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Dred Scott vs. Sanford
The 1857Supreme Court ruling declaring that a slave that had escaped to a free state enjoyed no rights as a citizen and that Congress had no right to ban slavery in territories. -
13th Amendment
The 13th Amendment ended slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States of America. -
14th Amendment
The Constitutional Amendment adapted after the Civil War that states "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privledges or immunities of citizens of the U.S.; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law. This amendment marked the beginning of the incorportation doctrine, which began the application of the Bill of Rights to the states. -
15th Amendment
The 15th amendment to the constitution granted African American men the right to vote by declairing that "the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United states or by any state on the account of race, color, or previous conditions of servitude". States found a loop hole in the amendment and required literacy tests, and poll taxes to disenfranchise African Americans. -
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White Primaries
White primaries were elections in the Southern United States that permitted only white voters to participate. This was eventually ended in the Supreme Court case Smith vs. Allwright -
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Poll Taxes
Poll taxes are essentially, taxes associated with performing the act of voting. After the 14th Amendment was passed, poll taxes were used as a means of preventing African-Americans from voting. They were successful in doing so: of the 130,000 African-Americans registered to vote in 1896 in Louisiana, only about 1,300 were able to vote in 1904. Poll taxes were abolished with the passage of the 24th Amendment in 1962. -
Plessy v. Feruson
Plessy v. Ferguson is a landmark United States Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in public facilities under the doctrine of "separate but equal." -
The Nineteenth Amendment
The Nineteenth Amendment prohibited any citizen of the United States to be denied the right to vote because of their gender. -
The Equal Rights Amendment
The Equal Rights Amendment was an amendment proposed to Congress in 1923 that was designed to gurantee rights for women in the United States. -
Brown v. Board of Education
Brown v. Board of Education was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson which previously allowed segregation. -
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Affirmative Action
Affirmative action is the policy of favoring members of a disadvantaged group who are perceived to suffer from discrimination. It was signed in under Kennedy with the goal of ending discrimination. -
24th Amendment
The 24th Amendment further extended the right to vote in the United States to African-Americans by abolishing poll taxes. -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a landmark piece of civil rights legislation in the United States that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.Powers given to enforce the act were initially weak, but were supplemented during later years. Congress asserted its authority to legislate under several different parts of the United States Constitution, principally its power to regulate interstate commerce. -
Voting Rights Act of 1965
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 even further extended rights to voting to African-Americans by eliminating various means of preventing African-Americans from voting such as literacy tests that had been traditionally used to prevent African Americans from voting. -
Reed v.Reed
Reed v. Reed was an Equal Protection case in the United States in which the Supreme Court ruled that the administrators of estates cannot be named in a way that discriminates between sexes.The Supreme Court ruled for the first time that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited differential treatment based on sex -
Regents of the University of California v. Blakke
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States which upheld affirmative action, allowing race to be one of several factors in college admission policy. However, the court ruled that specific quotas, such as the 16 out of 100 seats set aside for minority students, were impermissible. -
Bowers v. Hardwick
Bowers v. Hardwick is a United States Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of a Georgia sodomy law criminalizing oral and anal sex in private between consenting adults when applied to homosexuals in a 5–4 ruling. -
Americans with Disabilities Act
Legislation passedin 1990 that prohibits discrimination against United States citizens with disabilities. -
Lawrence v. Texas
Lawrence v. Texas is a decision by the United States Supreme Court in which the Court struck down the sodomy law in Texas and, by extension, invalidated sodomy laws in 13 other states, making same-sex sexual activity legal in every U.S. state and territory. The Court overturned its previous ruling on the same issue in Bowers v. Hardwick.
