Civil Rights Timeline Activity

  • 13th Amendment

    13th Amendment
    The 13th Amendment was created. The 13th amendment is "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
  • Civil Rights Timeline Activity

    The 13th Amendment was created
  • 14th Amendment

    14th Amendment
    The 14th Amendment was created. The 14th amendment is basically states that all persons born or naturalized in the United States - including African Americans - are citizens of the country.
  • 15th Amendment

    15th Amendment
    The 15th Amendment was created. The 15th amendment states that "The right of citizens...to vote shall not be denied or abridged...on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
  • Plessey v. Ferguson

    Plessey v. Ferguson
    Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court issued in 1896. It upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws for public facilities as long as the segregated facilities were equal in quality – a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal".
  • Truman Desegregates the Military

    Truman Desegregates the Military
    Executive Order 9981 was an executive order issued on July 26, 1948, by President Harry S. Truman. It abolished racial discrimination in the United States Armed Forces and eventually led to the end of segregation in the services.
  • Brown v. Board of Education

    Brown v. Board of Education
    Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483, was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional.
  • Rosa Parks/Montgomery Bus Boycott

    Rosa Parks/Montgomery Bus Boycott
    Montgomery Bus Boycott. Sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks on 1 December 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott was a 13-month mass protest that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional.
  • Little Rock Crisis

    Little Rock Crisis
    The Little Rock Nine was a group of nine African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957.
  • Sit -in Movement

    Sit -in Movement
    The sit-in movement, or student sit-in movement, was a wave of sit-ins that followed the Greensboro sit-ins on February 1, 1960 in North Carolina. The sit-in movement employed the tactic of nonviolent direct action and was a pivotal event during the Civil Rights Movement.
  • Freedom Riders

    Freedom Riders
    Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated southern United States, in 1961 and subsequent years, in order to challenge the non-enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decisions Morgan v. Virginia (1946) and Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional.
  • James Meredith and Ole Miss

    James Meredith and Ole Miss
    James Meredith, an African American man, attempted to enroll at the all-white University of Mississippi in 1962. Chaos soon broke out on the Ole Miss campus, with riots ending in two dead, hundreds wounded and many others arrested, after the Kennedy administration called out some 31,000 National Guardsmen and other federal forces to enforce order.
  • Letter from a Birmingham Jail

    Letter from a Birmingham Jail
    The Letter from Birmingham Jail, also known as the Letter from Birmingham City Jail and The Negro Is Your Brother, is an open letter written on April 16, 1963, by Martin Luther King Jr. The letter defends the strategy of nonviolent resistance to racism.
  • March on Washington/"I have a dream" Speech

    March on Washington/"I have a dream" Speech
    The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the March on Washington, or The Great March on Washington, was held in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, August 28, 1963.
  • Freedom Summer

    Freedom Summer
    Freedom Summer, or the Mississippi Summer Project, was a volunteer campaign in the United States launched in June 1964 to attempt to register as many African-American voters as possible in Mississippi.
  • Civil Rights Act of 1964

    Civil Rights Act of 1964
    The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a landmark civil rights and US labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin.
  • Selma March

    Selma March
    The Selma to Montgomery marches were three protest marches, held in 1965, along the 54-mile highway from Selma, Alabama to the state capital of Montgomery.
  • Voting Rights Act

    Voting Rights Act
    The Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, aimed to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote as guaranteed under the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.