Leaders of the 1963 March on Washington walking arm in arm at the front of the crowd
Leaders of the March on Washington, 28 August 1963
Marked Montgomery

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The civil rights movement

Black Americans organised boycotts, marches, sit-ins and court cases to end segregation and win the vote in the South. Their movement won the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Place
Montgomery · Greensboro · Birmingham · Washington · SelmaThe Americas
Laid out as
A revolutionHow things were before, the moment it turned, and how things were after.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet
Image
Rowland Scherman, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

BeforeSegregation by law, and votes denied.

  1. IBrown v. Board of Education
  2. IIThe Montgomery bus boycott
  3. IIISit-ins
  4. IVThe march on Washington
  5. VSelma
  6. VIThe laws of 1964 and 1965

AfterSegregation outlawed, and voting rights protected.

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Rosa Parks
  • Martin Luther King Jr
  • Ella Baker
  • Fannie Lou Hamer
  • John Lewis
  • Malcolm X

Objects

  • Rosa Parks’s bus
  • The Greensboro lunch counter

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1954 to 1968. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?