Civil Rights protests grew throughout the 1950s and 60s.

The ongoing nationwide housing crisis for African Americans and other forms of systemic racism led to significant civil unrest in the 1950’s (Feagin, 2014, pp. 155-157). While a number of civil rights advancements were made—many supported by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the NAACP—positive steps like Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) which desegregated schools, did little to reduce the overall impact of segregation. Civil rights advanced at a slow and sometimes violent pace (Feagin, 2014, p. 274).

As the 1950’s ended and the 1960’s began, national civil rights leaders like Medgar Evers and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged to champion Black resistance to systemic racism.

In Missouri, Jim Crow laws were repealed while people “in the Lower South states endured arrests, bombings, and death for attempting to register African Americans to vote” (Lang, 2009, p. 128). Nevertheless, African Americans still faced a “postsegregation pattern of black racial control” (Lang, 2009, p. 128). At times, this Black racial control took extreme forms of violence, such as the assassination of civil rights leader Medgar Evers on June 12, 1963, which sparked uprisings nationwide.

The civil rights movement did gain legal protections for African Americans with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

President John F. Kennedy and his successor Lyndon B. Johnson helped the U.S. Congress pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was meant to end race-based discrimination. This legislation and the 1965 Voting Rights Act were steps in the right direction, but as with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments passed after the Civil War, legal rights did not automatically create social and economic ones. Local governments and local institutions controlling housing, real estate, and education resisted federal laws as much as possible, especially in the south, which led to widespread civic upheaval in 1967 and 1968 (Feagin, 2014, pp. 204-205).