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Brown vs Board of Education
This is how the Brown vs. Board of Education lawsuit was started in 1951. Linda’s father, Oliver Brown, and thirteen other parents tried to enroll their children in the local "white schools" in the summer of 1950, but were turned down because they were African Americans. They were told they must attend one of the four schools in the city for African American children. These parents filed suit against the Topeka Board of Education for their children. After Oliver was turned down by the school, he -
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Civil Rights Movement - Protests Timeline
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Montgomery bus boycott
The Montgomery Bus Boycott officially started on December 1, 1955. 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 she tried to re-enter through the rear door, as the driver had told her to do. Perhaps the movement started on the day in 1949 when a black professor Jo Ann Robinson absentmindedly sat at the front of a nearly empty bus, then ran off in tears when the bus driver screamed at her for doing -
Woolworth's sit-in
McCain shares his recollection of the exchanges the four African-American men had with the lunch-counter staff, the store manager and a policeman who arrived on the scene — and also a lesson he learned that day. On that first day, Feb. 1, the four men stayed at the lunch counter until closing. The next day, they came back with 15 other students. By the third day, 300 joined in; later, 1,000. The sit-ins spread to lunch counters across the country — and changed history. -
Freedom Rides
In 1961 CORE undertook a new tactic aimed at desegregating public transportation throughout the south. These tactics became know as the "Freedom Rides". 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
The Children's Crusade was the name bestowed upon a march by hundreds of school students in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 2, May 3, and May 4, 1963, during the American Civil Rights Movement's Birmingham Campaign. Initiated and organized by Rev. James Bevel, the purpose of the march was to walk downtown to talk to the mayor about segregation in their city. Many children left their schools in order to be arrested, set free, and then to get arrested again the next day. -
March on Washington
In 1963 leaders of the civil rights movement decided to organize what became known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Bayard Rustin was given overall control of the march and he managed to persuade the leaders of all the various civil rights groups to participate in the planned protest meeting at the Lincoln Memorial. -
Selma to Montgomery March
On Sunday March 7, 1965, about six hundred people began a fifty-four mile march from Selma, Alabama to the state capitol in Montgomery. They were demonstrating for African American voting rights and to commemorate the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, shot three weeks earlier by an state trooper while trying to protect his mother at a civil rights demonstration. On the outskirts of Selma, after they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the marchers, in plain sight of photographers and journalists, were
