committee to enforce nondiscrimination in Federal Employment.

1955 - Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

1957 - President Eisenhower federalizes the National Guard and orders US Army troops to escort the Little Rock Nine to school.

1963 - 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama is bombed, killing four girls.

1963 - The March on Washington.

1964 - Mississippi Freedom Summer, college students from across the country register African American voters.

1965 - March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama results in attacks on peaceful marchers by State Troopers.

1965 - Voting Rights Act of 1965 signed into law.

1968 - Civil Rights Act of 1968 is signed into law.

Selma, Alabama (1965)

Image credit: Louisiana Weekly Feb. 27, 2012

This research guide will introduce you to sources at the Lehman College Lief Library that will help you research topics related to the American Civil Rights Movement from 1954-1968.

Where to begin?

Secondary materials, such as reference books and articles are a good place to begin your research process. Gaining a general understanding of a topic will be helpful before moving on to more specialized  research. 

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For more details on required and elective courses for African American Studies Majors see the  Lehman College African American Studies Department Page .

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• Africana Studies by Janet Munch Last Updated Jan 9, 2024 16 views this year
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Research Our Records

Civil Rights

• Civil Liberties Cases in NARA's Southeast Region, Atlanta  
• Civil Rights Records available in electronic format  
• Martin Luther King Jr. and the "I Have a Dream Speech" , display from the New York Region  
• The Civil Rights Act of 1964  
• An Act of Courage, The Arrest Records of Rosa Parks  
• Court Documents Related to Martin Luther King, Jr., and Memphis Sanitation Workers  
• African Americans and the American Labor Movement , Prologue article  
• An Archival Odyssey: The Search for Jackie Robinson , Prologue article  
• A Letter from Jackie Robinson: Civil Rights Advocate  
• Documenting the Struggle for Racial Equality in the Decade of the Sixties , Prologue article  
• From Sophie's Alley to the White House: Rediscovering the Visions of Pioneering Black Government Photographers , Prologue article  
• LBJ Fights the White Backlash: The Racial Politics of the 1964 Presidential Campaign , Prologue article  
• Race Relations in the United States and American Cultural and Informational Programs in Ghana, 1957-1966 , Prologue article  
• Civil Rights Act , in Our Documents  
• Voting Rights Act , in Our Documents  
• See more Civil Rights links to resources, compiled by the Archives librarians  

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Civil Rights Movement Timeline

By: History.com Editors

Updated: February 27, 2024 | Original: December 4, 2017

The civil rights movement was an organized effort by Black Americans to end racial discrimination and gain equal rights under the law. It began in the late 1940s and ended in the late 1960s. Although tumultuous at times, the movement was mostly nonviolent and resulted in laws to protect every American’s constitutional rights, regardless of color, race, sex or national origin.

July 26, 1948: President Harry Truman issues Executive Order 9981 to end segregation in the Armed Services.

May 17, 1954:  Brown v. Board of Education , a consolidation of five cases into one, is decided by the Supreme Court , effectively ending racial segregation in public schools. Many schools, however, remained segregated.

August 28, 1955: Emmett Till, a 14-year-old from Chicago is brutally murdered in Mississippi for allegedly flirting with a white woman. His murderers are acquitted, and the case bring international attention to the civil rights movement after Jet magazine publishes a photo of Till’s beaten body at his open-casket funeral.

December 1, 1955:  Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Her defiant stance prompts a year-long Montgomery bus boycott .

January 10-11, 1957: Sixty Black pastors and civil rights leaders from several southern states—including Martin Luther King Jr. —meet in Atlanta, Georgia to coordinate nonviolent protests against racial discrimination and segregation.

September 4, 1957: Nine Black students known as the “ Little Rock Nine ” are blocked from integrating into Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas . President Dwight D. Eisenhower eventually sends federal troops to escort the students, however, they continue to be harassed.

September 9, 1957: Eisenhower signs the Civil Rights Act of 1957 into law to help protect voter rights. The law allows federal prosecution of those who suppress another’s right to vote.

February 1, 1960: Four African American college students in Greensboro, North Carolina refuse to leave a Woolworth’s “whites only” lunch counter without being served. The Greensboro Four—Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil—were inspired by the nonviolent protest of Gandhi . The Greensboro Sit-In , as it came to be called, sparks similar “sit-ins” throughout the city and in other states.

November 14, 1960: Six-year-old Ruby Bridges is escorted by four armed federal marshals as she becomes the first student to integrate William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. Her actions inspired Norman Rockwell’s painting The Problem We All Live With (1964).

1961: Throughout 1961, Black and white activists, known as freedom riders, took bus trips through the American South to protest segregated bus terminals and attempted to use “whites-only” restrooms and lunch counters. The Freedom Rides were marked by horrific violence from white protestors, they drew international attention to their cause.

May 2, 1963: More than 1,000 Black school children march through Birmingham, Alabama in a demonstration against segregation . The goal of the non-violent demonstration, which became known as the " Children’s Crusade ," was to provoke the city’s leaders to desegregate. Although the police were mostly restrained the first day, that did not continue. Law enforcement brought out water hoses and police dogs. Journalists documented the young demonstrators getting arrested and hosed down by the Birmingham police, causing national outrage. Eventually an agreement was made to desegregate lunch counters, businesses and restrooms and improve hiring opportunities for Black people in Birmingham.

June 11, 1963: Governor George C. Wallace stands in a doorway at the University of Alabama to block two Black students from registering. The standoff continues until President John F. Kennedy sends the National Guard to the campus.

August 28, 1963: Approximately 250,000 people take part in The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Martin Luther King gives his “I Have A Dream” speech as the closing address in front of the Lincoln Memorial, stating, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’”

September 15, 1963: A bomb at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham , Alabama kills four young girls and injures several other people prior to Sunday services. The bombing fuels angry protests.

July 2, 1964: President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, preventing employment discrimination due to race, color, sex, religion or national origin. Title VII of the Act establishes the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to help prevent workplace discrimination.

February 21, 1965: Black religious leader Malcolm X is assassinated during a rally by members of the Nation of Islam.

March 7, 1965: Bloody Sunday. In the Selma to Montgomery March , around 600 civil rights marchers walk to Selma, Alabama to Montgomery—the state’s capital—in protest of Black voter suppression. Local police block and brutally attack them. After successfully fighting in court for their right to march, Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders lead two more marches and finally reach Montgomery on March 25.

August 6, 1965: President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to prevent the use of literacy tests as a voting requirement. It also allowed federal examiners to review voter qualifications and federal observers to monitor polling places.

April 4, 1968:  Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated on the balcony of his hotel room in Memphis, Tennessee. James Earl Ray is convicted of the murder in 1969.

April 11, 1968: President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968, also known as the Fair Housing Act , providing equal housing opportunity regardless of race, religion or national origin.

Executive Order 9981. Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum. Civil Rights Act of 1957. Civil Rights Digital Library. Governor George C. Wallace’s School House Door Speech. Alabama Department of Archives and History . Greensboro, NC, Students Sit-In for US Civil Rights, 1960. Swarthmore College Global Nonviolent Action Database. Historical Highlights. The 24th Amendment. History, Art & Archives United States House of Representatives. History—Brown v. Board of Education Re-enactment. United States Courts. History of Federal Voting Rights Laws. The United States Department of Justice. “I Have a Dream,” Address Delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute Stanford. Oldest and Boldest. NAACP. SCLC History. Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Selma to Montgomery March: National Historic Trail and All-American Road. National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. National Archives.

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Civil Rights Movements

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Finding Primary Sources about Civil Rights Movements

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By Leffler, Warren K., photographer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

General Primary Source Collections

• UC San Diego Digital Collection (View by Collection) View the UC San Diego Digital Collections by collection, including Chinese Cultural Revolution Posters, the Herman Baca Collection, Tell Us How UC It: History of Student Activism Timeline, etc.
• NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) is a scholarly organization devoted to forging links between the material archive of the nineteenth century and the digital research environment of the twenty-first.
• Brown University Archives and Manuscript Collections Online The manuscripts and archives of Brown University are a rich and diverse resource for students, faculty, and other researchers from a variety of disciplines. The collections are particularly strong in the following areas: American literature (especially poetry and drama), American political and diplomatic history, Rhode Island history, women's studies, history of education, and history of science.
• Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library: Digital Collections (Yale Universlty) Search for photographs, textual documents, illuminated manuscripts, maps, works of art, and books from the Beinecke's collections. Some materials in this database may be protected by U.S. or international copyright laws or by privacy and publicity rights. Be sure to use the pull-down menu to view all the available collections.
• Internet Archive The Internet Archive was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format.

Collections that Span Multiple Civil Rights Movement

• The '60s Center-University of Virginia Sixties Project: Primary Document Archive has several good links to primary source archives related to 1960’s civil rights movements, like the Black Panther Party, National Indian Youth Council, and the Young Lords Party.
• Decolonization Resource Collection: the Americas The Teaching Decolonization Resource Collection provides a range of materials to support the study of decolonization in the classroom. This diverse collection of resources is, in part, an outgrowth of the National History Center's decade-long International Decolonization Seminar. Primary and secondary sources are organized by region and theme, this collection is about movements in the Americas.
• Crowded Page (University of Nebraska-Lincoln & Lehigh University) The Crowded Page is an effort to test a theory: can digital technology give scholars a better understanding of the intricate network of relationships that bring works of art and literature into being? Can data mining and visualization tools reveal what might not be readily apparent through traditional methods of research? The datasets right now are focused on two discrete creative communities: the group located around Charles Pfaff's beer cellar in mid-nineteenth-century New York City; and the Greenwich Village "Bohemians" of the 1910s.
• Documenting the American South Documenting the American South (DocSouth), a digital publishing initiative sponsored by the University Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, provides access to digitized primary materials that offer Southern perspectives on American history and culture.
• Early Americas Digital Archive (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities) The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) is a collection of electronic texts and links to texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820. Open to the public for research and teaching purposes, EADA is published and supported by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) under the general editorship of Professor Ralph Bauer, at the University of Maryland at College Park. Intended as a long-term and inter-disciplinary project in progress committed to exploring the intersections between traditional humanities research and digital technologies, it invites scholars from all disciplines to submit their editions of early American texts for publication on this site.
• Witness to the Early American Experience The digital images of historical documents in this archive preserve the words of hundreds of eyewitnesses to the American Revolution in and around New York City. The letters, newspapers, broadsides, legal records, and maps presented here record events from the early years of the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam through the British occupation of the city during the Revolution. Here you can explore the history of New York through the words of those who lived it.
• Making of America (Cornell University) The Cornell University Library Making of America Collection is a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology. This site provides access to 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints.
• Modernist Journals Project The MJP is a multi-faceted project that aims to be a major resource for the study of modernism and its rise in the English-speaking world, with periodical literature as its central concern. The historical scope of the project has a chronological range of 1890 to 1922 (though the earliest journals that currently appear on the site date from 1896 and 1904), and a geographical range that extends to wherever English language periodicals were published.
• Text Creation Partnership (TCP) TCP provides access to subsets of the texts contained in three large historical text collections: Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans. Texts in the TCP subsets have been enhanced by additional textual mark-up to enable searching options more sophisticated than what is possible in the original databases.
• National Park Service: Civil Rights Movement Archive The Civil Rights Movement Archive is a website dedicated to telling the history of the movement from the perspective of those who were there. For many years, the name of the website was "Civil Rights Movement Veterans." The name was changed in 2019 to "Civil Rights Movement Archive" to reflect its growing importance as a repository of up from below and inside-out history as seen and interpreted by thse who were on the front lines of the movement. The Civil Rights Movement Archive provides a history of the movement through photographs, digitized versions of original movement documents, personal stories and histories, narratives and interviews, as well as memorials and tributes to those who have passed on. The site also includes frequently asked questions (FAQs), poetry, a speakers list, veteran contact information, and an extensive movement-related bibliography and list of web links.
• National Archives: Civil Rights Primary Sources and Collections Items and collections related to civil rights movements, including arrest records of Rosa Parks, court documents related to Martin Luther King Jr., and others.
• Civil Rights Digital Library: Documenting America's Struggle for Racial Equality The struggle for racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s is among the most far-reaching social movements in the nation's history, and it represents a crucial step in the evolution of American democracy. The Civil Rights Digital Library promotes an enhanced understanding of the Movement by helping users discover primary sources and other educational materials from libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters, and others on a national scale. The CRDL features a collection of unedited news film from the WSB (Atlanta) and WALB (Albany, Ga.) television archives held by the Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia Libraries. The CRDL provides educator resources and contextual materials, including Freedom on Film, relating instructive stories and discussion questions from the Civil Rights Movement in Georgia, and the New Georgia Encyclopedia, delivering engaging online articles and multimedia.

Collections pertaining to a Specific Topic/Movement/Person

• Washington Prison History Project The Washington Prison History Project is a multimedia effort to document the history of prisoner activism and policy in our state. The site features a robust collection of prisoner-produced newspapers from the late 20th century; oral histories and testimonials about the Washington state prison system; research on local histories of punishment; and a text-adventure computer game designed inside a maximum security prison.
• Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Collective is a group of researchers, educators, students, archivists and technologists dedicated to preserving imperiled Chicanx and Latinx histories of the long Civil Rights Era. Started by Professor Maria Cotera and filmmaker Linda Garcia Merchant in 2009, CPMR has traveled to over one dozen states to collect hundreds of hours of oral histories with notable Chicanas, Latinas, and allies. The project has also scanned personal archives for preservation and access.
• The Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project-The University of Washington This multi-media web site brings the vital history of Seattle's civil rights movements to life with scores of video oral histories, hundreds of rare photographs, documents, movement histories, and personal biographies, more than 300 pages in all. Based at the University of Washington, the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project is a collaboration between community groups and UW faculty and students.
• African American Women Writers of the 19th Century (NYPL) African American Women Writers of the 19th Century is a digital collection of some 52 published works by 19th-century black women writers. A part of the Digital Schomburg, this collection provides access to the thought, perspectives and creative abilities of black women as captured in books and pamphlets published prior to 1920.
• Charles Chestnutt Digital Archive This site offers an extensive collection of works by Chesnutt, including novels, short stories, essays, reviews, and poems. In addition to electronic versions of those works by Chesnutt that are readily available in print, our collection includes hard-to-find stories, reviews, essays, and poems, (including one transcribed from a manuscript in the Chesnutt collection at Fisk University). Many of the texts have been scanned directly from original print periodical versions. The site also includes a deep collection of reviews by others of Chesnutt's works, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources.
• Digital Thoreau Digital Thoreau is a resource and a community dedicated to promoting the deliberate reading of Thoreau's works in new ways, ways that take advantage of technology to illuminate Thoreau's creative process and facilitate thoughtful conversation about his words and ideas.
• Women's Travel Diaries (Duke University) The diaries in this digital collection were written by British and American women who documented their travels to places around the globe, including India, the West Indies, countries in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as around the United States.
• Wright American Fiction 1851-1875 (Indiana University) American fiction was still in its infancy in the years 1851-1875, but this period saw publication of works by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, and Herman Melville. Many of these authors, especially Twain, Harte and Howells, had just begun their writing careers during this period and went on to write their best known work later. However, most of the authors contained in the bibliography are little known.
• Mark Twain Project (University of California) Mark Twain Project Online applies innovative technology to more than four decades' worth of archival research by expert editors at the Mark Twain Project. It offers unfettered, intuitive access to reliable texts, accurate and exhaustive notes, and the most recently discovered letters and documents.
• Melville Electronic Library The Herman Melville Electronic Library (MEL) is an in-progress project that aims to be an online center for Melville studies. The "Editions" section currently includes digitized versions of the first British and American editions of Melville's Moby-Dick and Billy Budd.
• Radical Scatters: Emily Dickinson's Late Fragments and Related Texts, 1870-1886 Radical Scatters, developed by Marta Werner and hosted at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is a collection of digitized facsimiles and transcripts of over one hundred fragmentary texts composed by Emily Dickinson between 1870 and 1886. Documents can be searched and browsed in a variety of ways. The site also includes critical introductions to the fragments.
• The Valley of the Shadow (University of Virginia) The Valley of the Shadow is a digital archive of primary sources that document the lives of people in Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania, during the era of the American Civil War. Here you may explore thousands of original documents that allow you to see what life was like during the Civil War for the men and women of Augusta and Franklin.
• The Vault at Pfaff's (Lehigh University) Charles Pfaff's beer cellar in lower Manhattan was a magnet for some of the most unconventional and creative individuals of nineteenth-century New York City, including Walt Whitman, poet and actress Adah Isaacs Menken, journalist and social critic Henry Clapp, playwright John Brougham, and artist Elihu Vedder. The Vault at Pfaff's is bringing together in one place the poetry, drama, art, fiction, and social commentary that the Pfaff's bohemians produced, including The New York Saturday Press, the weekly periodical that served as the group's literary organ during this period.
• Walt Whitman Archive The Walt Whitman Archive is an electronic research and teaching tool that sets out to make Whitman's vast work, for the first time, easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers. Whitman, America's most influential poet and one of the four or five most innovative and significant writers in United States history, is the most challenging of all American authors in terms of the textual difficulties his work presents.
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Teaching Innovations

Teaching the History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement

Peter B. Levy | Oct 1, 1991

A generation of students born after the civil rights revolution is now at the doorsteps of America's colleges and universities. While most of them have only a peripheral knowledge or understanding of the momentous events of the 1950s and 1960s, they have shown considerable interest in learning more about the era. But how well prepared are we as professionals to meet this challenge? Are history departments offering courses on the civil rights movement and integrating relevant material into their traditional curriculum? Are there certain pitfalls and opportunities that we should be aware of? What teaching strategies and books have our colleagues found fruitful for use in undergraduate and graduate courses? What analytical questions should we be raising and what debates we should be encouraging?

This essay seeks to provide at least partial answers to these questions and others. It is based on two sources: a survey of over 150 colleges and universities and a panel discussion I chaired on "Teaching the History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement," held at the 1989 Organization of American Historians' meeting in St. Louis. Participants included Cheryl Greenberg, Trinity College; Martha Prescod Norman, University of Michigan and Wayne State University; and David J. Garrow, City University of New York.

In the fall of 1988 I sent questionnaires to the history departments of 165 educational institutions nationwide, ranging from small four-year private liberal arts colleges to large public universities. To my delight, 97 of them responded, which is a fairly high rate of return. Approximately one-third of the departments polled offer a course on the history of the civil rights movement, or a similar class such as modern race relations, at least on an irregular basis. Other departments, especially sociology, political science, and Afro-American (or black) studies, also offer courses on the civil rights movement. Regionally, southern schools (37 percent) are the most likely to offer such a course, western colleges (6 percent) the least likely, with midwestern (30 percent) and eastern colleges (27 percent) somewhere in between. Neither the size of the school nor its type—public, private, four-year or more—is a significant determinant. (A number of black colleges offer a course on the civil rights movement, but not all of those which were surveyed do so.)

The civil rights movement receives considerable attention in several other history courses that are offered on a regular basis, namely the U.S. history survey, Afro-American history, and recent America courses. In the latter two, my study revealed that teachers spend at least as much time, if not more, on the modern civil rights movement as they do on other major historical themes. On average, in one-semester courses on recent America, teachers spend 3.7 class hours on the civil rights movement, about the same amount of time they spend on the Vietnam War. In comparison, teachers spend less then 2 class hours on McCarthyism. On average, in the second half of a two-semester Afro-American history course, teachers spend 6.5 class hours on the civil rights movement, more than three times as much as they spend on the Harlem Renaissance and 50 percent more than on Reconstruction.

In a two-semester U.S. history survey course, teachers spend approximately 2.4 class hours on the civil rights movement, slightly more than they spend on Reconstruction and slightly less than they spend on the New Deal and the Progressive Era. The civil rights movement does not receive nearly as much treatment in U.S. history textbooks. Based on an examination of ten leading textbooks, the civil rights movement received on average eight pages of treatment, while Reconstruction, the Progressive Era, and the New Deal each received its own chapter, running at least twenty pages and in some cases well over thirty. Nor can the quality of the discussion of the civil rights movement be considered on a par with the discussion of these other themes in the texts, as it tends towards a journalistic account of the "big" events of the era, rather than a more mature discussion based on a body of historical literature (though one is now available).

Clearly there is considerable interest among faculty and students in the civil rights movement. As one history department chair wrote: "The movement was a critical period of social change in U.S. history and as such should receive attention. The current state of race relations in the United States requires that students be familiar with past efforts at social change, their achievements, and their weaknesses in order to understand current conditions in the United States." However, as we are only at the dawn of teaching this subject, there are many pedagogical and analytical issues that need exploration.

At the OAH meeting, Professor Cheryl Greenberg provided a succinct examination of some key concerns that teachers can expect to confront in a course on race relations or, more specifically, on the civil rights movement. She noted that the "typical" Trinity College student whom she teaches is white, middle- and upper-middle class, and has had limited contact with blacks and/or the problems of the urban ghetto. Although these students are well-meaning, they tend to deny the prevalence of racism in present-day American society, acknowledging instead the existence of individual prejudice (which of course they do not believe they share), but not institutionalized and systemic racism. To a large degree, this position grows out of their myopic or presentist view of history, which fails to digest or account for the long-term development of racial inequality in America, and, in its place, sees the present divorced from the past. As a result, Greenberg's white students have difficulty understanding affirmative action, busing, and the like, as anything but racism in reverse. They detest—verbally—Jim Crow, as it existed in the past, but have great difficulty in seeing its connection to contemporary responses to the system that either de jure or de facto segregation spawned.

It follows from this, Greenberg asserted, that she and other teachers of students with similar backgrounds must overcome the hurdle of developing their students' sense of racism if they are to gain a mature understanding of the modern civil rights movement. Professor Greenberg went on to describe some of the methods she uses to achieve this task. Most notably she challenges students' assumptions, prodding them to see that race and ethnicity are not the same and that the myth of the melting pot does not and has not applied to Afro-Americans. Moreover, Greenberg contends in the classroom that racism is not based on ignorance or irrational personal feelings, but rather has developed historically as a means for maintaining an unequal social and political system.

In addition to overcoming the inadequate understanding of racism on the part of her white students, Greenberg noted that she has encountered a pattern of difficulties faced by many of her black students. She focused on two particular types of behavior. Some black students "clam up" in class because of their embarrassment over not knowing more about "their" history. Rather than taking part in class discussions, they withdraw, feeling that other students expect them to have a nearly innate knowledge of the subject matter, which for various reasons they do not. There are also black students, who out of frustration with the lack of knowledge and level of discussion on the part of other students, find it difficult to participate constructively. They tend to give up rather than press their points and hence do not contribute information and learning they gained prior to the class.

Professor Martha Prescod Norman did not deal directly with the pedagogical concerns raised by Greenberg; rather, she concentrated on the conceptionalization of the civil rights movement itself. Norman, a veteran of the movement, noted that, unlike Greenberg, she has taught primarily at predominantly black urban colleges (Wayne State and the University of Toledo). Many of her students have been older men and women who had direct experiences with or memories of the civil rights movement and know the problems that beset the African-American community firsthand. Hence, the main challenge she faces and believes we all face, is "making it real," that is, reviving a sense of what it was like to have been in the midst of a vital movement for social change.

To emphasize this point, Norman began her presentation in an unorthodox manner (for an OAH conference) by singing, "Can You Hear the Freedom Bells Tolling," a civil rights tune. The song effectively drove home her main theme, that the civil rights movement is something that is only faintly heard in much of the present scholarship on the subject; that its feeling, aura, and sense of brother- and sisterhood, indeed its very meaning have been lost. The struggle has disappeared, and in its place one finds discussions of "great men" and select civil rights organizations. In order to teach the history of the movement properly, Norman contended, she has found it necessary to move beyond the standard treatments, to lend a sense of what it was like to be a participant in a great social movement in which she found tremendous personal and political fulfillment.

Norman offered several particular analytical criticisms of existing canons on the civil rights movement, especially the tendency to discuss the movement in too linear a form, as one big pressure group aimed primarily at achieving reform legislation. Such a view, Norman argued, makes the movement too respectable, leaves out many actors, and divests them of their activism. Related to this, most discussions of the movement do not comment on the long history of struggle for freedom and dignity within the African-American community from which the modern civil rights movement sprung. The civil rights movement drew on the strength of a culture steeped in struggle. Furthermore, she said, scholars need to highlight those goals of the black community that went beyond integration and civil rights.

Among works on the movement that Norman singled out for criticism was Eyes on the Prize . In her mind, this TV documentary exhibits some of the aforementioned problems. One could easily leave Eyes on the Prize with the impression that it was the civil rights leadership and organization which set southern communities in motion and determined the course of their activism. The degree to which these communities' actions determined the course and nature of the movement and, at the same time, set the organizations in action is not so clear. Norman added that the series makes it difficult to see how ordinary people, oppressed people, people not usually included in mainstream political equations balanced and weighed historical options and opportunities and, as a result, came to play pivotal and determinative roles in altering the terms under which they lived their lives. Not highlighting these aspects of the civil rights movement drains it of a significant portion of its militancy and radicalism. For example, Norman, who had been an activist in Selma, Alabama, finds the episode on Selma false to her memory of the dynamics of the struggle there. Professor John Bracey of the University of Massachusetts extended Norman's critique. Like Norman, Bracey, also a civil rights participant, found the movement as seen in the documentary stripped of much of its militancy and meaning. For example, he asked the panel: Where were Malcolm X and Robert Williams in Eyes on the Prize ? They were not unknown in the deep South, and their sentiment was shared by many.

Members of the audience and panelist David Garrow defended Eyes , with Garrow stating that the second part of the film series would air in 1990 and that Malcolm X would play a prominent role in it. He also noted that the filmmakers were limited by the visual material that was available, and in part this accounted for the lack of attention to Robert Williams. Bracey and several others countered that Eyes on the Prize replicated the problems that Norman emphasized. By placing Malcolm after the Selma episode, the series perpetuated the conceptualization of the civil rights movement as a linear pressure group that sought integration. Some in the audience seemed to agree that the producers of the series should have included Malcolm X and black nationalism earlier on, however they disagreed with the statement that the film divested the movement of its militancy and sense of struggle. On the contrary, several participants suggested that the visual images presented in the series left quite an impression on students as well as on instructors who had lived through the period but had forgotten how violent it was.

Most of Professor Garrow's comments examined ways to structure a civil rights course. Due to the general lack of familiarity with the civil rights movement among most undergraduates, Garrow has found it fruitful to present his courses chronologically. However, the lack of a good single volume narrative hampers such an approach. Garrow noted several books, however, with which he has had favorable experiences: Howell Raines' My Soul Is Rested , Clayborne Carson's In Struggle , his own Bearing the Cross , and the companion academic reader to Eyes on the Prize of the same title. Garrow stated, in contrast to Norman, that he had a very good experience with the "Eyes on the Prize" film series, emphasizing that he did not find the program a watered-down version of the movement.

Garrow then turned to ways to structure a graduate (or perhaps senior undergraduate-level) course. He challenged teachers to consider adopting an analytical or thematic rather than a chronological approach. He suggested a number of themes worthy of investigation, which in turn allow one to overcome some of the limitations mentioned in Norman: 1) the centrality of local activism, with Robert Norell's Reaping the Whirlwind as an effective source; 2) gender, with The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Woman Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson as a good reading along with Sara Evans' Personal Politics ; 3) age; 4) class; 5) tension between local and national organizations; 6) competition between national organizations; 7) the importance of the media; 8) the interaction between the federal government and the movement; 9) the dynamics among local movements and opposition from the white community; and 10) resource mobilization theory. Garrow added that to date historians have been weak in producing adequate theoretical works on the movement. They can, however, draw on a growing body of literature produced by sociologists and political scientists, and he named works by Aldon Morris, Craig Jenkins, Doug McAdam, Adolph Reed, William J. Wilson, and Herbert Haines as examples of such. These studies, Garrow stated, allow one to discuss the importance of the indigenous strength of the local black community and to get away from the emphasis on national organizations and a national conceptualization of the movement. Garrow also stressed that by examining the links between the civil rights movement and other movements, teachers and students can move beyond 1968, a problem that many have noted in the existing literature.

Both my survey and the panel discussion revealed the vitality and dynamism of this new field of history. More universities offer a course on the civil rights movement than expected; attendance at the panel discussion was much better than normal (especially for a lunch-time session). In a short period of time historians have identified key pedagogical and analytical concerns that undoubtedly deserve and will receive greater attention in the future. This said, we need to guard against an overly optimistic assessment of the teaching of the history of the civil rights movement. We cannot let this crucial period in United States history pass like the latest fad or allow the teaching of it to be ghettoized, offered at only certain schools and to a limited audience of students. If as a profession we really seek to integrate race, class, and gender into the mainstream curriculum, this is a good place to start. More schools need to regularly offer courses on the civil rights movement (just as they do on the Civil War and the American Revolution). Our textbooks need to be rewritten so as to grant the movement treatment on par with the New Deal and Progressivism. And teachers need to continue to examine the movement in their survey and upper-division courses, fully aware of the criticisms of the existing literature and ready to grapple with the historical mindset of their students.

Professor Peter Levy teaches American history at York College of Pennsylvania, including courses on recent America and race relations.

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116 Civil Rights Movement Essay Topics & Examples

Trying to write a successful civil rights movement essay? Questions about the subject may flood your brain, but we can help!

📃 8 Tips for Writing a Civil Rights Movement Essay

🏆 best civil rights movement topic ideas & essay examples, 🎓 most interesting civil rights movement topics to write about, 📌 good civil rights research topics, 👍 interesting civil rights essay topics, ❓ civil rights movement essay questions.

As a student, you can explore anything from civil disobedience to the work of Martin Luther King Jr in your paper. And we are here to help! Our experts have gathered civil rights movement essay topics for different assignments. In the article below, see research and paper ideas along with tips on writing. Besides, check civil rights essay examples via the links.

A civil rights movement essay is an essential assignment because it helps students to reflect on historical events that molded the contemporary American society. Read this post to find some useful tips that will help you score an A on your paper on the civil rights movement.

Tip 1: Read the instructions carefully. Check all of the documents provided by your tutor, including the grading rubric, example papers, and civil rights movement essay questions. When you know what is expected of you, it will be much easier to proceed with the assignment and achieve a high mark on it.

Tip 2: Browse sample papers on the topic. If you are not sure of what to write about in particular, you can see what other students included in their essays. While reading civil rights movement essay examples, take notes about the content, sources used, and other relevant points. This might give you some ideas on what to include in your paper and how to enhance it to meet the requirements.

Tip 3: Collect high-quality material to support your essay. The best sources are scholarly articles and books. However, there are also some credible websites and news articles that offer unbiased information on the civil rights movements. If the instructions don’t prevent you from using these, you could include a wide array of resources, thus making your essay more detailed.

Tip 4: Offer some context on the civil rights movement. The 20th century was instrumental to the history of America because there were many political and social events, including World War II and the subsequent Cold War. While some events may not relate to the history of the civil rights movement, they are important for the readers to understand the context in which the movement took place.

Tip 5: Consider the broader history of discrimination in the American society. Discrimination is the key focus of most civil rights movement essay topics. For the black population, the movement was instrumental in reducing prejudice and improving social position. However, there were many other populations that faced discrimination throughout the American history, such as women, Native Americans, and people from the LGBT community. Can you see any similarities in how these groups fought for equal rights?

Tip 6: Reflect on the sources of the civil rights movement. The story of racial discrimination and oppression in America spanned for over 400 years, so there is a lot of history behind the civil rights movement. Here, you could talk about slavery and segregation policies, as well as how the black communities responded to the struggle. For instance, you could consider the Harlem Renaissance and its influence on the Black identity or about other examples or cultural movements that originated in the black community.

Tip 7: If relevant, include a personal reflection. You can write about what the civil rights movement means for you and how it impacted the life of your family. You can also explore racial discrimination in contemporary society to show that some issues still remain unsolved.

Tip 8: Maintain a good essay structure. Ensure that every paragraph serves its purpose. A civil rights movement essay introduction should define the movement and state your main argument clearly. Follow it with several main body paragraphs, each one exploring a certain idea that relates to the key argument. In conclusion, address all the points you’ve made and demonstrate how they relate to your thesis.

With these few tips, you will be able to write an excellent paper on the civil rights movement. Check the rest of our website for essay titles, topics, and more writing advice!

• Impact of Civil Rights Movement The freedom to vote for all Americans became central in the civil rights movements, and one of its successes was the legislation that culminated in the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
• Civil Rights-Black Power Movement Barack Obama was aware of the violence and oppression of black people in the United States. It shows self determination of the black people in struggles for civil rights- black power.
• Ida B. Wells-Barnett: Leader of the Civil Rights Movement The psychology of a leader is the psychology of a winner. One such example is one of the early leaders of the civil rights movement, American investigative journalist Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, who, thanks to her […]
• Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War The Vietnam War caused unintended consequences for the civil rights movements of the 1960s as it awakened the African-Americans’ consciousness on the racism and despotism that they experienced in the United States.
• The Civil Rights Movement in the United States In the United States, the 1960s was characterized by the rise of Civil Rights Movements, the aim of which was to suppress and end discrimination and racial segregation against African Americans.
• Invisible Southern Black Women Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement Based on 36 personal interviews and multiple published and archived sources, the author demonstrates that black women in the South have played a prominent role in the struggle for their rights.
• African-American Women and the Civil Rights Movement The key factors that left the Black women unrecognized or led to recognition of just a few of them as leaders are class, race and gender biases.
• The Contributions of Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks to the Civil Rights Movement Among these were Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks who used literary works to voice out their displeasure on the discrimination against blacks as well as portray a humanitarian point of view on the plight of […]
• Plan: Civil Rights Movement in United States The following assessment plan has details on the objectives of the assessment plan, the types of assessment plans, and the adaptation of the lesson plan to fit special groups of students.
• The Civil Rights Movement: Historical Interpretation Rosa Parks was one of the pivotal figures in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and a critical event in the Civil Rights Movement.
• The Civil Rights Movement’s Goals and Achievements Despite the considerable oppression of non-white groups of the population and the fear accompanying it, the Movement continued to fight and achieved success in its goals, affecting the country even in the modern period.
• The Civil Rights Movement: I Have a Dream The civil rights movement has changed many aspects of the nation, such as housing, the economy, and jobs. The movement changed the outlook, the power structure, and the very core of the nation.
• Music and the Civil Rights Movement It was famous in the 1960s and 1970s and continues to live now.”We Shall Overcome”, like many other freedom songs, reflects the goals and methods of the early protestors.
• “The Souls of Black Folk” and the Civil Rights Movement At the beginning of the 20th century, multiple decades had passed since the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.
• Law History From Jim Crow to Civil Rights Movement It was not until the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.that the problems of law enforcement in the South was truly recognized and reforms started designed to reduce the influence of political agendas on the […]
• Civil Rights Movement: Fights for Freedom The Civil Rights Movement introduced the concept of black and white unification in the face of inequality. Music-related to justice and equality became the soundtrack of the social and cultural revolution taking place during the […]
• Civil Rights Movement and Political Parties One of the examples of the effects of social unrest on political institutions in American history is the Civil Rights Movement, and it defined the general courses of the main parties as well as the […]
• Civil Rights Movement Distorted Image The study of the role and image of historical characters in CRM is incorrect and distorted. Rosa Parks is considered the person who informally initiated the movement due to the refusal to give up a […]
• Protest Music and the US Anti-Lynching and Civil Rights Movement In the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights movement continually challenged the government to fulfill the promise of equality and justice.
• Civil Rights Movement in the USA Brief History From the Time Before the Civil War This was part of a planned act of civil disobedience in which Plessy was to be arrested, charged and tried, and the court case would then be used to challenge the law.
• Newspaper Coverage of Japan-America Internment in WW2 and the Civil Rights Movement The media covered this because this movement persuaded whites to join them in their mass protests and they were killed in the event.
• “Black Power” in the Civil Rights Movement They wanted to reform the system to ensure a more democratic and actively participating society in the decision-making process of governance for the country.
• Civil Rights Movement in “Freedom Riders” Documentary As a commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of freedom movements, Nelson’s movie is a story of segregation and racism, abhorrence, courage, and the general brutality of the depicted events.
• The Civil Rights Movement: Martin King and Malcolm X’s Views King also stressed that the major concepts he adopted were taken from the “Sermon on the Mount and the Gandhian method of nonviolent resistance”.
• President Johnson in the Civil Rights Movement The problem of gay and lesbian rights appeared to be rather challenging and disruptive to the society. They include hippies and other social layers that were not eager to change things while others were trying […]
• Medgar Wiley Evers in the Civil Rights Movement Following the rejection of his application to study at the University of Mississippi, NAACP hired him as a field secretary to Jackson that was to the Deep South in recognition of his effort and contribution […]
• Civil Rights Movement by E. Durkheim and K. Marx The theories will also be used to predict the future of racism in the United States. The level of segregation experienced in the country led to new interferences and constraints.
• Civil Rights Movement: Purposes and Effects The civil rights movement was a popular lobby group created to advocate for equality in the United States for both blacks and whites. To a large extent, the civil rights movement completely transformed the lives […]
• Coalition Politics After the Civil Rights Movement Such coalitions also forced the American government to address the challenges affecting different cities. New policies and laws emerged in order to promote the rights of many American citizens.
• Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance in the Civil Rights Movement by Lance Hill The book describes the tension and struggles that existed between the African Americans and the members of the white citizens’ council, Ku Klux Klan.
• Martin Luther King, Jr. Civil Rights Movement Martin Luther King noticed the negative trend and he took his stand to make people see the devastating effects of the war.
• Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson: the Civil Rights Movement The social historians have managed to cogently present the politics that surrounded the civil rights movement. The movement also managed to gain the support of the aims of government, the executive, legislature, and even the […]
• The Civil Rights Movement in the USA The movement’s main aim was to end the racial segregation and fight for the voting power of the black people in America.
• The Civil Rights Movement Although the positive role of the Civil Rights Movement for changing the role of the African Americans in the American society is visible, this topic is also essential to be discussed because the movement for […]
• The Civil Rights Movement: Oppressing the Black Population In response, the black citizen resorted to fighting for his rights; thus, the rise of the civil rights movement. In conclusion, these key events helped to reinforce the African American struggle for equal right rights, […]
• Music of the Civil Wars, Civil Rights & Freedom Movements of Europe, Africa, North & South America During the 20th Century The aim of Giovinezza was to reinforce the position of Mussolini as the leader of the Fascist Movement and of Italy.
• Silent Voices of the Modern Civil Rights Movement This is the why she gets my nomination for recognition in the “Museum of Silent Voices of the Modern Civil Rights Movement”.
• Dr. King’s Role in United States Civil Rights Movement His popularity started after he led other activists in boycotting the services of the Montgomery Bus Service in the year 1955 after an incident of open discrimination of a black woman in the bus. Martin […]
• The Civil Rights Act as a Milestone Element of American Legislation Although the Civil Rights Act has undergone several amendments, the Civil Right Act amendment of 1964 was the main amendment that addressed the above types of discrimination.
• Harold Washington With Civil Rights Movement Hence, this study examines the main achievements of Harold Washington in the fields of employment, racism, equality in provision of social amenities, gender equality, freedom of expression, and the creation of the ethics commission in […]
• American Africans Action in the Struggle for Equality Community leaders in various segmentations of the society had showed resistance to the white supremacy and domination against the African Americans which had been abounded in some states.’Everyday’s Use’ written at the peak of the […]
• The Civil Rights Movement: Ending Racial Discrimination and Segregation in America Finally, the paper will look at both the positive and negative achievements of the civil rights movements including an assessment of how the rights movement continues to influence the socio-economic and political aspects of the […]
• Civil Rights Movement Major Events in 1954-1968 This research paper seeks to highlight the historical events that took place in 1954-1968 in the United States which were instigated by the Civil Rights Movement in the hope of securing the civil and basic […]
• The African American Civil Rights Movement During the 1960s notable achievements were made including the passage of a Civil rights Act in 1964 that outlawed any form of discrimination towards people of a different “race, color or national origin in employment […]
• Civil Rights Movement The Civil Rights Movement is an era that was dedicated for equal treatments and rights to the activism of the African American in the US.
• Theatre in the Era of the Civil Rights Movement
• To What Extent Can the 1950’s Be Viewed as a Great Success for the Civil Rights Movement
• The Stages of the Progressive Reform in the Civil Rights Movement
• The Contradicting Outcome of the Civil Rights Movement in America
• The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Civil Rights Movement
• The Fight for Aid from the Civil Rights Movement
• The Long Term Effects of the Civil Rights Movement
• Violent and Non-violent Methods of Protests Embraced by African American in the Civil Rights Movement
• The Role of The Supreme Court in the Civil Rights Movement
• The Success of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950’s
• Women in the Civil Rights Movement
• U.S. Democracy and the Civil Rights Movement
• The History of the Civil Rights Movement in the United Stats and Its Impact on African Americans
• The Relationship of Southern Jews to Blacks and the Civil Rights Movement
• The Importance of Students During the Civil Rights Movement
• A Look at Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the Role of Martin Luther
• White Resistance to the Civil Rights Movement
• The Impact of Rock ‘n’ Roll on the Civil Rights Movement
• African Americans and Religion During the Civil Rights Movement
• The Historical Accuracy of the Portrayal of the Civil Rights Movement in Selma, a Drama Film by Ava DuVernay
• The War on Drugs and the Civil Rights Movement
• The Civil Rights Movement and the Black Middle Class
• The Role of Police During the Civil Rights Movement
• The Achievements of Peaceful Protest During the Civil Rights Movement
• Analyzing the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War
• The True Face of The Civil Rights Movement
• The History of the Civil Rights Movement, National Association of the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
• Successes and Failures of Civil Rights Movement
• The Historiography of Womens Role and Visibility in The Civil Rights Movement
• The Relationship Between Activism and Federal Government During the Civil Rights Movement
• To What Extent Was Grass Roots Activism a Significant Reason to Why the Civil Rights Movement Grew in the 1950s and 1960s
• The Value of Studying the Civil Rights Movement
• A History of the Civil Rights Movement and Feminist Movement in the United States
• The Foundation of the Niagara Movement and Its Influence on the Civil Rights Movement in America
• The Role of Black Women in the Civil Rights Movement
• The Role and Importance of the Grassroot Organizers on the Civil Rights Movement
• The Effect of Society on the World of Doubt and the Effects of the Civil Rights Movement
• The Importance and Impact of the Civil Rights Movement to the Public Policy
• The New York Times and The Civil Rights Movement
• Understanding the Civil Rights Movement: America Vs. Australia
• The Laws in the Reconstruction Era and the Civil Rights Movement
• How Effective Was the Early Civil Rights Movement in Advancing Black Civil Rights in 1880-1990?
• What Role Did Jews Play in the American Civil Rights Movement?
• How Did the African American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s?
• Did Minority Rights Campaigners Copy the Tactics of the Black American Civil Rights Movement?
• What is the NAACP’s Impact on the Civil Rights Movement in the US?
• How Did Gandhi Influence the Civil Rights Movement?
• To What Extent Can the 1950’s Be Viewed as a Great Success for the Civil Rights Movement?
• How Far Was the Effectiveness of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s Limited by Internal Divisions?
• How the Cold War Promoted the Civil Rights Movement in America, and How It Promoted Change?
• How Far Was Martin Luther King Responsible for the Civil Rights Movement?
• How Was Civil Disobedience Used in the Civil Rights Movement?
• How Did the Civil Rights Movement Change America?
• How Successful Had the Civil Rights Movement Been by the Late 1960s?
• Did Black Power Groups Cause Harm to the Civil Rights Movement in America?
• To What Extent Was Grass Roots Activism a Significant Reason to Why the Civil Rights Movement Grew in the 1950s and 1960s?
• How Did Kennedy and His Administration Effect the Civil Rights Movement?
• Did the Black Power Movement Help or Hinder the Civil Rights Movement?
• How the Civil Rights Movement Influenced the Women?
• What Are the Results of the Effort of the Civil Rights Movement?
• How Did Martin Luther King Affect the Civil Rights Movement?
• Are the Problems Faced by the Feminist and Sexual Emancipation Movements Similar to Those Faced by Civil Rights Movement, or Are There Major Differences?
• Was the Civil Rights Movement Successful?
• Has America Really Changed Since the Civil Rights Movement?
• Why Was the Civil Rights Movement Successful by 1965?
• How Did Religion Influence Martin Luther King, Jr as He Led the Civil Rights Movement?
• How Significant Was Martin Luther King Jr. to the Black Civil Rights Movement?
• How Did Martin Luther Kings Jr Death Affect the Civil Rights Movement?
• How Important Was Martin Luther King to the Civil Rights Movement?
• Does the Civil Rights Movement Have an Effect on the Way Minorities Are Treated by Authorities?
• Was the Civil Rights Movement a Success or Failure?
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