 In contemporary legal and political thought, the term ‘civil rights’ is indissolubly linked to the organized, mass liberation struggle of American blacks during the mid-20th century. The Civil Rights Movement sought the abolition of the Jim Crow system of racial oppression and exploitation and aimed to make free and equal citizenship a reality for blacks. The idea of civil rights central to the movement referred to the rights belonging, as a matter of justice, to free and equal citizens. It was an idea that had found expression in those amendments to the U.S. Constitution adopted in the era of Reconstruction that followed the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War. 