Civil Rights

Electioneering in the South, circa 1868. 

Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library.
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-3fa3-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Voter Registration, Macon, Ga.

Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library.
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-3fa4-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

"The National Colored Convention in Session at Washington, DC.” 

Harper’s Weekly (February 6, 1869).

Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia, https://librarycompany.org/

President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. 

President Lyndon Johnson shakes hands with Dr Martin Luther King Jr after signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. 

Newpaper article about President Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

After state troopers attack peaceful marchers in Selma, Ala., on March 7, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson calls for a strong voting rights law; congressional hearings begin.

Signed by Johnson on Aug. 6, 1965, the groundbreaking law prohibits racial discrimination in voting. 

Dr Martin Luther King Jr voting along with his wife Corretta Scott King.  

The Civil Rights Movement (1865–1896) aimed to eliminate racial discrimination against African Americans, improve their educational and employment opportunities, and establish their electoral power, just after the abolition of slavery in the United States. The period from 1865 to 1895 saw a tremendous change in the fortunes of the Black community following the elimination of slavery in the South.

Immediately after the American Civil War, the federal government launched a program known as Reconstruction which aimed to rebuild the states of the former Confederacy. The federal programs also provided aid to the former slaves and attempted to integrate them into society as citizens. Both during and after this period, Black people gained a substantial amount of political power and many of them were able to move from abject poverty to land ownership. At the same time resentment of these gains by many whites resulted in an unprecedented campaign of violence which was waged by local chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, and in the 1870s it was waged by paramilitary groups like the Red Shirts and White League.

In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, a landmark upholding "separate but equal" racial segregation as constitutional. It was a very significant setback for civil rights, as the legal, social, and political status of the Black population reached a nadir. From 1890 to 1908, beginning with Mississippi, southern states passed new constitutions and laws disenfranchising most Black people and excluding them from the political system, a status that was maintained in many cases into the 1940s.

Much of the early reform movement during this era was spearheaded by the Radical Republicans, a faction of the Republican Party. By the end of the 19th century, with disenfranchisement in progress to exclude Black people from the political system altogether, the so-called lily-white movement also worked to substantially weaken the power of remaining Black people in the party. The most important civil rights leaders of this period were Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) and Booker T. Washington (1856–1915).

The Civil Rights Movement (1896–1954) was a long, primarily nonviolent action to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to all Americans. The era has had a lasting impact on American society – in its tactics, the increased social and legal acceptance of civil rights, and in its exposure of the prevalence and cost of racism.

Two US Supreme Court decisions in particular serve as bookends of the movement: the 1896 ruling of Plessy v Ferguson, which upheld "separate but equal" racial segregation as constitutional doctrine; and 1954's Brown v Board of Education, which overturned Plessy. This was an era of new beginnings, in which some movements, such as Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, were very successful but left little lasting legacy; while others, such as the NAACP's legal assault on state-sponsored segregation, achieved modest results in its early years, as in, Buchanan v. Warley (1917) (zoning), making some progress but also suffering setbacks, as in Corrigan v. Buckley (1926) (housing), gradually building to key victories, including in Smith v. Allwright (1944) (voting), Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) (housing), Sweatt v. Painter (1950) (schooling) and Brown. In addition, the Scottsboro Boys cases led to a pair of 1935 rulings in Powell v. Alabama, and Norris v. Alabama, that served to make anti-racism jurisprudence more prominent in the context of criminal justice.

Following the civil war, the United States expanded the legal rights of African Americans. Congress passed, and enough states ratified, an amendment ending slavery in 1865 — the 13th amendment to the US constitution. This amendment only outlawed slavery; it provided neither citizenship nor equal rights. In 1868, the 14th amendment was ratified by the states, granting African Americans citizenship, whereby all persons born in the US were extended equal protection under the laws of the constitution. The 15th amendment (ratified in 1870) stated that race could not be used as a condition to deprive men of the ability to vote. During Reconstruction (1865–1877), northern troops occupied the South. Together with the Freedmen's Bureau, they tried to administer and enforce the new constitutional amendments. Many Black leaders were elected to local and state offices, and many others organized community groups, especially to support education.

Reconstruction ended following the Compromise of 1877 between northern and southern White elites. In exchange for deciding the contentious presidential election in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes, supported by northern states, over his opponent, Samuel J. Tilden, the compromise called for the withdrawal of northern troops from the South. This followed violence and fraud in southern elections from 1868 to 1876, which had reduced Black voter turnout and enabled southern White Democrats to regain power in state legislatures across the South. The compromise and withdrawal of federal troops meant that such Democrats had more freedom to impose and enforce discriminatory practices. Many African Americans responded to the withdrawal of federal troops by leaving the South in the Kansas Exodus of 1879.

The Civil Rights Movement (1954 - 1968) was a social movement in the United States from 1954 to 1968 which aimed to abolish legalized racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement in the country, which most commonly affected African Americans. The movement had origins in the Reconstruction era in the late 19th century, and modern roots in the 1940s. After years of nonviolent protests and civil disobedience campaigns, the civil rights movement achieved many of its legislative goals in the 1960s, during which it secured new protections in federal law for the civil rights of all Americans.

Following the American Civil War (1861–1865), the three Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery and granted citizenship to all African Americans, the majority of whom had recently been enslaved in the southern states. During Reconstruction, African-American men in the South voted and held political office, but after 1877 they were increasingly deprived of civil rights under racist Jim Crow laws (which for example banned interracial marriage, introduced literacy tests for voters, and segregated schools) and were subjected to violence from white supremacists during the nadir of American race relations. African Americans who moved to the North in order to improve their prospects in the Great Migration also faced barriers in employment and housing. Legal racial discrimination was upheld by the Supreme Court in its 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which established the doctrine of "separate but equal". The movement for civil rights, led by figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, achieved few gains until after World War II. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman issued an executive order abolishing discrimination in the armed forces.

In 1954, the Supreme Court struck down state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education. A mass movement for civil rights, led by Martin Luther King Jr. and others, began a campaign of nonviolent protests and civil disobedience including the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955–1956, "sit-ins" in Greensboro and Nashville in 1960, the Birmingham campaign in 1963, and a march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. Press coverage of events such as the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 and the use of fire hoses and dogs against protesters in Birmingham increased public support for the civil rights movement. In 1963, about 250,000 people participated in the March on Washington, after which President John F. Kennedy asked Congress to pass civil rights legislation. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, overcame the opposition of southern politicians to pass three major laws: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in public accommodations, employment, and federally assisted programs; the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed discriminatory voting laws and authorized federal oversight of election law in areas with a history of voter suppression; and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which banned housing discrimination. The Supreme Court made further pro–civil rights rulings in cases including Browder v. Gayle (1956) and Loving v. Virginia (1967), banning segregation in public transport and striking down laws against interracial marriage.

The new civil rights laws ended most legal discrimination against African Americans, though informal racism remained. In the mid-1960s, the Black power movement emerged, which criticized leaders of the civil rights movement for their moderate and incremental tendencies. A wave of civil unrest in Black communities between 1964 and 1969, which peaked in 1967 and after the assassination of King in 1968, weakened support for the movement from White moderates. Despite affirmative action and other programs which expanded opportunities for Black and other minorities in the U.S. by the early 21st century, racial gaps in income, housing, education, and criminal justice continue to persist.

By 1967 the emergence of the Black Power movement (1966–75) began to gradually eclipse the original "integrated power" aims of the successful Civil Rights Movement that had been espoused by Martin Luther King Jr. and others. Advocates of Black Power argued for black self-determination, and asserted that the assimilation inherent in integration robs Africans of their common heritage and dignity. For example, the theorist and activist Omali Yeshitela argues that Africans have historically fought to protect their lands, cultures, and freedoms from European colonialists, and that any integration into the society which has stolen another people and their wealth is an act of treason.

Today, most Black Power advocates have not changed their self-sufficiency argument. Racism still exists worldwide, and some believe that blacks in the United States, on the whole, did not assimilate into U.S. "mainstream" culture. Blacks arguably became even more oppressed, this time partially by "their own" people in a new black stratum of the middle class and the ruling class. Black Power's advocates generally argue that the reason for this stalemate and further oppression of the vast majority of U.S. blacks is because Black Power's objectives have not had the opportunity to be fully carried through.

One of the most public manifestations of the Black Power movement took place in the 1968 Olympics, when two African-Americans, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, stood on the podium doing a Black Power salute. This act is still remembered today as the 1968 Olympics Black Power salute.

Black Nationalism is a nationalist movement which seeks representation for Black people as a distinct national identity, especially in racialized, colonial and postcolonial societies. Its earliest proponents saw it as a way to advocate for democratic representation in culturally plural societies or to establish self-governing independent nation-states for Black people. Modern Black nationalism often aims for the social, political, and economic empowerment of Black communities within white majority societies, either as an alternative to assimilation or as a way to ensure greater representation and equality within predominantly Eurocentric cultures.

As an ideology, Black nationalism encompasses a diverse range of beliefs which have variously included forms of economic, political and cultural nationalism, or pan-nationalism. It often overlaps with, but is distinguished from, similar concepts and movements such as Pan-Africanism, Ethiopianism, the back-to-Africa movement, Afrocentrism, Black Zionism, and Garveyism. Critics of Black nationalism compare it to white nationalism and white supremacy, and say it promotes racial and ethnic nationalism, separatism and Black supremacy. Most experts distinguish between these movements, saying that while white nationalism ultimately seeks to maintain or deepen inequality between racial and ethnic groups, most forms of Black nationalism instead aim to increase equality in response to pre-existing forms of white dominance.

Pan-Africanism is a nationalist movement that aims to encourage and strengthen bonds of solidarity between all indigenous peoples and diasporas of African ancestry. Based on a common goal dating back to the Atlantic slave trade and the Trans-Saharan slave trade, the movement extends beyond continental Africans with a substantial support base among the African diaspora in the Americas and Europe.

Pan-Africanism is said to have its origins in the struggles of the African people against enslavement and colonization and this struggle may be traced back to the first resistance on slave ships—rebellions and suicides—through the constant plantation and colonial uprisings and the "Back to Africa" movements of the 19th century. Based on the belief that unity is vital to economic, social, and political progress, it aims to "unify and uplift" people of African ancestry.

At its core, pan-Africanism is a belief that "African people, both on the continent and in the diaspora, share not merely a common history, but a common destiny." Pan-Africanism posits a sense of a shared historical fate for Africans in the Americas, the West Indies, and on the continent, itself centered on the Atlantic trade in slaves, African slavery, and European imperialism.

Pan-African thought influenced the establishment of the Organisation of African Unity (since succeeded by the African Union) in 1963. The African Union Commission has its seat in Addis Ababa and the Pan-African Parliament has its seat in Midrand, Johannesburg.

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a decentralized political and social movement that aims to highlight racism, discrimination and racial inequality experienced by black people, and to promote anti-racism. Its primary concerns are police brutality and racially motivated violence against black people. The movement began in response to the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Rekia Boyd, among others. BLM and its related organizations typically advocate for various policy changes related to black liberation and criminal justice reform. While there are specific organizations that label themselves "Black Lives Matter", such as the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the overall movement is a decentralized network with no formal hierarchy. As of 2021, there are about 40 chapters in the United States and Canada. The slogan "Black Lives Matter" itself has not been trademarked by any group.

In 2013, activists and friends Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Ayọ Tometi originated the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on social media following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of African-American teen Trayvon Martin. Black Lives Matter became nationally recognized for street demonstrations following the 2014 deaths of two more African Americans, Michael Brown—resulting in protests and unrest in Ferguson, Missouri—and Eric Garner in New York City. Since the Ferguson protests, participants in the movement have demonstrated against the deaths of numerous other African Americans by police actions or while in police custody. In the summer of 2015, Black Lives Matter activists became involved in the 2016 United States presidential election.

The movement gained international attention during global protests in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. An estimated 15 to 26 million people participated in Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, making it one of the largest protest movements in the country's history. Despite being characterized by opponents as violent, the overwhelming majority of BLM demonstrations have been peaceful.

The popularity of Black Lives Matter has shifted over time, largely due to changing perceptions among white Americans. In 2020, 67% of adults in the United States expressed support for the movement, declining to 51% of U.S. adults in 2023. Support among people of color has, however, held strong, with 81% of African Americans, 61% of Hispanics and 63% of Asian Americans expressing support for Black Lives Matter as of 2023.

Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, c. February 14, 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. He became the most important leader of the movement for African-American civil rights in the 19th century.

After escaping from slavery in Maryland in 1838, Douglass became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York and gained fame for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. Accordingly, he was described by abolitionists in his time as a living counterexample to claims by supporters of slavery that enslaved people lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been enslaved. It was in response to this disbelief that Douglass wrote his first autobiography.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963) was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist.

Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. After completing graduate work at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin and Harvard University, where he was its first African American to earn a doctorate, Du Bois rose to national prominence as a leader of the Niagara Movement, a group of black civil rights activists seeking equal rights. Du Bois and his supporters opposed the Atlanta Compromise. Instead, Du Bois insisted on full civil rights and increased political representation, which he believed would be brought about by the African-American intellectual elite. He referred to this group as the talented tenth, a concept under the umbrella of racial uplift, and believed that African Americans needed the chances for advanced education to develop its leadership.

Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. Du Bois used his position in the NAACP to respond to racist incidents. After the First World War, he attended the Pan-African Congresses, embraced socialism and became a professor at Atlanta University. Once the Second World War had ended, he engaged in peace activism and was targeted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He spent the last years of his life in Ghana and died in Accra on August 27, 1963.

Medgar Wiley Evers (July 2, 1925 – June 12, 1963) was an American civil rights activist and soldier who was the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi. Evers, a United States Army veteran who served in World War II, was engaged in efforts to overturn racial segregation at the University of Mississippi, end the segregation of public facilities, and expand opportunities for African Americans, including the enforcement of voting rights when he was assassinated by Byron De La Beckwith.

A college graduate, Evers became active in the civil rights movement in the 1950s. Following the 1954 ruling of the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, Evers challenged the segregation of the state-supported public University of Mississippi. He applied to law school there, as the state had no public law school for African Americans. He also worked for voting rights, economic opportunity, access to public facilities, and other changes in the segregated society. In 1963 Evers was awarded the NAACP Spingarn Medal. Evers was murdered in 1963 at his home in Jackson, Mississippi, now the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, by Byron De La Beckwith,[1] a member of the White Citizens' Council in Jackson. This group was formed in 1954 in Mississippi to resist the integration of schools and civil rights activism. 

Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister, activist, and political philosopher who was one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. King advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through the use of nonviolent resistance and nonviolent civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws and other forms of legalized discrimination.

A black church leader, King participated in and led marches for the right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other civil rights. He oversaw the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and later became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As president of the SCLC, he led the unsuccessful Albany Movement in Albany, Georgia, and helped organize some of the nonviolent 1963 protests in Birmingham, Alabama. King was one of the leaders of the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and helped organize two of the three Selma to Montgomery marches during the 1965 Selma voting rights movement. The civil rights movement achieved pivotal legislative gains in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. There were several dramatic standoffs with segregationist authorities, who often responded violently.

Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little, later el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz; May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965) was an African American revolutionary, Muslim minister and human rights activist who was a prominent figure during the civil rights movement until his assassination in 1965. A spokesman for the Nation of Islam (NOI) until 1964, he was a vocal advocate for Black empowerment and the promotion of Islam within the African American community. A controversial figure accused of preaching violence, Malcolm X is also a widely celebrated figure within African American and Muslim communities for his pursuit of racial justice.

Malcolm spent his adolescence living in a series of foster homes or with relatives after his father's death and his mother's hospitalization. He committed various crimes, being sentenced to 8 to 10 years in prison in 1946 for larceny and burglary. In prison, he joined the Nation of Islam, adopting the name Malcolm X to symbolize his unknown African ancestral surname while discarding "the white slavemaster name of 'Little'", and after his parole in 1952, he quickly became one of the organization's most influential leaders. He was the public face of the organization for 12 years, advocating Black empowerment and separation of Black and White Americans, and criticizing Martin Luther King Jr. and the mainstream civil rights movement for its emphasis on non-violence and racial integration. Malcolm X also expressed pride in some of the Nation's social welfare achievements, such as its free drug rehabilitation program. From the 1950s onward, Malcolm X was subjected to surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an American activist in the civil rights movement, best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott. The United States Congress has honored her as "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement".

Parks became an NAACP activist in 1943, participating in several high-profile civil rights campaigns. On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks rejected bus driver James F. Blake's order to vacate a row of 4 seats in the "colored" section in favor of a white female passenger who had complained to the driver, once the "white" section was filled. Parks was not the first person to resist bus segregation, but the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) believed that she was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws, and she helped inspire the black community to boycott the Montgomery buses for over a year. The case became bogged down in the state courts, but the federal Montgomery bus lawsuit Browder v. Gayle resulted in a November 1956 decision that bus segregation is unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Charlotte E. Ray (January 13, 1850 – January 4, 1911) was an American lawyer. She was the first black American female lawyer in the United States. Ray graduated from Howard University School of Law in 1872. She was also the first female admitted to the District of Columbia Bar, and the first woman admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia. Her admission was used as a precedent by women in other states who sought admission to the bar.

Ray opened her own law office in Washington, D.C., advertising in a newspaper run by Frederick Douglass. However, she practiced law for only a few years because prejudice against African Americans and women made her business unsustainable. Ray eventually moved to New York, where she became a teacher in Brooklyn. She was involved in the women's suffrage movement and joined the National Association of Colored Women.

Charles Hamilton Houston (September 3, 1895 – April 22, 1950) was an American lawyer. He was the dean of Howard University Law School and NAACP first special counsel. A graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School, Houston played a significant role in dismantling Jim Crow laws, especially attacking segregation in schools and racial housing covenants. He earned the title "The Man Who Killed Jim Crow".

Houston is also well known for having trained and mentored a generation of black attorneys, including Thurgood Marshall, future founder and director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the first Black Supreme Court Justice. He recruited young lawyers to work on the NAACP's litigation campaigns, building connections between Howard's and Harvard's university law schools.

 Jane Matilda Bolin (April 11, 1908 – January 8, 2007) was an American attorney and judge. She was the first black woman to graduate from Yale Law School, the first to join the New York City Bar Association and the first to join the New York City Law Department. Bolin became the first black woman to serve as a judge in the United States when she was sworn into the bench of the New York City Domestic Relations Court in 1939. 

 Thurgood Marshall (July 2, 1908 – January 24, 1993) was an American civil rights lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1967 until 1991. He was the Supreme Court's first African-American justice. Prior to his judicial service, he was an attorney who fought for civil rights, leading the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Marshall was a prominent figure in the movement to end racial segregation in American public schools. He won 29 of the 32 civil rights cases he argued before the Supreme Court, culminating in the Court's landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which rejected the separate but equal doctrine and held segregation in public education to be unconstitutional. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court in 1967.   

Constance Baker Motley (September 14, 1921 – September 28, 2005) was an American jurist and politician who served as a Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

A key strategist of the civil rights movement, she was state senator, and Borough President of Manhattan in New York City before becoming a United States federal judge. She obtained a role with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund as a staff attorney in 1946 after receiving her law degree, and continued her work with the organization for more than twenty years.

She was the first Black woman to argue at the Supreme Court and argued 10 landmark civil rights cases, winning nine. She was a law clerk to Thurgood Marshall, aiding him in the case Brown v. Board of Education.

 Fred David Gray (born December 14, 1930) is an American civil rights attorney, preacher, activist, and state legislator from Alabama. He handled many prominent civil rights cases, such as Browder v. Gayle, and was elected to the Alabama House of Representatives in 1970, along with Thomas Reed, both from Tuskegee. They were the first black state legislators in Alabama in the 20th century. He served as the president of the National Bar Association in 1985, and in 2001 was elected as the first African-American President of the Alabama State Bar. 

 Johnnie Lee Cochran Jr. (October 2, 1937 – March 29, 2005) was an American attorney from California who was involved in numerous civil rights and police brutality cases throughout his 38-year career spanning from 1964 to 2002. Noted for his skill in the courtroom, he is best known for leading the so-called "Dream Team" during the murder trial of O.J. Simpson.

Cochran also represented Sean Combs, Michael Jackson, Tupac Shakur, Stanley Tookie Williams, Todd Bridges, football player Jim Brown, Snoop Dogg, former heavyweight champion Riddick Bowe, 1992 Los Angeles riot beating victim Reginald Oliver Denny, inmate and activist Geronimo Pratt, and athlete Marion Jones when she faced doping charges during her high school track career.

 Willie E. Gary (born July 12, 1947) is an American lawyer. Gary and his wife Gloria established Martin County's first Black law firm at the age of 27, presently known as, Gary, Williams, Parenti, Watson, Gary & Gillespie, P.L.L.C. Gary was portrayed by actor Jamie Foxx in the 2023 film The Burial.  

Bryan Stevenson (born November 14, 1959) is an American lawyer, social justice activist, and law professor at New York University School of Law, and the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. Based in Montgomery, Alabama, he has challenged bias against the poor and minorities in the criminal justice system, especially children. He has helped achieve United States Supreme Court decisions that prohibit sentencing children under 18 to death or to life imprisonment without parole. 

Stevenson initiated the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, which honors the names of each of more than 4,000 African Americans lynched in the twelve states of the South from 1877 to 1950. He argues that the history of slavery and lynchings has influenced the subsequent high rate of death sentences in the South, where it has been disproportionately applied to minorities. A related museum, The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, offers interpretations to show the connection between the post-Reconstruction period of lynchings to the high rate of incarceration and executions of people of color in the United States.

 Barack Hussein Obama II ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African-American president. Obama previously served as a U.S. senator representing Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004, and worked as a civil rights lawyer and university lecturer.   

Benjamin Lloyd Crump (born October 10, 1969) is an American attorney who specializes in civil rights and catastrophic personal injury cases such as wrongful death lawsuits. His practice has focused on cases such as those of Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, George Floyd, Keenan Anderson, Randy Cox, Sonya Massey and Tyre Nichols, people affected by the Flint water crisis, the estate of Henrietta Lacks, the estate of Malcolm X and the plaintiffs behind the 2019 Johnson & Johnson baby powder lawsuit alleging the company's talcum powder product led to ovarian cancer diagnoses. Crump is also founder of the firm Ben Crump Law of Tallahassee, Florida.

In 2020, Crump became the attorney for the families of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Jacob Blake. In 2021, he became the attorney for a passenger in the car with Winston Boogie Smith and for the family of Daunte Wright. Ongoing cases surrounding their killings or injuries led to protests against police brutality in America as well as internationally.

Due to his legal reputation, he has been referred to as "Black America's attorney general".

The American Equal Rights Association (AERA) was formed in 1866 in the United States. According to its constitution, its purpose was "to secure Equal Rights to all American citizens, especially the right of suffrage, irrespective of race, color or sex." Some of the more prominent reform activists of that time were members, including women and men, blacks and whites.

The AERA was created by the Eleventh National Women's Rights Convention, which transformed itself into the new organization. Leaders of the women's movement had earlier suggested the creation of a similar equal rights organization through a merger of their movement with the American Anti-Slavery Society, but that organization did not accept their proposal.

The AERA conducted two major campaigns during 1867. In New York, which was in the process of revising its state constitution, AERA workers collected petitions in support of women's suffrage and the removal of property requirements that discriminated specifically against black voters. In Kansas they campaigned for referendums that would enfranchise African Americans and women. In both places they encountered increasing resistance to the campaign for women's suffrage from former abolitionist allies who viewed it as a hindrance to the immediate goal of winning suffrage for African American men. The Kansas campaign ended in disarray and recrimination, creating divisions between those who worked primarily for the rights of African Americans and those who worked primarily for the rights of women, and also creating divisions within the women's movement itself.

The AERA continued to hold annual meetings after the failure of the Kansas campaign, but growing differences made it difficult for its members to work together. Disagreement about the proposed Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which would prohibit the denial of suffrage because of race, was especially sharp because it did not also prohibit the denial of suffrage because of sex. The acrimonious AERA meeting in 1869 signaled the end of the organization and led to the formation of two competing women's suffrage organizations. The bitter disagreements that led to the demise of the AERA continued to influence the women's movement in subsequent years.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is an American civil rights organization formed in 1909 as an interracial endeavor to advance justice for African Americans by a group including W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, Moorfield Storey, Ida B. Wells, Lillian Wald, and Henry Moskowitz. Over the years, leaders of the organization have included Thurgood Marshall and Roy Wilkins. The NAACP is the largest and oldest civil rights group in America.

Its mission in the 21st century is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate race-based discrimination". NAACP initiatives include political lobbying, publicity efforts, and litigation strategies developed by its legal team. The group enlarged its mission in the late 20th century by considering issues such as police misconduct, the status of black foreign refugees and questions of economic development. Its name, retained in accordance with tradition, uses the once common term colored people, referring to those with some African ancestry. The NAACP started publishing a quarterly magazine The Crisis and it had as its editor W.E.B Du Bois for 24 years.

The NAACP bestows annual awards on African Americans in three categories: Image Awards are for achievements in the arts and media, Theatre Awards are for achievements in theatre and stage, and Spingarn Medals are for outstanding achievements of any kind. Its headquarters are in Baltimore, Maryland.

The National Urban League (NUL), formerly known as the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes, is a nonpartisan historic civil rights organization based in New York City that advocates on behalf of economic and social justice for African Americans and against racial discrimination in the United States.[1] It is the oldest and largest community-based organization of its kind in the nation. Its current president is Marc Morial.

The Negro Fellowship League (NFL) Reading Room and Social Center was one of the first black settlement houses in Chicago. It was founded by Ida B. Wells and her husband Ferdinand Barnett in 1910, and provided social services and community resources for black men arriving in Chicago from the south during the Great Migration. Resources included helping them find employment, housing, voting access, literacy and education resources, and more.

In addition to providing resources to men arriving in the city, the Negro Fellowship League served as an office for Ida B. Wells to organize community events, spread information, and practice her activism. It also served as the meeting location for the Alpha Suffrage Club, the suffrage organization founded by Wells to engage black women voters.

Wells felt strongly that people should have access to educational resources and stay informed on issues. She owned and operated several newspapers, including the Fellowship Herald, the official newspaper for the Negro Fellowship League. The Fellowship Herald was a resource to help community members stay informed on events and issues that many white-owned papers did not cover, particularly around incidents of racially motivated violence and lynching.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is an American nonprofit civil rights organization founded in 1920. ACLU affiliates are active in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. The budget of the ACLU in 2024 was $383 million.

The ACLU provides legal assistance in cases where it considers civil liberties at risk. Legal support from the ACLU can take the form of direct legal representation or preparation of amicus curiae briefs expressing legal arguments when another law firm is already providing representation. In addition to representing persons and organizations in lawsuits, the ACLU lobbies for policy positions established by its board of directors.

The ACLU's current positions include opposing the death penalty; supporting same-sex marriage and the right of LGBTQ+ people to adopt; supporting reproductive rights such as birth control and abortion rights; eliminating discrimination against women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ people; decarceration in the United States; protecting housing and employment rights of veterans; reforming sex offender registries and protecting housing and employment rights of convicted first-time offenders; supporting the rights of prisoners and opposing torture; upholding the separation of church and state by opposing government preference for religion over non-religion or for particular faiths over others; and supporting the legality of gender-affirming treatments, including those that are government funded, for trans youth.

The National Council of Negro Women, Inc. (NCNW) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1935 with the mission to advance the opportunities and the quality of life for African-American women, their families, and communities. Mary McLeod Bethune, the founder of NCNW, wanted to encourage the participation of Negro women in civic, political, economic and educational activities and institutions. The organization was considered as a clearing house for the dissemination of activities concerning women but wanted to work alongside a group that supported civil rights rather than go to actual protests. Women on the council fought more towards political and economic successes of black women to uplift them in society. NCNW fulfills this mission through research, advocacy, national and community-based services, and programs in the United States and Africa.

NCNW serves as a super organization that acts as a cohesive umbrella for the other African-American groups that already existed. With its 37 national affiliate organizations and its more than 200 community-based sections, NCNW has an outreach to nearly four million women, all contributing to the peaceful solutions of the problems of human welfare and rights. The national headquarters, which acts as a central source for program planning, is based in Washington, D.C., on Pennsylvania Avenue, located between the White House and the U.S. Capitol. NCNW also has two field offices.

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (NAACP LDF, the Legal Defense Fund, or LDF) is an American civil rights organization and law firm based in New York City.

LDF is wholly independent and separate from the NAACP. Although LDF can trace its origins to the legal department of the NAACP created by Charles Hamilton Houston in the 1930s, Thurgood Marshall founded LDF as a separate legal entity in 1940, which became totally independent from the NAACP in 1957.

Janai Nelson serves as the eighth President and Director-Counsel, since March 2022. Previous Director-Counsels include Sherrilyn Ifill (2012–2022), John Payton (2008–2012), Ted Shaw (2004–2008), Elaine Jones (1993–2004),8 Julius Levonne Chambers (1984–1993), Jack Greenberg (1961–1984), and founder Thurgood Marshall (1940–1961).

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) is an African-American civil rights organization in the United States that played a pivotal role for African Americans in the civil rights movement. Founded in 1942, its stated mission is "to bring about equality for all people regardless of race, creed, sex, age, disability, sexual orientation, religion or ethnic background." To combat discriminatory policies regarding interstate travel, CORE participated in Freedom Rides as college students boarded Greyhound Buses headed for the Deep South. As the influence of the organization grew, so did the number of chapters, eventually expanding all over the country. Despite CORE remaining an active part of the fight for change, some people have noted the lack of organization and functional leadership has led to a decline of participation in social justice.

The Black Panther Party (originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense) was a Marxist–Leninist and black power political organization founded by college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in October 1966 in Oakland, California. The party was active in the United States between 1966 and 1982, with chapters in many major American cities, including San Francisco, New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Philadelphia. They were also active in many prisons and had international chapters in the United Kingdom and Algeria. Upon its inception, the party's core practice was its open carry patrols ("copwatching") designed to challenge the excessive force and misconduct of the Oakland Police Department. From 1969 onward, the party created social programs, including the Free Breakfast for Children Programs, education programs, and community health clinics. The Black Panther Party advocated for class struggle, claiming to represent the proletarian vanguard.

In 1969, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), described the party as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country." The FBI sabotaged the party with an illegal and covert counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) of surveillance, infiltration, perjury, and police harassment, all designed to undermine and criminalize the party. The FBI was involved in the 1969 assassinations of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, who were killed in a raid by the Chicago Police Department. Black Panther Party members were involved in many fatal firefights with police. Huey Newton allegedly killed officer John Frey in 1967, and Eldridge Cleaver (Minister of Information) led an ambush in 1968 of Oakland police officers, in which two officers were wounded and Panther treasurer Bobby Hutton was killed. The party suffered many internal conflicts, resulting in the murder of Alex Rackley.

Government persecution initially contributed to the party's growth among African Americans and the political left, who both valued the party as a powerful force against de facto segregation and the US military draft during the Vietnam War. Party membership peaked in 1970 and gradually declined over the next decade, due to vilification by the mainstream press and infighting largely fomented by COINTELPRO. Support further declined over reports of the party's alleged criminal activities, such as drug dealing and extortion.

The party's legacy is controversial. Older historical work described the party as more criminal than political, characterized by "defiant posturing over substance." Other assessments described the Party as "mainly victims of a repressive state." These older assessments have been criticized as incomplete. Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin characterized the Black Panther Party as the most influential black power organization of the late 1960s, with an "eventually tragic evolution" - collapsing due to infighting, often partly initiated by the government.

The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) was an American activist organization that fought for the welfare rights of people, especially women and children. The organization had four goals: adequate income, dignity, justice, and democratic participation. The group was active from 1966 to 1975. At its peak in 1969, NWRO membership was estimated at 25,000 members (mostly African American women). Thousands more joined in NWRO protests.

The Rainbow Coalition was an anti-racist, working-class multicultural movement founded April 4, 1969, in Chicago, Illinois by Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party, along with William "Preacherman" Fesperman of the Young Patriots Organization and José "Cha Cha" Jiménez, founder of the Young Lords. It was the first of several 20th-century black-led organizations to use the "rainbow coalition" concept.

Other prominent members of the Rainbow Coalition included Young Patriot members Jack "Junebug" Boykin, Bobby Joe Mcginnis, and Hy Thurman, as well as Field Marshall Bobby Lee of the Black Panthers.

The Rainbow Coalition's first alliance was between the Young Patriots and the Black Panthers by Bob Lee. Hampton then incorporated the Young Lords. The Rainbow Coalition soon included various radical socialist community groups like the Lincoln Park Poor People's Coalition, and Rising Up Angry. The coalition was later joined nationwide by the Students for a Democratic Society ("SDS"), the Brown Berets, the American Indian Movement, and the Red Guard Party. In April 1969, Hampton called several press conferences to announce that this "Rainbow Coalition" had formed. The Rainbow Coalition engaged in joint action against poverty, corruption, racism, police brutality, and substandard housing. The participating groups supported each other at protests, strikes, and demonstrations where they had a common cause.

The coalition espoused an iteration of militancy that aimed to decrease urban unemployment, promote public education, and advance "class" solidarity. For instance, in a 1970 issue of The Patriot, the Young Patriots Organization called for nonviolent support of Bobby Seale (on trial), but also declared that "Guns in the Hands of the Police Represent Capitalism and Racism...Guns In the Hands of the People Represent Socialism and Solidarity." Scholars distinguish this militancy from the direct action of "militant nonviolence" formulated by Martin Luther King Jr., weeks before his assassination during the 1968 Poor People's Campaign, by Erik Erikson in Gandhi's Truth (1969), and by Coretta Scott King during the 1970 imprisonment of Cesar Chavez. Elements of this alternate variant have, in turn, been found in doctrines of nonviolent extremism.

The coalition eventually collapsed under duress from constant harassment by local and federal law enforcement, including the assassination of Hampton.

The National Black Justice Coalition (NBJC) is an American civil rights organization serving primarily Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBTQ) people. Since 2003, NBJC has collaborated with national civil rights groups and LGBT organizations, advocating for the unique challenges and needs of the African American LGBT community in the United States.