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Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. -
While visiting his relatives in Mississippi, Till went to the Bryant store with his cousins and may have whistled at Carolyn Bryant. Her husband, Roy Bryant, and brother-in-law, J.W. Milam, kidnapped and brutally murdered Till, dumping his body in the Tallahatchie River. -
The Montgomery Bus Boycott was 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, an African American woman, was arrested and fined for refusing to yield her bus seat to a white man. -
The Little Rock Nine were a group of nine black students who enrolled at formerly all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957. ... Eisenhower sent in federal troops to escort the Little Rock Nine into the school. It drew national attention to the civil rights movement. -
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. -
Freedom Rides, in U.S. history, a series of political protests against segregation by blacks and whites who rode buses together through the American South in 1961. -
four African American girls were killed when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was blown up. FBI identified four suspects who were all members of the KKK. Despite several strong leads and evidence gathered through informants and wiretaps on the suspects' phones, then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called his agents off the case and sealed the recordings, reasoning that an Alabama jury—most likely composed of all white males—would never convict the Klansmen" -
March on Washington, in full March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the political demonstration held in Washington, D.C., in 1963 by civil rights leaders to protest racial discrimination and to show support for major civil rights legislation that was pending in Congress (To pressure President Kennedy to pass the Civil Rights Act.). -
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 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 March 7, 1965, the late John Lewis and other civil rights leaders led a march from Selma to Montgomery to demonstrate voting rights. While crossing onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the peaceful demonstrators, including Lewis, were brutally beaten by police. -
This 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 (9–0) struck down state antimiscegenation statutes in Virginia as unconstitutional under the equal protection and due process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.