1. Basic civil rights were granted to emancipated African Americans during the Reconstruction era (1865–77) that followed the Civil War. But almost as soon as Reconstruction ended, white supremacy was reinstitutionalized in the South, primarily through the system of Jim Crow segregation that was legitimized by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Plessy Ferguson case (1896), which established the constitutionality of “separate but equal” facilities for Black and white people.
2. Martin Luther King, Jr., a local pastor who successfully led the Montgomery bus boycott, became the most prominent leader of the civil rights movement by advocating the principles of civil disobedience and nonviolent protest pioneered by Indian activist Mahatma Gandhi.
3. Two of the so-called Reconstruction Amendments—the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship and equal rights to formerly enslaved people, and the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed that the right to vote could not be denied based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude”—were the cornerstones of legal challenges to racial discrimination during the civil rights movement.
4. The Freedom Rides of 1961 signaled the beginning of a period when civil rights protest activity grew in scale and intensity as nonviolent activists confronted Southern segregation at its strongest points so as to pressure the federal government to intervene to protect the constitutional rights of African Americans.
5. In the aftermath of civil disorder in Watts (1965), Cleveland (1966), Detroit (1967), and Newark (1967) and throughout the United States following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968), U.S. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson created the Kerner Commission to identify the causes of the unrest. It cited racism, discrimination, and poverty and warned that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”
6. As African Americans made social, political, and economic gains, some white Americans began, in the 1970s, to claim that they were victims of “reverse discrimination.” Since then, such claims have been used, sometimes effectively, to argue against affirmative action policies and to block civil rights initiatives.
