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The Civil Rights StruggleA Very Short History

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arDespite the Emancipation Proclamation, black people are routinely oppressed, unjustly accused, and lynched.

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48President HenTruman signs Executive Order 9981, which states, "It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin.”

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54The Supreme Court overturns Plessy v. Ferguson – which had allowed for “separate but equal” treatment of people according to their race, and rules that schools cannot segregate in Brown v. Board of Education. Thurgood Marshall, the successful attorney would later become our nation’s first black Justice.

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55August—Emmett Till, while visiting family in Mississippi, is brutally kidnapped, beaten, shot, and dumped in a river. Allegedly, he had whistled at a white woman. The two white men, who later bragged about committing the crime, were acquitted by an all-white jury.

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North Carolina—Four students protest stores that segregate by staging a sit-in at a local Woolworth’s. Their actions lead to similar protests across the south.

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Over the spring and summer, student volunteers begin taking bus trips through the South to test out new laws that prohibit segregation in interstate travel facilities, which includes bus and railway stations. Several of the groups, known as “freedom riders” are attacked along the way.

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62 James Meredith becomes the first black person to enroll at the University of Mississippi. The violence and tension around his enrollment compel President Kennedy to send 5,000 troops to the state.

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April—Martin Luther King Jr. is arrested and imprisoned during protests in Alabama. He writes his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

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August—About 200,000 people join the March on Washington. Congregating at the Lincoln Memorial, participants listen as Martin Luther King delivers his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

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63 Four young girls (Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins) attending Sunday school are killed by a bomb explosion at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a popular location for civil rights meetings. Riots erupt in Birmingham, leading to the deaths of two more black youths.

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