Civil Rights Timeline

  • 13,14,15 Amendments

    13,14,15 Amendments
    They were designed to ensure equality for recently emancipated slaves.
  • Plessy v Ferguson

    Plessy v Ferguson
    Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal"
  • NAACP created

    NAACP created
    interracial endeavor to advance justice for African Americans by a group including W. E. B. Du Bois
  • 19th Amendment

    19th Amendment
    Granted women the right to vote
  • Truman’s desegregation of the military

    Truman’s desegregation of the military
    Truman's order ended a long-standing practice of segregating Black soldiers and relegating them to more menial jobs
  • Brown v Board of Education

    Brown v Board of Education
    Brown v. Board of Education was one of the cornerstones of the civil rights movement, and helped establish the precedent that “separate-but-equal” education and other services were not, in fact, equal
  • Freedom Riders

    Freedom Riders
    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
  • Greensboro NC Sit-in’s

    Greensboro NC Sit-in’s
    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.
  • Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”

    Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
    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
  • March on Washington – “I have a Dream Speech”

    March on Washington – “I have a Dream Speech”
    At the march, final speaker Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech in which he called for an end to racism.
  • Civil Rights Act of 1964

    Civil Rights Act of 1964
    prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin
  • Voting Rights Act of 1965

    Voting Rights Act of 1965
    It outlawed the discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states after the Civil War, including literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting
  • 24 Amendment

    24 Amendment
    prohibited states from requiring payment of a poll tax as a condition for voting in federal elections
  • Black Panthers

    Black Panthers
    political organization founded in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale to challenge police brutality against the African American community
  • American Indian Movement founded

    American Indian Movement founded
    centered in urban areas to address systemic issues of poverty, discrimination, and police brutality against Native Americans