Major Civil Rights Protests

  • Brown V. Board of Education

    Brown V. Board of Education
    This is how the Brown vs. Board of Education lawsuit was started in 1951. Linda’s father, Oliver Brown, and thirteen other parents tried to enroll their children in the local "white schools" in the summer of 1950, but were turned down because they were African Americans. They were told they must attend one of the four schools in the city for African American children. These parents filed suit against the Topeka Board of Education for their children. Oliver Brown was the first parent listed in th
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    Major civil rights protests

  • Montgomery Bus Boycott

    Montgomery Bus Boycott
    The Montgomery Bus Boycott officially started on December 1, 1955. That was the day when the blacks of Montgomery, Alabama, decided that they would boycott the city buses until they could sit anywhere they wanted, instead of being relegated to the back when a white boarded. It was not, however, the day that the movement to desegregate the buses started. Perhaps the movement started on the day in 1943 when a black seamstress named Rosa Parks paid her bus fare and then watched the bus drive off as
  • Woolworth's sit-in

    Woolworth's sit-in
    On Feb. 1, 1960, four students from all-black North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College walked into a Woolworth five-and-dime with the intention of ordering lunch.
    But the manager of the Greensboro Woolworth had intentions of his own — to maintain the lunch counter's strict whites-only policy.
    Franklin McCain was one of the four young men who shoved history forward by refusing to budge.
    McCain remembers the anxiety he felt when he went to the store that Monday afternoon, the plan he
  • Freedom Rides

    Freedom Rides
    The first Freedom Ride took place on May 4, 1961 when seven blacks and six whites left Washington, D.C., on two public buses bound for the Deep South. They intended to test the Supreme Court's ruling in Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which declared segregation in interstate bus and rail stations unconstitutional.
  • Birmingham Children's March and Boycott

    Birmingham Children's March and Boycott
    The Children's Crusade was the name bestowed upon a march by hundreds of school students in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 2, May 3, and May 4, 1963, during the American Civil Rights Movement's Birmingham Campaign. The purpose of the march was to walk downtown to talk to the mayor about segregation in their city. Many children left their schools in order to be arrested, set free, and then to get arrested again the next day.
  • March on Washingtom

    March on Washingtom
    The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963. Attended by some 250,000 people, it was the largest demonstration ever seen in the nation's capital, and one of the first to have extensive television coverage
  • Selma to Montgomery March

    Selma to Montgomery March
    On "Bloody Sunday," March 7, 1965, some 600 civil rights marchers headed east out of Selma on U.S. Route 80. They got only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge six blocks away, where state and local lawmen attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas and drove them back into Selma. Two days later on March 9, Martin Luther King, Jr., led a "symbolic" march to the bridge. Then civil rights leaders sought court protection for a third, full-scale march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery