Civil Rights Movement 1960s

The Civil Rights Movement or 1960s Civil Rights Movement encompasses social movements in the United States whose goals were to end racial segregation and discrimination against African Americans and to secure legal recognition and federal protection of the citizenship rights enumerated in the Constitution and federal law. This article covers the phase of the movement between 1954 and 1968, particularly in the South. The leadership was African-American, and much of the political and financial support came from labor unions, major religious denominations, and prominent white Democratic Party politicians such as Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon B. Johnson.
The movement was characterized by major campaigns of civil resistance. Between 1955 and 1968,
citizenship to whites only. Following the Civil War, three constitutional amendments were passed, including the 13th Amendment that ended slavery; the 14th Amendment that gave African Americans citizenship, adding their total population of four million to the official population of southern states for Congressional apportionment; and the 15th Amendment that gave African-American males the right to vote . From 1865 to 1877, the United States underwent a turbulent Reconstruction Era trying to establish free labor and civil rights of freedmen in the South after the end of slavery. Many whites resisted the social changes, leading to insurgent movements such as the Ku Klux Klan, whose members attacked black and white Republicans to maintain white supremacy. In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant, the U.S. Army, and U.S. Attorney General Amos T. Akerman, initiated a campaign to repress the KKK under the Enforcement Acts. Some states were reluctant to enforce the federal measures of the act; by the early 1870s, other white supremacist and paramilitary groups arose that violently opposed African-American legal equality and
While progress was made in some areas, this status of excluding African Americans from the political system lasted in most southern states until national civil rights legislation was passed in the mid-1960s to provide federal enforcement of constitutional voting rights. For more than 60 years, blacks in the South were not able to elect anyone to represent their interests in Congress or local government. Since they could not vote, they could not serve on local