Infographic: A Timeline of the Civil Rights Movement (2024)

Although rulings on isolated cases concerning segregation in education took place before the 1950s, the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which was a consolidation of five separate cases, to declare racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional kicked off a more than a decade-long fight for equality for minorities and especially African-Americans still subjected to the Jim Crow laws of the 19th century in many southern states.

Notable activists and organizers of the civil rights movement, which, according to sources like history.com, PBS and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, was most active between 1954 and 1968, were Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Parks, although not the first Black U.S. citizen to defy segregation laws in public transport, made nationwide waves with her arrest due to not giving up her seat to a white man in December of 1955. This sparked a year-long boycott of Montgomery buses by noteworthy Black members of the movement, among them a young Martin Luther King Jr.

King, whose work is ingrained into public memory largely thanks to his "I have a dream" speech held at the March on Washington in August 1963, helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957 and became its first chairman. Between his participation in the bus boycotts and his 1963 speech, King helped organize a variety of protests and held speeches across the country, being connected to the Freedom Riders of 1962 and the Children's Crusade through Birmingham, Alabama in May 1963. His efforts earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

Malcolm X was often seen as a counterpart to King's alleged non-violent form of protesting, which has been described as becoming "flattened" according to some critics. A member of the religious group Nation of Islam from 1953 to 1964, Malcolm X spoke out against imperialism and espoused communist views, for which he was put on a watchlist by the FBI. In 1965, Malcolm X was killed in New York, the specifics of which and the question of who the perpetrators were are debated to this day.

Three years after Malcolm X's killing and the achievement of one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s main goals, an improvement on the voting rights for African-Americans, passed into law, King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Although the fight for equal rights continues to this day, King's assassination marked the end of an especially prominent time of the U.S. civil rights movement.