Foundations, Terror & Early Legal Challenges (Lessons 2–4)

Ku Klux Klan (KKK)

White supremacist hate group established post-Civil War using violent terror, lynchings, and intimidation to suppress Black Americans and enforce segregation.

Jim Crow Laws

State and local statutes enacted across the Southern United States that enforced racial segregation and disenfranchised Black citizens.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

Supreme Court decision that constitutionalized state-mandated racial segregation under the 'separate but equal' doctrine.

Disenfranchisement Tactics

Discriminatory measures such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses used to suppress Black voting rights.

Racial Lynching

Extrajudicial public violence and murder used by white supremacists to terrorize Black communities and enforce racial hierarchy.

Creation of the NAACP (1909)

The founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to secure political, legal, and social equality.

W.E.B. Du Bois

Prominent civil rights activist, scholar, and NAACP co-founder who advocated for immediate civil rights, higher education, and political empowerment for Black Americans.

NAACP Legal Strategy

Systematic approach of challenging segregation and civil rights violations through the federal court system.

Thurgood Marshall

Lead NAACP civil rights lawyer who successfully argued Brown v. Board of Education and later became the first Black Supreme Court Justice.

Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

Landmark Supreme Court ruling declaring state-sanctioned racial segregation of public schools unconstitutional and inherently unequal.

Southern Manifesto (1956)

Document signed by nearly 100 Southern congressmen accusing the Supreme Court of an abuse of judicial power in the Brown v. Board decision.

Massive Resistance

Policy and campaign adopted by Southern white political leaders to actively obstruct and refuse the desegregation of public schools.

White Citizens' Councils

Networks of Southern white civic and business elites formed to oppose racial integration through economic and political coercion.

Murder of Emmett Till (1955)

The brutal lynching of a 14-year-old Black boy in Mississippi whose open-casket funeral catalyzed national civil rights outrage.

Declaration of Constitutional Principles

The formal title of the Southern Manifesto, which asserted that federal desegregation rulings infringed upon states' rights.