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Between 1800 and 1890 there was a tremendous change and upheaval in America. Despite the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves, the promise of equality guaranteed to African Americans by the Civil War Amendments by the Civil War Amendments failed to become a reality. Women's rights activists also began to make claims for equality, often using the arguments enunciated for the abolition of slavery, but they too fell far short of their goals.
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As the nation grew westward in the early 1800's conflicts between northern and southern states intensified over the admission of new states to the union with free or slave status. The firs major crisis occurred when Missouri applied for admission to the union as a slave state. The compromise prohibited slavery north of geographical boundary at 36 degrees latitude.
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William Lloyd Garrison, a white New Englander, galvanized the abolitionist movement. He then founded the American Anti-Slavery Society, and within five years it had more than 250,000 members.
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Garrison and Frederick Douglass, a well-known black abolitionist writer, left the Anti-Slavery Society when it refused to accept their demand that women be allowed to participate equally in all its activities.
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Three hundred women and men, including Frederick Douglass, attended the firs meeting for women's rights, which was held in Seneca Falls, New York. The convention attracted people from all over New York State and other states as well who believed that men and women should be able to enjoy all rights of citizenship equally. Attendees passed resolutions calling for the abolition of legal, economic, and social discrimination against women.
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Written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, this novel depicts the evils of slavery, and it further inflamed the country. In 1852 this novel sold more than 300,000 copies.
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The Court ruled that the Missouri Compromise, which prohibited slavery north of a set geographical boundary, was unconstitutional. Furthermore, the court went on to add that slaves were not United States citizens, and as a consequence, slaves could not bring suits in federal court.
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The Civil War lasts from 1861 to 1865.
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The addition of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments that were passed, between 1865 and 1870, were considered the Civil War Amendments. They introduced the notion of equality into the Constitution.
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With the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment slavery and involuntary servitude was outlawed.
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The acts were enacted by Congress to invalidate some state Black Codes. President Andrew Johnson vetoed the legislation, but for the first time in history Congress overrode a presidential veto.
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Congress passed a law allowing free migration from China.
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With the passing of this Amendment all freed slaves were guaranteed citizenship. This Amendment also barred states from abridging "the privileges or immunities of citizenship" or denying "any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law" or denying "any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
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This Amendment guaranteed the "right of citizens" to vote regardless of their "race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
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Congress passed these acts which were designed to grant equal access to public accommodations such as theaters, restaurants, and transportation. The act also prohibited the exclusion of African Americans from jury service.
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The Jim Crow Laws were enacted by southern states that discriminated against blacks by creating "whites only" schools, theaters, hotels, and other public accommodations. These laws also banned interracial marriage. These laws were actually upheld by the judiciary.
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Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was the first to restrict the immigration of any identifiable nationality.
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These were five separate cases involving the convictions of private individuals found to have violated the Civil Rights Act by refusing to extend accommodations to African Americans in theaters, a hotel, and a railroad.
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The Dawes Act, the government switched policies to promote assimilation over separation.
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Poll taxes, property-owning qualifications, and "literacy" or "understanding" tests were given to all voters to help eliminate the effect of the black vote in the south.
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When the National and American Woman Suffrage Associations merged the new organization was renamed the National American Woman Suffrage Association, headed by Susan B. Anthony.
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This case declared that separate but equal was constitutional.
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Many souther states added a grandfather clause which prohibited anyone from voting unless their grandfather had voted before Reconstruction.
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Oswald Garrison Villard and William Lloyd Garrison called a conference to discuss the problem of race riots in American cities. The group soon evolved into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
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A collation of women's groups, led b NAWSA and the Newer, more radical National Woman's Party, was able to secure ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. This Amendment guaranteed all women the right to vote.
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The early immigrants that moved to New Mexico formed the League of United Latin American Citizens.
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The NAACP started to test the constitutionally of the Jim Crow Laws preparing to try and change a case to readdress separate but equal enacted by Plessy v. Ferguson.
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This case was really four cases brought from different areas of the South and border states involving public elementary or high school systems that mandated separate but equal schools for blacks and whites. The court ruled that separate but equal "has no place."
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The Court ruled that racially segregated systems must be dismantled "with all deliberate speed."
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Rosa Parks refused to leaver her seat on a bus to move to the back to make room for a white male passenger. She was arrested for violation an Alabama law banning integration of public facilities, including buses. After being released on bond, Parks and the NAACP enlisted city clergy and distributed 35,000 handbills calling for African Americans to boycott the Montgomery Bus System. Pastors preached the cause in their Sunday sermons.
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The recognition and respect that Reverend Martin Luther King earned within in the African American community helped him to launch the SCLC.
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This case was filed by the Little Rock School Board asking the federal district court for a two-and-one-half year delay in implementation of its desegregation plans. The court ruled that "no state legislator or executive or judicial officer can war against the Constitution without violation his undertaking to support it."
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Sudents at the all-black north Carolina Agricultural and Technical College participated in the first sit-in. The Students marched to a local lunch counter, sat down, and ordered cups of coffee. They were refused service, but sat at the counter until police arrived.
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The Justice John Harlan wrote, "Despite the enlightened emancipation of women from the restrictions and protections of bygone years, and their entry into many parts of community life formerly considered to be reserved to men, a woman is still regarded as the center of home and family life."
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Florida required women who wished to serve on juries to travel to the country courthouse and register for that duty. However, all me who were registered to vote were automatically eligible to serve.
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President John F. Kennedy requested that Congress pass a law banning discrimination in public accommodations. Seizing the moment Martin Luther King Jr. called for a monumental march on Washington D.C. to demonstrate widespread support for far-ranging anti-discrimination legislation.
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when this report was released it documented pervasive discrimination against women in all walks of life.
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This act requires employers to pay women and men equal pay for equal work.
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Birmingham Marches
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. launched a series of massive nonviolent demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama. Thousands of blacks and whites marched to Birmingham in a show of solidarity. Peaceful marchers were met by the police commissioner, who ordered his officers to use dogs, clubs, and fire hoses on the marchers, Americans watched these events unfold and were horrified. -
The publication of Beddy Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" led some women to question their lives and status in society, added to their dawning recognition that something was wrong.
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The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was held only a few months after the Birmingham demonstrations. More than 250,000 people heard King deliver his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. However, before Congress had the opportunity to vote on any legislation President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas.
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The United States Congress passes sweeping anti-discrimination legislation in this act. This act banned discrimination in employment, public accommodations, and education based on race, creed, color, religion, national origin, or sex. Congress has since added prohibition based on pregnancy and disability to the act.
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The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passes after the longest filibuster in the history of the Senate. These acts outlawed arbitrary discrimination in voter registration and expedited voting rights lawsuits, barred discrimination in public accommodations engaged in interstate commerce, authorized the Department of Justice to initiate lawsuits to desegregate public facilities and schools, and prohibited discrimination in employment on grounds of race, creed, color, religion, national origin, or sex.
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After the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission failed to enforce the law as it applied to sex discrimination, female activists formed the National Organization for Women. This group was modeled after the NAACP
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The Native American Rights Fund was founded, because the NAAPC LDF of the Indian rights movement.
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With this case the Supreme Court ruled that all vestiges of state-imposed segregation or discrimination by law, must be eliminated at once.
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With pressure from NOW and other feminist groups Congress voted in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment, by overwhelming majorities.
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The Supreme Court decided that women had a constitutionally protected right to privacy that included the right to terminate a pregnancy.
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National attention was drawn to the plight of Indians when members of the radical American Indian Movement took over Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the site of the massacre of 150 Indians by the U.S. Army in 1890.
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The Supreme Court refused to find that a Texas law under which the state appropriated a set dollar amount to each school district per pupil, while allowing wealthier districts to enrich educational programs from other funds, violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
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The original ruling of the Supreme Court was unanimously reversed.
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In the late 1970's the lesbians initially did not fare well in the Supreme Court. The Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Lesbian Rights Project, and Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders were founded by gay and lesbian activists dedicated to ending legal restrictions on the civil rights of homosexuals.
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A sharply divided Court concluded that Bakke's rejection had been illegal because the use of strict quotas was inappropriate. The medical school, however, was free to "take race into account."
