What happened to the Native American Indians during the Black Civil Rights Movements? Did they get any rights?

The answer is yes. So here's the context:

The Indian Relocation Act of 1956 - which moved Indians from reservations to urban centers - was a program of “vocational training” meant to force assimilation and conformity to the culture of the United States; it was a continuation of the boarding schools which came earlier. But there were unintended consequences. As Native students were relocated to urban centers, they began learning how to work within the white system. Young Indians of different tribal affiliations began coming into contact and working with one another with the effect of cultivating a unified, pan-Indian identity which would form the foundation of the modern Indian movement. This was incredibly important, and continues to be so today.

As the Civil Rights Movement started gaining momentum, the more socially conscious urban centers of the late fifties and sixties worked to radicalize a new generation of young Indians, and the program of urban relocation really backfired on the BIA. In 1961, five hundred politicized Natives gathered in Chicago and, later, went on to form the National Indian Youth Council. The organization’s first president, a Paiute named Mel Thom, wrote that “Indians are gathering together to deliberate their destiny” and that they “are gaining confidence and courage that their cause is right”. As the foundation of a modern Native American movement was formed, its members looked toward Puget Sound where Indians were coming into conflict with the state over fishing rights. As an American Indian movement began to develop, the Pacific Northwest became its battleground.

In 1962, Washington State police began raiding and placing under heavy surveillance Nisqually fishermen at Frank’s Landing during their winter fishing season. But the Nisqually engaged in civil disobedience, passively resisted the aggression of police, and asserted their right to fish in their own, traditional homeland. “By the mid-1960s Frank’s Landing . . . had become the focal point for the tribal assertion of treaty rights in the Northwest” and “lay at the moral center of the tribal sovereignty movement nationally”. In the face of continual police brutality, Nisqually tribal members returned again and again to the Landing, knowing that they would be sent right back to jail. They asserted their right to exist and, in 1970, the federal government intervened by filing United States v. Washington. In 1974, Judge Hugo Bolt – who had been assigned to the case – ruled in favor of the Nisqually and neighboring tribes.

Now this is huge. The Boldt Decision mandated that they would be allowed to fish in their “usual and accustomed places” as a an old treaty had once promised. If you go to any tribal museum in Washington today, they'll talk about their U&A. Furthermore, they were entitled to fifty percent of the total resource, whether it be salmon or, in the case of the Makah (the only tribe this applies to), whales. Boldt was a very conservative judge who, after exhaustively listening to the testimony of - among everyone else - elders, compiled his notes into something like a 400 page report* before issuing the decision.

If you're interested in this kind of stuff, The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King is a great read. This is also where quotes on the National Indian Youth Council came from, the rest are from Messages from Frank's Landing by Charles Wilkinson.

*I can't remember the exact number right now, but if I'm off it was huge. This is the one thing you can't quote me on.