The sit-ins even got the support of President Eisenhower. After the Greensboro sit-ins started, he said he was "deeply sympathetic with the efforts of any group to enjoy the rights of equality that they are guaranteed by the Constitution."
In April 1960, students who had led sit-ins were invited to a conference. At the conference, they decided to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC would become an important group in the civil rights movement.
In 1960, the Supreme Court had ruled in "Boynton v. Virginia" that it was illegal to segregate people on public transportation that was going from one state to another. In 1961, student activists decided to test whether the Southern states would follow this ruling. Groups of black and white activists decided to ride buses through the South, sitting together instead of segregating themselves. They planned to ride buses from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans, Louisiana. They called these rides the "Freedom Rides."
The Freedom Riders were met with danger and violence. For example:
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) brought in more Freedom Riders to keep the movement going. They were also met with violence:
However, people around the country began to support the Freedom Riders, who had never used violence, even when being attacked. Eventually, Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General in his brother John F. Kennedy's government, insisted on a new law about de-segregation. It said that:
Between 1961 and 1965, activist groups worked on trying to get black people registered (signed up) to vote. Since the end of Reconstruction, the Southern states had passed laws and used many strategies to keep black people from registering to vote. Often, these laws did not apply to white people.
Voter registration activists started out in Mississippi. All of Mississippi's civil rights organizations joined together to try to get people registered. Activist groups in Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina then started similar programs. However, when the activists tried to register black people to vote, police, white racists, and the Ku Klux Klan beat, arrested, shot, and even murdered them.
Meanwhile, black people who tried to register to vote were fired from their jobs, thrown out of their homes, beaten, arrested, threatened, and sometimes murdered.
In 1964, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. It made discrimination illegal, and specifically said it was illegal to have different voter registration requirements for different races. However, even after this law was passed, the Southern states still made it very difficult for black people to vote. Finally, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed. This law included ways to make sure that all United States citizens were getting their right to vote.
Starting in 1956, a black man named Clyde Kennard wanted to go to Mississippi Southern College. Kennard had served in the Korean War, and he wanted to use the GI Bill to go to college. The college's president, William McCain, asked state politicians and a local racist group who supported segregation to make sure Kennard never got into the college.
Kenner was arrested twice for crimes he never committed. Eventually he was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison. After Kennard had spent three years in prison doing forced labor, Governor Ross Barnett pardoned him. Journalists had looked into Kennard's case, and wrote that the state did not give Kennard the treatment he needed for his colon cancer. Kennard died that same year. Later, in 2006, a court ruled that Kennard was innocent of the crimes he had been sent to jail for.
In September 1962, James Meredith won a lawsuit that gave him the right to go to the University of Mississippi. He tried three times to get into the university to sign up for classes. Governor Ross Barnett blocked Meredith each time. He told Meredith: "[N]o school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your Governor."
Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent United States Marshals to protect Meredith. On September 30, 1962, Meredith was able to enter the college with the Marshals protecting him. However, that evening, students and other racist whites started a riot. They threw rocks and fired guns at the Marshals. Two people were killed; 28 marshals were shot; and another 160 people were hurt. President John F. Kennedy sent the United States Army to the school to stop the riot. Meredith was able to begin classes at the college the day after the Army arrived. Meredith survived harassment and isolation at the college and graduated on August 18, 1963, with a a degree in political science.
Meredith and other activists kept working on de-segregating public universities. In 1965, the first two African American students were able to go to the University of Southern Mississippi.
In 1963, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) started a campaign in Birmingham, Alabama. Its goals were to de-segregate the stores in downtown Birmingham; make hiring fair; and create a committee, including blacks and whites, that would make a plan for de-segregating Birmingham's schools. Martin Luther King described Birmingham as "probably the most [completely] segregated city in the United States."
Birmingham's Commissioner of Public Safety was Eugene "Bull" Connor. (A Commissioner of Public Safety is in charge of the police and fire department, and deals with emergencies that could be dangerous to people in the city.) Connor was very much against integration. He often let the police, Ku Klux Klan, and racist white people attack civil rights activists. He promised that blacks and whites would never be integrated in Birmingham.
The activists used a few different non-violent ways of protesting, including sit-ins, "kneel-ins" at local churches, and marches. However, the city got a court order saying all protests like this were illegal. The activists knew this was illegal, and in an act of civil disobedience, they refused to follow the court order. The protesters, including Martin Luther King, were arrested.
While in jail, King was held in solitary confinement. While there, he wrote his famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail." He was let go after about a week.
However, very few activists could afford to risk being arrested. One of SCLC's leaders then came up with the idea of training high school, college, and elementary school students to take part in the protests. He reasoned that students did not have full-time jobs to go to, they did not have families to take care of, and they could "afford" to be in jail more than their parents.
"Newsweek" magazine later named this plan the "Children's Crusade." On May 2, more than 600 students, including some as young as 8 years old, tried to march from a local church to City Hall. They were all arrested.
The next day, another 1,000 students started to march. Bull Connor let police dogs loose to attack them and used fire hoses to knock down the students. Reporters were there, and videos and pictures showing the violence were shown on television and printed across the country.
People throughout the United States were so angry at seeing these videos that President Kennedy worked with the SCLC and the white businesses in Birmingham to work out an agreement. It said:
Some of Birmingham's whites were not happy with this agreement. They bombed the SCLC's headquarters; the home of King's brother; and a hotel where King had been staying. Thousands of blacks reacted by rioting; some burned buildings and one even stabbed and hurt a police officer.
On September 15, 1963, the Ku Klux Klan bombed a church in Birmingham, where civil rights activists often met before starting their marches. Since it was a Sunday, church services were going on. The bomb killed four young girls and hurt 22 other people.