4.6 Major Civil Rights Organizations

These groups had different styles and sometimes disagreed, but they shared the goal of ending racial discrimination and inequality. Their local branches built a national movement using nonviolent, direct and racially inclusive protest and grassroots organizing: marches, sit-ins, lawsuits, economic boycotts and the use of mass media. Protesters were often met with violence, which sometimes led to armed self-defense, especially in rural Southern communities.

In his 1957 essay 'Nonviolence and Racial Justice', a required source, King explained nonviolent direct action, drawing on Christian teachings and the example of Mahatma Gandhi in India. In his account, nonviolence resists injustice itself rather than trying to defeat or humiliate opponents, aims to win them over, accepts suffering without striking back, and is grounded in love for all people. Nonviolence was both a moral belief and a strategy: when peaceful protesters were attacked, the violence exposed the brutality of segregation to the nation and the world.

• Birmingham Children's Crusade (1963): organizers deliberately included children and teenagers, who couldn't lose jobs or homes the way adults could. Police attacked them with fire hoses and dogs, and the televised images shocked Americans and people around the world.
• March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (1963): organized by A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin and an alliance of civil rights, religious and labor groups, it drew over 250,000 people. It highlighted unemployment, economic inequality and discrimination, and King delivered his 'I Have a Dream' speech. SNCC's John Lewis also spoke, stressing the urgency of change and the need for protection from violence.
• Mississippi Freedom Summer (1964): volunteers worked to register Black voters and ran 41 Freedom Schools teaching civic activism and Black history. The murder of three young activists, James Chaney, who was Black, and Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were Jewish, drew national attention and energized the movement, including the new Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged Mississippi's all-white delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

These coordinated efforts won major federal laws. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended legal segregation in public places and banned discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, passed after violent attacks on marchers in Selma, Alabama, outlawed discriminatory voting barriers like literacy tests.

The required 1962 photograph by Danny Lyon shows John Lewis and other activists kneeling in prayer at a segregated swimming pool in Cairo, Illinois, a reminder that the movement also challenged segregation outside the Deep South.