On June 21, 1964, three young civil rights workers were murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Their bodies were discovered a few weeks later.
Here’s is the original New York Times story about the crime:

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0621.html#article

If Hollywood gets its way, the civil rights movement was saved when Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe rolled into town like two gunslinging Western marshals. In this revisionist cinematic version of history, two FBI men bring truth and vigilante justice to the nasty Ku Klux Klan while a bunch of bewildered Negroes meekly stand by, shuffling and avoiding trouble.
The 1989 film Mississippi Burning was an emotional roller coaster. It was difficult to watch without being moved, breaking into a sweat, and finally cheering when the forces of good terrorized the redneck Klansmen into telling where the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers were buried. The movie gave audiences the feeling of seeing history unfold. But in the grand tradition of American filmmaking, this version of events had as much to do with reality as did D. W. Griffith’s racist “classic,” Birth of a Nation.
The movie opens with the backroads murder of three young civil rights activists in the summer of 1964. That much is true. Working to register black voters, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two whites from the North, and James Chaney, a black southerner, disappeared after leaving police custody in Philadelphia, Mississippi. In the film, two FBI agents arrive to investigate, but get nowhere as local rednecks stonewall the FBI and blacks are too fearful to act. The murderers are not exposed until Agent Anderson (Gene Hackman), a former southern sheriff who has joined the FBI, begins a campaign of illegal tactics to terrorize the locals into revealing where the bodies are buried and who is responsible.
It is a brilliantly made, plainly manipulative film that hits all the right emotional notes: white liberal guilt over the treatment of blacks; disgust at the white-trash racism of the locals; excitement at Hackman’s Rambo-style tactics; and, finally, vindication in the murderers’ convictions.
The problem is that besides the murders, few of the events depicted happened that way. Pressed by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent a large contingent of agents to Mississippi, but they learned nothing. The case was broken only when Klan informers were offered a $30,000 bribe and the bodies of the three men were found in a nearby dam site. Twenty-one men were named in the indictment, including the local police chief and his deputy. But local courts later dismissed the confessions of the two Klansmen as hearsay. The Justice Department persisted by bringing conspiracy charges against eighteen of the men. Tried before a judge who had once compared blacks to chimpanzees, seven of the accused were nonetheless convicted and sentenced to jail terms ranging from three to ten years.
Although J. Edgar Hoover put on a good public show of anti-Klan FBI work, it masked his real obsession at the time. To the director, protecting civil rights workers was a waste of his bureau’s time. Although the film depicts a black agent, the only blacks employed by the bureau during Hoover’s tenure as head were his chauffeurs. The FBI was far more interested in trying to prove that Martin Luther King was a Communist and that the civil rights movement was an organized Communist front. Part of this effort was the high-level attempt to eavesdrop on King’s private life, an effort that did prove that the civil rights leader had his share of white female admirers willing to contribute more than just money to the cause. Hoover’s hatred of King boiled over at one point when he called King “the most notorious liar” in the country. Another part of this effort involved sending King a threatening note suggesting he commit suicide.

This material is adapted from Don’t Know Much About History

Here is the original NYTimes story about that protest and what it started.
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0201.html#article

Howell Raines, who covered the civil rights movement for the Times wrote an op-ed on the subject:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/opinion/01greensboro.html

The act of ordering coffee at a Woolworth’s lunch counter was not a “random act of kindness,” that clichéd panacea for the world’s ills. It was a deliberate act of defiance. and that got me thinking about deliberate defiance today.
What should we be defying?
The two wars?
The discrimination against Americans who want to marry or serve in the military?
Hope is a nice word. So is Change. But if we really hope to change anything, what should we be doing that would be as earth-shaking as ordering a cup of coffee?

History is taught as the record of presidents, kings and generals. But sometimes it is the extraordinary story of an “ordinary” person that history must tell. On December 1, 1955, one woman’s act of defiance changed history. But it wouldn’t be fair to call Rosa Parks, who was born in 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama and died October 24, 2005 at age 92, an “ordinary person.” What do you know about this courageous woman who helped spark the civil rights movement that transformed America? (Answers below)

1. Where and why was Rosa Parks arrested?
2. Before her arrest, was Rosa Parks involved in the civil rights movement?
3. How much education did Rosa Parks, the descendant of slaves, receive?
4. What action did her arrest trigger?
5. Who was elected president of the organization that ran the boycott?

Here is a link to resources about Rosa parks from the Library of Congress:
http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/rosaparks/rosaparks.html

Quiz adapted from Don’t Know Much About Anything

Answers
1. She refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. A city law required that whites and blacks sit in separate rows. The law also required blacks to leave their seats to make room for white passengers.
2. Yes. Rosa Parks had become one of the first women to join the Montgomery Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1943, serving as its secretary until 1956. Employed as a seamstress, she lost her job as a result of the boycott and later moved to Detroit.
3. She attended Alabama State Teachers College.
4. Her arrest triggered a boycott of the city’s segregated bus system that had been planned by local civil rights leaders who were awaiting the right moment. The arrest of Rosa Parks was that moment. For 382 days, thousands of blacks refused to ride Montgomery’s buses and the boycott ended when the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated seating on the city’s buses unconstitutional.
5. A young and unknown Martin Luther King, Jr. –then a Baptist minister in Montgomery– was chosen as president, providing his first national stage.

Read more about Rosa Parks in Don’t Know Much About History and my biography for young readers, Don’t Know Much About Rosa Parks

In the mindlessness of its evil, the 16th Street bombing was also the most heinous act of the era.

When In the early morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963.
Where The 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama
What As children filed into the church for a worship service, 122 sticks of dynamite, with a time-delayed fuse, exploded outside the church basement
Who Four young girls –Addie Mae Collins (14), Denise McNair (11), Carole Robertson (14) and Cynthia Wesley (14) were killed by the blast. Other children were gravely injured. Later in the day two more young African-Americans were killed in shootings in the aftermath of the bombing. No arrests were made at the time of the bombing. The FBI later reopened the case.

In 1975, Robert Chambliss was convicted of four counts of murder in the case. In 2000, the case was again reopened and two other men were convicted: Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton. Two other suspects died before being charged.
This is the New York Times account of the last of the convictions in the case.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/23/us/38-years-later-last-of-suspects-is-convicted-in-church-bombing.html?scp=4&sq=Birmingham+bombing+convictions&st=nyt

There are many excellent books about the civil rights era. Here are four of particular note:
Carry Me Home by Diane McWhorter is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about Birmingham that focuses on the bombings.
Eyes on the Prize by Juan Williams and Julian Bond, companion to a PBS documentary series
Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch is the first of a 3-part biography of Martin Luther King that goes up to 1963, the year of the bombings.
My Soul is Rested is an excellent history of the civil rights era by Howell Raines, a New York Times writer who also wrote a magazine piece about Birmingham on the 20th anniversary of the church bombings.
http://www.nytimes.com/1983/07/24/magazine/the-birmingham-bombing.html?scp=5&sq=Birmingham+Bombing+Howell+Raines&st=nyt

Here is the New York Times account of the march and speech:
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0828.html#article

King’s most memorable speech was the culmination of the mass march on Washington, D.C., that drew a huge crowd of blacks and whites to the nation’s capital. In his biography of King, Bearing the Cross, author David J. Garrow calls the speech,

“The clarion call that conveyed the moral power of the movement’s cause to the millions who had watched the live national network coverage. Now, more than ever before…white America was confronted with the undeniable justice of blacks’ demands.”

The march was followed nearly one year later by passage of the Civil Rights Act, signed into law by Lyndon Johnson in June 1964, and the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Dr. King in October 1964.

Not everyone liked the march. Or the speech. Malcolm X responded to the historic occasion this way:

Not long ago, the black man in America was fed a dose of another form of the weakening, lulling, and deluding effects of so-called “integration.”
It was that “Farce on Washington,” I call it. . . . .
. . . Yes, I was there. I observed that circus. Who ever heard of angry revolutionists all harmonizing “We Shall Overcome . . . Someday . . .” while tripping and swaying along arm-in-arm with the very people they were supposed to be angrily revolting against? Who ever heard of angry revolutionists swinging their bare feet together with their oppressor in lily-pad park pools, with gospels and guitars and “I Have A Dream” speeches?

What many people have also forgotten about the March was that it was about more than civil rights. Billed as the March for Jobs and Freedom, the March was also dedicated to economic justice. Martin Luther King increasingly voiced his opposition to the war in Vietnam as well.

In the current landscape of high unemployment and two foreign wars, it is difficult to imagine that Dr. King would be satisfied that his work was done. So the Dream goes on.

This is a link to the King Center Photo and video archive:
http://www.thekingcenter.org/PhotoVideo/Default.aspx

You can read more about King, the march and teh civil rights movement in Don’t Know Much About History