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rosa parks
an NAACP activist in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a public bus in 1955. Her act of civil disobedience galvanized the U.S. civil rights movement. -
emmitt till
In August 1955, a Chicago teenager, Emmett Till, was brutally murdered in Mississippi while visiting family. Till was lynched for the alleged “crime” of allegedly whistling at a white woman. The episode riveted national attention on violence against blacks in the South. -
civil rights
the act established a two-year U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (CCR) and created a civil rights division in the Justice Department, but its powers to enforce voting laws and punish the disfranchisement of black voters were feeble, as the commission noted in 1959 -
bloody sunday
King and Ralph Abernathy led marchers who were turned around by state troopers across the bridge. The successful Selma to Montgomery March finally began on March 21 and concluded on March 25, where approximately 25,000 marchers, black and white, assembled at the Alabama State Capitol -
right to vote
January 1965 Martin Luther King Jr., President of SCLC, launched a campaign to secure the right to vote in Selma, Alabama, following an unsuccessful voter registration drive begun by SNCC in 1963 -
voting rights act
March 15, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress to urge the passage of a voting rights bill in response to Martin Luther King Jr.’s campaign in Selma, Alabama