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Dred Scott v. Sandford
The case persisted through several courts and ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court, whose decision incensed abolitionists, gave momentum to the anti-slavery movement and served as a stepping stone to the Civil War. -
13 Amendment
The 13th Amendment forever abolished slavery as an institution in all U.S. states and territories. In addition to banning slavery, the amendment outlawed the practice of involuntary servitude and peonage. -
14th Amendment
The 14th Amendment was significant to the Civil Rights Movement because it ensured that states guaranteed all people born or naturalized in the U.S. the rights granted by the Bill of Rights -
15 amendment
The amendment was successful in encouraging African Americans to vote. Many African Americans were even elected to public office during the 1880s in the states that formerly had constituted the Confederate States of America. -
Plessy V. Ferguson
Plessy v. Ferguson was important because it essentially established the constitutionality of racial segregation. As a controlling legal precedent, it prevented constitutional challenges to racial segregation for more than half a century until it was finally overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown. -
Nineteenth Amendment
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 sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. -
Brown V. Board of Education
The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. ... Board marked a shining moment in the NAACP's decades-long campaign to combat school segregation. In declaring school segregation as unconstitutional, the Court overturned the longstanding “separate but equal” doctrine established nearly 60 years earlier in Plessy v. -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Act prohibited discrimination in public accommodations and federally funded programs. It also strengthened the enforcement of voting rights and the desegregation of schools. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is the nation's benchmark civil rights legislation, and it continues to resonate in America. -
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. -
Reed v. Reed
Reed v. Reed was the first major Supreme Court case that addressed that discrimination based on gender was unconstitutional because it denies equal protection. -
Title IX
The U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) enforces, among other statutes, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Title IX protects people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance. -
Regents of University of California v. Bakke
In Regents of University of California v. Bakke (1978), the Court ruled unconstitutional a university's use of racial "quotas" in its admissions process, but held that affirmative action programs could be constitutional in some circumstances. -
Americans with Disabilities Act
The ADA not only provided comprehensive civil rights protections for people with disabilities for the first time in the nation's history, but it also marked a sea change in the nation's attitudes toward disability rights. -
Obergefell v. Hodges
Obergefell v. Hodges is a landmark civil rights case in which the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples by both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States