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The 13th Amendment declared that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." Formally abolishing slavery in the United States,
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The 14th Amendment granted citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” which included former slaves recently freed.
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The 15th Amendment granted African American men the right to vote by declaring that 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."
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Plessy vs Ferguson was a landmark constitutional law case of the US Supreme Court. It upheld state racial segregation laws for public facilities under the doctrine of "separate but equal".
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Mendez vs. Westminster School District of Orange County was a federal court case that challenged racial segregation in Orange County, California schools.
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Jackie Robinson became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball in the modern era.
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The first black bus boycott was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, way before Rosa Parks.
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Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas unanimously held that the racial segregation of children in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
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Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American boy from Chicago, is killed near Money, Miss., for allegedly whistling at a white woman.
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In Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks sat in the white section of a bus and refused to move, which started a bus boycott which eventually led to reform.
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Four young African-American men go to a Woolworth in Greensboro, N.C., and sit down at a whites-only lunch counter
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James Meredith became the first African-American student at Ole Miss after President Kennedy orders U.S. marshals to Mississippi to ensure his safety.
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The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the March on Washington, or The Great March on Washington, was one of the largest political rallies for human rights in United States history and demanded civil and economic rights for African Americans.
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Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act which formally banned segregation in public places such as hospitals and schools.
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One week after his home was firebombed, Malcolm X was shot to death by Nation of Islam members while speaking at a rally of his organization in New York City.
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Martin Luther King Jr. was shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee