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Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to all persons "born or naturalized in the United States," including formerly enslaved people
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Jim Crow law, in U.S. history, any of the laws that enforced racial segregation in the South.
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The U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson ruled that separate-but-equal facilities were constitutional. The Plessy v. Ferguson decision upheld the principle of racial segregation over the next half-century.
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President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981, creating the President's Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services. The order mandated the desegregation of the U.S. military.
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The justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional.
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Emmett Louis Till was an African American boy who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955 at the age of 14, after being accused of offending a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family's grocery store.
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Rosa Parks invigorated the struggle for racial equality when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks' arrest on December 1, 1955 launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott by 17,000 black citizens.
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The first African American students to enter Little Rock's Central High School.
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The Greensboro sit-in was a civil rights protest that started in 1960, when young African American students staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave after being denied service. The sit-in movement soon spread to college towns throughout the South.
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The Freedom Riders challenged this status quo by riding interstate buses in the South in mixed racial groups to challenge local laws or customs that enforced segregation in seating.
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Meredith became the first African-American student to enroll at the University of Mississippi.
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Attempting to block integration at the University of Alabama, Governor of Alabama George Wallace stands at the door of Foster Auditorium while being confronted by U.S. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach.
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Medgar Wiley Evers was an American civil rights activist and the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi, who was murdered by Byron De La Beckwith.
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Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. In the speech, he evoked the memory of Abraham Lincoln, the emancipation of the slaves, and the "shameful condition" of segregation in America 100 years after the American Civil War.
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Lyndon B. Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act that was able to put an end to the discriminatory practice.
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Hundreds of people gathered in Selma, Alabama to march to the capital city of Montgomery. They marched to ensure that African Americans could exercise their constitutional right to vote.
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US courts have long recognized a constitutional right to marry. The US Supreme Court ruled that bans on interracial marriage were unconstitutional, extending the right to marry to interracial couples nationwide.
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Amendment Twenty-four to the Constitution abolished and forbids the federal and state governments from imposing taxes on voters during federal elections.
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Martin Luther King Jr., an African-American clergyman and civil rights leader, was fatally shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.