Civil Rights Movement, 1950s–1964

30 vocabulary flashcards covering major events, legal cases, organizations, and terms from the Civil Rights Movement lecture notes.

Segregation

Systemic separation of people by race in housing, education, transportation, and voting during the mid-20th-century United States.

White Flight

Mass movement of White families and capital from inner-city neighborhoods to suburban areas, exacerbating urban racial and economic divides.

Levittowns

Large post-WWII suburban housing developments that symbolized suburban growth and were largely closed to minorities.

Redlining

Discriminatory banking practice of designating minority neighborhoods as high-risk (often shaded red on maps) to deny them mortgage loans.

Federal Housing Administration (FHA)

U.S. agency whose loan-insurance policies favored White applicants and excluded minority neighborhoods during the 1950s.

G.I. Bill Mortgages

VA-backed home loans for veterans that were often denied to Black servicemembers through discriminatory lending.

Restrictive Housing Covenants

Contractual clauses that barred the sale of property to racial minorities, widely used before being deemed unenforceable.

Shelley v. Kraemer (1948)

Supreme Court ruling declaring that courts cannot enforce racially restrictive housing covenants because they violate the Equal Protection Clause.

Equal Protection Clause

Fourteenth Amendment provision requiring states to apply laws equally, central to many civil-rights decisions.

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

Decision that established the “separate but equal” doctrine used to justify segregation until 1954.

Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

Landmark case declaring segregation in public schools unconstitutional, overturning Plessy v. Ferguson.

"With all deliberate speed"

Ambiguous phrase in Brown ruling instructing southern schools to integrate, allowing long delays.

Little Rock Nine

Nine Black students who integrated Central High School in 1957 under federal troop protection ordered by President Eisenhower.

Governor Orval Faubus

Arkansas governor who used the National Guard to block the Little Rock Nine from entering Central High School.

Segregation Academies

Private schools established by southern Whites to avoid public-school integration after Brown.

Southern Manifesto (1956)

Statement by 96 southern congressmen pledging to resist school desegregation.

White Citizens’ Councils

Middle- and upper-class White supremacist groups that used economic and political intimidation to oppose integration.

Emmett Till

Fourteen-year-old Black boy whose 1955 lynching in Mississippi galvanized the civil-rights movement.

Open Casket Funeral (Till)

Mamie Till-Mobley’s decision to show her son’s brutalized body, exposing racial violence to national audiences.

Double Jeopardy Protection

Constitutional rule preventing re-trial; Till’s killers confessed in Look magazine after acquittal without fear of prosecution.

Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56)

Year-long Black boycott of segregated buses that ended with a Supreme Court ruling against bus segregation.

Rosa Parks

NAACP activist whose arrest for refusing to yield her bus seat sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Claudette Colvin

Fifteen-year-old who refused to give up her bus seat months before Parks; her case was not used publicly due to age and pregnancy.

Nonviolent Resistance

Strategy, advocated by Martin Luther King Jr., of confronting injustice through peaceful protest.

Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

Youth-led organization founded in 1960 to coordinate direct-action protests and voter registration drives.

Sit-In Movement (1960)

Protests initiated by four Black students at a Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter that spread to over 100 cities.

Birmingham Campaign (1963)

Mass civil-rights action where televised police dogs and fire hoses attacking protesters prompted national outrage.

Freedom Summer (1964)

Mississippi voter-registration drive involving mostly White college students; faced violent backlash, including three murders.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

Federal law banning discrimination in public accommodations and employment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)

Agency created by the 1964 act to investigate and enforce workplace anti-discrimination laws.