The Civil Rights Movement in the United States has been a long, primarily nonviolent struggle to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to all Americans. This reform movement in the United States was aimed at abolishing racial discrimination against African Americans and restoring the right to vote in Southern states.

The movement has had a lasting impact on United States society due to its tactics, increased social and legal acceptance of civil rights, and in its exposure of the prevalence and costs of racism. Civil Rights in modern thinking usually refers to the political struggles and reform movements between 1945 and 1970, especially in the U.S. South.

The history of the Civil Rights movement dates back to two United States Supreme Court decisions--Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), which upheld "separate but equal" racial segregation as constitutional doctrine, and Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) which overturned Plessy-- serve as milestones. This was an era of stops and starts, in which some movements, such as Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, achieved great success but left little lasting legacy, while others, such as the NAACP's painstaking legal assault on state-sponsored segregation, achieved modest results in its early years but made steady progress on voter rights and gradually built to a key victory in Brown v. Board of Education.

By 1966, the emergence of the Black Power Movement, which lasted roughly from 1966 to 1975, enlarged the aims of the Civil Rights Movement to include racial dignity, economic and political self-sufficiency, and freedom from White domination.

Many of those who were most active in the Civil Rights Movement, with organizations such as SNCC, CORE and SCLC, prefer the term "Southern Freedom Movement" because the struggle was about far more than just civil rights under law; it was also about fundamental issues of freedom, respect, dignity, and justice, as well as economic and social equality.

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