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In December 1955 NAACP activist Rosa Parks’s impromptu refusal to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, sparked a sustained bus boycott that inspired mass protests elsewhere to speed the pace of civil rights reform. After boycott supporters chose Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr., to head the newly established Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), King soon became the country’s most influential advocate of the concepts of nonviolent resistance forged by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Despite the bombing of King’s house and other acts of intimidation by segregationists, MIA leaders were able to sustain the boycott until November 1956, when the NAACP won a Supreme Court order to desegregate the bus system. In 1957 King and his supporters founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to provide an institutional framework supporting local protest movements.
Four Black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, sparked a new phase of the Southern civil rights movement on February 1, 1960, when they staged a sit-in at a drugstore lunch counter reserved for whites. In the wake of the Greensboro sit-in, thousands of students in at least 60 communities, mostly in the upper, urbanized South, joined the sit-in campaign during the winter and spring of 1960. Despite efforts by the NAACP, SCLC, and CORE to impose some control over the sit-in movement, the student protesters formed their own group, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), to coordinate the new movement. SNCC gradually acquired a staff of full-time organizers, many of whom were former student protesters, and launched a number of local projects designed to achieve desegregation and voting rights. Although SNCC’s nonviolent tactics were influenced by King, SNCC organizers typically stressed the need to develop self-reliant local leaders to sustain grassroots movements.
The Freedom Rides of 1961 signaled the beginning of a period when civil rights protest activity grew in scale and intensity. CORE sponsored the first group of bus riders who sought to desegregate Southern bus terminals. After attacks by white mobs in Alabama turned back the initial protesters, student activists from Nashville and other centers of sit-in activities continued the rides into Jackson, Mississippi, where they were promptly arrested for disobeying racial segregation rules. Despite U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s plea for a “cooling-off” period, the Freedom Rides demonstrated that militant but nonviolent young activists could confront Southern segregation at its strongest points and pressure the federal government to intervene to protect the constitutional rights of African Americans. The Freedom Rides encouraged similar protests elsewhere against segregated transportation facilities and stimulated local campaigns in many Southern communities that had been untouched by the student sit-ins.
SCLC leaders worked with Birmingham, Alabama, minister Fred Shuttlesworth to launch a major campaign featuring confrontations between nonviolent demonstrators and the often brutal law-enforcement personnel directed by Birmingham’s police commissioner, Eugene T. (“Bull”) Connor. Televised confrontations between nonviolent protesters and vicious policemen with clubs and police dogs attracted Northern support and resulted in federal intervention to bring about a settlement that included civil rights concessions. King’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” of April 16, 1963, defended civil disobedience and warned that frustrated African Americans might turn to Black nationalism, a development that he predicted would lead inevitably to a frightening racial nightmare. International news coverage of the Birmingham clashes prompted Pres. John F. Kennedy to introduce legislation that eventually became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Similar mass protests in dozens of other cities made white Americans more aware of the antiquated Jim Crow system, though Black militancy also prompted a white “backlash.” Those mass protests culminated on August 28, 1963, in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which attracted over 200,000 participants. King used his concluding “I Have a Dream” speech at the march as an opportunity to link Black civil rights aspirations with traditional American political values. He insisted that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution comprised “a promissory note” guaranteeing all Americans “the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
While media attention concentrated on the urban demonstrations in Birmingham, the voter-registration campaign in rural Mississippi and Alabama, spearheaded by SNCC and groups under the auspices of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), stimulated the emergence of resilient indigenous leadership and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). COFO director Robert Moses spearheaded a summer project in 1964 that brought together voting rights organizers and hundreds of Northern white volunteers. While the murders of three civil rights workers focused national attention on Mississippi, the MFDP, led by Fannie Lou Hamer, failed in its attempt to unseat the regular all-white delegation at the 1964 National Democratic Convention. During the following year, however, mass protests in the Alabama cities of Selma and Montgomery led Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson to introduce legislation that became the Voting Rights Act of 1965.