Civil Rights Act of 1960
By the late 1950s, the Civil Rights Movement had been pressuring Congress to enact legislation to protect the constitutional civil rights of African Americans. The first major piece of civil rights legislation passed by Congress was the Civil Rights Act of 1957. While enforcing the voting rights of African Americans set out in the Fifteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, the act had several loopholes. Southern states continued to discriminate against African Americans in application of voter registration and electoral laws, in segregation of school and public facilities, and in employment.
History of the United States
Starting in the late 1950s, institutionalized racism across the United States, but especially in the South, was increasingly challenged by the growing Civil Rights Movement. The activism of African-American leaders Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which launched the movement. For years African Americans would struggle with violence against them but would achieve great steps toward equality with Supreme Court decisions, including "Brown v. Board of Education" and "Loving v. Virginia", the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which ended the Jim Crow laws that legalized racial segregation between whites and blacks.