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Dred Scott v. Sandford
In Dred Scott v. Sandford (argued 1856 -- decided 1857), the Supreme Court ruled that Americans of African descent, whether free or slave, were not American citizens and could not sue in federal court. The Court also ruled that Congress lacked the power to ban slavery in the U.S. territories. Finally, the Court declared that the rights of slaveowners were constitutionally protected by the Fifth Amendment because slaves were categorized as property. -
13th Amendment
The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1865 in the aftermath of the Civil War, abolished slavery in the United States. -
14th Amendment
Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship and equal civil and legal rights to African Americans and slaves who had been emancipated after the American Civil War. -
15th Amendment
The 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted African American men the right to vote by declaring that the "right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." -
White Primaries
A state primary election that restricts voting to whites only; outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1944. The white primary was one method used by white Democrats to disenfranchise most black and other minority voters. -
Plessy v. Ferguson
A legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court, on May 18, 1896, by a seven-to-one majority (one justice did not participate), advanced the controversial “separate but equal” doctrine for assessing the constitutionality of racial segregation laws. -
19th Amendment
Provided men and women with equal voting rights. -
Brown v. Board of Education
a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional -
Affirmative Action
a policy in which an individual's color, race, sex, religion or national origin are taken into account to increase opportunities provided to an underrepresented part of society. -
24th Amendment
Not long ago, 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. -
Poll Tax
Begun in the 1890s as a legal way to keep African Americans from voting in southern states, poll taxes were essentially a voting fee. It is based on the idea that everyone pays the same amount of tax. This is regardless of how much they earn. -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
Ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, is considered one of the crowning legislative achievements of the civil rights movement. -
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. -
Reed v. Reed
marked the first time in history that the Court applied the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to strike down a law that discriminated against women. -
Equal Rights Amendment
a proposed but unratified amendment to the U.S. Constitution that was designed mainly to invalidate many state and federal laws that discriminate against women; its central underlying principle was that sex should not determine the legal rights of men or women. -
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke
the Supreme Court ruled that a university's use of racial "quotas" in its admissions process was unconstitutional, but a school's use of "affirmative action" to accept more minority applicants was constitutional in some circumstances. -
Bowers v. Hardwick
a Georgia state law banning sodomy. The ruling was overturned by the court 17 years later in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which struck down a Texas state law that had criminalized homosexual sex between consenting adults. -
Americans With Disabilities Act
The ADA is a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life, including jobs, schools, transportation, and all public and private places that are open to the general public. -
Lawrence v. Texas
a legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled (6–3) on June 26, 2003, that a Texas state law criminalizing certain intimate sexual conduct between two consenting adults of the same sex was unconstitutional. The sodomy laws in a dozen other states were thereby invalidated. -
Obergefell v. Hodges
Groups of same-sex couples sued their relevant state agencies in Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, and Tennessee to challenge the constitutionality of those states' bans on same-sex marriage or refusal to recognize legal same-sex marriages that occurred in jurisdictions that provided for such marriages.
