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Yick Wo v. Hopkins
The first case where the United States Supreme Court ruled that a law that is race-neutral on its face, but is administered in a prejudicial manner, is an infringement of the Equal Protection Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. -
Executive Order 9066
Executive Order 9066 was a United States presidential executive order signed and issued during World War II by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt -
Korematsu V. United states
Supreme Court held that the wartime internment of American citizens of Japanese descent was constitutional. Above, Japanese Americans at a government-run internment camp during World War II. -
Jackie Robinson intergrates baseball
A major breakthrough of the color line in sports occurred when Jackie Robinson, a 28-year-old African-American ballplayer and war veteran, was brought up from the minor leagues to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The nation was divided at first. -
Community Service Organization
Important California Latino civil rights organization, most famous for training Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. It was founded in 1947 by Fred Ross, Antonio Rios and Edward Roybal. -
Ruby Bridges
American activist known for being the first black child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana during the New Orleans school desegregation crisis in 1960. -
Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Ks
United States Supreme Court handed down its ruling in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Allowed for “separate but equal” public facilities, including public schools in the United States. Declaring the Brown v. Board decision helped break the back of segregation, and provided a spark to the American civil rights movement. -
Murder of Emmitt Till
14 year old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago, is brutally murdered for flirting with a white woman four days earlier. The two men then beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head, and then threw his body, tied to the cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, into the river. -
Montgomery Bus Boycott
the Montgomery bus boycott was a 13-month mass protest that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional. -
Little Rock Nine
The Little Rock Nine was a group of nine African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school. -
Civil Rights Act of 1957
Primarily a voting rights bill, was the first federal civil rights legislation passed by the United States Congress. -
Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee
In 1956, the National Farm Labor Union renamed
the National Agricultural Workers Union (NAWU) made some attempts to organize farm workers. -
Greensboro Sit-Ins
Four African American college students sat down at a lunch counter at Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina, and politely asked for service. Their request was refused. When asked to leave, they remained in their seats. -
Mexican American Political Association
The Mexican American Political Association (MAPA) was organized by 150 volunteer delegates at Fresno as a means to elect Mexican American candidates to public office -
Freedom Rides
Group of 13 African-American and white civil rights activists launched the Freedom Rides, a series of bus trips through the American South to protest segregation in interstate bus terminals. African-American Freedom Riders tried to use “whites-only” restrooms and lunch counters, and vice versa. The group encountered tremendous violence from white protesters along the route, but also drew international attention to their cause. -
United Farm Workers
A labor union for farm workers in the United States. It originated from the merger of two workers' rights organizations, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) and the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). They became allied and transformed from workers' rights organizations into a union as a result of a series of strikes -
Meredith and the Integration of Ole Miss
An African-American man named James Meredith attempted to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Chaos briefly broke out on the Ole Miss campus, with riots ending in two dead, hundreds wounded and many others arrested, after the Kennedy administration called out some 31,000 National Guardsmen and other federal forces to enforce order. -
Murder of Medgar Evers
Medgar Wiley Evers was an American civil rights activist from Mississippi who worked to overturn segregation at the University of Mississippi and to enact social justice and voting rights. He was murdered by a white supremacist and Klansman. -
Letter from Birmingham Jail
Open letter written by Martin Luther King Jr. 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. -
March on Washington
On August 28, 1963, more than 200,000 Americans gathered in Washington, D.C., for a political rally known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Organized by a number of civil rights and religious groups, the event was designed to shed light on the political and social challenges African Americans continued to face across the country. -
24th Amendment
The Twenty-fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution prohibits both Congress and the states from conditioning the right to vote in federal elections on payment of a poll tax or other types of tax. -
Freedom Summer
Volunteer campaign in the United States launched in June 1964 to attempt to register as many African-American voters as possible in Mississippi. -
Voting Rights Act of 1965
The Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson aimed to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote under the 15th Amendment (1870) to the Constitution of the United States. -
Southeast Asian Immigration increase
The number of Asian immigrants grew from 491,000 in 1960 to about 12.8 million in 2014, representing a 2,597 percent increase. In 1960, Asians represented 5 percent of the U.S. foreign-born population; by 2014, their share grew to 30 percent of the nation's 42.4 million immigrants. -
Malcolm X Assassinated
Malcolm X was an African-American Muslim minister and human rights activists.Malcolm X took to the stage of the Audubon Ballroom, a site often used for civic meetings. His wife, Betty Shabazz, and four children were in the crowd. Malcolm X was 39 when he was gunned down in 1965. -
Poor Peoples March on Washington
Dr. King announced the plan to bring together poor people from across the country for a new march on Washington. This march was to demand better jobs, better homes, better education—better lives than the ones they were living. -
Loving v. Virginia
Court case which declared anti-miscegenation laws (laws banning interracial marriages) to be unconstitutional. The Court unanimously held that prohibiting and punishing marriage based on racial qualifications violated the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. -
Martin Luther King Assassinated
Martin Luther King Jr. was an American clergyman and civil rights leader who was fatally shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968. -
Civil Rights Act of 1968
The Civil Rights Act signed into law in April 1968–popularly known as the Fair Housing Act–prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin and sex. -
Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968
Congress passed the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 to address civil rights in Indian country. The Act appears today in Title 25, sections 1301 to 1303 of the United States Code. -
Red Power Movement
A political movement in the 1960's. The Native Americans were fighting to get back their land. They felt that they had to get violent in order to regain their civil rights. -
Alcatraz Occupation
An occupation of Alcatraz Island by 89 American Indians who called themselves Indians of All Tribes. -
Stonewall Riots of 1969
A series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations by members of the gay (LGBT) community against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn. -
Bloody Sunday
An incident in the Bogside area of Derry, Northern Ireland, when British soldiers shot 28 unarmed civilians during a peaceful protest march against internment. -
Occupation of Catalina Island
Twenty-six members (25 men and one woman) of the Brown Berets began a twenty-four day occupation of Santa Catalina Island. A contingent of Brown Berets arrived in small groups aboard a tourist boat and a small plane. -
Wounded knee occupation
200 Oglala Lakota and followers of the American Indian Movement (AIM) seized and occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation -
Civil right Act of 1964
The nation's premier civil rights legislation. The Act outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, required equal access to public places and employment, and enforced desegregation of schools and the right to vote. -
Longest Walk
The Longest Walk was intended to symbolize the forced removal of American Indians from their homelands and to draw attention to the continuing problems of Indian people and their communities. -
Chicano Youth Leadership Conference
The Chicano Latino Youth Leadership Project) was organized in 1982 with the primary purpose of preparing students to participate in California’s economic, social and political development. -
Hate Crimes Statistics Act of 1990
Act that requires the Attorney General to collect data on crimes committed because of the victim's race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity. -
Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act
Authorization Act for 2010. Conceived as a response to the murders of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr., the measure expands the 1969 United States federal hate-crime law to include crimes motivated by a victim's actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.
