<P> The strategy of public education, legislative lobbying, and litigation that had typified the civil rights movement during the first half of the 20th century broadened after Brown to a strategy that emphasized "direct action": boycotts, sit - ins, Freedom Rides, marches or walks, and similar tactics that relied on mass mobilization, nonviolent resistance, standing in line, and, at times, civil disobedience . </P> <P> Churches, local grassroots organizations, fraternal societies, and black - owned businesses mobilized volunteers to participate in broad - based actions . This was a more direct and potentially more rapid means of creating change than the traditional approach of mounting court challenges used by the NAACP and others . </P> <P> In 1952, the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), led by T.R.M. Howard, a black surgeon, entrepreneur, and planter, organized a successful boycott of gas stations in Mississippi that refused to provide restrooms for blacks . Through the RCNL, Howard led campaigns to expose brutality by the Mississippi state highway patrol and to encourage blacks to make deposits in the black - owned Tri-State Bank of Nashville which, in turn, gave loans to civil rights activists who were victims of a "credit squeeze" by the White Citizens' Councils . </P> <P> Although considered and rejected after Claudette Colvin's arrest for not giving up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus in March 1955, after Rosa Parks' arrest in December Jo Ann Gibson - Robinson of the Montgomery Women's Political Council put a long - considered Bus Boycott protest in motion . Late that night, she, John Cannon (chairman of the Business Department at Alabama State University) and others mimeographed and distributed thousands of leaflets calling for a boycott . The eventual success of the boycott made its spokesman Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a nationally known figure . It also inspired other bus boycotts, such as the successful Tallahassee, Florida, boycott of 1956--57 . </P>

Where did the civil rights movement start and end