-
13th Amendment
Abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. -
14th Amendment
Grants citizenship to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States" which included former slaves who had just been freed after the Civil War. -
15th Amendment
Prohibits the federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." -
Plessey v. Ferguson
Plessey a colored man had got on a train and sat in whites only section and got arrested, charged with violation of the Separate Car Law, tried in a Criminal District Court for the Parish of Orleans and found juilty. Appealed his conviction to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which upheld the law and Plessy's conviction. Plessy and his lawyers then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. This was like seperate but equal. -
Mendez v. Westminster
Principle of a school makes children that are mexican-american go to a differnt school to keep them seperated. When there was no state law mandating their segregation, they argued that segregating children of Mexican ancestry was a violation of the equal protection of the law clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. -
Delgado v. Bastrop ISD
Complaint for the Mexican American parents, the attorneys argued that the school districts had “prohibited, barred, and excluded” Mexican American children from attending public school with “other white school children” in violation of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. -
Sweatt v. Painter
The case involved a black man, Heman Marion Sweatt, who was refused admission to the School of Law of the University of Texas, whose president was Theophilus Painter, on the grounds that the Texas State Constitution prohibited integrated education. At the time, no law school in Texas would admit black students, or, in the language of the time, "Negro" students. -
Brown v. Board of Education
Supreme Court ruled that separating children in public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional. It signaled the end of legalized racial segregation in the schools of the United States, overruling the "separate but equal" principle set forth in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case. -
Hernandez v. Texas
Pete went home, obtained a gun, returned, and shot Joe Espinosa. An all-Anglo jury found Hernandez guilty of murder with malice and sentenced him to life in prison. Hernandez’s lawyers argued that exclusion of persons of Mexican or Latin American descent deprived him, as a member of this class, of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. -
Civil Rights Act
President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed into law the Civil Rights Act. Included a number of important provisions for the protection of voting rights. Civil Rights Bill aimed to ensure that all African Americans could exercise their right to vote. This act maintained the bill, it aimed to increase the number of registered black voters and stated it support for such a move. -
24th Amendment
Prohibits requiring a poll tax for voters in federal elections. -
Civil Rights Act 1964
Signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson. This document was the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. The provisions of this civil rights act forbade discrimination on the basis of sex as well as race in hiring, promoting, and firing. -
Voting Rights Act 1965
Signed by President Lyndon Johnson. Called the day calling the day ‘‘a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield’’.Abolished literacy tests and poll taxes designed to disenfranchise African American voters, and gave the federal government the authority to take over voter registration in counties with a pattern of persistent. discrimination. -
Edgewood v. Kirby
Concerning public school finance, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund filed suit against commissioner of education William Kirby.
