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Dred Scott v Stanford
Dred Scott was a slave in Missouri who resided for a time in the free state of Illinois and Loisianna Territory. He sued for freedom on the basis that his residence in free territory made him a free man. In a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court concluded that Dredd Scott was a slave, agruing that a person who was not a citizen of the United States could not be a citizen of a state, & no descendent of an American slave was a citizen. The court also declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. -
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Civil Rights Timeline
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13th Amendment
Stated that, in Section 1 "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punsihment for crime wherof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction" and, in Section 2 "Congress shall have power to enforce this aricle by appropriate legislation." This is significant because if officially outlawed slavery in the United States. -
14th Amendment
This Amendment provided a broad definition of citizenship, overruling the Dred Scott decision and guaranteeing slaves and thier descendents Constitutional rights. The Due Process clause of this amendment is particularly important as it has allowed the application of the Bill of Rights to the states and not just to the federal government. Another important section is the Equal Protection Clause which guarantees all persons equal protection under law. -
15th Amendment
This Amendment to the Constitution prohibits the United States government from denying a citizen the right to vote on account of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Basically, it allowed former slaves the right to vote. -
Poll Taxes
A tax that was required as a pre-requisite to voting. Many southern states enacted poll taxes with grandfather clauses after the passage of the 15th Amendment to prevent African-Americans from exercising their right to vote. Poll taxes were outlawed by the 24th Amendment which was ratified in 1964. -
Plessy v. Ferguson
This decision upheld state-imposed racial segregation. The justices based their decision on the seperate but equal doctrine, arguing that segregated facilities were legal under the 14th Amendment provided that the facilities were equal. -
Nineteenth Amendment
This amendment to the Constitution prohibited both state and federal government from denying any citizen the right to vote on account of gender. It marked the end of a long battle for woman's suffarage in the United States. -
White Primaries
Primary elections held in Southern States that prohibited any non-white voter from participating. They were common in the South from about 1890 up until the 1960s. The Supreme Court case of Smith v. Allwright was a turning point in the allowance of white primaries as the Supreme Court ruled that the Texas law limiting Democratic primaries to white voters only was unconstitutional. -
Brown v. Board of Education
This Supreme Court case is significant because it ruled that racial segregation was unconstitutional, overturning their previous decision in Plessy v Furguson. The court ruled that racial segregation in public education has a detrimental effect on minority children because it is interpreted as a sign of inferiority. The long-held doctrine that separate facilities were permissible provided they were equal was rejected. Separate but equal is inherently unequal in the context of public education. -
24th Amendment
This Amendment prohibits both Congress and the states from conditioning the right to vote in federal elections on the basis of a poll tax or any other types of tax. This allowed African-Americans in the South the ability to exercise their right to vote because they no longer had to pay for it. -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
This piece of legislation outlawed unequal application of voter registration requirements and ended racial segregation in schools. It prohibited discrimination in public facilities, government, and emloyment, thus invalidating the Jim Crow laws that had previously stood in the South. It also became illegal to compel segregation. -
Voting Rights Act of 1965
This piece of legislature owtlawed any discriminatory voting practices in the United States, forbidding any prerequisites or standards for voting that were designed to deny the right of a citizen to vote on the basis of race or color. The act also provided for extensive federal oversight of election administrations. -
Reed v. Reed
This case concerned an Idaho state law which stated that "males must be preferred to females" in appointing administrators of estates. In this Supreme Court case the Court ruled that this law was unconstitutional, arguing that to give a mandatory preference to members of either sex over members of the other, merely to accomplish the elimination of hearings on the merits, is to make the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. -
Affirmative Action
“Affirmative action” means positive steps taken to increase the representation of women and minorities in areas of employment, education, and business from which they have been historically excluded. When those steps involve preferential selection—selection on the basis of race, gender, or ethnicity—affirmative action generates intense controversy. It became an inflammatory issue as early as 1972 and continues to be an issue today. -
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke
Bakke, a white man, applied for admission to the University of California medical school and was declined both times due to the reservation of 16 spots every year for racial minorities. He argued that this violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th. The court ruled in favor of Bakke, ordering the school to admit him, but did not totally reject the use of racial quotas in admissions decisions. -
Equal Rights Amendment
This was a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution which was intended to guarantee that equal rights under any federal, state, or local law could not be denied on account of sex. It was introduced into congress in 1972 and passed both Houses, but it failed to meet its ratification deadline of June 30, 1982. -
Bowers v. Hardwick
Michael Hardwick was observed by a Georgia police officer while engaging in the act of consensual homosexual sodomy with another adult in the bedroom of his home. After being charged with violating a Georgia statute that criminalized sodomy, Hardwick challenged the statute's constitutionality. The Supreme Court found that there was no constitutional protection for acts of sodomy and that consequently states could chose to outlaw the practice. -
Americans With Disabilities Act
This is a wide ranging civil rights law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of a disability. It provides similar protections for people with disabilites as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did for other categories of Americans. The determination of what is a disability is made on a case by case basis, not necessarily a set standard. -
Lawrence v. Texas
Houston police entered John Lawrence's apartment and saw him and another adult man, Tyron Garner, engaging in a private, consensual sexual act. Lawrence and Garner were arrested and convicted of deviate sexual intercourse in violation of a Texas statute forbidding two persons of the same sex to engage in certain intimate sexual conduct. The Supreme Court ruled that the statute violated the Due Process Clause and overturned their previous ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick.
