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The 14th Amendment was designed to grant citizenship to and protect the civil liberties of people recently freed from slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment, which was approved by the Senate on June 8, 1866, and was ratified on July 9, 1868, gave citizenship to all people "born or naturalized in the United States," including people who had previously been enslaved. It also gave all citizens "equal protection under the laws," which extended the Bill of Rights to the states.
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U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson ruled that separate-but-equal facilities were constitutional. The Plessy v. Ferguson decision upheld the principle of racial segregation over the next half-century.
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Jim Crow law, in U.S. history, any of the laws that enforced racial segregation in the South between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the beginning of the civil rights movement in the 1950s. Jim Crow was the name of a minstrel routine (actually Jump Jim Crow) performed beginning in 1828 by its author, Thomas Dartmouth (“Daddy”) Rice, and by many imitators, including actor Joseph Jefferson.
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United States (1915), states were forced to stop using the grandfather clauses to provide exemption to literacy tests. Without the grandfather clauses, tens of thousands of poor Southern whites were disenfranchised in the early 20th century.
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President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981, creating the President's Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services. The order mandated the desegregation of the U.S. military.
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U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously (9–0) that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits the states from denying equal protection of the laws to any person within their jurisdictions.
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W. Till was brutally murdered by Milam, who then dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River. Young African Americans who joined the Civil Rights Movement out of fear that something similar might happen to their friends, family, or even them were inspired by the newspaper coverage and murder trial. The Civil Rights History Project's interviewees recall this case's profound impact on their lives.
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Called "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.
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The Little Rock Nine, group of African American high-school students who challenged racial segregation in the public schools of Little Rock, Arkansas. The group became the centre of the struggle to desegregate public schools in the United States, especially in the South.
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The students—Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair, Franklin McCain, and David Richmond—purchased several items in the store before sitting at the counter reserved for white customers. When a waitress asked them to leave, they politely refused; to their surprise, they were not arrested. The four students remained seated for almost an hour until the store closed.
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Although the campaign succeeded in securing an Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) ban on segregation in all facilities under their jurisdiction, the Freedom Rides fueled existing tensions between student activists and Martin Luther King, Jr., who publicly supported the riders, but did not participate in the campaign.
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Meredith became the first African-American student to enrol at the University of Mississippi. Meredith's admission is regarded as a pivotal moment in the history of civil rights in the United States.
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In a symbolic attempt to keep his inaugural promise of "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" and stop the desegregation of schools, stood at the door of the auditorium as if to block the entry of two African American students: Vivian Malone and James Hood.In response, President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 11111, which federalized the Alabama National Guard, and Guard General Henry V. Graham then commanded Wallace to step aside.
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Medgar Wiley Evers was an American civil rights activist and the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi, who was murdered by Byron De La Beckwith.It took more than three decades, but justice was finally served in the 1963 murder of a pioneering civil rights leader in Jackson, Mississippi. Medgar Evers stands near a sign of the state of Mississippi in 1958.
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In the speech, he evoked the memory of Abraham Lincoln, the emancipation of the slaves, and the "shameful condition" of segregation in America 100 years after the American Civil War.
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The 24th Amendment was effected to abrogate the Supreme Court ruling in Golaknath v. State of Punjab. The Supreme Court delivered its ruling, by a majority of 6-5 on 27 February 1967.
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Hundreds of people gathered in Selma, Alabama to march to the capital city of Montgomery. They marched to ensure that African Americans could exercise their constitutional right to vote — even in the face of a segregationist system that wanted to make it impossible.
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Virginia that bans on interracial marriage were unconstitutional, extending the right to marry to interracial couples nationwide.
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Martin Luther King was shot dead while standing on a balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. News of King’s assassination prompted major outbreaks of racial violence, resulting in more than 40 deaths nationwide and extensive property damage in over 100 American cities. James Earl Ray, a 40-year-old escaped fugitive, later confessed to the crime and was sentenced to a 99-year prison term.