Domestic Policy: Government, Civil Rights, and Race Relations

Roots of the Civil Rights Movement.

The civil rights movement burst onto the American political scene in the 1960s. Before then the principal tactic in the fight against discriminatory laws was the lawsuit, usually filed by lawyers for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Southern resistance to court-ordered desegregation of public schools had been strikingly demonstrated in 1957, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower had to send U.S. Army troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce a school-integration order. The successful bus boycott led by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956 was a preview of civil rights tactics of the 1960s. The next year King was among the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), whose purpose was to help provide an organizational base through which activist black clergy and their churches could mount nonviolent resistance to...

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