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The Civil Rights Movement received an
infusion of energy with a student sit-in at a Woolworth's store in
Greensboro, North Carolina. On February 1, 1960, four students from North
Carolina Agricultural & Technical College, an all-black college, sat down at
the segregated lunch counter to protest Woolworth's policy of excluding
African Americans. The people would dump food on the kids and they were
violent towards them. These protesters were encouraged to dress
professionally, to sit quietly, and to occupy every other stool so that
potential white sympathizers could join in. The sit-in soon inspired other
sit-ins in Richmond, Virginia; Nashville, Tennessee and Atlanta, Georgia. Martin Luther King jr. was assassinated April 4, 1968. He went to Memphis, Tennessee to support a strike of sanitation workers but was later shot while standing on a motel balcony. There were riots across the streets in every city when MLK was assassinated. Malcolm X was an African- American Muslim minister, public speaker, and human rights activist. He was a courageous advocate for the rights of African Americans was what many people saw him as, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against black Americans. Malcolm blamed racism on Western culture and urged African Americans to join with sympathetic whites to bring to an end. His detractors accused him of preaching racism, black supremacy, anti-Semitism , and violence. He has been described as one of the greatest and most influential African Americans in history. Civil Rights Act of 1957-primarily a voting rights bill, was the first civil rights legislation enacted by Congress in the United States Civil Rights Act of 1964-The nation's first comprehensive law making it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. Title VII of that law, which is enforced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, is specifically aimed at discrimination in employment. Civil Rights Act of 1968-expanded on previous acts and prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin, and as of 1974, gender; as of 1988, the act protects the disabled and families with children. It also provided protection for civil rights workers. Voting Rights Act of 1965- the Act prohibited states from imposing any "voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure ... to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.
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