The movement built on decades of earlier organizing by the NAACP, Black churches, labor unions and legal advocates. Key moments include Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 and 1956, and the Greensboro sit-ins in 1960. They continued with the Freedom Rides in 1961, the March on Washington in 1963, Freedom Summer in 1964 and the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965.
Groups such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality coordinated campaigns. Local leaders, many of them women such as Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer, did much of the organizing. Activists faced arrests, beatings, bombings and killings, and the FBI surveilled leaders through COINTELPRO.
The movement ended legal segregation and transformed voting in the South. It also inspired movements for women's, disability, Latino, Native and LGBTQ rights. Many of its laws remain under legal challenge today.