After decades of organizing and strategic efforts by parents, teachers, lawyers, and more — the U.S. Supreme Court issued the unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education on school segregation.
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Nine people entered the Selective Service Offices, removed and burned draft records, and were collectively arrested in protest of the Vietnam War — they became known as the Catonsville Nine.
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Medgar Evers made a 17-minute speech on WLBT in a rare and historic exception to the white supremacist only voice on Mississippi radio and television.
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Blanche K. Bruce became Register of the Treasury, which placed his name on all U.S. currency.
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The forcible removal of Native American tribes, known as the Trail of Tears, began.
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Ernest Green became the first African-American to graduate from Little Rock Central High School in 1958.
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The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in three cases that weakened the structure of legalized segregation.
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Air Force veteran James Meredith began the March Against Fear from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi.
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Homer Plessy was arrested for violating Louisiana’s Separate Car Act.
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Freedom Riders traveling from New Orleans, Louisiana to Jackson, Mississippi were arrested in 1961.
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Joseph N. Welch confronted Sen. Joseph McCarthy about allegations of communists in the U.S. Army.
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Students for a Democratic Society held its founding convention in Michigan and issued the Port Huron Statement.
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Ben Chester White, caretaker on a farm, was brutally murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Natchez, Mississippi.
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More than 100,000 students stayed out of school to protest inequality and segregation in Chicago, Illinois.
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The 14th Amendment to the constitution was passed, granting citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.”
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The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Mildred and Richard Loving in the historic Loving v. Virginia case.
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Henry Highland Garnet, abolitionist and minister, called for a militant slave revolt.
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Rather than desegregate, the Prince Edward County, Virginia Board of Supervisors refused to appropriate money from the County School Board to the public schools.
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Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. Rethinking Schools. 29 pages.
Through examining FBI documents, students learn the scope of the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign to spy on, infiltrate, discredit, and disrupt all corners of the Black Freedom Movement.
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During a clear sign of Reconstruction era voter suppression, a Black militia was accused of blocking a road and punished with the Hamburg Massacre.
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The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted.
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Shirley Chisholm was an historic candidate at the Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach. Chisholm was outspoken on behalf of civil rights legislation, the Equal Rights Amendment, and a minimum family income; she opposed wiretapping, domestic spying, and the Vietnam War.
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The Niagara Movement — starting as a conference of Black leaders in upstate New York — was formed, paving the way for the creation of the NAACP.
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Protest and civil unrest broke out in Cleveland following years of escalation of racial tension.
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The bodies of three lynched civil rights workers (James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman) were found in Neshoba County, Mississippi.
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