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13th Amendment
13th Amendment was important because it created a constitutional amendment that banned slavery in ALL of the American states. The Emancipation Proclamation, although frequently credited for abolishing slavery in the United States, only declared slavery illegal in "rebelling" parts of America - so basically within the Confederacy. States fighting for the Union who had slavery system were not required to free their slaves. -
14th Amendment
14th Amendment contained three major provisions: The Citizenship Clause granted citizenship to All persons born or naturalized in the United States. The Due Process Clause declared that states may not deny any person "life, liberty or property, without due process of law." -
15th Amendment
15th Amendment, granting African-American men the right to vote, was formally adopted into the U.S. Constitution on March 30, 1870. Passed by Congress the year before, the amendment reads: “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.” -
Literacy Test
literacy test was a device to restrict the total number of immigrants while not offending the large element of ethnic voters. The "old" immigration (British, Irish, German, Scandinavian) had fallen off and was replaced by a "new" immigration from Italy, Russia and other points in Southern and eastern Europe. The "old" immigrants were voters and strongly approved of restricting the "new" immigrants. All groups of American voters strongly opposed Chinese and Asian immigration. -
Plessy v Ferguson
Plessy 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. -
19th Amendment
19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted American women the right to vote—a right known as woman suffrage. At the time the U.S. was founded, its female citizens did not share all of the same rights as men, including the right to vote. It was not until 1848 that the movement for women’s rights launched on a national level with a convention in Seneca Falls, New York, organized by abolitionists Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) and Lucretia Mott (1793-1880). -
Equal Rights Amendment
The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution designed to guarantee equal rights for women. The resolution in Congress that proposed the amendment set a ratification deadline of March 22, 1979. Several feminist organizations that dispute the validity and the permanence of the ratification deadline, along with also disputing the validity of the five rescissions, continue to work at the federal and state levels for the adoption of the ERA. -
Jim Crow Law
Jim Crow Laws were statutes and ordinances established between 1874 and 1975 to separate the white and black races in the American South. In theory, it was to create "separate but equal" treatment, but in practice Jim Crow Laws condemned black citizens to inferior treatment and facilities. Education was segregated as were public facilities such as hotels and restaurants under Jim Crow Laws. -
Sweatt v Painter
Racial separation by force of law was a historic custom in the United States until the decision of Sweatt v. Painter by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1950. The manner in which segregation of the races by state action in a variety of contexts became established at law, in the face of the Fourteenth Amendment's prohibiting a state from denying to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. -
Brown v Board of Education
Brown v. Board of Education of Topek was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which allowed state-sponsored segregation, insofar as it applied to public education. Handed down on May 17, 1954. -
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. -
Civil Right Act of 1964
which ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, is considered one of the crowning legislative achievements of the civil rights movement. First proposed by President John F. Kennedy, it survived strong opposition from southern members of Congress and was then signed into law by Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. In subsequent years, -
Voting Rights Act
Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson (1908-73) on August 6, 1965, aimed to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote under the 15th Amendment (1870) to the Constitution of the United States. The act significantly widened the franchise and is considered among the most far-reaching pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S. history. -
24th Amendment
24th Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits requiring a poll tax for voters in federal elections. Southern states of the former Confederacy adopted poll taxes in laws of the late 19th century and new constitutions from 1890 to 1908, after the Democratic Party had generally regained control of state legislatures decades after the end of Reconstruction as a measure to prevent African Americans and often poor whites from voting. -
Poll Tax
poll tax was a prerequisite to the registration for voting in a number of states The tax emerged in some states of the United States in the late 19th century as part of the Jim Crow laws. After the right to vote was extended to all races by the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment ereto the United States Constitution, a number of states enacted poll tax laws as a device for restricting voting rights. -
Robert Kennedy- speech
It was supposed to be a routine campaign stop. In a poor section of Indianapolis, 40 years ago Friday, a largely black crowd had waited an hour to hear the presidential candidate speak. The candidate, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, had been warned not to go by the city's police chief. As his car entered the neighborhood, his police escort left him. Once there, he stood in the back of a flatbed truck. He turned to an aide and asked, "Do they know about Martin Luther King?" -
Reed v Reed
Reed v. Reed 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.Sally and Cecil Reed, a married couple who had separated, were in conflict over which of them to designate as administrator of the estate of their deceased son. -
regrets of the U of C v Bakke
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke was a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States. It upheld affirmative action, allowing race to be one of several factors in college admission policy. However, the court ruled that specific quotas, such as the 16 out of 100 seats set aside for minority students by the University of California, Davis School of Medicine, were impermissible. -
Affirmative Action
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 often focus on employment and education. In institutions of higher education, affirmative action refers to admission policies that provide equal access to education for those groups that have been historically excluded or underrepresented, such as women and minorities. -
Bowers v Hardwick
Bowers v. Hardwick 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.The majority opinion, written by Justice Byron White, argued that the Constitution did not confer "a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy." -
Americans with Disabilities Act
The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 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.The ADA is a wide-ranging civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on disability. It affords similar protections against discrimination to Americans with disabilities as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made discrimination based on race, religion, sex, national origin, and other characteristics illegal. -
Lawrence v Texas
Lawrence v. Texas is a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court. In the 6–3 ruling the Court struck down the sodomy law in Texas and, by extension, invalidated sodomy laws in 13 other states, making same-sex sexual activity legal in every U.S. state and territory. The Court overturned its previous ruling on the same issue in the 1986 case Bowers v. Hardwick, where it upheld a challenged Georgia statute and did not find a constitutional protection of sexual privacy, -
Fisher v Texas
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 and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke to its admissions program. -
Indiana's 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. -
Korematsu v United States
Korematsu v. United States was a landmark United States Supreme Court case concerning the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II regardless of citizenship.The decision in Korematsu v. United States has been very controversial.Korematsu's conviction for evading internment was overturned on November 10, 1983.
