A History of the Civil Rights Movement

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A History of the Civil Rights Movement

pushed back. Civil rights activists were attacked and beaten. Some lost their lives. But between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s, the legal struc ture of Jim Crow was dismantled. Laws enacted by the federal government banned racial segregation and removed obstacles that had prevented African Americans from exercising the right to vote. At last, after centuries

Slaves pick cotton on a Southern plantation, 1850s. When the Civil War began in 1861, nearly 4 million African Americans were held in slavery.