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Direct action also took such forms as the sit-in campaigns to desegregate lunch counters that began in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960, and the 1961 Freedom Rides in which black and white volunteers rode buses and trains through the South to enforce a 1946 Supreme Court decision that desegregated interstate transportation (
Morgan v. Virginia ).
Morgan v. Virginia , 328 U.S. 373 (1946). While such focused campaigns could be effective, they often had little impact in places where they were not replicated. In addition, some of the campaigns led to violence against both the campaigns’ leaders and ordinary people; Rosa Parks, a longtime NAACP member and graduate of the Highlander Folk School for civil rights activists, whose actions had begun the Montgomery boycott, received death threats, E. D. Nixon’s home was bombed, and the
Freedom Riders were attacked in Alabama.
See Lynne Olson. 2002.
Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830–1970 . New York: Scribner, 97; D. F. Gore et al. 2009.
Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle . New York: New York University Press; Raymond Arsenault. 2007.
Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice . New York: Oxford University Press.
As the campaign for civil rights continued and gained momentum, President John F.
Kennedy called for Congress to pass new civil rights legislation, which began to work its way through Congress in 1963. The resulting law (pushed heavily and then signed by President Lyndon B.
Johnson after Kennedy’s assassination) was the
Civil Rights Act of 1964, which had wide-ranging effects on U.S. society. Not only did the act outlaw government discrimination and the unequal application of voting qualifications by race, but it also, for the first time, outlawed segregation and other forms of discrimination by most businesses that were open to the public, including hotels, theaters, and restaurants that were not private clubs. It outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, sex, or national origin by most employers, and it created the
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to monitor employment discrimination claims and help enforce this provision of the law. The provisions that affected private businesses and employers were legally justified not by the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws but instead by Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce.
See
Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States , 379 U.S. 241 (1964);
Katzenbach v. McClung , 379 U.S. 294 (1964), which built on
Wickard v. Filburn , 317 U.S. 111 (1942).
Even though the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had a monumental impact over the long term, it did not end efforts by many southern whites to maintain the white-dominated political power structure in the region. Progress in registering African American voters remained slow in many states despite increased federal activity supporting it, so civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King , Jr. decided to draw the public eye to the area where the greatest resistance to voter registration drives were taking place. The SCLC and SNCC particularly focused their attention on the city of Selma, Alabama, which had been the site of violent reactions against civil rights activities.
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