After WW2, blacks and other races were more accepted due to many reasons. Propaganda for anti-Nazi groups made people realize their own prejudice. Problems related to racism were now addressed nationally. The establishment of the United Nations made racial inequality more visible. There were also growths of whites willing to speak out for blacks. Most important,however,were the actions of blacks themselves.
The first legal action against racism was through courts. In a series of cases involving education, the court system ruled that education was not equal and all-white schools were required to admit blacks. Despite the ruling, more than ten years passed before blacks dared to cross the line in the south. In the North,segregated schools and houses influenced separation of races after 1954. A second major breakthrough against segregation grew out of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycotts in 1955. The boycott began when Rosa Parks,a black woman, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white person. This resulted in meetings of blacks and boycotts of buses on which racial segregation occurred. The one-year boycott was very effective. Before courts used the power of judicial review to declare segregation of buses unconstitutional, Martin Luther King,Jr.,a baptist minister and experience speaker,had become nationally famous and completed a plan to nonviolent direct action to gain civil rights.
Nonviolent direct action, born in the boycott, was adopted by blacks and white supporters throughout the country. Sit-ins and freedom rides were constantly used to end segregation and protest demonstrations. Probably the most famous of these activities was the march on Washington of August,28,1963,in which more than 200,000 blacks and whites protested segregation and discrimination. This and other acts,like Birmingham,Alabama,and Selma,Alabama,were directed by long-established groups like NAACP and CORE(the Congress Of Racial Equality, founded 1942), and newly founded national groups such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and SNCC(the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee), and even by local groups like Dallas County(ALABAMA) Voters' League and Princeton(N.J.) Association of Human Rights.
The response of the segregationists to these actions was to blame outside agitators for causing the trouble. Many law officials took strong, often brutal measures to halt demonstrations or else refused to protect the right of demonstrators to protest peacefully. Extremists,however, took violent action against individuals connected with the protest and their property. Three civil rights workers were brutally murdered in Philadelphia,Mississippi, in 1964; four black children were mordered in the bombing of 16th street Baptist church in Birmingham in 1963; and dozens of black churches in the south were bombed or burned. Two whites and one black were murdered during the Selma,Alabama demonstrations in 1965. Such violence against white and black civil rights activists was commonplace. In 1968, Martin Luther King,Jr., the recognized leader of the civil rights movement, was assassinated.
The response to violent reaction was the passage of several new laws.The most important of which were enacted in 1964 and 1965. The Civil Rights Act(1964) undermined the remaining structure of Jim Crow laws and provided federal protection in the exercise of Civil Rights.
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