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Brown vs Board of Education
Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. -
Murder of Emmett Till
he reportedly flirted with a white cashier at a grocery store. Four days later, two white men kidnapped Till, beat him and shot him in the head. The men were tried for murder, but an all-white, male jury acquitted them. -
Montgumery Bus Boycott
Boycott orginixed by MLK that ws inspored by Roas Parks when whe was arrested for refusing to give up her seat for a white man, it lasted over a year. -
Little rock nine
a group of nine African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School. The students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas. -
Greensboro sit-in
a series of nonviolent protests in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960, which led to the Woolworth department store chain removing its policy of racial segregation in the Southern United States. -
Freedom Rides
civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated southern United States -
James Meredith Ole Miss
fought between Southern segregationist civilians and federal and state forces segregationists were protesting the enrollment of James Meredith, a black US military veteran, at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) at Oxford, Mississippi. Two civilians were killed during the night, including a French journalist, and over 300 people were injured, including one third of the US Marshals deployed. -
Birmingham Protests
a movement organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to bring attention to the integration efforts of African Americans in Birmingham, Alabama. Led by Martin Luther King, Jr., James Bevel, Fred Shuttlesworth and others, the campaign of nonviolent direct action culminated in widely publicized confrontations between young black students and white civic authorities, and eventually led the municipal government to change the city's discrimination laws. -
March on Washington
one of the largest political rallies for human rights in United States history and demanded civil and economic rights for African Americans. -
Freedom Summer
a volunteer campaign in the United States launched in attempt to register as many African-American voters as possible in Mississippi, which had historically excluded most blacks from voting. The project also set up dozens of Freedom Schools, Freedom Houses, and community centers in small towns throughout Mississippi to aid the local black population. -
Selma Campaign
The three Selma to Montgomery marches were 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, a landmark federal achievement of the Civil Rights Movement. -
Kerner Commission
an 11-member commission established by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate the causes of the 1967 race riots in the United States and to provide recommendations for the future. -
MLK assassination
was fatally shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee an the age of 39.