ABSTRACT
This chapter describes author's experience about the civil rights movement. SNCC, CORE, and the SCLC had all been devoted to the philosophy and strategy of nonviolence. Passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act marked the end of one phase in the unending struggle of African Americans for equality in America. So did the emergence of the vague but resonant slogan black power. SNCC renounced nonviolence and asked whites to leave. The civil rights movement revealed a kind of social change that is neither the result of established democratic procedures nor a revolutionary seizure of power. It certainly did not eliminate racism or black poverty, but it radically changed the terrorist subjugation of blacks in the deep South. It eliminated the legal segregation against which the sit-ins and Freedom Rides were aimed. Catholic protestors in Northern Ireland called their struggle the civil rights movement and modeled it on that of American blacks.
