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Major Civil Rights Protests
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Brown V. Board of Education
Segregation of white and Negro children in the public schools of a State solely on the basis of race, pursuant to state laws permitting or requiring such segregation, denies to Negro children the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment -- even though the physical facilities and other "tangible" factors of white and Negro schools may be equal. -
Montgomery Bus Boycott
The Montgomery Bus Boycott officially started on December 1, 1955. That was the day when the blacks of Montgomery, Alabama, decided that they would boycott the city buses until they could sit anywhere they wanted, instead of being relegated to the back when a white boarded. It was not, however, the day that the movement to desegregate the buses started. Perhaps the movement started on the day in 1943 when a black seamstress named Rosa Parks paid her bus fare and then watched the bus drive off as -
First Freedom Ride
The first Freedom Ride took place on May 4, 1961 when seven blacks and six whites left Washington, D.C., on two public buses bound for the Deep South. They intended to test the Supreme Court's ruling in Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which declared segregation in interstate bus and rail stations unconstitutional. -
Birmingham Children's March and boycott
It was not all that long ago that Jim Crow laws made segregation and discrimination a part of life in America. While these laws existed primarily in the "old south," negative attitudes about diversity and legal barriers to integration existed all over America. For example, in Chicago suburbs, it was common to have property deeds state that a house could not be sold to an African American. -
Woolsworth Sit-In
Our Woolworth Sit-In, Jackson Mississippi, 5/28/63 was the most violently attacked sit-in of the '60s and the most publicized. Involving a White mob of several hundred, it went on for several hours while hostile police from Jackson's huge all-White police department stood by approvingly outside and while hostile FBI agents inside (in sun-glasses) "observed." Seated, left to right are Hunter Gray (John R. Salter, Jr.) -- Native American; Joan Trumpauer (now Mulholland), a White Southern stude -
March on Washington
The 1963 March on Washington attracted an estimated 250,000 people for a peaceful demonstration to promote Civil Rights and economic equality for African Americans. Participants walked down Constitution and Independence avenues, then — 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed — gathered before the Lincoln Monument for speeches, songs, and prayer. Televised live to an audience of millions, the march provided dramatic moments, most memorably the Rev Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Ha -
Selma to Montgomery March
On "Bloody Sunday," March 7, 1965, some 600 civil rights marchers headed east out of Selma on U.S. Route 80. They got only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge six blocks away, where state and local lawmen attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas and drove them back into Selma.
