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The Fourteenth Amendment, which was approved by the Senate on June 8, 1866, and was ratified on July 9, 1868, gave citizenship to all people "born or naturalized in the United States," including people who had been enslaved in the past. It also gave all citizens "equal protection under the laws."
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The landmark 1896 decision by the United States Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the "separate but equal" doctrine. Homer Plessy, an African American train passenger, refused to sit in a car for Black people in 1892, which led to the case.
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The 100-year-old Jim Crow laws were a collection of state and local statutes that made racial segregation legal. It denied African Americans the right to vote, work, and an education. There were fines, jail time, and death sentences to those that defied the laws.
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In Guinn v. United States, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in 1915 that grandfather clauses violated the Constitution. In those days, the court upheld any and all segregationist laws, and even in Guinn, it said that literacy tests that weren't tied to grandfather clauses were fine.
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The Desegregation of the Armed Forces (Executive Order 9981) expressed that "there will be equity of treatment and a chance for all people in the military regardless of race, variety, religion, or public beginning." In order to put this policy into action, it established the President's Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services to recommend changes to military regulations.
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On May 17, 1954, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren conveyed the consistent decision in the milestone social liberties case Earthy colored v. Leading body of Instruction of Topeka, Kansas. The 14th amendment's prohibition on the segregation of public schools was a violation, and as a result, it was unconstitutional.
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The Montgomery bus boycott was a 13-month mass protest that culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional. It was sparked by Rosa Parks' arrest on December 1, 1955.
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In 1955, Emmett Till, then 14 years old, was murdered, drawing national attention to Mississippi's history of racial violence and injustice. Till may have whistled at Carolyn Bryant while he and his cousins were shopping at a store. Till was kidnapped, brutally murdered, and his body dumped in the Tallahatchie River by her relatives.
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The United States Supreme Court decided in 1954 that segregated schools were against the law. It was only after September 1957 when nine teenagers would become images. The "Little Stone Nine," as the nine teenagers came to be known, were to be the principal African American understudies to enter Little Stone's Focal Secondary School. The Little Rock school board had pledged to voluntarily desegregate its schools three years earlier, following the Supreme Court's decision.
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On February 1, 1960, four black students from North Carolina A & T College sat down at a Woolworths lunch counter in the center of Greensboro, North Carolina, to begin the sit-ins. To manage protests, the students soon established the Student Executive Committee for Justice. Segregationists regularly heckled and abused the protesters, and were detained by the police.
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Throughout the spring of 1961, student activists set off on Freedoms Rides to challenge segregation on highway transports and transport terminals. Going on transports from Washington, D.C., to Jackson, Mississippi, the riders met savage resistance in the Deep South, collecting broad media attention.
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On October 2, 1962, James Meredith became the first African American student at the University of Mississippi. He was constantly verbally hounded by a small group of students, and he was guarded round-the-clock by army and reserve U.S. deputy marshals.
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Martin Luther King Jr., an American civil rights activist and Baptist minister, gave the public speech "I Have a Dream" on August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In the discourse, Ruler called for common and monetary privileges and a finish to prejudice in the US.
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About half past 12 PM, a shot rang out. It was June 12, 1963, and the incident took place in a Jackson, Mississippi, suburb. After attending a NAACP meeting, civil rights activist Medgar Evers, who was 37 years old, had just returned home. The bullet hit Evers in the back as he began the short walk up to his single-story rambler. It was linked to Byron De La Beckwith by the FBI. Beckwith was detained a few days later because he was a well-known white supremacist and segregationist.
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On June 11, 1963, The Stand in the Schoolhouse Door was held in Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama. George Wallace, the Legislative leader of Alabama, in an emblematic endeavor to keep his debut vow to stop the integration of schools, remained at the entryway of the hall as though to impede the passage of two African American understudies: Vivian Malone and James Hood.
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In the not so distant past in America, residents in certain states needed to pay a charge to cast a ballot in a public political race. This charge was known as a poll tax. On January 23, 1964, the US approved the 24th Amendment to the Constitution, restricting any poll tax in decisions for government authorities.
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On March 7, 1965, hundreds of people gathered in Selma, Alabama, to march to Montgomery, the state capital. Even though a segregationist system wanted to prevent African Americans from exercising their constitutional right to vote, they marched to ensure that they could.
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In the landmark civil rights decision Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that laws prohibiting interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.
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On Thursday, 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King was shot dead while remaining on a gallery outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Inn in Memphis, Tennessee. More than 40 people were killed across the country as a result of the incident, which sparked major outbreaks of racial violence that caused extensive property damage in over 100 American cities. After confessing to the crime, the 40-year-old fugitive James Earl Ray was given a 99-year prison sentence.