Background
Debbie Louis was an author and collector of civil rights materials.The real beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement came in 1954 when, in Brown vs. Board of Education, the Court found
separate schools inherently unequal and called for desegregation. In 1957 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was
formed in Atlanta, and Martin Luther King, Jr. became leader of the movement. Major advances of the movement came with the
sit-ins at the Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch counters (orchestrated by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee),
the Freedom Rides integrating buses in the South, the voter registration drives in Mississippi, the protests and marches in
Birmingham, Alabama, and the March on Washington in August 1963. President Johnson called upon Congress to act, and the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 was passed. After violence occurred in a march just outside Selma, Alabama, Congress passed the Voting
Rights Law of 1965. The movement began to fragment following the urban rioting throughout the U.S. in the summers of 1965-67.
The Black Panther movement led by Stokely Carmichael, formerly of SNCC, called for a revolution in the ghettos. King was assassinated
in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968.
Restrictions
Property rights to the physical object belong to the UCLA Library,
Department of Special Collections. Literary rights, including copyright,
are retained by the creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of
the researcher to determine who holds the copyright and pursue the
copyright owner or his or her heir for permission to publish where The UC
Regents do not hold the copyright.