From massive protests against racial segregation and discrimination in the 1960s to the fight against police brutality, African Americans have advocated for equality for decades. In the Post-Reconstruction era, the Supreme Court ruling Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 implemented the “separate but equal” doctrine, allowing for racial segregation in the United States (U.S.).
This system of segregation had persisted for many decades and resulted in some of the most brutal treatment toward African Americans. By 1954, efforts of activists from organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) culminated in Brown v. Board of Education, a Supreme Court case challenging the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. After a long legal battle, the ruling began the disintegration of American schools. Although Brown v. Board of Education ended the legal battle for desegregation, the fight for equality was far from over, and it would be years until America’s public schools would be fully integrated.
In a similar strive for equality, in 1955, Claudette Colvin — a high school student in Montgomery, Alabama — boarded a city bus. In accordance with Jim Crow laws, public transit was segregated and Black passengers were legally required to yield their seats to white passengers. During her ride, Colvin was asked to give up her seat to a white passenger. She refused to do so, replying to the bus driver that it was her “constitutional right” to remain seated. Colvin was removed from the bus and arrested because of her refusal.

Months later, NAACP member Rosa Parks similarly refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, and like Colvin, she was arrested. This refusal mobilized the community, beginning the Montgomery Bus Boycott. 90 percent of Montgomery’s Black residents stayed off the buses for 13-months. Despite efforts to stop the demonstrations by city officials, protesters were determined to continue their boycott until their demands were met, and in 1965, they were met by the Supreme Court case Gayle v. Browder, which ruled that segregation was unconstitutional on buses.
By the late 1950s, Civil Rights movements in Montgomery, Alabama had amassed national attention. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — bolstered as a leader of the Civil Rights Movement — during a demonstration, was arrested alongside hundreds of protesters. From his jail cell, Dr. King wrote his renowned “Letters from the Birmingham Jail.” Following his release, in 1963, Dr. King joined a quarter of a million people for the historic March on Washington, where he delivered his iconic “I have a Dream” speech.
Following decades of Black struggle, President Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which prohibited “discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.” Later on, President Johnson passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed discriminatory voting practices adopted by many Southern States after the civil war.

Although the Civil Rights Movement made strides to end segregation, the fight was far from over. The Black Power Movement, persisting from the 1960s to the 1980s, was another fight for African American political, economic and cultural agency. Spearheaded by Malcom X, this movement centered around self-reliance and self-determination for African Americans.
According to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, “The Black Power movement frightened most of white America and unsettled scores of black Americans.” Instead of focusing on integration, this movement “insisted that African Americans should have power over their own schools, businesses, community services and local government. The movement also focused on combating centuries of humiliation by demonstrating self-respect and racial pride as well as celebrating the cultural accomplishments of black people around the world.”
In 1966, the Black Panther Party was created as a Black marxist political organization. California activists, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale — party founders — organized young, poor and disenfranchised African Americans to continue the work of the Civil Rights Movement – a movement they saw as a failure. The founders sought to improve conditions for Black people outside the South.
Like Malcom X, the Black Panthers did not believe that nonviolent resistance was truly liberating. Seale insisted, “We don’t hate nobody because of color. We hate oppression.” The Black Panthers, known for their protection of Black citizens from brutality and “survival programs,” was labeled an extremist organization by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The group provided food, clothing and transportation to the African American community.
The Black Power Movement embraced iconic figures like Angela Davis, a Black Panther Party member and activist. Known most for her work during the George Jackson trial in the 1970s, Davis has continued her activism all throughout her life, and presently she is a distinguished professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
As the Black Power Movement came to an end, the Black community faced new challenges. President Richard Nixon’s war on drugs and tough on crime policies disproportionately targeted
Black communities, leading to mass incarcerations and an extreme rise in police brutality.
After a long journey through Congress, the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was signed into law by President Johnson. This act served as an extension of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Federal Fair Housing Act, prohibited discrimination in housing on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability and familial status.

In 1992, following the acquittal of four police officers who brutally beat Rodney King, an African American man, a series of riots erupted throughout Los Angeles (LA). During these five days of rioting, residents set fires, looted buildings and engaged in large-scale protests until California Gov. Pere Wilson declared a state of emergency, and deployed thousands of national guard soldiers on protesters.
The 1990s also saw the emergence of a new kind of activism, including the 1955 Million Man March. This political demonstration brought hundreds of thousands of African American men to Washington, D.C. in order to promote unity and civic engagement.
In 2010, scholar Micelle Alexander laid forth an argument in her book, “The New Jim Crow,” that the post-Reconstruction judicial system was a modern day recreation of Jim Crow laws. Her novel highlighted how mass incarceration during the war on drugs functioned as a new form of racial control over African Americans, continuing segregation.
In response to the growing police brutality against African Americans, the 2010s had a resurgence of large-scale activism. After the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a police officer who fatally shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement became a cry against racial injustices and police brutality. The movement gained further momentum in 2014 after the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York, sparking nationwide protests and demands for police accountability.
The murder of George Floyd by police officers who kneeled on his neck for over nine minutes ignoring his pleas to let him breathe ignited one of the largest protests in U.S. history. Millions took to the streets across the globe to call for the “defunding of the police.”
From the Civil Rights movements of the 1950s to the BLM protests, African American activism has continued to evolve to meet new challenges. Modern concerns of police brutality often mirror the discrimination enacted in the 1950s, showing the progression of civil rights movements from America’s earliest movements to now.