Citizens' Council
The Citizens' Councils (usually known as the White Citizens' Councils) were organizations of white businessmen and professionals who banded together to thwart integration and local Black empowerment. The councils were formed in communities throughout the South in response to the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision mandating the racial integration of public schools. Popularly known as the "white-collar klan," the groups used financial and legal pressure to delay integration in schools and other institutions and to prevent Black residents from voting. One council member openly admitted that the group's purpose was "to make it difficult, if not impossible, for any Negro who advocates desegregation to find and hold a job, get credit, or renew a mortgage."

Congress of Racial Equality
Founded in Chicago in 1942, CORE was an outgrowth of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an international pacifist organization. CORE chapters soon formed in major cities in the North, but not in the Deep South. James Farmer, the group's founder, became its national director in 1961. Responding to pleas from movement activists in the South, CORE helped organize the 1961 Freedom Rides, involving biracial groups traveling together on interstate buses to challenge segregation on the buses and in the terminals. CORE workers also helped students organize sit-ins at segregated lunch counters and chain stores throughout the South, and organized "sympathy pickets" at the stores of targeted chains in the North. CORE was active in voter registration, and during Freedom Summer three workers on its Mississippi project were murdered.

Federal Bureau of Investigation
The FBI was created in 1908 as the investigations arm of the U.S. Justice Department. After J. Edgar Hoover was appointed director in 1924, the FBI broadened its focus to include "domestic security threats." During the Cold War, Hoover viewed the civil rights movement as just such a threat, and under his direction the bureau waged counterintelligence operations against civil rights groups and their supporters.

Fellowship of Reconciliation
Constituted mainly of students, professors, and ministers, the FOR was founded in England in 1914 in opposition to World War I. Its goals were to promote nonviolence and international brotherhood. The first American chapter was established in 1915, and in 1947 the group sponsored the original "Freedom Ride," which they termed the "Journey of Reconciliation." A biracial group of volunteers rode together on an interstate bus, testing a 1946 Supreme Court ruling that had outlawed segregation on interstate buses.

During the year-long Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56, the FOR's Glenn Smiley and Bayard Rustin advised Martin Luther King, Jr., on techniques of nonviolence. Upon the success of the boycott, the FOR used a $5,000 grant to print 200,000 copies of a brochure, in comic book format, telling the Montgomery story. Intended to reach semiliterate Black people in rural areas, the comic book found a wider audience among African American college students.

Highlander Folk School
The Highlander Folk School was founded in 1932 in Monteagle, Tennessee, by Myles Horton, a teacher and community activist. Originally a training ground for labor organizers in the Appalachian Mountains, the school broadened its scope in the 1950s and '60s to include workshops for civil rights workers. In addition to training the movement's grass roots organizers, the school launched a literacy program for Black adults in 1955. Knowing how to read and write was particularly important because, in the South, Black people who wanted to register to vote were often given long and complicated literacy tests at the polls to prevent their registration. The school withstood harassment from segregationists: in 1957 the IRS voided the school's tax- exempt status, and three years later Highlander's charter was revoked. Horton reopened the school in New Market, Tennessee, in 1971.

Ku Klux Klan
The original Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist organization of Confederate veterans, was formed around 1866 in Tennessee. It developed into a secret society aimed at intimidating Black people into submission, but was soon disbanded by its leader when the group turned to violence.

In 1915 a new KKK was organized in Georgia with a national constituency and with Jews, Catholics, immigrants, pacifists, and radicals added to its list of enemies. Its strength peaked in the 1920s, with the KKK claiming five million members and its activities spreading to more than twenty Northern and Western states. The Klan's terrorist tactics included beatings, arson, intimidation, and lynchings. Its members, operating in gangs and often under cover of darkness, hid their identities under white hoods and robes. The Klan trademark was a burning cross, often stuck into the ground at the scene of Klan violence.

The mid-twentieth century saw a resurgence of the Klan, with its new mission to "protect" America from Communism and the civil rights movement. Klan members murdered several movement activists throughout 1950s and '60s and were responsible for countless acts of violence against them.

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
The largest and oldest civil rights organization in the United States, the NAACP was founded in 1909 to combat racism and fight for the civil rights of Black Americans. The expressed purpose of the biracial organization was "to achieve, through peaceful and lawful means, equal citizenship rights for all American citizens by eliminating segregation and discrimination in housing, employment, voting, schools, the courts, transportation, recreation." The organization's magazine, Crisis, first edited by W.E.B. Du Bois, became a major journal of African American thought and concerns. Throughout the modern civil rights movement, the NAACP sought redress in the courts and worked for the passage of equal rights legislation and enforcement. As a result of the activism of strong local NAACP leaders in the South, Alabama banned the NAACP in 1956, and many of its Southern leaders were killed, such as Medgar Evers, the Reverend George Lee, and Vernon Dahmer.

NAACP Legal Defense Fund
The legal arm of the NAACP, the LDF was formed in 1939 and subsequently led many court battles challenging the constitutionality and legality of segregation in American society. Thurgood Marshall was at the LDF's helm during the struggle to integrate the public schools, and he was the chief strategist in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference
An organization composed largely of activist Black clergymen throughout the South, SCLC was founded in 1957 under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. SCLC espoused Christian pacifism and philosophical non-violence and was the chief organizer of numerous civil rights campaigns, demonstrations, and marches, most notably in Birmingham, Selma, Atlanta, and Saint Augustine, Florida.

In 1966 SCLC expanded its direct action campaign to a "War on Slums" in Chicago, challenging restricted housing and unequal services in African American sections of the city. During this campaign SCLC joined in support of the Meredith March in Mississippi. In 1968, it initiated a Poor People's March to Washington, D.C., to mobilize the poor across racial lines around issues of employment and housing. The organization was supporting the Memphis sanitation workers' strike when King was assassinated in 1968. The Reverend Ralph Abernathy then assumed leadership of the organization.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
Formed in 1960, SNCC (pronounced "snick") was a grass roots organization of Southern and Northern students that grew out of the college sit-in movement. SNCC used the tactics of nonviolent direct action to desegregate lunch counters and other public establishments and to increase African American voter registration. The older activist, Ella Baker, acted as guide and mentor to the students, but she insisted that they themselves set the agenda and determine their strategies.

SNCC continued the original Freedom Ride into Mississippi in 1961 and began grass roots organizing in rural areas of Alabama, Mississippi, and Southwest Georgia. In 1964 SNCC initiated "Freedom Summer," a campaign aimed at increasing voter registration and building a grass roots political party (the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party). The summer project also established community centers and "freedom schools" throughout Mississippi. SNCC was building a Black political organization in Alabama in 1966 when Stokely Carmichael, its new head, issued the call for "Black Power" on the Meredith March in Mississippi.

Women's Political Council
The WPC was a grass roots organization of Black professional women dedicated to fighting discrimination and segregation in the city of Montgomery, Alabama. Founded in the 1940s, the council was successful in lobbying the city government to hire its first African American police officers and to increase funding for parks and playgrounds in Black neighborhoods. With their sights set on the city's segregated buses, the group was instrumental in planning the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56. When Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, the council called for a one-day bus boycott on the day of Parks's trial. Council co-chair Jo Ann Robinson--who a few years earlier had been kicked off a bus because she took a seat near the front--stayed up all night mimeographing 35,000 flyers to inform the community of the boycott. The event lasted thirteen months and ended in court-ordered desegregation of the buses.