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The Congress of Racial Eqyality
The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) is a U.S. civil rights organization that played a pivotal role for African Americans in the Civil Rights Movement. Founded in 1942, CORE was one of the "Big Four" civil rights organizations, along with the SCLC, the SNCC, and the NAACP -
Brown v. Board of Education
United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional -
Emmett Till
African-American teenager who was lynched in Mississippi at the age of 14 after reportedly flirting with a white woman. -
Rosa Parks/ Montgomery Bus Boycott
Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, refused to yield her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus. She was arrested and fined. The boycott of public buses by blacks in Montgomery began on the day of Parks’ court hearing and lasted 381 days. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ordered Montgomery to integrate its bus system -
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
An African American Civil Rights organization. its focus expanded beyond busses to ending all forms of segregation -
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
formed to give younger blacks more of a voice in the civil rights movement, became one of the movement’s more radical branches -
Letter from Birmingham Jail
The letter defends the strategy of nonviolent resistance to racism. It says that people have a moral responsibility to break unjust laws and to take direct action rather than waiting potentially forever for justice to come through the courts. Responding to being referred to as an "outsider," King writes, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere".
The letter was widely published and became an important text for the American Civil Rights Movement during the early 1960s -
"I Have A Drean" Speech
calls for an end to racism in the United States and called for civil and economic rights -
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama, bombing
The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was an act of white supremacist terrorism which occurred at the African-American 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham when four members of the Ku Klux Klan planted at least 15 sticks of dynamite attached to a timing device beneath the front steps of the church. -
24th Amendment
The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state by reason of failure to pay any poll tax -
The Civil Rights Act of 1964
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 -
Malcolm X Assassination
he was preparing to address the Organization of Afro-American Unity in Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom when someone in the 400-person audience yelled, "Nigger! Get your hand outta my pocket!"As Malcolm X and his bodyguards tried to quell the disturbance,a man rushed forward and shot him once in the chest with a sawed-off shotgun and two other men charged the stage firing semi-automatic handguns. Malcolm X was pronounced dead at 3:30 pm -
Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama
part of the Voting Rights Movement underway in Selma, Alabama. By highlighting racial injustice in the South, they contributed to passage that year of the Voting Rights Act -
The Voting Rights Act of 1965
prohibits racial discrimination in voting -
Executive Order 11246—Affirmative Action
which prohibits federal contractors and federally-assisted construction contractors and subcontractors, who do over $10,000 in Government business in one year from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. -
The Black Panthers
The Panthers practiced militant self-defense of minority communities against the U.S. government, and fought to establish revolutionary socialism through mass organizing and community based programs -
Stokely Carmichael
man who coined the term "Black Power". By 1964 he had risen to the leadership of SNCC, one of the most militant of the civil rights groups and by 1966 had become Chairman. It was at this point that his message of Black Power came to the forefront. -
Martin Luther King Assassination
fatally shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on Thursday, April 4, 1968, at the age of 39 a day after giving his I Have seen the Mountain Top Speech -
The Civil Rights Act of 1968
provided for equal housing opportunities regardless of race, creed, or national origin and made it a federal crime to “by force or by threat of force, injure, intimidate, or interfere with anyone … by reason of their race, color, religion, or national origin
