# data[].attributes.body
- I can analyze the connections and distinctions between individuals, ideas, or events in a text.
- I can analyze how specific dialogue or incidents in a plot propel the action, reveal aspects of a character, or provoke a decision.

# data[].attributes.body
- I can use items about the civil rights era to build background knowledge about A Mighty Long Way.
- I can analyze how incidents in A Mighty Long Way provoke Carlotta to make certain decisions and shape her story.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The thirteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolishes slavery throughout the country.

1865
At the recommendation of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate Congress signs and passes the "Negro Soldier Bill," allowing slave enlistment.

1865
Joseph Johnston surrenders to Union forces

1865
General Lee surrenders to Union General Grant at the Appomattox Court House in Virginia.

1865
The newly re-elected Lincoln is assassinated. Andrew Johnson, a Southern Democrat, becomes president. Johnson's Reconstruction plan offers amnesty to those promising future loyalty and requires that leading Confederate officials submit for individual Presidential pardons. States must also ratify the thirteenth amendment.

1865
Tennessee abolishes slavery.

1865
Mississippi enacts a "Black Code."

1865
Congress refuses to acknowledge state governments formed under Johnson's reconstruction plan.

1865
Congress establishes the U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (The Freedmen's Bureau) to assist former slaves in the transition to freedom.

1866
Virginia legally recognizes marriages between African Americans and grants children of those marriages legitimacy and inheritance rights.

1866
The Republican majority Congress passes a Civil Rights Bill to protect the rights of blacks. After repeated presidential vetoes, Congress overrides Johnson to enact the bill

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Slavery and the Making of America . Timeline | PBS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The thirteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolishes slavery throughout the country. 1865 At the recommendation of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate Congress signs and passes the "Negro Soldier Bill," allowing slave enlistment. 1865 Joseph Johnston surrenders to Union forces 1865 General Lee surrenders to Union General Grant at the Appomattox Court House in Virginia.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Time for Justice - A Civil Rights Timeline

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This timeline accompanies the film “America’s Civil Rights Movement: A Time for Justice.”

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Black history in the United States is a rich and varied chronicle of slavery and liberty, oppression and progress, segregation and achievement. Though captive and free Africans were likely present in the Americas by the 1400s, the kidnapped men, women and children from Africa who were sold first to European colonists in 1619, and later to American citizens, became symbolic of the early years of Black history in the United States.

Slavery Comes to North America, 1619

To satisfy the labor needs of the rapidly growing North American colonies, white European settlers turned in the early 17th century from indentured servants (mostly poorer Europeans) to a cheaper, more plentiful labor source: enslaved Africans. After 1619, when a Dutch ship brought 20 Africans ashore at the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia, slavery spread quickly through the American colonies. Though it is impossible to give accurate figures, some historians have estimated that 6 to 7 million enslaved people were imported to the New World during the 18th century alone, depriving the African continent of its most valuable resource-its healthiest and ablest men and women.

Many northern states had abolished slavery by the end of the 18th century, but the institution was absolutely vital to the South, where Black people constituted a large minority of the population and the economy relied on the production of crops like tobacco and cotton. Congress outlawed the import of new enslaved people in 1808, but the enslaved population in the U.S. nearly tripled over the next 50 years, and by 1860 it had reached nearly 4 million, with more than half living in the cotton-producing states of the South.

Rise of the Cotton Industry, 1793

In the years immediately following the Revolutionary War, the rural South-the region where slavery had taken the strongest hold in North America-faced an economic crisis. The soil used to grow tobacco, then the leading cash crop, was exhausted, while products such as rice and indigo failed to generate much profit. As a result, the price of enslaved people was dropping, and the continued growth of slavery seemed in doubt.

Around the same time, the mechanization of spinning and weaving had revolutionized the textile industry in England, and the demand for American cotton soon became insatiable. Production was limited, however, by the laborious process of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers, which had to be completed by hand.

In 1793, a young Yankee schoolteacher named Eli Whitney came up with a solution to the problem: The cotton gin, a simple mechanized device that efficiently removed the seeds, could be hand-powered or, on a large scale, harnessed to a horse or powered by water. The cotton gin was widely copied, and within a few years the South would transition from a dependence on the cultivation of tobacco to that of cotton.

As the growth of the cotton industry led inexorably to an increased demand for enslaved Africans, the prospect of slave rebellion-such as the one that triumphed in Haiti in 1791-drove slaveholders to make increased efforts to prevent a similar event from happening in the South. Also in 1793, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it a federal crime to assist an enslaved person trying to escape. Though it was difficult to enforce from state to state, especially with the growth of abolitionist feeling in the North, the law helped enshrine and legitimize slavery as an enduring American institution.

Nat Turner's Revolt, August 1831

In August 1831, Nat Turner struck fear into the hearts of white Southerners by leading the only effective slave rebellion in U.S. history. Born on a small plantation in Southampton County, Virginia, Turner inherited a passionate hatred of slavery from his African-born mother and came to see himself as anointed by God to lead his people out of bondage.

In early 1831, Turner took a solar eclipse as a sign that the time for revolution was near, and on the night of August 21, he and a small band of followers killed his owners, the Travis family, and set off toward the town of Jerusalem, where they planned to capture an armory and gather more recruits. The group, which eventually numbered around 75 Black people, killed some 60 white people in two days before armed resistance from local white people and the arrival of state militia forces overwhelmed them just outside Jerusalem. Some 100 enslaved people, including innocent bystanders, lost their lives in the struggle. Turner escaped and spent six weeks on the run before he was captured, tried and hanged.

Oft-exaggerated reports of the insurrection-some said that hundreds of white people had been killed-sparked a wave of anxiety across the South. Several states called special emergency sessions of the legislature, and most strengthened their codes in order to limit the education, movement and assembly of enslaved people. While supporters of slavery pointed to the Turner rebellion as evidence that Black people were inherently inferior barbarians requiring an institution such as slavery to discipline them, the increased repression of southern Black people would strengthen anti-slavery feeling in the North through the 1860s and intensify the regional tensions building toward civil war.

Abolitionism and the Underground Railroad, 1831

The early abolition movement in North America was fueled both by enslaved people's efforts to liberate themselves and by groups of white settlers, such as the Quakers, who opposed slavery on religious or moral grounds. Though the lofty ideals of the Revolutionary era invigorated the movement, by the late 1780s it was in decline, as the growing southern cotton industry made slavery an ever more vital part of the national economy. In the early 19th century, however, a new brand of radical abolitionism emerged in the North, partly in reaction to Congress' passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the tightening of codes in most southern states. One of its most eloquent voices was William Lloyd Garrison, a crusading journalist from Massachusetts, who founded the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator in 1831 and became known as the most radical of America's antislavery activists.

Antislavery northerners-many of them free Black people-had begun helping enslaved people escape from southern plantations to the North via a loose network of safe houses as early as the 1780s called the Underground Railroad.

Dred Scott Case, March 6, 1857

Upon his return to Missouri, Scott sued for his freedom on the basis that his temporary removal to free soil had made him legally free. The case went to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and the majority eventually ruled that Scott was an enslaved person and not a citizen, and thus had no legal rights to sue.

According to the Court, Congress had no constitutional power to deprive persons of their property rights when dealing with enslaved people in the territories. The verdict effectively declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, ruling that all territories were open to slavery and could exclude it only when they became states.

While much of the South rejoiced, seeing the verdict as a clear victory, antislavery northerners were furious. One of the most prominent abolitionists, Frederick Douglass, was cautiously optimistic, however, wisely predicting that-"This very attempt to blot out forever the hopes of an enslaved people may be one necessary link in the chain of events preparatory to the complete overthrow of the whole slave system."

John Brown's Raid, October 16, 1859

On the night of October 16, 1859, he led a small band of less than 50 men in a raid against the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. Their aim was to capture enough ammunition to lead a large operation against Virginia's slaveholders. Brown's men, including several Black people, captured and held the arsenal until federal and state governments sent troops and were able to overpower them.

John Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859. His trial riveted the nation, and he emerged as an eloquent voice against the injustice of slavery and a martyr to the abolitionist cause. Just as Brown's courage turned thousands of previously indifferent northerners against slavery, his violent actions convinced slave owners in the South beyond doubt that abolitionists would go to any lengths to destroy the "peculiar institution." Rumors spread of other planned insurrections, and the South reverted to a semi-war status. Only the election of the anti-slavery Republican Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860 remained before the southern states would begin severing ties with the Union, sparking the bloodiest conflict in American history.

Civil War and Emancipation, 1861

In the spring of 1861, the bitter sectional conflicts that had been intensifying between North and South over the course of four decades erupted into civil war, with 11 southern states seceding from the Union and forming the Confederate States of America. Though President Abraham Lincoln 's antislavery views were well established, and his election as the nation's first Republican president had been the catalyst that pushed the first southern states to secede in late 1860, the Civil War at its outset was not a war to abolish slavery. Lincoln sought first and foremost to preserve the Union, and he knew that few people even in the North-let alone the border slave states still loyal to Washington-would have supported a war against slavery in 1861.

By the summer of 1862, however, Lincoln had come to believe he could not avoid the slavery question much longer. Five days after the bloody Union victory at Antietam in September, he issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation; on January 1, 1863, he made it official that enslaved people within any State, or designated part of a State in rebellion, "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." Lincoln justified his decision as a wartime measure, and as such he did not go so far as to free enslaved people in the border states loyal to the Union, an omission that angered many abolitionists.

The Post-Slavery South, 1865

The 15th Amendment, adopted in 1870, guaranteed that a citizen's right to vote would not be denied-on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." During Reconstruction, Black Americans won election to southern state governments and even to the U.S. Congress. Their growing influence greatly dismayed many white southerners, who felt control slipping ever further away from them. The white protective societies that arose during this period-the largest of which was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)-sought to disenfranchise Black voters by using voter suppression and intimidation as well as more extreme violence. By 1877, when the last federal soldiers left the South and Reconstruction drew to a close, Black Americans had seen dishearteningly little improvement in their economic and social status, and what political gains they had made had been wiped away by the vigorous efforts of white supremacist forces throughout the region.

'Separate But Equal,' 1896

As Reconstruction drew to a close and the forces of white supremacy regained control from carpetbaggers (northerners who moved South) and freed Black people, Southern state legislatures began enacting the first segregation laws, known as the "Jim Crow" laws. Taken from a much-copied minstrel routine written by a white actor who performed often in blackface, the name "Jim Crow" came to serve as a general derogatory term for African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South. By 1885, most southern states had laws requiring separate schools for Black and white students, and by 1900, "persons of color" were required to be separated from white people in railroad cars and depots, hotels, theaters, restaurants, barber shops and other establishments. On May 18, 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its verdict in Plessy v. Ferguson, a case that represented the first major test of the meaning of the 14th Amendment's provision of full and equal citizenship to African Americans.

By an 8-1 majority, the Court upheld a Louisiana law that required the segregation of passengers on railroad cars. By asserting that the equal protection clause was not violated as long as reasonably equal conditions were provided to both groups, the Court established the "separate but equal" doctrine that would thereafter be used for assessing the constitutionality of racial segregation laws. Plessy vs. Ferguson stood as the overriding judicial precedent in civil rights cases until 1954, when it was reversed by the Court's verdict in Brown v. Board of Education.

Washington, Carver & Du Bois, 1900

As the 19th century came to an end and segregation took ever stronger hold in the South, many African Americans saw self-improvement, especially through education, as the single greatest opportunity to escape the indignities they suffered. Many Black people looked to Booker T. Washington, the author of the bestselling Up From Slavery (1900), as an inspiration. As president of Alabama's Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Washington urged Black Americans to acquire the kind of industrial or vocational training (such as farming, mechanics and domestic service) that would give them the necessary skills to carve out a niche for themselves in the U.S. economy. George Washington Carver, another formerly enslaved man and the head of Tuskegee's agriculture department, helped liberate the South from its reliance on cotton by convincing farmers to plant peanuts, soybeans and sweet potatoes in order to rejuvenate the exhausted soil.

By 1940, peanuts had become the second cash crop in the South. Like Washington, Carver had little interest in racial politics, and was celebrated by many white Americans as a shining example of a modest, industrious Black man. While Washington and Carver represented a philosophy of accommodation to white supremacy, another prominent Black educator, the Harvard-trained historian and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, became a leading voice in the growing Black protest movement during the first half of the 20th century. In his 1903 book Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois spoke strongly against Washington's advocacy of industrial education, which he saw as too narrow and economically focused, and stressed the importance of higher education for African Americans.

NAACP Founded, 1909

First established in Chicago, the NAACP had expanded to more than 400 locations by 1921. One of its earliest programs was a crusade against lynching and other lawless acts. Those efforts-including a nationwide protest of D.W. Griffiths' silent film Birth of a Nation (1915), which glorified white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan-would continue into the 1920s, playing a crucial role in drastically reducing the number of lynchings carried out in the United States. Du Bois edited the NAACP's official magazine, The Crisis, from 1910 to 1934, publishing many of the leading voices in African American literature and politics and helping fuel the spread of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s.

Marcus Garvey and the UNIA, 1916

Born in Jamaica, the Black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey founded his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) there in 1914; two years later, he brought it to the United States. Garvey appealed to the racial pride of African Americans, exalting blackness as strong and beautiful. As racial prejudice was so ingrained in white civilization, Garvey claimed, it was futile for Black people to appeal to white peoples' sense of justice and democratic principles. Their only hope, according to him, was to flee America and return to Africa to build a country of their own. After an unsuccessful appeal to the League of Nations to settle a colony in Africa and failed negotiations with Liberia, Garvey announced the formation of the Empire of Africa in 1921, with himself as provisional president.

Other African American leaders, notably W.E.B. Du Bois of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), criticized Garvey and his "Back to Africa" movement; he was openly contemptuous of them in return. There was no denying the movement's appeal, however. Garvey's boast of 6 million followers in 1923 was probably exaggerated, but even his critics admitted that the UNIA had some 500,000 members. In 1923, the U.S. government successfully prosecuted and convicted Garvey for mail fraud in connection with selling stock in his Black Star Line shipping company. After serving a two-year jail sentence, Garvey was pardoned by President Calvin Coolidge and immediately deported; he died in London in 1940.

Harlem Renaissance, 1920

In the 1920s, the great migration of Black Americans from the rural South to the urban North sparked an African American cultural renaissance that took its name from the New York City neighborhood of Harlem but became a widespread movement in cities throughout the North and West. Also known as the Black Renaissance or the New Negro Movement, the Harlem Renaissance marked the first time that mainstream publishers and critics turned their attention seriously to African American literature, music, art and politics. Blues singer Bessie Smith, pianist Jelly Roll Morton, bandleader Louis Armstrong, composer Duke Ellington, dancer Josephine Baker and actor Paul Robeson were among the leading entertainment talents of the Harlem Renaissance, while Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston were some of its most eloquent writers.

There was a flip side to this greater exposure, however: Emerging Black writers relied heavily on white-owned publications and publishing houses, while in Harlem's most famous cabaret, the Cotton Club, the preeminent Black entertainers of the day played to exclusively white audiences. In 1926, a controversial bestseller about Harlem life by the white novelist Carl von Vechten exemplified the attitude of many white urban sophisticates, who looked to Black culture as a window into a more "primitive" and "vital" way of life. W.E.B. Du Bois, for one, railed against Van Vechten's novel and criticized works by Black writers, such as McKay's novel Home to Harlem, that he saw as reinforcing negative stereotypes of Black people. With the onset of the Great Depression, as organizations like the NAACP and the National Urban League switched their focus to the economic and political problems facing Black Americans, the Harlem Renaissance drew to a close. Its influence had stretched around the world, opening the doors of mainstream culture to Black artists and writers.

African Americans in WWII, 1941

During World War II, many African Americans were ready to fight for what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the "Four Freedoms"-freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear-even while they themselves lacked those freedoms at home. More than 3 million Black Americans would register for service during the war, with some 500,000 seeing action overseas. According to War Department policy, enlisted Black and white people were organized into separate units. Frustrated Black servicemen were forced to combat racism even as they sought to further U.S. war aims; this became known as the "Double V" strategy, for the two victories they sought to win.

The war's first African American hero emerged from the attack on Pearl Harbor, when Dorie Miller, a young Navy steward on the U.S.S. West Virginia, carried wounded crew members to safety and manned a machine gun post, shooting down several Japanese planes. In the spring of 1943, graduates of the first all-Black military aviation program, created at the Tuskegee Institute in 1941, headed to North Africa as the 99th Pursuit Squadron. Their commander, Captain Benjamin O. Davis Jr., later became one of the first African American generals (his father- General Benjamin O. Davis Sr.-was the first). The Tuskegee Airmen saw combat against German and Italian troops, flew more than 3,000 missions, and served as a great source of pride for many Black Americans.

Aside from celebrated accomplishments like these, overall gains were slow, and maintaining high morale among black forces was difficult due to the continued discrimination they faced. In July 1948, President Harry S. Truman finally integrated the U.S. Armed Forces under an executive order mandating 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."

Jackie Robinson, 1947

By 1900, the unwritten color line barring Black players from white teams in professional baseball was strictly enforced. Jackie Robinson, a sharecropper's son from Georgia, joined the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League in 1945 after a stint in the U.S. Army (he earned an honorable discharge after facing a court-martial for refusing to move to the back of a segregated bus). His play caught the attention of Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who had been considering bringing an end to segregation in baseball. Rickey signed Robinson to a Dodgers farm team that same year and two years later moved him up, making Robinson the first African American player to play on a major league team.

Robinson played his first game with the Dodgers on April 15, 1947; he led the National League in stolen bases that season, earning Rookie of the Year honors. Over the next nine years, Robinson compiled a .311 batting average and led the Dodgers to six league championships and one World Series victory. Despite his success on the field, however, he encountered hostility from both fans and other players. Members of the St. Louis Cardinals even threatened to strike if Robinson played; baseball commissioner Ford Frick settled the question by threatening to suspend any player who went on strike.

After Robinson's historic breakthrough, baseball was steadily integrated, with professional basketball and tennis following suit in 1950. His groundbreaking achievement transcended sports, and as soon as he signed the contract with Rickey, Robinson became one of the most visible African Americans in the country, and a figure that Black people could look to as a source of pride, inspiration and hope. As his success and fame grew, Robinson began speaking out publicly for Black equality. In 1949, he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee to discuss the appeal of Communism to Black Americans, surprising them with a ferocious condemnation of the racial discrimination embodied by the Jim Crow segregation laws of the South: "The white public should start toward real understanding by appreciating that every single Negro who is worth his salt is going to resent any kind of slurs and discrimination because of his race, and he's going to use every bit of intelligence...to stop it..."

Brown v. Board of Education, May 17, 1954

On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its verdict in Brown v. Board of Education, ruling unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the 14th Amendment's mandate of equal protection of the laws of the U.S. Constitution to any person within its jurisdiction. Oliver Brown, the lead plaintiff in the case, was one of almost 200 people from five different states who had joined related NAACP cases brought before the Supreme Court since 1938.

The landmark verdict reversed the "separate but equal" doctrine the Court had established with Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which it determined that equal protection was not violated as long as reasonably equal conditions were provided to both groups. In the Brown decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren famously declared that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." Though the Court's ruling applied specifically to public schools, it implied that other segregated facilities were also unconstitutional, thus striking a heavy blow to the Jim Crow South. As such, the ruling provoked serious resistance, including a "Southern manifesto" issued by southern congressmen denouncing it. The decision was also difficult to enforce, a fact that became increasingly clear in May 1955 when the Court remanded the case to the courts of origin due to "their proximity to local conditions" and urged "a prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance." Though some southern schools moved towards integration relatively without incident, in other cases-notably in Arkansas and Alabama-enforcing Brown would require federal intervention.

Emmett Till, August 1955

In August 1955, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago named Emmett Till had recently arrived in Money, Mississippi to visit relatives. While in a grocery store, he allegedly whistled and made a flirtatious remark to the white woman behind the counter, violating the strict racial codes of the Jim Crow South. Three days later, two white men-the woman's husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam-dragged Till from his great uncle's house in the middle of the night. After beating the boy, they shot him to death and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River. The two men confessed to kidnapping Till but were acquitted of murder charges by an all-white, all-male jury after barely an hour of deliberations. Never brought to justice, Bryant and Milam later shared vivid details of how they killed Till with a journalist for Look magazine, which published their confessions under the headline "The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi."

Till's mother held an open-casket funeral for her son in Chicago, hoping to bring public attention to the brutal murder. Thousands of mourners attended, and Jet magazine published a photo of the corpse. International outrage over the crime and the verdict helped fuel the civil rights movement: just three months after Emmett Till's body was found, and a month after a Mississippi grand jury refused to indict Milam and Bryant on kidnapping charges, a citywide bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama would begin the movement in earnest.

Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, December 1955

On December 1, 1955, an African American woman named Rosa Parks was riding a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama when the driver told her to give up her seat to a white man. Parks refused and was arrested for violating the city's racial segregation ordinances, which mandated that Black passengers sit in the back of public buses and give up their seats for white riders if the front seats were full. Parks, a 42-year-old seamstress, was also the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. As she later explained: "I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed. I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen."

Four days after Parks' arrest, an activist organization called the Montgomery Improvement Association-led by a young pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. -spearheaded a boycott of the city's municipal bus company. Because African Americans made up some 70 percent of the bus company's riders at the time, and the great majority of Montgomery's Black citizens supported the bus boycott, its impact was immediate.

About 90 participants in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, including King, were indicted under a law forbidding conspiracy to obstruct the operation of a business. Found guilty, King immediately appealed the decision. Meanwhile, the boycott stretched on for more than a year, and the bus company struggled to avoid bankruptcy. On November 13, 1956, in Browder v. Gayle, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court's decision declaring the bus company's segregation seating policy unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. King, called off the boycott on December 20, and Rosa Parks-known as the "mother of the civil rights movement"-would be one of the first to ride the newly desegregated buses.

Central High School Integrated, September 1957

Although the Supreme Court declared segregation of public schools illegal in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the decision was extremely difficult to enforce, as 11 southern states enacted resolutions interfering with, nullifying or protesting school desegregation. In Arkansas, Governor Orval Faubus made resistance to desegregation a central part of his successful 1956 reelection campaign. The following September, after a federal court ordered the desegregation of Central High School, located in the state capital of Little Rock, Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine African American students from entering the school. He was later forced to call off the guard, and in the tense standoff that followed, TV cameras captured footage of white mobs converging on the " Little Rock Nine " outside the high school. For millions of viewers throughout the country, the unforgettable images provided a vivid contrast between the angry forces of white supremacy and the quiet, dignified resistance of African American students.

After an appeal by the local congressman and mayor of Little Rock to stop the violence, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the state's National Guard and sent 1,000 members of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division to enforce the integration of Central High School. The nine Black students entered the school under heavily armed guard, marking the first time since Reconstruction that federal troops had provided protection for Black Americans against racial violence. Not done fighting, Faubus closed all of Little Rock's high schools in the fall of 1958 rather than permit integration. A federal court struck down this act, and four of the nine students returned, under police protection, after the schools were reopened in 1959.

Loving v. Virginia Ruling, 1958

Mildred and Richard Loving were one of the first interracial couples legally married in the United States and their union marked a pivotal moment in marriage rights for mixed-race families. At 2 a.m. on July 11, 1958, Mildred Jeter was lying next to her husband Richard Loving, when police began knocking on their door, demanding to know about the nature of their relationship. At the time, interracial marriage was illegal in Virginia and the newly-wed couple was guilty of breaking the law.

Richard spent the night in prison, and his sister had to pay a $1,000 bond for his release. Mildred, however, spent three nights in a small women's cell and was released to her father. The couple was then given a choice: spend 25 years in prison or leave Virginia. They chose exile and abandoned the state for nine years, making periodic trips back to visit family while trying to avoid being detected.

Amidst the civil rights movement, ACLU lawyers Bernard S. Cohen and Philip J. Hirschkop decided to take on the couple's case. They tried to have the case vacated and the ruling overturned without success. They then tried appealing the decision to the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, but the court ultimately stuck to the original ruling. The case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, where a majority of members decided on June 12, 1967, that laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional.

Sit-In Movement and Founding of SNCC, 1960

On February 1, 1960, four Black students from the Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at the lunch counter in a local branch of Woolworth's and ordered coffee. Refused service due to the counter's "whites-only" policy, they stayed put until the store closed, then returned the next day with other students. Heavily covered by the news media, the Greensboro sit-ins sparked a movement that spread quickly to college towns throughout the South and into the North, as young Black and white people engaged in various forms of peaceful protest against segregation in libraries, on beaches, in hotels and other establishments. Though many protesters were arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace, their actions made an immediate impact, forcing Woolworth's-among other establishments-to change their segregationist policies.

To capitalize on the sit-in movement's increasing momentum, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC) was founded in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 1960. Over the next few years, SNCC broadened its influence, organizing so-called "Freedom Rides" through the South in 1961 and the historic March on Washington in 1963; it also joined the NAACP in pushing for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Later, SNCC would mount an organized resistance to the Vietnam War. As its members faced increased violence, SNCC became more militant, and by the late 1960s it was advocating the "Black Power" philosophy of Stokely Carmichael (SNCC's chairman from 1966-67) and his successor, H. Rap Brown. By the early 1970s, SNCC was effectively disbanded.

CORE and Freedom Rides, May 1961

Founded in 1942 by the civil rights leader James Farmer, the Congress of Racial Equality ( CORE) sought to end discrimination and improve race relations through direct action. In its early years, CORE staged a sit-in at a Chicago coffee shop (a precursor to the successful sit-in movement of 1960) and organized a "Journey of Reconciliation," in which a group of Black and white activists rode together on a bus through the upper South in 1947, a year after the U.S. Supreme Court banned segregation in interstate bus travel.

Kennedy sent federal marshals to escort the riders to Jackson, Mississippi, but images of the bloodshed made the worldwide news, and the freedom rides continued. In September, under pressure from CORE and other civil rights organizations, as well as from the attorney general's office, the Interstate Commerce Commission ruled that all passengers on interstate bus carriers should be seated without regard to race and carriers could not mandate segregated terminals.

Integration of Ole Miss, September 1962

By the end of the 1950s, African Americans had begun to be admitted in small numbers to white colleges and universities in the South without too much incident. In 1962, however, a crisis erupted when the state-funded University of Mississippi (known as "Ole Miss") admitted a Black man, James Meredith. After nine years in the Air Force, Meredith had studied at the all-Black Jackson State College and applied repeatedly to Ole Miss with no success. With the aid of the NAACP, Meredith filed a lawsuit alleging that the university had discriminated against him because of his race. In September 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Meredith's favor, but state officials including Governor Ross Barnett vowed to block his admission.

When Meredith arrived at Ole Miss under the protection of federal forces including U.S. marshals, a mob of more than 2,000 people formed on the Oxford, Mississippi campus. Two people were killed and close to 200 injured in the ensuing chaos, which ended only after President Kennedy's administration sent some 31,000 troops to restore order. Meredith went on to graduate from Ole Miss in 1963, but the struggle to integrate higher education continued. Later that year, Governor George Wallace blocked the enrollment of a Black student at the University of Alabama, pledging to "stand in the schoolhouse door." Though Wallace was eventually forced by the federalized National Guard to integrate the university, he became a prominent symbol of the ongoing resistance to desegregation nearly a decade after Brown v. Board of Education.

Birmingham Church Bombed, 1963

Governor George Wallace was a leading foe of desegregation, and Birmingham had one of the strongest and most violent chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. Birmingham had become a leading focus of the civil rights movement by the spring of 1963 when Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested there while leading supporters of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in a nonviolent campaign of demonstrations against segregation.

While in jail, King wrote a letter to local white ministers justifying his decision not to call off the demonstrations in the face of continued bloodshed at the hands of local law enforcement officials, led by Birmingham's police commissioner, Eugene "Bull" Connor. "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" was published in the national press even as images of police brutality against protesters in Birmingham-including children being attacked by police dogs and knocked off their feet by fire hoses-sent shock waves around the world, helping to build crucial support for the civil rights movement.

'I Have a Dream,' 1963

On August 28, 1963, some 250,000 people-both Black and white-participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the largest demonstration in the history of the nation's capital and the most significant display of the civil rights movement's growing strength. After marching from the Washington Monument, the demonstrators gathered near the Lincoln Memorial, where a number of civil rights leaders addressed the crowd, calling for voting rights, equal employment opportunities for Black Americans and an end to racial segregation.

The last leader to appear was the Baptist preacher Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), who spoke eloquently of the struggle facing Black Americans and the need for continued action and nonviolent resistance. " I have a dream," King intoned, expressing his faith that one day white and Black people would stand together as equals, and there would be harmony between the races: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

King's improvised sermon continued for nine minutes after the end of his prepared remarks, and his stirring words would be remembered as undoubtedly one of the greatest speeches in American history. At its conclusion, King quoted an "old Negro spiritual: 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'" King's speech served as a defining moment for the civil rights movement, and he soon emerged as its most prominent figure.

Civil Rights Act of 1964, July 1964

At its most basic level, the act gave the federal government more power to protect citizens against discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex or national origin. It mandated the desegregation of most public accommodations, including lunch counters, bus depots, parks and swimming pools, and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to ensure equal treatment of minorities in the workplace. The act also guaranteed equal voting rights by removing biased registration requirements and procedures and authorized the U.S. Office of Education to provide aid to assist with school desegregation. In a televised ceremony on July 2, 1964, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law using 75 pens; he presented one of them to King, who counted it among his most prized possessions.

Freedom Summer and the 'Mississippi Burning' Murders, June 1964

In the summer of 1964, civil rights organizations including the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) urged white students from the North to travel to Mississippi, where they helped register Black voters and build schools for Black children. The organizations believed the participation of white students in the so-called "Freedom Summer" would bring increased visibility to their efforts. The summer had barely begun, however, when three volunteers-Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, both white New Yorkers, and James Chaney, a Black Mississippian-disappeared on their way back from investigating the burning of an African American church by the Ku Klux Klan. After a massive FBI investigation (code-named "Mississippi Burning") their bodies were discovered on August 4 buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, in Neshoba County, Mississippi.

Although the culprits in the case-white supremacists who included the county's deputy sheriff-were soon identified, the state made no arrests. The Justice Department eventually indicted 19 men for violating the three volunteers' civil rights (the only charge that would give the federal government jurisdiction over the case) and after a three-year-long legal battle, the men finally went on trial in Jackson, Mississippi. In October 1967, an all-white jury found seven of the defendants guilty and acquitted the other nine. Though the verdict was hailed as a major civil rights victory-it was the first time anyone in Mississippi had been convicted for a crime against a civil rights worker-the judge in the case gave out relatively light sentences, and none of the convicted men served more than six years behind bars.

Selma to Montgomery March, March 1965

In early 1965, Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) made Selma, Alabama, the focus of its efforts to register Black voters in the South. Alabama's governor, George Wallace, was a notorious opponent of desegregation, and the local county sheriff had led a steadfast opposition to Black voter registration drives: Only 2 percent of Selma's eligible Black voters had managed to register. In February, an Alabama state trooper shot a young African American demonstrator in nearby Marion, and the SCLC announced a massive protest march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery.

On March 7, 600 marchers got as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside Selma when they were attacked by state troopers wielding whips, nightsticks and tear gas. The brutal scene was captured on television, enraging many Americans and drawing civil rights and religious leaders of all faiths to Selma in protest. King himself led another attempt on March 9, but turned the marchers around when state troopers again blocked the road; that night, a group of segregationists fatally beat a protester, the young white minister James Reeb.

On March 21, after a U.S. district court ordered Alabama to permit the Selma-Montgomery march, some 2,000 marchers set out on the three-day journey, this time protected by U.S. Army troops and Alabama National Guard forces under federal control. "No tide of racism can stop us," King proclaimed from the steps of the state capitol building, addressing the nearly 50,000 supporters-Black and white-who met the marchers in Montgomery.

Malcolm X Shot to Death, February 1965

In 1952, the former Malcolm Little was released from prison after serving six years on a robbery charge; while incarcerated, he had joined the Nation of Islam (NOI, commonly known as the Black Muslims), given up drinking and drugs and replaced his surname with an X to signify his rejection of his "slave" name. Charismatic and eloquent, Malcolm X soon became an influential leader of the NOI, which combined Islam with Black nationalism and sought to encourage disadvantaged young Black people searching for confidence in segregated America.

As the outspoken public voice of the Black Muslim faith, Malcolm challenged the mainstream civil rights movement and the nonviolent pursuit of integration championed by Martin Luther King Jr. Instead, he urged followers to defend themselves against white aggression "by any means necessary." Mounting tensions between Malcolm and NOI founder Elijah Muhammad led Malcolm to form his own mosque in 1964. He made a pilgrimage to Mecca that same year and underwent a second conversion, this time to Sunni Islam. Calling himself el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, he renounced NOI's philosophy of separatism and advocated a more inclusive approach to the struggle for Black rights.

On February 21, 1965, during a speaking engagement in Harlem, three members of the NOI rushed the stage and shot Malcolm some 15 times at close range. After Malcolm's death, his bestselling book The Autobiography of Malcolm X popularized his ideas, particularly among Black youth, and laid the foundation for the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and 1970s.

Voting Rights Act of 1965, August 1965

Less than a week after the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers were beaten and bloodied by Alabama state troopers in March 1965, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress, calling for federal legislation to ensure protection of the voting rights of African Americans. The result was the Voting Rights Act, which Congress passed in August 1965.

The Voting Rights Act sought to overcome the legal barriers that still existed at the state and local levels preventing Black citizens from exercising the right to vote given them by the 15th Amendment. Specifically, it banned literacy tests as a requirement for voting, mandated federal oversight of voter registration in areas where tests had previously been used and gave the U.S. attorney general the duty of challenging the use of poll taxes for state and local elections.

Along with the Civil Rights Act of the previous year, the Voting Rights Act was one of the most expansive pieces of civil rights legislation in American history, and it greatly reduced the disparity between Black and white voters in the U.S. In Mississippi alone, the percentage of eligible Black voters registered to vote increased from 5 percent in 1960 to nearly 60 percent in 1968. In the mid-1960s, 70 African Americans were serving as elected officials in the South, while by the turn of the century there were some 5,000. In the same time period, the number of Black people serving in Congress increased from six to about 40.

Rise of Black Power

After the heady rush of the civil rights movement's first years, anger and frustration was increasing among many African Americans, who saw clearly that true equality-social, economic and political-still eluded them. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this frustration fueled the rise of the Black Power movement. According to then-SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael, who first popularized the term "Black Power" in 1966, the traditional civil rights movement and its emphasis on nonviolence, did not go far enough, and the federal legislation it had achieved failed to address the economic and social disadvantages facing Black Americans.

Black Power was a form of both self-definition and self-defense for African Americans; it called on them to stop looking to the institutions of white America-which were believed to be inherently racist-and act for themselves, by themselves, to seize the gains they desired, including better jobs, housing and education. Also in 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, college students in Oakland, California, founded the Black Panther Party.

While its original mission was to protect Black people from white brutality by sending patrol groups into Black neighborhoods, the Panthers soon developed into a Marxist group that promoted Black Power by urging African Americans to arm themselves and demand full employment, decent housing and control over their own communities. Clashes ensued between the Panthers and police in California, New York and Chicago, and in 1967 Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter after killing a police officer. His trial brought national attention to the organization, which at its peak in the late 1960s boasted some 2,000 members.

Fair Housing Act, April 1968

The Fair Housing Act of 1968, meant as a follow-up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, marked the last great legislative achievement of the civil rights era. Originally intended to extend federal protection to civil rights workers, it was later expanded to address racial discrimination in the sale, rental or financing of housing units. After the bill passed the Senate by an exceedingly narrow margin in early April, it was thought that the increasingly conservative House of Representatives, wary of the growing strength and militancy of the Black Power movement, would weaken it considerably.

On the day of the Senate vote, however, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Pressure to pass the bill increased amid the wave of national remorse that followed, and after a strictly limited debate, the House passed the Fair Housing Act on April 10. President Johnson signed it into law the following day. Over the next years, however, there was little decrease in housing segregation, and violence arose from Black efforts to seek housing in white neighborhoods.

From 1950 to 1980, the total Black population in America's urban centers increased from 6.1 million to 15.3 million; during this same time period, white Americans steadily moved out of the cities into the suburbs, taking with them many of the employment opportunities Black people needed. In this way, the ghetto-an inner city community plagued by high unemployment, crime and other social ills-became an ever more prevalent fact of urban Black life.

MLK Assassinated, April 4, 1968

On April 4, 1968, the world was stunned and saddened by the news that the civil rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot and killed on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to support a sanitation workers' strike. King's death opened a huge rift between white and Black Americans, as many Black people saw the killing as a rejection of their vigorous pursuit of equality through the nonviolent resistance he had championed. In more than 100 cities, several days of riots, burning and looting followed his death.

The accused killer, a white man named James Earl Ray, was captured and tried immediately; he entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to 99 years in prison; no testimony was heard. Ray later recanted his confession, and despite several inquiries into the matter by the U.S. government, many continued to believe that the speedy trial had been a cover-up for a larger conspiracy. King's assassination, along with the killing of Malcolm X three years earlier, radicalized many moderate African American activists, fueling the growth of the Black Power movement and the Black Panther Party.

The success of conservative politicians that year-including Richard Nixon 's election as president and the third-party candidacy of the ardent segregationist George Wallace, who won 13 percent of the vote-further discouraged African Americans, many of whom felt that the tide was turning against the civil rights movement.

Shirley Chisholm Runs for President, 1972

By the early 1970s, the advances of the civil rights movement had combined with the rise of the feminist movement to create an African American women's movement. "There can't be liberation for half a race," declared Margaret Sloan, one of the women behind the National Black Feminist Organization, founded in 1973. A year earlier, Representative Shirley Chisholm of New York became a national symbol of both movements as the first major party African American candidate and the first female candidate for president of the United States.

A former educational consultant and a founder of the National Women's Caucus, Chisholm became the first Black woman in Congress in 1968, when she was elected to the House from her Brooklyn district. Though she failed to win a primary, Chisholm received more than 150 votes at the Democratic National Convention. She claimed she never expected to win the nomination. It went to George McGovern, who lost to Richard Nixon in the general election.

The outspoken Chisholm, who attracted little support among African American men during her presidential campaign, later told the press: "I've always met more discrimination being a woman than being Black. When I ran for the Congress, when I ran for president, I met more discrimination as a woman than for being Black. Men are men."

The Bakke Decision and Affirmative Action, 1978

Beginning in the 1960s, the term "affirmative action" was used to refer to policies and initiatives aimed at compensating for past discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, religion or national origin. President John F. Kennedy first used the phrase in 1961, in an executive order calling on the federal government to hire more African Americans. By the mid 1970s, many universities were seeking to increase the presence of minority and female faculty and students on their campuses. The University of California at Davis, for example, designated 16 percent of its medical school's admissions spots for minority applicants.

After Allan Bakke, a white California man, applied twice without success, he sued U.C. Davis, claiming that his grades and test scores were higher than those of minority students who were admitted and accusing UC Davis of "reverse discrimination." In June 1978, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the use of strict racial quotas was unconstitutional and that Bakke should be admitted; on the other hand, it held that institutions of higher education could rightfully use race as a criterion in admissions decisions in order to ensure diversity.

In the wake of the Bakke verdict, affirmative action continued to be a controversial and divisive issue, with a growing opposition movement claiming that the so-called "racial playing field" was now equal and that African Americans no longer needed special consideration to overcome their disadvantages. In subsequent decisions over the next decades, the Court limited the scope of affirmative action programs, while several U.S. states prohibited racially based affirmative action.

Jesse Jackson Galvanizes Black Voters, 1984

As a young man, Jesse Jackson left his studies at the Chicago Theological Seminary to join Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in its crusade for Black civil rights in the South; when King was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968, Jackson was at his side. In 1971, Jackson founded PUSH, or People United to Save Humanity (later changed to People United to Serve Humanity), an organization that advocated self-reliance for African Americans and sought to establish racial parity in the business and financial community.

He was a leading voice for Black Americans during the early 1980s, urging them to be more politically active and heading up a voter registration drive that led to the election of Harold Washington as the first Black mayor of Chicago in 1983. The following year, Jackson ran for the Democratic nomination for president. On the strength of his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, he placed third in the primaries, propelled by a surge of Black voter participation.

He ran again in 1988 and received 6.6 million votes, or 24 percent of the total primary vote, winning seven states and finishing second behind the eventual Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis. Jackson's continued influence in the Democratic Party in the decades that followed ensured that African American issues had an important role in the party's platform.

Throughout his long career, Jackson has inspired both admiration and criticism for his tireless efforts on behalf of the Black community and his outspoken public persona. His son, Jesse L. Jackson Jr., won election to the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois in 1995.

Oprah Winfrey Launches Syndicated Talk Show, 1986

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the success of the long-running sitcom The Cosby Show-featuring popular comedian Bill Cosby as the doctor patriarch of a close-knit middle-class African American family-helped redefine the image of Black characters on mainstream American television. Suddenly, there was no lack of educated, upwardly mobile, family-oriented Black characters for TV viewers to look to, both in fiction and in life. In 1980, entrepreneur Robert L. Johnson founded Black Entertainment Television (BET), which he later sold to entertainment giant Viacom for some $3 billion. Perhaps the most striking phenomenon, however, was the rise of Oprah Winfrey.

Born in rural Mississippi to a poor unwed teenage mother, Winfrey got her start in television news before taking over a morning talk show in Chicago in 1984. Two years later, she launched her own nationally syndicated talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, which would go on to become the highest rated in TV history. Celebrated for her ability to talk candidly about a wide range of issues, Winfrey spun her talk show success into a one-woman empire-including acting, film and television production and publishing.

She notably promoted the work of Black female writers, forming a film company to produce movies based on novels like The Color Purple, by Alice Walker, and Beloved, by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. (She starred in both.) One of the most influential individuals in entertainment and the first Black female billionaire, Winfrey is also an active philanthropist, giving generously to Black South Africans and to the historically Black Morehouse College, among other causes.

Los Angeles Riots, 1992

In March 1991, officers with the California Highway Patrol attempted to pull an African American man named Rodney King over for speeding on a Los Angeles freeway. King, who was on probation for robbery and had been drinking, led them on a high-speed chase, and by the time the patrolmen caught up to his car, several officers of the Los Angeles Police Department were on the scene. After King allegedly resisted arrest and threatened them, four LAPD officers shot him with a TASER gun and severely beat him.

Caught on videotape by an onlooker and broadcast around the world, the beating inspired widespread outrage in the city's African American community, who had long condemned the racial profiling and abuse its members suffered at the hands of the police force. Many demanded that the unpopular L.A. police chief, Daryl Gates, be fired and that the four officers be brought to justice for their use of excessive force. The King case was eventually tried in the suburb of Simi Valley, and in April 1992 a jury found the officers not guilty.

Rage over the verdict sparked the four days of the L.A. riots, beginning in the mostly Black South Central neighborhood. By the time the riots subsided, some 55 people were dead, more than 2,300 injured, and more than 1,000 buildings had been burned. Authorities later estimated the total damage at around $1 billion. The next year, two of the four LAPD officers involved in the beating were retried and convicted in a federal court for violating King's civil rights; he eventually received $3.8 million from the city in a settlement.

Million Man March, 1995

In October 1995, hundreds of thousands of Black men gathered in Washington, D.C. for the Million Man March, one of the largest demonstrations of its kind in the capital's history. Its organizer, Minister Louis Farrakhan, had called for "a million sober, disciplined, committed, dedicated, inspired Black men to meet in Washington on a day of atonement." Farrakhan, who had asserted control over the Nation of Islam (commonly known as the Black Muslims) in the late 1970s and reasserted its original principles of Black separatism, may have been an incendiary figure, but the idea behind the Million Man March was one most Black-and many white-people could get behind.

The march was intended to bring about a kind of spiritual renewal among Black men and to instill in them a sense of solidarity and of personal responsibility to improve their own condition. It would also, organizers believed, disprove some of the stereotypical negative images of Black men that existed in American society.

By that time, the U.S. government's "war on drugs" had sent a disproportionate number of African Americans to prison, and by 2000, more Black men were incarcerated than in college. Estimates of the number of participants in the Million Man March ranged from 400,000 to more than 1 million, and its success spurred the organization of a Million Woman March, which took place in 1997 in Philadelphia.

Colin Powell Becomes Secretary of State, 2001

In 2001, George W. Bush appointed Powell as secretary of state, making him the first African American to serve as America's top diplomat. Powell sought to build international support for the controversial U.S invasion of Iraq in 2003, delivering a divisive speech to the United Nations regarding that country's possession of weapons material that was later revealed to be based on faulty intelligence. He resigned after Bush's reelection in 2004.

In another history-making appointment, Condoleezza Rice, Bush's longtime foreign policy adviser and the former head of the National Security Council, succeeded Powell, becoming the first African American woman to serve as secretary of state. Though he largely stayed out of the political spotlight after stepping down, Powell remained an admired figure in Washington and beyond.

Though he continued to brush off any speculation of a possible future presidential run, Powell made headlines during the 2008 presidential campaign when he broke from the Republican party to endorse Barack Obama, the eventual winner and the first African American to be elected president of the United States.

Barack Obama Becomes 44th US President, 2008

On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States; he is the first African American to hold that office. The product of an interracial marriage-his father grew up in a small village in Kenya, his mother in Kansas-Obama grew up in Hawaii but discovered his civic calling in Chicago, where he worked for several years as a community organizer on the city's largely Black South Side.

After studying at Harvard Law School and practicing constitutional law in Chicago, he began his political career in 1996 in the Illinois State Senate and in 2004 announced his candidacy for a newly vacant seat in the U.S. Senate. He delivered a rousing keynote speech at that year's Democratic National Convention, attracting national attention with his eloquent call for national unity and cooperation across party lines. In February 2007, just months after he became only the third African American elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction, Obama announced his candidacy for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

After withstanding a tight Democratic primary battle with Hillary Clinton, the New York senator and former first lady, Obama defeated Senator John McCain of Arizona in the general election that November. Obama's appearances in both the primaries and the general election drew impressive crowds, and his message of hope and change-embodied by the slogan "Yes We Can"-inspired thousands of new voters, many young and Black, to cast their vote for the first time in the historic election. He was reelected in 2012.

The Black Lives Matter Movement

The term "Black lives matter" was first used by organizer Alicia Garza in a July 2013 Facebook post in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a Florida man who shot and killed unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012. Martin's death set off nationwide protests like the Million Hoodie March. In 2013, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi formed the Black Lives Matter Network with the mission to "eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes."

The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter first appeared on Twitter on July 13, 2013, and spread widely as high-profile cases involving the deaths of Black civilians provoked renewed outrage.

A series of deaths of Black Americans at the hands of police officers continued to spark outrage and protests, including Eric Garner in New York City, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Tamir Rice in Cleveland Ohio and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland.

The Black Lives Matter movement gained renewed attention on September 25, 2016, when San Francisco 49ers players Eric Reid, Eli Harold, and quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem before the game against the Seattle Seahawks to draw attention to recent acts of police brutality. Dozens of other players in the NFL and beyond followed suit.

George Floyd Protests

The movement swelled to a critical juncture on May 25, 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic when 46-year-old George Floyd died after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by police officer Derek Chauvin.

Chauvin was filmed kneeling on Floyd's neck for more than eight minutes. Floyd had been accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill at a local deli in Minneapolis. All four officers involved in the incident were fired. In April 2021, Chauvin was convicted of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. In February 2022, the three other officers were found guilty of depriving Floyd of his civil rights when they helped with the restraint that led to his death.

Floyd's killing came on the heels of two other high-profile cases in 2020. On February 23, 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery was killed while out on a run after being followed by three white men in a pickup truck. And on March 13, 26-year-old EMT Breonna Taylor was shot eight times and killed after police broke down the door to her apartment while executing a nighttime warrant.

On May 26, 2020, the day after Floyd's death, protestors in Minneapolis took to the streets to protest Floyd's killing. Police cars were set on fire and officers released tear gas to disperse crowds. After months of quarantine and isolation during a global pandemic, protests mounted, spreading across the country in the following days and weeks.

Kamala Harris Becomes the First Woman and First Black US Vice President, 2021

In January 2021, Kamala Harris became the first woman and first woman of color to become vice president of the United States. Then-candidate Joe Biden had nominated Harris in August 2020 during the Democratic party's "remote" national convention. Harris, whose mother immigrated to the United States from India and whose father immigrated from Jamaica, was the first person of African or Asian descent to become a major party's vice presidential candidate-and the first to win the office.

In her victory speech in November 2020, Harris said that she was thinking "about the generations of women, Black women, Asian, white, Latina, Native American women-who throughout our nation's history have paved the way for this moment tonight-women who fought and sacrificed so much for equality and liberty and justice for all."

Sources

Ferguson shooting victim Michael Brown. BBC.
George Floyd Protests: A Timeline. The New York Times.
Tamir Rice. PBS.org.
The Matter of Black Lives. The New Yorker.
The Hashtag Black Lives Matter. Pew Research.
The Path to Eric Garner's death. The New York Times.
Timeline of Murder Trial of Amber Guyger. ABC.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Black History Milestones: Timeline | HISTORY

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
African American history began with slavery, as white European settlers first brought Africans to the continent to serve as enslaved workers. After the Civil War, the racist legacy of slavery persisted, spurring movements of resistance. Learn important dates and facts about the African American experience.

# data[].attributes.body
- I can cite evidence that supports my analysis of A Mighty Long Way.
- I can analyze how incidents in a A Mighty Long Way provoke Carlotta to make certain decisions.

# data[].attributes.body
- I can make connections between the texts I have read in this unit, and the title and lyrics in "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around".
- I can cite evidence from the text to support my connections between lyrics and text.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Problems in the Post-War South

The time: Spring 1865, at the end of the Civil War

The place: The American South

The problems: Destruction, hunger, lawlessness and violence

More than a million African Americans were refugees, homeless, separated from family during years of slavery, wondering what to do now. The white male population had been decimated by the war. The survivors straggled home, many of them wounded. But when they arrived home, they found a strange new world waiting for them.

Governments in many places ceased to exist. Southern infrastructure was almost totally destroyed. Cities were in shambles. Chimneys loomed in overgrown fields where homes once stood. Farm fields were destroyed. The familiar social order was gone. Former slaves were now free with the same rights as everyone else. Even the so-called 'favorite' house slaves - the ones their masters had thought loved them - were long gone. The federal government was imposing their concept of Reconstruction, troops still marched through the cities to enforce new laws, and Northern civilians streamed in, for better or worse.

You might say these former Confederates got what they deserved; after all, slavery is wrong. But at least for the short term, the morality of slavery was irrelevant. The immediate problem was that it was late spring, and the crops needed to get in the ground before it was too late. The people who knew how to work the fields were demanding wages, yet land owners had no money to pay them until the harvest came in. What could possibly be done?

The new labor arrangements of tenant farming and sharecropping were born out of this necessity. Laborers who had everything they needed to farm (except the land) became tenant farmers. Essentially, they just rented the fields, with payment in cash either up front or at the harvest. Tenant farmers often had the freedom to plant whatever crops they wanted. But far more freedmen became sharecroppers. Sharecroppers rented tools and animals from the landowner, worked the land at their own expense and then agreed to pay the owner between half and two-thirds of the crop after the harvest. Sharecroppers usually had to plant specific crops required by the landowner.

These arrangements did offer a solution to the farming crisis, but sharecropping, especially, became a way for wealthy whites to continue dominating society and keep blacks repressed well beyond the Civil War. Contracts, of course, favored the land owner. Sharecroppers generally lacked the resources to market their harvest independently and were often cheated during the sale. Then there were the plantation stores. Operated by the land owner, the stores conveniently sold everything farmers needed to run their households, like seed, clothing, medicine and food items they couldn't grow. The stores granted a credit account to buy supplies when they were needed and then pay the tab at harvest. But the price for this convenience was extremely high. Many sharecroppers found that their share of the crops at the harvest wasn't enough to pay their debts to the store - much less give them anything for the year ahead. Debtors were then legally obligated to stay on at the plantation, hoping that next year's crop would be better and allow them to settle the bill.

This system of labor lasted in some parts of the south for a century, involving a majority of landless black and white farmers in many parts of the South.

Convict Leasing

Though sharecropping reduced many freedmen back to circumstances very similar to slavery, there were laborers who worked without any wages at all, legally. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery, except as punishment for a crime. It was a pretty big loophole.

For many years after the Civil War, Southern states routinely convicted poor African Americans and some whites of vagrancy or other crimes, and then sentenced them to prolonged periods of forced labor. Owners of businesses, like plantations, railroads and mines, then leased these convicts from the state for a low fee. It was a win-win situation for people at the top. Business owners had an inexpensive workforce that couldn't make labor demands. And convicts were actually cheaper than slaves, so incentive to treat them well was low. The struggling state governments had nearly no overhead expenses when the convicts were leased, and the prisoners generated an enormous income stream. How big? In Alabama, convict leasing constituted 73% of the state's revenue in 1898!

It may come as no surprise that criminal populations multiplied in several states by as much as ten times between 1865 and the turn of the century. Inmates were big business. What kind of crime might lead someone to be sentenced to convict labor? Being homeless or having a home that seemed too expensive (suggesting the homeowner is stealing), being unemployed, gambling, vagrancy and a host of other real and imagined offenses. Convict leasing existed in every former Confederate state, except Virginia, and lasted for almost 60 years.

Redeemers

Sharecropping and convict leasing were just two of the ways that Democrats began to 'redeem' the South. Redeemers were white Southerners who worked to reclaim the social and political control that they had exercised for more than a century. The problem wasn't just that Republicans were in charge. Black men were now their political equals. Northern carpetbaggers were actually taking public office, along with traitorous scalawags (that is, Southern Republicans). Not only were former Confederates resentful of this political takeover, they also disdained the Northern social attitudes that were influencing the younger generation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
life in the south after the civil war - video & lesson transcript | study.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Life in the South After the Civil War - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The time: Spring 1865, at the end of the Civil War The place: The American South The problems: Destruction, hunger, lawlessness and violence More than a million African Americans were refugees, homeless, separated from family during years of slavery, wondering what to do now. The white male population had been decimated by the war.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
From the 1880s into the 1960s, a majority of American states enforced segregation through "Jim Crow" laws (so called after a black character in minstrel shows). From Delaware to California, and from North Dakota to Texas, many states (and cities, too) could impose legal punishments on people for consorting with members of another race. The most common types of laws forbade intermarriage and ordered business owners and public institutions to keep their black and white clientele separated. Here is a sampling of laws from various states.

Amateur Baseball

Georgia - It shall be unlawful for any amateur white baseball team to play baseball on any vacant lot or baseball diamond within two blocks of a playground devoted to the Negro race, and it shall be unlawful for any amateur colored baseball team to play baseball in any vacant lot or baseball diamond within two blocks of any playground devoted to the white race.

Barbers

Georgia - No colored barber shall serve as a barber [to] white women or girls.

Bathroom Facilities, Male

Alabama - Every employer of white or negro males shall provide for such white or negro males reasonably accessible and separate toilet facilities.

The Blind

Louisiana - The board of trustees shall...maintain a separate building...on separate ground for the admission, care, instruction, and support of all blind persons of the colored or black race.

Burial

Georgia - The officer in charge shall not bury, or allow to be buried, any colored persons upon ground set apart or used for the burial of white persons.

Buses

Alabama - All passenger stations in this state operated by any motor transportation company shall have separate waiting rooms or space and separate ticket windows for the white and colored races.

Child Custody

South Carolina - It shall be unlawful for any parent, relative, or other white person in this State, having the control or custody of any white child, by right of guardianship, natural or acquired, or otherwise, to dispose of, give or surrender such white child permanently into the custody, control, maintenance, or support, of a negro.

Circus Tickets

Louisiana - All circuses, shows, and tent exhibitions, to which the attendance of...more than one race is invited or expected to attend shall provide for the convenience of its patrons not less than two ticket offices with individual ticket sellers, and not less than two entrances to the said performance, with individual ticket takers and receivers, and in the case of outside or tent performances, the said ticket offices shall not be less than twenty-five (25) feet apart.

Cohabitation

Florida - Any negro man and white woman, or any white man and negro woman, who are not married to each other, who shall habitually live in and occupy in the nighttime the same room shall each be punished by imprisonment not exceeding twelve (12) months, or by fine not exceeding five hundred ($500.00) dollars.

Education

Florida - The schools for white children and the schools for negro children shall be conducted separately.

Mississippi - Separate schools shall be maintained for the children of the white and colored races.

Missouri - Separate free schools shall be established for the education of children of African descent; and it shall be unlawful for any colored child to attend any white school, or any white child to attend a colored school.

New Mexico - Separate rooms [shall] be provided for the teaching of pupils of African descent, and [when] said rooms are so provided, such pupils may not be admitted to the school rooms occupied and used by pupils of Caucasian or other descent.

Texas - [The County Board of Education] shall provide schools of two kinds; those for white children and those for colored children.

Fishing, Boating, and Bathing

Oklahoma - The [Conservation] Commission shall have the right to make segregation of the white and colored races as to the exercise of rights of fishing, boating and bathing.

Hospital Entrances

Mississippi - There shall be maintained by the governing authorities of every hospital maintained by the state for treatment of white and colored patients separate entrances for white and colored patients and visitors, and such entrances shall be used by the race only for which they are prepared.

Housing

Louisiana - Any person...who shall rent any part of any such building to a negro person or a negro family when such building is already in whole or in part in occupancy by a white person or white family, or vice versa when the building is in occupancy by a negro person or negro family, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and on conviction thereof shall be punished by a fine of not less than twenty-five ($25.00) nor more than one hundred ($100.00) dollars or be imprisoned not less than 10, or more than 60 days, or both such fine and imprisonment in the discretion of the court.

Intermarriage

Arizona - The marriage of a person of Caucasian blood with a Negro, Mongolian, Malay, or Hindu shall be null and void.

Florida - All marriages between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a person of negro descent to the fourth generation inclusive, are hereby forever prohibited.

Georgia - It shall be unlawful for a white person to marry anyone except a white person. Any marriage in violation of this section shall be void.

Maryland - All marriages between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a person of negro descent, to the third generation, inclusive, or between a white person and a member of the Malay race; or between the negro a nd a member of the Malay race; or between a person of Negro descent, to the third generation, inclusive, and a member of the Malay race, are forever prohibited, and shall be void.

Mississippi - The marriage of a white person with a negro or mulatto or person who shall have one-eighth or more of negro blood, shall be unlawful and void.

Missouri - All marriages between...white persons and negroes or white persons and Mongolians...are prohibited and declared absolutely void...No person having one-eighth part or more of negro blood shall be permitted to marry any white person, nor shall any white person be permitted to marry any negro or person having one-eighth part or more of negro blood.

Wyoming - All marriages of white persons with Negroes, Mulattos, Mongolians, or Malaya hereafter contracted in the State of Wyoming are and shall be illegal and void.

Juvenile Delinquents

Florida - There shall be separate buildings, not nearer than one fourth mile to each other, one for white boys and one for negro boys. White boys and negro boys shall not, in any manner, be associated together or worked together.

Libraries

North Carolina - The state librarian is directed to fit up and maintain a separate place for the use of the colored people who may come to the library for the purpose of reading books or periodicals.

Texas - Any white person of such county may use the county free library under the rules and regulations prescribed by the commissioners court and may be entitled to all the privileges thereof. Said court shall make proper provision for the negroes of said county to be served through a separate branch or branches of the county free library, which shall be administered by [a] custodian of the negro race under the supervision of the county librarian.

Lunch Counters

South Carolina - No persons, firms, or corporations, who or which furnish meals to passengers at station restaurants or station eating houses, in times limited by common carriers of said passengers, shall furnish said meals to white and colored passengers in the same room, or at the same table, or at the same counter.

Mental Hospitals

Georgia - The Board of Control shall see that proper and distinct apartments are arranged for said patients, so that in no case shall Negroes and white persons be together.

Militia

North Carolina - The white and colored militia shall be separately enrolled, and shall never be compelled to serve in the same organization.No organization of colored troops shall be permitted where white troops are available, and while white permitted to be organized, colored troops shall be under the command of white officers.

Mining

Oklahoma - The baths and lockers for the negroes shall be separate from the white race, but may be in the same building.

Nurses

Alabama - No person or corporation shall require any white female nurse to nurse in wards or rooms in hospitals, either public or private, in which negro men are placed.

Parks

Georgia - It shall be unlawful for colored people to frequent any park owned or maintained by the city for the benefit, use and enjoyment of white persons...and unlawful for any white person to frequent any park owned or maintained by the city for the use and benefit of colored persons.

Pool and Billiard Rooms

Alabama - It shall be unlawful for a negro and white person to play together or in company with each other at any game of pool or billiards.

Prisons

Mississippi - The warden shall see that the white convicts shall have separate apartments for both eating and sleeping from the negro convicts.

Promotion of Equality

Mississippi - Any person...who shall be guilty of printing, publishing or circulating printed, typewritten or written matter urging or presenting for public acceptance or general information, arguments or suggestions in favor of social equality or of intermarriage between whites and negroes, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and subject to fine or not exceeding five hundred (500.00) dollars or imprisonment not exceeding six (6) months or both.

Railroads

Alabama - The conductor of each passenger train is authorized and required to assign each passenger to the car or the division of the car, when it is divided by a partition, designated for the race to which such passenger belongs.

Maryland - All railroad companies and corporations, and all persons running or operating cars or coaches by steam on any railroad line or track in the State of Maryland, for the transportation of passengers, are hereby required to provide separate cars or coaches for the travel and transportation of the white and colored passengers.

Virginia - The conductors or managers on all such railroads shall have power, and are hereby required, to assign to each white or colored passenger his or her respective car, coach or compartment. If the passenger fails to disclose his race, the conductor and managers, acting in good faith, shall be the sole judges of his race.

Reform Schools

Kentucky - The children of white and colored races committed to the houses of reform shall be kept entirely separate from each other.

Restaurants

Alabama - It shall be unlawful to conduct a restaurant or other place for the serving of food in the city, at which white and colored people are served in the same room, unless such white and colored persons are effectually separated by a solid partition extending from the floor upward to a distance of seven feet or higher, and unless a separate entrance from the street is provided for each compartment.

Georgia - All persons licensed to conduct a restaurant, shall serve either white people exclusively or colored people exclusively and shall not sell to the two races within the same room or serve the two races anywhere under the same license.

Teaching

Oklahoma - Any instructor who shall teach in any school, college or institution where members of the white and colored race are received and enrolled as pupils for instruction shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction thereof, shall be fined in any sum not less than ten dollars ($10.00) nor more than fifty dollars ($50.00) for each offense.

Telephone Booths

Oklahoma - The Corporation Commission is hereby vested with power and authority to require telephone companies...to maintain separate booths for white and colored patrons when there is a demand for such separate booths. That the Corporation Commission shall determine the necessity for said separate booths only upon complaint of the people in the town and vicinity to be served after due hearing as now provided by law in other complaints filed with the Corporation Commission.

Textbooks

North Carolina - Books shall not be interchangeable between the white and colored schools, but shall continue to be used by the race first using them.

Theaters

Virginia - Every person...operating...any public hall, theatre, opera house, motion picture show or any place of public entertainment or public assemblage which is attended by both white and colored persons, shall separate the white race and the colored race and shall set apart and designate...certain seats therein to be occupied by white persons and a portion thereof , or certain seats therein, to be occupied by colored persons.

Transportation

North Carolina - The...Utilities Commission...is empowered and directed to require the establishment of separate waiting rooms at all stations for the white and colored races.

Wine and Beer

Georgia - All persons licensed to conduct the business of selling beer or wine...shall serve either white people exclusively or colored people exclusively and shall not sell to the two races within the same room at any time.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Jim Crow Laws - Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From the 1880s into the 1960s, a majority of American states enforced segregation through "Jim Crow" laws (so called after a black character in minstrel shows). From Delaware to California, and from North Dakota to Texas, many states (and cities, too) could impose legal punishments on people for consorting with members of another race.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Contents

1. Plessy v. Ferguson: Background and Context

2. Black Resistance to Segregation

3. Supreme Court Ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson

4. John Marshall Harlan's Dissent

5. Plessy v. Ferguson Significance

Plessy v. Ferguson was a landmark 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the "separate but equal" doctrine. The case stemmed from an 1892 incident in which African American train passenger Homer Plessy refused to sit in a car for blacks. Rejecting Plessy's argument that his constitutional rights were violated, the Supreme Court ruled that a law that "implies merely a legal distinction" between whites and blacks was not unconstitutional. As a result, restrictive Jim Crow legislation and separate public accommodations based on race became commonplace.

Plessy v. Ferguson: Background and Context

After the Compromise of 1877 led to the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, Democrats consolidated control of state legislatures throughout the region, effectively marking the end of Reconstruction.

Southern blacks saw the promise of equality under the law embodied by the 13th Amendment, 14th Amendment and 15th Amendment to the Constitution receding quickly, and a return to disenfranchisement and other disadvantages as white supremacy reasserted itself across the South.

As historian C. Vann Woodward pointed out in a 1964 article about Plessy v. Ferguson, white and black Southerners mixed relatively freely until the 1880s, when state legislatures passed the first laws requiring railroads to provide separate cars for "Negro" or "colored" passengers.

Florida became the first state to mandate segregated railroad cars in 1887, followed in quick succession by Mississippi, Texas, Louisiana and other states by the end of the century.

Black Resistance to Segregation

As Southern blacks witnessed with horror the dawn of the Jim Crow era, members of the black community in New Orleans decided to mount a resistance.

At the heart of the case that became Plessy v. Ferguson was a law passed in Louisiana in 1890 "providing for separate railway carriages for the white and colored races." It stipulated that all passenger railways had to provide these separate cars, which should be equal in facilities.

Homer Adolph Plessy, who agreed to be the plaintiff in the case aimed at testing the law's constitutionality, was of mixed race; he described himself as "seven-eighths Caucasian and one-eighth African blood."

On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a ticket on a train from New Orleans bound for Covington, Louisiana, and took a vacant seat in a whites-only car. After refusing to leave the car at the conductor's insistence, he was arrested and jailed.

Convicted by a New Orleans court of violating the 1890 law, Plessy filed a petition against the presiding judge, Hon. John H. Ferguson, claiming that the law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Supreme Court Ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson

Over the next few years, segregation and black disenfranchisement picked up pace in the South, and was more than tolerated by the North. Congress defeated a bill that would have given federal protection to elections in 1892, and nullified a number of Reconstruction laws on the books.

Then, on May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court delivered its verdict in Plessy v. Ferguson. In declaring separate-but-equal facilities constitutional on intrastate railroads, the Court ruled that the protections of 14th Amendment applied only to political and civil rights (like voting and jury service), not "social rights" (sitting in the railroad car of your choice).

In its ruling, the Court denied that segregated railroad cars for blacks were necessarily inferior. "We consider the underlying fallacy of [Plessy's] argument," Justice Henry Brown wrote, "to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it."

John Marshall Harlan's Dissent

Alone in the minority was Justice John Marshall Harlan, a former slaveholder from Kentucky. Harlan had opposed emancipation and civil rights for freed slaves during the Reconstruction era - but changed his position due to his outrage over the actions of white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

Harlan argued in his dissent that segregation ran counter to the constitutional principle of equality under the law: "The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race while they are on a public highway is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with the civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution," he wrote. "It cannot be justified upon any legal grounds."

Plessy v. Ferguson Significance

The Plessy v. Ferguson verdict enshrined the doctrine of "separate but equal" as a constitutional justification for segregation, ensuring the survival of the Jim Crow South for the next half-century.

Intrastate railroads were among many segregated public facilities the verdict sanctioned; others included buses, hotels, theaters, swimming pools and schools. By the time of the 1899 case Cummings v. Board of Education, even Harlan appeared to agree that segregated public schools did not violate the Constitution.

It would not be until the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, at the dawn of the civil rights movement, that the majority of the Supreme Court would essentially concur with Harlan's opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson..

Writing the majority opinion in that 1954 case, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that "the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place" in public education, calling segregated schools "inherently unequal," and declaring that the plaintiffs in the Brown case were being "deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment."

Sources

C. Vann Woodward, " Plessy v. Ferguson: The Birth of Jim Crow," American Heritage(Volume 15, Issue 3: April 1964).

Landmark Cases: Plessy v. Ferguson, PBS: The Supreme Court - The First Hundred Years.

Louis Menand, "Brown v. Board of Education and the Limits of Law," The New Yorker (February 12, 2001).

Today in History - May 18: Plessy v. Ferguson, Library of Congress.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Plessy v. Ferguson: Background and Context Black Resistance to Segregation Supreme Court Ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson John Marshall Harlan's Dissent Plessy v. Ferguson Significance Plessy v. Ferguson was a landmark 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the "separate but equal" doctrine.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Thelonious Monk - American Composer - Pt 01

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Although he spent a great deal of his life abroad, James Baldwin always remained a quintessentially American writer.

Whether he was working in Paris or Istanbul, he never ceased to reflect on his experience as a black man in white America. In numerous essays, novels, plays and public speeches, the eloquent voice of James Baldwin spoke of the pain and struggle of black Americans and the saving power of brotherhood.

James Baldwin - the grandson of a slave - was born in Harlem in 1924. The oldest of nine children, he grew up in poverty, developing a troubled relationship with his strict, religious stepfather. As a child, he cast about for a way to escape his circumstances. As he recalls, "I knew I was black, of course, but I also knew I was smart. I didn't know how I would use my mind, or even if I could, but that was the only thing I had to use." By the time he was fourteen, Baldwin was spending much of his time in libraries and had found his passion for writing.

During this early part of his life, he followed in his stepfather's footsteps and became a preacher. Of those teen years, Baldwin recalled, "Those three years in the pulpit - I didn't realize it then - that is what turned me into a writer, really, dealing with all that anguish and that despair and that beauty." Many have noted the strong influence of the language of the church, the language of the Bible, on Baldwin's style: its cadences and tone. Eager to move on, Baldwin knew that if he left the pulpit he must also leave home, so at eighteen he took a job working for the New Jersey railroad.

After working for a short while with the railroad, Baldwin moved to Greenwich Village, where he worked for a number of years as a freelance writer, working primarily on book reviews. He caught the attention of the well-known novelist, Richard Wright - and though Baldwin had not yet finished a novel, Wright helped him secure a grant with which he could support himself as a writer. In 1948, at age 24, Baldwin left for Paris, where he hoped to find enough distance from the American society he grew up in to write about it.

After writing a number of pieces for various magazines, Baldwin went to a small village in Switzerland to finish his first novel. Go Tell It on the Mountain, published in 1953, was an autobiographical work about growing up in Harlem. The passion and depth with which he described the struggles of black Americans were unlike anything that had been written. Though not instantly recognized as such, Go Tell It on the Mountain has long been considered an American classic.

Over the next ten years, Baldwin moved from Paris to New York to Istanbul, writing two books of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961), as well as two novels, Giovanni's Room (1956) and Another Country (1962). The essays explored racial tension with eloquence and unprecedented honesty; the novels dealt with taboo themes (homosexuality and interracial relationships). By describing life as he knew it, Baldwin created socially relevant, psychologically penetrating literature ... and readers responded. Both Nobody Knows My Name and Another Country became immediate bestsellers.

Being abroad gave Baldwin a perspective on the life he'd left behind and a solitary freedom to pursue his craft. "Once you find yourself in another civilization," he notes, "you're forced to examine your own." In a sense, Baldwin's travels brought him even closer to the social concerns of contemporary America. In the early 1960s, overwhelmed by a sense of responsibility to the times, Baldwin returned to take part in the civil rights movement. Traveling throughout the South, he began work on an explosive work about black identity and the state of racial struggle, The Fire Next Time (1963). This, too, was a bestseller: so incendiary that it put Baldwin on the cover of TIME Magazine. For many, Baldwin's clarion call for human equality - in the essays of Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name and The Fire Next Time - became an early and essential voice in the civil rights movement. Though at times criticized for his pacifist stance, Baldwin remained an important figure in that struggle throughout the 1960s.

After the assassinations of his friends Medgar Evers, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, Baldwin returned to St. Paul de Vence, France, where he worked on a book about the disillusionment of the times, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974). Many responded to the harsh tone of If Beale Street Could Talk with accusations of bitterness - but even though Baldwin had encapsulated much of the anger of the times in his book, he always remained a constant advocate for universal love and brotherhood. During the last ten years of his life, he produced a number of important works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. He also turned to teaching as a new way of connecting with the young.

By 1987, when he died of stomach cancer at age 63, James Baldwin had become one of the most important and vocal advocates for equality. From Go Tell It on the Mountain to The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), James Baldwin created works of literary beauty and depth that will remain essential parts of the American canon.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
James Baldwin Biography and Quotes ~ James Baldwin Biography | American Masters | PBS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
James Baldwin spoke of the pain and struggle of Black Americans and the saving power of brotherhood.

# data[].attributes.body
Racism: prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized
Prologue: a separate introductory section of a literary or musical work
Inference:  a conclusion reached on the basis of evidence and reasoning
Segregationists: a person who supports the policy of enforced separation of different racial groups
Desegregation: Segregation is the separation of people on the basis of their race, or some other characteristic. Desegregation is simply the ending of that practice
Fortitude: courage in pain or adversity
Composure: the state or feeling of being calm and in control of oneself

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Just a Mortal Man: The Jerry Lawson Story

Jerry Lawson was the original lead singer of the legendary a cappella group The Persuasions, first discovered by Frank Zappa in the early '70s. During his 40-year tenure with the group, Jerry recorded 24 albums, toured internationally and sang alongside Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell, among others.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Just a Mortal Man: The Jerry Lawson Story Jerry Lawson was the original lead singer of the legendary a cappella group The Persuasions, first discovered by Frank Zappa in the early '70s. During his 40-year tenure with the group, Jerry recorded 24 albums, toured internationally and sang alongside Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell, among others.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Buddy Guy: True to the Blues

Combining footage from the American Masters documentary, "Buddy Guy: The Blues Chase the Blues Away," with additional performances, this program includes interviews with Guy, who talks about his life and rich career.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Buddy Guy: True to the Blues Combining footage from the American Masters documentary, "Buddy Guy: The Blues Chase the Blues Away," with additional performances, this program includes interviews with Guy, who talks about his life and rich career.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Poet Amanda Gorman reads 'The Hill We Climb'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we tasked curators across the country with the difficult task of choosing a single work of art that they feel defines the ethos of the Civil Rights Era. Their choices present a kaleidoscopic and occasionally surprising group of works that span continents and centuries-from iconic photographs to ritual sculptural objects.

See the works and read the curators' insights below.

Joe Minter's Children In Jail (2013)

This contemporary work by Joe Minter reflects back on Birmingham, Alabama's Children's Crusade: On May 2, 1963, more than 1,000 students skipped school and took to the streets from the doors of the 16th Street Baptist Church, and for days faced police violence and dog attacks, brutal sprays of fire hoses, and mass arrests. Ultimately, more than 3,000 children took part in the direct actions. More than 500 children were jailed by Alabama Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor, including 75 kids crammed into a cell meant for eight adults, and still others locked into animal pens at the fairgrounds for days on end. Thanks to their sacrifices and the widespread media images of brutalized black children, President Kennedy took notice, the city negotiated with Martin Luther King Jr., jailed demonstrators were freed, and Connor lost his job.

In Minter's multi-part sculpture, a seemingly domestic image of praying children is placed behind bright red bars. The violence of Birmingham's police and fire departments is indicated by the strewn hats and smiling dog statue, laced with rusted chains alongside tools that Minter uses to refer to 400 years of labor and oppression inflected on Blacks by whites. A makeshift cage traps three baby dolls, representing kids in cages who fought "JUST TO B FREE."

I'm still struck by my memory of this work, five years after seeing it at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in Alabama. And, as a side note, I'll add that every person living in the US should visit Montgomery's Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the Equal Justice Initiative's racial injustice museum and elegiac monument to more than 4,400 lynching victims-African American men, women, and children.
-Carmen Hermo, associate curator, Brooklyn Museum
Will Count's Elizabeth Eckford of The Little Rock Nine (1954)

It can be argued that there is no more important medium to the Civil Rights movement than that of photography. The documentation of violences enacted upon black people in the south-in private lunch counters, in public parks and bridges, in educational spaces, and so forth-and the subsequent mass dissemination of this imagery, heightened public awareness of such abuses and galvanized a public's increasing demand for judicial and legislative action that would enforce the equality of African Americans. Indeed it said that the mass reproduction of Charles Moore's infamous photograph of Civil Rights protesters being high-pressure water hosed at a spring 1963 action directly impacted the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

Yet as scholars and curators like Leigh Raiford, Maurice Berger, and Connie Choi have written, the usage, status, and function of photography during the movement was much more complicated than mere documentary realism. For instance, there was not uniformity around how these images were read and understood by all publics, even intra-racially; nor did all images themselves evince the larger context in which these actions took place or offer up the full scope of the movement's participants. Indeed, as Raiford argues, black people increasingly turned to photography as a tool for shaping and presenting their own images to themselves, not just an imagined white public.

Of course, photography in this moment also calls forth questions of spectacle, and that of the ethics surrounding the circulation of images that feature violence being enacted upon, or violated, black persons. When has an image served its "purpose"? How do the reproduction of these images serve to shape public consciousness over time in ways more complex than mere "awareness"?

In this image, a group of young white women and men are angry. This is gleaned from the facts of the faces: of the menacing glares, of the mouth agape in rage. A slight step ahead of them is the target of this terror: a young black woman, looking forward through her sunglasses, clutching her binder in hand.

There are the things that a photograph can and cannot say. For instance, it had always been the plan for the group of students chosen to integrate Little Rock Central High School in the fall of 1957 to arrive together. One of the "Little Rock Nine," 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford had ultimately arrived at the wrong meeting place, not having received word of a shifted meeting plan. In this photograph, she makes her way through a mob of hundreds, with her gaze directed forward through her sunglasses, as she clutches her binder in hand, alone. This mob-which includes Hazel Bryan, who shouts aspersions at her back, and the National Guard deployed to terrorize the integrating students-prevents her from entering school on this day. It would take the deployment of troops at the command of the president to allow safe (physical) entrance for Eckford and the other eight, some weeks later. The traumatic events of this day will go on to effect Eckford into her adulthood.

When I see this photograph, I think of the ordinary and the extraordinary, of youth and of bravery. How a young, ordinary girl, was forced to occupy a posture of extraordinary bravery in the face of a violence that was extraordinarily hostile and in part extraordinary in its ordinariness. I sit with what that means.
- Ashley James, associate curator of contemporary art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Elizabeth Catlett's Homage To My Young Black Sisters (1968)

Homage to My Young Black Sisters represents the influence of hundreds of everyday young women who participated in grassroots organizing and revolutionary activity during the Civil Rights era. Catlett often identified with these women because she, too, was consistently beleaguered by the US government for her revolutionary political ties and eventually forced to relinquish her American citizenship, in 1962. The gesture of the sculpture is clear. Its clenched fist and dominant stance shouts Black Power in the wake of Jim Crow segregation. Catlett speaks openly to her audience with this work, revealing that the pulse of the Civil Rights era began with black women.
-Kelli Morgan, associate curator of American art, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields
Gordon Parks's Ethel Sharrieff, Chicago, Illinois (1963)

No other visual medium defined the Civil Rights movement than documentary photography, particularly the black-and-white images of male leaders, cordons of marchers under turbulent skies, or black children in their Sunday best blasted with G-forces by the Birmingham fire department. Gordon Parks, one of the great chroniclers of the era, made the important decision to equally document black people in their communities, often in moments of peace and self-sufficiency. His "Black Muslims" series for Life magazine was a wake-up call for many non-black Americans who were fascinated and alarmed by the group. Park's portrait Ethel Sharieff for the magazine feature stands as an iconic image of the series and the Civil Rights era. A single woman set against an army of sisters encapsulates all the resolve, communitarianism, and new consciousness the moment was brewing, without falling back on any proscribed clichés.
-Naomi Beckwith, senior curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
Frank Bowling's Night Journey (1969-70)

It's a tall-even impossible-task to summarize the Civil Rights Era with a single work of art. The best I can do is to highlight a few of my favorites (across media) and admit to a particular favorite in the Met collection. I love so many of Gordon Parks's photographs from the period, especially Department Store, Mobile, Alabama (1956), an image that never loses its power. Elizabeth Catlett's Black Unity (1968) is a great sculptural icon of the period. David Hammons's body prints, such as The Door (Admissions Office) (1969), are difficult to surpass in their inventiveness and visceral impact. A favorite of mine at the Met is Frank Bowling's Night Journey (1969-70), a beautiful painting in the artist's "Map" series. Bowling masterfully employs his staining and pouring techniques to ruminate on the forced sea journeys endured by enslaved people taken from West Africa to the Americas and West Indies.
-Randall Griffey, curator, the Metropolitan Museum of Art
David Hammons's The Door (Admissions Office) (1969)

With the ridges of fingerprints and curls of hair still visible in the dried black oil, a human Rorschach test is printed upon a transparent windowed admissions door. Hand-prints halo above the image of a double face; the gesture is one, often futile, made in pleas for safety, one which remains important in protests of communal recognition. David Hammons's The Door (Admissions Office) (1969) not only critically comments on the blockades of academia, civil rights, and nationhood, but speaks directly to the political commitments and legacy activism of youth in the country.

This work continues to reaffirm the presence of barricades and borders that remain closed but could be easily opened, if only for the single turn of a wrist. This work, often generously loaned by the California African American Museum, continues to be emblematic of artistic interventions of the Civil Rights era and has been a part of significant exhibitions such as "Crosscurrents: Africa and Black Diasporas in Dialogue, 1960-1980" at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; "Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties" at the Brooklyn Museum, and is now on view as a part of the international tour of "Soul of a Nation."
-Emily A. Kuhlmann, director of exhibitions and curatorial affairs, Museum of the African Diaspora
Congolese's Nkisi Nkondi (Power Figure)

Often referred to as a power figure, was a container that held the (medicine) that purified the self and community in "Kongo" culture. This figure mediated the sacred and profane spheres, addressing social concerns and warding off evil spirits. It's jarring presence endured many driven nails that bind promises and seal deals. No other symbol could have encapsulated the Civil Rights movement in this country. Despite all the tribulations, progress was made in archiving some of the aspirations that defined the cause at that time.
-Ndubuisi C. Ezeluomba, Françoise Billion Richardson curator of African art, New Orleans Museum of Art

Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Art Defined the Civil Rights Era? We Asked 7 Museum Curators to Pick One Work That Crystallized the Moment

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, we tasked curators across the country with the difficult task of choosing a single work of art that they feel defines the ethos of the Civil Rights Era. Their choices present a kaleidoscopic and occasionally surprising group of works that span continents and centuries-from iconic photographs to ritual sculptural objects.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The mesmerizing performance from Academy Award-nominated actress and singer Andra Day in "The United States Vs. Billie Holiday" has revived interest in the hauntingly beautiful and controversial song "Strange Fruit," which Holiday first popularized in the late 1930s.

The film details the numerous ways in which the US government terrorized the singer over her performances of the song right up until her untimely death in 1959, but it does not cover the unusual origins of the song, which was originally written as a poem by a Jewish American teacher from the Bronx, who was also a member of the Communist party.

Abel Meeropol, a son of Russian Jewish immigrants, taught English at Dewitt Clinton High School in the Bronx for 17 years before turning to music and motion pictures, writing under the pen name Lewis Allan. Meeropol was very disturbed by the persistence of systemic racism in America and was motivated to write the poem "Bitter Fruit" after seeing a photo depicting the lynching of two Black teens in Indiana in 1930. The poem was published in the journal The New York Teacher in 1937, and again later published in the Marxist journal, The New Masses, before Meeropol decided to turn the poem into lyrics and set it to music.

After that, Meeropol began to perform the song at several protest rallies and venues around the city along with his wife and African American singer Laura Duncan. The song first came to Holiday's attention when she was working at New York's first integrated nightclub, Café Society in Greenwich Village. Holiday was hesitant at first to sing it because she didn't want to politicize her performances, and was (rightfully) concerned about being targeted at her performances. But the positive audience responses and frequent requests for "Strange Fruit" soon prompted Holiday to close out every performance with the song. Ahead of time, the waiters would stop serving so there was a deathly silence in the room, then a spotlight would shine on Holiday's face and she would begin to sing:

"Southern trees bear a strange fruit/ Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/ Black bodies swingin' in the Southern breeze/ Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees..."

Each night, Holiday would perform the song only once, without an encore, after which the lights would go out. Not everyone was impressed. Some of the cafe's patrons promptly stood up and walked out as she began to sing it, but the power and audacity of the performance wowed others in the crowd.

Holiday later approached her regular record label, Columbia, about recording the song, but was told they didn't want to take the risk of backlash. So, she went instead with independent jazz label Commodore Records who recorded the song with Holiday and the Café Society Band in 1939.

Despite strong resistance, especially from radio stations in the South who refused to play "Strange Fruit," the song rose in the charts, eventually selling 1 million copies to become the best selling record of Holiday's career.

It became known as a powerful protest anthem that irked the conservative US government at a time when it was starting to crack down on suspected communists in the entertainment industry and beyond. The response was swift, especially once the racist Federal Bureau of Narcotics commissioner Harry Anslinger decided to make it his mission to destroy the singer and shut down her message about segregation and racism. After Holiday refused to stop performing the song at Anslinger's request, he had agents from his department sell her heroin to frame her. She was sent to prison for more than a year, and was stripped of her cabaret performer's license by authorities upon her release in 1948, essentially ending her nightclub career.

Holiday continued to perform at concert venues, including Carnegie Hall, but haunted by her violent childhood, eventually succumbed once again to drug use. She was hospitalized in 1959 with heart, lung and liver problems developed from years of alcohol and drugs consumption. Determined to carry out his retribution to the end, Anslinger sent his agents to the hospital in New York to handcuff Holiday to the gurney and forbade doctors to provide her with further treatment. She died several days later on July 17, 1959 at the age of 44.

"Strange Fruit" remains one of Holiday's most popular and well-known recordings.

It was named "Song of the Century," by Time in 1999 and was included in the National Recording Registry on January 27, 2003. It has also been covered by many artists over time, including Nina Simone, Herbie Hancock, Dee Dee Bridgewater, and Jeff Buckley. Holiday was also posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987 and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The story behind Billie Holiday's 'Strange Fruit' | American Masters | PBS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Strange Fruit" was a controversial protest anthem sung by Billie Holiday in the 1930s which got her targeted by the U.S. government.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Nat King Cole - "The Christmas Song" (1961)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
To Kill a Mockingbird Official Trailer #1 - Gregory Peck Movie (1962) HD

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Ronettes - Be My Baby (Official Audio)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Raisin in the Sun (1961) ORIGINAL TRAILER [HD 1080p]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
John Lewis: Good Trouble - Official Trailer

# data[].attributes.body
Family tree:
Paternal
Maternal
Memoir
Redeemer
Disenfranchised
Tenant farmer
Sharecropper
carpetbagger
scalawag

# data[].attributes.body
- I can analyze how incidents in A Mighty Long Way provoke Carlotta to make certain decisions and shape her story.
- I can use a Frayer Model to deepen my understanding of words in A Mighty Long Way.
- I can cite evidence that supports my analysis of A Mighty Long Way.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sam Cooke - A Change Is Gonna Come (Official Lyric Video)

# data[].attributes.body
- I can determine the central idea of the 14th Amendment.
- I can determine the meaning of words and phrases in the 14th Amendment.

# data[].attributes.body
amendment: a minor change or addition designed to improve a text, piece of legislation, etc.
innocence: the state, quality, or fact of being innocent of a crime or offense.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This article was most recently revised and updated by

Fourteenth Amendment, amendment (1868) to the Constitution of the United States that granted citizenship and equal civil and legal rights to African Americans and slaves who had been emancipated after the American Civil War, including them under the umbrella phrase "all persons born or naturalized in the United States." In all, the amendment comprises five sections, four of which began in 1866 as separate proposals that stalled in legislative process and were later amalgamated, along with a fifth enforcement section, into a single amendment.

This so-called Reconstruction Amendment prohibited the states from depriving any person of "life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" and from denying anyone within a state's jurisdiction equal protection under the law. Nullified by the Thirteenth Amendment, the section of the Constitution apportioning representation in the House of Representatives based on a formula that counted each slave as three-fifths of a person was replaced by a clause in the Fourteenth Amendment specifying that representatives be "apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed." The amendment also prohibited former civil and military office holders who had supported the Confederacy from again holding any state or federal office-with the proviso that this prohibition could be removed from individuals by a two-thirds vote in both Houses of Congress. Moreover, the amendment upheld the national debt while exempting the federal government and state governments from any responsibility for the debts incurred by the rebellious Confederate States of America. Finally, the last section, mirroring the approach of the Thirteenth Amendment, provided for enforcement.

The full text of the amendment is:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state.

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Among those legislators responsible for introducing the amendment's provisions were Rep. John A. Bingham of Ohio, Sen. Jacob Howard of Michigan, Rep. Henry Deming of Connecticut, Sen. Benjamin G. Brown of Missouri, and Rep. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania. The Congressional Joint Resolution proposing the amendment was submitted to the states for ratification on June 16, 1866. On July 28, 1868, having been ratified by the requisite number of states, it entered into force. However, its attempt to guarantee civil rights was circumvented for many decades by the post-Reconstruction-era black codes, Jim Crow laws, and the U.S. Supreme Court's "separate but equal" ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Adam Augustyn.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Fourteenth Amendment | Definition, Summary, Rights, Significance, & Facts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fourteenth Amendment, amendment (1868) to the Constitution of the United States that granted citizenship and equal civil and legal rights to African Americans and slaves who had been emancipated after the Civil War, including them under the umbrella phrase 'all persons born or naturalized in the United States.'

# data[].attributes.body
- I can cite evidence to analyze the importance of the Plessy v. Ferguson case.
- I can determine the court's point of view in its decision on the Plessy v. Ferguson case.

# data[].attributes.body
primary source: a first-hand account of an event or topic
justices: a judge or magistrate, in particular a judge of the Supreme Court of a country or state
public facilities:  institutional responses to basic human needs, such as health, education, safety, recreation, and worship
due process of law: fair treatment through the normal judicial system, especially as a citizen's entitlement.

equal protection of law: the idea that a governmental body may not deny people equal protection of its governing laws
exercise of police/ legislative power:
badge of inferiority:
prejudices: preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience
voluntary consent of individuals:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Plessy v. Ferguson Summary | quimbee.com

# data[].attributes.body
- I can cite evidence to analyze the importance of the Plessy v. Ferguson case.
- I can determine the court's point of view in its decision on the Plessy v. Ferguson case.
- I can analyze how the authors of the court's decision and the dissenting opinion on Plessy v. Ferguson disagree on matters of fact and interpretation.

# data[].attributes.body
- I can cite evidence to analyze the importance of the Plessy v. Ferguson case.
- I can determine the court's point of view in its decision on the Plessy v. Ferguson case.
- I can analyze how the authors of the court's decision and the dissenting opinion on Plessy v. Ferguson disagree on matters of fact and interpretation.

# data[].attributes.body
Dissent: disagree; dis- means apart from
Dissenting
Pernicious
Under the guise

# data[].attributes.body
- I can explain how the Plessy v Ferguson Supreme Court ruling codified the Jim Crow laws.
- I can explain how the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case connects to the Jim Crow laws.
- I can use sentence starters to build on others' ideas.

# data[].attributes.body
- I can analyze how incidents in A Mighty Long Way provoke Carlotta to make certain decisions and shape her story.
- I can cite evidence that supports my analysis of A Mighty Long Way.

# data[].attributes.body
- metaphor: a figure of speech that makes a comparison of two ideas or objects that is not literal
- double entendre: a word or phrase that can have two meanings at the same time
- injunction: an authoritative warning or order

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Lyrics_ _Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around_

# data[].attributes.body
In these two lessons, we are preparing for our end of Unit 1 assessment - the Socratic Seminar. If you are absent during these lessons, check Google Classroom for "Preparation for End of Unit 1 Assessment" under the Assessments tab. There, you will find the materials and activities we are working on to prepare. The assessment will take place during the week of 3/21.

# data[].attributes.body
- I can make connections between the texts I have read in this unit and the lyrics in the second stanza of "Lift Every Voice and Sing".
- I can cite evidence from the text to support my connections between the lyrics and text.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Lift Every Voice and Sing - A Cappella (Berklee We Will Rise Summit)

# data[].attributes.body
- I can make connections between the texts I have read in this unit, and the title and lyrics in 'Lift Every Voice and Sing."
- I can cite evidence from the text to support my connections between the lyrics and text.
- I can listen to others and build on their ideas during a Socratic Seminar discussion.