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The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott decision to deny citizenship and constitutional rights to all black people,
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Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Lincoln freed slaves in the Confederacy
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The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery.
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14th Amendment granted due process and equal protection under the law to African Americans.
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15th Amendment granted blacks the right to vote, including former slaves.
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Congress passed a third Civil Rights Act in response to many white business owners and merchants who refused to make their facilities and establishments equally available to black people. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 prohibited cases of racial discrimination and guaranteed equal access to public accommodations regardless of race or color.
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The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson 1890 Louisiana racially segregated but equal railroad cars.
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The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded by a multiracial group of activists in New York, N.Y.
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The U.S. Supreme Court's ruled in the case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas that public school segregation was unconstitutional.
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While visiting family in Mississippi, fourteen year old Emmett Till was kidnapped,beaten, shot and dumped in the Tallahatchie River for whistling at a white woman. Two white men were arrested for the murder and acquitted by an all white jury.
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Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat at the front of the "colored section" of a bus in Montgomery to a white passenger Because of her arrest the Montgomery black community launched a bus boycott that lasted over a year
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At Central High School in Little ,Rock Nine black students, who became known as the "Little Rock Nine," were blocked from entering the school of . federal troops and the National Guard were called on because of the students
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More than 250,000 people join in the March on Washington. Congregating at the Lincoln Memorial, participants listened as Martin Luther King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.
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President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
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A Black Muslim Minister, revolutionary black freedom fighter, civil rights activist and for a time the national spokesperson for the Nation of Islam was assassinated
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Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, making it easier for Southern blacks to register to vote.
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Martin Luther King Jr. at age 39, was shot as he was standing on the balcony outside his hotel room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn. James Earl Ray was convicted of the crime.
