Civil Rights Movement Key Figures

People

• Martin Luther King Jr. was a leader of the Civil Rights Movement, advocating for nonviolent protest and civil disobedience.
• Rosa Parks was an activist who refused to give up her seat to a white passenger, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
• Ella Baker was a civil rights activist and organizer who played a key role in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
• Fannie Lou Hamer was a voting rights activist and co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, working to increase African American political participation.
• John Lewis was a civil rights leader and congressman who participated in the Selma to Montgomery marches and advocated for voting rights.
• Emmett Till was an African American teenager whose brutal murder in 1955 drew national attention to the violence and racism faced by African Americans in the South.
• James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were civil rights activists murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964 while working to register African American voters in Mississippi.
• James Earl Ray assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

Events, Laws, and Cases

• The Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) ruling upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws for public facilities under the doctrine of "separate but equal."
• Black Codes (1865-1877) were laws enacted in the Southern United States to maintain control over the newly freed African American population and preserve the pre-war social order.
• Jim Crow laws (1870’s-1960’s) were a system of racial segregation and discrimination that became entrenched in Southern society following the Reconstruction period.
• The Tulsa Race Massacre (1921) occurred in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, when a white mob attacked the affluent African American neighborhood of Greenwood.
• The Zoot Suit Riots (1943) were a series of racially motivated attacks in Los Angeles, California, targeting Mexican American youths who wore distinctive clothing.
• The Brown v. Board of Education (1954) case declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional.
• The Greensboro sit-ins (1960) were nonviolent protests in Greensboro, North Carolina, where four African American college students sat at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter, sparking a wave of sit-ins across the South.
• Ruby Bridges integrated William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1960, symbolizing the struggle for school desegregation.