How far were the actions of the African Americans the main reason for the advancement of the Civil Rights in the period 1865-1980?

“Power concedes nothing without demand, it never has and it never will”[1].
Said by Fredrick Douglass in 1857, an escaped slave who had bearded the brunt of the slave years. He had come to the realisation that African Americans had a fountain of “power”; however that power that they possessed would never establish anything without a “demand”. Fredrick Douglass awoke the conscious of African Americans to make them realise that wanting to be free and wanting to achieve full civil rights was not enough, neither was enduring a life under white supremacy waiting for life after death to see a new dawn .Believing and hoping was not enough. “Power concedes nothing without demand” the solution is to be willing to work hard to establish it yourself by demanding what belongs to them. However using power in order to concede civil rights was a struggle which was acknowledged by Fredrick Douglass “Without struggle there is no success”. To achieve advancement in African American Civil Rights, African Americans had to undergo a process of struggle. A rainbow is not made without rain; you can not want rain without thunder and lightening being accompanied by it. To achieve full civil rights African Americans had to pay the price along the way which was persecution, de-humanisation and scrutiny.
Martin Luther King being inspired by Fredrick Douglass said “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor it must be demanded by the oppressed”. Martin Luther King certainly did demand as he wrote this from a Birmingham prison in a letter. If you are being enslaved it is the choice of the slave master to decide when to let you free, if freedom is a priority to the slave it is then their own responsibility to demand to be freed. This is the same with