Civil Rights Movement

By madalynrau

  • Brown v. Board of Education Topeka

    The U.S. Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in public schools. The ruling, ending the five-year case of Oliver Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, was a unanimous decision. African American students had been denied admittance to certain public schools based on laws allowing public education to be segregated by race. They argued that such segregation violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

  • Boycott Montgomery Bus

    A civil rights protest during which African Americans refused to ride city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest segregated seating. The boycott took place from December 5, 1955, to December 20, 1956, and is regarded as the first large-scale U.S. demonstration against segregation.

  • Little Rock Nine Protest

    Under escort from the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division, nine Black students enter all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Governor Orval Faubus mobilized the Arkansas National Guard in an effort to prevent nine African American students from integrating the high school.

  • Sit-In at Greensboro

    In Greensboro, North Carolina, four Black college students spark a nationwide civil rights movement by refusing to leave a “whites-only” lunch counter at a popular retail store after they are denied service. Greensboro sit-in, act of nonviolent protest against a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, that began on February 1, 1960. Its success led to a wider sit-in movement, that spread throughout the South.

  • Washington D.C. March

    A quarter of a million people rallied in Washington, D.C. to demand an end to segregation, fair wages and economic justice, voting rights, education, and long overdue civil rights protections. Civil rights leaders took to the podium to issue urgent calls to action that still resonate decades later. The historic gathering took place on August 28, 1963. Some 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, and more than 3,000 members of the press covered the event.

  • 1964 Civil Rights Act

    Signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, prohibited discrimination in public places, provided for the integration of schools and other public facilities, and made employment discrimination illegal. The right to full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation. You cannot be treated differently by a place of public accommodation because of your race, color, religion, or national origin.

  • March on Bloody Sunday

    Hundreds of people gathered in Selma, Alabama to march to the capital city of Montgomery. They marched to ensure that African Americans could exercise their constitutional right to vote — even in the face of a segregationist system that wanted to make it impossible. In Selma, Alabama, a 600-person civil rights demonstration ends in violence when marchers are attacked and beaten by white state troopers and sheriff's deputies. The day's events became known as "Bloody Sunday."

  • 1965 Voting Rights Act

    On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson came to the Capitol to sign the Voting Rights Act. Following a ceremony in the Rotunda, the president, congressional leaders, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and others crowded into the President's Room near the Senate Chamber for the actual signing.

  • MLK

    At 6:05 P.M. on Thursday, 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King was shot dead while standing on a balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. More than 100 US cities dissolved into violence. Dr. King was in the city to speak on his growing Poor People's Campaign, and to support an economic protest by Black sanitation workers.

  • 1968 Civil Rights Act (New)

    President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which was meant as a follow-up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. AN ACT To prescribe penalties for certain acts of violence or intimidation, and for other purposes. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That this Act may be cited as the Civil Rights Act of 1968.