What was the civil rights movement?
Answer
The struggle for African American equality
Explanation
The civil rights movement was the long struggle by African Americans and their allies for legal, political, and social equality, with its most famous and successful phase running from the mid-1950s through the late 1960s. The roots reached back to the abolition of slavery during the Civil War, the Reconstruction Amendments of 1865 to 1870, and the legal organizing of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1909.
The modern movement gained national attention with the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education on May 17, 1954, which struck down public school segregation. Other major events followed quickly. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, sparking a 381-day boycott led by a young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King Jr. Federal troops escorted nine Black students into Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Sit-ins began at a Greensboro, North Carolina lunch counter on February 1, 1960. Freedom Riders rode interstate buses through the South in 1961 to challenge segregated terminals.
The Birmingham campaign in 1963 produced powerful images of police dogs and fire hoses turned on peaceful protesters and contributed to broad public support for civil rights legislation. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963 drew about 250,000 people to the Lincoln Memorial, where King delivered his I Have a Dream speech. Three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, were murdered in Mississippi in June 1964.
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on July 2 of that year, banning discrimination in employment and public accommodations. Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965, when state troopers attacked peaceful marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, prompted Johnson to push the Voting Rights Act, signed on August 6, 1965, which banned literacy tests and authorized federal voter registration.
King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968. The Civil Rights Act of 1968, also called the Fair Housing Act, banned discrimination in housing. The movement transformed American law and remains a model for nonviolent reform.
Why this matters for your test
USCIS asks about the civil rights movement because it is the most influential American social movement of the twentieth century and the foundation of modern equal protection law. Understanding it helps applicants connect current debates over voting rights and discrimination to a long American tradition of citizen activism.
Source: USCIS 128 Civics Questions (2025)
