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The Plessy v. Ferguson decision upheld the principle of racial segregation over the next half-century. Writing for the majority, Associate Justice Henry Billings Brown rejected Plessy's arguments that the act violated the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibited slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted full and equal rights of citizenship to African Americans. -
European Theater of World War II.
First African-American pilots who proved themselves just as useful as white Americans. -
Team owners knew that if baseball were integrated, the Negro Leagues would probably not survive losing their best players to the majors, major league owners would lose significant rental revenue, and many Negro League players would lose their livelihoods. All thanks to Jackie Robinson. -
Executive Order 9981 stated that "there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed forces without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin." -
A case in which the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited the University of Texas from rejecting applicants solely on the basis of race. -
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483, was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. -
Emmett's death in Mississippi in 1955, African Americans across the country, including in the segregated South, had begun the struggle for justice. Emmett Till's murder was a spark in the upsurge of activism and resistance that became known as the Civil Rights movement. -
Rosa Parks stood up for herself and her rights by not letting the white Americans let them do as they want because they aren't "colored." She became popular after she was arrested for not giving up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. -
The desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, gained national attention on September 3, 1957, when Governor Orval Faubus mobilized the Arkansas National Guard in an effort to prevent nine African American students from integrating the high school. -
The result was the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. The new act established the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department and empowered federal prosecutors to obtain court injunctions against interference with the right to vote thanks to president Eisenhower. -
When four Black students refused to move from a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in 1960, nation-wide student activism gained momentum. -
Freedom Riders were groups of white and African American civil rights activists who participated in Freedom Rides, bus trips through the American South in 1961 to protest segregated bus terminals. -
Restricted the act of taxing on votes. -
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. -
The Stand in the Schoolhouse Door took place at Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama. -
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Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated on Friday, November 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m. CST in Dallas, Texas, while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza. -
In 1964, Congress passed Public Law 88-352 (78 Stat. 241). The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Provisions of this civil rights act forbade discrimination on the basis of sex, as well as, race in hiring, promoting, and firing. -
Malcolm X was an African-American Muslim minister and human rights activist who was a prominent figure during the civil rights movement. A spokesman for the Nation of Islam until 1964, he was a vocal advocate for black empowerment and the promotion of Islam within the black community. -
The first march took place on March 7, 1965, organized locally by Bevel, Amelia Boynton, and others. State troopers and county possemen attacked the unarmed marchers with billy clubs and tear gas after they passed over the county line, and the event became known as Bloody Sunday. -
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. -
Martin Luther King Jr., an African-American clergyman and civil rights leader, was fatally shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, at 6:01 p.m. CST. He was rushed to St. Joseph's Hospital, where he died at 7:05 p.m. -
An expansion of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, popularly known as the Fair Housing Act, prohibits discrimination concerning the sale, rental, or financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin, and sex.