March: Books 2 & 3

Nonviolent resistance was among the most important aspects of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and early 1960s. From Rosa Parks refusing to leave her “whites-only” bus seat in Montgomery to John Lewis marching down the Edmund Pettus Bridge into a wall of police, activists willingly subjected themselves to arrest, violence, and even the risk of death without retaliation. Nonviolent resistance drew inspiration from the writings of Henry David Thoreau on “civil disobedience” and cited as a model Mohandas Gandhi’s peaceful protest against British imperial rule in India. Earlier generations of Black Americans had also sought to challenge segregation with peaceful protests, but the federal government’s endorsement of “separate but equal” facilities gave them no recourse against oppressive local laws. The Supreme Court’s striking down of segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 then opened the way for a broader challenge to segregation, beginning with Rosa Parks and the boycott of Montgomery’s bus system from 1955 to 1956. Through boycotts, marches, and deliberate violations of segregation law, activists sought to expose the fundamental injustice of a system that criminalizes someone for sitting down, ordering a meal, or using the bathroom. The often-brutal treatment that people endured, while they themselves put up no resistance, would hopefully elicit the sympathy of a broader