The Brown decision fueled violent resistance during which Southern states evaded the law. The Montgomery bus boycott began a campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience to protest segregation that attracted national and international attention. Media coverage of the use of fire hoses and attack dogs against protesters and bombings and riots in Birmingham compelled Kennedy to act, sending a civil rights bill to Congress.
Montgomery Bus Boycott
Sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks on 1 December 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott was a 13-month mass protest that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional. The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) coordinated the boycott, and its president, Martin Luther King, Jr., became a prominent civil rights leader as international attention focused on Montgomery. The bus boycott demonstrated the potential for nonviolent mass protest to successfully challenge racial segregation and served as an example for other southern campaigns that followed. In Stride Toward Freedom, King’s 1958 memoir of the boycott, he declared the real meaning of the Montgomery bus boycott to be the power of a growing self-respect to animate the struggle for civil rights.
Cultural Boycott and the Anti Apartheid Movement Campaign
The Anti-Apartheid Movement began as the Boycott Movement, set up in 1959 to persuade shoppers to boycott goods from apartheid sources.
Martin Luther King, Jr. , Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963) – Knowledge for Freedom seminar
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice
Waging a good war: a military history of the civil rights movement, 1954-1968
"A new history of the Civil Rights Movement with an emphasis on its nonviolent use of military tactics and strategy"--
John Brown, abolitionist : the man who killed slavery, sparked the Civil War, and seeded civil rights : Reynolds, David S., 1948-
Includes bibliographical references and index
Anti-War Protests of the 1960s-70s
The Vietnam anti-war movement was one of the most pervasive displays of opposition to the government policy in modern ti...
"We Will Shoot Back": The Natchez Model and Paramilitary Organization in the Mississippi Freedom Movement
Between 1965 and 1979, economic boycotts were a principal form of insurgency for Black activists in Mississippi. After 1964, in several communities, the boycott of White-owned commerce became the primary tactic utilized by human rights forces to disrupt the system of segregation. These boycotts relied upon paramilitary organization to protect the activities and leadership of the Mississippi freedom movement and the Black community in general and to sanction anyone in the Black community who wished to violate the boycott. This paradigm of economic boycotts supported by paramilitary organization was first utilized in 1965 in Natchez. Natchez is a commercial center in southwest Mississippi. The combination of economic boycott with armed resistance posed an effective coercive campaign to pressure the local White power structure for concessions demanded by the movement. The insurgent model of Natchez was replicated throughout the state, particularly in Black communities of southwest Mississippi.
93% of Black Lives Matter Protests Have Been Peaceful, New Report Finds
The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project analyzed more than 7,750 BLM demonstrations in all 50 states and D.C.
Silencing the Streets
The 47-page report, “‘Silencing the Streets’: The Right to Protest Under Attack in the UK,” documents that the UK’s Labour government has failed to reverse sweeping anti-protest laws introduced by the previous Conservative government. Instead, Labour has attempted to expand them with the Crime and Policing Bill 2025 and through the unprecedented misuse of terrorism legislation to target and criminalize peaceful protest. The Crime and Policing bill, pending before parliament, is to be debated in the House of Lords in January 2026.
Between Threat and Reality: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Emergence of Armed Self-Defense in Clarksdale and Natchez, Mississippi, 1960-1965
Annelieke Dirks, Between Threat and Reality: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Emergence of Armed Self-Defense in Clarksdale and Natchez, Mississippi, 1960-1965, Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring 2007), pp. 71-98
History of Successful Boycotts | Ethical Consumer
These examples of successful boycotts show the big an impact this campaign tactic can have.
Freedom Now | Polity: Vol 52, No 3
Left-wing politics is resurgent. Self-proclaimed socialists are unexpectedly popular. Proposals like universal health care are a commonplace of Democratic campaigns. But there is not yet a clear, unifying idea behind this political shift. We propose that that idea is freedom. While the left once understood freedom as emancipation from the economy, the right spent the twentieth century neutralizing and appropriating the idea of freedom by reinventing the economy as the true site of freedom. To reclaim freedom as a value of the left, we have to begin with the daily experience of most people: the unfreedom of the workplace. The authoritarian organization of work is not just an offense against freedom; it also helps us understand how freedom requires emancipation both from the economy and within the economy, and why that emancipation requires mass struggle.
Meet the second-generation immigrants who are helping protect your civil rights.
Meet the second-generation immigrants who are helping protect your civil rights
Deeds, Not Words: The Myth of Polite Revolution
A refusal of the sanitized story that rights were won by asking nicely. The suffragettes bombed Westminster Abbey. The Deacons for Defense guarded MLK. Man…
In 1977, Disabled activists occupied the Federal Building in San Francisco to demand the passage of Section 504— legislation to protect against disability discrimination.When the building was cordoned off, in an effort to starve activists out, The Black Panthers *Broke In* to deliver them hot meals.
The 504 Protests and the Black Panther Party – Disability Social History Project
disabilityhistory.org