When I was two years old — totally unbeknownst to me — they modern Civil Rights Movement began when the Warren Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Plessey vs. Ferguson was unconstitutional in its Brown vs. Board of Education ruling in 1954. Segregation was now illegal.

This important ruling did not just appear. For a couple of decades, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund under the guidance of Charles Hamilton Huston and Thurgood Marshall — who later became the first Black U.S. Supreme Court justice — leading the way.

Of course, it is one thing for the Supreme Court to declare it unconstitutional and for people — especially in the South — to respect the ruling and follow it as the law of the land. To say there was massive resistance is an understatement.

The next year, in December 1955, a young Bpatist minister by the name of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a community-wide bus boycott when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger. It was the will of Montgomery’s Black community and its solidarity — which was kept strong through weekly Mass Meetings — that led to the end of Montgomery’s segregated buses in December 1956.

While Dr. King spearheaded the national movement and its visibility through the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, it was groups of people in individual towns aand cities across the South who fought to end de jure segregation.