A. Philip Randolph
Randolph finally realized his vision for a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, which attracted between 200,000–300,000 to the nation's capital. The rally is often remembered as the high-point of the Civil Rights Movement, and it did help keep the issue in the public consciousness. However, when President Kennedy was assassinated three months later, Civil Rights legislation was stalled in the Senate. It was not until the following year, under President Lyndon B. Johnson, that the Civil Rights Act was finally passed. In 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed. Although King and Bevel rightly deserve great credit for these legislative victories, the importance of Randolph's contributions to the Civil Rights Movement is large.
New South
The beginnings of the Civil Rights era in the 1960s led to a revival of the term to describe a South which would no longer be held back by Jim Crow Laws and other aspects of compulsory legal segregation. Again, the initially slow pace of civil rights reforms, notably in the areas of school desegregation and voting rights, at first made the "New South" more of a slogan than a description of the South as it actually was; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 brought an era of far more rapid change.