<human>:  What is the history of the civil rights movement?
<bot>: The civil rights movement began as a struggle to end racial discrimination and segregation in the United States. It started in the late 1950s, when African Americans and civil rights organizations began to challenge the long-standing segregation laws and practices by staging protests and boycotts. This culminated in Martin Luther King Jr's legendary "I Have A Dream" speech in 1963, which helped galvanize public opinion in favor of civil rights reform. Following this, a number of landmark pieces of civil rights legislation were passed, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. This period was a major turning point in the fight for civil rights, and since then, a number of other initiatives, such as the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, and the Women’s Rights Movement, have all been enacted to protect the rights of all people in the United States.