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Civil Rights!!!
The Rights of Citizens to Political and Social Freedom and Equality!!! -
Desegration of the Armed Forces
More than one million were inducted into the armed forces. African Americans, who constituted approximately 11 per cent of all registrants liable for service, furnished approximately this proportion of the inductees in all branches of the service except the Marine Corps. Along with thousands of black women, these inductees served in all branches of service and in all Theaters of Operations during World War II. -
Brown vs. Board of Education
The U.S. Supreme Court had consolidated these five cases under one name, Oliver Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka. One of the justices later explained that the U.S. Supreme Court felt it was better to have representative cases from different parts of the country. This collection of cases was the culmination of years of legal groundwork laid by the NAACP in its work to end segregation. None of the cases would have been possible without individuals who were courageous enough. -
Baton Rouge Bus Boycott
African American citizens banded together to fight the segregated seating system on city buses. They quit riding for eight days, staging what historians believe was the first bus boycott of the budding Civil Rights movement. After eight days of boycotting the buses, the Baton Rouge City Council agreed to a compromise that opened all seats — except for the front two, which would be for whites, and the back two, for black riders. -
Emmit Till
Till entered Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market and some of the kids with him would later report that he whistled at a white female. Four days later, at 2:30 a.m. Roy Bryant, Carolyn's husband and his half brother J.W. Milam kidnapped Till from Moses Wright's home. They then beat the teenager brutally, dragged him to the bank of the Tallahatchie River, shot him in the head, tied him with barbed wire to a large metal fan and shoved his mutilated body into the water. -
Rosa Parks
After a long day's work at a Montgomery department store, where she worked as a seamstress, Rosa Parks boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus for home. She took a seat in the first of several rows designated for "colored" passengers. Though the city's bus ordinance did give drivers the authority to assign seats, it didn't specifically give them the authority to demand a passenger to give up a seat to anyone (regardless of color). -
Litle Rock Nine
In a key event of the American Civil Rights Movement, nine black students enrolled at formerly all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas testing a landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional.The court had mandated that all public schools in the country be integrated “with all deliberate speed” in its decision related to the groundbreaking case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The students were attacked and treated badly. -
SCLC and the SNCC
The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), formed to give younger blacks more of a voice in the civil rights movement, became one of the movement’s more radical branches. February 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina, Ella Baker, then director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), helped set up the first meeting of what became SNCC. She was concerned that SCLC, led by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. -
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.African-American Freedom Riders tried to use “whites-only” restrooms and lunch counters, and vice versa. The group encountered tremendous violence from white protestors along the route, but also drew international attention to their cause. The next few months, several hundred Freedom Riders did the same. -
Letter From Birmingham Jail
The letter Martin Luther King wrote while incarcerated here's an excerpt "While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work." -
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. The march, which became a key moment in the growing struggle for civil rights in the United States. -
24th Amendment
Citizens in some states had to pay a fee to vote in a national election. This fee was called a poll tax. On January 23, 1964, the United States ratified the 24th Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting any poll tax in elections for federal officials. -
Malcom X's Assassination
In New York City, Malcolm X, an African American nationalist and religious leader, is assassinated by rival Black Muslims while addressing his Organization of Afro-American Unity at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights. On February 21, 1965, one week after his home was firebombed, Malcolm X was shot to death by Nation of Islam members while speaking at a rally of his organization in New York City. -
Selma March
In early 1965, Martin Luther King Jr.’s SCLC. On March 17, 1965, even as the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers fought for the right to carry out their protest, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress, calling for federal voting rights legislation to protect African Americans from barriers that prevented them from voting. -
The Black Panther Party
Malcolm had represented a militant revolutionary, with the dignity and self-respect to stand up and fight to win equality for all oppressed minorities; while also being an outstanding role model, someone who sought to bring about positive social services; something the Black Panthers would take to new heights. The Panthers followed Malcolm's belief of international working class unity across the spectrum of color and gender, and thus united with various minority and white revolutionary groups. -
MLK's Assaination
In early April 1968, the U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. His assassination led to an outpouring of anger among black Americans, as well as a period of national mourning that helped speed the way for an equal housing bill that would be the last significant legislative achievement of the civil rights era.
