Brown v. Board of Education Ends School Segregation
Picture this: it’s 1954, and a simple school enrollment request by a Black father for his daughter would change American history forever. On May 17, 1954, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous ruling in the landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, and this historic decision marked the end of the “separate but equal” precedent set by the Supreme Court nearly 60 years earlier in Plessy v. Ferguson. The Court ruled that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” and therefore laws that impose them violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. What started as Oliver Brown’s frustration that his daughter Linda had to walk miles to a segregated school instead of attending the nearby white school became the foundation that would topple Jim Crow laws across America. The case, and the efforts to undermine the Court’s decision, brought greater awareness to the racial inequalities that African Americans faced and galvanized civil rights activists and increased efforts to end institutionalized racism throughout American society. This wasn’t just about education – it was about human dignity and equal treatment under the law.
Rosa Parks Sparks the Montgomery Bus Boycott
Sometimes the most powerful revolutions start with someone who’s just plain tired – not just physically, but tired of injustice. The event that triggered the boycott took place in Montgomery on December 1, 1955, after seamstress Rosa Parks refused to give her seat to a white passenger on a city bus. But here’s what most people don’t realize: this wasn’t spontaneous. Many of Montgomery’s African American residents were politically organized long before Parks was arrested, and the Women’s Political Council (WPC) was founded in 1946, and it had been lobbying the city for improved conditions on the buses for a decade before the bus boycott began. On 5 December, 90 percent of Montgomery’s black citizens stayed off the buses, and during this meeting the MIA was formed, and King was elected president. The boycott lasted 381 days and proved that organized, peaceful resistance could bring down even the most entrenched systems of oppression. The Montgomery bus boycott was a 13-month mass protest that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional.
Martin Luther King Jr. Emerges as a Leader
A 26-year-old pastor with a fresh PhD was about to become the voice of a generation. The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) coordinated the boycott, and its president, Martin Luther King, Jr., became a prominent civil rights leader as international attention focused on Montgomery. Martin Luther King, the charismatic young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, was elected president of the MIA, and a powerful orator, he was new to the area and had few enemies, and, thus, local leaders believed he could rally the various factions of the African American community to the cause. King’s approach was revolutionary in its simplicity: fight hatred with love, meet violence with nonviolence. If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. His leadership style combined moral authority with practical strategy, making him the perfect symbol for a movement that demanded both justice and dignity.
The March on Washington Reaches Peak Momentum
What happens when 260,000 people gather in one place with a single dream of equality? History gets made. On August 28, 1963, some 100 years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves, a young man named Martin Luther King climbed the marble steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. to describe his vision of America, and more than 200,000 people-black and white-came to listen. Stemming from a rapidly growing tide of grassroots support and outrage over the nation’s racial inequities, the rally drew over 260,000 people from across the nation, and celebrated as one of the greatest — if not the greatest — speech of the 20th century, Dr. King’s celebrated speech, “I Have a Dream,” was carried live by television stations across the country. Dr. King, originally slated to speak for 4 minutes, went on to speak for 16 minutes, giving one of the most iconic speeches in history. The march wasn’t just about hope – it was about concrete demands for jobs, freedom, and legislative action that would soon bear fruit.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 Becomes Law
Sometimes it takes a tragedy to push progress forward, and President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 gave his successor the political momentum needed to pass sweeping civil rights legislation. On June 19, the compromise bill passed the Senate by a vote of 73–27, quickly passed through the conference committee, which adopted the Senate version of the bill, then was passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law by Johnson on July 2, 1964. This wasn’t just symbolic – it had real teeth. Title II outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin in hotels, motels, restaurants, theaters, and all other public accommodations engaged in interstate commerce. After centuries of endurance by people of color, after a decade of organized, multiracial struggle and sacrifice, the U.S. Congress finally passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting racial discrimination in public accommodations and employment, and after a decade of continued lobbying of Congress and the President led by the NAACP, plus other peaceful protests for civil rights, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet implementation would prove just as challenging as passage.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 Ensures Political Power
The Civil Rights Act was a great start, but it had a glaring weakness – it didn’t fully address voting rights, which is where real power lies in a democracy. This title did not eliminate literacy tests, which acted as one barrier for black voters, other racial minorities, and poor whites in the South or address economic retaliation, police repression, or physical violence against nonwhite voters, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 directly addressed and eliminated most voting qualifications beyond citizenship, eliminating literacy tests. One year later, he signed the National Voting Rights Act of 1965, and together, these laws outlawed discrimination against blacks and women, effectively ending segregation, and sought to end disenfranchisement by making discriminatory voting practices illegal. The act was like handing formerly disenfranchised Americans the keys to political power – suddenly, their voices could be heard at the ballot box. Despite having a limited impact on African-American voter participation, at a time when black voter registration ranged from 0% (in 11 counties) to less than 5% (in 97 counties) despite being majority-Black counties, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 did establish the United States Commission on Civil Rights and the United States Department of Justice Civil Rights Division.
School Integration Faces Massive Resistance
Passing laws and implementing them are two very different things, as America would painfully learn in the years following Brown v. Board. In the Southern United States, the reaction to Brown among most white people was “noisy and stubborn”, especially in the Deep South where racial segregation was deeply entrenched in society, and many Southern governmental and political leaders embraced a plan known as “massive resistance”, created by Senator Harry F. Byrd, in order to frustrate attempts to force them to de-segregate their school systems. HEW’s Office for Civil Rights struggled to enforce school desegregation, with Southern states exploiting loopholes like “freedom of choice” plans, and not until Green v. County School Board (1968) did courts mandate active integration. It’s almost heartbreaking to think that children had to be escorted by federal troops just to go to school. Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, backed by enforcement by the Justice Department, began the process of desegregation in earnest. The gap between legal victory and lived reality showed just how deep racism ran in American society.
The Fight for Economic Equality Beyond Legal Rights
Civil rights wasn’t just about where you could sit or go to school – it was fundamentally about economic opportunity and the chance to build wealth. Economists identify three phases of wage convergence attributable to the Act: 1965–1975: Narrowed the Black-white wage gap by 7.3% in the South. The data shows that legal changes actually moved the economic needle, but progress was frustratingly slow. The Johnson administration deployed “Commerce Clause test cases”—carefully selected lawsuits against interstate businesses like Ollie’s Barbecue (Katzenbach v. McClung) to establish precedent, and by 1965, only 12% of Southern hotels had desegregated voluntarily, requiring DOJ intervention in 3,200 cases. Think about it this way: you could finally eat at that restaurant, but could you afford it? The civil rights movement opened doors, but economic inequality meant many African Americans still couldn’t walk through them. This economic dimension would become increasingly important as the movement evolved beyond the 1960s.
Recent Voting Rights Challenges and Protections
Fast forward to today, and voting rights remain under attack in ways that would have shocked civil rights pioneers. However, at least 14 states passed laws in 2023 that make it more difficult to vote. It’s like watching history repeat itself, but with more sophisticated methods. New Mexico and Minnesota passed laws that allow individuals to vote upon release from prison, and a federal court overturned Mississippi’s lifetime voting ban for individuals convicted of some felony offenses, calling the practice cruel and unusual. The good news is that some states are expanding access rather than restricting it. For the first time in US history, a former president faced significant sanctions, including criminal and civil charges, in part for his efforts to overturn the 2020 elections, a serious infringement of the right to vote. These recent developments show that the fight for voting rights is far from over – it’s an ongoing battle that requires constant vigilance.
LGBTQ+ Rights as the New Civil Rights Frontier
The principles established by the 1960s civil rights movement have found new expression in the fight for LGBTQ+ equality, though progress has been uneven. Michigan is the only state where lawmakers adopted a comprehensive LGBT-inclusive nondiscrimination law in 2023, making it the 22nd state to do so. That means 28 states still don’t have comprehensive protections – imagine if we accepted that level of incomplete coverage for racial discrimination today. As recently as June 2023, the Supreme Court ruled in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis in favor of a business owner who sought to discriminate against LGBTQI+ persons by refusing to create a customizable wedding website for LGBTQI+ couples, and the ruling allows for open discrimination against LGBTQI+ individuals under the guise of First Amendment rights. As of August 2024, 26 states had passed bans on gender-affirming care, and studies have shown that many LGBTQI+ people continue to face employment and housing discrimination in their personal lives, in addition to discrimination in accessing health care. The playbook is familiar, but the struggle continues with new communities fighting for the same basic dignity and equality.
Modern Threats to Civil Rights Progress
Today’s civil rights landscape faces threats that would have seemed unimaginable to 1960s activists – some using the very language of civil rights to roll back protections. Project 2025 would direct the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to spearhead an equity purge in government, including in several key agencies such as the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the EEOC, and under Project 2025, the DOJ and EEOC would be tasked with enforcing Title VII against entities that promote critical race theory, equity, or any type of racial classification. It’s a stunning reversal – using civil rights laws to prevent civil rights progress. This type of crackdown has already been seen in 567 anti-critical race theory bills that were introduced in state legislatures in 2023, with more across the country introduced in 2024, and additionally, research shows that major corporations such as Meta, Tesla, DoorDash, Lyft, Home Depot, Wayfair, and X have cut the size of their DEIA teams by 50 percent or more in 2023 alone. State-level lawmakers continued to undermine democracy by banning books and passing laws that restrict truthful classroom discussions of race, history, sexual orientation, and gender. The current moment shows how fragile civil rights protections can be when political winds shift.
Technology and Artificial Intelligence as Civil Rights Issues
The latest frontier in civil rights isn’t taking place in courtrooms or on city buses – it’s happening in algorithms and data centers across America. The second report, “The Civil Rights Implications of the Federal Use of Facial Recognition Technology,” explored concerns about the federal government’s unrestricted use of Facial Recognition Technology (FRT), and it examined how FRT is currently being used and provides recommendations for regulations and best practices to address these concerns. Think about it: facial recognition technology that works better on white faces than Black faces isn’t just a technical glitch – it’s a civil rights issue with real-world consequences. Numerous federal agencies are considering how to regulate powerful new technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), and regulations should contain rights protections and enforcement mechanisms and be informed by civil society inputs on human rights harms. Meanwhile, advances in artificial intelligence are used to limit freedoms and violate human rights. We’re living through a moment where the tools that could promote equality might instead entrench existing biases on a massive scale.
Environmental Justice as Civil Rights
Environmental racism might sound like a new concept, but it’s really an extension of the same patterns of discrimination that civil rights activists have been fighting for decades. These impacts are disproportionately borne by already marginalized communities—including Black, Indigenous, and other people of color and low-income communities—and perpetuate systemic racism. It’s not coincidental that toxic waste sites and polluting industries are more likely to be located in communities of color. The Biden administration issued an executive order that directs all federal agencies to incorporate the pursuit of environmental justice into their missions and announced the creation of a new policy committee to coordinate efforts to prioritize public health, economic development, and equity in tackling the global plastics pollution crisis. However, the US is also on track to be responsible for the world’s largest expansion in oil and gas extraction from 2023 to 2050, and fossil fuels are the single largest contributor to global warming and can be linked to human rights harms. The contradiction is striking: acknowledging environmental justice while simultaneously expanding the very industries that cause environmental harm to vulnerable communities. Clean air and water aren’t luxuries – they’re basic human rights that shouldn’t depend on your zip code or skin color.
What legacy will today’s civil rights struggles leave for future generations?
