From 1954 through 1968, the American civil rights movement was a populist party and campaign in the United States to end institutionalized racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement. The movement began during the late-nineteenth-century Reconstruction era, but it rose to prominence in the mid-1960s as a result of years of direct action and grassroots demonstrations. The biggest peaceful protest and civil disobedience tactics of the civil rights movement finally resulted in new federal civil rights safeguards for all Americans.

The Reconstruction Amendments to the  United States Constitution extended liberation and constitutional rights of citizenship to all African Americans, the majority of whom had previously been enslaved, following the American Civil War and elimination of slavery in the 1860s. For a brief time, African American men were allowed to vote and hold political office, but they were gradually stripped of their civil rights, typically under the so-called Jim Crow laws, and African Americans in the South were subjected to discrimination and relentless violence by white supremacists. African Americans undertook different attempts during the next century to safeguard their legal and civil rights, as well as the civil rights movement.

With the United States Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education judgment and other following rulings, the racially segregated doctrine, which helped the enforcement of Jim Crow laws, was significantly weakened and subsequently eliminated in 1954. Non-violent mass demonstrations and civil disobedience sparked crises and beneficial talks between protesters and government officials between 1955 and 1968. These circumstances frequently required urgent responses from federal, state, and municipal councils, companies, and communities highlighting the injustices that African Americans suffer across the country. The killing of Chicago teenager Emmett Till in Mississippi, as well as the indignation caused by witnessing how he had been tortured when his mother opted on an open-casket burial, electrified the African-American community across the country.

Boycotts, such as the successful Montgomery bus banning in Alabama, 'lay,' like the Greensboro sit-ins in North Carolina and efficient Nashville stay in Tennessee, mass parades, like the 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade and the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches in Alabama, and a variety of other non - violence actions and opposition are amongst the protest and/or civil disobedience.