Chapter 20

The Civil Rights Movement

1945-175

1. de jure and de facto segregation policies

• De jure is segregation by law and de facto is segregation by custom or tradition.

2. Thurgood Marshall

• He was part of the NAACP that used the law to fight segregation.

• He helped overturn separate but equal by winning the Brown v. B.O.E.

• He was the first African American to serve as Justice on the Supreme Court.

3. Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas

• Supreme Court decision that segregated schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment

4. Little Rock “Central High School”

• Nine black teenagers who integrated Central High School in 1957 and became the focus of a national crisis that required the intervention of federal troops to resolve.

5. Civil Rights Act 1957

• Legislation to investigate violations of civil rights and voting rights.

• It lacked any real power.

• First Civil Rights bill passed by Congress since the Civil War.

6. Montgomery Bus Boycott/Rosa Parks

• Rosa Parks was a NAACP member who sparked the boycott for refusing to move to the back of the bus because of her race.

• A year long bus boycott that brought a new leader, Martin Luther King Jr., and a new strategy of nonviolent protest to the forefront of the Civil Rights movement.

7. Martin Luther King, Jr./SCLC

• Civil rights organization founded by Martin Luther King Jr. that used black churches to devise a new nonviolent strategy of direct action.

8. Freedom Rides

• An interstate bus journey by black and white activists who entered segregated bus facilities together throughout the South to ensure federal law was followed. They meet violent resistance along journey.

9. Birmingham Campaign

• Civil rights effort to desegregate Birmingham, AL, where shocking images of police brutality prompted Kennedy to push for a federal civil rights act.

• Children’s March

10. March on Washington

• In 1963, massive demonstration in the nation’s capital that demanded passage of a federal civil rights act and more economic opportunities.

• The place where MLK Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream Speech”.

11. Civil Rights Act 1964

• Legislation that banned segregation in businesses and places open to public (restaurants & public schools) and prohibited racial and gender discrimination in employment.

12. 24th Amendment

• Prohibited the use poll tax for elections.

13. Voting Rights of 1965

• Legislation that prohibited literacy tests and poll taxes, plus authorized the use of federal registrars to register voters if states failed to respect the Fifteenth Amendment.

14. Malcolm X

• Malcolm X was a radical African American leader who offered alternative solution to MLK Jr.

15. Nation of Islam

• Nation of Islam was an African American sect that rejected integration as the path to salvation for the black community and instead wanted to establish a separate black nation.

16. SNCC

• Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

• Student-run civil rights organization founded in 1960.

17. Lunch counter sit-down strikes in OKC and elsewhere

• Nonviolent demonstrations where civil rights protesters employed the tactic of civil disobedience to occupy seats at white-only counters.

• On August 19, 1958, school teacher Clara Luper and thirteen members of the Oklahoma City NAACP Youth Council went to the whites-only lunch counter at the Katz Drug Store in downtown Oklahoma City.

18. Stokley Carmichael/Black Power

• Stokley Carmichael was a SNCC Leader

• Black Power was a call for blacks to unite politically and economically in black-only organizations to protect their racial identity as they fought for equality.

19. Freedom Summer

• In 1964, multipronged attack on white supremacy in Mississippi that included a voter registration drive and the creation of Freedom Schools.

20. Black Panthers

• Militant civil rights group dedicated to armed self-defense, racial pride, and inner-city renewal.