Dr. Robert C Luckett’s talk traces the roots of the modern civil rights movement to World War II, a movement that began long before the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 and lasted long after Dr. King’s assassination in Memphis in 1968, a movement that in many ways never ended. Specifically, Dr. Luckett discusses the major people and events of the modern civil rights movement in Mississippi like Emmett Till; Medgar and Myrlie Evers; Ross Barnett; the Citizens’ Council and the Sovereignty Commission; the Freedom Rides; James Meredith and the 1962 integration of Ole Miss; the 1963 Woolworth’s sit-in; leading civil rights organizations like the Council of Federal Organizations, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the NAACP; 1964 Freedom Summer; Fannie Lou Hamer; the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; Anne Moody and Coming of Age in Mississippi; the Meredith March against Fear; and many other topics in the field.
