The civil rights movement in the United States has a long history, beginning with the political framing of the U.S. Constitution in 1789, which compromised the rights of African Americans. In the Three-Fifths Compromise, slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person, both for the purposes of representation and taxation. The issue of black civil rights continued as a center point of American domestic conflict through the Nullification Crisis of 1840, the U.S. Civil War (1861–1865), the adoption of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, the Plessy v. Ferguson "separate but equal" decision of 1896, and the "Jim Crow" segregation tradition that defined the next five decades in the American South.

The term "civil rights" has been applied to issues other than African-American racial strife, including civil rights for other racial minorities, for women, and for gays and...