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plessy v ferguson
Rejecting Plessy’s argument that his constitutional rights were violated, the Court ruled that a state law that “implies merely a legal distinction” between whites and blacks did not conflict with the 13th and14th Amendments. -
jackie robinson
Jackie Robinson became the first black player in the major leagues in 1947, signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers. -
medger evers
Medgar Evers was a civil rights activist who organized voter-registration efforts, demonstrations and boycotts of companies that practiced discrimination. -
james meredith
James H. Meredith, who in 1962 became the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi, is shot by a sniper shortly after beginning a lone civil rights march through the South. -
(CORE)
he 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. -
sweatt v painter
a U.S. Supreme Court case that successfully challenged the "separate but equal" doctrine of racial segregation established by the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson. -
brown v borad of education
Despite these Amendments, African Americans were often treated differently than whites in many parts of the country, especially in the South. -
southern christian leadership conference (sclc)
The very beginnings of the SCLC can be traced back to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. -
montgomery bus boycott
The Montgomery Bus Boycott, in which African Americans refused to ride city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest segregated seating, took place from December 5, 1955, to December 20, 1956, and is regarded as the first large-scale demonstration against segregation in the U.S. On December 1, 1955, four days before the boycott began, Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, refused to yield her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus. -
the southern manifesto
The Declaration of Constitutional Principles (known informally as the Southern Manifesto) was a document written in February and March 1956, in the United States Congress, in opposition to racial integration of public places. -
little rock-centeral high school
Print Cite In a key event of the American Civil Rights Movement, nine black students enrolled at formerly all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957, testing a landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional. -
greenboro sit in
Despite advances in the fight for racial equality (including the landmark 1954 Supreme Court verdict in Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery Bus Boycott), segregation was still the norm across the southern United States in 1960 -
student nonviolent coordinating committee (sncc)
The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), formed to give younger blacks more of a voice in the civil rights movement, became one of the movement’s more radical branches. -
freedom rides
The first Freedom Ride took place on May 4, 1961 when seven blacks and six whites left Washington, D.C., on two public buses bound for the Deep South. They intended to test the Supreme Court's ruling in Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which declared segregation in interstate bus and rail stations unconstitutional. -
letter from birmingham jail
On April 16, 1963, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., imprisoned in an Alabama prison cell, completed work on one of the seminal texts of the American Civil Rights Movement. -
march on washington
Print Cite 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
