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Sweatt V. Painter
In a unanimous decision, the Court held that the Equal Protection Clause required that Sweatt be admitted to the university. The Court found that the "law school for Negroes," which was to have opened in 1947, would have been grossly unequal to the University of Texas Law School. It was the successfully challenged the "separate but equal" doctrine of racial segregation. -
Keys v. Carolina Coach
At just 22 years old, on Aug. 1, 1952, Sarah Keys Evans refused to give up her seat on a state-to-state charter bus, prompting the landmark court case, Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company, in which the Interstate Commerce Commission outlawed the segregation of Black passengers in buses traveling across state lines. -
Montgomery bus boycott
The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a civil rights protest during which African Americans refused to ride city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest segregated seating and is regarded as the first large-scale U.S. demonstration against segregation. -
Civil Rights Act of 1957
This legislation established a Commission on Civil Rights to investigate civil rights violations and also established a Civil Rights Division within the Department of Justice. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 authorized the prosecution for those who violated the right to vote for United States citizens. -
Cooper v. Aaron
In making its decision, the Supreme Court applied the principle of the Fourteenth Amendment that states that no state shall deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, thereby enforcing and reinstating the school board's plan for desegregation in compliance with the Brown v. -
Albany Movement
The Albany Movement began in fall 1961 and ended in summer 1962. It was the first mass movement in the modern civil rights era to have as its goal the desegregation of an entire community, and it resulted in the jailing of more than 1,000 African Americans in Albany and surrounding rural counties. -
Integration of the University of Mississippi
On September 30, 1962, riots erupted on the campus of the University of Mississippi in Oxford where locals, students, and committed segregationists had gathered to protest the enrollment of James Meredith, a black Air Force veteran attempting to integrate the all-white school. -
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
On August 28 1963, a quarter of a million people rallied in Washington, D.C. for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom to demand an end to segregation, fair wages and economic justice, voting rights, education, and long overdue civil rights protections. -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
This act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on July 2, 1964, prohibited discrimination in public places, provided for the integration of schools and other public facilities, and made employment discrimination illegal. It was the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. -
Voting Rights Act of 1965
The Voting Rights Act was enacted on August 6, 1965, and it prohibited states from imposing qualifications or practices to deny the right to vote on account of race; permitted direct federal intervention in the electoral process in certain places, based on a “coverage formula”; and required preclearance of new laws. -
Martin Luther King Jr
At 6:05 P.M. on Thursday, 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King was shot dead while standing on a balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. News of King's assassination prompted major outbreaks of racial violence, resulting in more than 40 deaths nationwide and extensive property. -
Swann v. Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools
The Fourteenth Amendment permits the systematic use of buses to convey children of different races across district lines to further the goal of integrating public schools. The issue of forced integration was debated. While school districts no longer had overtly segregationist policies, many remained segregated, and Swann argued that they should be forced to integrate. -
Shirley Chisholm's Presidential Campaign
Chisholm was also the first African American woman to campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 1972 with the slogan “Unbought and Unbossed.” Beset by both racist and sexist opposition, she failed to win her party's nomination, losing to anti-Vietnam War candidate Senator George McGovern. -
Barbara Jordan's Address at the Democratic National Convection
On July 12, 1976, Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. As Americans sensed a fracturing of American life in the 1970s, Jordan called for Americans to commit themselves to a “national community” and the “common good.” Jordan began by noting she was the first black woman to ever deliver a keynote address at a major party convention and that such a thing would have been almost impossible even a decade earlier. -
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke
In Regents of University of California v. Bakke (1978) the Supreme Court ruled that a university's use of racial "quotas" in its admissions process was unconstitutional, but a school's use of "affirmative action" to accept more minority applicants was constitutional in some circumstances. Which that a university's admissions criteria which used race as a definite for an admission decision violated Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of Civil Rights Act of 1964.