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The Montgomery Bus Boyott
segregation is being challenged in court, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat for a white man on a bus. This created The Jim Crow laws. fun fact: one of the first leaders of the boycott was Jo Ann Robinson who stayed up all night after Rosa was arrested and made copies of a flyer to hand out about the boycott. -
Little Rock 9
In 1896 the Supreme Court ruled it legal to segregate schools.However they were not equal Daisy Bates recruted 9 African Americans to enroll in Central HIgh.They became known as the Little Rock 9.After the first year, in 1958, the Arkansas governor closed all the public high schools in Little Rock. He decided that it was better to have no school at all than to have integrated schools. The schools remained closed for the entire school year. -
Civil Rights Act of 1957
The Civil Rights Act of 1957 did not create new rights, but it prohibited attempts to intimidate or prevent persons from voting and laid the foundation for federal enforcement of civil rights law including civil lawsuits. The Act created the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice and gave it the power to seek court injunctions against anyone interfering with the right to vote. It created the Civil Rights Commission increasing protection of voting rights and the power to investigate.. -
The Sit -In Movement
it quietly and wait to be served. Often the participants would be jeered and threatened by local customers. Sometimes they would be pelted with food or ketchup. Angry onlookers tried to provoke fights that never came. In the event of a physical attack, the student would curl up into a ball on the floor and take the punishment.In April 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. sponsored a conference to discuss strategy.TUDENT NONVIOLENT COORDINATING COMMITTEE (SNCC). Early leaders included STOKELY CARMICHAEL -
The Freedom Riders
In May, 1961, 13 Freedom Rider volunteers, seven black, six white, and nearly all young, were recruited by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to challenge state Jim Crow laws by riding buses together into the Deep South. Two buses set out to take them from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans. Serious violence erupted in Alabama when one bus was firebombed near Anniston, and riders in the other were badly beaten in Birmingham. While the original riders were forced to fly to New Orleans -
James Meredith and the Desegregation of the University of Mississippi
On September 30, 1962, riots erupted on the campus of the University of Mississippi in Oxford where locals, students, and committed segregationists had gathered to protest the enrollment of James Meredith, a black Air Force veteran attempting to integrate the all-white school. Despite the presence of more than 120 federal marshals who were on hand to protect Meredith from harm, the crowd turned violent after nightfall, and authorities struggled to maintain order. -
Protests in Birmingham
On 3 April the desegregation campaign was launched with a series of mass meetings, direct actions, lunch counter sit-ins, marches on City Hall, and a boycott of downtown merchants. King spoke to black citizens about the philosophy of nonviolence and its methods, and extended appeals for volunteers at the end of the mass meetings. With the number of volunteers increasing daily, actions soon expanded to kneel-ins at churches, sit-ins at the library, and a march on the county building to register. -
The March on Washington
On August 28, 1963, more than 200,000 Americans gathered in Washington, D.C., for a political rally known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Organized by a number of civil rights and religious groups, the event was designed to shed light on the political and social challenges African Americans continued to face across the country. The march, which became a key moment in the growing struggle for civil rights in the United States, culminated in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Drea -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights 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, Congress expanded the act. -
The Selma March
In early 1965, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) made Selma, Alabama, the focus of its efforts to register black voters in the South. That March, protesters attempting to march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery were met with violent resistance by state and local authorities. As the world watched, the protesters (under the protection of federalized National Guard troops) finally achieved their goal. -
Voting Rights Act of 1965
This act was signed into law on August 6, 1965, by President Lyndon Johnson. It outlawed the discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states after the Civil War, including literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting.This “act to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution” was signed into law 95 years after the amendment was ratified. In those years, African Americans in the South faced tremendous obstacles to voting, including poll taxes, literacy tests,.. -
Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
In early April 1968, shock waves reverberated around the world with the news that U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. A Baptist minister and founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), King had led the civil rights movement since the mid-1950s, using a combination of powerful words and non-violent tactics such as sit-ins, boycotts and protest marches (including the massive March on Washington in 1963)....
