Civil Rights Movement
The civil rights movement was a struggle to fulfill the promise, made in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, of full citizenship and equal opportunity for African Americans. It originated with those amendments (in fact, one could say, with the earliest African Americans) and more particularly with the decline in commitment to those amendments that the rise of segregation and disfranchisement embodied by the early twentieth century.