Rock, Arkansas, but they needed the support-
ive presence of more than 1,000 troops from the
101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army to do so.
School integration throughout the South did not
come swiftly, and after schools were integrated, so-
cial activities lagged behind. In May 2002 Taylor
County High School in central Georgia voted to
hold its first integrated prom.
On February 1, 1960, four young male students
at North Carolina A&T State University in Greens-
boro, North Carolina, walked the few blocks to the
downtown Woolworth’s to sit at the counter to
order coffee. Their simple action launched a wave
of sit-ins across the South. Within weeks, students
from historical black colleges and universities were
sitting in at counters asking for service where black
citizens had traditionally been denied. Leaders of
the sit-ins in various cities became leaders of the
Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC), which was formed at Shaw University in
Raleigh, North Carolina, in April 1960.
In May 1961, national attention was directed
toward the Freedom Riders, especially after their
bus was attacked and burned in Anniston, Ala-
bama, and further violence erupted at stops in
Montgomery and Birmingham. In 1963, people
around the globe watched and listened for news of
Birmingham—from the hosing of the black citi-
zens to the police attack dogs to the jailing of men,
women, and children who participated in what
were supposed to have been peaceful demonstra-
tions. In June 1963, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE
ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE activist Medgar
Evers was assassinated as he walked from his car
toward his front door in Jackson, Mississippi. His
killer roamed free for more than 30 years before
being convicted and sentenced. Equally important
is the historically successful March on Washington
in August of 1963, where King delivered his “I Have
a Dream” speech, and the bombing, a few weeks
later, of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church,
in which four young girls attending Sunday school
were killed.
Freedom Summer 1964 flooded Mississippi
with college students from all over the country
who volunteered their time in direct action with
Freedom Schools for the children and voter reg-
istration drives for the adults. The summer was
plagued by an FBI search for three young men—
James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael
Schwerner—who were reported missing in June
and whose bodies were found in August. The voter
registration drive culminated in members of the
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party attempting
to seat themselves in Atlantic City, New Jersey, at
the National Democratic Convention. Though un-
successful in 1964, their actions paved the way for
integrated representations from southern states in
all subsequent national political conventions.
The last hurrah of the modern Civil Rights
movement took place in March 1965 with the suc-
cessful walk from Selma to Montgomery; an esti-
mated 25,000 people joined in this final triumphant
moment on Dexter Avenue in front of the steps of
the state capitol to listen to speeches delivered by
the movement’s leaders, who, as it turned out, were
assembled for the last time. Within hours, a voting
rights bill was journeying through the corridors of
the nation’s capitol to becoming law.
The Civil Rights movement was responsible for
massive gains for black Americans in the erosion
of the Jim Crow South. Many people died, while
others went to prison, boycotted both transporta-
tion and businesses, marched in the streets, and
organized themselves in the hopes of achieving a
better tomorrow. Despite the many famous lead-
ers associated with this movement, including King
and Jesse Jackson, it would not have been a success
without the courage and labor of thousands of un-
named and unknown ordinary citizens.
Significantly, the Civil Rights movement be-
came and remains an important setting and theme
in African-American literature. Virtually every
black writer writing during the last half of the
20th century, from MAYA ANGELOU, JAMES BALD-
WIN, and AMIRI BARAKA to JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN
and JOHN A. WILLIAMS, address this movement in
their works. For example, it provides the major
backdrop for ERNEST GAINES’s novels The AUTOBI-
OGRAPHY OF MISS JANE PITTMAN (1971) and A Gath-
ering of Old Men (1983) and is a central theme in
the short stories of ALICE WALKER and a critical rite
of passage for the heroine of her novel Meridian
(1976). MARGARET WALKER’s collection of poemsCivil Rights movement 105