Civil Rights Movement

By: Simon Wendt

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century

Civil Rights Movement

“Civil rights movement” is an umbrella term that refers to the various efforts of African American activists to gain full citizenship rights and to end racial discrimination in American society. Sustained civil rights organizing began in the early twentieth century, matured in the 1940s and 1950s, and culminated in the mass nonviolent protests of the 1960s. After securing civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s, the movement became more radical, increasingly rejecting nonviolent protest and advocating more fundamental change. Though the movement lost momentum in the late 1960s, militant Black Power activism and political organizing continued until the mid-1970s.

The Roots of the Movement.

After the Civil War, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments abolished slavery, made African Americans citizens of the United States, and accorded black men full voting rights. But blacks soon lost these rights and the political power they had gained during Reconstruction (1865–1877). Beginning in the early 1880s, southern authorities enacted legislation that mandated racial segregation in public life and disfranchised black men. In 1896 the U.S. Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson decision affirmed the constitutionality of what came to be known as Jim Crow. White southerners used intimidation and violence, particularly lynching, to enforce the region's racial hierarchy. Although most northern blacks could vote, they, too, faced discrimination, segregation, and racist violence.

African Americans used various strategies to resist their subordination. Between 1900 and 1906 black middle-class activists staged unsuccessful boycotts against segregated streetcars in more than twenty-five cities in every state of the former Confederacy. By contrast, the black leader Booker T. Washington argued that southern blacks ought to accept segregation and disfranchisement and focus their energies on self-help and vocational education to advance the race. Black intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter condemned Washington's approach and called for an immediate end to all forms of racial discrimination. In 1905 Du Bois organized the short-lived Niagara Movement, bringing together a number of prominent black leaders and intellectuals who seconded his demands. The founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 marked the beginning of sustained efforts to gain civil rights for African Americans. Founded by an interracial group of social activists, among them Du Bois and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the NAACP sought to secure blacks’ constitutional rights by challenging in the courts segregation and disfranchisement. In addition, the organization widely publicized lynchings and other instances of racial injustice to confront American society with the violent consequences of white racism.

World War I and the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to northern cities in the second decade of the twentieth century had a significant impact on race relations and black activism. Between 1910 and 1930 more than a million blacks left the South, hoping to escape racial oppression and to find both better living conditions and better jobs. The National Urban League, a black social welfare organization that was founded in 1910, tried to help these migrants adjust to the conditions they encountered in northern cities. As a result of the migration, northern black communities grew tremendously, which led to frictions with white city residents. On several occasions racial tensions exploded into violent race riots. In some of these clashes black World War I veterans defended their communities against white attackers. In the 1920s the black nationalist Marcus Garvey and his enormously popular Universal Negro Improvement Association exemplified and nurtured such militancy, which found cultural expression in the Harlem Renaissance.

The 1930s proved an important phase for civil rights organizing, despite the economic hardship brought about by the Great Depression. Some white activists attempted to forge alliances with African Americans to work for social change. In 1932 the seminary-trained Myles Horton cofounded the Highlander Folk School, a Tennessee-based institution that aimed to bring together black and white labor activists. Two years later the socialist Henry L. Mitchell founded the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU), an interracial organization that sought to improve the pitiable plight of black sharecroppers in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri. The American Communist Party also supported the struggles of civil rights activists and black workers.

Throughout the decade African Americans began to use more overt forms of protest. In 1936 the newly founded National Negro Congress (NNC), an umbrella organization that sought to unite various civil rights groups, advocated boycotts and picketing. In thirty-five cities across the nation African Americans used such tactics to protest against racial discrimination in retail employment. In the North some blacks also staged small demonstrations against segregation in public accommodations and schools or participated in rent strikes and anti-eviction protests. The NAACP's legal strategy continued to yield the most tangible results. Under the leadership of Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, NAACP lawyers successfully challenged the exclusion of blacks from professional and graduate schools, an approach that was intended to prepare the ground for challenging the constitutionality of segregated education.

The 1940s and 1950s.

World War II initiated and accelerated social and political developments that would facilitate future civil rights organizing. The booming war industry provided jobs for thousands of black southerners who streamed into northern and western cities. Black communities’ growing resources led to the creation of larger black churches and colleges, independent black newspapers, and powerful political organizations, all of which strengthened social networks that civil rights activists could draw on. Outside the Deep South, moreover, African Americans became an important voting bloc in national politics, frequently providing the winning margin in presidential elections. Foreign policy concerns, coupled with blacks’ increasing political weight, forced the federal government to pay more attention to black demands. America's proclaimed mission to fight for genuine democracy abroad clashed with racist realities at home and embarrassed the U.S. government in the fight against Nazi Germany.

During the war a few civil rights activists experimented with nonviolent protest. In 1941 the black labor leader A. Philip Randolph warned President Franklin D. Roosevelt that he would bring one hundred thousand African Americans to Washington, D.C., to protest against blatant discrimination in the defense industry. Exploiting the embarrassing international implications of Jim Crow, Randolph's threatened March on Washington campaign compelled Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802, which ended discrimination in the defense industry and established the Fair Employment Practices Commission.

Shortly after this success Randolph founded the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) to sustain pressure on white authorities. Like Randolph the members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a small interracial group of pacifists that was founded in Chicago in 1942, believed in the power of nonviolence as articulated by the Indian activist Mohandas Gandhi. Between 1942 and 1943, CORE chapters staged numerous successful “sit-down” campaigns in northern cities, forcing restaurants and public accommodations to end their policy of de facto segregation. In 1947 CORE launched it first national project, the Journey of Reconciliation, which tested a U.S. Supreme Court decision that had declared segregation in interstate travel unconstitutional.

The NAACP's tremendous wartime growth, coupled with important legal victories, further prepared the ground for future activism. By 1946 the association's membership had soared tenfold to five hundred thousand in more than one thousand chapters across the country. Two years earlier the NAACP had won a crucial victory in the struggle for voting rights. In Smith v. Allwright the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the white primary, a tool designed by Southern Democrats to disfranchise African Americans. The Smith decision reenfranchised black voters in Florida, Tennessee, and Texas, and it helped NAACP chapters and other local groups to register several hundred thousand African American voters. In this task they received support from numerous black World War II veterans, whose military service had become a catalyst for civil rights activism. In the North the NAACP focused on protesting against job and housing discrimination.

In the 1940s and early 1950s the advent of the Cold War proved both beneficial and detrimental to the civil rights cause. On the one hand, the implications of racial discrimination for America's ideological struggle with the Soviet Union provided black activists with powerful political leverage. After World War II the NNC and the NAACP used the United Nations as an international forum to accuse the United States of genocide. Concerns about the damaging effect of such public embarrassments, combined with blacks’ growing political influence and Randolph's continued threats of civil disobedience, compelled President Harry S. Truman to issue directives that abolished discriminatory hiring practices in federal government employment and initiated the desegregation of the armed forces. On the other hand, domestic anticommunism led to the destruction of left-wing civil rights organizations such as the NNC and seriously impeded the activities of CORE, the NAACP, and other like-minded groups, which were hard-pressed to disprove allegations that they were infiltrated by Communists.

After surviving the initial anticommunist onslaught, the NAACP achieved one of its greatest victories. On 17 May 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the U.S. Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional, rescinding its “separate but equal” ruling of 1896. Yet while border states such as Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri initiated school desegregation soon after Brown, whites in the Deep South devised various strategies to prevent racial integration. In July 1954, white middle-class Mississippians organized the White Citizens’ Council, which used threats and economic pressure to stop racial integration.

Another Supreme Court decision, known as Brown II, in May 1955 failed to set a timetable for the implementation of school desegregation, thus encouraging southern white supremacists to step up the region's massive resistance. In the following months White Citizens’ Councils spread quickly across the South and boasted a membership of almost a quarter of a million by 1956. Southern politicians also vowed to defend white supremacy. In March 1956 ninety-six U.S. congressmen from the region signed a “Southern Manifesto,” in which they expressed their determination to uphold Jim Crow. Meanwhile southern authorities attempted to destroy the NAACP, again charging that it was linked to Communism. Several states banned the organization, which cost the NAACP almost fifty thousand southern members. Segregationists also used violence to stop the black freedom movement. Killings such as the murder of the NAACP activist George W. Lee and the lynching of the black teenager Emmett Till in 1955 frightened many but also inspired others to become involved in the struggle.

Amid the furor created by the Brown decision, blacks in Montgomery, Alabama, staged a successful boycott to end segregation on the city's bus lines. Local activists, among them Edgar Daniel Nixon and Jo Ann Robinson, had long considered civil disobedience to challenge Jim Crow. When on 1 December 1955 the black activist Rosa Parks violated Alabama's segregation laws by refusing to vacate her seat for a white man, Nixon, Robinson, and others initiated the boycott and used her conviction as a legal test case to challenge bus segregation in federal court. The young Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr. agreed to lead the local struggle, which lasted 381 days. In November 1956 the U.S. Supreme Court finally declared Alabama's segregation laws unconstitutional.

The success of the Montgomery boycott inspired a number of similar campaigns in the South and made King the black freedom movement's most visible spokesman. It also resolved King and other activists to establish the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957 to encourage and coordinate civil rights protest in the region. Advocating nonviolence, the SCLC demanded full citizenship rights for African Americans and their integration into American society. Until the end of the 1950s, however, the SCLC accomplished little, primarily because it lacked funds and an organizational program.

After the Montgomery bus boycott, white southerners’ continuing efforts to stop school desegregation dominated the headlines. The most violent incident took place in Little Rock, Arkansas, where Governor Orval Faubus ordered national guardsmen to prevent nine black students from attending the city's all-white Central High School. Spurred on by Faubus's defiance of federal law, a white mob later besieged the school and harassed some of the students. The governor's rebelliousness infuriated President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was far from being a champion of racial equality but brooked no insubordination. In an action unprecedented since Reconstruction, the president dispatched federal troops to Little Rock to quell the disorder and to protect the black students. Ultimately, however, the Little Rock crisis did little to speed up school integration. Although massive resistance subsided by the end of the 1950s, many southern authorities successfully prevented desegregation by adopting discriminatory pupil-placement laws, by giving tuition grants to white students to attend private schools, or by simply closing those schools that were ordered to enroll black students.

The civil rights movement's attempts to increase the number of southern black voters in the second half of the 1950s were more successful but had a similarly negligible impact on the racial status quo. New civil rights legislation failed to help activists overcome the obstacles they confronted. Neither the Civil Rights Act of 1957 nor the Civil Rights Act of 1960 provided federal authorities or the Justice Department with sufficient power to enforce school integration or to prosecute cases of voter discrimination and racist violence on a widespread basis. Confronted with strong southern resistance and reluctant federal authorities, the civil rights movement appeared to be stalled.

Mass Protest and Voter Registration.

In February 1960 a student-led sit-in movement against segregated lunch counters revived the stagnating civil rights movement. By April almost fifty thousand students had staged sit-ins in seventy-eight cities in nine southern states. Lunch counters in border states quickly desegregated as a result of the demonstrations, but the Deep South remained a bulwark of Jim Crow. When student activists pondered joining the established civil rights organizations during a conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, in April 1960, the veteran activist Ella Baker convinced them to form their own group: the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In the Freedom Ride of 1961, which was organized by CORE, SNCC activists had a chance to continue the nonviolent direct-action techniques they had used during the sit-ins. Modeled on the Journey of Reconciliation, the Freedom Ride was designed to test the U.S. Supreme Court's Boynton v. Virginia decision, which had extended desegregation to all terminal facilities in interstate travel.

On 4 May 1961 two interracial teams of activists set off for the Deep South from Washington, D.C. White mob violence in Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama, served CORE's goal of focusing national and international attention on southern injustice. Because of the crises the Freedom Ride created, President John F. Kennedy dispatched federal troops to the South to protect the activists. In Jackson, Mississippi, the journey was finally stopped when local authorities arrested the freedom riders for violating local segregation laws, but similar campaigns spread quickly in the following months. In September 1961 the Interstate Commerce Commission finally desegregated all interstate travel facilities.

After the Freedom Ride the SCLC staged two ambitious nonviolent demonstrations in southern cities. In Albany, Georgia, however, where SNCC activists had helped to organize a local movement, black activists’ efforts in 1962 to provoke extensive media coverage and federal intervention by staging peaceful demonstrations soon collapsed. The SCLC's campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1963 reflected the lessons that activists had learned in Albany. Thoroughly planned, the project concentrated on local white merchants’ discriminatory practices. More important, activists expected Birmingham's racist public safety commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor to react with violence to their peaceful demonstrations, which they hoped would trigger the media coverage that had eluded the Albany movement.

March to Register Voters. Thousands of marchers walk fifty-four miles from Selma to Montgomery to promote awareness of the low number of registered black voters in the South, March 1965. Photograph by Jack Hopper.

Birmingham News/Polaris

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In early May, Connor fulfilled the SCLC's expectations, ordering his deputies and local firemen to attack protesting black children with clubs, dogs, and high-pressure water hoses. The violence shocked national and international audiences and compelled the administration of President Kennedy to intervene as a mediator. Although not all of the SCLC's demands were met, Birmingham was considered a major success for the civil rights movement. It triggered a wave of similar demonstrations across the South and contributed to the decision of President Kennedy to propose civil rights legislation in a televised address to the nation. In June 1963 almost a quarter of a million people descended on Washington, D.C., in a peaceful March on Washington to lobby for the new bill. After the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, managed to secure the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned racial discrimination in public life and employment.

Although the media concentrated on civil rights activism in the Deep South, the black freedom struggle of the 1960s did not remain confined to the former Confederacy. In midwestern and northern cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Wichita, Kansas, black activists and their white allies also used nonviolent demonstrations, boycotts, and legal action to protest de facto school segregation and discrimination in employment and housing. Sometimes these efforts proved successful, but many activists quickly learned that breaking racist customs in the North frequently proved just as hard and as dangerous as trying to topple legalized white supremacy in the South. In Cambridge, Maryland, for instance, the black civil rights leader Gloria Richardson and her followers had to rely on armed guards to protect themselves against white mobs that invaded the black community.

Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the southern movement tested white compliance with the new law and focused on securing black southerners’ right to vote. SNCC and CORE had been attempting to launch voter registration campaigns in the Deep South since 1961. In subsequent organizing efforts, local black women became the backbone of the movement, participating in civil rights meetings, voter registration drives, and demonstrations far more often than did men. But white violence seriously hampered civil rights activism. Especially in Mississippi, the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups intimidated black supporters and murdered veteran civil rights leaders such as Medgar Wylie Evers with impunity. SNCC's 1964 Freedom Summer project, which brought hundreds of white northern volunteers to Mississippi to conduct voter registration drives and to teach black children in so-called Freedom Schools, was intended to focus national attention on the state and to force the federal government to protect SNCC's activities. Even though the brutal murder of three activists brought the attention that SNCC sought, President Johnson did nothing to ensure the safety of black and white civil rights organizers.

Confronted with racist terrorism and a procrastinating White House, a number of southern black activists established self-defense groups to protect themselves and their white allies. As early as 1957 the NAACP leader Robert F. Williams formed a protective unit in Monroe, North Carolina. In the 1960s more sophisticated defense organizations emerged in the Deep South, among them the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Jonesboro, Louisiana, and a protective squad in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. In Mississippi similar groups protected white and black activists during SNCC's Freedom Summer project. Such defensive efforts helped local freedom movements survive in the face of racist violence, frequently bolstered the morale of nonviolent protesters, and instilled pride in many black protectors, but they also triggered heated debates over the legitimacy of self-defense within SNCC and CORE. Ultimately, many activists came to accept armed resistance as an integral part of civil rights organizing in the South.

In 1965 the civil rights movement finally secured legislation that ended the disfranchisement of African Americans in the Deep South. Despite the grassroots organizing of CORE and SNCC, white resistance had prevented any considerable increase in the number of black voters. SNCC's effort to challenge the legitimacy of Mississippi's racist Democratic Party by establishing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) also failed to convince federal authorities of the need for voting rights legislation or the inclusion of blacks in the Democratic Party.

To lobby for a new voting rights bill, the SCLC launched a protest campaign in Selma, Alabama, in January 1965. When the SCLC led a protest march from Selma to the state capital Montgomery in March, Alabama state troopers responded with clubs and tear gas. The unprovoked attack on peaceful protesters triggered a national outcry of indignation and stimulated a broad consensus in favor of federal legislation. In August 1965, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. Banning tests designed to disqualify black applicants and enabling the attorney general to send federal voting registrars to states that were suspected of discriminating against its voters, the new law led to a tremendous upsurge of African Americans on the voter rolls.

Bloody Sunday. The Selma Movement leader Amelia Boynton is aided after being gassed and clubbed to the ground by police upon her attempt to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge with other marchers in the Selma-to-Montgomery March in Alabama, 7 March 1965. Photograph by Spider Martin.

© 1965 Spider Martin. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

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Radicalization and Demise.

After the Selma campaign the radicalization of SNCC and CORE pushed the movement in a more militant direction. In large part this radicalization was a consequence of activists’ experience in the South. During their long struggle, activists had become increasingly distrustful of the federal government and traditional party politics. Many became convinced that blacks would have to organize outside mainstream politics to gain power. In addition the dominant role of white volunteers in civil rights projects and the patronizing attitude of white liberal supporters had led activists to the conclusion that the movement ought to concentrate on forming independent all-black organizations and institutions. Their support for nonviolent tactics had also been eroded by years of racist terrorism.

Other factors that contributed to the growing militancy of SNCC and CORE were the influence of the black Muslim minister Malcolm X, race riots in northern and western cities that testified to the limited impact of civil rights legislation outside the South, and the escalation of the Vietnam War. During the 1966 James Meredith March against Fear, the SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael first voiced the slogan “Black Power,” which was the crystallization of these various tactical and ideological reconsiderations and became synonymous with the movement's radicalization in the following years.

But not only the southern activists contributed to the emergence of Black Power in the second half of the 1960s. Outside the South, black militants had long argued for alternative strategies to tackle poverty, unemployment, discrimination, and police brutality in urban black communities. In Detroit activists such as Albert Cleage Jr., Richard and Milton Henry, and James and Grace Lee Boggs became part of a vital network of black militants. Cleage's Group on Advanced Leadership (GOAL), founded in 1961, advocated independent black political activism and forged alliances with black nationalist groups such as the Nation of Islam (NOI). The NOI's leader Elijah Muhammad denounced white people as “devils” and advocated black pride, moral uplift, and economic self-reliance.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Malcolm X, a hustler-turned-Muslim-minister, became the NOI's most famous spokesman, lambasting King's nonviolent philosophy and recruiting thousands of new followers. Malcolm's advocacy of black pride and self-defense influenced many black militants. Among his followers were Maxwell Stanford and Donald Freeman, who in 1962 founded the Revolutionary Action Movement, an organization that sought to use mass action and armed resistance to foster a revolutionary black movement. The revival of black nationalism in the late 1950s and early 1960s was also fueled by the Cuban revolution and the process of decolonization in Africa. In such publications as the Liberator, Soulbook, and Muhammad Speaks, black nationalists from across the nation discussed the meaning of these revolutionary events, as well as their political and cultural programs.

Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, Black Power remained an ambiguous term, and the vital movement that the slogan inspired was multilayered and had many different agendas. Common themes that could be found in most Black Power programs were black pride, black political and economic power, community control of black institutions, radical internationalism, and armed self-defense. The various strands of the Black Power movement, however, advocated different strategies to accomplish these goals. Revolutionary nationalists such as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (later the Black Panther Party, or BPP), which was founded in Oakland, California, in 1966, ultimately sought to establish global socialism by overthrowing U.S. capitalism and imperialism. Cultural nationalists such as Maulana Ron Karenga, who founded US Organization (or Organization US) in Los Angeles in 1965, argued that a reaffirmation of the uniqueness and beauty of African American and African culture had to predate any revolutionary action.

For activists like Karenga, the Black Arts Movement became one of the major vehicles to link cultural nationalism and political struggle. Territorial nationalists such as Milton Henry and his group Republic of New Africa, on the other hand, called for an independent black nation within the United States, claiming five Deep South states and some black enclaves in northern cities as the new nation's territory. On hundreds of college campuses, meanwhile, African American student activists pressed white authorities to establish African American studies programs and institutional changes that were grounded in Black Power principles. And in numerous urban communities across the nation, African American activists struggled to implement Black Power principles at the local level.

In part because of its ambiguity, Black Power encountered strong opposition from both black civil rights leaders and white Americans. The NAACP's executive secretary Roy O. Wilkins initially denounced Black Power as a violent form of reverse racism. King, though acknowledging the frustrations that fueled the movement's radicalization, also argued that it contained dangerous connotations of separatism and violence. Many black militants, in turn, ridiculed King's insistence that nonviolent protest would help end poverty and unemployment in northern black communities.

King's assassination on 4 April 1968 suggested to many that the era of nonviolence was over. White liberals, on the other hand, felt betrayed by the Black Power stance adopted by SNCC and CORE in 1966 and stopped supporting these two organizations. Federal authorities and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were even more concerned, considering Black Power a threat to national security. The FBI regarded the martial rhetoric of black nationalist organizations and the hundreds of race riots that rocked northern and western cities between 1964 and 1968 as a justification for government repression. Black Power groups were considerably weakened by COINTELPRO, a highly sophisticated domestic counterintelligence program that the FBI used to disrupt and destroy black militant organizations.

Despite the demise of nonviolent protest in the late 1960s and the opposition that Black Power groups encountered, black activism continued across the nation until the mid-1970s. In the South, African Americans used voter registration and litigation to implement the new civil rights laws and also fought for economic justice and political power. The national NAACP and its local chapters remained at the forefront of this struggle. In terms of political representation, these efforts yielded impressive results. By 1970 more than seven hundred African Americans had won political offices in the states of the former Confederacy—compared to twenty-four elected officials in 1964. However, since many of these politicians held minor offices and needed the support of white allies, they rarely managed to bring about significant social change in their communities.

Outside the South an increasing number of Black Power activists sought to combine cultural nationalism, institution building, and political organizing, gradually abandoning earlier plans to use revolutionary violence to transform American society. On the East Coast the black nationalist Amiri Baraka helped organize a series of black conventions that brought together various Black Power groups to discuss the future of the black community and to support black political candidates. The 1972 National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, marked the zenith of Baraka's efforts to unite the Black Power movement, bringing together thousands of activists and elected officials.

Although the black convention movement lost momentum in the following years, black political representation in northern and western cities increased considerably. By 1974 more than fifteen hundred elected African Americans officials served on various levels outside the South. Six years later there were almost twenty-five hundred. In the 1970s and 1980s a number of black politicians became mayors of large cities, among them Coleman Young in Detroit and Harold Washington in Chicago. In the 1980s the former SCLC activist Jesse Jackson emerged as one of the most visible black politicians, becoming the second African American (after Shirley Chisholm in 1972) to seek the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.

But the civil rights movement also faced a serious white backlash that sought to delay or prevent social change. Whereas school integration was finally implemented in the South in the early 1970s, for instance, the desegregation of northern schools encountered severe resistance. In 1974 white parents in Boston began a three-year campaign to prevent the busing of black children to formerly all-white schools. That same year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Milliken v. Bradley that white children from suburban neighborhoods could not be forced to be bused to inner-city schools to achieve racial integration. In part because of this court decision, an increasing number of urban schools abandoned desegregation in the following two decades.

The backlash could also be seen in national politics. In the 1968 presidential election the segregationist third-party candidate George Wallace enjoyed considerable support from white voters across the nation. The election of the Republican Richard Nixon reflected an increasingly conservative political climate that was less supportive of civil rights. In the 1980s President Ronald Reagan's opposition to affirmative action and his decision to cut funding for welfare programs represented a further blow to the movement for racial justice. Though the powerful coalition of conservative Republicans that came to be known as the New Right could not completely undo the changes brought about by the civil rights movement, it continued to wage political and legal assaults on laws that benefited African Americans.

Impact and Legacy.

The civil rights movement had an enormous impact on American society. Because of the increased educational and employment opportunities that desegregation and affirmative action programs provided, a growing proportion of African Americans were able to enter the middle class. African Americans’ political representation also grew tremendously in the decades that followed the civil rights struggle. By 2001 there were more than 9,000 black elected officials in the nation, compared to 103 in 1964. In addition, the activism of civil rights organizations and Black Power groups helped reinterpret African American identity and left a significant cultural and intellectual legacy that continues to shape American society in the twenty-first century. The prominence of black intellectuals such as Henry Louis Gates Jr., Toni Morrison, Nell Irvin Painter, and Cornel West, as well as the controversial Million Man March in 1995, the Million Woman March in 1997, and similar protests, testify to the power of this legacy. Finally, the black freedom struggle became a catalyst for other movements for equal rights, among them the women's movement and the protest movements of Mexican Americans and Native Americans.

Not all African Americans benefited from the movement's victories, however. Many blacks continue to struggle with economic problems. In 2004, 24.7 percent of African Americans lived below the poverty line, compared to 8.6 percent of non-Hispanic whites. In many poor urban communities, crime, gang warfare, family breakdowns, and drugs thwart African Americans’ efforts to share in the wealth of American society. The Civil Rights Act of 1968, passed in reaction to the wave of civil disorders in the 1960s and forbidding housing discrimination on the basis of race, failed to integrate or improve rundown inner-city neighborhoods. In urban communities across the United States, patterns of residential segregation remain unchanged.

Police brutality and racial profiling, which civil rights and Black Power groups had criticized in the 1960s, also continued largely unabated in many parts of the nation. In 1992 the frustration over this injustice once more exploded into violence when blacks in South Central Los Angeles rioted in reaction to a court verdict that acquitted four white police officers who had brutally beaten a black man named Rodney King. In light of such instances of injustice, many black politicians and activists argue that full racial equality is a goal yet to be achieved.

[See also Anticommunism and Civil Rights; Birmingham Campaign; Black Nationalism; Black Panther Party; Black Power Movement; Civil Disobedience; Communism and African Americans; Congress of Racial Equality; Desegregation and Integration; Disfranchisement of African Americans; Freedom Rides; Highlander Folk School; Jim Crow Laws; Journey of Reconciliation; Laws and Legislation; Marches on Washington, D.C.; Martyrdom and Civil Rights; Massive Resistance; Mississippi Freedom Summer; Montgomery Bus Boycott; Legal Defense and Educational Fund; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; National Negro Congress; National Urban League; Niagara Movement; Political Parties and Civil Rights; Poor People's Campaign; Riots and Rebellions, subentry Riots and Rebellions of the 1960s; Segregation; Sit-ins; Social Sciences and Civil Rights; Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Voting Rights; and biographical entries on figures mentioned in this article.]

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