In January 1965, Martin Luther King and the SCLC went to Selma, Alabama. Civil rights groups there had asked them to come help get black people registered to vote. At the time, 99% of the people registered to vote in Selma were white. Together, they started working on voting rights.
However, the next month, an African-American man named Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot by a police officer during a peaceful march. Jackson died. Many African-American people were very angry. The SCLC was worried that people were so angry that they would get violent.
The SCLC decided to organize a march from Selma to Montgomery. This would be a 54-mile (87-kilometer) march. Activists hoped the march would show how badly African-Americans wanted to vote. They also wanted to show that they would not let racism or violence stop them from getting equal rights.
The first march was on March 7, 1965. Police officers and racist whites attacked the marchers with clubs and tear gas. They threatened to throw the marchers off the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Seventeen marchers had to go to the hospital, and 50 others were also injured. This day came to be called Bloody Sunday. Pictures and film of the marchers being beaten were shown in newspapers and on television around the world.
Seeing these things made more people support the civil rights activists. People came from all over the United States to march with the activists. One of them, James Reeb, was attacked by white people for supporting civil rights. He died on March 11, 1965.
Finally, President Johnson decided to send soldiers from the United States Army and the Alabama National Guard to protect the marchers. From March 21 to March 25, the marchers walked along the "Jefferson Davis Highway" from Selma to Montgomery. On March 25, 25,000 people entered Montgomery. Martin Luther King gave a speech called "How Long? Not Long" at the Alabama State Capitol. He told the marchers that it would not be long before they had equal rights, "because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
After the march, Viola Liuzzo, a white woman from Detroit, drove some other marchers to the airport. While she was driving back, she was murdered by three members of the Ku Klux Klan.
On August 6, 1965, the United States passed the Voting Rights Act. This law made it illegal to stop somebody from voting because of their race. This meant that all the state laws that kept black people from voting were now illegal.
For almost 100 years, registrars (the government workers who had registered people to vote) were all white. They had total power over who they could register and who they would not register. If a registrar refused to let a black person register, that person could only file a lawsuit, which they were not likely to win. However, the Voting Rights Act finally made a change to this system. If a registrar discriminated against black people, the Attorney General could send federal workers to replace local registrars.
The law worked right away. Within a few months, 250,000 new black voters had signed up to vote. One out of every three of them was registered by a federal worker who replaced a racist registrar. In 1965, 74% of Mississippi's black voters actually voted, and more black politicians were elected in Mississippi than in any other state. By 1967, most African Americans were registered to vote in 9 of the 13 states in the South.
Politics in the South were completely changed by African Americans having the power to vote. White politicians could no longer make laws about African Americans without blacks having a say. In many parts of the South, black people outnumbered whites. This meant that they could vote in black politicians, and vote out racist whites. Also, black people who were registered to vote could be on juries. Before this, any time an African American was charged with a crime, the jury that decided whether they were guilty would be all-white.
From 1966 to 1968, the civil rights movement focused a lot on fair housing. Even outside the South, fair housing was a problem. For example, in 1963, California passed a Fair Housing Act which made segregation in housing illegal. White voters and real estate lobbyists got the law reversed the next year. This helped cause the Watts Riots. (Later, in 1966, California made the Fair Housing Act the law again.)
Activists, including Martin Luther King, led a movement for fair housing in Chicago in 1966. The next year, young NAACP members did the same in Milwaukee. Activists in both cities got attacked physically by white homeowners, and legally by politicians who supported segregation.
Of all the civil rights laws passed during the Civil Rights Movement, the Fair Housing Act was the hardest to pass. The law would make discrimination in housing illegal. This meant black people would be allowed to move into white neighborhoods. As Senator Walter Mondale said: "This was civil rights getting personal."
The suggested Fair Housing Bill was sent to the United States Senate first. There, most Senators - Northern and Southern - were against the bill. In March of 1968, the Senate sent a weaker version to the House of Representatives. The House was expected to make changes that would make the bill even weaker.
That did not happen. On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was murdered. This made many members of Congress feel like they needed to do something about civil rights quickly. The day after Dr. King's murder, Senator Mondale stood in front of the Senate and said:
On April 10, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1968. President Johnson signed the law the next day. Part of the law is called the "Fair Housing Act." It makes it illegal to discriminate in selling, renting, or lending money for housing, based on a person's race, skin color, religion, or home country.
In 1968, Martin Luther King and the SCLC were planning the Poor People's Campaign. People of all races took part in the movement. The movement's goal was to decrease poverty for people of all races.
As part of his work against poverty, Dr. King and the SCLC started to speak out against the Vietnam War. King argued that poor people in Vietnam were being killed, and that the War would only make them poorer. He also argued that the United States was spending more and more money and time on the War, and less on programs to help poor Americans.
In March 1968, Dr. King was invited to Memphis, Tennessee to support garbage workers that were on strike. These workers were paid very little, and two workers had been killed doing their jobs. They wanted to be members of a labor union. Dr. King thought this strike was a perfect fit for his Poor People's Campaign. As soon as he got to Memphis, King started getting threats.
The day before he was murdered, King gave a sermon called "I've Been to the Mountaintop." The next day he was murdered. After King was killed, people rioted in more than 100 cities across the United States.
Civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy continued the Poor People's Campaign after King's death. About 3,000 activists camped out on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for about six weeks.
The day before Dr. King's funeral, his wife, Coretta Scott King, and three of their children led 20,000 marchers through Memphis. Soldiers protected the marchers. On April 9, Mrs. King led another 150,000 people through Atlanta during Dr. King's funeral. An old, wooden wagon, pulled by mules, pulled Dr. King's casket. The wagon was a symbol of Dr. King's Poor People's Campaign.
Mrs. King once said:
Many people were killed during the Civil Rights Movement. Some were killed because they supported civil rights. Others were killed by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) or other racist whites who wanted to terrorize black people. No one knows just how many people were killed during the Civil Rights Movement. However, here are some examples. People whose names are highlighted in blue were children or teenagers when they were killed.