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Sit-ins Challenge Segragation
The Greensboro sit-in was a civil rights protest that started in 1960, when young African-American students staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave after being denied service. Though many of the protesters were arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace, their actions made an immediate and lasting impact, forcing Woolworth’s and other establishments to change their segregationist policies. -
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The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
The SNCC, or Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, was a civil-rights group formed to give younger blacks more of a voice in the civil rights movement. The SNCC soon became one of the movement’s more radical branches. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee also directed much of the black voter registration drives in the South. Three of its members died at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan during the MississippiFreedom Summer of 1964. -
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Letter From a Birmingham Jail
In 1963, Martin Luther had been arrested in Birmingham while leading supporters of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference in a nonviolent campaign of demonstrations against segregation. King wrote a letter to local white ministers justifying his decision not to call off the demonstrations. His letter was published in the national press, along with shocking images of police brutality against protesters in Birmingham that helped build widespread support for the civil rights cause. -
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Freedom Riders
Freedom Riders were groups of white and African American civil rights activists who participated in Freedom Rides, bus trips through the American South in 1961 to protest segregated bus terminals. The groups were confronted by arresting police officers, as well as horrific violence from white protestors, along their routes, but also drew international attention to their cause. -
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Integration of Ole Miss
James Meredith, an African American man, attempted to enroll at the all-white University of Mississippi in 1962. Chaos soon broke out on the Ole Miss campus, with riots ending in two dead, hundreds wounded and many others arrested, after the Kennedy administration called out some 31,000 National Guardsmen and other federal forces to enforce order. -
I have a Dream
The March on Washington was a massive protest march that occurred in August 1963, when some 250,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The event aimed to draw attention to continuing challenges and inequalities faced by African Americans a century after emancipation. It was also the occasion of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s now-iconic “I Have A Dream” speech. -
Selma March: The Last Revolution
In January, King's SCLC had joined with Selma activists and the SNCC to work on a registration campaign, seeing in the factionalized white government and officials' stubborn resistance to extending the ballot a chance to make a national breakthrough on voting rights. Thousands of people were arrested in the fight for civil rights in Selma before the march to Montgomery began. Many bled in Dallas and Lowndes counties before "Bloody Sunday;" many bled afterward. Two were killed.