Civil Rights Movement Flashcards

Flashcards relating to the Civil Rights Movement. These flashcards are in vocabulary format.

Plessy v. Ferguson

Declared segregation legal in 1896.

Separate-but-equal doctrine

Established by Plessy v. Ferguson, making segregation legal as long as equal facilities were provided.

Jim Crow Laws

Laws segregating African Americans and whites, common in the South after Plessy v. Ferguson.

De facto segregation

Segregation by custom and tradition, such as in the North.

Civil Rights Movement

Effort to attain racial equality after WWII.

Executive Order #9981

Ended discrimination in the U.S. armed forces.

Jackie Robinson

Broke the baseball color line in 1947.

Thurgood Marshall

African American attorney and chief counsel for the NAACP who worked to end segregation in public schools.

Brown v. Board of Education

Ruled segregation in public schools was unconstitutional in 1954.

Southern Manifesto

Called for resistance from southern states to reject Brown and forestall school integration.

Emmett Till

14-year-old black boy murdered in Mississippi in 1955 for whistling at a white woman.

Rosa Parks

Refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama.

NAACP

Led by Edgar D. Nixon, recognized that the arrest of Parks might rally local African Americans to protest segregated buses.

Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA)

Led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., called for a nonviolent passive resistant approach to end segregation and racism.

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)

Challenged the segregation of public transportation, housing, at the voting booths, and in public accommodations, led by MLK Jr.

Eisenhower

Sent federal troops into the South to protect African Americans and their constitutional rights in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Civil Rights Act of 1957

Intended to protect the right of African Americans to vote, passed in 1957.

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)

Founded in 1942 by James Farmer, used sit-ins as a form of protest against segregation and discrimination.

Sit-ins

Four college students began protesting racial segregation in restaurants by sitting at "White Only" lunch counters and waiting to be served.

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

Founded in Raleigh, North Carolina, to help organize and direct the student sit-in movement.

Freedom Rides

Asked teams of African Americans and white Americans to travel into the South to integrate bus terminals.

James Meredith

Tried to register at the segregated University of Mississippi in 1962.

George C. Wallace

Governor of Alabama who tried to block the desegregation of the University of Alabama in 1963.

Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Penned by MLK Jr. in jail, defends the strategy of nonviolent resistance to racism.

Bull Connor

Used high-pressure water hoses and police attack dogs on children and adult bystanders in Birmingham.

Medgar Evers

NAACP Mississippi field secretary, was shot and killed in front of his home in June 1963.

March on Washington

King led 250,000 demonstrators to the nation’s capital and staged a peaceful rally.

16th Street Baptist Church Bombing

Marked a turning point in the United States during the civil rights movement and contributed to support for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

Prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion or national origin, and granted the federal government new powers to enforce the law.

Voting Rights Act of 1965

Suspended the use of literacy and other voter qualification tests in voter registration.