Nearly 100 years after the Emancipation declaration, African Americans in Southern states still occupied a basically unequal world of disenfranchisement, separation and different forms of domination, including race-inspired violence. “Jim Crow” laws at the local and state levels disqualified them from classrooms and bathrooms, from theaters and train cars, from judges and government. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the “separate but equal” policy that formed the basis for state-sanctioned inequity, drawing national and international attention to African Americans’ plight.
Because large segments of the population particularly African-Americans, women, and men lacking property have not forever been accorded full citizenship rights in the American Republic, civil rights movements, or "freedom struggles," has been a normal feature of the nation's history. In exacting, movements to achieve civil rights for black Americans have had special historical implication. Such movements have not only protected citizenship rights for blacks but have also redefined existing beginning of the nature of civil rights and the role of government in defensive these rights.
The initial phase of the black complaint action in the post-Brown period began on December 1, 1955. Rosa Parks of Montgomery, Alabama, decline to give up her seat to a white bus rider, thereby resist a southern custom that necessary blacks to give seats near the front of buses to whites. When she was jailed, a black society boycott of the city's buses began. The refuse lasted more than a year, representative the unity and resolve of black residents and inspiring blacks elsewhere.
Martin Luther King, Jr., who appears as the boycott movement's most effective leader, obsessed unique appeasing and oratorical skills. He understood the larger implication of the boycott and quickly realizes that the nonviolent plans used by the Indian nationalist Mahatma Gandhi could be used by southern blacks. "I had come to see early that the Christian policy of love operating through the Gandhian method of peacefulness was one of the most powerful weapons available to the Negro in his resist for freedom," he explained.
The SCLC protest tactic achieved its first major success in 1963 when the group launches a major campaign in Birmingham, Alabama. Highly exposed argument between nonviolent protesters, including schoolchildren, on the one hand, and police with clubs, fire hoses, and police dogs, on the other, gained northern consideration. The Birmingham conflict and other simultaneous civil rights efforts encouraged President John F. Kennedy to push for passage of new civil rights legislation.
