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13th Amendment
Passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified on December 6, 1865, the 13th amendment abolished slavery in the United States and provides that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.". -
14th Amendment
The 14th amendment to the US Constitution was ratified on July 9, 1868 during the Reconstruction era. It, along with the 13th and 15th amendments are collectively known as the Reconstruction amendments. However, of those three, the 14th is the most complicated and the one that has had the more unforeseen effects. -
15th Amendment
The 15th Amendment to the Constitution granted African American men the right to vote by declaring that the "right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." -
Poll Tax
A poll or head tax is one imposed equally on all adults at the time of voting and is not affected by property ownership or income. The poll tax was used in the South during and after Reconstruction as a means of circumventing the 14th Amendment and denying civil rights to blacks. This form of taxation gradually fell out of favor in the South in the mid-20th century, but it was not until the adoption of the 24th Amendment that poll taxes were made illegal as a prerequisite for voting in federal e -
Literarcy Tests
A literacy test, in the context of American political history from the 1890s to the 1960s, refers to state government practices of administering tests to prospective voters purportedly to test their literacy in order to vote. In practice, these tests were intended to disenfranchise African-Americans. For other nations, literacy tests have been a matter of immigration policy. -
Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy (P) attempted to sit in an all-white railroad car. After refusing to sit in the black railway carriage car, Plessy was arrested for violating an 1890 Louisiana statute that provided for segregated “separate but equal” railroad accommodations. Those using facilities not designated for their race were criminally liable under the statute. At trial with Justice John H. Ferguson (D) presiding, Plessy was found guilty on the grounds that the law was a reasonable exercise of the state’s police -
19th Amendment
Between 1878, when the amendment was first introduced in Congress, and August 18, 1920, when it was ratified, champions of voting rights for women worked tirelessly, but strategies for achieving their goal varied. Some pursued a strategy of passing suffrage acts in each state--nine western states adopted woman suffrage legislation by 1912. -
Korematsu v. United States
Fred Korematsu refused to obey the wartime order to leave his home and report to a relocation camp for Japanese Americans. He was arrested and convicted. After losing in the Court of Appeals, he appealed to the United States Supreme Court, challenging the constitutionality of the deportation order. -
Sweatt v. Painter
In 1946, Heman Marion Sweatt, a black man, applied for admission to the University of Texas Law School. State law restricted access to the university to whites, and Sweatt's application was automatically rejected because of his race. When Sweatt asked the state courts to order his admission, the university attempted to provide separate but equal facilities for black law students. -
Brown v. Board of Education
Brown v. Board of Education (1954), now acknowledged as one of the greatest Supreme Court decisions of the 20th century, unanimously held that the racial segregation of children in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. -
Montgomery Bus Boycott
The Montgomery Bus Boycott, in which African Americans refused to ride city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest segregated seating, took place from December 5, 1955, to December 20, 1956, and is regarded as the first large-scale demonstration against segregation in the U.S. On December 1, 1955, four days before the boycott began, Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, refused to yield her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus. She was arrested and fined. -
End of Montgomery Bus Boycott
The ending of the Montgomery Bus Boycott on this date. The Bus Boycott started with Rosa Parks and escalated quickly. -
Literarcy Tests Ended
The literarcy tests ended on this date after all those years. The literarcy tests have affected many people and shaped lives today. -
24th Amendment
The 24th amendment was important to the Civil Rights Movement as it ended mandatory poll taxes that prevented many African Americans. Poll taxes, combined with grandfather clauses and intimidation, effectively prevented African Americans from having any sort of political power, especially in the South. -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (July 2, 1964) is a landmark piece of civil rights legislation in the United States that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It ended unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public (known as "public accommodations"). -
Jim Crow
The Jim Crow Laws were created in 1876 simply to segregate black people from the white population. Some English Dictionaries define ‘Jim Crow’ as the name for an implement that can straighten or bend iron rails; or, along with ‘Jim Crowism’, systems or practices of racial discrimination or segregation. The American English Dictionary suggests that the name only emerged in dictionaries in 1904, but it was clearly used generally in 1876, at least. -
Voting Rights Act of 1965
The Voting Rights Act (VRA) bans racial discrimination in voting practices by the federal government as well as by state and local governments. Passed in 1965 after a century of deliberate and violent denial of the vote to African-Americans in the South and Latinos in the Southwest – as well as many years of entrenched electoral systems that shut out citizens with limited fluency in English – the VRA is often held up as the most effective civil rights law ever enacted. It is widely regarded as -
Robert Kennedy Speech in Indianapolis upon death of MLK
Robert F. Kennedy's speech on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. was given on April 4, 1968, in Indianapolis, Indiana. Kennedy, the United States senator from New York, was campaigning to earn the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination when he learned that King had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Earlier that day Kennedy had spoken at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend and at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. -
Equal Rights Amendment
After women's right to vote was guaranteed by the 19th Amendment in 1920, she proposed the ERA as the next step in confirming "equal justice under law" for all citizens. The ERA was introduced into every Congress between 1923 and 1972, when it was passed and sent to the states for ratification. -
Reed v. Reed
Reed v. Reed, 404 U.S. 71 (1971), was an Equal Protection case in the United States in which the Supreme Court ruled that the administrators of estates cannot be named in a way that discriminates between sexes. -
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke
Allan Bakke, a thirty-five-year-old white man, had twice applied for admission to the University of California Medical School at Davis. He was rejected both times. The school reserved sixteen places in each entering class of one hundred for "qualified" minorities, as part of the university's affirmative action program, in an effort to redress longstanding, unfair minority exclusions from the medical profession. -
Bowers v. Hardwick
Bowers v. Hardwick, (1986), is a United States Supreme Court decision, overturned in 2003, that upheld, in a 5–4 ruling, the constitutionality of a Georgia sodomy law criminalizing oral and anal sex in private between consenting adults when applied to homosexuals. -
Americans with Disabilities Act
The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) is a law that was enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1990. Senator Tom Harkin authored the bill and was its chief sponsor in the Senate. Harkin delivered part of his introduction speech in sign language, saying it was so his deaf brother could understand. It was signed into law on July 26, 1990, by President George H. W. Bush, and later amended with changes effective January 1, 2009. -
Lawerence v. Texas
Houston police were dispatched to Lawrence’s apartment in response to a reported weapons disturbance. The officers found Lawrence and Garner engaged in a sexual act. Lawrence and Garner were charged and convicted under Texas law of “deviate sexual intercourse, namely anal sex, with a member of the same sex (man).” -
Fisher v. Texas
Fisher v. University of Texas, (2013), is a United States Supreme Court case concerning the affirmative action admissions policy of the University of Texas at Austin. The Supreme Court voided the lower appellate court's ruling in favor of the University and remanded the case, holding that the lower court had not applied the standard of strict scrutiny, articulated in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), to its admissions program. -
Indiana Gay Rights Court Battle
Same-sex marriage has been legally recognized in Indiana since October 7, 2014. The state had previously restricted marriage to male-female couples by statute in 1986. By legislation passed in 1997, it denied recognition to same-sex relationships established in other jurisdictions. -
Affirmative Action
According to the National Conference of State Legislators, affirmative action policies are those in which an "institution or organization actively engages in efforts to improve opportunities for historically excluded groups in American society. Affirmative action policies tend to focus on issues such as education and employment, specifically granting special consideration to minorities and women who have been historically excluded groups in America.
