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"You've got to get out there and push and organize and agitate and stand up and make some noise."
-- Civil rights leader John Lewis
One hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, much of the country was still segregated. In the South, unfair laws kept many African Americans from voting. Black people couldn't sit next to white people on interstate buses and trains. Even lunch counter seats were reserved for whites.
In the 1960s, a new generation rose up in protest. They made their voices heard by taking direct action. Four black college freshmen sat down at a "whites-only" lunch counter in Greensboro, NC, and refused to leave. Within days, sit-ins spread across the South. Within weeks, the growing student movement found a voice in a powerful new organization -- the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
The students were the "shock troops" of a new American revolution televised on the nightly news. Their methods were peaceful, but their opponents were armed and dangerous. From the Freedom Rides to Freedom Summer, from the Children's Crusade to Bloody Sunday, thousands of young people exercising their constitutional rights were attacked, arrested and jailed. But still they marched, and still they made some noise, until segregation was defeated. |