Students will analyze how as the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s grew, local and national organizations and grassroots groups employed a variety of methods, aims, philosophies and strategies to achieve their goals, including an expanded emphasis on direct action.
Essential Knowledge
6.A. The 1960s showed the power of nonviolent direct action as a tool for change, beginning in Greensboro, North Carolina, with a series of student-led sit-ins of segregated businesses. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) quickly became the main engine of student activism in the movement.
6.B. The Freedom Rides, a form of direct action sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), challenged the segregation of interstate buses and terminals. Freedom Riders were Black and white volunteers who rode buses through the South together. They were attacked, beaten and jailed, but many chose to remain in the South after their release to help start local movements.
6.C. Marches and protests drew attention to the movement, and violence against protesters spurred change on a national level. In 1963, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) led a campaign to protest segregation and racism in Birmingham, Alabama, culminating in a march by thousands of African Americans—including children—who were viciously attacked by the police. The resulting images shocked and outraged viewers around the world, prompting the Kennedy administration to finally intervene and help negotiate for desegregation.
6.D. The 1963 March on Washington, during which Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, drew a crowd of more than 250,000 people from across the United States. However, the march was dismissed by some people and organizations in the movement as ineffective. They argued that while the event helped build white public support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it did little to influence congressional votes or to support events on the ground in the freedom struggle.
6.E. Across the South, organizing focused heavily on the right to vote. In Mississippi, activist groups coordinated to organize the 1964 Freedom Summer push to register eligible African Americans to vote.
6.F. In Alabama, activists organized a voting rights campaign in Selma, leading to the famous 1965 Selma to Montgomery march.
6.G. Nonviolence was not the only organizing philosophy of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It was common for activists to believe in armed self-defense. Armed escorts routinely protected protesters engaged in nonviolent direct action.
6.H. Today, this era of well-publicized marches and national attention on civil rights activism—and the period of legislative achievements that followed—is sometimes presented as the extent of the Black movement for equality and civil rights. But highlighting only this period of the narrative neglects the long, continuous work that led to the more rapid changes of the mid-1960s and the work that came after.
Related Resources
- [6.A.] To learn about the history of SNCC, its role within the movement, and strategies for teaching about the organization, educators can listen to—or read the transcript of—the Teaching Hard History podcast episode “Community Organizing, Youth Leadership and SNCC.”
- [6.A.] The Zinn Education Project’s “Teaching SNCC: The Organization at the Heart of the Civil Rights Revolution” provides further useful recommendations.
- [6.A.] To learn about SNCC’s activities and organizers, explore the SNCC Digital Gateway, which offers student-friendly introductions to some of the people in the movement, as well as interviews and other resources.
- [6.A.] Students should also learn about the life of U.S. Rep. John Lewis. The March trilogy—graphic novels written by Lewis with Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell—focuses on his experiences in the movement. A clip of LFJ’s “Interview With John Lewis” introduces the series with Lewis walking readers through his experience at a lunch counter sit-in. Students can also read LFJ’s excerpt from Lewis’ autobiography Walking With the Wind to learn how he and other activists prepared for the sit-ins.
- [6.A.] SNCC’s goal was to expand voting access not just in urban areas but in rural areas, too. Students can review the LFJ text “Report on Voter Registration—Projected Program” from the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Freedom Summer Digital Collection to better understand the challenges of organizing in rural areas and the necessity of expanding registration campaigns beyond urban centers.
- [6.B.] To learn about the ways Freedom Riders planned and prepared for their trips, read Bernard Lafayette Jr.’s article “The First Time John Lewis and I Integrated the Buses.”
- [6.B.] For an introduction to the goals and experiences of the Freedom Riders, educators might share the American Experience documentary “Freedom Riders” and accompanying articles available through PBS.
- [6.C.] Students can also see for themselves the violence against marchers in the Civil Rights Movement Archive’s collection of photographs “The Children’s Crusade: Birmingham—1963,” which includes famous photographs alongside lesser-known images.
- [6.C.] For evidence of how the violence in Birmingham caught the attention of the nation, students can read the LFJ text “Notes on Situation in Birmingham, Alabama, 5/12/1963,” which includes images and a transcript of President John F. Kennedy’s handwritten notes.
- [6.D.] To teach about the March on Washington, review the Rethinking Schools article “Teaching a People’s History of the March on Washington,” which identifies some common misconceptions often reinforced by textbooks’ depictions of the march and recommends alternative approaches.
- [6.D.] The LFJ article “Gary Younge: Heroes Are Human” can help provide a more complete history about the March on Washington that goes beyond the packaged narrative that the event was problem-free and widely embraced. Students and educators can use “The Speech” interactive pages available on the Guardian’s website to learn more regarding the lead-up to and aftermath of the march.
- [6.D.] The National Museum of African American History and Culture’s collection The Historical Legacy of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom includes primary source documents to explore as well as analytical articles and short videos of some of the speeches from the march.
- [6.D.] To understand the range of issues that brought people to the March on Washington, review photographs to see the signs the marchers carried. The LFJ text “Dr. Martin Luther King Marches on Washington” offers a great example.
- [6.D.] For more on the range of issues, watch “John Lewis’ Historic Speech at the March on Washington” (available from NowThis News on YouTube). At the march, John Lewis presented a censored version of his original speech. For deeper understanding, students can read the original version of Lewis’ speech, “Patience Is a Dirty and Nasty Word” (available in the LFJ text library) and compare it to the speech he gave.
- [6.E.] Many methods were used to disenfranchise voters, including literacy tests. Reviewing a sample Alabama literacy test will show how local registrars could choose harder questions for people they didn’t want to pass the test and could even choose to interpret correct answers as incorrect. The test is available in the LFJ text library and the online Civil Rights Movement Archive, which holds many primary sources from the movement, most donated by movement veterans.
- [6.E.] For an example of the barriers Black Mississippians faced when registering to vote, students can watch archival footage of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in Jackson, Mississippi. In this Library of Congress clip, activist Unita Blackwell—later the first Black woman to become a mayor in Mississippi—reads aloud the impossible literacy test she was expected to pass. In the same footage, a white Mississippi registrar testifies he has not registered any Black voters during his tenure and then fails to correctly interpret the passage Blackwell read.
- [6.E.] Students should learn about Ella Baker, Robert “Bob” Moses and other SNCC leaders who repeatedly endured jail and violence as they worked through the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), the major point of coordination for organizing in Mississippi. To learn more about the work of SNCC and COFO in Mississippi, read SNCC’s “Survey: Current Fieldwork, Spring, 1963” and COFO’s “Freedom School Data.” These primary source documents, available in the LFJ text library, show that civil rights organizing took many forms, including educating children and adults.
- [6.E.] COFO was instrumental in forming the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and organizing the Freedom Summer. The Zinn Education Project’s “Sharecroppers Challenge U.S. Apartheid: The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party” offers a useful introduction.
- [6.E.] To learn more about the MFDP and civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, review Hamer’s “Testimony Before the Credentials Committee” of the 1964 Democratic National Convention about the barriers she faced while registering to vote, which created such a sensation that President Lyndon B. Johnson called an impromptu press conference to draw attention away from it.
- [6.E.] To better understand the MFDP’s challenge at the convention and their stated goals for moving forward, review “Freedom Primer No. 1: The Convention Challenge and the Freedom Vote.”
- [6.F.] To teach about the Selma to Montgomery march, educators can use Teaching for Change’s free Teach About Selma resources.
- [6.F.] To better understand the relationships and the crucial decisions that led to the Selma to Montgomery march, students can also try self-paced exploration on the website Selma Online, a guided narrative featuring the voices of young activists who were at the march.
- [6.G.] To learn more about self-defense within the movement, educators can listen to the Teaching Hard History podcast episode “Nonviolence and Self-Defense.”
- [6.G.] Though many civil rights organizations held nonviolence as an ideal, other key figures, such as Robert F. Williams, argued for a more militant approach. To better understand the reasoning activists used to argue that nonviolent strategies could not be the only method for fighting oppression, read an excerpt from Williams’ 1962 book Negroes With Guns.
- [6.H.] The Teaching Hard History podcast episodes “Reframing the Movement” and “Beyond the ‘Master Narrative’” explore the impact of a limited civil rights narrative that only focuses on this mid-century era and recommend ways educators can teach a more accurate, fuller history of the movement.
