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Brown vs. Board of Education
Court declared that racial segregation in public schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, effectively overturning the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision mandating "separate but equal." The Brown ruling directly affected legally segregated schools in twenty-one states. -
Emmett Till Murder
while visiting family in Money, Mississippi, 14-year-old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago, is brutally murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman four days earlier. -
Rosa Parks & the Montgomery Bus Boycott
regarded as the first large-scale U.S. demonstration against segregation. Four days before the boycott began, Rosa Parks, an African American woman, was arrested and fined for refusing to yield her bus seat to a white man. -
The Little Rock Nine and Integration
In 1959, a federal court struck down Faubus' school-closing law, and in August 1959 Little Rock's white high schools opened a month early with Black students in attendance. All grades in Little Rock public schools were finally integrated in 1972. -
Greensboro Woolworth's Sit-ins
our African-American students of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University sat at a white-only lunch counter -
Freedom Rides
The bus passengers assaulted that day were Freedom Riders, among the first of more than 400 volunteers who traveled throughout the South on regularly scheduled buses for seven months in 1961 to test a 1960 Supreme Court decision that declared segregated facilities for interstate passengers illegal -
24th Amendment
On this date in 1962, the House passed the 24th Amendment, outlawing the poll tax as a voting requirement in federal elections, -
MLK’s Letter From Birmingham Jail
In 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested and sent to jail because he and others were protesting the treatment of blacks in Birmingham, Alabama. -
March on Washington
Officially called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the historic gathering took place on August 28, 1963 -
Birmingham Baptist Church Bombing
It was a quiet Sunday morning in Birmingham, Alabama—around 10:24 on September 15, 1963—when a dynamite bomb exploded in the back stairwell of the downtown -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
is a landmark civil rights and labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, and later sexual orientation and gender identity. -
“Bloody Sunday”/Selma to Montgomery March
white segregationists attacked a group of peaceful demonstrators in the town of Marion, Alabama -
Voting Rights Act of 1965
This act was signed into law on August 6, 1965, by President Lyndon Johnson. It outlawed the discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states after the Civil War, including literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting -
Loving v. Virginia
proscriptions against interracial marriage were declared unconstitutional.