,

After he was arrested and placed in solitary confinement for protesting segregation in April 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. penned his landmark Letter from Birmingham Jail, urging fellow clergy to support his work against racial injustice.

In May of that year, hundreds of peacefully demonstrating children were attacked in Birmingham, Alabama, with fire hoses, batons and menacing police dogs.

Just days later, the A.G. Gaston Motel – a Black-owned establishment where white business owners, city officials and civil rights leaders had reached a compromise to desegregate the city – was bombed, and four people suffered minor injuries.

The civil unrest in Birmingham captured the nation’s attention and prompted President John F. Kennedy to call in federal troops. Compelled by the images of peaceful protests met with brutal violence, Kennedy backed a comprehensive civil rights bill that was sent to Congress on June 19, 1963 – a week after civil rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated in Mississippi.

That August, King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington. In September, the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed, killing four young girls. These watershed events further galvanized public support for the civil rights bill, but Kennedy himself would not live to see it pass – he was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963.

Kennedy’s civil rights bill fell into the hands of Lyndon B. Johnson, his vice president and successor.

Fifty-six years ago today, on July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. It ended segregation in public places. It also banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. And it set the stage for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed racial discrimination in voting.

“More than 100 years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law, the formerly enslaved abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, ‘If there is no struggle, there is no progress,’ and this sentiment was echoed in the sacrifices of those who suffered and laid down their lives for the civil rights we enjoy today,” said Tafeni English, director of the Civil Rights Memorial Center, which is operated by the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, and honors martyrs of the movement.

“The words of Frederick Douglass still ring true today in the clarion calls for racial justice following the recent murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Sean Reed, Yassin Mohamed, Ahmaud Arbery and Rayshard Brooks,” English said. “The words of Frederick Douglass still ring true today in the ongoing fight against voter suppression across the South, and they ring true in the continued struggle for racial equality in our schools. As we celebrate the anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s passage, we must remain vigilant in our fight for equality, as King said, ‘until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.’”

Women of the civil rights movement

The history of the fight for racial equality has often centered on men like King, Kennedy, Johnson and Evers. But far less attention has been paid to the women who made the civil rights movement possible.

They are women like Ella Baker, a former NAACP national director who worked to integrate schools in New York and improve the quality of education for Black children. Inspired by the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Baker co-founded the organization In Friendship to raise money for the civil rights movement in the South.

In conjunction with a group of Southern Black ministers, Baker helped form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), with King as its first president and Baker as its director. She left the SCLC in 1960 to help organize the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which became one of the foremost advocates for human rights in the country. She also did much of the behind-the-scenes work for the protests that led to the Civil Rights Act’s passage.

Read more here.