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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. -
State-sanctioned segregation of public schools was a violation of the 14th amendment and was therefore unconstitutional.
overruling the "separate but equal" principle set forth in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case. -
kidnapped, beaten, shot in the head, had a large metal fan tied to his neck with barbed wire, and was thrown into the Tallahatchie River. -
violating a city law requiring racial segregation of public buses
a 13-month mass protest that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional. -
The Little Rock Nine refers to a group of African American students who were the first to integrate Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957.
keeping the nine students from entering the school, -
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. -
a dynamite bomb exploded in the back stairwell of the downtown Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.
killing four African-American girls on the other side and injuring more than 20 inside the church. -
a federal appeals court ordered the University of Mississippi to admit James Meredith, an African-American student. -
Byron De La Beckwith fired a single bullet,
Evers died shortly after arriving at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. His last words were, “Turn me loose.” -
The Stand in the Schoolhouse Door took place at Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama
a symbolic protest by Alabama governor George Wallace against integration of Alabama public universities. -
racial equality, justice
helped create the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, ending racial segregation in the United States. -
three protest marches, held in 1965, along the 54-mile highway from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery.
law enforcement officers beat unarmed marchers with billy clubs and sprayed them with tear gas. -
United States Senate passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
It outlawed the discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states after the Civil War, including literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting. -
It was a revolutionary organization with an ideology of Black nationalism, socialism, and armed self-defense, particularly against police brutality. -
James Earl Ray knowingly, intelligently, and voluntarily pleaded guilty to the first degree murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.