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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. -
While visiting family in Money, Mississippi, 14-year-old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago, is brutally murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman four days earlier. -
A civil rights protest during which African Americans refused to ride city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest segregated seating. Four days before the boycott began, Rosa Parks, was arrested and fined for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. -
The Little Rock Nine was a group of nine African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas. -
The Greensboro sit-in was a civil rights protest that started in 1960, when 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. The sit-in movement soon spread to college towns throughout the South. -
Black and White people rode around in a bus in the south of the United States and protested against segregation. -
A massive protest march, when some 250,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. -
Martin Luther King jr says that people have a moral responsibility to break unjust laws and to take direct action rather than waiting potentially forever for justice to come through the courts. He was referred to as an "outsider" and this is how he responded: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." -
The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was a white supremacist terrorist bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. -
The 24th amendment outlawed the poll tax as a voting requirement in federal elections. The poll tax exemplified “Jim Crow” laws, developed in the post-Reconstruction South, which aimed to disenfranchise black voters and institute segregation. -
It prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. The Act prohibited discrimination in public accommodations and federally funded programs. It also strengthened the enforcement of voting rights and the desegregation of schools. -
On "Bloody Sunday," some 600 civil rights marchers headed east out of Selma on U.S. Route 80. They got only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge six blocks away, where state and local lawmen attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas and drove them back into Selma. -
This act was signed by President Lyndon Johnson. It outlawed the discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states after the Civil War. -
A Supreme Court case that struck down state laws banning interracial marriage in the United States. The plaintiffs in the case were Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and Black woman whose marriage was deemed illegal according to Virginia state law.