civil rights movement

Cultural  

1. The national effort made by black people and their supporters in the 1950s and 1960s to eliminate segregation and gain equal rights. The first large episode in the movement, a boycott of the city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, was touched off by the refusal of one black woman, Rosa Parks, to give up her seat on a bus to a white person. A number of sit-ins and similar demonstrations followed. A high point of the civil rights movement was a rally by hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C., in 1963, at which a leader of the movement, Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his “I have a dream” speech. The federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 authorized federal action against segregation in public accommodations, public facilities, and employment. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed after large demonstrations in Selma, Alabama, which drew some violent responses. The Fair Housing Act, prohibiting discrimination by race in housing, was passed in 1968. After such legislative victories, the civil rights movement shifted emphasis toward education and changing the attitudes of white people. Some civil rights supporters turned toward militant movements (see Black Power), and several riots erupted in the late 1960s over racial questions (see Watts riots). The Bakke decision of 1978 guardedly endorsed affirmative action.

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Example Sentences

Protesters crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma before continuing events in Montgomery, where speakers framed the current political moment as a continuation, not a conclusion of the civil rights movement.

From Salon • May 17, 2026

British music star FKA twigs is to play Josephine Baker in a new biopic of the Roaring Twenties icon who became a hero of the French Resistance and the American civil rights movement.

From Barron's • May 12, 2026

She wondered if “Kin” was actually an effort to better understand her parents, particularly her mother, a former economist who’d been active in the civil rights movement.

From Los Angeles Times • Feb. 24, 2026

Jackson was a key figure during the US civil rights movement of the 1960s, and was known for being the first African-American to make the jump from activism to major-party presidential politics.

From BBC • Feb. 17, 2026

Abernathy was Martin Luther King Jr.’s closest collaborator and had inherited the mantle of his Poor People’s Campaign, the second phase of the civil rights movement.

From "Hidden Figures" by Margot Lee Shetterly