Civil Rights VFL Terms

Thurgood Marshall

dedicated his life to fighting racism. He was the first African-American Supreme Court Justice. His most stunning victory came on May 17, 1954, in the case known as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. He remained a strong advocate of civil rights until he retired in 1991.

Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka

a 1954 case in which the supreme court ruled that “separate but equal” education for black and white students was unconstitutional.

Rosa Parks

protested segregation through everyday acts. On December 1, 1955 she refused to move so a white man could sit down on the bus. She was then arrested.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He was elected to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association after earning his PhD in theology.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)

an organization formed in 1957 by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, and other leaders to work for civil rights through nonviolent means.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

an organization formed in 1960 to coordinate sit-ins and other protests and to give young blacks a larger role in the civil rights movement.

Sit-in

a form of demonstration used by African Americans to protest discrimination, in which the protesters sit down in a segregated business and refuse to leave until they are served.

Freedom riders

civil rights activists who rode buses through the south in the early 1960s to challenge segregation.

James Meredith

Air Force Veteran who won a federal court case that allowed him to enroll at the all-white Ole Miss. However, when he arrived on campus he was refused the right to register as a student.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

a law that banned the discrimination on the basis of race, sex, national origin, or religion in public places and most workplaces.

Freedom Summer

a 1964 project to register African American voters in Mississippi

Fannie Lou Hamer

the daughter of Mississippi sharecroppers, who was the voice of the MFDP at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. She describes how she was jailed for registering to vote and how police forced other prisoners to beat her

Voting Rights Act of 1965

a law that made it easier for African Americans to register to vote by eliminating discriminatory literacy tests and authorizing federal examiners to enroll voters denied at the local level.

de facto segregation

a racial separation established by practice and custom, not by law.

de jure segregation

racial separation established by law.

Malcolm X

went to jail at age 20 for burglary. He studied the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and openly preached his views of black superiority and separatism from whites.

Nation of Islam

a religious group, popularly known as the black Muslims, founded by Elijah Muhammad to promote black separatism and the Islamic religion

Black Power

a slogan used by Stokely Carmichael in the 1960s that encouraged African American pride and political and social leadership.

Black Panthers

a militant African American political organization formed in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale to fight police brutality and to provide services in the ghetto.

Civil Rights Act of 1968

a law that banned discrimination in housing.

Affirmative Action

a policy that seeks to correct the effects of past discrimination by favoring the groups who were previously disadvantaged.