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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Civil Rights Movement

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Introduction

The civil rights movement was among the most important social movements in 20th-century United States history. The movement overturned de jure (legal) segregation in the South and border states, ended southern disenfranchisement of most African Americans, and increased economic and educational opportunities for many blacks, while helping to facilitate the growth of the African American middle class. Apart from changing the lives of many African Americans, the civil rights movement also influenced other movements for minorities and women, the anti-Vietnam war movement in the United States, and the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland, and was itself influenced by anticolonial struggles abroad. Yet although radically affecting race relations, the movement also revealed that racial discrimination persisted across the United States and, even when not enshrined in law, was perpetuated by federal, state, and local government policies, employers, realtors, and widespread racial prejudice. The civil right movement’s successes included federal and Supreme Court rulings, federal and state legislation, the growth of the African American electorate, many more black elected officials, and increased educational attainment and income for many blacks. Nevertheless, one-third of African Americans still lived in poverty in the 1980s. Covert and overt racial discrimination also remained a reality for many. Early accounts of the civil rights movement, which were heavily influenced by contemporary coverage by newspapers and television, established what some scholars label the dominant narrative. These accounts begin with the US Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education that declared segregated public school segregation unconstitutional or with the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–1956; they end either with the Selma, Alabama, demonstrations of 1965 or the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Early scholarship focused on mass protests, prominent civil rights leaders, national or regional organizations, and the actions of the federal government. Since the 1980s, however, many historians have extended the chronology of the movement, both backward and forward in time, widened its geography beyond the South, called attention to the contributions of women and lesser-known figures, emphasized the importance of armed self-defense in the southern movement, and studied the interplay of local, regional, and national civil rights struggles.

Historiography

Historiographical writings, such as overviews in Lawson 2003 and Verney 2006, explain how the field has developed, introduce and assess key works, and sometimes suggest questions and sources for future research. Gaines 2002, Hall 2005, and Theoharis 2006 argue that there was a “long civil rights movement” that stretched from the New Deal era through to and beyond the 1960s, and that this movement was national in scope. Sympathetic to left-wing radicalism and disturbed by resurgent conservatism in the United States, Hall issues a rallying cry against the conservative appropriation of color-blind rhetoric that ignores structural racism. Eagles 2000 contends that the many former civil rights activists, participants, and sympathizers who have written about the movement have contributed to a celebratory approach to the movement that also fails to study the white supporters of racial segregation. Unconvinced by advocacy of a “long civil rights movement,” Cha-Jua and Lang 2007 and Lawson 2011 argue that the organized public protests of the 1950s and 1960s in the South made that period distinctive.

Cha-Jua, Sundiata Keita, and Clarence Lang. “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies.” Journal of African American History 92.2 (2007): 265–288.
DOI: 10.1086/JAAHv92n2p265 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A critical response to advocates of a “long civil rights movement,” arguing that such an approach neglects change over time, downplays the distinctive character of protests in the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, and masks differences between the South and the rest of the nation.
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Eagles, Charles W. “Toward New Histories of the Civil Rights Era.” Journal of Southern History 66.4 (2000): 815–848.
DOI: 10.2307/2588012 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Making an analogy with American historians who wrote about the Cold War while it was in progress, Eagles argues that civil rights historians have often lacked sufficient detachment from their subject and largely neglected to investigate differences among white segregationists that influenced the movement’s approach.
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Gaines, Kevin. “The Historiography of the Struggle for Black Equality since 1945.” In A Companion to Post-1945 America. Edited by Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig, 211–234. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002.
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Gaines favorably assesses critiques of liberalism and the civil rights movement, endorses early expositions of the “long civil rights movement,” and laments state and judicial undermining of the Voting Rights Act.
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Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd. “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past.” Journal of American History 91.4 (2005): 1233–1263.
DOI: 10.2307/3660172 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Discerns a nationwide “long civil rights movement” between the 1930s and 1970s that emphasized economic justice as much as equality under the law.
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Lawson, Steven F. “Long Origins of the Short Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1968.” In Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement. Edited by Danielle L. McGuire and John Dittmer, 9–38. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011.
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In a challenge to scholars of the long civil rights movement, Lawson defends the idea of a “short civil rights movement” between 1954 and 1968 that was characterized by distinctive mass public protests with charismatic leadership focused on specific goals.
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Lawson, Steven F. “Freedom Them, Freedom Now: The Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement.” In Civil Rights Crossroads: Nation, Community, and the Black Freedom Struggle. Edited by Steven F. Lawson, 3–28. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003.
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Lawson explains the development of civil rights scholarship, critiques influential studies, and calls for a “multi-dimensional understanding of the civil rights movement” that incorporates the intersection of its local and national manifestations.
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Theoharis, Jeanne. “Black Freedom Studies: Re-imagining and Redefining the Fundamentals.” History Compass 4.2 (2006): 348–367.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00318.x Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Theoharis redefines the civil rights movement as a “national black freedom movement” between the 1940s and 1970s that was led and organized by local communities throughout the United States.
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Verney, Kevern. The Debate on Black Civil Rights in America. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2006.
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Verney briefly summarizes and lists influential scholarly works.
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General Overviews

While there have been many general histories of the civil rights movement, this selection focuses on books published since 1998 and, except for Chappell 2004, which is highly analytical and suitable for graduates, provide narrative and analysis appropriate for undergraduates. Earlier overviews have largely been superseded by later works that take a more expansive view of the movement temporally and spatially, and which pay more attention to the role of women, lesser known figures and organizations, and local and state activities. Aldridge 2011 and Dierenfield 2013 provide basic introductions for students. Cook 1998 is a thorough treatment. Newman 2004 combines narrative and historiographical commentary. Marable 2007 pays particular attention to black radicalism. Both Fairclough 2002 and Tuck 2010 offer detailed studies that are engagingly written for a general audience.

Aldridge, Daniel D. Becoming American: The African American Quest for Civil Rights, 1861–1976. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2011.
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A basic introductory text which argues that a long civil rights era began after the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 and ended during the 1970s. Aldridge refers to “civil rights movements” that “began well before the 1950s and occurred all over the nation.”
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Chappell, David L. A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
DOI: 10.5149/uncp/9780807828199 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
In an interpretive overview, Chappell argues that prophetic religion lay at the center of the southern civil rights movement, while lack of religious support weakened its segregationist opponents.
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Cook, Robert. Sweet Land of Liberty? The African-American Struggle for Civil Rights in the Twentieth Century. London: Longman, 1998.
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A thorough examination of the antecedents and development of the civil rights movement that anticipated the development of scholarship that argues for a long civil rights movement and is particularly attentive to labor and civil rights.
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Dierenfield, Bruce J. The Civil Rights Movement. Rev. ed. London: Routledge, 2013.
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Dierenfield combines a succinct overview with selected documents, mostly from 1954 to 1966, and a useful annotated bibliography. He briefly discusses developments after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968 but regards the movement as largely dissipated before then and further weakened by King’s death.
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Fairclough, Adam. Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality 1890–2000. New York: Penguin, 2002.
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Fairclough places the civil rights movement in the context of a long and continuing struggle for racial equality, and combines an events-driven narrative with description of its major figures.
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Marable, Manning. Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-137-15327-2 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Marable emphasizes leftist contributions to the civil rights movement that other scholars sometimes neglect or downplay and argues that the Cold War severely hampered the black struggle for equality.
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Newman, Mark. The Civil Rights Movement. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
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An introductory text that emphasizes the contribution and diversity of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, recognizes the significance of women, and widens the movement’s chronology beyond the period 1954 to 1965.
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Tuck, Stephen. We Ain’t What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010.
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Covering the period between 1861 and Barack Obama’s inaugural in 2009 as America’s first African American president, Tuck stresses the longevity of African Americans’ efforts to challenge discrimination and improve the conditions of their lives. He endorses the idea of a short civil rights movement, manifest between 1960 and 1965.
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Primary Sources

There are a wealth of primary sources about the civil rights movement that continue to be augmented as activists, participants, and observers share their recollections in interviews, articles, and books, and as scholars produce edited collections of contemporary materials and interviews. Many primary sources have been digitized and/or made available on the Internet by archives, educational institutions, and participants, as well as issued in print form. Some archives have civil rights databases that are searchable and accessible online and more are likely to follow. African American and other contemporary newspapers and magazines, some of which have been digitized, are also useful sources. Widely considered a paper of record, the New York Times has a fully searchable electronic database. The vast array and variety of primary sources available at archives, electronically and in print form, have contributed to and reflected a burgeoning of local and state studies and biographies of neglected figures, as well as aided overviews and studies of presidential administrations and civil rights.

Oral History

Interviews with movement participants, as well as nationally known leaders, have augmented and sometimes challenged our understanding of major events and also revealed many local struggles and the importance of women in the movement. Greenberg 1998 focuses on one civil rights organization. Hampton and Fayer 1990, the Civil Rights History Project, the Eyes on the Prize Interviews and Ralph J. Bunche Collection have a broad range of interviews, while the Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive, Documenting the American South, and the Mississippi Freedom Project focus on particular states, and Raines 1977 on the Deep South. The Voting Rights Act Oral History Project is thematic and examines the impact of landmark civil rights legislation.

Civil Rights History Project.
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A large online collection at the Library of Congress of filmed interviews and transcripts with civil rights activists that concern local and national organizations and many geographical locations.
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Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive.
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An online collection that contains transcripts and some recordings of interviews with civil rights activists and their contemporaries in Mississippi, along with photographs and documents, housed at the University of Southern Mississippi.
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Documenting the American South: Oral Histories of the American South: The Civil Rights Movement.
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Online excerpts of transcripts and recordings relating to the civil rights movement, mostly in North Carolina but also including several other southern states. The materials are drawn from the Southern Oral History Program of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Eyes on the Prize Interviews: The Complete Series.
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Contains full versions and transcripts of extensive interviews filmed for the two series of the Eyes on the Prize PBS civil rights movement documentary first broadcast in 1987 and 1990. The documentary commences in 1954 and addresses the North and South before concluding in the mid-1980s. The interviews, housed at the Film and Media Archive, Washington University, St. Louis, include civil rights leaders, activists, and some of their opponents.
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Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn, ed. A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998.
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Provides edited transcripts of a symposium of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee veterans and a few scholars. Most of the recollections concern the first half of the 1960s.
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Hampton, Henry, and Steve Fayer. Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s. New York: Bantam, 1990.
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Presents edited versions of interviews undertaken for Eyes on the Prize, with introduction and commentaries that provide context and background.
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Mississippi Freedom Project.
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The University of Florida Digital Collections contain transcripts of over two hundred interviews with civil rights activists in Mississippi and prominent figures in the Mississippi Delta.
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Raines, Howell. My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1977.
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Focused on the civil rights movement from Montgomery to Selma, the collection includes interviews with civil rights leaders and lesser-known figures, including women, and segregationists, lawyers, police, and reporters.
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Ralph J. Bunche Collection, Civil Rights Documentation Project, Moorland Spingarn Collection, Howard University, Washington, DC.
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Comprises more than seven hundred transcribed interviews and television transcripts from between 1967 and 1973 that document the civil rights movement.
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Voting Rights Act Oral History Project, Moorland Spingarn Collection, Howard University, Washington, DC.
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Interviews with supporters, opponents, and beneficiaries document the impact of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and efforts to secure its extension. Initiated in 1994, the interviews cover the period between 1965 and 1985.
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Collections

There are several edited collections of primary sources that include important individuals, organizations, and journalism, and provide different perspectives about the movement’s history. Carson, et al. 2003a and Carson, et al. 2003b cover journalism, Burns 1997 the Montgomery bus boycott, and Carson, et al. 1997 on Martin Luther King Jr. By contrast, Carson, et al. 1991, D’Angelo 2001, Lawson and Payne 1998, and Levy 1992 provide a broad range of important documents relating to the civil rights movement.

Burns, Stewart. Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
DOI: 10.5149/uncp/9780807846612 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Contains over one hundred documents pertaining to the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–1956. The collection includes familiar figures, such as Martin Luther King Jr. who became the boycott’s leader, but also those less familiar in the story.
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Carson, Clayborne, David J. Garrow, Gerald Gill, Vincent Harding, and Darlene Clark Hine, eds. The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader. New York: Penguin, 1991.
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A companion to the television series Eyes on the Prize, the collection covers the period from 1954 to the mid-1980s, with later sections dealing with the aftermath of the civil rights movement. The materials include letters, interviews, speeches, writings, and other documents
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Carson, Clayborne, Ralph E. Luker, and Penny A. Russell, eds. The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997–.
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An ongoing project to publish the papers of Martin Luther King Jr., the nation’s best known and most prominent civil rights movement leader, in fourteen volumes. Each volume has an introductory essay and explanatory annotations for documents.
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Carson, Clayborne, David J. Garrow, Bill Kovack, and Carol Polsgrove, eds. Reporting Civil Rights. Vol. 1, American Journalism 1941–1963. New York: Library of America, 2003a.
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A compilation of journalism about race relations and the civil rights movement from World War II until 1963.
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Carson, Clayborne, David J. Garrow, Bill Kovack, and Carol Polsgrove, eds. Reporting Civil Rights. Vol. 2, American Journalism 1963–1973. New York: Library of America, 2003b.
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Journalism about race relations and the civil rights movement from 1963 until 1973.
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D’Angelo, Raymond, ed. The American Civil Rights Movement: Readings and Interpretations. New York: McGraw Hill/Dushkin, 2001.
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Combines scholarly articles and book extracts with documents. The collection includes the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s early years, and its selections imply that the civil rights movement emerged in the 1940s and ended after the success of the Selma, Alabama, campaign of 1965 and the emergence of Black Power. The final chapter includes material about the condition of African Americans in the 1980s and 1990s
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Lawson, Steven F., and Charles Payne. Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 1945–1968. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998.
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Key documents preceded by stimulating essays by Lawson and Payne focusing on the importance of the federal and local levels respectively for understanding civil rights history.
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Levy, Peter B., ed. Let Freedom Ring: A Documentary History of the Modern Civil Rights Movement. New York: Praeger, 1992.
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Contains nearly one hundred documents ranging from the 1940s to the 1980s, including sermons, speeches, memoirs and legal cases, with editorial introductions. Levy’s documents selection and arrangement suggests there was a short southern civil rights movement that was followed by the emergence of Black Power.
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Internet Resources

There are many primary sources on the Internet that include a good range of activities and types of material, much of which is not readily available in printed form or is otherwise confined to archives. These materials are particularly helpful for undergraduate research projects. Civil Rights Movement Veterans, Freedom Now!, the Freedom Summer Digital Collection, and Sovereignty Commission Online focus on Mississippi. The Greensboro Sit-ins and The Montgomery Bus Boycott concern specific events in civil rights history. The Southern Courier Archives contain an entire run of a weekly paper that covered the civil rights movement and the Jim Peppler Southern Courier Photograph Collection photographs from its staff photographer. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute focuses on a leading figure in the movement.

Civil Rights Movement Veterans.
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A website created by participants in the Mississippi civil rights movement that includes audio interviews, documents, and photographs.
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Freedom Now!.
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A searchable database of documents from the Tougaloo College archives about the Mississippi civil rights movement.
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Freedom Summer Digital Collection.
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An extensive collection of organizational and personal papers, newsletters, press clippings, brochures, and photographs about the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project that are searchable and held by the Wisconsin Historical Society.
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Greensboro Sit-ins.
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Hosted by the Greensboro News and Record, the site documents the sit-ins that began in the city in February 1960. It contains local news reports, brief biographies of key players, a photograph gallery, and a chronology.
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Jim Peppler Southern Courier Photograph Collection.
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A searchable online collection at the Alabama Department of Archives and History that contains over eleven thousand photographs of the civil rights movement, social conditions in central Alabama, and the funeral of Martin Luther Jr. taken by Jim Peppler, a photographer at the Southern Courier.
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Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.
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Contains a wealth of materials relating to Martin Luther King Jr. and his civil rights activities, and access to documents, chronologies, and introductory essays from the published volumes of King’s papers.
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The Montgomery Bus Boycott: They Changed the World.
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Maintained by the Montgomery Advertiser, the site contains a selection of the newspaper’s reports about the boycott, a photograph gallery, biographies and reports about boycott participants, and filmed interview clips.
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Southern Courier Archives.
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Online copies of the Southern Courier, a weekly paper published between 1965 and 1968. Based in Montgomery, Alabama, and produced by a biracial staff, the paper sought to provide unbiased coverage of the civil rights movement.
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Sovereignty Commission Online.
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Fully searchable collection of the files of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a state-funded agency established in 1956 to protect segregation and undermine civil rights activity. Users should be aware that the commission conducted its investigations partly in an effort to discredit civil rights activists. Its information was sometimes factually inaccurate. Consequently, commission reports should be treated with due caution and corroborated by other sources. The files also contain newspaper clippings, civil rights flyers, and other material produced by the movement.
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Memoirs and Autobiographies

There are many published accounts from civil rights activists. They include those who held prominent leadership positions in major civil rights organizations, notably Farmer 1998, Forman 1972, Lewis and D’Orso 1998, White 1994, Wilkins and Matthews 1982, and Young 1996, and also lesser known figures who provide additional insights about the movement, including Height 2005, whose author worked with many civil rights leaders, Moody 2014 about Mississippi, and Robinson 1987 on the Montgomery bus boycott.

Farmer, James. Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1998.
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Originally published in 1985. Recollections from a cofounder of the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942, who served as its national director between 1961 and 1966.
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Forman, James. The Making of Black Revolutionaries. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972.
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Forman tells the story of his transformation from a key member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to an advocate of Marxist revolution by the late 1960s and argues for continuity between the civil rights movement and Black Power.
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Height, Dorothy. Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir. New York: Public Affairs, 2005.
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Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, recalls her long career of civil rights activism.
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Lewis, John, with Michael D’Orso. Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.
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Lewis, who served as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee between 1963 and 1966, recalls his involvement in many southern civil rights movement protests in the late 1950s and 1960s.
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Moody, Anne. Coming of Age in Mississippi. New York: Bantam Dell, 2014.
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Originally published in 1968. A compelling account of growing up in southwest Mississippi and joining the civil rights movement by a young African American, who discusses the destructive nature of racism and provides a first-hand account of the movement from a foot soldier’s perspective.
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Robinson, Jo Ann Gibson. The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson. Edited by David J. Garrow. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987.
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An insider’s account of the Montgomery bus boycott from the president of the Women’s Political Council, which helped initiate the boycott. Robinson focuses attention on the crucial role of African American women in the protest.
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White, Walter. A Man Called White. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994.
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Originally published in 1948. An autobiography by the executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People between 1931 and 1955. White, who joined the organization in 1918, discusses many of its campaigns and his observations of racism.
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Wilkins, Roy, with Tom Matthews. Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins. New York: Viking Press, 1982.
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An autobiography by Walter White’s successor as executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People between 1955 and 1977. Wilkins emphasizes and defends the organization’s contribution to the civil rights movement, assesses the response of successive presidents, and condemns Black Power.
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Young, Andrew J. An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.
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A revealing autobiography by an important staff member and later executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that provides an insider’s account of its campaigns and leading figures during the 1960s
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Foundations and Early Beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement

While historians disagree about when the civil rights movement started, many of these works provide support for those who trace the movement’s origins to the first half of the 20th century and argue in favor of a “long civil rights movement.” Advocates of a long movement often emphasize the contributions of the Communist Party USA and its satellite organizations to civil rights organizing, especially during the 1930s. Gellman 2012 and Sullivan 2009 present organizational studies whereas Gilmore 2008 and Sullivan 1996 discuss the Popular Front and Kelley 1990 Communist organizing in rural Alabama. Goluboff 2007, Fairclough 1995, and Lau 2006 discuss local African American agency, which Hine 1979 also incorporates into the author’s story of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s battle against the white primary in Texas. By contrast, Pfeffer 1990 provides a biography of civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph.

Fairclough, Adam. Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915–1972. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1995.
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Although Fairclough notes discontinuities in the civil rights movement, he argues that “black protest between the late 1930s and the mid-1950s” in Louisiana was “the first act of a two-act play.”
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Gellman, Erik S. Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
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Gellman investigates the history of the African American–led National Negro Congress (1935–1947) by examining five of its seventy-five councils. He contends that the NNC illustrates blacks’ vital role in the Popular Front of the 1930s. However, the council lost support as it became “increasingly aligned” with an inconsistent Communist Party that repeatedly changed course to fit the foreign policy needs of the Soviet Union.
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Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.
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Gilmore regards Communists as early leaders of a southern civil rights struggle that began in 1919 and, in the 1930s, saw Communists ally with some southern liberals in a Popular Front against segregation and black disenfranchisement. However, she argues from a narrow evidence base, mostly limited to Alabama and North Carolina.
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Goluboff, Risa L. The Lost Promise of Civil Rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
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Goluboff focuses on legal cases for African American agricultural and industrial workers’ rights that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People pursued in the 1940s before narrowing its litigation strategy to challenging segregation. The result, she contends, was a missed opportunity for a more broad-based attack on racial inequality including economics. Her study emphasizes black workers’ agency.
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Hine, Darlene Clark. Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas. Millwood, NY: KTO, 1979.
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Hine discusses the long but ultimately successful efforts of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to overturn the white primary in Smith v. Allwright (1944), which, she claims with considerable exaggeration, was “the watershed in the struggle for black people.”
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Kelley, Robin D. G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.
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Kelley study finds that by focusing on local matters, the Communist Party in Alabama attracted working-class African Americans, who viewed the party and Marxism through their own interests, radicalism, and impulse to confront racial subordination.
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Lau, Peter F. Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Equality since 1865. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006.
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Lau argues that while African American activists in South Carolina sought enfranchisement and legality equality, they regarded them as necessary for, and part of, a struggle for economic advancement. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People spearheaded the civil rights movement in the state and included women and the working class.
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Pfeffer, Paula F. A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990.
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Pfeffer’s biography discusses Randolph’s organizing of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, leadership of the National Negro Congress, and subsequent extensive civil rights activities.
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Sullivan, Patricia. Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
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Sullivan discusses grass-roots biracial efforts in the South to bring democracy in the 1930s and 1940s. She examines organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Southern Human Welfare Conference, and a host of lesser known progressive southerners of both races. She concludes that mounting anticommunism after World War II undermined their efforts.
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Sullivan, Patricia. Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement. New York: New Press, 2009.
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An official history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People that discusses the organization between its founding in 1909 and the 1950s. Sullivan’s largely celebratory account argues that although the group publicized lynchings and unsuccessfully lobbied for a federal anti-lynching law, its litigation strategy overturned segregated housing ordinances and the white primary, opened up higher education to blacks, and made segregated public schools unconstitutional.
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The Civil Rights Movement in the 1940s and 1950s

The argument for a “long civil rights movement” stresses black activism in the North as well as the South, and explores the role played by left-wing labor unions, especially in the 1940s.

Litigation, Lobbying, and Protest

Feldman 2004, Kirk 2002, Morris 1984, and Tuck 2001 discuss civil rights activism in the South, Biondi 2003 and Sugrue 2008 activism in the North, and Theoharis and Woodard 2005 what they consider to have been a national black freedom struggle. Kluger 1976 details school desegregation litigation that led to the Brown ruling. While some of these studies highlight wartime activism, Kruse and Tuck 2012 caution against regarding World War II as a turning point. Horne 1988 focuses on the postwar Civil Rights Congress that was destroyed by the Red Scare.

Biondi, Martha. To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
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Biondi argues that the civil rights movement in 1940s New York City was grounded in a labor-based, leftist Popular Front of the 1930s. Rather than integration, the movement sought equality in all aspects of life, including housing and employment, and an end to police brutality. However, the movement’s leftist associations made it vulnerable during the domestic Red Scare which brought it to a stop.
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Feldman, Glenn, ed. Before Brown: Civil Rights and White Backlash in the Modern South. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004.
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The collection focuses on southern civil rights activism in the 1940s and early 1950s, and opposition from white segregationists.
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Horne, Gerald. Communist Front? The Civil Rights Congress, 1946–1956. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988.
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Horne offers a positive assessment of the Civil Rights Congress’s activities and achievements, particularly in working with other groups to secure “civil liberties rulings that expanded the rights of all in the United States.” He argues that “Communists played a leading role” in the Congress, but it was not “directed from the Kremlin” and did not always follow policies “in lockstep” with the Communist Party USA.
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Kruse, Kevin M., and Stephen Tuck, eds. Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
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A collection of essays, which, the editors claim, demonstrate that World War II was not “a watershed of civil rights activism” and did not see “a widespread mobilization of the civil rights struggle.” Instead, “the impact and legacy of war were decidedly ambiguous, at times empowering black activists, at times constraining them, at times emboldening those seeking to preserve racial hierarchies, and at times making surprisingly little difference at all.”
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Kirk, John A. Redefining the Color Line: Black Activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1940–1970. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.
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Kirk argues that civil rights activism in Little Rock preceded and continued after the well-known school desegregation crisis at Central High School in 1957.
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Kluger, Richard. Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976.
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A thoroughly researched massive study that traces the long history of racial discrimination in America, the background of the five public school desegregation cases consolidated under Brown v. Board of Education, and how the US Supreme Court reached unanimity.
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Morris, Aldon D. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. New York: Free Press, 1984.
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Morris regards the civil rights movement as a southern movement centered on nonviolent direct action protests with origins in the 1950s. In his view, the southern black church provided the movement with the organizational networks, leadership, and finance that were crucial to its success, but he overestimates the effectiveness of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the 1950s.
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Sugrue, Thomas J. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. New York: Random House, 2008.
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Sugrue contends that a northern civil rights movement developed in the 1930s and 1940s, initially from a Popular Front of black and white leftists, and continued in various forms into the 1970s. The movement challenged segregation and discrimination in employment, housing, schools, and public services that resulted from federal, state, and local government policies, realtors’ practices and widespread northern white racism.
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Theoharis, Jeanne, and Komozi Woodard, eds. Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America. New York: New York University Press, 2005.
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An edited volume of essays that includes examples from across the nation of a developing civil rights movement.
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Tuck, Stephen G. N. Beyond Atlanta: The Struggle for Racial Equality in Georgia, 1940–1980. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2001.
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Tuck argues that the 1940s marked the beginning of a concerted drive for civil rights in Georgia, stimulated by rising wartime expectations, the election of a moderate governor, Ellis Arnall, who repealed the poll tax, and the outlawing of white primary elections. In 1946, white supremacists regained political control, which continued through the 1950s.
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Organized Labor and Civil Rights

The works Korstad and Lichtenstein 1988, Korstad 2003, and Honey 1993 argue that the Red Scare and employer hostility ended the prospects for a developing civil right unionism focused on racial equality and economic issues. They find that Communists were particularly effective union organizers and that to a limited extent civil rights unionism crossed racial lines. Pfeffer 1990 discusses the civil rights work of A. Philip Randolph, leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, an all–African American union and Arnesen 2001 the activities of lesser known black railroad unions. Arnesen 2001, Draper 1994, Minchin 2001, Nelson 2001, and Salmond 2004 emphasize that the great majority of southern white union members opposed racial equality and desegregation. Their works suggest that white rank and file hostility, rather than the Red Scare, doomed the prospects for an effective and widespread coalition between organized labor and the civil rights movement.

Arnesen, Eric. Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
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Faced with persistent racism from white railroad employers and their white employees, African American railroad workers, who included porters, firemen, red caps, and brakemen, created their own black labor unions. Arnesen contends that their efforts helped prepare the way for and contributed to the civil rights movement, especially during World War II when they utilized the Fair Employment Practice Committee and, more effectively, the US Supreme Court.
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Draper, Alan. Conflict of Interests: Organized Labor and the Civil Rights Movement in the South, 1954–1968. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1994.
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Draper argues that in the 1950s the white state leaders of unions in the South did not support the Brown public school desegregation ruling overtly. Instead, they called for the maintenance of public schools when segregationist politicians closed or threatened to close them to prevent desegregation and argued that segregationist leaders were also anti-union. However, white rank and file unionists overwhelmingly opposed desegregation and racial equality.
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Honey, Michael K. Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
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Honey provides examples of interracial cooperation in Memphis during the late 1930s and 1940s among Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions with Communist leadership that held out the prospect of developing a labor–civil rights movement alliance. However, the failure of the CIO’s Operation Dixie launched in 1946 to unionize the South and the Red Scare destroyed left-led unionism and with it any promise of biracial unionism.
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Korstad, Robert Rogers. Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth Century South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
DOI: 10.5149/uncp/9780807854549 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Korstad discusses how African American and white Communists in the 1940s organized tobacco workers in Winston-Salem and established a largely black union local that improved workers’ pay and conditions. The union revived the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and increased black voter registration, which led to the election of the city’s first black alderman. The Red Scare and mechanization destroyed the union.
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Korstad, Robert, and Nelson Lichtenstein. “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals and the Early Civil Rights Movement.” Journal of American History 75.3 (1988): 786–811.
DOI: 10.2307/1901530 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A pioneering exposition of what later became known as the long civil rights movement. Korstad and Lichtenstein argue that the early civil rights movement, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, addressed economic as well as civil rights discrimination, constituting a “lost opportunity” for a very different movement from that which took form between 1954 and 1965.
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Minchin, Timothy J. The Color of Work: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Southern Paper Industry, 1945–1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
DOI: 10.5149/uncp/9780807849330 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Local and national paper companies established rigid segregation in their southern plants that white-led unions accepted and replicated in their locals when they unionized the industry in the 1930s and 1940s. Often veterans of World War II and the Korean War, African American unionists challenged discrimination but had no impact until, assisted by civil rights lawyers, they utilized the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that forbade racial discrimination in employment.
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Nelson, Bruce. Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
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Nelson’s study of longshoremen in New York, the West Coast, and New Orleans and of steelworkers begins in the 1850s and extends into the 1960s. He argues that white workers largely opposed the African American struggle for equality in the workplace, even when white union leaders offered it some degree of support.
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Pfeffer, Paula F. A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990.
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Pfeffer addresses union leader A. Philip Randolph’s many civil rights activities, mostly in the 1940s and 1950s, which included the March on Washington Movement and organizing civil rights marches in Washington, DC, in the late 1950s, and his influence on Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr.
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Salmond, John A. Southern Struggles: The Southern Labor Movement and the Civil Rights Struggle. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004.
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Salmond’s synthesis focuses on the period from the 1930s until the late 1960s. He contends that the racism of white workers prevented the development of a significantly biracial movement for economic and social justice in the South.
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Civil Rights and the Early Cold War

Scholars disagree about the impact of the early Cold War on the civil rights movement. Some studies, such as Dudziak 2000, Borstelmann 2001, and Rosenberg 2006, find that the Cold War aided the movement in some ways while at the same time narrowing acceptable grounds for dissent in the United States and forestalling any possibility of a mass protest movement. By contrast, other scholars, including Anderson 2003, Korstad and Lichtenstein 1988, and Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin 2002, contend that the war and the domestic Red Scare that accompanied it decimated the movement’s radical and leftist groups and led the movement to jettison a developing broad-based human rights agenda that, had it endured, would have challenged the inequities of racism rooted, they argue, in capitalism and imperialism. Arnesen 2012a and Arnesen 2012b find these arguments overestimate the Communist left’s significance and neglect a broad-based, widely focused civil rights movement. Gore 2011 argues that although the Cold War undermined leftist organizations, it also provided opportunities for black leftist women to assert their agency, while Lau 2006 finds that the civil rights movement in South Carolina was not hampered by the Cold War. Plummer 1996 and Von Eschen 1997 chronicle African Americans’ interest and involvement in foreign affairs.

Anderson, Carol. Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
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Anderson argues that the efforts of the National Negro Congress (NNC), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) to petition the United Nations to act against human rights violations in the United States were defeated by the Truman administration and conservative southern Democrats. Pressured by the administration, the NAACP retreated to the narrower realm of civil rights, while red-baiting destroyed the NNC and CRC.
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Arnesen, Eric. “Civil Rights and the Cold War at Home: Postwar Activism, Anticommunism, and the Decline of the Left.” American Communist History 11.1 (2012a): 5–44.
DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2012.665246 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Arnesen contends that scholars of a “long civil rights movement” have overestimated the strength of a Communist Party “left-labor-civil rights coalition” after World War II and ignored the party’s rejection of Popular Front alliances and its internal purges. He argues that early postwar civil rights activism was not dependent on the Communist left and included an anticolonialist and economic agenda.
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Arnesen, Eric. “The Final Conflict? On the Scholarship of Civil Rights, the Left and the Cold War.” American Communist History 11.1 (2012b): 63–80.
DOI: 10.1080/14743892.2012.664888 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Arnesen responds to his critics and maintains that during the early Cold War “the cause of civil rights continued to advance on numerous fronts, despite the repression of the CP [Communist Party].”
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Borstelmann, Thomas. The Cold War and the Color Line. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
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Borstelmann argues that American presidents, albeit with greater domestic leverage and success, sought “to limit racial polarization, both in the American South and South Africa, by containing the forces of white racism and channeling the energies of race reformers along moderate lines” while “encouraging gradual change.”
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Dudziak, Mary L. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
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Dudziak argues that concerns about America’s image abroad helped “motivate” successive presidential administrations from 1946 until the mid-1960s to support “civil-rights reform,” although the Cold War and domestic anticommunism also “led to a narrowing of acceptable civil rights discourse.” Following civil rights legislation, “America’s image seemed secure, [and] Cold War concerns dropped out as one of the factors encouraging civil-rights reform.”
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Gore, Dayo F. Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War. New York: New York University Press, 2011.
DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9780814732366.001.0001 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Gore contends that female African American activists who joined the Popular Front against economic and racial discrimination in the 1930s continued such activism during the early Cold War and often into the 1960s and 1970s. The undermining of black leftist organizations and their male leadership by the domestic Red Scare provided such women with more opportunity to challenge and organize against racism and sexism, including gender discrimination within leftist groups.
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Korstad, Robert, and Nelson Lichtenstein. “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals and the Early Civil Rights Movement.” Journal of American History 75.3 (1988): 786–811.
DOI: 10.2307/1901530 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Based on case studies of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Detroit in the mid-1940s, Korstad and Lichtenstein argue that intolerance of radical dissent and leftism during the early Cold War destroyed a developing civil rights unionism in which organized labor helped shape the agenda of an emerging civil rights movement focused on economic issues as well as equality under the law.
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Lau, Peter F. Democracy Rising: South Carolina and the Fight for Black Equality since 1865. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006.
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Lau finds that the African American struggle for legal equality and economic justice in South Carolina continued despite the onset of the Cold War and was led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which almost doubled its branches in the state during the decade after 1945.
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Plummer, Brenda Gayle. Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
DOI: 10.5149/uncp/9780807845752 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Plummer documents the interest and involvement of the African American elite, and sometimes the black populace, in American foreign policy. She discusses black efforts to influence the United Nations to address racism at home and abroad, and colonialism, while recognizing the diversity of African American opinion.
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Rosenberg, Jonathan. How Far the Promised Land? World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
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Rosenberg claims that African American leaders adopted “color-conscious internationalism” that sought to involve international organizations in America’s racial problems and sought cooperation with the world’s non-white peoples. He contends that America’s effectiveness abroad was hampered by its tolerance of racism at home and emphasizes the benefits the Cold War afforded the civil rights movement.
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Stepan-Norris, Judith, and Maurice Zeitlin. Left Out: Reds and America’s Industrial Unions. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511499395 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Sociologists Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin’s study of eighteen Communist-led unions in the Congress of Industrial Organizations during the Popular Front of the 1930s and 1940s argues that they supported equal rights more than other unions. Consequently, their purge from the CIO as a result of the domestic Red Scare hampered the civil rights struggle in the short and longer term.
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Von Eschen, Penny M. Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.
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Von Eschen contends that the Communist-influenced Council on African Affairs was central to African American anticolonialism and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People linked its criticism of American foreign policy to the domestic denial of civil rights. However, the Cold War led the NAACP to support its government’s foreign policy and focus on civil rights at home, and the government to target and discredit the council.
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Massive Resistance to Desegregation in the South

In similar ways to their debates about the civil rights movement, historians disagree about when massive resistance began and ended, and the extent to which it was a top-down or a bottom-up phenomenon. Some historians, such as the author of Bartley 1969, view massive resistance as essentially southern white opposition to public school desegregation by all lawful means, while others, such as Lewis 2006, interpret massive resistance more broadly to include all opposition to the demands of the civil rights movement. Lewis 2004, Woods 2004, and Katagiri 2014 explore the importance of anticommunism in massive resistance. McMillen 1971 also considers ideology in his study of the Citizens’ Councils. Jacoway 2007 discusses the Little Rock school desegregation crisis, while Klarman 1994 argues that paradoxically massive resistance benefited the civil rights movement.

Bartley, Numan V. The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South during the 1950s. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969.
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Bartley interprets massive resistance as a top-down phenomenon orchestrated by “neobourbon” politicians from the Black Belt who were anxious to retain their control of the South by rallying whites behind segregation under threat from the civil rights movement. Bartley ends his book in 1961 by which time massive resistance had given way to token desegregation, conceded by moderate segregationists who were concerned by the negative economic consequences of continued staunch resistance.
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Jacoway, Elizabeth. Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis That Shocked the Nation. New York: Free, 2007.
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Jacoway argues that fear of miscegenation (racial intermarriage) mainly motivated white resistance to desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957 and that Governor Orval Faubus acted initially to prevent desegregation not from political opportunism but because he feared segregationist violence. However, if miscegenation was so determinative, the question remains why elite white women mounted a successful campaign to reopen schools even with token desegregation.
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Katagiri, Yasuhiro. Black Freedom, White Resistance, and Red Menace: Civil Rights and Anticommunism in the Jim Crow South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014.
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Katagiri investigates state agencies in several southern states that sought to discredit the civil rights movement as communist. He links southern and northern white anticommunism by cataloguing the work of anti-communist campaigners Myers G. Lowman of Cincinnati and J. B. Matthews of New York with southern state agencies and committees. After the federal government intervened to enforce school desegregation in Little Rock, Katagiri argues, segregationists emphasized anticommunism over states’ rights.
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Klarman, Michael J. “How Brown Changed Race Relations: The Backlash Thesis.” Journal of American History 81.1 (1994): 81–118.
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Klarman’s self-titled “backlash thesis” controversially contends that the Brown decision “was a relatively unimportant motivating factor for the civil rights movement.” Instead, its importance lay in driving southern politics “to the right on racial issues,” resulting in the election of militant segregationists. Their brutal suppression of civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s, he maintains, outraged northern whites, who pressured the federal government to enact far-reaching civil rights legislation.
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Lewis, George. The White South and the Red Menace: Segregationists, Anticommunism, and Massive Resistance, 1945–1965. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2004.
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After describing the history of anticommunism in the South, Lewis uses Virginia and North Carolina as case studies to explore “genuine and cynical anticommunism.” He argues that as massive resistance increasingly proved counterproductive in the late 1950s and early 1960s, segregationists employed anticommunism for “what it might achieve for the maintenance of white supremacy, not because it expressed any great ideological principle.”
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Lewis, George. Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement. London: Hodder Arnold, 2006.
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Lewis contends that massive resistance was diverse in composition, ideas, and strategy, and often shaped by grass-roots initiatives as well as by political elites. It peaked between 1956 and 1960, declined over the next five years, while becoming increasingly brutal, and assumed more cunning guises thereafter, such as mechanisms to dilute the impact of black votes. Elements of massive resistance, he finds, merged into a new mood of American conservatism.
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McMillen, Neil R. The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance in the Second Reconstruction, 1954–64. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971.
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McMillen divides his study of the Citizens’ Councils and like-minded organizations in the South into three parts: composition; ideology; and tactics. He argues the councils drew their membership primarily from businessmen and professionals, believed that Africans Americans were biologically inferior, and used economic, social, and political pressure in their efforts to preserve segregation. Some council members also used violence against their opponents.
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Woods, Jeff. Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948–1968. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004.
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Woods examines the “local, state, and federal institutions [that] directed the southern red scare” and prominent southern red-baiters, arguing that “a conservative white-power elite led” the effort to try to discredit the civil rights movement. Although damaged, the movement eventually succeeded in securing the momentous civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Woods derives most of his evidence from the Deep South.
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The Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s

The first half of the 1960s, which saw civil rights protests peak and the movement achieve its greatest legislative success, has received a great deal of scholarly analysis. Historians have also examined the impact of the Vietnam Water and Black Power on the movement, and their contribution to its fragmentation.

Direct Action Protests in the South and Border States

Scholarship by Branch 1988, Branch 1998, Fairclough 1987, Garrow 1986, Meier 2001, and Morris 1984 considers the contribution of major civil rights organizations and leaders, especially Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to direct action protest, and Eskew 1997 focuses on the intersection of local and national struggles in Birmingham, Alabama. Arsenault 2006 discusses the Freedom Rides of 1961 that had local, state, and national significance. Chafe 1980 and Thornton 2002 emphasize the importance of local initiative in the civil rights movement.

Arsenault, Raymond. Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
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Arsenault provides a detailed account of the Freedom Rides of 1961, the violence they faced, and the complicity of the federal government, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Alabama and Mississippi governors in denying the riders their civil rights. He also examines the impact of their experience on the riders.
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Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.
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The first of a narrative-driven civil rights trilogy that often places Martin Luther King Jr. at the center of events. Branch’s bestsellers both reflected and helped shaped popular perceptions of the movement as taking place between 1954 and 1968. The first volume won a Pulitzer Prize.
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Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.
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Branch tells the story of the best known civil rights protests between 1963 and 1965, culminating with the beginning of the Selma voting rights protests. He also examines Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover’s relentless efforts to destroy Martin Luther King Jr.
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Chafe, William H. Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.
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Chafe examines race relations in Greensboro mostly between 1954 and 1971, during which time white leaders projected an image of “civility” in race relations that helped perpetuate racial discrimination and conceded change only under intense pressure. He also presents a detailed analysis of the lunch counter sit-ins in 1960 that sparked a wave of similar sit-ins in much of the South and other civil rights activities.
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Eskew, Glenn T. But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggles. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
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Eskew examines differences between the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Fred Shuttlesworth, who led its Birmingham affiliate the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, during the civil rights campaign of 1963 in the city. Eskew favorably contrasts Shuttlesworth’s uncompromising stand for civil rights with Martin Luther King Jr. who “accommodated the desires of the establishment while compromising the demands of the movement.”
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Fairclough, Adam. To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987.
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A well-written, thought-provoking history and analysis of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King Jr. that also examines the organization in the first years after King’s assassination.
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Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: William Morrow, 1986.
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An exhaustive, meticulously researched study that emphasizes narrative over analysis. It won a Pulitzer Prize.
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Meier, August. “On the Role of Martin Luther King.” In The American Civil Rights Movement: Readings and Interpretations. Edited by Raymond D’Angelo, 195–202. New York: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, 2001.
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Originally published in 1965. An incisive essay by a white scholar-participant who characterizes Martin Luther King Jr. as a “conservative militant,” able to communicate effectively to black and white audiences alike. While King participated in campaigns that largely failed to achieve their local objectives, Meier argues, they sometimes had a crucial impact in advancing the movement’s aims before a national audience and in bringing supportive federal action.
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Morris, Aldon D. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. New York: Free Press, 1984.
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Morris, a sociologist, argues that rather than being spontaneous the sit-ins of 1960 were organized and supported by civil rights activists in the Congress of Racial Equality, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He underestimates the spontaneity that accounted for the sit-ins’ rapid spread across much of the urban South and the organizational weaknesses of the SCLC.
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Thornton, J. Mills. Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002.
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Thornton outlines how the civil rights movement successfully exploited the intransigence of white authorities in three Alabama cities and divisions among whites regarding what they were prepared to give up to preserve segregation. Responding to changes in municipal politics, local activism developed when African Americans perceived opportunities to capitalize on differences between unbending militant segregationists and business-oriented moderate segregationists, who were prepared to make concessions to protect economic development.
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The Movement in Mississippi

Influential works by Dittmer 1994 and Payne 1995, together with oral history, helped encourage an outpouring of books and articles about the movement in Mississippi, one of the most racially repressive states in the nation. African American women were especially important in the civil rights struggle throughout the state and especially in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. Growing appreciation of their role contributed to wider reassessment of women’s importance within the movement as a whole, such as Crawford, et al. 1993, and across the nation. Eagles 2009 chronicles the desegregation of the University of Mississippi, while Branch 1998 and Hogan 2007 join Dittmer 1994 in paying particular attention to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Andrews 2004 and Newman 2004 examine the movement in some parts of Mississippi from the 1960s into the 1980s.

Andrews, Kenneth T. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: The Mississippi Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacy. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
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A sociological study of “the continuity and transformation of the Mississippi civil rights movement from the early 1960s through the early 1980s” that concentrates on Bolivar, Holmes, and Madison counties and emphasizes a “community-organizing tradition.”
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Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.
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Branch addresses the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964 and its aftermath, especially the efforts of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to be seated at the Democratic Party’s national convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
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Crawford, Vicki, et al. eds. Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
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An important collection of essays that challenged scholars’ then widespread neglect of women’s vital role in the civil rights movement. The collection contains four essays about women in the Mississippi movement, including Charles Payne’s provocative claim that in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, “Men Led, but Women Organized.”
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Dittmer, John. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
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A pioneering study of the movement in the Magnolia state that traces the civil rights movement to the aftermath of World War II before the crucial arrival of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the early 1960s. Dittmer analyzes class conflicts within the Mississippi movement but prematurely terminates his study in 1968.
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Eagles, Charles W. The Price of Defiance: James Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
DOI: 10.5149/9780807895597_eagles Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
A well-researched study of the desegregation of the University of Mississippi in 1962 by James Meredith and its aftermath. It includes an extensive discussion of segregationist perspectives.
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Hogan, Wesley C. Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
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Hogan’s study discusses Bob Moses’s organizing work in Mississippi, the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964, and the attempt of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to unseat the racially discriminatory regular state delegation to the Democratic Party’s national convention
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Newman, Mark. Divine Agitators: The Delta Ministry and Civil Rights in Mississippi. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2004.
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Newman tells the story of the Delta Ministry, inaugurated in 1964 by the National Council of Churches, to assist the African American poor in parts of Mississippi. By 1967, the ministry maintained the largest field staff of any civil rights group in the South, but budget and staff cuts in 1971 substantially reduced its operations.
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Payne, Charles M. I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
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Payne, a sociologist, uses oral history conducted with local Mississippi activists as the main source for a detailed study of the civil rights movement, mostly in Greenwood, in the 1960s, which he links to a grass-roots African American organizing tradition in the state that dated from the 1940s. He accepts his interviewees’ recollections uncritically without confirmation from other evidence.
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Armed Self-Defense and the Southern Civil Rights Movement

While Martin Luther King Jr. and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s founding statement characterized nonviolence as lying at the heart of the civil rights movement, since the millennium scholars, often influenced by Tyson 1999, have increasingly recognized how armed self-defense in the South operated alongside and often complemented nonviolent protest and organizing. Umoja 2013 explains that armed protection enabled demonstrations and boycotts to proceed and deterred segregationist aggression and retaliation, while Walker 2001 discusses African Americans’ real and rhetorical violence in the southern movement. Hill 2004 examines the Deacons for Defense and Justice, while Strain 2005 and Wendt 2007 present a series of case studies. Walker 2004 focuses on Gloria Richardson to explore how the media shaped perceptions of the movement. Cobb 2015 argues that armed self-defense became less important in the southern movement after 1965, whereas Umoja 2013 finds it became more significant.

Cobb, Charles E., Jr. This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.
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Cobb combines his recollections as a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizer in Mississippi with interviews with other former civil rights activists and secondary sources to argue that armed self-defense “ensured the survival not only of countless brave men and women but also of the freedom struggle itself.” He claims that “the need for organized self-defense seemed to decrease after the early 1960s” and concludes his study in 1966.
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Hill, Lance. The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
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Hill documents the history of the Deacons for Defense and Justice founded in Jonesboro, Louisiana, in 1964, which expanded to twenty-one chapters in Louisiana and Mississippi, protected civil rights activities, and operated until 1967. The Deacons were working-class and often veterans. Surveying the civil rights movement, Hill contends that “the white power structure was unwilling to make any meaningful concessions unless there was a threat of black civil violence.”
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Strain, Christopher B. Pure Fire: Self-Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2005.
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Focusing on the period between 1955 and 1968, Strain argues that armed self-defense, which had a long tradition in African American history, was an intrinsic part of the civil rights movement and that “more than a tactic used alongside nonviolence. It was an essential part of the struggle for black citizenship itself.”
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Tyson, Timothy B. Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
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A biography of army veteran Robert F. Williams who recruited a working-class National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter in his native Monroe, North Carolina, that drove off the Ku Klux Klan with their weapons. Williams’s call for armed self-defense and, briefly, retaliatory violence made him a national figure. Censured by the NAACP, he later fled from a white mob and bogus kidnapping charges to temporary exile abroad.
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Umoja, Akinyele O. We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2013.
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Examining Mississippi from the 1940s until the late-1970s, Umoja contends that “armed resistance was critical to the efficacy of the southern freedom struggle and the dismantling of segregation and Black disenfranchisement.” Beginning in Natchez in 1965, armed resistance, hitherto providing informal protection for activism, became organized and public in support of an economic boycott, augmented by “enforcer squads.” Protesters, Umoja argues, replicated the “Natchez model” into the next decade.
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Walker, Jenny. “A Media Made Movement? Black Violence and Nonviolence in the Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement.” In Media, Culture, and the Modern African-American Freedom Struggle. Edited by Brian Ward, 41–66. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001.
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Walker argues that “Violent rhetoric and posturing as well as actual instances of violence in the southern civil rights campaigns of the late 1950s and early 1960s molded and defined the early Movement to a far greater extent than the contemporary press and subsequent historians have allowed.”
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Walker, Jenny. “The ‘Gun-Toting’ Gloria Richardson: Black Violence in Cambridge, Maryland.” In Gender and the Civil Rights Movement. Edited by Peter J. Ling and Sharon Montieth, 169–186. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004.
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Walker argues that the media and scholarship has created a distorted image of Gloria Richardson as inclined toward violence and downplayed her preference for nonviolent tactics.
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Wendt, Simon. The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007.
DOI: 10.5744/florida/9780813030180.001.0001 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Wendt argues that “armed resistance served as a significant auxiliary to nonviolent protest in the southern civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s” and that armed defense groups viewed their role as being to support, not supplant, a nonviolent movement whose goals they shared. Nonviolent protests that were unsupported by armed self-defense, he finds, “more frequently provoked white violence.”
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The Civil Rights Movement in the North, Midwest, and West

Civil rights scholarship has increasingly conceived of the movement as national in scope, rather than as an addendum or corollary to southern protests. Studies of the North, Midwest, and the West, with the exception of the more broad ranging study in Sugrue 2008, have mostly focused on selected cities: Jolly 2006 on St. Louis, Jones 2009 on Milwaukee, Ralph 1993 on Chicago, and Taylor 1995 on Seattle. However, Meier and Rudwick 1973 and Theoharis and Woodard 2003 include examples from a range of urban areas. Taking a different approach, Brilliant 2010 examines court battles and lawmaking in California.

Brilliant, Mark. The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941–1978. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
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Brilliant analyzes civil rights struggles in California focused on litigation and legislation, which involved African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians whose interests and priorities, he finds, often differed.
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Jolly, Kenneth. Black Liberation in the Midwest: The Struggle in St. Louis, 1964–1970. New York: Routledge, 2006.
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Jolly argues after successful desegregation sit-ins in the early postwar years, the Congress of Racial Equality in St. Louis eventually turned to Black Power to address the intractable problems of discrimination in employment and housing, and police brutality.
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Jones, Patrick D. The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
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Jones focuses chiefly on the campaigns of white Catholic priest James Groppi, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Youth Council he headed, and the Black Commandos, exponents of unarmed self-defense and Black Power, to desegregate schools and housing.
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Meier, August, and Elliott Rudwick. CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
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Meier and Elliott’s study includes Congress of Racial Equality chapters in different parts of the country, and change over time.
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Ralph, James R. Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago and the Civil Rights Movement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
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Ralph analyzes the multiplicity of reasons why Martin Luther King Jr.’s Chicago campaign failed to achieve its ambitions.
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Sugrue, Thomas J. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. New York: Random House, 2008.
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Sugrue analyzes the northern struggle focused on discrimination in employment, housing, and education.
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Taylor, Quintard. “The Civil Rights Movement in the American West: Black Protest in Seattle, 1960–1970.” Journal of Negro History 80.1 (1995): 1–14.
DOI: 10.2307/2717703 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Taylor argues that the civil rights movement in Seattle pursued a local agenda focused on discrimination in employment and housing, and de facto (in practice rather than mandated by law) school segregation but, like the southern movement, adopted marches, sit-ins, picketing, and boycotts. Although the Seattle movement made progress in jobs and housing, de facto school segregation proved intractable.
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Theoharis, Jeanne, and Komozi Woodard, eds. Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
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The collection, which includes essays about school desegregation efforts in Boston and New York and their legacy, argues that there was a national black freedom struggle.
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Black Power, Vietnam, and Civil Rights

Studies by Carson 1981 and Meier and Rudwick 1973 illustrate how the adoption of Black Power undermined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality by splitting and driving away membership, and alienating financial donors. Later scholars, notably Tyson 1999 and Joseph 2006, have reassessed Black Power by arguing that it was a positive affirmation by African Americans of their rights and racial pride. In this view, Black Power developed alongside the civil rights movement, rather than displacing it and undermining the struggle for racial equality by taking a nihilistic turn that alienated many whites and divided African Americans. Scholars have also examined how the Vietnam War contributed to the fragmentation of the civil rights coalition, as well as causing dissension within civil rights groups and helping to divert federal and public attention away from civil rights issues. Branch 2006 and Fairclough 1987 explain Martin Luther King Jr.’s response to Black Power and the Vietnam War, while Hall 2005, Hall 2007, and Lucks 2014 explore the civil rights movement’s response more broadly to one or both of these developments. Countryman 2006 examines Black Power on a micro level in his study of Philadelphia.

Branch, Taylor. At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965–68. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.
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Branch addresses the period from the Selma demonstrations to Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, including Black Power and the anti-war movement.
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Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
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Carson charts how Black Power divided the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and how its opposition to American participation in the Vietnam War, like Black Power, cost it many of its white sympathizers, as well as generating federal government opposition and repression.
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Countryman, Matthew. Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
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Countryman documents the transition in Philadelphia from a liberal middle-class led civil rights movement to a working-class black nationalist movement, followed by Black Power politics.
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Fairclough, Adam. To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987.
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Fairclough analyzes Martin Luther King Jr.’s response to Black Power during and after the Meredith March of 1966 and his decision to oppose America’s war in Vietnam publicly.
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Hall, Simon. Peace and Freedom: The Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements of the 1960s. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
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Hall argues that the anti-Vietnam war movement was white dominated because the leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League prioritized the civil rights struggle and their alliance with the Johnson administration, and white and black radicals differed about focus and tactics and were beset by sectarianism.
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Hall, Simon. “The NAACP, Black Power, and the African American Freedom Struggle, 1966–1969.” The Historian 69.1 (2007): 49–81.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6563.2007.00174.x Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Hall argues that “much of the NAACP’s hostility toward ‘Black Power’ during 1966–1967 stemmed from concerns over image rather than disputes over ideology.”
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Joseph, Peniel E. Waiting’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America. New York: Henry Holt, 2006.
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Joseph offers a largely positive assessment of Black Power which, he claims, “paralleled, and sometimes overlapped the historic civil rights era,” and had international, as well as domestic, roots that he traces to the mid-1950s and early 1960s.
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Lucks, Daniel. Selma to Saigon: The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2014.
DOI: 10.5810/kentucky/9780813145075.001.0001 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Lucks investigates the diversity of the African American response to the Vietnam War, which, he argues, “aggravated fissures within the civil rights movement along generational and ideological lines.”
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Meier, August, and Eliott Rudwick. CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
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A major study that documents the impact of Black Power and opposition to the Vietnam War on the Congress of Racial Equality, which eventually excluded whites and adopted black nationalism.
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Tyson, Timothy B. Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
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Tyson argues that activist Robert F. Williams of the Monroe, North Carolina, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, articulated “as early as 1959” what “we have come to associate with the Black Power movement that gained national attention after 1965—anticolonial internationalism, black pride, economic nationalism, cultural politics, and armed self-defense” and that he influenced its development.
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The Civil Rights Movement after the 1960s

Except for some pioneering work, such as Lawson 1985, scholars did not begin studying the civil rights movement after the 1960s in any depth until after the millennium. Apart from periodic efforts to ensure renewal of the Voting Rights Act in undiluted form discussed in Lawson 1985 and Chappell 2016, studies, notably Tuck 2001, argue that most of the civil rights movement’s activities after the 1960s occurred at the local, rather than the national, level. While Tuck 2008 notes that traditional hallmarks of the movement continued to some extent, such as street demonstrations and rallies, various civil rights groups sought to ensure implementation of civil rights legislation passed in the 1960s and to tackle devices that undermined the impact of African American votes, such as gerrymandering. Danielson 2013 discusses litigation and protest in Mississippi, Minchin 1999 the overturning of discrimination in the southern textile industry, and Minchin and Salmond 2011 wider efforts to achieve civil rights compliance. De Jong 2010 discusses the continuation of racism and the struggle against it.

Chappell, David L. Waking from the Dream: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
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Focusing on the national level, Chappell assesses civil rights legislation and black political engagement and organizing in the twenty-five years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, as well as King’s personal reputation following revelations of adultery and academic plagiarism.
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Danielson, Chris. After Freedom Summer: How Race Realigned Mississippi Politics, 1965–1986. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013.
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Danielson argues that although white response to African American enfranchisement was not uniform in Mississippi and the civil rights movement continued through litigation and boycotts, continuing racism constrained and limited black political influence.
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De Jong, Greta. Invisible Enemy: The African American Freedom Struggle after 1965. Chichester, UK, and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
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De Jong documents the persistence of racial inequality and institutional racism in American politics, economics, and education, and the continuation of the civil rights struggle after 1965.
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Lawson, Steven F. In Pursuit of Power: Southern Blacks and Electoral Politics, 1965–1982. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
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Lawson discusses the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its renewals that brought black political empowerment in the South. He explains why in the early 1980s African Americans remained disproportionately under-represented in political office and concludes that many faced “as bleak an economic future as their ancestors of a century ago.”
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Minchin, Timothy J. Hiring the Black Worker: The Desegregation of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960–1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
DOI: 10.5149/uncp/9780807847718 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Minchin argues that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission were crucial in enabling African Americans to challenge racial discrimination in the southern textile industry and that the fight against employment discrimination illustrates the continuation of the civil rights struggle beyond the mid-1960s.
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Minchin, Timothy J., and Salmond, John A. After the Dream: Black and White Southerners since 1965. Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 2011.
DOI: 10.5810/kentucky/9780813129785.001.0001 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Minchin and Salmond examine enforcement of civil rights legislation and the rise of conservatism that appropriated color-blind ideology to limit the gains of the civil rights movement.
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Tuck, Stephen G. N. Beyond Atlanta: The Struggle for Racial Equality in Georgia, 1940–1980. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2001.
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A well-researched state study that takes the story of Georgia civil rights through the 1970s. Tuck contends that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference “became the driving force in the development of small town protests across Georgia” that occurred until mid-decade.
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Tuck, Stephen. “‘We Are Taking Up Where the Movement of the 1960s Left Off’: The Proliferation and Power of African American Protest in the 1970s.” Journal of Contemporary History 43.4 (2008): 637–654.
DOI: 10.1177/0022009408095420 Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »
Tuck argues that historians have missed the continuation of African American protest and organizing after the 1960s because they were much less focused on direct action. He takes a broad approach that includes welfare rights organizing and efforts against employment discrimination, and places working-class blacks at the center of 1970s black protest.
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Civil Rights Movement
by
Mark Newman
LAST REVIEWED: 11 May 2023
LAST MODIFIED: 25 October 2018
DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190280024-0060

Introduction

Historiography

General Overviews

Primary Sources

Oral History

Collections

Internet Resources

Memoirs and Autobiographies

Foundations and Early Beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement in the 1940s and 1950s

Litigation, Lobbying, and Protest

Organized Labor and Civil Rights

Civil Rights and the Early Cold War

Massive Resistance to Desegregation in the South

The Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s

Direct Action Protests in the South and Border States

The Movement in Mississippi

Armed Self-Defense and the Southern Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement in the North, Midwest, and West

Black Power, Vietnam, and Civil Rights

The Civil Rights Movement after the 1960s

African American Studies

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Civil Rights Movement byMark NewmanLAST REVIEWED: 11 May 2023LAST MODIFIED: 25 October 2018DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190280024-0060

Introduction

Historiography

General Overviews

Primary Sources

Oral History

Collections

Internet Resources

Memoirs and Autobiographies

Foundations and Early Beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement in the 1940s and 1950s

Litigation, Lobbying, and Protest

Organized Labor and Civil Rights

Civil Rights and the Early Cold War

Massive Resistance to Desegregation in the South

The Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s

Direct Action Protests in the South and Border States

The Movement in Mississippi

Armed Self-Defense and the Southern Civil Rights Movement

The Civil Rights Movement in the North, Midwest, and West

Black Power, Vietnam, and Civil Rights

The Civil Rights Movement after the 1960s

African American Studies

Article

Related Articles Expand or collapse the "related articles" section about

Civil Rights Movement
by
Mark Newman
LAST REVIEWED: 11 May 2023
LAST MODIFIED: 25 October 2018
DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190280024-0060