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Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy v. Ferguson was a landmark 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine. The case stemmed from an 1892 incident in which African American train passenger Homer Plessy refused to sit in a train car for Black people. -
Brown vs Board of Education
The NAACP combined 5 cases from Kansas, Virginia, Delaware, South Carolina, and the District of Columbia, to the Supreme Court. The Court declared 9-0 that racial segregation in public schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, effectively overturning the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision mandating "Separate but Equal." The Brown ruling directly affected legally segregated schools in twenty-one states. -
Murder of Emmet Till
in Money, Mississippi, 14-year-old Emmett Till, from Chicago, is brutally murdered for whistling at a Carolyn Bryant a white woman three days earlier.
Roy Bryant and JW Milam the two men then beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, cut off his ear, shot him in the head and then threw his body, tied to a cotton gin fan with barbed wire, into the river. 50,000 people viewed his open casket. The men were tried and found not guilty of the murder. -
Rosa Parks and Montgomery Boycott
"the mother of the civil rights movement," Rosa Parks invigorated the struggle for racial equality when she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks' arrest on December 1, 1955 launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott by 17,000 black -
Founding of Southern Christian Leadership Conference
From the beginning, the SCLC focused its efforts on citizenship schools and efforts to desegregate individual cities such as Albany, Georgia, Birmingham, Alabama, and St. Augustine, Florida. It played key roles in the March on Washington in 1963 and the Selma Voting Rights Campaign and March to Montgomery in 1965 -
Little Rock Nine
In 1957, nine ordinary teenagers walked out of their homes and stepped up to the front lines in the battle for civil rights for all Americans. The media coined the name “Little Rock Nine" to identify the first African American students to desegregate Little Rock Central High School. -
Greensboro sit in
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 -
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Freedom Summer
SNCC sought to coordinate youth-led nonviolent, direct-action campaigns against segregation and other forms of racism. SNCC members played an integral role in sit-ins, Freedom Rides, the 1963 March on Washington, and such voter education projects as the Mississippi Freedom Summer. -
Freedom Ride
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. -
March on Washington
The March on Washington was a massive protest march that occurred in August 1963, when some 250,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Also known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the event aimed to draw attention to continuing challenges and inequalities faced by African Americans a century after emancipation. It was also the occasion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s now-iconic “I Have a Dream” speech -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
In 1964, Congress passed Public Law 88-352 (78 Stat. 241). 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. -
Voting Rights Act of 1965
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.