civil rights movement

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.

Example Sentences

We didn’t know it then, but the civil rights movement was nearing its peak.

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With the backdrop of the civil rights movement and televisions that increasingly broadcast our nation’s inequity and high rates of poverty, many people—including a lot of Negroes—started criticizing our work, calling it extravagant and insensitive to all the people who struggled just to get by here on Earth.

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The bar had survived the Civil Rights movement; the Olympics in 1984 and the L.A. riots in 1992.

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Black churches were the organizing centers of the Civil Rights Movement.

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Williams noted that Welteroth got her start in journalism at Ebony Magazine, a women’s publication previously owned by the Johnson Publishing Company, which played a prominent role in documenting the Civil Rights Movement and brutality against Black people.

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