After 1945, the Americas entered a long era of civil rights campaigning. Groups who had been denied full citizenship — indigenous peoples, African Americans, and later women and Hispanic Americans — organized to demand equality. This micro covers the origins of that struggle: indigenous rights, the African American movement's roots and tactics, its Supreme Court victories, and the leadership of Dr Martin Luther King Jr up to 1965.
Why indigenous peoples come first: Indigenous nations across the Americas had faced centuries of land loss, broken treaties and forced assimilation. After 1945 they began organizing using the same tools — courts, protest, media — that other civil rights movements would later use.
- Termination policy (US, 1953) — Congress tried to end federal recognition of tribes and push assimilation; many tribes lost land and services
- Relocation programs — the US government encouraged Native Americans to move from reservations to cities, weakening tribal communities
- American Indian Movement (AIM), founded 1968 — organized urban Native Americans to fight police harassment, poverty and loss of treaty rights
- Occupation of Alcatraz (1969–1971) — Native American activists occupied the former prison island to demand land rights and highlight broken treaties, drawing national media attention
- Wounded Knee occupation (1973) — AIM activists occupied the South Dakota site for 71 days to protest corrupt tribal leadership and demand the US honour old treaties
Canada and Latin America too: Indigenous civil rights were not only a US story. In Canada, First Nations peoples pressed for land claims and an end to residential schools. In Latin America, indigenous movements challenged governments over land rights and cultural survival — part of the same post-1945 pattern of marginalized groups demanding recognition.
How this fits a Paper 3 essay: If a question asks about civil rights movements in the Americas, indigenous rights is a valid example beyond the US, and it also shows the comparative angle IB examiners reward — don't write only about African Americans.
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By 1945, African Americans in the southern United States lived under Jim Crow — segregated schools, transport, restaurants and voting barriers. Wartime service and the Great Migration (Black Americans moving to northern cities for factory jobs) raised expectations of equality that segregation denied. This gap between expectation and reality fuelled a mass movement.
Key organizations
- NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded 1909) — used the courts to challenge segregation laws directly; led the legal campaign that produced Brown v. Board of Education
- SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference, founded 1957) — led by Dr Martin Luther King Jr; church-based, organized mass non-violent protest across the South
- SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, founded 1960) — young activists who organized sit-ins and voter registration drives, often more confrontational than the SCLC
- CORE (Congress of Racial Equality, founded 1942) — organized the Freedom Rides testing desegregation of interstate buses
Tactics: non-violent direct action
Litigation
NAACP lawyers, especially Thurgood Marshall, took segregation cases to the Supreme Court, chipping away at the legal basis of Jim Crow.
Boycotts
Mass refusal to use segregated services — the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–56) showed economic pressure could force change.
Sit-ins
Students sat at whites-only lunch counters (Greensboro, 1960) and refused to leave, filling jails and forcing media coverage.
Freedom Rides
Integrated groups rode interstate buses into the Deep South (1961) to test federal desegregation rulings, provoking violent white backlash that shocked the nation.
Mass marches
Events like the March on Washington (1963) and Selma to Montgomery (1965) used huge peaceful crowds to pressure Congress and the President.
Sue it, boycott it, sit at it, ride through it, march on it.
Why non-violence mattered: Non-violent protest put the moral weight on segregationists — when police used dogs and fire hoses on peaceful protesters (Birmingham, 1963), television images turned national opinion against segregation and pushed Washington to act.
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Segregation in the South was ended through two connected forces: legal rulings from the Supreme Court that removed its constitutional protection, and mass protest led by Dr Martin Luther King Jr that forced Congress to pass enforcing laws.
Supreme Court and legal challenges
| Case / law | Year | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| Brown v. Board of Education | 1954 | Ruled segregated public schools unconstitutional, overturning the 1896 'separate but equal' doctrine |
| Brown II | 1955 | Ordered desegregation to proceed 'with all deliberate speed' — vague wording let the South delay for years |
| Civil Rights Act | 1964 | Banned discrimination in employment and public places; ended segregation in businesses |
| Voting Rights Act | 1965 | Banned literacy tests and sent federal officials to register Black voters in the South |
Rulings were not self-enforcing: Brown (1954) declared segregation illegal, but southern states used delay tactics, and some closed schools entirely rather than integrate. Real desegregation in the South took until roughly 1980, and only after federal troops, further court orders and new laws forced compliance.
Dr Martin Luther King Jr
King rose to national leadership during the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–56), sparked when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat. He founded the SCLC in 1957 and led campaigns built on Christian non-violence and Gandhi's ideas of civil disobedience.
Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–56)
381 days of Black residents refusing city buses; ended when the Supreme Court ruled bus segregation unconstitutional. Made King a national figure.
Birmingham campaign (1963)
King targeted one of the most segregated cities in the US; police violence against peaceful marchers, broadcast nationally, built pressure for federal civil rights law.
March on Washington (1963)
250,000 people gathered; King delivered his 'I Have a Dream' speech, pushing Kennedy's and then Johnson's civil rights bills through Congress.
Selma to Montgomery marches (1965)
Marchers were beaten by police on 'Bloody Sunday'; the outrage directly led to the Voting Rights Act later that year.
Role of government: Presidents did not lead this movement — they responded to it. Eisenhower sent troops to enforce school desegregation in Little Rock (1957); Kennedy and Johnson only proposed civil rights laws once protest and media pressure made inaction politically costly.