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Tuskegee University is a private, historically black land-grant university in Tuskegee, Alabama. The campus is designated as the Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site by the National Park Service. The university was home to scientist George Washington Carver and to World War II's Tuskegee Airmen. -
A case in which the Court held that state-mandated segregation laws did not violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. -
Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesman and leader in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. -
When Truman signed Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948, he declared “there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.” That same day, he also signed an executive order to desegregate the federal workforce. -
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483, 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 -
Emmett Louis Till was a 14-year-old African American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store -
The Montgomery bus boycott was a political and social protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the public transit system of Montgomery, Alabama. It was a foundational event in the civil rights movement in the United States. -
The Little Rock Nine were 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 result was the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. The new act established the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department and empowered federal prosecutors to obtain court injunctions against interference with the right to vote. -
Freedom Riders were groups of white and African American civil rights activists who participated in Freedom Rides, bus trips through the American South in 1961 to protest segregated bus terminals. -
By April 12, King was in prison along with many of his fellow activists. While imprisoned, King penned an open letter now known as his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” a full-throated defense of the Birmingham protest campaign that is now regarded as one of the greatest texts of the civil rights movement -
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 in hiring, promoting, and firing. -
The Selma to Montgomery marches were three protest marches, held in 1965, along the 54-mile highway from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery -
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 -
The American Indian Movement is a Native American grassroots movement founded in July 1968 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, initially centered in urban areas to address systemic issues of poverty, discrimination, and police brutality against Native Americans.