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1865 - Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation – a presidential order freeing slaves in the Confederate states

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1896 - Homer Adolph Plessy challenged a Louisiana segregation law

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1955 - Rosa Parks was arrested for refusal to give up her seat on a bus to a white man

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May 1963- in Birmingham 900 demonstrating black schoolchildren were arrested and transported to jail in school buses

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250,000 blacks and whites gathered peacefully in the capital to demonstrate for jobs, equality, and passage of the civil rights bill pending in the U.S. Congress.

The demonstration grabbed the attention of the members of Congress, the President, and the nation as a whole.

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Kennedy's assassination, November 22, 1964

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Kennedy's assassination, November 22, 1964

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A new president, Lyndon Johnson urged the Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a memorial to the slain president.

"Kennedy's great contribution was to write a bill that would get through both houses of Congress. He had just gotten that bill out of the rules committee when he was assassinated. When Johnson became president, that changed the situation because he was a Southerner who had to run for reelection and needed northern and minority support. In his state of the Union address in January 1964, President Johnson called for the end of all segregation in American society. No president had ever done that before in American history.

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"to join in this effort to bring justice and hope to all our people and peace to our land … let us close the springs of racial poison."

It addressed voting, public accommodations, public facilities, and public schools;

it gave tenure to a civil rights commission to police America's enforcement of civil rights laws, addressed the questions of U.S. Government aid, employment, statistics, courts, and conciliatory services, and assured the right of jury trial in criminal contempt cases growing out of any part of the act.

discrimination in public accommodations was outlawed

the law authorized the U.S. Government to provide technical and financial aid to all school districts engaged in the process of desegregation.

it has also helped many others, including Hispanics and other racial and ethnic minorities, the handicapped, homosexuals, and women. Indeed, the Civil Rights Act became a starting point to press for additional legislation or guarantees of protection.

it paved the way for the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the Fair Housing Act in 1968, in 1972, for legislation banning discrimination against the handicapped and the elderly and for additional protection against unfair practices in housing and education