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civil rightsRights of the individual citizen. In many countries they are specified (as in the Bill of Rights of the US constitution) and guaranteed by law to ensure equal treatment for all citizens. In the USA, the struggle to obtain civil rights for former slaves and their descendants, both through legislation and in practice, has been a major theme since the Civil War. See civil-rights movement, women's movement, and gay rights movement.
civil rights - events| 24 December 1865 | USA | Former Confederate cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest founds the Ku Klux Klan, allegedly as a social club for Confederate veterans and their families. | | 2–5 July 1917 | USA | A race riot erupts in East St Louis, Missouri, where alienated white workers rampage through black neighbourhoods killing any black American in sight. ‘Official’ figures list 39 black and 8 white people killed, but civil-rights leader W E B Du Bois insists that as many as 125 people have died in what is undoubtedly the worst racial pogrom in US history. | | 10–19 June 1953 | USA | A bus boycott in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, results in an amendment of the rules requiring blacks to sit at the back of buses; it is the first major action of the modern civil-rights movement. | | 2 May 1956 | USA | The general conference of the Methodist Church, meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, orders the abolishment of racial segregation in its churches. | | 1957 | USA | The civil-rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr, helps establish the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization devoted to ending discrimination nonviolently. | | 28 August 1963 | USA | Over 200,000 Americans take part in the March on Washington, a peaceful demonstration for civil rights in Washington, DC. They are addressed by the civil-rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr, who proclaims, with the Lincoln Memorial as a backdrop, ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character’. | | 18 January 1965 | USA | Protest marches begin in Selma, Alabama; civil-rights campaigners led by Martin Luther King, Jr, of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference demand that blacks be allowed to register as voters. Many marchers are repressed by local police. | | 21 February 1965 | USA | Malcolm X, US black militant leader, is shot dead at the Audubon Ballroom, in New York City (39). | | 6 August 1965 | USA | The Voting Rights Act becomes law in the USA, making illegal the southern states' practice of disenfranchising black voters by imposing taxation, literacy, or other requirements on potential voters. | | 1968 | USA | The US social activist and Black Panther member Eldridge Cleaver publishes Soul on Ice, a book of essays on the personal effects of racism that quickly acquires an international status. | | 1974 | USA | The US Equal Opportunity Act forbids discrimination on the grounds of marital status or sex. | | 2 November 1983 | USA | The US Congress votes to make the birthday of the black American civil-rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr, (15 January) a federal holiday from 1986. |
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