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13th - 1865 Outlawed slavery and forced labor

Civil War Amendments 14th - 1868 Defined U.S. citizen as anyone born or naturalized in the U.S. Required states to grant its citizens equal protection of the laws.

15th - 1870 Gave African Americans the right to vote. (Men)

Checking for Understanding Define Match the terms on the right with their definitions on the left. __ B 1. the social separation of the races

A. discrimination

D 2. programs intended to make up for __ past discrimination by helping minority groups and women gain access to jobs and opportunities

B. segregation

__ E 3. singling out an individual as a suspect due to appearance of ethnicity __ A 4. unfair treatment based on prejudice against a certain group

__ C 5. the rights of full citizenship and equality under the law

Click the mouse button or press the Space Bar to display the answers.

C. civil rights D. affirmative action E. racial profiling

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court declared in a unanimous decision that the board of education of Topeka, Kansas, had to admit four African-American children to a previously all-white school. Overturning the “separate but equal” doctrine adopted in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court declared that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and, as such, violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees all citizens “equal protection of the laws.” The ruling, the result of years of work by the NAACP, had the impact of a lightning strike. The Brown ruling paved the way for large-scale desegregation—although it certainly did not bring desegregation about overnight. The winning attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was Thurgood Marshall, who later became the nation's first African-American justice of the Supreme Court.

Brown vs. Board of Education,

Topeka, Kansas

Worn out after a hard day's work, NAACP member and Montgomery, Alabama, resident Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat at the front of a public bus to a white passenger on December 1, 1955. According to law and long-established custom, African-Americans were supposed to sit in the back of public buses. Police arrested Parks when she flaunted the law and the custom. The Rosa Parks incident was, however, in no way spontaneous. Parks was part of a trained-for-civil-disobedience cadre of civil rights workers; her action was part of a preplanned strategy to call attention to southern separatist policies. Rosa Parks was certainly not the first to refuse to obey such laws, or to be arrested for refusing.

Rosa Parks Takes a Ride

The eventful year of 1957 saw a number of extraordinary events—among them, the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and King's early march on Washington. But the most remarkable events in the civil rights realm took place in Little Rock, Arkansas. Arkansas governor Orval Faubus defied a federal court order to integrate the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, in accordance with the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. In fact, he called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the admission of nine African-American students who had been carefully selected to be the first to integrate the school. President Dwight Eisenhower was forced to send 1,000 paratroopers and federalize 10,000 members of the Arkansas National Guard to protect the students and uphold the law. When the students were duly admitted on September 25, 1957, a clear message was sent that the federal government would physically, as well as legally, support integration.

The Little Rock Nine

Arkansas National Guard troops turn student Elizabeth Eckford away from Central High School

The Sit- Ins Begin What would turn out to be a major, and highly effective, civil rights tactic made its debut on February 1, 1960, when four African-American students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro sat down at a segregated lunch counter in Woolworth's Five and Dime and placed their orders. In so doing, they were breaking the law. A crowd of white teenagers poured drinks on their heads and shouted obscenities. However, the students hung in. The New York Times covered the incident, which drew national attention. Over the next few days, the four were joined by other students, white as well as African-American. Soon there were similar nonviolent protests all over the South.

The Freedom Rides In the spring of 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) set out to test the implementation of laws requiring the integration of interstate public transportation. Gathering groups of student volunteers and clergy, they sent them on bus trips through the south. Bigoted Alabamans set one bus on fire. However, by September, over a thousand “freedom riders” had participated in the effort, which was widely covered by the media.

I have A Dream… Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his most famous speech at the August 28, 1963, March on Washington. Speaking from the Lincoln Memorial to a crowd of some 300,000 civil rights advocates of all ages and races, his largely improvised remarks were to become his most famous words: “I have a dream today …people will be not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character…”

Freedom Summer, 1964 In the summer of 1964 civil rights groups banded together in a massive effort to register African-American voters in Mississippi. They sent college students and others all over the south knocking on doors. Some southern whites objected to what they called “outside agitators.” On June 21 three young civil rights workers, one African-American and two white, disappeared. Their bodies were found buried in a dam only after President Lyndon Johnson sent Army soldiers to look for them. Making the most of the legacy of the assassinated John F. Kennedy, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, making segregation in public facilities and discrimination in employment illegal.

Mississippi Burning 



In October, the FBI "broke" the case when a Ku Klux Klan member, James Jordon, revealed that he was a witness to the murders. It was discovered that the three were initially arrested by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price for an alleged traffic violation and taken to the jail in Neshoba Country. They were released that evening and on the way back to Meridian, Mississippi were stopped by two carloads of white men on a remote rural road. The men approached their car and then shot and killed Schwermer, then Goodman, and finally Chaney. The Justice Department, reasoning that those responsible would be acquitted by an all white jury, charged nineteen individuals (under an 1870 federal law) with conspiring to deprive the three of their civil rights. The charges were lodged against Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price and 17 other men.

Mississippi Burning Continued. On October 21st, 1967, seven of the men were found guilty of conspiring to deprive Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney of their civil rights. Those found guilty included Deputy Sheriff Price (the ringleader of the group). Deputy Sheriff Price and Sheriff Rainey at Their sentences ranged arraignment. from 3 to 10 years in prison. Sheriff Rainey was acquitted. This (Neshoba County had the largest per capita consumption story is told is the movie of entitled chewing tobacco of any county in the United States.) Mississippi Burning.

Bloody Sunday Selma, Alabama 1965 Outraged by the killing of a civil rights activist by an Alabama state trooper, the African-American community decided to hold a march on Sunday, March 7, 1965. They planned to walk from Selma to Montgomery, to demand that Governor George Wallace take action to put a stop to police brutality. However, when the marchers reached the city limits, they found state troopers blocking their way. As the demonstrators crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge (which led out of Selma), the troopers ordered them to disperse. The troopers, however, did not wait for the warning to be heeded. They attacked the crowd of people, using tear gas, whips, and clubs. Fifty marchers were hospitalized. “Bloody Sunday” received national attention. Numerous marches were organized in response. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led a march to the Selma bridge two days later (during which one protestor was killed), and another march from Selma to Montgomery on March 25. Shortly thereafter, President Johnson addressed Congress on the recent violence and in support of civil rights legislation. The speech helped ensure the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on August 10. This legislation outlawed literacy tests and other such requirements intended to restrict African-American voting.

Pettus bridge voting march

King Assassinated On April 4, 1968, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, to support a sanitation workers' strike. After an uplifting speech, he returned to the Lorraine Motel, where he was staying. Standing on the second-floor balcony with aides, he was shot and killed. Across the country, there were riots in 130 cities. Thousands attended the Nobel Peace Prize winner's funeral. The eloquent and charismatic interpreter of the nonviolent principles of Mahatma Gandhi was mourned internationally. James Earl Ray pled guilty to the crime, was convicted, and died in prison. With King's death, the civil rights leader with the broadest appeal was silenced. His passing marked the end of an era that had seen important improvements in civil rights—and continuing evidence of the violence and cruelty that lurked not far beneath the surface of mainstream racism in white America. In the year Dr. King was assassinated, Governor George Wallace of Alabama—at that point still an unrepentant segregationist—mounted a presidential campaign that garnered 13.5 percent of the popular vote (amounting to nearly 10 million votes) and 46 electoral votes. Although progress had been made, racism was still going strong in the United States of America.

King grave site

Hotel balcony where King was shot.

JUSTICE!!! In 1999, Attorney General Mike Moore reexamined and opened the case, with the state contemplating murder charges for the first time. On January 6th, 2005, forty-one years after the killings, a grand jury returned the first-ever state murder indictment in the case against Killen. Witnesses for the prosecution included James Chaney's mother, Fannie Lee Chaney, 82, who testified about the slain trio and about the threats that drove her to leave Mississippi following the murders. Also on the witness stand was Rita Bender, the widow of Michael Schwerner, who was with him in Mississippi in 1964. Schwerner had been targeted by the Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers for "elimination" because of his effective voter-registration and economic boycott work in Meridian. Killen was sentenced to 60 years in prison!!!!

Big Mouth Racist!!! A major reason the case was reopened was a 1999 interview with Sam Bowers, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard convicted in 1967 of giving the order to have Michael Schwerner killed. Bowers remarked in the interview that took place more than 30 years after the crime, "I was quite delighted to be convicted and have the main instigator of the entire affair walk out of the courtroom a free man. Everybody, including the trial judge and the prosecutors and everybody else, knows that that happened." Bowers claims that Killen was a central figure in the murders and organized the KKK mob that carried them out. (Bowers is currently serving a life sentence for ordering a 1966 firebombing in Hattiesburg, Miss., that killed Vernon Dahmer, a Mississippi civil rights leader—another crime that took decades to successfully prosecute).