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The U.S. supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education marked a turning point in the history of race relations in the United States. On May 17, 1954, the Court stripped away constitutional sanctions for segregation by race, and made equal opportunity in education. -
Emmett Till, a fourteen year old African American boy, was murdered in August 1955 in a racist attack that shocked the nation and provided a catalyst for the emerging civil rights movement. Till was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, when he was accused of harassing a local white woman. -
The boycott took place from December 5, 1955, to December 20, 1956, and is regarded as the first large scale U.S. demonstration against segregation. Four days before the boycott began, Rosa Parks, an African American woman, was arrested and fined for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. -
The Little Rock Nine became an integral part of the fight for equal opportunity in American education when they dared to challenge public school segregation by enrolling at the all-white Central High School in 1957. Their appearance and award are part of the Centennial Celebration of Women at Marquette. -
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. -
The Freedom Rides brought together civil rights activists who rode interstate buses from DC into the segregated South in 1961 to challenge the non-enforcement of the U.S. Supreme Court decisions that ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional. -
The March on Washington was a massive protest march that occured in August 1963, when 250,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Also known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the event aimed to draw attention to continuing challenges and inequalities faced by African Americans a century after emancipation. -
The Birmingham church bombing occurred on September 15, 1963, when a bomb exploded before Sunday morning services at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Four young girls were killed and many other people injured. Outrage over the incident and the violent clash between protesters and police that followed helped draw national attention to the hard fought, often dangerous struggle for civil rights for African Americans. -
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 hiring, promoting and firing. -
The 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. -
Virginia, legal case, decided on June 12, 1967 in which the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down state statutes in Virginia as unconstitutional under the equal protection and due process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. -
Bloody Sunday, demonstration in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, on Sunday, January 30, 1972, by Roman Catholic civil rights supporters that turned violent when British paratroopers opened fire, killing 13 and injuring 14 others.