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Student Strike at Moton High School
On April 23, 1951, a group of Moton High School students walked out of their school and into history. To protest the overcrowded and inferior facilities at their school, 16-year-old Barbara Johns organized and led a two-week strike, during which students refused to attend classes. The students called upon lawyers from the NAACP. -
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African American Civil Rights
On April 23, 1951, a group of Moton High School students walked out of their school and into history. To protest the overcrowded and inferior facilities at their school, 16-year-old Barbara Johns organized and led a two-week strike, during which students refused to attend classes. The students called upon lawyers from the NAACP. -
Brown v. Board of Education
A landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 which allowed state-sponsored segregation. -
Emmett Till Murder
An African-American boy who was brutally murdered in Mississippi at the age of 14 after reportedly flirting with a white woman. Till was from Chicago, Illinois, visiting his relatives in the Mississippi Delta region when he spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the married proprietor of a small grocery store. -
Montgomery Bus Boycotts
A seminal episode in the U.S. civil rights movement, was a political and social protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the public transit system of Montgomery, Alabama. -
Massive Resistance Declared
A policy declared by U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr. of Virginia to unite other white politicians and leaders in Virginia in a campaign of new state laws and policies to prevent public school desegregation after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. -
Little Rock Nine
A group of African-American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. The ensuing Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, and then attended after the intervention of President Eisenhower, is considered to be one of the most important events in the African-American Civil Rights Movement -
Greensboro Sit-Ins
A series of nonviolent protests in 1960 which led to the Woolworth's department store chain reversing its policy of racial segregation in the Southern United States. -
Freedom Riders
Civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated southern United States in 1961 and following years to test the United States Supreme Court decisions Boynton v. Virginia. -
Integration of Ole Miss
An African-American man named James Meredith attempted to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Chaos briefly 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.