6 Congress had finally granted equal rights, but the black population of America had a long way to go before their rights were truly equal. .
Many groups such as the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee), and CORE (Congress Of Racial Equality) were formed to organize rallies and marches to support their cause.7 A few individuals such as James Farmer and Marin Luther King, Jr., however, stand out among all others as the true leaders of the movement. Farmer was the nation's first black man to earn a Ph.D., and he was also the founder of CORE. He realized that the black population would be seen as ignorant and inferior until they had equal education and job training.8 He demanded that the federal government provide programs to make education and training available, stating, "When a society has crippled some of it's people, it has an obligation to provide the requisite crutches?9 Martin Luther King Jr., born in 1929, became famous for his methods of anti-violent protest, modeled after the methods of the late Mahatma Gandhi. In 1964, King became the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.9 On April 4, 1968, however, King's short life was brought to an untimely end when he was assassinated by white supremacist James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tennessee at the age of thirty-nine. To this day, some people believe that the FBI was involved in the killing, due to the fact that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover strongly and openly disliked King. However, these beliefs have never been confirmed.10 King's tactics of peaceful demonstration were the most popular of the time. Sit-ins were very common, originating in 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina when, despite being covered in ketchup and brutally beaten by violent spectators, four black students refused to leave a lunch counter at Woolworth's until they were served.11 Protestors simply wrapped their ankles around the stool legs and grasped the edges of their seats, defiantly resisting all attempts to remove them.
