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Brown vs. board of education
The Supreme Court ruled that separating children in public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional.t signaled the end of legalized racial segregation in the schools of the United States, overruling the "separate but equal" principle set forth in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case. -
Emmett till murder
Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was a 14-year-old African American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store. -
Rosa Parks & the Montgomery Bus Boycott
In Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks is jailed for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man, a violation of the city's racial segregation laws. The successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, organized by a young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., followed Park's historic act of civil disobedience. -
The Little Rock Nine and Integration
the United States Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools were illegal. The case, Brown v. The Board of Education, has become iconic for Americans because it marked the formal beginning of the end of segregation. -
Greensboro Woolworth's Sit-ins
The Greensboro sit-in was a civil rights protest that started in 1960, when young African American students staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave after being denied service. The sit-in movement soon spread to college towns throughout the South. -
Freedom Rides
the Greyhound bus was the first to arrive in Anniston, Alabama. ... The mob followed the bus in automobiles, and when the tires on the bus blew out, someone threw a bomb into the bus. The Freedom Riders escaped the bus as it burst into flames, only to be brutally beaten by members of the surrounding mob. -
MLK’s Letter From Birmingham Jail
The goal of “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” was for Martin Luther King Jr. to respond to a group of white clergy who had criticized his use of nonviolent civil disobedience in Birmingham, Alabama.It says that people have a moral responsibility to break unjust laws and to take direct action rather than waiting potentially forever for justice to come through the courts. -
March on Washington
The purpose of the march was to advocate for the civil and economic rights of African Americans. At the march, final speaker Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech in which he called for an end to racism. -
Birmingham Baptist Church Bombing
a dynamite bomb exploded in the back stairwell of the downtown Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The violent blast ripped through the wall, killing four African-American girls on the other side and injuring more than 20 inside the church.It was a clear act of racial hatred: the church was a key civil rights meeting place and had been a frequent target of bomb threats.Our Birmingham office launched an immediate investigation and wired the FBI Director about the crime. -
24th Amendment
The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.The Act prohibited discrimination in public accommodations and federally funded programs. It also strengthened the enforcement of voting rights and the desegregation of schools. -
“Bloody Sunday”/Selma to Montgomery March
some 600 civil rights marchers headed east out of Selma on U.S. Route 80. They got only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge six blocks away, where state and local lawmen attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas and drove them back into Selma. -
Voting Rights Act of 1965
It outlawed the discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states after the Civil War, including literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting. this “act to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution” was signed into law 95 years after the amendment was ratified. -
Loving v. Virginia
in which the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously (9–0) struck down state anti miscegenation statutes in Virginia as unconstitutional under the equal protection and due process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.
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