The civil rights movement was a social movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement in the country. The movement had its origins in the Reconstruction era during the late 19th century and had its modern roots in the 1940s, although the movement made its largest legislative gains in the 1960s after years of direct actions and grassroots protests. The social movement's major nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience campaigns eventually secured new protections in federal law for the civil rights of all Americans.
Asa Philip Randolph was an American labor unionist and civil rights activist. In 1925, he organized and led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first successful African-American-led labor union. In the early Civil Rights Movement and the Labor Movement, Randolph was a prominent voice. His continuous agitation with the support of fellow labor rights activists against racist labor practices helped lead President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802 in 1941, banning discrimination in the defense industries during World War II. The group then successfully maintained pressure, so that President Harry S. Truman proposed a new Civil Rights Act and issued Executive Orders 9980 and 9981 in 1948, promoting fair employment and anti-discrimination policies in federal government hiring, and ending racial segregation in the armed services.
An African American is a citizen or resident of the United States who has origins in any of the black populations of Africa. African American-related topics include:
Whitney Moore Young Jr. was an American civil rights leader. Trained as a social worker, he spent most of his career working to end employment discrimination in the United States and turning the National Urban League from a relatively passive civil rights organization into one that aggressively worked for equitable access to socioeconomic opportunity for the historically disenfranchised. Young was influential in the United States federal government's War on Poverty in the 1960s.
Mary Frances Berry is an American historian, writer, lawyer, activist and professor who focuses on U.S. constitutional and legal, African-American history. Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought where she teaches American legal history at the Department of History, School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the former chairwoman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. Previously, Berry was provost of the College of Behavioral and Social Science at University of Maryland, College Park, and was the first African American chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder.
In his twelve years in office, United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not appoint or nominate a single African American to be either a secretary or undersecretary in his presidential cabinet. Denied such an outlet, African American federal employees in the executive branch began to meet informally in an unofficial Federal Council of Negro Affairs to try to influence federal policy on race issues. By mid-1935, there were 45 African Americans working in federal executive departments and New Deal agencies. Referred to as the Black Cabinet, Roosevelt did not officially recognize it as such, nor make appointments to it. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt encouraged the group. Although many have ascribed the term to Mary McLeod Bethune, African American newspapers had earlier used it to describe key black advisors of Theodore Roosevelt, Taft, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover.
Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. (ΑΦΑ) is the oldest intercollegiate historically African American fraternity. It was initially a literary and social studies club organized in the 1905–1906 school year at Cornell University but later evolved into a fraternity with a founding date of December 4, 1906. It employs an icon from Ancient Egypt, the Great Sphinx of Giza, as its symbol. Its aims are "Manly Deeds, Scholarship, and Love For All Mankind," and its motto is "First of All, Servants of All, We Shall Transcend All." Its archives are preserved at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center.
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.
Executive Order 8802 was an executive order signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 25, 1941. It prohibited ethnic or racial discrimination in the nation's defense industry, including in companies, unions, and federal agencies. It also set up the Fair Employment Practice Committee. Executive Order 8802 was the first federal action, though not a law, to promote equal opportunity and prohibit employment discrimination in the United States. It represented the first executive civil rights directive since Reconstruction.
The Big Six—Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, John Lewis, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young—were the leaders of six prominent civil rights organizations who were instrumental in the organization of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.
Eugene Kinckle Jones was a leader of the National Urban League and one of the seven founders of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity at Cornell University in 1906. Jones became Alpha chapter's second President.
Lester Blackwell Granger was an African American social worker, and civic leader who headed the National Urban League (NUL) from 1941 to 1961.
The civil rights movement in Omaha, Nebraska, has roots that extend back until at least 1912. With a history of racial tension that starts before the founding of the city, Omaha has been the home of numerous overt efforts related to securing civil rights for African Americans since at least the 1870s.
John Preston Davis was an American journalist, lawyer and activist intellectual, who became prominent for his work with the Joint Committee on National Recovery (JCNR). In 1935, he co-founded the National Negro Congress, an organization dedicated to the advancement of African Americans during the Great Depression.
The March on Washington Movement (MOWM), 1941–1946, organized by activists A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin was a tool designed to pressure the U.S. government into providing fair working opportunities for African Americans and desegregating the armed forces by threat of mass marches on Washington, D.C. during World War II. When President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 in 1941, prohibiting discrimination in the defense industry under contract to federal agencies, Randolph and collaborators called off the initial march.
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.
Rev. William Henry Jernagin was an African-American Baptist pastor, an important figure in the civil rights movement (1896–1954), and Pan-African activist. The National Race Congress selected Jernagin to attend the Paris Peace Conference and the First Pan-African Congress in 1919.
George Edmund Haynes was an American sociology scholar and federal civil servant, a co-founder and first executive director of the National Urban League, serving 1911 to 1918. A graduate of Fisk University, he earned a master's degree at Yale University, and was the first African American to earn a doctorate degree from Columbia University, where he completed one in sociology.
Verina Harris Morton Jones was an American physician, suffragist and clubwoman. Following her graduation from the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1888 she was the first woman licensed to practice medicine in Mississippi. She then moved to Brooklyn where she co-founded and led the Lincoln Settlement House. Jones was involved with numerous civic and activist organizations and was elected to the board of directors of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Ruth Standish Bowles Baldwin was an American suffragist and a co-founder of the National Urban League.
