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Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy v. Ferguson was a constitutional law case of the US Supreme Court decided in 1896. It upheld state racial segregation laws for public facilities under the doctrine of "separate but equal". The decision was handed down by a vote of 7 to 1 with the majority opinion written by Justice Henry Billings Brown and the dissent written by Justice John Marshall Harlan. -
Cesar Chavez
Cesar Chavez was an American labor leader and civil rights activist who, with Dolores Huerta, co-founded the National Farm Workers Association in 1962. He became the best known Latino American civil rights activist, and was strongly promoted by the American labor movement. -
Brown V. Board of Education
Brown v. Board of Education was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Warren Court's unanimous (9–0) decision stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." As a result, racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. -
Rosa Parks
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks ) was an activist in the Civil Rights Movement, whom the United States Congress called "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement". On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to obey bus driver James F. Blake's order to give up her seat in the "colored section" to a white passenger, after the whites-only section was filled. -
Montgomery Bus Boycott
The Montgomery bus boycott, a seminal event in the Civil Rights Movement, was a political and social protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the public transit system of Montgomery, Alabama. The campaign lasted from December 5, 1955 to December 20, 1956, when a federal ruling, Browder v. Gayle, took effect, and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws requiring segregated buses to be unconstitutional. -
Orval Faubus
Orval Eugene Faubus was an American politician who served as 36th Governor of Arkansas from 1955 to 1967. A Democrat, he is best remembered for his 1957 stand against desegregation of the Little Rock School District during the Little Rock Crisis, in which, by ordering the Arkansas National Guard to prevent black students from attending Little Rock Central High School, he defied a unanimous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court made in the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education. -
Stokely Carmichael
Stokely Carmichael was a Trinidadian-American who became a prominent figure in the Civil Rights Movement and the global Pan-African movement. He would eventually become active in the Black Power movement, first as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), later as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party (BPP), and lastly as a leader of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party (A-APRP). -
George Wallace
George Corley Wallace Jr. was an American politician and the 45th Governor of Alabama. Wallace is remembered for his Southern neo-dixiecrat and pro-segregation "Jim Crow" positions during the mid-20th century period of the Civil Rights Movement. -
Lester Maddox
Lester Garfield Maddox Sr. was an American politician who served as the 75th Governor of the U.S. state of Georgia from 1967 to 1971. A populist Democrat, Maddox came to prominence as a staunch segregationist, when he refused to serve black customers in his Atlanta restaurant, in defiance of the Civil Rights Act. -
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using the tactics of nonviolence and civil disobedience. He led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. He also helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. -
Hector P. Garcia
Hector Perez Garcia was a Mexican-American physician, surgeon, World War II veteran, civil rights advocate, and founder of the American G.I. Forum. Forum charter member, to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1966. Garcia was named as alternate representative to the United Nations in 1967, was appointed to the United States Commission on Civil Rights in 1968, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in 1984. -
Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Prior to his judicial service, he successfully argued several cases before the Supreme Court, including Brown v. Board of Education. In that position, he argued several cases before the Supreme Court, including Smith v. Allwright, Shelley v. Kraemer, and Brown v. Board of Education, which held that racial segregation in public education is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. -
Betty Friedan
Betty Friedan was an American writer, activist, and feminist. A leading figure in the women's movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century. In 1966, Friedan co-founded and was elected the first president of the National Organization for Women , which aimed to bring women "into the mainstream of American society now fully equal partnership with men."
