Identify prominent events, organizations, and campaigns that shaped the civil rights movement. Look at the provided sources and classify the information you find into three categories: a description of the events, the individuals and organizations involved, and the tactics they employed to get the country's attention.

Clarifying Questions

• What were some major events and campaigns of the civil rights movement?
• Who were some of the major individuals and organizations who contributed to the movement?
• What strategies did advocates use to draw attention to their goals and efforts?

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Vocabulary

• Southern Christian Leadership Conference: founded in 1957, this organization sought through nonviolent protest to appeal to the moral conscience of white Americans and end discrimination against Black Americans.
• Freedom Summer: a project in which hundreds of Black and white students volunteered to go to the Deep South to work on African American voter registration.
• segregation/desegregation: segregation is a setting apart or a separation of people from others, usually referring to races. To desegregate is the process of ending the separation of the groups.
• Jim Crow: this term refers to the social, political, and economic restrictions placed on African Americans between 1877 to the 1950s; Jim Crow encompasses both laws and ordinances as well as the social interactions between African Americans and others during the period.
• Little Rock desegregation crisis: a crisis that began in 1957 when nine African American students attempted to desegregate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas but were prevented by Gov. Orval Faubus' directive to call in the local troops to block their entrance. President Dwight D. Eisenhower dispatched the National Guard to ensure that the African American students were admitted to the school.
• Montgomery bus boycott: a protest and economic boycott from December 1955 to December 1956 against racial segregation of the public transportation system in Montgomery, Alabama.

Background Information

By the beginning of the 20th century, African Americans found themselves constrained by the system of segregation and racial etiquette for racial behavior known as Jim Crow. Jim Crow laws sought to separate African Americans from white Americans and exclude them from the privileges granted to white society. To maintain white "racial purity," which was central to the Jim Crow racial caste system, these regulations sought to keep Black and white people from mixing by prohibiting interracial relationships and marriage through antimiscegenation laws. In addition, many of these laws banned African Americans from using the same facilities as white people, such as schools, restaurants, bathrooms, and even water fountains. Within this backdrop, by the early 1950s, African Americans were completely disenchanted with this rigid racial system keeping them subordinate. One of the first arenas in which civil rights battles were fought involved using the court system to overturn racial segregation. In addition, other segregated areas of life such as education, public accommodations including transportation, and the right to vote became important arenas where civil rights activists and organizations worked to achieve equality for African Americans during the decades of the 1950s and 1960s.