On 6 August 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, calling the day ''a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield'' (Johnson, ''Remarks in the Capitol Rotunda'').

Biography.com examines the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. who led the U.S. civil rights movement from the mid-1950s until his assassination in 1968.

Rosa Louise Parks was nationally recognized as the "mother of the modern day civil rights movement" in America. Her refusal to surrender her seat to a white male passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, December 1, 1955, triggered a wave of protest December 5, 1955 that reverberated throughout the United States.