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The Scottsboro Boys were nine African American teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women on a train in Alabama in 1931, sparking an infamous, racially charged trials highlighting deep-seated Southern racism and leading to decades of legal battles, becoming a pivotal case in American civil rights history. -
Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black teenager from Chicago, was brutally lynched in Money, Mississippi on August 28, 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman. His kidnappers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, beat and shot him, dumping his body in the Tallahatchie River. An all-white jury acquitted them, igniting the Civil Rights Movement. -
The Little Rock Nine were nine African American students who became famous in 1957 for integrating Little Rock Central High School, a pivotal event in the American civil rights movement, facing mobs and state obstruction before President Eisenhower sent federal troops to ensure their entry, demonstrating federal commitment to desegregation after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling. -
On November 14, 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges became the first African American child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans.