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#Civil Rights

112 entries

People (36)

44th President of the United States, 2009–2017

Author of The Feminine Mystique and Founder of Second-Wave Feminism, 1921–2006

Booker T. Washington

Educator, founder of Tuskegee Institute, and architect of the Atlanta Compromise

Labor organizer who won rights for America's farmworkers

Chief Justice whose Court transformed American civil rights, 1953–1969

Eleanor Roosevelt

First Lady, diplomat, and the human rights conscience of the 20th century

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Suffragist, abolitionist, and primary architect of the American women's rights movement

Fannie Lou Hamer

Sharecropper, Voting Rights Activist, and Voice of the Mississippi Freedom Movement, 1917–1977

Frederick Douglass

Abolitionist, orator, and the 19th century's most powerful voice against American slavery

Author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the conscience of the Constitutional Convention

Journalist and activist who became the defining public voice of second-wave American feminism

Abolitionist, Union spy, and conductor of the Underground Railroad

Deaf-blind author and activist whose radicalism the 20th century spent decades trying to forget

Co-founder of the Black Panther Party and Revolutionary of the Black Power Era, 1942–1989

Journalist, anti-lynching crusader, and one of the founders of the NAACP

Jackie Robinson

The Man Who Broke Baseball's Color Line, 1919–1972

Novelist and essayist who bore witness to race in America with unmatched clarity

Four Gold Medals at Hitler's Olympics, 1913–1980

John F. Kennedy

35th President of the United States, 1961–1963

Joseph McCarthy

U.S. Senator whose anti-Communist crusade defined — and disgraced — an era

Langston Hughes

Poet, Playwright, and Voice of the Harlem Renaissance

Lyndon B. Johnson

The Texas dealmaker who built the Great Society and broke himself on Vietnam

The civil rights era's most uncompromising voice for Black self-determination and human dignity

Martin Luther King Jr.

Baptist minister who led the American civil rights movement

NAACP Field Secretary in Mississippi, Assassinated June 12, 1963

Norman Rockwell

America's most beloved illustrator — and a more complicated artist than his reputation suggests

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The Great Dissenter — Supreme Court Justice and philosopher of American law, 1902–1932

Robert F. Kennedy

Attorney General, Senator, and presidential candidate assassinated in 1968

Civil rights activist whose 1955 arrest sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Supreme Court Justice and architect of American gender equality law, 1993–2020

Sandra Day O'Connor

First woman to serve on the Supreme Court, 1981–2006

Sojourner Truth

Abolitionist, suffragist, and orator who escaped slavery to become its most forceful living refutation

Susan B. Anthony

The suffragist whose half-century of organizing made the 19th Amendment possible

Thaddeus Stevens

Radical Republican Congressman and Architect of Reconstruction

Thurgood Marshall

The lawyer who dismantled segregation in court and became the first Black Supreme Court Justice

Sociologist, co-founder of the NAACP, and theorist of Black identity in America

Places (11)

Alcatraz Island

The island fortress in San Francisco Bay that held the nation's most dangerous men — and became a symbol of Native resistance

The phoenix city of the New South, rebuilt from Sherman's ashes into a regional capital

Birthplace of the American Revolution and one of the republic's oldest cities

The state that absorbed the Gold Rush, built Hollywood, and became America's largest economy

The city that built itself from nothing, burned down, rebuilt, and became America's most American city

The Motor City that built America's middle class and paid the price of its collapse

The city that became America's second metropolis by inventing itself from scratch

Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library

The travertine monolith on the University of Texas campus in Austin

Cradle of the American Revolution and of American intellectual life

The empire state — gateway, financial capital, and engine of American ambition

California's gateway city, remade by gold, catastrophe, and perpetual reinvention

Eras (2)

Civil Rights Era

The 14 years of legislation, protest, and federal action that dismantled legal segregation, 1954–1968

The unfinished project of rebuilding the South and remaking American citizenship, 1865–1877

Events (22)

Assassination of Malcolm X

The 1965 killing of a defining voice of Black radicalism

Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

The 1968 killing that convulsed the nation and the movement

Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy

The 1968 murder that silenced a generation's hope

The Democratic Convention that tore a party apart and handed the White House to Nixon

Civil Rights Movement

The decades-long struggle that dismantled legal segregation and reshaped American democracy

Election of 1968

Nixon's narrow victory amid assassination, riots, and the collapse of the New Deal coalition

Freedmen's Bureau

The federal agency that tried — and was not allowed — to secure Black Americans' freedom

Internment of Japanese Americans

The forced relocation of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II

June 19, 1865 — the day freedom finally arrived in Texas, and the holiday it became

Los Angeles Riots (1992)

Six days of urban unrest following the acquittal of officers who beat Rodney King

March on Washington

The August 1963 demonstration where 250,000 Americans demanded civil rights — and heard a dream

Montgomery Bus Boycott

The 381-day protest that launched the modern civil rights movement

Murder of George Floyd

The 2020 killing that triggered a global racial-justice reckoning

Selma to Montgomery Marches

The 1965 voting rights marches that broke open the conscience of a nation

Stonewall Riots

The 1969 Greenwich Village uprising that launched the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement

The AIDS Epidemic

A public-health catastrophe that reshaped medicine and activism

The Freedom Rides

The 1961 campaign that put civil rights on buses and forced the federal government to act

The Great Migration

The movement of six million Black Americans from the South to the North and West, 1910–1970

The Harlem Renaissance

The explosion of Black art, literature, and music that redefined American culture, 1920–1940

Six Days of Uprising That Redefined the Civil Rights Movement, 1965

Women's Suffrage Movement

The seven-decade campaign that won American women the right to vote in 1920

Wounded Knee 1973

The 71-Day AIM Occupation That Revived Native American Resistance

Documents (22)

Brown v. Board of Education

The 1954 Supreme Court ruling that declared school segregation unconstitutional

Civil Rights Act of 1866

The first federal law to define American citizenship and guarantee equal rights regardless of race

Civil Rights Act of 1875

Reconstruction's promise of equal public life — struck down 89 years before it could be replaced

Civil Rights Act of 1964

The landmark law that banned discrimination and made legal segregation a federal crime

Civil Rights Act of 1968

The Fair Housing Act — Passed One Week After King's Assassination

Espionage Act of 1917

The Wartime Law That Criminalized Dissent — and Never Went Away

Fifteenth Amendment

The 1870 amendment that prohibited denying the vote on the basis of race

First Amendment

The constitutional guarantee of speech, press, religion, assembly, and petition

Fourteenth Amendment

The 1868 amendment that defined citizenship and guaranteed equal protection under the law

Gideon v. Wainwright

The unanimous 1963 ruling that guaranteed the right to counsel for every criminal defendant

Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington, August 28, 1963

Loving v. Virginia

The 1967 ruling that struck down bans on interracial marriage

Miranda v. Arizona

The 1966 ruling that gave every suspect the right to silence

Nineteenth Amendment

The Constitutional Amendment That Gave Women the Right to Vote, 1920

Obergefell v. Hodges

The 2015 Supreme Court decision that established the constitutional right to same-sex marriage

Plessy v. Ferguson

The 1896 Supreme Court ruling that made "separate but equal" the law of the land

The 1973 Supreme Court decision that made abortion a constitutional right — and its 2022 reversal

The Bill of Rights

The first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, ratified 1791

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965

The Hart-Celler Act that abolished the national-origins quotas and remade America

The USA PATRIOT Act

The 2001 law that expanded surveillance after September 11

Twenty-fourth Amendment

The abolition of the poll tax in federal elections

Voting Rights Act of 1965

The law that finally enforced the 15th Amendment — nearly a century after its ratification

Concepts (16)

The movement to end slavery in America, from moral argument to political force

Affirmative Action

The Six-Decade Legal and Political Battle Over Race-Conscious Remediation

Black Lives Matter

The movement against racism and police violence born of a hashtag

A movement demanding Black self-determination, pride, and political independence

Civil Disobedience

The deliberate, nonviolent refusal to obey unjust laws as a form of moral protest

The constitutional guarantee that government cannot deprive citizens of life, liberty, or property without fair procedures

Equal Protection

The Fourteenth Amendment guarantee that government must treat similarly situated people equally under the law

The system of racial segregation that governed the South from Reconstruction to the 1960s

The anti-communist witch hunt that suppressed dissent and defined postwar American politics

Two Episodes of Anti-Communist Hysteria That Reshaped American Civil Liberties

The Legal and Social System That Enforced Racial Separation Across American Life

The American Indian Movement

The activism that revived Native rights and demanded the treaties be honored

The Counterculture of the 1960s

The cultural rebellion that challenged postwar conformity and permanently altered American life

The Great Society

Lyndon Johnson's legislative program to end poverty and expand opportunity

Underground Railroad

The secret network of routes and safe houses that carried enslaved people to freedom

Women's Liberation Movement

The feminist uprising of the 1960s and '70s that transformed American law and culture

Organizations (3)

The civil rights organization that fought segregation in the courts, founded 1909

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Martin Luther King's engine of the nonviolent civil rights movement, 1957

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

The young radicals who put their bodies on the line for civil rights, 1960

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