When the 60's began, two main groups, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had already been hard at work on a variety of desegregation efforts in public facilities, transportation, and schools. The decision by students of North Carolina A&T to desegregate the lunch counter at the local Greensboro Woolworth's store precipitated a new form of student protest in the South that highlighted local official compliance in the violence of an outraged southern white population. Attacks on segregation continued to spread through the efforts of new groups such as the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

A landmark year-long black boycott of public transportation in Montgomery Alabama was victorious after Rosa Parks refused to move to the rear of the bus, but full equality under the law has yet to be universally recognized in the United States. Even after such landmark cases as Brown vs. the Board of Education produced a legal basis for ending school segregation, and school integration became the official law of the land, the process still was far from complete. The 50's, 60's, and 70's did, however, see the struggle for black civil rights reemerge publicly as the most significant social issue the country ever faced. Now, in the early years of the 21^st Century, while continuing progress toward common decency is increasingly visible, prejudices still fester.