American Civil Rights Movement (1896-1954)

The civil rights movement in the United States has been a long, primarily nonviolent struggle to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to all Americans. The movement has had a lasting impact on United States society, both in its tactics, the increased social and legal acceptance of civil rights it brought about and its exposure of the prevalence and cost of racism.

Related Topics:
United States - Nonviolent - Civil rights

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It has been made up of many movements, though it most often refers to the struggles between 1945 and 1970 to end discrimination against African-Americans and to end racial segregation, especially in the U.S. South. This article focuses on an earlier phase of that particular struggle, using two United States Supreme Court decisions—Plessy v. Ferguson, {{ussc|163|537|1896}}, which enshrined "separate but equal" racial segregation as constitutional doctrine, and Brown v. Board of Education, {{ussc|347|483|1954}} which overturned Plessy—as milestones. This is an era of stops and starts, in which some movements, such as Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, achieved great success but left little lasting legacy, while others, such as the NAACP's legal assault on state-sponsored segregation, achieved only modest results in its early years but gradually built to a key victory in Brown v. Board of Education.

Related Topics:
1945 - 1970 - African-American - Racial segregation - U.S. South - United States Supreme Court - Plessy v. Ferguson - 1896 - Constitutional - Brown v. Board of Education - 1954 - Marcus Garvey - Universal Negro Improvement Association - NAACP

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