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14th Amendment ratified
The 14th Amendment, granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States, including formerly enslaved people. -
15th Amendment ratfied
The 15th Amendment sought to protect the voting rights of Black men after the Civil War, and was adopted into the U.S. Constitution in 1870. It banned the use of literacy tests, provided for federal oversight of voter registration in areas where less than 50 percent of the non-white population had not registered to vote and authorized the U.S. attorney general to investigate the use of poll taxes in state and local elections -
1st Women's Suffrage Amendment defeated
The woman suffrage amendment was first introduced in the U.S. Senate in 1868. It was then introduced in both chambers in 1869, and plenty more times between 1875 and 1888. In 1887, the Senate voted on it but defeated it. -
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Plessy V. Ferguson
It was a case that had a ruling that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine.
The case stemmed from an 1892 incident in which African American train passenger Homer Plessy refused to sit in a car for Black people.
Southern Black people saw the promise of equality under the law embodied by the 13th Amendment, 14th Amendment and 15th Amendment to the Constitution fading quickly. -
NAACP is founded
The NAACP or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was established in 1909 and is America’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. -
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19th Amendment approved and ratified
The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted American women the right to vote and was ratified on August 18, 1920, ending a century of protest. -
Shelley v. Kraemer decided
A St. Louis, Missouri neighborhood enacted a racially restrictive contract designed to prevent African-Americans and Asian-Americans from living in the area. Louis Kraemer brought suit to enforce the contract and prevent the Shelleys from moving into their house. Then a similar lawsuit arose in Detroit, Michigan.
The Supreme Court combined the cases.The Court said that standing alone, racially restrictive contracts do not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. -
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Brown v. Board of Education
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. It overturned the “separate but equal” slogan. -
Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat
In Montgomery, Alabama on December 1, 1955, 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 first day of the bus boycott was a great success. On November 13, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Alabama state and Montgomery city bus segregation laws as being in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended legal segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. -
National Organization of Women
The National Organization for Women is an American activist organization founded in 1966 that promotes equal rights for women. Betty Friedan, one of its founders, served as NOW’s first president. The organization is composed of both men and women, and is in all 50 states. Its headquarters are in Washington, D.C.
Its initial major concern was passage of a national Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. -
Green v. County School Board of New Kent County
The school district implemented a plan where students could choose which school they wanted to attend. The school district didn't prevent anyone from attending a different school but few African American students transferred to New Kent and no white students transferred to George W. Watkins. Students and parents brought this action against the school district, arguing that the plan did not adequately integrate the school system. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit remanded the case. -
Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education
On April 20, 1971, the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously upheld busing programs that aimed to speed up the racial integration of public schools in the United States. In later decades, court-ordered busing plans were criticized not only by whites but also by African Americans, who often charged that busing harmed African American students by requiring them to endure long commutes to and from school. Busing continued in most major cities until the late 1990s. -
Proposition 209- California
A California ballot proposition which amended the state constitution to prohibit the state from considering race, sex, or ethnicity, in the areas of public employment, public contracting, and public education. In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled that the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative is constitutional, and that states had the right to ban the practice of racial and gender preferences/affirmative action if they chose to do so. Its passage amended the California constitution to have a new section.