Category Archives: Civil rights movement

Claudette Colvin: the woman who refused to give up her bus seat – nine months before Rosa Parks

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It was a spring afternoon in 1955 when a teenager’s spontaneous act of defiance changed US history. Why did it take 40 years for her to get any credit?

It was 2 March 1955, and an unusually humid spring day when students at Booker T Washington high school, a segregated school in the heart of the Jim Crow south, had been let off early to make their way home. A group boarded a segregated public bus, which wound through segregated neighbourhoods gradually filling up with passengers.

A 15-year-old gifted Black student, with aspirations to become a civil rights attorney, took a window seat near the exit door. She gazed outdoors until the white driver instructed her to give up her seat for a white passenger standing nearby.

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Counted out: Trump’s desperate fight to stop the minority vote

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How Republicans applied old school racism to new demographics, and lost

In March 1965, ABC interrupted a showing of its Sunday-night movie – Judgment at Nuremberg, a courtroom drama about Nazi war crimes – to show shocking footage from Selma, Alabama, where mostly Black protesters were being beaten bloody by mounted police with billy clubs as they tried to cross Edmund Pettus bridge into the city, demanding the right to vote.

John Lewis, then just 25 years old, led the way. “I can’t count the number of marches I have participated in in my lifetime, but there was something peculiar about this one,” he wrote in his memoir, Walking With the Wind. “It was more than disciplined. It was somber and subdued, almost like a funeral procession.”

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Obama, Bush and Clinton speak at funeral for congressman John Lewis – video

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Former US presidents Barack Obama, George W Bush, Bill Clinton and House speaker Nancy Pelosi have delivered eulogies for congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis. Hailing him as founding father for 'a fuller, fairer, better' America, Obama praised Lewis's influence on his own path to the presidency. Clinton said Lewis believed 'none of us will be free until all of us are equal', while Bush said he lived in a better and nobler country because of the congressman


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Barack Obama: John Lewis fought for our highest ideals | Barack Obama

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In a transcript of his remarks at the congressman’s funeral, the former president calls on Americans to follow Lewis’s lead at a time of crisis

Representative John Lewis, a legendary civil rights leader and member of Congress, died of cancer on 17 July. In a eulogy at his memorial on Thursday, Barack Obama spoke about Lewis’s legacy, especially the importance of continuing his fight to protect voting rights. This is an abridged version of his remarks.

James wrote to the believers: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing.”

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Obama attacks police brutality and voter suppression in powerful eulogy for John Lewis – video

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During the funeral of congressman John Lewis, former US president Barack Obama delivered a powerful eulogy in which he praised the late civil rights icon, saying Lewis 'will be a founding father of a fuller, fairer, better America'. 

In his speech, Obama also received standing ovations for his indirect criticism of the Trump administration's decision to send federal agents to peaceful demonstrations in Portland, and his condemnation of voter suppression tactics in the US

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Obama hails John Lewis as founding father of ‘fuller, better’ US in eulogy

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Former president called for Americans to fight Trump’s effort to undermine the right to vote in eulogy at congressman’s funeral

Barack Obama hailed John Lewis as a founding father of “a fuller, better” United States in a soaring eulogy on Thursday, while forcefully calling on Americans to stand up to the forces threatening a cause the late congressman was willing to die for: the right to vote.

From the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr once preached, Obama traced the arch of Lewis’s life – a child born into the Jim Crow south, the youngest speaker at the March on Washington in 1963, a leader of the civil rights marches in Selma, and a US congressman from Georgia – tying his legacy to the present-day civil rights protests ignited by the death of George Floyd, a black man under the knee of a white police officer. He then drew a line from the racist leaders who opposed civil rights in the 1960s to the policies and ideologies embraced by Donald Trump.

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‘John Lewis worked on the side of the angels’, says Nancy Pelosi – video

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Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi held back tears as she delivered an emotional remembrance of civil rights icon John Lewis at his funeral in Atlanta. Pelosi, who worked with Lewis for more than 30 years, said: ‘We always knew he worked on the side of the angels, and now he is with them’

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‘He never yielded’: mourners pay respects to John Lewis outside Capitol

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Kept outdoors by coronavirus threat, hundreds view casket of congressman and civil rights icon

Born in Citronelle, Alabama, in the early 1950s, Frankie Blevins grew up with the cruelties imposed by the Jim Crow south: racially segregated drinking fountains, restrooms and restaurants.

On her family’s first road trip, her mother packed food to sustain them for the entire trip, knowing they would not be allowed to stop for provisions along the way.

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John Lewis, US civil rights hero and Democratic congressman, dies at 80

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Lewis helped Martin Luther King organise the March on Washington in 1963 and once suffered a fractured skull at the hands of state troopers

John Lewis, the civil rights leader and Democratic congressman, has died. He was 80.

Related: John Lewis obituary

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John Lewis remembers ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Selma – video report

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John Lewis, the civil rights hero and Democratic congressman, has died at the age of 80. In 1965 he headed a march across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama, and was knocked to the ground and beaten by police. The incident, along with other beatings during peaceful protests, brought attention to racial oppression in the US south. 20 years later he recalled the events for the documentary series Eyes on the Prize for Washington University in St Louis


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Civil rights activist and politician John Lewis – a life in pictures

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The civil rights leader John Lewis, known at the ‘conscience of America’, has died. Born the son of sharecroppers in Alabama on 21 February 1940, he attended segregated public schools and, inspired by the words of Martin Luther King Jr, became active in the civil rights movement. From university onwards he organised sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, took part in the Freedom Rides, was chair of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and was a key speaker at the historic March on Washington in 1963. He led one of the pivotal moments in the civil rights movement, a march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama that was brutally attacked by state troopers.

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A history of Fourth of July protests in America – in pictures

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‘This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn,’ Frederick Douglass lamented 13 years before Reconstruction. Since the 19th century, abolitionists, suffragists and civil rights activists have seized the Fourth of July as an occasion to protest injustices sustained by those omitted from the founding fathers’ vision. In the 20th century, the civil rights movement and Vietnam war brought to light legacies of slavery, imperialism and sexism that continue to challenge the narrative of ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’. Today, the potency of Black Lives Matter has established civil disobedience as an unwavering American tradition

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Will justice finally be done for Emmett Till? Family hope a 65-year wait may soon be over

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Not a day has been spent in jail nor a penny paid in compensation for the brutal murder of a 14-year-old boy in Mississippi that helped spark the civil rights movement

Thelma Wright Edwards knows this is the last chance for justice for Emmett Till. The next few weeks and months will determine whether there will ever be closure for her beloved cousin “Bobo”, as the family affectionately call the child.

The Guardian has learned that a reinvestigation of the boy’s murder that has been carried out by the FBI over the past three years could be wrapped up in weeks. For Thelma and the rest of the Till family, a decades-long struggle for justice is fast approaching its conclusion.

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Joseph Lowery, American civil rights leader, dies at 98

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Reverend helped start the influential Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King Jr

The American civil rights movement leader Joseph Lowery died on Friday at the age of 98, his family said.

A charismatic and fiery preacher, Lowery helped the Rev Martin Luther King Jr to fight against racial discrimination and led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for two decades – restoring its financial stability and pressuring businesses not to trade with South Africa’s apartheid-era regime. He retired in 1997.

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Atlanta’s confederate monuments: how do ‘context markers’ help explain racism?

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Symbols dedicated to the south’s soldiers have come under debate for not mentioning their roots in racial segregation

Atlanta’s monuments to its Confederate past cannot be taken down by law. But the city is now moving to provide much-needed historical context on the realities of slavery, the civil war and the era of Jim Crow segregation that followed.

Homages to Atlanta’s history crop up in many cemeteries and parks. Little context accompanies those stone memorials with engraved plaques referring to “heroic efforts” and the south’s soldiers’ efforts to “unite” the country after the civil war. There is no mention of racism or slavery and segregation.

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Bernie Sanders’ Chicago 2020 speech to focus on fight against racism

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The Vermont senator will conclude a two-part launch in the Windy City, harking back to his student days in the civil rights era

With the Chicago skyline around him, Bernie Sanders will on Sunday conclude his two-part presidential campaign launch by emphasizing the role of race and racial discrimination in American society.

Related: Bernie Sanders draws on personal history in 2020 campaign launch

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