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In an effort to save the balance in Congress between slave states and free states, the Missouri Compromise was passed in 1820 making Missouri a slave state and Maine as a free state. With the exception of Missouri, this law prohibited slavery in the Louisiana Territory north of the 36° 30´ latitude line.
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Dred Scott, who was a slave, filed a lawsuit saying that he should be free because his master had taken him to live in free territory for a few years. The case, known as Dred Scott v. Sandford, made it to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857. The Court ruled that black Americans did not have the rights of citizens, so Scott was not entitled to file his lawsuit.
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On October 16, 1859, the federal army at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, was captured by the abolitionist named John Brown and 21 of his followers. Although they were quickly defeated and their goal of freeing local slaves and to mount a full-scale rebellion . The attack would have huge consequences for the national debate on the future of slavery in the United.
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In the spring of 1861, the election Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860 caused seven southern states to secede from the Union to form the Confederate States of America; four more joined them after the first shots of the Civil War were fired. Four years of awful conflict were marked by historic battles made it “The War Between the States”. It put neighbor against neighbor and in some cases, brother against brother. By the time it ended it became the costliest American war.
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After the Union won the Civil War in 1865 and gave some 4 million slaves their freedom. The process of rebuilding the South during the Reconstruction period introduced a new set of huge challenges. Under the administration of President Andrew Johnson, new southern state legislatures passed restrictive "black codes" to control the labor and behavior of former slaves and other African Americans.
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The Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863. It stated that “all persons held as slaves are, and henceforward shall be free.” About 3.5 million African Americans in the Confederacy were freed from slavery.
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Homer Plessy was a black man who refused to sit in the Jim Crow car of a train, so he was arrested, and was brought before Judge John H. Ferguson. The law was challenged in the Supreme Court because of a conflict with the 13th and 14th Amendments. By a vote of 7 to 1 the court said it was constitutional, so Plessy was locked up for his “crime”.
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Jim Crow Laws were laws passed by Southerners enforcing racial segregation. They wanted to keep blacks at a lower social and economic position. They strictly enforced public racial segregation in almost all of Southern life. The laws didn’t exist in the north, but discrimination still happened everywhere.
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The book was set in early 1930 in Maycomb, a small town in Alabama, in the arthor's childhood.
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On May 17, 1954 the United States Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools were unconstitutional. With their ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the Court opened the doors of change and helped fuel the civil-rights struggles of the next two decades.
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Sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks on 1 December 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott was a 13-month mass protest that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional. The bus boycott showed that nonviolent mass protest could successfully challenge racial segregation and served as an example for other southern campaigns that followed.
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To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960.
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About 50,000 Afrcan American marched on Washington D.C.protesting for jobs and freedom. This gave hope for blacks and whites to live together.
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MLK made his speech with the famous words "I have a dream". His dream for whites and blacks living as one.
