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Plessy v. Ferguson
The ruling had established the “separate but equal” doctrine. Laws that segregated African Americans were permitted as long as equal facilities were provided for them. -
Southern Resistance
The actions to the desegregation rights in the south resulted in thousands of white students rebelling against the government trying to pressure their local governments and school boards into defying the school board. Many states adopted pupil assignment laws. These laws established elaborate requirements other than race that schools could use to prevent African Americans from attending white schools. -
Brown Vs. Board of Education
After WWII, the NAACP continued to challenge segregation in the courts. The chief counsel and director at that time was Thurgood Marshall. After the war Marshall focused his segregation in public schools. In 1954 the Supreme Court combined several cases and was to issue a general ruling on segregation cases in schools. A signifigant case was involving a girl named Linda Brown, who was denied admission to her school in Topeka, KS because of her race. With the help of the NAACP, her parents then s -
Rosa Parks Incadent
Rosa Parks left her job as a seamstress in Montgomery, AL and boarded a bus to go home. At that time Montgomery reserved seats in the front for the whites and seats in the rear for African Americans. Seats in the middle were open to African Americans but only if there are few whites on the bus. She took a seat just behind the white section; soon all of the seats on the bus were filled. When the bus driver noticed a white man standing, he told Parks and three other African Americans in her row to -
Montgomery Bus Boycott
Because of Rosa Parks incident several African American leaders formed the Montgomery improvement association to run the boycott and to negotiate with city leaders for an end to segregation. They elected a young pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. to lead them. -
Eisenhower Sympathizes
Along with the civil rights movements president Eisenhower personally disagreed with segregation. Following the precedent set by President Truman, he ordered navy ship yards and veteran hospitals to desegregate. -
Bus Segregation Illegal
On November 1956 the Supreme Court affirmed the decision of a special three-judge panel declaring Alabama’s law requiring segregation on buses unconstitutional. -
SCLC
After the Montgomery Bus Boycott demonstrated that non violent protests could be successful African American ministers lead by Martin Luther King established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. -
New Civil Rights Legislation
The same year that the little rock crisis began, congress passed the first civil rights law since reconstruction. The civil rights act of 1957 was intended to protect the right of African Americans to vote. -
Crisis In Little Rock
On September 1957, the school board in Little Rock, AR, when a court order requiring nine African American students be admitted to Central High a school with 2000 white students. The Governor of Arkansas orders troops from the Arkansas National Guard, to prevent the nine students from entering the school. -
The Sit In Movement
Four young African Americans enrolled at North Carolina agricultural and technical college. The four freshmen spent evenings talking about the Civil Rights Movement. In January 1960, one of them suggested a sit in at the white’s only lunch counter in the nearby Woolworth department store -
The Freedom Riders
They were a team of African American and white volunteers, many who were college students, traveling to the south to draw attention to its refusal to integrate bus terminals. When they arrived to the south they were greeted by a mob of angry white people that slit the bus tires and threw rocks at the windows and at one point someone threw a fire bomb into the buses -
The Civil Rights Act of 1964
This was the most comprehensive Civil Rights Law congress had ever enacted. It gave the federal government broad power to prevent racial discrimination in a number of areas. The law made segregation illegal in most places of public congregation, and gave citizens of all races and nationalities access to public facilities. The law gave the U.S. attorney general more power to bring lawsuits to force school desegregation and required private employers to end discrimination in the work place. It als -
The Selma March
In January 1965, the SCLC and Dr. King selected Selma, AL, as the focal point for their campaign for voting rights. Even though the population of the town was made up of mainly African Americans only 3% were registered voters. They marched from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery, a distance of about 80 miles. On Sunday March 7, 1965 the march began. They led 500 protestors toward U.S. highway 80, the route that marchers had planned to follow to Montgomery -
SNCC
The Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee played a key role in desegregating public facilities in dozens of southern communities. SNCC also began sending volunteers into rural areas in the deep south to register African Americans to vote -
Malcolm X
By the early 1960s, a young man named Malcolm X had become a symbol of the black power movement. When he was young he experienced a difficult childhood in adolescence. He drifted in to a life of crime and, in 1946, he was convicted of burglary and sent to prison for 6 years. Prison transformed Malcolm. He began to educate himself and played an active role in the prison debate society. Eventually, he joined the Nation of Islam, commonly known as the Black Muslims. Despite their name, the Black Mu -
The Voting Rights Act of 1965
On august 3, 1965, the House of Representatives passes Voting Rights Bill by a wide margin. It authorized the U.S. attorney general to send federal examiners to register qualified voters, by passing local officials who often refused to register African Americans. The law also suspended discriminatory devices, such as literacy tests, in countries where less than half of all adults were registered to vote -
The Watts Riot
Just five days after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights, a riot erupted in Watts, in an African American neighborhood Los Angeles. Police brutality caused the uprising, which lasted for six days and required over 14,000 members of the National Guard and 1,500 law officers to restore order. Rioters burned and looted entire neighborhoods and destroyed about $45 million in property. They killed 34 people and injured about 900 others -
The Chicago Movement
The Chicago Movement started when Dr. King and his wife moved into a slum apartment in an African American neighborhood in Chicago. Dr. King and the SCLC hoped to work with local leaders to improve the economic status of African Americans in poor neighborhoods. When Dr. King led a march through the all white suburb of Marquette Park to demonstrate the need for open housing, he was met by angry white mobs similar to those in Birmingham, and Selma -
The Kerner Commission
The Kerner Commission was established to study the causes of the urban riots and to make recommendations to prevent them from happening again. The commission blamed racism for most of the problems in the inner city. The commission recommended the creation of two million inter-city jobs, the construction of 6 million new units of public housing, and a renewed federal commitment to fight defacto segregation -
King’s Assassination
Dr. King went to Memphis, TN to support a strike of African American sanitation workers in March, 1968. On April 4, 1968, as he stood on his hotel balcony in Memphis, Dr. King was assassinated by a sniper. Dr. King’s death touched off both national mourning and riots in more than a hundred cities, including Washington D.C. -
Civil Rights Act of 1968
The act contained a fair housing provision, outlined discrimination and housing sales, and rentals, and gave the justice apartment authority to bring suits against such discrimination -
Violence In Birmingham
In the spring of 1963, Dr. King decided to launch demonstrations in Burmingham, Alabama, knowing they would provoke a violent response. He believed it was the only way to get President Kennedy to actively support Civil Rights -
The March on Washington
Determined to introduce the Civil Rights Bill, Kennedy now waited for a dramatic moment to address the nation on the issue. Dr. King realized that Kennedy would have a very difficult time pushing his Civil Rights bill through congress. To aid with this Dr. King decided to make a march on Washington. On August 28, 1963, more than 200,000 demonstrators of all races flocked to the nation’s capital
