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On May 17, 1954, following two years of debate, Chief Justice Earl Warren announced the Supreme Court's ruling on segregated schooling. The court unanimously ruled that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. This allowed African Americans to attend the same schools as Caucasian students.
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Following his public smearings and radical beliefs, including his accusing many innocent Americans of being communist spies, Senator Joseph McCarthy was censured by the US Senate on December 2, 1954, fading into irrelevance and alcoholism. He died in May 1957 at 48 years old.
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On August 28, 1955, Emmet Till, an African-American 14-year-old boy from Chicago, while visiting his family in Money, MI, allegedly whistled at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman. For this, he was abducted, beaten, shot, mutilated, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River. The horror of the case fueled the Civil Rights Movement.
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On Dec 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus to a white person and was arrested. Laws in the segregated South required African American passengers to sit at the rear of buses and surrender their seats to white passengers. In response, the Montgomery Improvement Association, headed by Martin Luther King, Jr., organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott, wherein Blacks refused to use the city's transit system.
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In a book penned by public intellectual Kenneth Galbraith in 1958, he criticized the American post-war economy, which focused primarily on increasing the production of goods to satisfy the self-indulgent consumption of luxury items. He warned that it would lead to economic inequality as the interests of the private sector overshadowed those of the general American public.
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After Castro's and his army initiated a new era for Cuba, the Castro government began to become more closely aligned with the Soviet Union. In 1962, the Soviet Union (SU) deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba. On October 14 of the same year, American spy planes detected the construction of the missile launch sites. The American public was informed on October 22. On October 28, the SU agreed to remove the missiles if America pledged not to invade Cuba and to remove missiles from Turkey.
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Lyndon Johnson laid out a vision for a package consisting of domestic reforms known as the Great Society. The goal was to bring "... an end to poverty and racial injustice". The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were included in the Great Society's legislation. Included also was the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) of 1964, which included the Community Action program.
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President Lyndon B. Johnson was critical to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and signed it into law on July 2, 1964. It was deemed by many to have been the most important piece of civil rights legislation in US history. It outlawed segregation in public facilities and made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, and national or religious origin.