The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded in 1942, became one of the leading activist organizations in the early years of the American Civil Rights Movement. In the early 1960s CORE, working with other civil rights groups, launched a series of initiatives: the Freedom Rides, aimed at desegregating public facilities, the Freedom Summer voter registration project and the historic 1963 March on Washington. CORE initially embraced a pacifist, non-violent approach to fighting racial segregation, but by the late 1960s the group’s leadership had shifted its focus towards the political ideology of Black Nationalism.