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Brown v. Board of Education
It was a significant moment when the Supreme Court unanimously declared that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. -
Emmett Till Murder
A 14-year-old African-American boy was murdered in a racist accusation that stunned the country and sparked the civil rights movement. Till was in Mississippi, visiting relatives when he was accused of harassing a local white woman. -
Rosa Parks & the Montgomery Bus Boycott
Rosa Parks was a civil rights activist who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama to a white passenger. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a civil rights demonstration in Montgomery, Alabama, in which African Americans refused to ride city buses in protest of segregated seating. -
Little Rock Nine
A group of nine black students who enrolled at Little Rock's Central High School, which was formerly all-white. They became an important part of the struggle for equal opportunities in American education. -
Greensboro Woolworth's Sit-ins
A civil rights movement that began in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960, when young African American students held a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter and refused to leave after being refused service. -
Freedom Rides
In 1961, civil rights activists rode interstate buses from Washington, DC to the segregated South to protest the lack of enforcement of US Supreme Court decisions finding segregated public buses unconstitutional. -
March on Washington
250,000 protesters assembled in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. in August 1963 for a huge protest march. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is also known as the Jobs and Freedom March. -
Birmingham Baptist Church Bombing
Before Sunday morning services at Birmingham, Alabama's 16th Street Baptist Church, a predominantly Black congregation that also acted as a meeting place for civil rights activists, a bomb detonated. Many people were wounded, including four young girls that died. -
Civil Rights Act
The Act prohibited discrimination based on race, religion, colour, sex, or national origin, mandated school desegregation and voting rights, and mandated equal access to public places and jobs. -
“Bloody Sunday”/Selma to Montgomery March
On U.S. Route 80 east of Selma, about 600 civil rights marchers set out. They only made it six blocks to the Edmund Pettus Bridge before being assaulted with billy clubs and tear gas by state and local police, who drove them back into Selma. -
Voting Rights Act
The national ban on tests and devices was made effective by Congress. The 1975 amendments also extended voting rights to minorities that had previously been exempt from the Act's guarantees. -
Loving v. Virginia
A landmark in which the Supreme Court struck down interracial marriage bans and dealt a significant blow to segregation by finding Virginia's anti-miscegenation statute unconstitutional.