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The quest for equality by black Americans played a central role in the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s. Stemming from an effort dating back to the Civil War and Reconstruction, the black movement had gained more momentum by the mid-twentieth century. Afric ....

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.... citizenship rights and to achieve racial equality. In 1962, the civil rights movement accelerated. James Meredith, a black air force veteran and student at Jackson State College, applied to the all-white University of Mississippi and rejected on racial grounds. Suing to gain admission, he carried his case to the Supreme Court. An even more violent confrontation began in April 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama, where local black leaders encouraged Martin Luther King,Jr., to launch another attack on the southern segregation. Forty percent black, the city was rigidly segregated along racial and class lines. "We believed that while a campaign in Birmingham ....