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Period: to
Civil Rights movement
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Dred Scott V. Sandford
A landmark decision in the United States supreme court, Dred Scott was a slave whose master brought him out of the save state of Missouri to Illinois and later Minnesota, both of which were free states. Scott and his master then returned to Missouri where Scott was sold to Sanford. Scott sued however stating his long stays in free states made him a free citizen. The court ruled with Sanford stating slaves cannot become U.S. citizens under the constitution. -
13th Amendment
Prohibited slavery in the United States. -
14th Amendment
Made African Americans full citizens and gave them equal protection under the law. -
15th Amendment
The Fifteenth Amendment (Amendment XV) to the United States Constitution prohibits the federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's race, color, or previous condition of servitude. It is the third and last of the Reconstruction Amendments. -
Plessy V. Ferguson
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. Separate but equal remained standard doctrine in U.S. law until the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education. -
Nineteenth Amendment
Prohibits any United States citizen from being denied the right to vote on the basis of sex. -
White Primaries
Primary elections in the United States of America in which only white voters were permitted to participate. White primaries were established by state legislatures in many Southern states as part of a variety of methods used to achieve disfranchisement of most black and other minority voters. -
Brown V. Board of Education
A landmark 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 decision which allowed state-sponsored segregation, insofar as it applied to public education. The Court's unanimous decision stated that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. -
24th Amendment
The Twenty-fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits requiring a poll tax for voters in federal elections. -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
A landmark piece of civil rights legislation in the United States that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It ended unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public -
Voting Rights Act of 1965
a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting it was designed to enforce the voting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments -
Afirmative Action
The policy of favoring members of a disadvantaged group who are perceived to suffer from discrimination within a culture. The concept of affirmative action was introduced in the early 1960s in the United States, as a way to combat racial discrimination in the hiring process and, in 1967, the concept was expanded to include sex. -
Poll Taxes
Payment of a poll tax was a prerequisite to the registration for voting in a number of states. The tax emerged in some states as part of the Jim Crow laws after the right to vote was extended to all races by the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, a number of states enacted poll tax laws as a device for restricting voting rights. -
Reed V. Reed
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. -
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke
A landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States. It 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 by the University of California, Davis School of Medicine, were impermissible. -
Equal Rights Amendment
A proposed amendment designed to guarantee equal rights for women. In 1923, it was introduced in the Congress for the first time, finally in 1972 it passed both houses of Congress and went to the state legislatures for ratification. Through 1977, the amendment received 35 of 38 state ratifications. In 1978, a joint resolution of Congress extended the ratification deadline to June 30, 1982, but no further states ratified the amendment before the passing of the deadline. -
Bowers V. Hardwick
A United States Supreme Court decision, overturned in 2003, that upheld, in a 5–4 ruling, the constitutionality of a Georgia sodomy law criminalizing oral and anal sex in private between consenting adults when applied to homosexuals. -
Americans with Disabilities Act
A wide-ranging civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on disability. It affords similar protections against discrimination to Americans with disabilities as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which made discrimination based on race, religion, sex, national origin, and other characteristics illegal. In addition, unlike the Civil Rights Act, the ADA also requires covered employers to provide reasonable accommodations to employees with disabilities, and imposes accessibility. requirement -
Lawrence V. Texas
A landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court. In the 6–3 ruling 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 the 1986 case Bowers v. Hardwick, where it upheld a challenged Georgia statute and did not find a constitutional protection of sexual privacy.
