In the early 1960s, the leading voice of the civil rights movement was Martin Luther King, Jr. An advocate of nonviolent protest who had been a central figure in the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott of the mid-1950s, King was jailed in 1963 for leading a successful civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Ala. On August 28 of that year, he participated in the March on Washington, a massive civil rights demonstration in Washington, D.C. The highlight of the march, which attracted more than 200,000 black and white participants, was King's historic “I Have a Dream” speech, which rallied civil rights advocates throughout the country.

In the years that followed, the civil rights movement won several important legal victories. On July 2, 1964, United States President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. One of the most comprehensive civil rights laws to be enacted by Congress, the act outlawed discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and federal programs and regulated literacy tests for voting. A year later, Johnson responded to King's call to register nearly 3 million blacks in the South by enacting the Voting Rights Act.

The progress of the period was accompanied by renewed violence against blacks and civil rights workers, however. In 1963 Medgar Evers, the field secretary of the Mississippi branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was killed near his home in Jackson. During the summer of 1964, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and civil rights workers who were attempting to register voters in Mississippi were routinely beaten and jailed. In mid-June three of the workers were arrested and killed by local law officials in Philadelphia, Miss. In 1968, the civil rights movement suffered a devastating blow when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn.

Even before the death of King, some African Americans, particularly residents of poor urban areas, had begun to look for new leadership. Many urban residents had grown increasingly impatient with the slow progress of the nonviolence movement and the failure of recently enacted civil rights legislation to make significant changes in their lives: in 1965, nearly one half of American blacks lived below the poverty level, and the majority still experienced discrimination and violence daily. In the mid-1960s this frustration erupted into race riots, including a major disturbance in the Watts area of Los Angeles, Calif., in 1965. The period saw the transition from the civil rights movement to the more militant black power movement, marked by the birth of black nationalist organizations such as the Black Panthers and the adoption of a more radical stance by the SNCC. Malcolm X, a minister of the Nation of Islam in the early 1960s and later the leader of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, was an eloquent proponent of the black power philosophy until his assassination in 1965.