The organized campaign by African Americans and their allies between 1954 and 1968 to dismantle the system of legal racial segregation and disenfranchisement in the United States — achieving landmark legislation in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 through nonviolent direct action, legal challenges, mass organizing, and sustained political pressure, while revealing the limits of legal reform in addressing the structural economic dimensions of racial inequality.
The Civil Rights Movement achieved in a decade what a century of formal legal equality had failed to produce. The Thirteenth Amendment had abolished slavery in 1865. The Fourteenth Amendment had established citizenship in 1868. The Fifteenth Amendment had established voting rights in 1870. None of this had produced equality. The Jim Crow system — legal segregation in public life, systematic disenfranchisement, state-sanctioned violence against Black Americans — survived the constitutional amendments intact for nearly a century. Then between 1955 and 1965, a combination of nonviolent direct action, legal strategy, and political organizing dismantled the legal architecture of Jim Crow. How a movement accomplished in a decade what constitutional amendments had failed to achieve for a century is the central question.