The American mass movement of roughly 1954–1968 that destroyed the legal architecture of Jim Crow segregation and reshaped American political and constitutional life. The conventional bookends — Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (1968) — bracket a period of extraordinary political organization, moral seriousness, and physical courage. The Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–56), the Greensboro sit-ins (1960), the Freedom Rides (1961), the Birmingham campaign (1963), the March on Washington (1963), Freedom Summer (1964), the Selma-to-Montgomery march (1965), and the Memphis sanitation strike (1968) are some of the campaigns through which the movement built sustained pressure on Southern segregationist regimes and on a federal government that for most of the period preferred not to act.
The major legislative outcomes — the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968 — are the most legible legacy. The deeper legacies are the political and theological ones: the demonstration that disciplined nonviolent action could move a federal state, the public articulation of a religious-political vision of the Beloved Community in King's speeches and writings, the recovery of the Black church tradition as a source of national political imagination, and the formation of organizers — Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, John Lewis, Fannie Lou Hamer, Diane Nash, James Lawson, Pauli Murray, and many less-remembered — whose work made the visible leadership possible.
The movement's longer arc is contested. The voting-rights victories were significantly rolled back after Shelby County v. Holder (2013); the educational integration that Brown ordered has substantially reversed; the racial wealth gap is roughly what it was in 1968. Bryan Stevenson, James Forman Jr., Isabel Wilkerson, and others have traced how Mass Incarceration became the institutional successor to formal segregation. The movement remade American law and the American moral imagination; the structures it confronted have proven more durable than its leaders hoped.