ABSTRACT
Starting in the 1950s, African Americans and Whites began to organize effective civil rights campaigns across the South. A key component of the campaign was the philosophy of civil disobedience and nonviolence successfully employed by Mahatma Ghandi in India. In the early 1960s national civil rights groups as well as Black and White students from across the US worked to register African Americans disenfranchised by restrictive voting rights laws. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, first proposed by Kennedy in 1963, outlawed discrimination based on race, sex, nationality, or religion. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 allowed the government to enforce Constitutional voting rights and regulate elections in states found out of compliance, while the Civil Rights Act of 1968 required fair housing practices. By the early 1970s, the Civil Rights Movement had fragmented, with each faction employing different philosophies working toward the same ultimate goal—equality for all.
