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Civil Disobedience
is the active, professed refusal to obey certain laws, demands, and commands of a government, or of an occupying international power. -
Black Codes
These laws had the intent and the effect of restricting African Americans' freedom, and of compelling them to work in a labor economy based on low wages or debt. -
13th Amendment
abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. -
14th Amendment
was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments. The amendment addresses citizenship rights and equal protection of the laws and was proposed in response to issues related to former slaves following the American Civil War. The amendment was bitterly contested, particularly by the states of the defeated Confederacy, which were forced to ratify it in order to regain representation in Congress. -
Sharecropping/ Tenant Farming
is a form of agriculture in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on their portion of land. -
15 Amendment
to the United States Constitution prohibits the federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude". -
JIm Crow Laws
mandated the segregation of public schools, public places, and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants, and drinking fountains for whites and blacks. -
Lynching
is an extrajudicial punishment by an informal group. -
Plessy v. Ferguson
Was a landmark 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". -
Non-violent protest
is the practice of achieving goals such as social change through symbolic protests, civil disobedience, economic or political noncooperation, or other methods, while being nonviolent. -
CORE
the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) became one of the leading activist organizations in the early years of the American Civil Rights Movement. -
Brown v Board of Education
African American minors had been denied admittance to certain public schools based on laws allowing public education to be segregated by race. They argued that such segregation violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. -
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 by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas. They then attended after the intervention of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. -
Orval 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. -
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. -
Emmett Till
Emmett Louis Till was a 14-year-old African-American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after a white woman said she was offended by him in her family's grocery store. -
SCLC
is an African-American civil rights organization. SCLC, which is closely associated with its first president, Martin Luther King Jr, had a large role in the American Civil Rights Movement. -
Desegregation
is the process of ending the separation of two groups usually referring to races. This is most commonly used in reference to the United States. -
Civil Rights Act of 1957
primarily a voting rights bill, was the first federal civil rights legislation passed by the United States. -
Sit-ins
is a form of direct action that involves one or more people occupying an area for a protest, often to promote political, social, or economic change. -
Freedom Riders
a 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. -
Cesar Chavez
was an American labor leader and civil rights activist who, with Dolores Huerta, co-founded the National Farm Workers Association (later the United Farm Workers union, UFW) in 1962. Originally a Mexican American farm worker, Chavez became the best known Latino American civil rights activist, and was strongly promoted by the American labor movement, which was eager to enroll Hispanic members. -
Ole Miss Integration
fter a legal battle, 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. -
George Wallace
was an American politician and the 45th Governor of Alabama, having served two nonconsecutive terms and two consecutive terms as a Democrat. Wallace has the third longest gubernatorial tenure in post-Constitutional U.S. history, at 16 years and four days. He was a U.S. Presidential candidate for four consecutive elections, in which he sought the Democratic Party nomination, and was the American Independent Party candidate in the 1968 presidential election. -
March on Washington
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. Culminated in Martin Luther King Jr's "I have a dream" speech. -
U of Alabama Integration
a federal district court in Alabama ordered the University of Alabama to admit African American students Vivien Malone and James Hood during its summer session. The court's decision virtually ensured a showdown between federal authorities and Alabama Governor George Wallace who had made a campaign promise a year earlier to prevent the school's integration even if it required that he stand in the schoolhouse door. -
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 (NOW), which aimed to bring women "into the mainstream of American society now fully equal partnership with men." -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
is a landmark civil rights and US labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. -
Voting Rights Act of 1965
is a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting. -
Watts Riots
an African-American motorist was arrested for suspicion of drunk driving. A minor roadside argument broke out, and then escalated into a fight. -
Hector P. Garcia
was a Mexican-American physician, surgeon, World War II veteran, civil rights advocate, and founder of the American G.I. Forum. As a result of the national prominence he earned through his work on behalf of Hispanic Americans, he was instrumental in the appointment of Vicente T. Ximenes, a Mexican American and American G.I. Forum charter member, to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1966. -
Stokely Carmichael
a Trinidadian-American who became a prominent figure in the Civil Rights Movement and the global Pan-African movement. He grew up in the United States from the age of 11 and became an activist while he attended Howard University. He would eventually become active in the Black Power movement, first as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, later as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party, and lastly as a leader of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party. -
Black Panthers
was a revolutionary black nationalist and socialist organization founded by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton in October 1966. -
Thurgood Marshall
He was a U.S. Supreme Court justice and civil rights advocate. He was the nations first black associate justice of the Supreme Court. He crafted a distinctive jurisprudence. -
Lester Maddox
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. He later served as Lieutenant Governor during the time that Jimmy Carter was Governor. -
Martin Luther King Jr
Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the Civil Rights Movement. -
Title IX
is a portion of the United States Education Amendments of 1972 -
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". -
Affirmative Action
is the policy of favoring members of a disadvantaged group who suffer or have suffered from discrimination within a culture.
