HY 357 Lecture Notes - Lecture 53: Ethnic Conflict, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Civil Disobedience
6 Jun 2018
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The Civil Rights Movement
Civil rights groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP), which was organized in 1909, led the fight to end discrimination by using the courts.
While the Brown decision demonstrated their success, other tactics were needed to move the
country and the government into action. Civil disobedience, boycotts, and protest demonstrations
created a climate of opinion that led to legislative steps to end discrimination.
Civil disobedience
Civil disobediencemeans testing an unjust law by deliberately breaking it. This
approach was championed by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who founded the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In 1955, King organized a boycott
of the bus service in Montgomery, Alabama, which went on for more than a year until
public transportation was desegregated. Cesar Chavez and his largely Mexican-
American Farm Workers of America union led a successful national boycott against
table grapes produced by nonunion growers a decade later. Sit-ins were used at white-
only lunch counters in the South; African Americans who were refused service simply
remained in their seats and were replaced by others when the police came to arrest
them. Protest marches to publicize the inequities of discrimination were usually declared
illegal by local authorities in the South and were sometimes violently dispersed. News
coverage of these events dramatically increased the support for the civil rights
movement and brought activists, both black and white, to the South to participate.
Civil rights legislation
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which survived several challenges in the courts,
prohibited employment discrimination by private businesses connected with interstate
commerce, authorized the attorney general to begin school desegregation lawsuits if
complaints were filed, and cut off federal funding for any program that practiced
discrimination. The 1965 Voting Rights Acteliminated literacy tests and, thus,
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