king or a ruler. In these cases, however,
they wanted rights only for their own
group. For instance, the Magna Carta
was a document that granted rights to
noblemen in England. The king signed
it in 1215. But most people still had no
way to complain if the king mistreated
them.
In the 1700s some people began to talk
about the idea that all people had certain
rights. They thought that it was
wrong for kings to ignore these rights.
This idea led some people to fight two
major revolutions against their kings—
the American Revolution and the
French Revolution. Afterward, the
Americans and the French set up new
forms of government run by the people.
These governments granted certain civil
rights to the people. In the United
States, the Bill of Rights of the U.S.
Constitution listed many of these rights.
France used a similar list, the Declaration
of the Rights of Man and of the
Citizen, as a part of its first constitution.
The Fight for Equal Rights
However, even these new governments
did not give equal rights to all citizens.
Women did not have the right to vote in
the United States until the 1920s.
French women could not vote until
1945. African Americans were enslaved
in parts of the United States until the
mid-1860s. Even after they gained freedom,
the government did not always
protect their rights. They fought to gain
the same civil rights as whites for many
years. The civil rights movement that
began in the 1950s was a part of this
struggle. Today people in some countries
are still fighting to gain the same civil
rights that other citizens have.
#More to explore
Bill of Rights • Civil Rights Movement
• Human Rights • Magna Carta
A man votes in South Africa. Voting
became a civil right for both black and
white South Africans in the 1990s.
128 Civil Rights BRITANNICA STUDENT ENCYCLOPEDIA
Civil Rights
Movement
The rights of a country’s citizens are
called civil rights. Many African Americans
were denied full civil rights for
about 100 years after the end of slavery.
The struggle for those rights, especially
in the 1950s and 1960s, is known as the
civil rights movement.
Before the CivilWar most blacks in the
United States were slaves, who had no
civil rights. After the war ended in 1865,
blacks made some progress. Between
1865 and 1870 the 13th, 14th, and
15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution
ended slavery and gave citizenship
and voting rights to former slaves.
These rights were often ignored, however,
especially in the South. To keep
poor African Americans from voting,
some states made people pay a tax or
pass a difficult test before they could
vote. Violent groups such as the Ku
Klux Klan tried to scare blacks away
from the polls. Southern governments
passed laws to keep African Americans
separate, or segregated, from whites. In
many places, for example, black children
were not allowed to attend the same
schools as white children.
Some African Americans resisted this
unfair treatment all along. But not until
the 20th century did blacks organize
themselves into a movement. The most
important leader in the early years of the
civil rights movement was W.E.B. Du
Bois. In 1909 he and others formed the
National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP). The
NAACP used the courts to fight for civil
rights for blacks.
Events of the 1950s
The civil rights movement won its first
major victory in 1954, in the court case
of Brown vs. Board of Education of
Topeka, Kansas. NAACP lawyers led by
Thurgood Marshall argued the case
before the U.S. Supreme Court. The
Court ruled that separate schools for
whites and blacks were unequal and
therefore violated the Constitution.
On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery,
Alabama, a black woman named Rosa
Parks was arrested for refusing to give up
her seat on a bus to a white person.
Blacks protested her arrest by boycotting
(refusing to use) the bus system. Late in
1956 the Supreme Court ruled that seg-
W.E.B. Du Bois (center row, second from
right) and other early leaders of the civil
rights movement are pictured in 1905.
The U.S.
Supreme
Court ruled
that racial segregation
was
legal in 1896.
The Court
reversed this
decision in
1954.
BRITANNICA STUDENT ENCYCLOPEDIA Civil Rights Movement 129
regation on public transportation was
unconstitutional. One of the leaders of
the boycott was a young minister named
Martin Luther King, Jr. In the late
1950s King organized the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, a
group dedicated to peaceful civil rights
activities.
Many white people resisted change,
especially in the South. In 1957 whites
rioted at a high school in Little Rock,
Arkansas, when the first black students
enrolled there. U.S. President Dwight
D. Eisenhower sent soldiers to restore
order.
Events of the 1960s
In 1960 the civil rights movement began
using a form of protest called the sit-in.
Protesters sat down in a place where they
knew they would not be served, such as
a segregated lunch counter, and refused
to leave. Though the protesters were
often harassed or arrested, they
remained peaceful, which created sympathy
for their cause. A group called the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
