Civil Rights Movement

The mid-20th-century movement that challenged racial segregation and discrimination and sought equal rights for Black Americans, especially in the American South.

Montgomery bus boycott: A 1955–1956 protest that ended racial segregation on Montgomery, Alabama’s public buses. A yearlong mass boycott turned resistance to bus segregation into a national campaign.
Nonviolent resistance: A strategy for pursuing political change through disciplined action that avoids physical violence. Many campaigns used it to expose injustice and build public pressure.
Martin Luther King Jr.: A Baptist minister and civil-rights leader who advocated nonviolent protest against racial segregation and discrimination. He led major campaigns and became the movement’s most prominent public spokesman.
Reconstruction: The period from 1865 to 1877 when the United States rebuilt the South and contested the rights of formerly enslaved people. Its constitutional amendments later became foundations for civil-rights litigation.
Civil Rights Act of 1968: A U.S. federal law whose Title VIII, known as the Fair Housing Act, prohibited discrimination in housing. The law extended federal civil-rights protections to housing discrimination.
Little Rock Nine: Nine Black students who integrated Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas in 1957. Their enrollment tested whether the federal government would enforce school desegregation.
Civil disobedience: The deliberate, public violation of a law judged unjust, usually without violence. Sit-ins and other protests challenged segregation rules directly.
Rosa Parks: A Black American activist whose 1955 arrest for refusing to surrender her bus seat helped trigger the Montgomery bus boycott. Her action became the immediate catalyst for the boycott.
Jim Crow laws: State and local laws that enforced racial segregation and restricted Black Americans’ rights, especially in the South. These laws were a central target of the movement’s campaigns.
Desegregation: The ending or reduction of legally enforced separation between racial groups in public institutions and spaces. Court rulings and federal laws required institutions to dismantle formal segregation.

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