The modern civil rights movement in America took place from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s. This turbulent period transformed America, changing it into a society with greater racial equality. The civil rights movement first focused on overturning the South’s legal segregation, its so-called Jim Crow laws. Later, it turned toward fighting racial discrimination in housing and employment, problems that affected the entire nation.
In the 1960s and 1970s blacks, women and Native Americans were often set apart from white male protesters in other protest movements. It was not difficult for the white protesters to enter into the dominant social currents after their protest commitment was over. Blacks, women and Indians, on the other hand, suffered collective discriminations that prevented their easy entry into mainstream currents.
This fact distinguished their activism from the other groups that challenged the nation’s moral and social structure during this time. There was little interaction with other contemporary movements. After all, blacks, women and Indians were challenging historical patterns of discrimination based on negative perceptions of biological differences rather than simply assaulting contemporary philosophical, political and ideological targets.
The civil rights struggle of the 1960s and 1970s accelerated advances in research by historians. While the first literature about this period was largely written by participants, many of the contributors to the historiography were young scholars of the 1970s and 1980s and thus writing from a fresh perspective. Not surprisingly, one important focus of research has been Martin Luther King, Jr. For example, David J. Garrow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of King, Taylor Branch’s Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicle of the King years, and David L. Lewis’s King offer studies of King’s contribution to the black freedom struggle through an analysis of his nonviolent legal-oriented protest campaigns.............
