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Dred Scott v. Sanford
The Dred Scott v. Sanford court case is a monumental one for the United States. Dred Scott was a slave from Missouri before his masters took him to the Missouri and Louisiana Territory where most states would be "free" states, meaning they could not have slavery in those states. He tried buying his freedom from his master, but she refused and he took legal action. He sued his master and wanted his freedom, but the court that he had gone to favored 7-2 for the family. -
13th Amendment
The Thirteenth Amendment was ratified shortly after the American Civil War. This amendment to the constitution prohibited slavery in all of the United States, but also said all forms of involuntary servitude. -
14th Amendment
The Fourteenth Amendment grants all persons born in the United States citizenship, and states that no person granted this citizenship shall have their rights infringed by both the federal and state governments. -
15th Amendment
The Fifteenth Amendment does not grant the right to vote to all citizens of the U.S., however it does state that a citizen's right to vote could not be denied based on their race or color of skin. -
Poll Taxes
A poll tax was a tax placed as a prerequisite to voting. This was specifically designed to limit the amount of African American voters during the time of the Jim Crow Laws and Civil Rights. -
White Primaries
The white primary was a method used by southern white Democrats to limit the voting turnout of mostly black but also other minority voters. They passed laws and constitutions with barriers to voter registration in most of the southern confederate states. -
Plessy v. Ferguson
The U.S. Supreme Court case was a landmark decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial discrimination under the "separate but equal" doctrine. The case started with an incident in 1892 in which an African American train passenger Home Plessy refused to sit in a car for blacks. -
19th Amendment
The 19th amendment states that the right to vote shall not be denied on the account of sex. This was used to give women the right to vote. This amendment was pushed by Suffragettes, or women who were protesting for the right to vote in the United States. -
Equal Rights Amendment
The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is a proposed amendment to the constitution of the United States Constitution that was designed to guarantee the equal legal rights to every citizen regardless of sex. It seeks to end the legal distinctions between men and women in terms of divorce, property, employment, and others. -
Brown v. Board of Education
The Brown v. Board of Education case in the U.S. Supreme Court was a landmark case in which the justices voted unanimously (9-0) that the racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. This was a cornerstone civil rights case for advancing equal rights for African Americans and other minority groups. -
Affirmative Action
Affirmative Action means the practice or policy of favoring individuals belonging to groups known to have been discriminated previously. In the context of Civil Rights, this term mostly referred to being used by companies and universities, like the University of California. -
24th Amendment
The Twenty Fourth Amendment prohibits any form of poll tax on elections for federal officials. This pushed for voting equality in the 20th century because poll taxes were most commonly used to restrict the right to vote for African Americans. -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a civil rights and labor law that prohibits discrimination based on sex, race, religion, color, or natural origin. It also prohibits the unequal application of voter registration requirements, and also bans racial segregation in schools, employment, and public accommodations. -
Voting Rights Act of 1965
This act was designed to enforce the 15th amendment to the Constitution of the United States. It did this by prohibiting the discriminatory voting practices that were adopted by the southern states after the Civil War to limit the African American voting population, like literacy tests. -
Reed v. Reed
The Reed v. Reed Supreme Court case was a case in which the justices voted unanimously that the administrators of estates cannot be named in a way that discriminates between sexes. This was brought to the Supreme Court by Sally Reed going against her ex-husband after a dispute about who should become the administrator of the estate of the two's dead son. Idaho Code stated that "males must be preferred to females". -
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke
This landmark Supreme Court case upheld affirmative action, which allowed race to be one of the several factors in the admissions process for colleges and universities in the United States. However, it did say that specific racial quotas, like how 16 out of the 100 seats in the school of medicine needed to be set aside for minority students, were impermissible. -
Bowers v. Hardwick
Bowers v. Hardwick was a Supreme Court case that upheld, in a 5-4 ruling, the constitutionality of a Georgia sodomy law which prohibited oral and anal sex in private between consenting adults, with respect to homosexual sodomy, but the law did not state the difference between homosexual and heterosexual sodomy. -
Americans with Disabilities Act
The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) is a civil rights law that prohibits the discrimination of individuals with disabilities "in all areas of public life", which includes schools, jobs, transportation, and all places open to the general public. -
Lawrence v. Texas
Lawrence v. Texas was a Supreme Court decision in which the court ruled that American laws prohibiting private homosexual activity between consenting adults are unconstitutional. This decision was made based off the freedom to privacy, stated in previos decisions like Roe v. Wade. This decision overturned an earlier decision in Bowers. Hardwick. -
Obergefell v. Hodges
Obergefell v. Hodges was a landmark Supreme Court decision in which the justices ruled 5-4 that the fundamental right to marry is guaranteed in same-sex couples. Their reasoning was because of both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the fourteenth amendment. The decision required all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the Insular Areas to perform and recognize the marriages of same-sex couples.
