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Jim Crow Laws
Jim Crow laws were state and local laws established in the 1870s used to discriminate against black people in the Southern states. Black people could not go to the same bathrooms, hospitals, schools, or even drink from the same drinking fountains as white people. -
Lynching Phenomenon
In 1882, at least 49 blacks were lynched. The numbers raise to 3,438 until 1954. One of the NAACP's many goals were to stop the lynching of African Americans. -
Ida B. Wells' Incident
Wells traveled by train from Memphis to Woodstock, Tennessee where the school where she teaches. Like Homer Plessy, she sat in the Whites Only train car and refused to move, The conductor forcibly removed her and she bit him on his hand. She then sued the company successfully, but the lawsuit got reversed by the Tennessee Supreme Court. -
Plessy's Incident
Homer Plessy, an 1/8 Black Mixed American, refused to get up from the train car for white people. He was immediately arrested by a detective and taken off of the train once it stopped. -
Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy claimed that the law of segregation denied his rights under the 13th and 14th Amendments. Louisiana's highest court denied Plessy's claim saying that it's not invalidating rights, but it's a public policy. -
Supreme Court Decision
John Marshall Harlan was the only lawyer in the Supreme Court 7-1 decision who thought the law requiring whites and blacks to ride different parts of the train was against the Constitution. He said that the law should be "color-blind" and segregation makes blacks inferior. The Supreme Court ruled that equal rights did not mean co-mingling of the races, effectively legalizing and facilitating "separate but equal" access for blacks. -
Founding NAACP
The NAACP was founded in 1909 by William English Walling, Mary White Ovington, and others. The NAACP’s goals were the abolition of segregation, discrimination, disenfranchisement, and racial violence, particularly lynching. -
The Pink Franklin Case
The NAACP had their first case, defending Pink Franklin, an African American sharecropper from South Carolina after he was accused of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison, but thanks to the NAACP, he was freed in 1919. -
Jim Crow Expands
Every southern state and a lot of northern cities had Jim Crow laws. -
Gong Lum v. Rice
The Supreme Court held that a Mississippi school district may require a Chinese-American girl to attend a segregated Black school rather than a White school. The Court applied the "separate but equal" phase of Plessy v. Ferguson to the public schools. -
Lloyd Gaines
A black student named Lloyd Gaines was denied admission to the white-only State University of Missouri Law School, so he took legal action. He argued that the school denying him based on his race was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. He did not expect to be one of the cases to overturn the "separate but equal" standard set by Plessy. -
Thurgood Marshall
As the Special Counsel of NAACP, Thurgood Marshall succeeded Houston, continuing the legal campaign of the association. Marshall successfully challenged "white caucuses" in Smith v. Allwright during the mid-1940s, banning African Americans from voting in a number of southern states. In Morgan v. Virginia, Marshall won a case in which the Supreme Court reversed a state law that enforced segregation of interstate carriers ' buses and trains. -
Charles Hamilton Houston
Houston was a part of almost every Civil Rights case from 1930 to 1954. His goal was to defeat Jim Crow by using the "separate but equal" doctrine. He was of many NAACP lawyers and even trained Thurgood Marshall. He was awarded by the NAACP after his death both in 1950 and 1958. -
Sweatt v. Painter
This case involved Heman Marion Sweatt, who was denied access to University of Texas where integrated learning. This case successfully changed the "separate but equal" statement about racial segregation from the Plessy case and was influential in the Brown v Board of Education case. -
McLaurin v Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education
George W. McLaurin was at first denied by Oklahoma University to get his Doctorate due to his race. The University soon admitted McLaurin but provided him separate parts of the school including a special table in the cafeteria, a designated desk in the library, and a desk just outside the classroom door. This case and Sweatt v Painter were both decided on the same day and ended the Separate but Equal doctrine. -
Brown v. Board of Education
The Brown v Board of Education case was a combination of five cases involving segregation at public schools in Kansas, Delaware, Virginia, South Carolina, and the District of Columbia. Oliver Brown, the father of lead plaintiff Linda Brown, sued on her behalf after Linda denied to an all-white public high school in Topeka, Kansas. This case overturned Plessy v. Ferguson and declared that racial segregation violated the 14th Amendment. -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
The 1964 Civil Rights Act is a U.S. civil and labor law that prohibits discrimination based on race, color, ethnicity, gender, or national origin.This forbids discriminatory implementation of conditions for registration of voters and racial segregation in schools, employment and public housing. -
The Voting Case of 1965
The 1965 Voting Rights Act is a main piece of U.S. federal law banning racial discrimination in voting. -
Fair Housing Act of 1968
The 1968 Act abolished discrimination based on race, ethnicity, and national origin, extended to include gender in 1974, and expanded again in 1988 to include disabled people and families with children. -
NAACP Today
NAACP advocates are still fighting racial discrimination today, whether it exists in the form of corporate hotel policies that discriminate against African-American college students, voting disenfranchisement during national presidential elections, or state-sponsored white supremacy symbols, such as the confederate battle flag.
