8.10 The African American Civil Rights Movement (1960s)

On February 1, 1960, four Black college students sat down at a whites-only Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave until served. Sit-ins spread to dozens of cities. With help from veteran organizer Ella Baker, students formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960, which favored grassroots organizing over top-down leadership.

In 1961 CORE's Freedom Riders, Black and white, rode interstate buses into the South to test a Supreme Court ruling against segregated bus terminals. Mobs burned a bus in Anniston, Alabama, and beat riders in Birmingham and Montgomery, forcing the Kennedy administration to protect them and enforce desegregation.

In 1963 King and the SCLC targeted Birmingham, Alabama, one of the most segregated cities. Jailed for marching, King wrote his 'Letter from Birmingham Jail', defending nonviolent civil disobedience against white ministers who urged patience. When police commissioner Bull Connor used fire hoses and police dogs on young marchers, televised images shocked the nation and pushed President Kennedy to propose a civil rights bill.

On August 28, 1963, about 250,000 people joined the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King gave his 'I Have a Dream' speech. Weeks later, a bombing at Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church killed four Black girls.

After Kennedy's assassination, Johnson pushed the bill through a Southern filibuster. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned segregation in public accommodations like restaurants and hotels, banned job discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin (Title VII), created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and let the government cut off funds to segregated programs.

In 1964 the Freedom Summer project brought hundreds of volunteers, mostly white college students, to register Black voters in Mississippi; three civil rights workers (James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner) were murdered. Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenged the state's all-white delegation at the 1964 Democratic convention. The 24th Amendment (1964) banned poll taxes in federal elections.

In March 1965, state troopers attacked marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on 'Bloody Sunday'. Johnson then pushed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which suspended literacy tests, sent federal examiners to register voters, and required certain states with histories of discrimination to get federal approval before changing voting rules (preclearance). Black voter registration in Mississippi rose from under 7 percent in 1964 to about 60 percent by 1967.

Malcolm X, a minister of the Nation of Islam, criticized nonviolence and integration, urging Black pride, self-reliance and self-defense. He later broke with the Nation of Islam and began moving toward cooperation with other groups before he was assassinated in 1965.

In 1966 SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael popularized the slogan 'Black Power', calling for Black communities to control their own institutions. The Black Panther Party, founded in Oakland in 1966, combined armed self-defense against police with community programs like free breakfasts for children.

Riots broke out in many cities, including Watts in Los Angeles (1965) and Detroit and Newark (1967), driven by poverty, unemployment and police brutality. The Kerner Commission (1968) warned that the nation was moving toward two societies, Black and white, separate and unequal. After King was assassinated in April 1968, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act as part of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, banning discrimination in housing.