The civil rights movement [ b ] was a social movement and campaign in the United States from to that aimed to abolish legalized racial segregation , discrimination , and disenfranchisement in the country, which was most commonly employed against African Americans. The movement had origins in the Reconstruction era during the late 19th century, and had modern roots in the s.
The movement's major nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience campaigns eventually secured new protections in federal law for the civil rights of all Americans. After the American Civil War and subsequent abolition of slavery in the southern states in , the three Reconstruction Amendments to the United States Constitution had granted emancipation and constitutional rights of citizenship to all African Americans, the majority of whom had recently been enslaved.
For a short period of time, African-American men voted and held political office, but as time went on Blacks in the South were increasingly deprived of civil rights, often under racist Jim Crow laws , and were subjected to discrimination and sustained violence by White supremacists. African Americans who moved to the North to enhance their prospects in the Great Migration also faced barriers in employment and housing.
Over the following century, various efforts were made by African Americans to secure their legal and civil rights, such as the civil rights movements of β and of β The movement was characterized by nonviolent mass protests and civil disobedience following highly publicized events such as the lynching of Emmett Till in These included economic boycotts such as the Montgomery bus boycott , " sit-ins " in Greensboro and Nashville , a series of protests during the Birmingham campaign , and a march from Selma to Montgomery.
Discrimination was often supported by courts, including by the Supreme Court in its decision Plessy v. Ferguson , which upheld the doctrine of separate but equal. At the culmination of a legal strategy pursued by African Americans, in the Supreme Court struck down the underpinnings of laws that allowed racial discrimination as unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education. The Warren Court made further pro-civil rights rulings in cases such as Browder v. Gayle and Loving v.
