Abstract: Racial dissidents prompted the military to abandon racial exclusion, nudged courts to invalidate the constitutionality of racial segregation, moved governments at the municipal, state, and federal levels to outlaw racial discrimination in markets for public accommodation, employment, and housing, and pushed the federal government to remove obvious racial barriers to Blacks seeking voter registration. In what is often called the "classical" or "heroic" civil rights movement, racial justice advocates were nourished and led by an array of organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp), the naacp Legal Defense Fund (ldf), the Congress of Racial Equality (core), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (sclc), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (sncc), and many kindred organizations. In response, Black Montgomery boycotted the buses for 381 days, created an alternative governing structure for itself, and also sued city and state authorities, winning a judgment at the Supreme Court that extended Brown v. Board of Education’s invalidation of segregation from schooling to transportation. Why and how segregation was overthrown in the armed forces without legislation or judicial intervention is a neglected subject that surely ought to be focused upon in an analysis of the civil rights movement written from a military perspective.