Brown had been the law of the land for barely a year when a single act of violence struck at the heart of black America. A fourteen-year-old African American from the South Side of Chicago, Emmett Till, was visiting relatives in Mississippi in the summer of 1955. Seen talking to a white woman in a grocery store, Till was tortured and murdered under cover of night. His mutilated body was found at the bottom of a river, tied with barbed wire to a heavy steel cotton gin fan. Photos of Till’s body in Jet magazine brought national attention to the heinous crime.

Two white men were arrested for Till’s murder. During the trial, followed closely in African American communities across the country, the lone witness to Till’s kidnapping — his uncle, Mose Wright — identified both killers. Feeling “the blood boil in hundreds of white people as they sat glaring in the courtroom,” Wright said, “it was the first time in my life I had the courage to accuse a white man of a crime.” Despite Wright’s eyewitness testimony, the all-white jury found the defendants innocent. This miscarriage of justice — later, the killers even admitted their guilt in a Look magazine article — galvanized an entire generation of African Americans; no one who lived through the Till case ever forgot it.

Montgomery Bus Boycott In the wake of the Till case, civil rights advocates needed some good news. They received it three months later, as southern black leaders embraced an old tactic put to new ends: nonviolent protest. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a civil rights activist in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. She was arrested and charged with violating a local segregation ordinance. Parks’s act was not the spur-of-the-moment decision that it seemed: a woman of sterling reputation and a longtime NAACP member, she had been contemplating such an act for some time. Middle-aged and unassuming, Rosa Parks fit the bill perfectly for the NAACP’s challenge against segregated buses.

Once the die was cast, the black community turned for leadership to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the recently appointed pastor of Montgomery’s Dexter Street Baptist Church. The son of a prominent Atlanta minister, King embraced the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. Working closely, but behind the scenes, with Bayard Rustin, King studied nonviolent philosophy, which Rustin and others in the Fellowship of Reconciliation had first used in the 1940s. After Rosa Parks’s arrest, King endorsed a plan proposed by a local black women’s organization to boycott Montgomery’s bus system. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was inspired by similar boycotts that had taken place in Harlem in 1941 and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1953.

For the next 381 days, Montgomery’s African Americans formed car pools or walked to work. “Darling, it’s empty!” Coretta Scott King exclaimed to her husband as a bus normally filled with black riders rolled by their living room window on the first day of the boycott. The transit company neared bankruptcy, and downtown stores complained about the loss of business. But only after the Supreme Court ruled in November 1956 that bus segregation was unconstitutional did the city of Montgomery finally comply. “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested,” said one woman boycotter.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott catapulted King to national prominence. In 1957, along with the Reverend Ralph Abernathy and dozens of black ministers from across the South, he founded the Atlanta-based Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The black church, long the center of African American social and cultural life, now lent its moral and organizational strength to the civil rights movement. Black churchwomen were a tower of strength, transferring the skills they had honed during years of church work to the fight for civil rights. The SCLC quickly joined the NAACP at the leading edge of the movement for racial justice.

Greensboro Sit-Ins The battle for civil rights entered a new phase in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960, when four black college students took seats at the whites-only lunch counter at the local Woolworth’s five-and-dime store. This simple act was entirely the brainchild of the four students, who had discussed it in their dorm rooms over several preceding nights. A New York-based spokesman for Woolworth’s said the chain would “abide by local custom,” which meant refusing to serve African Americans at the lunch counter. The students were determined to “sit in” until they were served. For three weeks, hundreds of students inspired by the original foursome took turns sitting at the counters, quietly eating, doing homework, or reading. Taunted by groups of whites, pelted with food and other debris, the black students — often occupying more than sixty of the sixty-six seats — held strong. Although many were arrested, the tactic worked: the Woolworth’s lunch counter was desegregated, and sit-ins quickly spread to other southern cities (American Voices).

Ella Baker and SNCC Inspired by the developments in Greensboro and elsewhere, Ella Baker, an administrator with the SCLC, helped organize the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee SNCC, pronounced “Snick”) in 1960 to facilitate student sit-ins. Rolling like a great wave across the Upper South, from North Carolina into Virginia, Maryland, and Tennessee, by the end of the year students had launched sit-ins in 126 cities. More than 50,000 people participated, and 3,600 were jailed. The sit-ins drew African American college students into the movement in significant numbers for the first time. Northern students formed solidarity committees and raised money for bail. SNCC quickly emerged as the most important student protest organization in the country and inspired a generation of students on college campuses across the nation.

Baker took a special interest in these students, because she found them receptive to her notion of participatory democracy. The granddaughter of slaves, Baker had moved to Harlem in the 1930s, where she worked for New Deal agencies and then the NAACP. She believed in nurturing leaders from the grass roots, encouraging ordinary people to stand up for their rights rather than to depend on charismatic figureheads. “My theory is, strong people don’t need strong leaders,” she once said. Nonetheless, Baker nurtured a generation of young activists in SNCC, including Stokely Carmichael, Anne Moody, John Lewis, and Diane Nash, who went on to become some of the most important civil rights leaders in the United States.

Freedom Rides Emboldened by SNCC’s sit-in tactics, in 1961 the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized a series of what were called Freedom Rides on interstate bus lines throughout the South. The aim was to call attention to blatant violations of recent Supreme Court rulings against segregation in interstate commerce. The activists who signed on — mostly young, both black and white — knew that they were taking their lives in their hands. They found courage in song, as civil rights activists had begun to do across the country, with lyrics such as “I’m taking a ride on the Greyhound bus line. … Hallelujah, I’m traveling down freedom’s main line!”

Courage they needed. Club-wielding Klansmen attacked the buses when they stopped in small towns. Outside Anniston, Alabama, one bus was firebombed; the Freedom Riders escaped only moments before it exploded. Some riders were then brutally beaten. Freedom Riders and news reporters were also viciously attacked by Klansmen in Birmingham and Montgomery. Despite the violence, state authorities refused to intervene. “I cannot guarantee protection for this bunch of rabble rousers,” declared Governor John Patterson of Alabama.

Once again, local officials’ refusal to enforce the law left the fate of the Freedom Riders in Washington’s hands. The new president, John F. Kennedy, was cautious about civil rights. Despite a campaign commitment, he failed to deliver on a civil rights bill. Elected by a thin margin, Kennedy believed that he could ill afford to lose the support of powerful southern senators. But civil rights was unlike other domestic issues. Its fate was going to be decided not in the halls of Congress, but on the streets of southern cities. Although President Kennedy discouraged the Freedom Rides, beatings shown on the nightly news forced Attorney General Robert Kennedy to dispatch federal marshals. Civil rights activists thus learned the value of nonviolent protest that provoked violent white resistance.

The victories so far had been limited, but the groundwork had been laid for a civil rights offensive that would transform the nation. The NAACP’s legal strategy had been followed closely by the emergence of a major protest movement. And now civil rights leaders focused their attention on Congress.