The civil rights movement was a social movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement in the country. The movement had its origins in the Reconstruction era during the late 19th century and had its modern roots in the 1940s, although the movement made its largest legislative gains in the 1960s after years of direct actions and grassroots protests. The social movement's major nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience campaigns eventually secured new protections in federal law for the civil rights of all Americans.
The 1963 March on Washington participants and leaders marching from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial
13th Amendment in the National Archives, bearing the signature of Abraham Lincoln
The mob-style lynching of Will James, Cairo, Illinois, 1909
Lynching victim Will Brown, who was mutilated and burned during the Omaha, Nebraska race riot of 1919. Postcards and photographs of lynchings were popular souvenirs in the U.S.
Racial segregation in the United States
Facilities and services such as housing, healthcare, education, employment, and transportation have been systematically separated in the United States based on racial categorizations. Segregation was the legally or socially enforced separation of African Americans from whites, as well as the separation of other ethnic minorities from majority and mainstream communities. While mainly referring to the physical separation and provision of separate facilities, it can also refer to other manifestations such as prohibitions against interracial marriage, and the separation of roles within an institution. The U.S. Armed Forces were formally segregated until 1948, as black units were separated from white units but were still typically led by white officers.
Sign for "colored" waiting room at a Greyhound bus terminal in Rome, Georgia, 1943. Throughout the South there were Jim Crow laws creating de jure legally required segregation.
"We Cater to White Trade Only" sign on a restaurant window in Lancaster, Ohio in 1938. Ohio, like most of the North and West, did not have de jure statutory enforced segregation (Jim Crow laws), but many places still had de facto social segregation in the early 20th century. Together with state sponsored segregation, such private owner enforced segregation was outlawed for public accommodations in the 1960s.
An African American man drinking at a "colored" drinking fountain in a streetcar terminal in Oklahoma City, 1939
A black man goes into the "colored" entrance of a movie theater in Belzoni, Mississippi, 1939.