civil rights activists assignment

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The Civil Rights Movement

Get to know Martin Luther King Jr., Barbara Johns, the Little Rock Nine, and other pioneers of the civil rights movement.

Featured Teaching Kits

Teacher-approved stories, resources, and worksheets for teaching about the civil rights movement in your classroom, courtesy of  Junior Scholastic , the middle school Social Studies classroom magazine

The Legacy of MLK

The 1968 assassination of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. stunned the nation, but his work continues to inspire the pursuit of racial equality in America.

How Barbara Johns Helped End Segregation

In 1951, there were 21 American states that required black students and white students to attend separate schools. A young African American girl named Barbara Johns knew this wasn't right—and that she had to do something about it. Her bravery led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling that changed the nation forever. 

The Fight for Equal Rights

The civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s defined a generation. Watch this video to learn about the movement, its leaders, and the sacrifices made in the fight for equal rights.

The Little Rock Nine

In 1957, nine black students walked into Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas—and into history. Relive their experience with this American History play.

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Famous quotes from civil rights leaders throughout history

“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. . . . No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

— Rosa Parks

“By the force of our demands, our determination, and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of God and democracy.”

— John Lewis

“You are not judged by the height you have risen but from the depths you have climbed.”

— Frederick Douglass

Key Figures  

Four civil rights figures who made an impact.

Martin Luther King Jr.

This Baptist minister become the most important leader of the civil rights movement. His “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington encapsulated the historic vision behind the movement for African American equality.

Thurgood Marshall

A prominent black attorney, he represented the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education —the case that struck down “separate but equal” in U.S. schools—before the U.S. Supreme Court. Marshall later became the first African American justice on the Court.

Barbara Johns

Barbara was just 16 years old in 1951 when she led a courageous protest to integrate the schools of her Virginia town. The lawsuit Johns started would become one of the cases folded into the historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

Jackie Robinson

When Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, he became the first African American to play in baseball’s major leagues. In doing so, Robinson also helped open up all professional sports in the U.S. to black players.

Supplemental resources that link to external websites about the civil rights movement

Civil Rights Timeline

A chronology of the struggle for civil rights in America, from President Harry S. Truman’s desegregation of the armed forces in 1948 to the Fair Housing Act of 1968

Martin Luther King Jr.: A Biography

Essential details about the movement’s most important leader, with links to more than two dozen short videos related to Dr. King and other civil rights pioneers. 

The March on Washington

On August 28, 1963, about a quarter of a million people gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for the largest civil rights rally up to that time.

Terms and definitions that pertain to the civil rights movement

a religious or national song, or a song that expresses the ideas of a particular group

to refuse, as an act of protest, to participate in a certain event or to buy particular products

civil rights

the rights of a country’s citizens, including social and political freedom and equality

describing laws and practices that discriminated against African Americans after the Civil War

segregation

the separation of people by race, ethnic group, gender, class, or personal orientation

a protest in which people seat themselves somewhere and refuse to move until their demands are met

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@historyhd On Unsplash (Civil Rights March); Bettmann/Getty Images (MLK); Gluekit (Photo Colorization), Rudolph Faircloth/AP Images (classroom); Bettmann / Contributor (woman and girl on Supreme Court steps); Bettmann/Getty Images (Little Rock Nine); CNP/Hulton Archive/Getty images (MLK); Stock Montage/Getty Images (Thurgood Marshall); Courtesy Of Joan Johns Cobbs (Barbara Johns); Mark Kauffman/Getty Images (Jackie Robinson)

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Places and People of the Civil Rights Movement

Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Wikimedia Commons

"Let freedom ring … from every village and every hamlet." -Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr., framed the goals and strategies of the Civil Rights Movement for a national audience, and with his message of nonviolent protest, he inspired ordinary African Americans to demand equal rights as American citizens. This lesson will focus on the individual men and women who embraced King’s message and advanced the Civil Rights Movement on a local level. By researching these people and the now historic places where they brought about change, students will discover how the simple act of sitting at a lunch counter in North Carolina could be considered revolutionary, and how, combined with countless other acts of nonviolent protest across the nation, it could lead to major legislation in the area of civil rights for African Americans.

Guiding Questions

How did local movements support and differ from actions taken by national civil rights leaders and groups?

To what extent was and is your town, city, or state connected to the civil rights movement?

Learning Objectives

Analyze how protest at the local level contributed to the success of the Civil Rights Movement as a whole.

Evaluate the defining events of the Civil Rights Movement, the people who participated in them, and the historic places where these events occurred.

Evaluate how individuals adapted Martin Luther King Jr.’s message of nonviolent protest to their own communities and situations.

Lesson Plan Details

NCSS.D2.His.1.9-12. Evaluate how historical events and developments were shaped by unique circumstances of time and place as well as broader historical contexts.

NCSS.D2.His.2.9-12. Analyze change and continuity in historical eras.

NCSS.D2.His.3.9-12. Use questions generated about individuals and groups to assess how the significance of their actions changes over time and is shaped by the historical context.

NCSS.D2.His.12.9-12. Use questions generated about multiple historical sources to pursue further inquiry and investigate additional sources.

NCSS.D2.His.14.9-12. Analyze multiple and complex causes and effects of events in the past.

NCSS.D2.His.15.9-12. Distinguish between long-term causes and triggering events in developing a historical argument.

NCSS.D2.His.16.9-12. Integrate evidence from multiple relevant historical sources and interpretations into a reasoned argument about the past.

Activity 1. Identifying the Need for Change

Begin the lesson by asking students to read the “Introduction” and “The Need for Change” on the We Shall Overcome: Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement website. Also, ask students to read King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which can be found at Great American Speeches: 80 Years of Political Oratory (to find this document, go to the home page of this website, then click on the “Speech Archive” link. Scroll down the page to the “1960s” section. A link to King’s speech, as well as helpful background, can be found under this heading).

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1967 "The Three Evils of Society" speech  at the National Conference on New Politics in Chicago illustrates the degree to which any change has occurred in the United States with regard to civil rights and what Dr. King believes must happen if change is to occur.

First, discuss with students the need for change. Define segregation for the class, and ask students to imagine living during this time period. How would they react to drinking from separate water fountains and using separate restrooms, sitting in segregated sections of restaurants, attending different and often inferior schools, riding in the back of buses and entering through separate doors, or being denied voting rights, simply because of the color of their skin? Discuss these and other inequities. (See the “ Introduction ” section for background on segregation the events leading up to the Civil Rights Movement.) Ask students once again if they could imagine being denied basic rights under the constraints of segregation. Why was there a need for change in the United States? Next, discuss Martin Luther King’s role in the Civil Rights Movement. Explain to students that although King was a leader of the movement, he believed its success depended on the participation of ordinary men and women who shared his dream of equality. Ask students to analyze King’s speech and identify the portions of the speech that reflect his idea of a collective movement and nonviolent protest.

For more background on King and nonviolent protest, please see the EDSITEment lesson plan, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Power of Nonviolence , and visit The Martin Luther King, Jr. website.

Activity 2. Ordinary People in the Civil Rights Movement

Divide students into four groups and assign each group one of the four sections of the We Shall Overcome site; the four sections are entitled “Players,” “Strategy," “Cost,” and “Prize.” (To find these sections from the home page of the We Shall Overcome site, click on “Introduction.” Links to the sections listed above can be accessed at the bottom of the “Introduction” page.) Depending on availability students may read from their computers, or they may read from handouts printed ahead of time. Students should identify the major points outlined in their sections, and present their findings to the class as a group, giving each member a chance to comment.

These brief presentations should develop into a larger discussion involving the entire class. Who were the players, and what did they want to accomplish? Again, emphasize the importance of ordinary men and women, and explain that the success of the Civil Rights Movement depended on a series of achievements at the local level by local people, several of whom will be discussed later in the lesson. Discuss the role of the church as a place of local activism, student involvement, and the roles of the opposition, namely the Ku Klux Klan and Southern whites. What was the strategy of the local people? What was the cost? Discuss the immediate victories of the movement, such as African-Americans being served a meal in a restaurant, as well as the long-term prize embodied in the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 .

Activity 3. Historic Places in the Civil Rights Movement

Ask students to form groups again, this time in smaller groups of two of three, and choose a historical site from the We Shall Overcome website. Consider including local and state sites to draw connections between the national civil rights movement and students' communities. Many states and territories have produced encyclopedias focused on local history and culture. EDSITEment's Teacher's Guide " Investigting Local History " provides free access to encyclopedias, historical societies, and libraries, as well as other NEH funded databases. 

Using the attached worksheet , ask each group to research a place by asking the same questions posed in the earlier discussion. Students should analyze their event and place in terms of the larger Civil Rights Movement.

• How did Martin Luther King, Jr. and his theory of nonviolence influence the people involved?
• In what ways did local organizers deviate from the strategies and philosophies of Dr. King and other national civil rights leaders and organizations?
• What is important about the place where the event occurred?
• How did the people at this place influence the larger Civil Rights Movement? 

When the presentations are complete, broaden the discussion to include the entire class, and compare and contrast the historical places presented by the students. Students can respond to presentations and discuss the following prompts:

• Which historic places were the most significant to the success of the movement?
• At which place was the strategy employed most successful? Least successful?
• At which place did the players suffer the greatest cost?
• At which places did Martin Luther King, Jr. play a direct role? At which places did he play an indirect role?

Finally, reiterate to the students that the events that occurred at each of these historic places were significant in that 1) they were led by ordinary men and women who believed in equal rights for all Americans, and 2) they did not stand alone, but were successful as part of a collective, non-violent movement in which local activism translated into sweeping national change in the area of civil rights for African-Americans.

Ask students to conduct an oral history with a family member or other adult who remembers the Civil Rights Movement. Students can visit Using Oral History at American Memory for more information on conducting oral history interviews and exploring their own family history. Among the questions to ask:

• Do you remember what happened at the place I studied in school?
• Tell me what you remember about the events at Little Rock High School. What was your reaction to those events at the time? How did others react? How do you feel about those events looking back on them today?
• Do you recall what happened in your own town during the Civil Rights Movement? Did you participate in the movement in any way?
• What was your reaction to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech?
• Discuss the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement as explained in “The Prize” on the We Shall Overcome website . Was the Civil Rights Movement a success? Ask students to give examples of successes and failures. In what way are civil rights being discussed today? How have the events of September 11th brought the issue of civil rights back into the spotlight?

Selected EDSITEment Websites

• Martin Luther King, Jr.
• American Memory
• Great American Speeches: 80 Years of Political Oratory
• We Shall Overcome: Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement

Materials & Media

Ordinary people, ordinary places: worksheet 1, related on edsitement, grassroots perspectives on the civil rights movement: focus on women, the freedom riders and the popular music of the civil rights movement, competing voices of the civil rights movement, "sí, se puede": chávez, huerta, and the ufw, asian american & pacific islander perspectives within humanities education.

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Abolitionism to Jim Crow

• Du Bois to Brown
• Montgomery bus boycott to the Voting Rights Act
• From Black power to the assassination of Martin Luther King
• Into the 21st century
• Black Lives Matter and Shelby County v. Holder

When did the American civil rights movement start?

• What did Martin Luther King, Jr., do?
• What is Martin Luther King, Jr., known for?
• Who did Martin Luther King, Jr., influence and in what ways?
• What was Martin Luther King’s family life like?

American civil rights movement

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• NeoK12 - Educational Videos and Games for School Kids - Civil Rights Movement
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• National Humanities Center - Freedom's Story - The Civil Rights Movement: 1919-1960s
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• Table Of Contents

The American civil rights movement started in the mid-1950s. A major catalyst in the push for civil rights was in December 1955, when NAACP activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man.

Who were some key figures of the American civil rights movement?

Martin Luther King, Jr. , was an important leader of the civil rights movement. Rosa Parks , who refused to give up her seat on a public bus to a white customer, was also important. John Lewis , a civil rights leader and politician, helped plan the March on Washington .

What did the American civil rights movement accomplish?

The American civil rights movement broke the entrenched system of racial segregation in the South and achieved crucial equal-rights legislation.

What were some major events during the American civil rights movement?

The Montgomery bus boycott , sparked by activist Rosa Parks , was an important catalyst for the civil rights movement. Other important protests and demonstrations included the Greensboro sit-in and the Freedom Rides .

What are some examples of civil rights?

Examples of civil rights include the right to vote, the right to a fair trial, the right to government services, the right to a public education, and the right to use public facilities.

Recent News

American civil rights movement , mass protest movement against racial segregation and discrimination in the southern United States that came to national prominence during the mid-1950s. This movement had its roots in the centuries-long efforts of enslaved Africans and their descendants to resist racial oppression and abolish the institution of slavery . Although enslaved people were emancipated as a result of the American Civil War and were then granted basic civil rights through the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution , struggles to secure federal protection of these rights continued during the next century. Through nonviolent protest, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s broke the pattern of public facilities’ being segregated by “race” in the South and achieved the most important breakthrough in equal-rights legislation for African Americans since the Reconstruction period (1865–77). Although the passage in 1964 and 1965 of major civil rights legislation was victorious for the movement, by then militant Black activists had begun to see their struggle as a freedom or liberation movement not just seeking civil rights reforms but instead confronting the enduring economic, political, and cultural consequences of past racial oppression.

(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Britannica essay on “Monuments of Hope.”)

American history has been marked by persistent and determined efforts to expand the scope and inclusiveness of civil rights. Although equal rights for all were affirmed in the founding documents of the United States, many of the new country’s inhabitants were denied essential rights. Enslaved Africans and indentured servants did not have the inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that British colonists asserted to justify their Declaration of Independence . Nor were they included among the “People of the United States” who established the Constitution in order to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Instead, the Constitution protected slavery by allowing the importation of enslaved persons until 1808 and providing for the return of enslaved people who had escaped to other states.

As the United States expanded its boundaries, Native American peoples resisted conquest and absorption. Individual states, which determined most of the rights of American citizens , generally limited voting rights to white property-owning males, and other rights—such as the right to own land or serve on juries—were often denied on the basis of racial or gender distinctions. A small proportion of Black Americans lived outside the slave system, but those so-called “free Blacks” endured racial discrimination and enforced segregation . Although some enslaved persons violently rebelled against their enslavement ( see slave rebellions ), African Americans and other subordinated groups mainly used nonviolent means—protests, legal challenges, pleas and petitions addressed to government officials, as well as sustained and massive civil rights movements—to achieve gradual improvements in their status.

During the first half of the 19th century, movements to extend voting rights to non-property-owning white male labourers resulted in the elimination of most property qualifications for voting, but this expansion of suffrage was accompanied by brutal suppression of American Indians and increasing restrictions on free Blacks. Owners of enslaved people in the South reacted to the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt in Virginia by passing laws to discourage antislavery activism and prevent the teaching of enslaved people to read and write. Despite this repression, a growing number of Black Americans freed themselves from slavery by escaping or negotiating agreements to purchase their freedom through wage labour. By the 1830s, free Black communities in the Northern states had become sufficiently large and organized to hold regular national conventions, where Black leaders gathered to discuss alternative strategies of racial advancement. In 1833 a small minority of whites joined with Black antislavery activists to form the American Anti-Slavery Society under the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison .

Frederick Douglass became the most famous of the formerly enslaved persons who joined the abolition movement . His autobiography—one of many slave narratives —and his stirring orations heightened public awareness of the horrors of slavery. Although Black leaders became increasingly militant in their attacks against slavery and other forms of racial oppression, their efforts to secure equal rights received a major setback in 1857, when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected African American citizenship claims. The Dred Scott decision stated that the country’s founders had viewed Blacks as so inferior that they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” This ruling—by declaring unconstitutional the Missouri Compromise (1820), through which Congress had limited the expansion of slavery into western territories—ironically strengthened the antislavery movement, because it angered many whites who did not hold enslaved people. The inability of the country’s political leaders to resolve that dispute fueled the successful presidential campaign of Abraham Lincoln , the candidate of the antislavery Republican Party . Lincoln’s victory in turn prompted the Southern slave states to secede and form the Confederate States of America in 1860–61.

Although Lincoln did not initially seek to abolish slavery, his determination to punish the rebellious states and his increasing reliance on Black soldiers in the Union army prompted him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) to deprive the Confederacy of its enslaved property . After the American Civil War ended, Republican leaders cemented the Union victory by gaining the ratification of constitutional amendments to abolish slavery ( Thirteenth Amendment ) and to protect the legal equality of formerly enslaved persons ( Fourteenth Amendment ) and the voting rights of male ex-slaves ( Fifteenth Amendment ). Despite those constitutional guarantees of rights, almost a century of civil rights agitation and litigation would be required to bring about consistent federal enforcement of those rights in the former Confederate states. Moreover, after federal military forces were removed from the South at the end of Reconstruction , white leaders in the region enacted new laws to strengthen the “ Jim Crow ” system of racial segregation and discrimination. In its Plessy v. Ferguson decision (1896), the Supreme Court ruled that “ separate but equal ” facilities for African Americans did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment , ignoring evidence that the facilities for Blacks were inferior to those intended for whites.

The Southern system of white supremacy was accompanied by the expansion of European and American imperial control over nonwhite people in Africa and Asia as well as in island countries of the Pacific and Caribbean regions. Like African Americans, most nonwhite people throughout the world were colonized or economically exploited and denied basic rights, such as the right to vote . With few exceptions, women of all races everywhere were also denied suffrage rights ( see woman suffrage ).

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Lesson Plan: Key Events of the Civil Rights Movement

Early Advances in Civil Rights

Journalist Callie Crossly asks experts about the origins of the civil rights movement and its early beginnings after the second World War.

Description

The Civil Rights Movement was the struggle for equal rights and freedom for African Americans in the United States. It was accomplished through a series of protests, social movements, and events carried out by various groups and leaders. In this lesson, students will explore the key events of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, including the methods used and groups who participated in them, and then analyze the impact and legacy of those events.

INTRODUCTION

As a class, view the following video clip and then discuss the questions below.

Video Clip: Early Advances in Civil Rights (4:17)

Describe the ideological shift that occurred from a pre-world war II climate on segregation to post war.

What does Ernest Green believe is one of the untold stories of the civil rights movement?

According to Carol Anderson what post war events cause Truman to take action against a fundamentally corrupt civil rights system?

• Discuss the differences between civil rights and human rights.

Break students into groups and have each group view the following video clips or assign each group selected clips. Students should take notes using the handout provided, and then share their findings with the rest of the class.

HANDOUT: Key Events of the Civil Rights Movement Handout (Google Doc)

Video Clip: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (5:34)

Justin Sochacki gave a tour of Monroe Elementary School, one of the four formerly segregated schools for African Americans in Topeka, Kansas, and talked about the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case.

Video Clip: Emmett Till's Kidnapping (8:51)

Simeon Wright, cousin of Emmett Till, provides an eyewitness account of events surrounding the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till.

Video Clip: Important Figures in the Early Fight for Civil Rights (4:11)

Senior Curator for the National African American Museum of History and Culture, William Pretzer, highlights the work of three civil rights activists whose stories are on display in the museum.

Video Clip: Jackie Robinson and the Civil Rights Movement (5:04)

Documentary Filmmaker Ken Burns discussed Jackie Robinson, his breaking of the color barrier in Major League Baseball, and its impact on the Civil Rights Movement.

Video Clip: Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King (15:27)

Felicia Bell and Rickey Brown talk about the Rosa Parks and her impact on the Civil Rights Movement.

Video Clip: Greensboro, North Carolina Sit-Ins (6:16)

Deena Hayes-Greene visited the Woolworth’s counter that sparked the Greensboro sit-ins in 1960, and discussed how the museum tells the story of the young civil rights activists who started the sit-in movement in Greensboro.

Video Clip: Freedom Riders (12:04)

Dorothy Walker told the story of the Freedom Riders and their trip from Washington, D.C. through the South to challenge illegal segregation laws related to interstate travel. Many travelers were attacked and arrested along their journey in 1961.

Video Clip: Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing (6:29)

The Reverend Arthur Price talked about the history of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and the bombing of the church that occurred on Sunday, September 15, 1963.

Video Clip: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail (3:40)

In April, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested for marching in Birmingham, Alabama. While in jail, King wrote a letter to eight white religious leaders in the south in response to a statement they wrote about protests during the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham.

Video Clip: 1963 March on Washington (11:49)

Professor William P. Jones talked about the history of the march.

Video Clip: Freedom Summer (11:25)

Stuart Rockoff, Executive Director of the Mississippi Humanities Council, talked about “Freedom Summer” and the movement to promote voter registration and civil rights in Mississippi in the 1960s.

Video Clip: 1964 Civil Rights Act (7:15)

Robert Brammer explains the content of the 1964 Civil Rights Act through the exhibit in the Library of Congress.

Video Clip: Selma March and "Bloody Sunday" (2:24)

Representative John Lewis (D-GA), recounts the events of the march from Selma, AL known as "Bloody Sunday" and its impact on the Civil Rights movement.

Video Clip: Black Panther Party (6:36)

Photographer Stephen Shames shows pictures from his book with Bobby Seale about the beginning of the Black Panther Party.

After watching the videos and reporting out to the class, have students write an essay (or similar culminating activity) that includes the following information. Students should cite specific examples from the videos and class discussion.

Describe the core ideas and actions of the Civil Rights Movement

Describe the different groups and people involved in the Civil Rights Movement, including the differing philosophies of each

Explain the impact of the key events of the Civil Rights Movement on the United States at the time

• Explain how the Civil Rights Movement changed the United States moving forward

Additional Resources

• Lesson Plan: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
• Lesson Plan: The Civil Rights Movement According to John Lewis
• Lesson Plan: Grading the Presidents on Civil Rights
• On This Day: The 1963 March on Washington
• On This Day: Rosa Parks - Life and Legacy
• On This Day: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day - Life, Death, Legacy
• Black Panther Party
• Brown V. Board Of Education
• Civil Rights Act Of 1964
• Civil Rights Movement
• Emmett Till
• Freedom Riders
• Freedom Summer
• Jackie Robinson
• Jim Crow Laws
• March On Washington
• Martin Luther King Jr.
• Montgomery Bus Boycott
• National Association For The Advancement Of Colored People
• Segregation
• Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

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Civil Rights Movement

By: History.com Editors

Updated: May 14, 2024 | Original: October 27, 2009

The civil rights movement was a struggle for social justice that took place mainly during the 1950s and 1960s for Black Americans to gain equal rights under the law in the United States. The Civil War officially abolished slavery , but it didn’t end discrimination against Black people—they continued to endure the devastating effects of racism, especially in the South. By the mid-20th century, Black Americans, along with many other Americans, mobilized and began an unprecedented fight for equality that spanned two decades.

Jim Crow Laws

During Reconstruction , Black people took on leadership roles like never before. They held public office and sought legislative changes for equality and the right to vote.

In 1868, the 14th Amendment to the Constitution gave Black people equal protection under the law. In 1870, the 15th Amendment granted Black American men the right to vote. Still, many white Americans, especially those in the South, were unhappy that people they’d once enslaved were now on a more-or-less equal playing field.

To marginalize Black people, keep them separate from white people and erase the progress they’d made during Reconstruction, “ Jim Crow ” laws were established in the South beginning in the late 19th century. Black people couldn’t use the same public facilities as white people, live in many of the same towns or go to the same schools. Interracial marriage was illegal, and most Black people couldn’t vote because they were unable to pass voter literacy tests.

Jim Crow laws weren’t adopted in northern states; however, Black people still experienced discrimination at their jobs or when they tried to buy a house or get an education. To make matters worse, laws were passed in some states to limit voting rights for Black Americans.

Moreover, southern segregation gained ground in 1896 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Plessy v. Ferguson that facilities for Black and white people could be “separate but equal."

World War II and Civil Rights

Prior to World War II , most Black people worked as low-wage farmers, factory workers, domestics or servants. By the early 1940s, war-related work was booming, but most Black Americans weren’t given better-paying jobs. They were also discouraged from joining the military.

After thousands of Black people threatened to march on Washington to demand equal employment rights, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941. It opened national defense jobs and other government jobs to all Americans regardless of race, creed, color or national origin.

Black men and women served heroically in World War II, despite suffering segregation and discrimination during their deployment. The Tuskegee Airmen broke the racial barrier to become the first Black military aviators in the U.S. Army Air Corps and earned more than 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses. Yet many Black veterans were met with prejudice and scorn upon returning home. This was a stark contrast to why America had entered the war to begin with—to defend freedom and democracy in the world.

As the Cold War began, President Harry Truman initiated a civil rights agenda, and in 1948 issued Executive Order 9981 to end discrimination in the military. These events helped set the stage for grass-roots initiatives to enact racial equality legislation and incite the civil rights movement.

On December 1, 1955, a 42-year-old woman named Rosa Parks found a seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus after work. Segregation laws at the time stated Black passengers must sit in designated seats at the back of the bus, and Parks complied.

When a white man got on the bus and couldn’t find a seat in the white section at the front of the bus, the bus driver instructed Parks and three other Black passengers to give up their seats. Parks refused and was arrested.

As word of her arrest ignited outrage and support, Parks unwittingly became the “mother of the modern-day civil rights movement.” Black community leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) led by Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr ., a role which would place him front and center in the fight for civil rights.

Parks’ courage incited the MIA to stage a boycott of the Montgomery bus system . The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted 381 days. On November 14, 1956, the Supreme Court ruled segregated seating was unconstitutional. 

Little Rock Nine

In 1954, the civil rights movement gained momentum when the United States Supreme Court made segregation illegal in public schools in the case of Brown v. Board of Education . In 1957, Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas asked for volunteers from all-Black high schools to attend the formerly segregated school.

On September 4, 1957, nine Black students, known as the Little Rock Nine , arrived at Central High School to begin classes but were instead met by the Arkansas National Guard (on order of Governor Orval Faubus) and a screaming, threatening mob. The Little Rock Nine tried again a couple of weeks later and made it inside, but had to be removed for their safety when violence ensued.

Finally, President Dwight D. Eisenhower intervened and ordered federal troops to escort the Little Rock Nine to and from classes at Central High. Still, the students faced continual harassment and prejudice.

Their efforts, however, brought much-needed attention to the issue of desegregation and fueled protests on both sides of the issue.

Civil Rights Act of 1957

Even though all Americans had gained the right to vote, many southern states made it difficult for Black citizens. They often required prospective voters of color to take literacy tests that were confusing, misleading and nearly impossible to pass.

Wanting to show a commitment to the civil rights movement and minimize racial tensions in the South, the Eisenhower administration pressured Congress to consider new civil rights legislation.

On September 9, 1957, President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 into law, the first major civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. It allowed federal prosecution of anyone who tried to prevent someone from voting. It also created a commission to investigate voter fraud.

Sit-In at Woolworth's Lunch Counter

Despite making some gains, Black Americans still experienced blatant prejudice in their daily lives. On February 1, 1960, four college students took a stand against segregation in Greensboro, North Carolina when they refused to leave a Woolworth’s lunch counter without being served.

Over the next several days, hundreds of people joined their cause in what became known as the Greensboro sit-ins. After some were arrested and charged with trespassing, protesters launched a boycott of all segregated lunch counters until the owners caved and the original four students were finally served at the Woolworth’s lunch counter where they’d first stood their ground.

Their efforts spearheaded peaceful sit-ins and demonstrations in dozens of cities and helped launch the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to encourage all students to get involved in the civil rights movement. It also caught the eye of young college graduate Stokely Carmichael , who joined the SNCC during the Freedom Summer of 1964 to register Black voters in Mississippi. In 1966, Carmichael became the chair of the SNCC, giving his famous speech in which he originated the phrase "Black power.”

Freedom Riders

On May 4, 1961, 13 “ Freedom Riders ”—seven Black and six white activists–mounted a Greyhound bus in Washington, D.C. , embarking on a bus tour of the American south to protest segregated bus terminals. They were testing the 1960 decision by the Supreme Court in Boynton v. Virginia that declared the segregation of interstate transportation facilities unconstitutional.

Facing violence from both police officers and white protesters, the Freedom Rides drew international attention. On Mother’s Day 1961, the bus reached Anniston, Alabama, where a mob mounted the bus and threw a bomb into it. The Freedom Riders escaped the burning bus but were badly beaten. Photos of the bus engulfed in flames were widely circulated, and the group could not find a bus driver to take them further. U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (brother to President John F. Kennedy ) negotiated with Alabama Governor John Patterson to find a suitable driver, and the Freedom Riders resumed their journey under police escort on May 20. But the officers left the group once they reached Montgomery, where a white mob brutally attacked the bus. Attorney General Kennedy responded to the riders—and a call from Martin Luther King Jr.—by sending federal marshals to Montgomery.

On May 24, 1961, a group of Freedom Riders reached Jackson, Mississippi. Though met with hundreds of supporters, the group was arrested for trespassing in a “whites-only” facility and sentenced to 30 days in jail. Attorneys for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP ) brought the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court, which reversed the convictions. Hundreds of new Freedom Riders were drawn to the cause, and the rides continued.

In the fall of 1961, under pressure from the Kennedy administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued regulations prohibiting segregation in interstate transit terminals

March on Washington

Arguably one of the most famous events of the civil rights movement took place on August 28, 1963: the March on Washington . It was organized and attended by civil rights leaders such as A. Philip Randolph , Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr.

More than 200,000 people of all races congregated in Washington, D. C. for the peaceful march with the main purpose of forcing civil rights legislation and establishing job equality for everyone. The highlight of the march was King’s speech in which he continually stated, “I have a dream…”

King’s “ I Have a Dream” speech galvanized the national civil rights movement and became a slogan for equality and freedom.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 —legislation initiated by President John F. Kennedy before his assassination —into law on July 2 of that year.

King and other civil rights activists witnessed the signing. The law guaranteed equal employment for all, limited the use of voter literacy tests and allowed federal authorities to ensure public facilities were integrated.

Bloody Sunday

On March 7, 1965, the civil rights movement in Alabama took an especially violent turn as 600 peaceful demonstrators participated in the Selma to Montgomery march to protest the killing of Black civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson by a white police officer and to encourage legislation to enforce the 15th amendment.

As the protesters neared the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were blocked by Alabama state and local police sent by Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, a vocal opponent of desegregation. Refusing to stand down, protesters moved forward and were viciously beaten and teargassed by police and dozens of protesters were hospitalized.

The entire incident was televised and became known as “ Bloody Sunday .” Some activists wanted to retaliate with violence, but King pushed for nonviolent protests and eventually gained federal protection for another march.

Voting Rights Act of 1965

When President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965, he took the Civil Rights Act of 1964 several steps further. The new law banned all voter literacy tests and provided federal examiners in certain voting jurisdictions. 

It also allowed the attorney general to contest state and local poll taxes. As a result, poll taxes were later declared unconstitutional in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections in 1966.

Part of the Act was walked back decades later, in 2013, when a Supreme Court decision ruled that Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional, holding that the constraints placed on certain states and federal review of states' voting procedures were outdated.

Civil Rights Leaders Assassinated

The civil rights movement had tragic consequences for two of its leaders in the late 1960s. On February 21, 1965, former Nation of Islam leader and Organization of Afro-American Unity founder Malcolm X was assassinated at a rally.

On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on his hotel room's balcony. Emotionally-charged looting and riots followed, putting even more pressure on the Johnson administration to push through additional civil rights laws.

Fair Housing Act of 1968

The Fair Housing Act became law on April 11, 1968, just days after King’s assassination. It prevented housing discrimination based on race, sex, national origin and religion. It was also the last legislation enacted during the civil rights era.

The civil rights movement was an empowering yet precarious time for Black Americans. The efforts of civil rights activists and countless protesters of all races brought about legislation to end segregation, Black voter suppression and discriminatory employment and housing practices.

Six Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement

Though their stories are sometimes overlooked, these women were instrumental in the fight for equal rights for African‑Americans.

How the Black Power Movement Influenced the Civil Rights Movement

With a focus on racial pride and self‑determination, leaders of the Black Power movement argued that civil rights activism did not go far enough.

8 Key Laws That Advanced Civil Rights

Since the abolishment of slavery, the U.S. government has passed several laws to address discrimination and racism against African Americans.

A Brief History of Jim Crow. Constitutional Rights Foundation. Civil Rights Act of 1957. Civil Rights Digital Library. Document for June 25th: Executive Order 8802: Prohibition of Discrimination in the Defense Industry. National Archives. Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-In. African American Odyssey. Little Rock School Desegregation (1957).  The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute Stanford . Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Global Freedom Struggle. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute Stanford . Rosa Marie Parks Biography. Rosa and Raymond Parks. Selma, Alabama, (Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965). BlackPast.org. The Civil Rights Movement (1919-1960s). National Humanities Center. The Little Rock Nine. National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior: Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site. Turning Point: World War II. Virginia Historical Society.

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Pushing Towards Civil Rights

The push towards civil rights in the United States has been longstanding and is ever-evolving. While not encompassing, our civil rights unit covers the expansion and abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s, and the expansion of rights through court cases and laws. For more coverage, check out additional cases in our Landmark Library .

Topic at a Glance: Civil Rights Movement | Nashville Sit-Ins | Montgomery Bus Boycott | Martin Luther King, Jr. | Rosa Parks | Barbara Johns | NAACP | Legal Defense Fund | Constance Baker Motley | Autherine Lucy | Pollie Ann Myers | Little Rock | Executive Order 10730 | voting rights | voting rights history | slavery | Missouri Compromise | Civil War and Reconstruction | Jim Crow | Jim Crow laws | segregation | separate but equal | right to fair housing | Shelley v. Kraemer | integration | desegregation | women’s suffrage | women’s rights | civic engagement | civic action | changemakers

Explore resources in this unit

• 6-8 | Middle
• 9-12 | High

Slavery: No Freedom, No Rights

From the basics about slavery to the attitudes that defended it and the efforts of those who wanted to see it abolished, in this lesson students learn about this dark part of…

Slave States, Free States

The debate over slavery ultimately helped drive the United States into civil war, but before it did, there were decades of careful balance between slaves states and free states. In…

Resisting Slavery

Prior to the Civil War, over 300 enslaved people sued for their freedom in St. Louis courts. The most well-known of these “freedom suits” was that of Dred and Harriet Scott. In…

Civil War & Reconstruction

The Civil War and Reconstruction Era brought about the end of slavery and the expansion of civil rights to African Americans through the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Compare…

Use primary documents and images to discover the ways state and local governments restricted the newly gained freedoms of African Americans after the Civil War. Compare, contrast,…

Woman Suffrage and World War I

Students will learn how World War I impacted the woman suffrage movement. Sources will show how suffragists promoted woman suffrage as a war measure, how women’s roles expanded…

A Movement in the Right Direction (Infographic)

How did women win the right to vote? Explore how the women’s suffrage movement spread across the United States beginning in the late 1800s.

The Road to Civil Rights

Discover the people, groups, and events behind the Civil Rights Movement. Learn about means of non-violent protest, opposition to the movement, and identify how it took all three…

Little Rock: Executive Order 10730

When President Eisenhower authorized troops under federal authority to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in 1957, he became the first president since Reconstruction to…

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund

In this video, students learn about a team of lawyers dedicated to achieving racial justice through the legal system. Formed in 1940 as part of the National Association for the…

Civil Rights Act of 1964

Meet the superhero legislation of civil rights. Students are introduced to eleven categories of civil rights protections with a focus on Title VII, which bans discrimination in the…

Students and the Struggle for School Integration

In this video, students learn about the activism of teenager Barbara Johns. In 1951, she organized over 450 students to protest in support of better conditions at their segregated…

Protection and Resistance: Slavery in the U.S.

Slavery was legal for over 12 generations. What impact has it had on the United States? In this lesson, students learn about the development and legal protection of the system of…

Reconstruction: The Battle Between the Branches

What happens when the branches of government don’t see eye to eye? After the Civil War, the federal government’s vision for Reconstruction led to a political battle between the…

The Successes and Failures of Reconstruction

The period of Reconstruction was complicated. The federal government’s efforts were a mixed bag of accomplishments and missteps. In this lesson, students examine the progress…

Jim Crow: Legislating Inequality

Equality under the law is an ideal, not a reality. In this lesson, students explore state segregation laws and their political, economic, and social impact on African Americans in…

Progressing Forward 1890-1930

The Civil Rights Movement didn’t begin in the 1950s and 1960s. The groundwork was laid a generation before. In this lesson, students explore how Black leaders fought for civil…

Use the Scope & Sequence to help you plan your iCivics classroom experience!

Whether you enjoy finding opportunities within a well-structured sequence of resources or prefer looking around for pieces and bits that can be jigsawed together, our Scope & Sequence documents are a perfect reference point for planning. Scope & Sequence documents are available for elementary, middle, and high school classrooms and list all of our resources in one place.

Resources: Discussions and Assignments

Module 12 assignment: the impact of the civil rights movement.

The social and political changes of the 1960s were a result of grassroots efforts and legislative action. The impact of civil rights organizations and new laws passed in this decade is still felt today, often in very personal ways.

Step 1 . To complete this assignment, first review the timelines below. As you do, focus in on the events between 1950 and 1980. Select one of the laws, initiatives, movements, or events from this time period that has had a direct impact on your own life.

• Civil Rights Legal Events Timeline
• Legal History of Women’s Rights Timeline
• Latino Civil Rights Timeline
• Asian American Milestones Timeline

Step 2 : Reflect on how the chosen law, initiative, or event has influenced your life.

• Begin by summarizing the law, initiative, or event you’ve selected using information from the module readings, primary sources, and/or outside sources.
• Share an image of an artifact (such as a photo, letter, video/audio recording, report card, certificate, etc.) that represents the law, initiative, movement, or event’s impact to you personally. (Be sure to remove or redact any information that is too personal, like addresses, phone numbers, etc.)
• In one to two paragraphs, narrate how the 1960s law, initiative, movement, or event impacted you.
• Describe how your chosen law, initiative, movement, or event impacted (or might have impacted) another person or group as well. You may choose to focus on someone you know, a public figure (past or present), or a group of people. Was their experience similar to or different from your own? How so?

Additional Details:

• The written portion should include details from the text and primary sources, including the name, date, and aims of the 1960s occurrence you’ve chosen to focus on.
• Cite your sources when using information from the text, primary sources, or course discussions.
• When sharing your own story, feel free to be personal but do not feel obligated to disclose more than you are comfortable sharing.

• Module 12 Assignment: The Impact of the Civil Rights Movement. Authored by : Heather Bennett for Lumen Learning. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution

Equal Justice Society

Civil Rights 50 Lesson Plans

The ‘Civil Rights at 50’ campaign led by the Equal Justice Society is promoting lesson plans originally based on Wherever There’s a Fight , the award-winning Heyday book by Elaine Elinson and Stan Yogi about the struggle to develop and protect rights in California.

The lesson plans, created by Jennifer Rader and Jah-Yee Woo, are available for educators who would like to teach civil rights in their high school and middle school classrooms.

The six lesson plans for high school and middle school classrooms were originally published separately on the Wherever There’s a Fight website, wherevertheresafight.com, and are combined into one document for this special edition.

Download the lesson plans packet as a PDF

‘Civil Rights at 50’ observes the 50th anniversaries of four of our nation’s civil rights tipping points: the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington (Aug. 28, 2013); the 50th anniversary of President Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (July 2, 2014); the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Aug. 10, 2015); and the 50th anniversary of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Oct. 3, 2015).

The Equal Justice Society kicked off the campaign on August 28, 2013, at a gala, “Everyday People: The Heroes and Heroines Who Powered the Civil Rights Movement,” at the Oakland Museum of California. The Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra, Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, and Zaccho Dance Theatre collaborated for the first time to produce a theatrical event that emphasized the contribution and voices of individuals who greatly contributed to the success of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and the larger Civil Rights Movement.

This contribution by everyday people was made through their words and ideas, dedication and hard work, and in some cases by sacrificing their lives. We should never forget that the struggle for equality in the 1960s was a war in many ways as important as the conflict abroad at that time.

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Martin Luther King, Jr.

Give Us the Ballot

The impact of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stretches beyond the past, working to protect our right to vote in the name of justice. Learn more about how you can active in your community by volunteering with the NAACP for MLK Day. 

No figure is more closely identified with the mid-20th century struggle for civil rights than Martin Luther King, Jr. His adoption of nonviolent resistance to achieve equal rights for Black Americans earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. King is remembered for his masterful oratorical skills, most memorably in his "I Have a Dream" speech.

Early Life and Education

Born in 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia, King was heavily influenced by his father, a church pastor, who King saw stand up to segregation in his daily life. In 1936, King's father also led a march of several hundred African Americans to Atlanta's city hall to protest voting rights discrimination.

As a member of his high school debate team, King developed a reputation for his powerful public speaking skills, enhanced by his deep baritone voice and extensive vocabulary. King left high school at the age of 15 to enter Atlanta's Morehouse College, an all-male historically Black university attended by both his father and maternal grandfather.

After graduating in 1948 with a bachelor's degree in sociology, King decided to follow in his father's footsteps and enrolled in a seminary in Pennsylvania before pursuing a doctorate in theology at Boston University. While studying for King served as an assistant minister at Boston's Twelfth Baptist Church, which was renowned for its abolitionist origins. In Boston, he met and married Coretta Scott, a student at the New England Conservatory of Music.

Joining the Civil Rights Movement

After finishing his doctorate, King returned to the South at the age of 25, becoming pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Shortly after King took up residence in the town, Rosa Parks made history when she refused to give up her seat for a white passenger on a Montgomery bus.

Starting in 1955, Montgomery's Black community staged an extremely successful bus boycott that lasted for over a year. King, played a pivotal leadership role in organizing the protest. His arrest and imprisonment as the boycott's leader propelled King onto the national stage as a lead figure in the civil rights movement.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.… We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." — Martin Luther King, Jr.

With other Black church leaders in the South, King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to mount nonviolent protests against racist Jim Crow laws. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's model of nonviolent resistance, King believed that peaceful protest for civil rights would lead to sympathetic media coverage and public opinion. His instincts proved correct when civil rights activists were subjected to violent attacks by white officials in widely televised episodes that drew nationwide outrage. With King at its helm, the civil rights movement ultimately achieved victories with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Nonviolent protest gains traction

In 1959, King returned to Atlanta to serve as co-pastor with his father at the Ebenezer Baptist Church. His involvement in a sit-in at a department 1960 presidential election between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. Pressure from Kennedy led to King's release.

Working closely with NAACP, King and the SCLC turned their sights on Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, organizing sit-ins in public spaces. Again, the protests drew nationwide attention when televised footage showed Birmingham police deploying pressurized water jets and police dogs against peaceful demonstrators. The campaign was ultimately successful, forcing the infamous Birmingham police chief Bull Connor to resign and the city to desegregate public spaces.

"There is nothing greater in all the world than freedom. It's worth going to jail for. It's worth losing a job for. It's worth dying for. My friends, go out this evening determined to achieve this freedom which God wants for all of His children." — Martin Luther King, Jr.

During the campaign, King was once again sent to prison, where he composed his legendary "Letter from Birmingham Jail," in response to a call from white sympathizers to address civil rights through legal means rather than protest. King passionately disagreed, saying the unjust situation necessitated urgent action. He wrote: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.… We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."

History-making marches

In 1963, King and the SCLC worked with NAACP and other civil rights groups to organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which attracted 250,000 people to rally for the civil and economic rights of Black Americans in the nation's capital. There, King delivered his majestic 17-minute "I Have a Dream" speech.

Along with other civil rights activists, King participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965. The brutal attacks on activists by the police during the march were televised into the homes of Americans across the country. When the march concluded in Montgomery, King gave his "How Long, Not Long" speech, in which he predicted that equal rights for African Americans would be imminently granted. His legendary words are widely quoted today: "How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

Less than six months later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act banning disenfranchisement of Black Americans.

Death and legacy

Over the next few years, King broadened his focus and began speaking out against the Vietnam War and economic issues, calling for a bill of rights for all Americans.

In the spring of 1968, King visited Memphis, Tennessee, to support Black sanitary workers who were on strike. On April 4, King was assassinated by James Earl Ray in his Memphis hotel. President Johnson called for a national day of mourning on April 7. In 1983, Congress cemented King's legacy as an American icon by declaring the third Monday of every January Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." — Martin Luther King, Jr.

King was honored with dozens of awards and honorary degrees for his achievement throughout his life and posthumously. In addition to receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, King was awarded the NAACP Medal in 1957 and the American Liberties Medallion by the American Jewish Committee in 1965. After his death, King was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1994 with his wife, Coretta.

King's legacy has inspired activists fighting injustice anywhere in the world. NAACP has carried on King's work on behalf of Black Americans and strives to keep his dream alive for future generations. We take inspiration from his closing remarks at the NAACP Emancipation Day Rally in 1957: "I close by saying there is nothing greater in all the world than freedom. It's worth going to jail for. It's worth losing a job for. It's worth dying for. My friends, go out this evening determined to achieve this freedom which God wants for all of His children."

March on Washington, August 28, 1963

"In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men – yes, black men as well as white men – would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.… America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'"

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Meet other heroes who advanced racial justice

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USII.T4 Native American Civil Rights Movement Assignment (WORD USII T4)

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Analyze the causes and course of the following social and political movements, including consideration of the role of protest, advocacy organizations, and active citizen participation. the movement to protect the rights, self-determination, and sovereignty of Native Peoples (e.g., the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968, the American Indian Movement, the Wounded Knee Incident at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1973, the Indian Self Determination & Education Assistance Act of 1975, and the efforts of Native Peoples’ groups to preserve Native cultures, gain federal or state recognition and raise awareness of Native American history

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Civil rights activist Sybil Morial, wife of New Orleans' first Black mayor, dead at 91

Civil rights activist Sybil Haydel Morial has died at age 91

NEW ORLEANS -- Sybil Haydel Morial, a civil rights activist, widow of New Orleans’ first Black mayor, Ernest “Dutch” Morial, and mother to former Mayor, Marc Morial, has died at age 91.

Her family announced her death Wednesday in a statement issued by the National Urban League, which Marc Morial serves as president and CEO. Details on the time and cause of death were not released.

“She confronted the hard realities of Jim Crow with unwavering courage and faith, which she instilled not only in her own children but in every life she touched,” the statement said.

Morial was born Nov. 26, 1932, and raised by her physician father and schoolteacher mother in a deeply segregated New Orleans. She later met the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Boston and returned home inspired to do her part in the civil rights movement.

In her 2015 memoir, “Witness to Change: From Jim Crow to Empowerment,” Morial described how she and her friends, including the future mayor of Atlanta, Andrew Young, were chased out of New Orleans’ City Park by a police officer because of their skin color.

She attended Xavier University, one of the city’s historically Black higher learning institutions, before transferring to Boston University, where King was pursuing a divinity degree and guest-preaching at churches.

Later, while traveling home, she and other Black passengers had to move to the baggage car when the train crossed the Mason-Dixon line.

“The barricade that kept us out of schools, jobs, restaurants, hotels, and even restrooms would have to be dismantled brick by brick, law by law,” she wrote.

She was in Boston in 1954, the year the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision overturning racial segregation in schools.

“Those of us from the South ... We wanted to go back home because we wanted to be a part of change. We knew change was coming,” she said during a 2018 interview with Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

That summer, she tried to integrate New Orleans’ other leading universities -- Tulane and Loyola. She signed up for summer sessions at both, and attended classes for nearly a week at Tulane while they waited for her transcript to arrive from Boston, but was eventually told that she could not enroll because of her race.

At Loyola, she was told that “according to state law, Negroes cannot attend the same school as whites.”

Her return home in 1954 also brought her face-to-face with the man she would marry: Ernest Nathan “Dutch” Morial. The two fell into an intense discussion about the court’s recent desegregation decision during a summer vacation book club.

They wed the next year and she supported her husband thereafter, raising five children and teaching school while he ran for the state Legislature in 1968 and for mayor in 1978.

She was often the one who had to shield their children from the resulting racist threats, racing for the phone to answer it first.

During Morial’s first mayoral term, National Guard troops were stationed at their house to protect the family during the 1979 police strike that led to the cancellation of Mardi Gras parades.

Sybil Morial also became a city power player in her own right.

She founded the Louisiana League of Good Government, which helped Black people register to vote at a time when they still had to pass tests such as memorizing the Preamble to the Constitution. She also was a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging a Louisiana law that barred public school teachers from being involved in groups fighting segregation, according to the LSU Women’s Center.

She held various administrative positions over 28 years at Xavier and served on numerous boards and advisory committees across the city.

“Few women have played such an outsized role in the recent history of New Orleans,” former Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in a social media post. Current Mayor LaToya Cantrell called Morial “a New Orleans treasure and trailblazer” and said the city's flag would fly at half-staff in her honor.

As part of the 1984 World’s Fair in New Orleans, she championed the building of a pavilion dedicated to African American contributions and experiences in American history, and in 1987 she was the executive producer of “A House Divided,” a documentary about desegregation in New Orleans.

After her husband died unexpectedly in 1989 at age 60, Morial wrote that she briefly flirted with the idea of running for mayor in 1994. Instead, her son Marc, then 35, ran and won, launching a second generation of Morial mayors.

Funeral plans have not been announced. Sybil Morial is survived by her five children, seven grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.

Associated Press Writer Kevin McGill contributed to this story.

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Civil rights activist Sybil Morial, wife of New Orleans’ first Black mayor, dead at 91

Attorney Ernest Morial, right, speaks on the telephone as his wife, Sybil, looks on after he won an outright victory in his race for a House seat in the Louisiana Legislature, in New Orleans, Nov. 5, 1967. (AP Photo/Jack Thornell)

FILE - Attorney Ernest Morial, right, gets a hug from his wife, Sybil, after apparently winning an outright victory in his race for a House seat in the Louisiana Legislature, Nov. 5, 1967, in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Jack Thornell, File)

FILE - Sybil Morial, Edgar Chase III, artist Ernest M. English and Stella Reese Chase look at a historical marker honoring significant locations in the Civil Rights movement in New Orleans, outside Dooky Chase’s Restaurant on May 3, 2021. (Max Becherer/The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate via AP, File)

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NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Sybil Haydel Morial, a civil rights activist, widow of New Orleans’ first Black mayor, Ernest “Dutch” Morial, and mother to former Mayor, Marc Morial, has died at age 91.

Her family announced her death Wednesday in a statement issued by the National Urban League, which Marc Morial serves as president and CEO. Details on the time and cause of death were not released.

“She confronted the hard realities of Jim Crow with unwavering courage and faith, which she instilled not only in her own children but in every life she touched,” the statement said.

Morial was born Nov. 26, 1932, and raised by her physician father and schoolteacher mother in a deeply segregated New Orleans. She later met the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Boston and returned home inspired to do her part in the civil rights movement.

In her 2015 memoir, “Witness to Change: From Jim Crow to Empowerment,” Morial described how she and her friends, including the future mayor of Atlanta, Andrew Young, were chased out of New Orleans’ City Park by a police officer because of their skin color.

She attended Xavier University, one of the city’s historically Black higher learning institutions, before transferring to Boston University, where King was pursuing a divinity degree and guest-preaching at churches.

Later, while traveling home, she and other Black passengers had to move to the baggage car when the train crossed the Mason-Dixon line.

“The barricade that kept us out of schools, jobs, restaurants, hotels, and even restrooms would have to be dismantled brick by brick, law by law,” she wrote.

She was in Boston in 1954, the year the Supreme Court issued a landmark decision overturning racial segregation in schools.

“Those of us from the South ... We wanted to go back home because we wanted to be a part of change. We knew change was coming,” she said during a 2018 interview with Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

That summer, she tried to integrate New Orleans’ other leading universities -- Tulane and Loyola. She signed up for summer sessions at both, and attended classes for nearly a week at Tulane while they waited for her transcript to arrive from Boston, but was eventually told that she could not enroll because of her race.

At Loyola, she was told that “according to state law, Negroes cannot attend the same school as whites.”

Her return home in 1954 also brought her face-to-face with the man she would marry: Ernest Nathan “Dutch” Morial. The two fell into an intense discussion about the court’s recent desegregation decision during a summer vacation book club.

They wed the next year and she supported her husband thereafter, raising five children and teaching school while he ran for the state Legislature in 1968 and for mayor in 1978.

She was often the one who had to shield their children from the resulting racist threats, racing for the phone to answer it first.

During Morial’s first mayoral term, National Guard troops were stationed at their house to protect the family during the 1979 police strike that led to the cancellation of Mardi Gras parades.

Sybil Morial also became a city power player in her own right.

She founded the Louisiana League of Good Government, which helped Black people register to vote at a time when they still had to pass tests such as memorizing the Preamble to the Constitution. She also was a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging a Louisiana law that barred public school teachers from being involved in groups fighting segregation, according to the LSU Women’s Center.

She held various administrative positions over 28 years at Xavier and served on numerous boards and advisory committees across the city.

“Few women have played such an outsized role in the recent history of New Orleans,” former Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in a social media post. Current Mayor LaToya Cantrell called Morial “a New Orleans treasure and trailblazer” and said the city’s flag would fly at half-staff in her honor.

As part of the 1984 World’s Fair in New Orleans, she championed the building of a pavilion dedicated to African American contributions and experiences in American history, and in 1987 she was the executive producer of “A House Divided,” a documentary about desegregation in New Orleans.

After her husband died unexpectedly in 1989 at age 60, Morial wrote that she briefly flirted with the idea of running for mayor in 1994. Instead, her son Marc, then 35, ran and won, launching a second generation of Morial mayors.

Funeral plans have not been announced. Sybil Morial is survived by her five children, seven grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.

Associated Press Writer Kevin McGill contributed to this story.

Civil rights activist Sybil Morial, wife of New Orleans' first Black mayor, dead at 91

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Civil rights activist Sybil Morial, wife of New Orleans’ first Black mayor, dead at 91

Associated Press

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Civil rights activist Sybil Haydel Morial has died at age 91. She was married to New Orleans’ first Black mayor, “Dutch” Morial. One of their sons, Marc Morial, also served as mayor. But Sybil Morial was a leader in her own right, even as she worked as a teacher and raised five children. She helped found the Louisiana League of Good Government, which helped Black people register to vote, and she held numerous positions at Xavier University. She also championed the African American experience pavilion at the 1984 World’s Fair and helped produce a documentary about desegregation.

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Ernest Calloway Fused Civil Rights and Class Struggle

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Twentieth-century black labor leader Ernest Calloway never became a household name. But through his work in both the Teamsters and the NAACP, he embodied the transformative potential of a united labor and civil rights movement.

Ernest Calloway (at right) with the rank-and-file organizing committee of the International Shoe Company, outside the Cherokee Plant at 3400 Lemp Avenue in St Louis, Missouri. (State Historical Society of Missouri, Ernest Calloway Papers)

On August 6, 1957, St Louis mayor Raymond R. Tucker, the quintessential technocrat, sourly watched the votes get tallied. His initiative, backed by the city’s business elite, to amend the city charter in order to blunt the power of local aldermen and unions went down in defeat. An unlikely coalition of forces including the NAACP, the Teamsters, black ward leaders, and small business interests voted down the measure by a three-to-two margin.

The victory encapsulated a period when the city’s civil rights and labor movement elements were confident and ascendant in their power. The St Louis NAACP had doubled its membership in less than a year and boasted a thriving trade union division. Teamsters Local 688, representing ten thousand mostly warehouse distribution workers, developed an innovative “community stewards” program that mobilized members around local political fights and racial justice issues.

Instrumental in all of this was Ernest Calloway, research director for Teamsters Local 688 and president of the St Louis NAACP. From his early life in the Kentucky coal fields as a United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) supporter to his golden years as a stimulating lecturer at St Louis University, Calloway offered a compelling theory and practice for exercising working-class power with a sophisticated political analysis that is all too rare in our time.

Ernest Calloway is not a household name. Robert Bussell’s Fighting for Total Person Unionism and Clarence Lang’s Grassroots at the Gateway provide some of the only scholarly glimpses into this fascinating figure.

His life and political career perfectly embodied the rise and fall of the civil rights–labor–New Deal coalition that reshaped US politics in the twentieth century — a period when the struggle for civil rights was grounded in economic justice, institutionally rooted in the labor movement, and tied to a broader vision for a radical restructuring of society.

Through a lifetime of transformative union organizing, hard-nosed electoral campaigns, civil rights crusading, and rigorous analysis, Calloway represented the great synergistic potential of this coalition.

Battlegrounds, Graveyards, and Company Towns

At the age of four, Calloway joined four other families in a migration to yet another mining camp. His father, who he described as an “ex-farmer, ex-gambler, ex-gun toting unionist,” was an itinerant miner in West Virginia and a United Mine Workers of America stalwart. In 1913, the family made its way to the coalfields of Jenkins, Kentucky.

Perhaps young Calloway’s future could be seen in his father, who quickly became the civic bedrock of Jenkins. At this time, black migrants constituted 25 percent of the region’s miners. Calloway’s father built the first black church and managed to convince company officials to convert a pool hall into the first black school.

Before the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) emerged in the 1930s, the UMWA was one of the few labor unions that organized black workers and upheld some degree of racial egalitarianism internally. It was unique among American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions for having not just black members but also black officials and staff. Calloway’s father became the first UMWA secretary in the area and remained a union activist his whole life.

Life in a mining town offered vivid lessons in unbridled class struggle and class domination. Calloway later described these places of his childhood as filled with “battle-grounds, graveyards, company towns and brutal memories of corporate feudal barons of coal seeking to reduce coal mining to a system of industrial peonage.” He believed the “feudal social structure” of the coal mines made miners “the most class-conscious worker in an industrial society whose class lines are alleged to be the most fluid in the Western world.”

The complete control that coal companies exerted over their workers’ lives planted the seed for a societal vision where workers controlled their destiny, which would stay with Calloway his whole life. His father’s positive experiences with unions and interracial organizing would also rub off.

In the summer of 1925, Calloway ran away to the excitement of Harlem, working as a busboy and getting exposure to the nightlife and the arts. Though he had to return just eight months later after hearing his mother was dying of cancer, his Harlem journey “had taken its toll with a new restlessness and curiosity about the world beyond Appalachia.”

“The Day My Revolt Began”

From 1926 to 1930, Calloway worked alongside his father in the Kentucky coal mines. Lacking stimulation, he “got mixed up with the usual drinking-gambling bouts plus certain troubles with women.”

His father’s small-scale successes notwithstanding, there were precious few political and social outlets for working-class black people like Calloway. With Jim Crow firmly entrenched in the South and racially discriminatory craft unionism fortified in the North, black political prospects during this period were dramatically curtailed. So Calloway took to the road again, this time to California.

During his wandering, Calloway had a quasi-spiritual experience that he claims altered the course of his life. As he walked amid the mountains near the Pacific Ocean, going without sleep for forty-eight hours, he had a vivid dream of a woman being devoured by worms. Calloway took this to be a sign of his aimless, embarrassing life.

“I was 24 years old and it was the day I became a man,” he would later write. “It was the day life and living in the heart of the Depression took on a new meaning. It was the day I became inquisitive. . . . It was the day my revolt began.”

In 1933, he returned to Jenkins, Kentucky, but this time with renewed political purpose fueled by personal tragedy when a friend of his was lynched. He corresponded with national NAACP director Walter White about forming a branch in Jenkins, but was stalled by “too many petty Negro politicians who were afraid to bring pressure to bear where it would be effective.”

At this time, the NAACP, and black political activity more broadly, were dominated by the more affluent middle-class elements emphasizing elite brokerage instead of mass mobilization. This was partly a response to Jim Crow, which blocked other forms of democratic political expression and organization. In the absence of viable paths toward engagement in electoral politics or the labor movement, black elites would by default fill the vacuum.

But as 1934 rolled around, this dynamic slowly began to change. Working-class organization and militancy in response to the Great Depression swelled, aided by the leadership and skills of left-wing activists. Civil rights organizations responded to the changed conditions by beginning to shift their focus toward working-class issues and forms of organization.

Calloway became involved in the Urban League’s workers’ council, which attempted to educate black workers about trade unions and build closer ties with the labor movement. He wrote for the League’s Opportunity magazine about the conditions of black workers in the Southern coalfields.

Impressed with his writing and organizational skills, Opportunity editor Elmer Carter and Urban League director Lester Granger helped get him a scholarship to attend the Brookwood Labor College. Brookwood would be formative for Calloway, expanding his intellectual horizons and sharpening his analysis of US society and politics. Here he would solidify his conviction that the task of the labor movement was to be an expansive social movement, not just a narrow sectional interest. Decades later in an essay for the Missouri Teamster , Calloway wrote that Brookwood “was a new invigorating experience. It opened up the intriguing world of social ideas to me.”

After Brookwood, Calloway got more practical organizing experience through work with the unemployed movement in Lynchburg, Virginia. The Virginia Workers Alliance fought discrimination in the administration of Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects. He also assisted the Industrial Department of the local black YMCA with workers’ education. Here again, he saw the power and potential of interracial organizing. Meetings with black and white women workers from the local hosiery mill were convened without any major issue.

Having anchored himself intellectually and accumulated some organizational experience, Calloway was prepared politically for a tidal wave that would upend both US and black politics: the coming of the CIO.

“The Shock Troops of the New Deal”

On May 30, 1937, Republic Steel workers on strike in Chicago were met with fierce repression that resulted in the death of sixteen workers and imprisonment of hundreds more. Earlier that same day, Ernest Calloway arrived in Chicago and got a job on a WPA project researching Chicago’s slums. He eventually secured a position with the Chicago WPA worker education adult program and joined the adult teachers’ union.

Through the WPA, Calloway established relationships with black political figures like union leader A. Philip Randolph and sociologist Horace Clayton . More important for his union career, it was in Chicago that Calloway encountered black union leader Willard Townsend and the struggle to organize the black baggage handlers at railroad terminals known as “red caps.”

Similar to the Pullman sleeping car porters , the red caps had a prestigious reputation among the black community that hid a more ugly reality. They relied mostly on tips for their income and took a great hit during the Depression. The existing union was only going to organize them on a segregated basis, so the International Brotherhood of Red Caps (later to become the United Transport Service Employees of America) was formed instead.

Calloway was brought on as the union’s education director and chief editor of Bags and Baggage, the union newsletter. Here he began to develop his creative vision for worker education that he would continue to implement his entire life. Far from a traditional dry union newsletter, Bags and Baggage featured cartoons, poems, social commentary, and stories of rank-and-file activity. Horace Clayton described it as “the best example of of workers education in a Negro trade union.”

The flowering of the red caps union was made possible by the existence of the CIO, which the red caps had decided to affiliate with in 1942. The CIO embodied the kind of crusading workers’ movement that Calloway and his fellow students had dreamt about at Brookwood. By the time that Calloway began working with the red caps, the CIO had swept its way into the heart of vital American industries like auto manufacturing, steel, meatpacking, rubber, and much more.

The movement represented the forging of class identity and power for the working class as a whole, but this renaissance was particularly profound for black workers. Unlike the AFL, the CIO unions set out to organize all workers regardless of race, proving in practice what they pledged in rhetoric. By 1940, the CIO had already organized 400,000 new black workers into labor unions, quadrupling black union membership nationwide.

Black organizations such as the NAACP and Urban League, as well as many black churches, recognized the opportunity presented by the CIO and began to reverse their previous skepticism toward unions. In the summer of 1936, the NAACP’s Crisis magazine reasoned that black workers “have everything to gain and nothing to lose by affiliation with the CIO.” In some cases, perhaps most notably during the United Auto Workers’ 1941 strike against Ford, the NAACP played a crucial role in winning over black workers to the union.

CIO unionism, partnered with New Deal social policies and a booming wartime economy, created remarkable advancements for black workers during the 1940s. Black income growth rose from 40 percent to 60 percent of whites, and black life expectancy grew five years (compared to three years for white). In short, black workers actually benefited more from the CIO than white workers.

But beyond the bread and butter, the CIO became a critical institutional home for black civic mobilization around broader social and political issues. In many parts of the Deep South, the CIO represented an egalitarian challenge to the Jim Crow regime. Often CIO union locals were the only institutions in the society consciously fostering interracial unity through integrated social events. The connection between the CIO and civil rights was perhaps best expressed by Thurgood Marshall when he said, “The program of the CIO has become a Bill of Rights for Negro labor in America.”

Calloway actively worked to promote the CIO among black workers. Of course, he wasn’t naive about the CIO, and he cautioned blacks to have realistic expectations. “The CIO does not claim perfection,” he wrote for the Negro Digest in 1945. “Signing a CIO card does not immediately convert a prejudice-ridden Tennessee hillbilly into an aspirant for a race-relations award.”

But in these hundreds of thousands of new black trade unionists, he saw an organic leadership for the black civil rights struggle. Writing for the Chicago Defender in 1942, he said, “Negro unionists must assume greater leadership in Negro communities instead of permitting individuals who represent none but themselves to monopolize group leadership.” Seeing the potential to go beyond black elite brokerage, he went on to say, “This is a day of representative leadership with rank and file democratic controls.”

Calloway was not content to concern himself only with black politics. The CIO trade unionists were the “shock troops of the New Deal” and only part of a broader coalition to remake US society in the interests of the working-class majority. “We have a second front to create at home. A solid liberal-labor-Negro front with a minimum organized program for the conquest of all poverty and inequalities.”

He threw himself into all the political opportunities that had opened up in the 1940s. Outraged by the hypocrisy of a Jim Crow army fighting fascism abroad, Calloway became one of the first black people to seek conscientious objector status on the basis of racial discrimination. This issue had garnered attention partly through A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement , which had included the abolition of racial segregation within the army as part of its demands. After over a year of litigation, Calloway was finally deemed physically unfit for service in 1943.

The first decade of the CIO was for Calloway, as for black politics more generally, incredibly inspiring and productive. He had established himself as a writer and union activist and experienced firsthand how the labor movement could be used to advance the cause of black civil rights.

But he was still a wanderer at heart, and increasingly felt straitjacketed within the UTSE. In 1949, he set off for England to study for a year at Ruskin College in Oxford, an opportunity afforded by a British Trades Union Congress scholarship. For someone who envisioned a broad social role for the labor movement, this was a perfect time to see the Labour Party in action. After winning substantial parliamentary majorities in the postwar elections, Labour was successfully implementing transformative social democratic reforms like the formation of the National Health Service .

He envied the achievements of the British labor movement, which only increased his yearning for an independent labor party in the United States. In a letter to Urban League leader Lester Granger, Calloway lamented the fact that US labor’s political perspective amounted to “the vacuous phrase of defeat your enemies and reward your friends.” On the contrary, the labor movement “must now think in terms of total community and the contribution it can make in establishing an equitable social order.”

After returning from England, Calloway worked for the CIO’s unsuccessful Operation Dixie drive to organize the South, but was clearly drifting away from the USTE. So again he became a political orphan, until getting a call from Harold Gibbons . Calloway first met Gibbons in Chicago in the WPA worker education program. Gibbons then was an organizer with the adult teachers’ union, but now served as president of the powerful Teamsters Local 688 in St Louis.

Gibbons invited Calloway, now age forty-one, to St Louis to help him build ambitious programs in the local. It would be the beginning of a lifelong friendship and political collaboration and allow Calloway to organize the “total community” in the ways he had always dreamed.

Onward to St Louis

Harold Gibbons, like Calloway, came from a coal-miner family and possessed radical political ambitions. First starting out as an organizer with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), his involvement in the 1937 Chicago taxi drivers’ strike won him over to the cause of industrial unionism.

He quickly developed a reputation for militancy as an organizer for the Textile Workers Organizing Committee (TWOC). In 1941, he accepted an invitation to St Louis to help lead warehouse workers who were part of the United Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Employees of America.

In 1949, Gibbons made the controversial decision to merge his union with the Teamsters to form Local 688, which had 9,000 members. Gibbons was able to create a strong local with a pioneering spirit. When Calloway arrived in St Louis in the spring of 1950, he encountered a union that was well-prepared to receive his energetic input.

His first official title was “administrative assistant” to Gibbons, but really he assumed a grab bag of duties. “Calloway’s sphere of influence was immense,” said Mike Ryan, the local’s education director in the 1960s. Other staffers described him as the “intellectual in residence” or “house utopian.”

Local 688’s power was proportional to its ability to deliver big for its members, prioritizing member security and the ability to express solidarity even in the hostile post-Taft-Hartley environment. Most 688 contracts included employer-paid healthcare, pensions, and employer-financed recreational programs. Perhaps more important, many contracts also featured the right to strike over grievances and to refuse to handle “hot cargo” produced by an employer whose workers were on strike.

Not surprisingly, the union’s power drew the attention and ire of the local business elite. In 1953, local and even federal investigations were conducted against the local in an attempt to find corruption. Calloway believed the Chamber of Commerce instigated the investigations. An internal FBI memo to J. Edgar Hoover confirmed as much when it said that “considerable pressure” to investigate the local “is being exerted by industrial leaders in St. Louis.”

Calloway became an influential figure in the Central Conference of Teamsters and celebrated the union’s ability to raise labor standards on a regional level. In his introduction to President Jimmy Hoffa’s annual report to the Central Conference, he pointed out how Teamster agreements in trucking, specifically the Central States Cartage and Over-the-Road agreements, “uprooted the idea of regional and sectional wage differentials” and “created a dynamic wage floor in the industry.”

These contracts had significant implications for racial equality given the substantial number of black Teamsters in the South. Calloway led a delegation of black Teamster business agents and organizers from across the South to meet with Martin Luther King Jr in Atlanta. Among the many things discussed, King and Calloway shared agreement that these national-level contracts went a long way toward closing racial wage gaps.

Community Stewards

Gibbons and Calloway both shared the belief that working people needed to be developed to their full potential as human beings, not just the part of them that worked. It was this perspective that inspired Local 688’s most innovative project: the community stewards program.

Calloway helped develop a memo in the early 1950s that motivated this initiative. It outlined the “wide view and the narrow view” of the labor movement’s goals, with the narrow view being that the local “would train stewards to do the job in the shop and nothing else.” Local 688 rejected this view, explaining, “The union member is also a citizen and his interests as a citizen coincide with the interests of his fellow citizens.” A staff orientation handbook reinforced this: “Members must be seen as total human beings and not as economic units only.”

The program applied the shop steward system of organization within a workplace to the ward system of political power. Local 688 members in all of St Louis’s twenty-eight wards would be represented by community stewards, who would solicit grievances about local neighborhood issues and work with the union to address them. Members were encouraged to attend local community meetings in their ward, and a “community grievance form” was even created.

The local put real resources into this project, designing an eight-week training program on political advocacy skills. Community stewards would first try to go to the local alderman to get a resolution, but if not they would proceed to pressure the appropriate city agency or even the mayor himself.

The community stewards chiefly took on transit and sewage issues. They gathered 40,000 petition signatures for public ownership of St Louis’s transit system and even assisted with making plans for the proposed public system. Though voters rejected the plan in 1955, community stewards demonstrated an ability to mobilize large numbers of people.

Their campaign for better sewer service saw more success. The city had chronic flooding and drainage problems, not to mention bad odors caused by the open sewers. Local 688 community stewards fought for public administration and overhaul of the sewer system, which voters approved in February 1954. By the mid-1950s, Local 688 had pursued over 250 community grievances dealing with a wide array of issues impacting their members’ lives, including trash collection, street signs, and lack of stop signs.

The local gained further credibility with St Louis’s black community when it confronted the plague of rat infestation, which had become an important public health and civil rights issue. In February 1955, Reginald Harrington, a two-month-old baby, was hospitalized from rat bites. Black community steward Floyd Glisper made the local aware of it, and they sprang into action.

Community stewards forced the issue by holding public hearings, testifying before the Board of Alderman, and garnering significant media attention. As the city dragged its feet, the union built a coalition including other labor unions, the NAACP, and the Metropolitan Church Federation. Finally, in March 1957, the Board of Alderman approved a settlement that guaranteed regular inspections.

The fight over rat infestation enhanced the local’s prestige among local civil rights organizations and the black press. Calloway began to explore other institutional avenues for carrying out a civil rights and civic revolution in St Louis.

The NAACP and the Charter Fight

Having established a successful record in Local 688, Calloway believed that the principles of trade union organizing could and should be extended into the fight for black civil rights. He set his sights on transforming the local NAACP chapter, shifting its focus and orientation more toward working-class people and issues.

He led the St Louis NAACP membership drive in 1951, and served as vice president in 1952. When its president Henry Wheeler ran for the Missouri legislature in 1955, Calloway was asked by the youth faction to run for the position. During the election, local business interests openly supported his more conservative opponent George Draper. Calloway won despite the opposition and immediately launched into his work with great zeal and skill.

Believing in mass mobilization, he started an ambitious membership drive to make the NAACP into a mass organization. He utilized existing networks and black organizations to bring in 5,500 new members. His wife, Deverne, helped recruit members of women’s clubs, while in Local 688 alone Calloway convinced 173 black trade unionists to join. Fifteen percent of all trade unionists in the city were black, and the St Louis NAACP ranked second in the country in the number of unionists recruited.

On top of this, Calloway led a voter education drive that registered an incredible nine thousand black voters in its first month. By the end of the decade, the St Louis NAACP was the sixth-largest chapter in the country. While he may have had the reputation of a “house utopian,” Calloway was also clearly an incredibly skilled practical organizer. Fellow member and colleague Margaret Bush Wilson remarked that Calloway “ran the NAACP with a level of competence that I had not seen before. He learned this from his union.”

With a thriving Local 688 and NAACP chapter, both with Calloway in a central leadership role, progressive forces in St Louis were ready to launch a decisive political battle against Mayor Raymond Tucker and the pro-business forces he represented.

Tucker wanted to curb the power of the city’s unions and wards in order to clear the way for business to attract new investment. “Aldermanic courtesy” gave aldermen the ability to veto development projects in their districts. Local 688, with its refusal to remain exclusively focused on workplace issues and consistent forays into city politics, was particularly concerning for Tucker.

Civic Progress, a group of St Louis business and civic leaders, proposed a change to the city’s charter to reduce the size of the Board of Alderman, increase the number of at-large aldermen, and give increased executive authority to the mayor’s office.

Calloway saw this proposal as economic blackmail, “a ‘treaty of surrender’ to the Chase banking interests of New York who were demanding this as a condition in making extensive investments in the St. Louis area.” He also worried this change would “contain the growing political influence of the Negro community by carving out a new political ghetto for the increasing Negro population.”

Calloway threw the NAACP and Local 688 into high gear to defeat the charter change. The community stewards system built in Local 688 provided the perfect infrastructure for the task and allowed for deep grassroots mobilization. The measure was defeated by a three-to-two margin in an audacious display of political power that out-organized the traditional ward system.

The Teamsters-NAACP tag team proved particularly effective in mobilizing black voters. In most citywide elections black voter participation was 20 percent, but 60 percent of black St Louisans voted in the charter fight and rejected it by a five-to-one margin.

Observers took note of how the anti-charter coalition could upend power dynamics in the city. Herbert Task of the Post-Dispatch declared, “This combination of forces creates a new power in St. Louis which must be reckoned with.” Globe-Democrat reporter John Hahn speculated that the Teamsters “could become the strongest pressure group in the city because they may well move into the position to deliver more votes on any given election than anyone else.”

Black Politics

Defeating the mayor’s charter change would indirectly help to further the development of black electoral politics. But Calloway wanted to use the NAACP to fight more directly for “the foremost social and economic problem of our community, the tremendous income gap between white and Negro workers.” In line with his concern for workers as citizens, he believed access to more skilled employment would give black people “dignity and self-respect that makes for good functional citizenship.”

Following the charter campaign, Calloway launched the Jobs Opportunities Council (JOC) through the NAACP. Instead of the usual elite negotiations, he wanted the JOC to “provide the vehicles for mass participation.” The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), at that time still a small organization, joined the NAACP in coalition.

The first targets were grocery and retail chains because of their high visibility and vulnerability to economic boycotts. Black workers in St. Louis’s dairy, soft drink, and brewing industries constituted only 3.6 percent of the workforce.

At A&P, where only four blacks were employed above the porter level, the JOC formed “Freedom Lines” and handed out “customer concern” cards that read “We want more than token employment of Negroes in your business.” After receiving over 5,000 such cards, in January 1958 A&P agreed to hire more blacks in skilled positions. Meanwhile the JOC got the meat cutters’ union to acquire its first black apprentice.

The JOC achieved a string of other modest but significant successes at companies like the Taystee Bread Company, National Tea, and Kroger. But fissures also occurred that were representative of broader divisions among black activists over strategy, tactics, and class position.

CORE partnered with the NAACP to fight for clerical and sales jobs at Famous-Barr, planning for a mass demonstration. Middle-class professional elements within the NAACP undermined the effort by responding favorably to management’s offer to allow integrated seating in its tea room instead. Partly they were upset that they weren’t consulted about the protest and saw the increasing usurpation of their leadership role by black working-class forces. This maneuvering by the black middle class made Calloway decide to not run again for NAACP leadership in 1958.

Generational divisions opened up as well. The youth wings of the NAACP and CORE increasingly became interested in forms of direct action that Calloway and others of his generation felt were misguided and unstrategic. After two students were arrested at a sit-in at a local diner, high-school students picketed outside, which led to fifty more arrests. Calloway said the students acted on a “purely agitational, piece-meal, highly emotional and isolated basis.”

A large faction of youth activists defected from the NAACP to CORE. While Calloway was not against militant direct action in general, he believed it should be used as part of a clearly defined overall strategy set by an organization. Somewhat anticipating the thoughts expressed by Bayard Rustin later in “From Protest to Politics,” Calloway believed that St Louis was becoming ripe for a “planned social revolution” that would require skillful political participation rather than direct action alone.

Despite no longer being in the NAACP leadership, he remained heavily involved in local civil rights organizing. Calloway was a central figure in some of the city’s first black electoral breakthroughs. John J. Hicks, pastor of Union Memorial Methodist Church and JOC steering committee member, was encouraged by local organizers to run for a school board seat in 1959. Calloway was picked as his campaign director and organized a robust get-out-the-vote operation that delivered Hicks the largest vote tally of all candidates.

The next year Calloway managed the campaign of Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters activist Theodore “Ted” McNeal. His victory in a five-one landslide made him the first black person elected to the Missouri state senate. In 1962, Calloway’s wife, Deverne, became the first black woman elected to the Missouri House of Representatives.

These activities continued to enhance his reputation as a dynamic political powerhouse, with the St. Louis Chronicle characterizing him as “a whiz at tidy organization and political know-how.” Calloway seemed to be able to excel at all arenas of political struggle, whether it was issue-based mass organizing, electoral campaigns, or popular education.

In late December, he started a weekly newspaper called Citizen Crusader that he put together with Deverne and other local activists. Perhaps hearkening back to his days as editor of Bags and Baggage, Calloway described the magazine as “an off-set, off-beat, do it yourself community newspaper.”

The organizational savvy and muscle of St Louis’s civil rights movement, in large part thanks to Calloway’s leadership, helped push the city to become a vanguard on racial justice. While there were many examples around the country of fruitful labor-civil-rights alliances, the Teamsters-NAACP collaboration in St Louis was among the most productive and ambitious. At a stage when civil rights battles in most of the country were focused on access to public accommodations, in St Louis civil rights activity took on structural issues like jobs, education, and housing much earlier.

But even with this progress, the issue of jobs for black workers remained a problem and the focus of Calloway’s attention. Calloway became president of the A. Philip Randolph–inspired Negro American Labor Council (NALC), drawing membership mostly from Local 688 and the BSCP. St Louis NALC helped organize a contingent of three hundred to attend the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom . Black trade unionists were central to the planning and building of the march, and economic justice was strongly emphasized in its programmatic demands.

Afterward Calloway participated in a panel with A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin , and John Lewis where the fight for good jobs was named as the most important issue in the next stage of the civil rights movement. Back in St Louis, NALC tried to make voluntary “Fair Share of Jobs Covenants” with major employers, a kind of tripartite agreement between the companies, unions, and civil rights organizations.

But this approach often became bogged down and failed to deliver meaningful results. After a long fight with the Southwestern Bell telephone company, Calloway and his lieutenant Ted McNeal decided to accept their concession of upgrading two black workers to telephone operator positions. This move drew criticism from younger and more militant NALC activists, and signaled that Calloway was perhaps becoming out of step with the mood of his base. The St. Louis Defender suggested that the deflating conclusion of the Southwestern Bell campaign “ended the reign of gladiator Ernest Calloway as king-maker and string-puller in the Sepia community.”

Gradually Calloway began to question whether the focus on fair employment, or the “FEPC approach” as he put it, was appropriate given the rapidly changing economic conditions. Fair employment made sense in the context of an expanding full-employment economy. But increasingly the issue for black workers was the lack of good jobs available in the first place, not the inability to get them because of discrimination.

In an October 1963 speech, Calloway put forward that the fair employment approach was like using “salve to cure cancer” and amounted to “the distribution of the restricted number of meaningful jobs available.” He believed robust federal action was needed to truly address the problem, and advocated for policies like massive public workers programs, the shortening of the workweek, and even creating a “Division of Technological Change” in the Department of Labor.

The urban riots of the mid-1960s, which demonstrated the degree to which equality before the law failed to address the deteriorating material conditions for black people in urban ghettos, served to further impress upon civil rights leaders the importance of class. Bayard Rustin claimed that the devastating Watts riot of 1965 was when Martin Luther King “really understood” just how crucial economic justice was for racial equality.

As black power became ascendant and urban riots rocked the nation, Calloway watched with concern and disappointment. He saw poor urban black communities as a “powder-keg of hopelessness” that the civil rights movement could not address if it didn’t successfully take on economic issues.

After the Watts riot, Calloway wrote in the Missouri Teamster , “Middle-class Negro expectations which have been partially achieved through law must now give way to a new conquest of the deep-seated inequalities and their all-inclusive causes at the broad base of the Negro community.” Years later, he put it even more bluntly: “One of the great weaknesses of the civil rights movement during the last 50 years is that most of the black poor have never been part of it.”

Early on, Calloway was able to recognize the widening class divide among black Americans and the fact that automation and structural economic changes “have intensified the traditional gap between the black middle class and the black poor to the point of institutionalizing the gap that is reflected in the emergence of third-class Americans or the separatist black under-class.”

Calloway met the War on Poverty, the Johnson Administration’s attempt to deal with black poverty and urban unrest, with deep skepticism and contempt. Its starting premise blamed poverty on pathological cultural deficiencies of the poor themselves instead of the economic system’s inability to provide good employment. Bayard Rustin believed that this framework propagated “delusions that the poor can be helped to organize themselves out of poverty.”

Calloway agreed with Rustin and wrote that the War on Poverty “diverted from the ferment of social change,” and that its main purpose was to “contain the ‘poor’ . . . without disturbing traditional economic and political balances in the urban complex.” Responding to the misguided emphasis on poor peoples’ motivation, he countered, “There is nothing like sufficient income in our competitive society to improve motivation, work habits, and the desire to upgrade one’s education and productive potential.”

The 1968 election for an open congressional seat provided a referendum on two competing visions for racial justice in St Louis. Calloway threw his hat in the ring against William Clay, one of the young Turks who left the NAACP for CORE in favor of more militant direct action. Calloway saw him as a rank opportunist and egomaniac, but Clay was not to be underestimated as a political operator.

Both candidates ran on a fairly similar platform that demonstrated how much traction social democratic policies had within black politics, even among black power advocates like Clay. Calloway emphasized public works programs and progressive taxation, while Clay ran on a thirty-five-hour workweek and raising the minimum wage.

Calloway lost by a decisive four-to-one margin. By 1968, his social democratic sensibilities did not capture the imagination of St Louis’ urban black community; Clay’s radical-sounding black nationalism did. Nationally, the economic dimension of black civil rights lost ground to a focus on a combination of cultural nationalism, antiwar organizing, and black capitalism. Clay would go on to be an influential founder of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Labor’s “Miami Beach Complex”

Throughout the 1960s, the civil rights struggle was arguably the most dynamic social movement reshaping US society. While undoubtedly the labor movement served as a key institutional ally in this and other efforts for social change, Calloway saw worrying signs of stagnation and bureaucratization. In St Louis, Calloway helped shape Local 688 into a beacon of creative, community-based organizing. But similar examples across the country were becoming increasingly hard to find.

In the mid-1960s, Calloway wrote a series of articles for the Missouri Teamster sounding this alarm. While the economy was expanding and the nonagricultural force continued to grow, union density fell from a peak of 36.1 percent in 1954 to 29.5 percent in 1966. He saw a combination of interrelated factors causing this, and pinpointed the need for labor unions to concentrate efforts in white-collar industries, the South, and small- to medium-size firms if labor was to reverse its fortunes.

For Calloway, US labor’s fatal flaw had been its inability to develop as an independent political movement. He contrasts this with European unionism, which he states “evolved as economic outposts for established anti-capitalist political organizations of workers,” which gave their activity “a strong political thrust.” But ever since the passage of Taft-Hartley, “US unionism entered a new stage of deep-seated political ineffectiveness.”

Going even deeper, Calloway sensed a spiritual death within labor and wondered, “Has American trade unionism out-grown its historic usefulness as a dynamic social force?” He found it troubling that labor was not taking account of the profound changes occurring in society and was “occupying a position of ‘dead center’ in an order in constant movement.” He chided US labor for reveling in its “comfortable position of self-satisfaction, new affluence and easy living” and encouraged the movement to “forsake its cozy, affluent Miami Beach complex and return to the turbulent ‘rice paddies’ of American life.”

Calloway looked back on the early fighting years of the CIO with nostalgia. In a piece titled “What Happened to Simple Union Contracts?” written for the Missouri Teamster, he complained that a union contract “used to be a simple human document that all parties clearly understood.” But now it has become less a symbol of social struggle and more like “the circuitous language of lawyers, the meaningless jargon of efficiency experts and the store-bought mouthings of the college-trained personnel complex.”

Calloway observed the 1970s with a mixture of hope for the rank-and-file insurgencies taking place in major unions and sober reflection on the massive structural economic barriers that the labor movement now faced. In a 1976 lecture at Forest Park Community College, he praised the “insurgent mood” that had returned to unions and referenced a letter from the UAW’s Victor Reuther about union reformer Ed Sadlowksi in the United Steelworkers.

But he also warned of the increasing globalization of the economy and weakened structural position of labor. The modern economy had shifted to a “new arrangement of capital, technology, planning, and decision-making that is essentially institutional in character and economically omnipotent in function and purpose.”

In a prescient warning, Calloway noted:

Carried to its ultimate this trend towards economic globalization could reduce our economy and manufacturing enterprise to a coupon-clipping or a modern rentier economy. Here we are given a nation without an industrial base — without factories, without plants and without an industrial workforce.

But before Calloway retired from his union post, Local 688 would wage one more epic battle that struck at the heart of power relations in the city. This fight, which Calloway called “a small October Revolution,” seemed to embody all the elements of the social movement he believed was needed to radically transform this country.

“A Small October Revolution”

Housing was an issue that Local 688’s community stewards program took on from the beginning of its inception. Nationally, housing became an urgent issue for the civil rights movement after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Both black power and social democratic advocates recognized that the increasingly deplorable housing conditions (as well as persistent segregation) in cities was a major cause of urban unrest and a problem that the landmark civil rights legislation did not address. It was also a thorny and complicated issue to organize around, as Martin Luther King’s ill-fated and unsuccessful 1966 Chicago housing campaign demonstrated.

Recognizing all of this as well as labor’s role in the fight, Calloway began in the mid-1960s to draw up grand plans for a “trade union oriented war on the slums.” He focused on the Tandy area, not least because he lived there alongside five hundred other black Local 688 members. Home to thirty thousand residents, it had an estimated 4,300 dilapidated buildings and 6,450 homes needing repair.

The Tandy Area Council (TAC) was formed, which in typical fashion Calloway described as an effort “to relate the articulate group-interest thrust the Negro trade unionist” has practiced in the workplace “to the sixteen hour period in the community where he lives.” Wisely, Calloway made sure the TAC had involvement and buy-in from key black Local 688 members and figures in the black community.

Replicating the community stewards model, Local 688 led the TAC in canvassing Tandy residents for grievances and engaging in a variety of activities. They forced landlords to fix apartments, made city officials punish delinquent landlords, and got buildings unfit for housing to be condemned. Bearing the imprint of creative labor union consciousness, the TAC actually tried to negotiate a kind of “Wagner Act” for landlords.

The St Louis Housing Authority relied on rents to fund public housing maintenance, which residents felt was barely existent. After attempting to raise rents, the tenants began the first public housing rent strike in US history in February 1969. Local 688 was an instrumental ally to the strikers, providing funding and meeting space throughout. The city, desperate to end the crisis, leaned on the Teamsters to exercise a leadership role.

Local 688 proposed an innovative kind of tripartite agreement whereby a St Louis Civic Alliance for Housing was created to manage local housing projects, with tenants comprising one-third of the board of directors. On October 29, 1969, this groundbreaking agreement was cemented, and rents were rolled back. Local 688 staff ran daily operations and negotiated lowered maintenance costs through deals with building trades unions.

Calloway deemed the whole struggle a “small October revolution.” In the age of a burgeoning black-nationalist mentality, he saw this experience as a rare example of urban black political protest rooted in material concerns. Writing for the St. Louis Sentinel, he declared that the rent strike was “one of the few ghetto-based conflicts firmly rooted in social reality and intimately related to the pressing problems of living, breathing people.” The strike even played a role in getting the Brooke Amendment to the 1969 Housing Act, which capped public housing rent to 25 percent of family income.

Calloway hoped the fight for quality public housing would become part of a broader transformative program for working people and not stay mired in petty urban political maneuvering. He warned, “There are those who have staked out political proprietorships, and view public housing essentially as their own little vote-herding preserve.”

Despite all these efforts, the Pruitt-Igoe complex eventually was slated to be razed. The Civic Alliance for Housing disbanded in 1972, but for nearly a decade Local 688 demonstrated a roadmap for how housing activists could make tangible progress and substantively intervene in the management of public housing.

Against “Narrow Racializing,” for Racial Equality

In 1973, after four decades of active organizing and involvement in the labor movement, Calloway retired from the Teamsters and took a teaching position at St Louis University. He would carry on writing for the Missouri Teamster and refine his analysis of labor, civil rights, and power dynamics in society at large.

He continued to bear witness to the early warning signs of social decline both local and nationally in every important realm. Within St Louis, he decried the city’s steadily declining black voter registration rates and lack of social planning from political elites.

Calloway could only observe the beginning stages of the crumbling of the labor-civil-rights coalition and New Deal economic order. He was one of many black political activists that built this order, and perhaps better than anyone he embodied the creative and transformative potential of this coalition to improve US society. Always fighting against “a narrow racializing of all important issues,” Calloway sought to place racial discrimination within the context of structural economic forces shaping the material conditions of working people.

Through all of Calloway’s activities — helping to win standard-setting union contracts, mobilizing shop stewards to confront local community issues, challenging job discrimination, intervening in city politics, fighting for quality public housing, or registering voters — he cultivated an actual base and constituency for protracted political work involving real stakes and material aims.

Calloway died in 1981. Black politics has steadily drifted from the principles and mode of operation exhibited during the heyday of the labor-civil-rights alliance. Increasingly the focus of racial politics for black political elites has become affirmative-action policies that disproportionately benefit the upwardly mobile, high-status job appointments, and minority business development.

The current framework of antiracism, propagated by theorists such as Ibram X. Kendi, focuses more on psychology, individual atonement, and interpersonal relations instead of broader political economy. As recent scandals involving Black Lives Matter demonstrate, contemporary movements around racial justice have failed to build durable constituency-rooted institutions.

Calloway deplored the tendency “to create small isolated groups of social protest on single issues” instead of building a “unified community instrument to deal with the various aspects of human inequity and social need.” We can look to his life and work as a model for how to build a comprehensive and powerful movement to challenge inequality in all its forms.

National News | Sybil Morial, revered New Orleans civil rights…

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National News | Sybil Morial, revered New Orleans civil rights activist, dies at 91

Morial died at University Medical Center in the city, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported. Her cause of death was not announced.

“Like many women of the Civil Rights Era, she was the steel in the movement’s spine,” the Morial family told local NBC affiliate WDSU. “She confronted the hard realities of Jim Crow with unwavering courage and faith, which she instilled not only in her own children but in every life she touched.”

In addition to her work in the civil rights movement, Morial was a dean and administrator at Xavier University of Louisiana for 28 years. She also founded the Louisiana League of Good Government to help register Black people to vote, after being told Black people couldn’t join the League of Women Voters.

Morial was known to many New Orleans residents as the wife of Ernest “Dutch” Morial, the city’s first Black mayor . She backed his campaign, worked as a teacher and took care of their five children while he pursued political office. Dutch Morial took office in 1978 and remained mayor until 1986. He died in 1989.

Less than a decade later, the Morials’ son Marc also became mayor. He served in the position from 1994 to 2002, and he is now president of the National Urban League .

“Mrs. Morial’s legacy as the matriarch of the iconic Morial family and her own contributions to civil rights and the city of New Orleans will forever be remembered with reverence and gratitude,” said Rep. Troy Carter (D-La.) , whose district includes parts of New Orleans.

With News Wire Services

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