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On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. -
African American historical figure Rosa Parks refused to give her seat up for a white man on a public bus, her subsequent arrest initiated a sustained bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. -
Led by Martin Luther King, Jr., then a young local pastor, and was so successful that it was extended indefinitely. In the ensuing months, protestors faced threats, arrests, and termination from their jobs -
the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling that segregated seating was unconstitutional, and the federal decision went into effect on December 20, 1956. -
In September 1957 nine African American students attended their first day at Little Rock Central High School, whose entire student population had until that point been white. The Little Rock Nine, as they came to be called, encountered a large white mob and soldiers from the Arkansas National Guard. -
Opposition to US military involvement in Southeast Asia began in the 1950s and started to attract media attention in 1963 as the Kennedy Administration pushed combat troops into Vietnam. -
As antiwar protests grow, Johnson and American military leaders increase reliance on "search-and-destroy" missions in an effort to draw the Viet Cong into battles and inflict heavy casualties. But the Viet Cong prove difficult to pin down. By year's end, 6,000 American soldiers have died. -
In a protest against changes to the draft policy that threaten some of their deferments, students stage the first "sit-in" at the University of Wisconsin, occupying an administration building peacefully for several days before a compromise is reached. -
Ramparts magazine publishes photographs of Vietnamese children burned by napalm, spurring the involvement of Martin Luther King Jr., who will publicly denounce the war at a speech in New York in April. -
a group of men who had served in the conflict and called themselves the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. America's combat role in Vietnam came to an official end with the peace agreement signed in early 1973.