The Civil Rights Era

1. The Civil Rights Era Adam Spark, Zeyadh Moosa, Todd Isbister, Greg Bourolias, Matt Clark, Dave Rodgers,

2. Brown vs. Board of Education • Linda Brown went up against the Board of Education because her daughter was not allowed to attend the much closer to home white school. • This was one of the first of many cases where people felt that the state was being unconstitutional in not allowing mixed schools. • The supreme court’s ruling stated that the Board of Education was being unconstitutional in separating blacks and whites into different schools.

3. Southern Manifesto • After the Brown vs. Board of Education the states still didn’t want mixed schools The Governor of Virginia threatened to close down public schools and send white children to private schools just so there would be no mixing.

4. The Murder of Emmett Till, 1955 • Murders of African-Americans at the hands of whites were still common in the 1950s and still unpunished in large areas of the South. The murder of Emmett Till, a teenage boy from Chicago visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi in the summer of 1955 was different. The age of the boy, the nature of his crime—allegedly whistling at a white woman in a store—and his mother's decision to have the casket open at his funeral, showing the beating that had been inflicted on her son by his two white abductors before he was shot and his body dumped in the Tallahatchie River on August 28 all made what might otherwise have been a routine statistic into an angry uproar.

5. Rosa Parks • December 1955 Rosa Parks refused to yield her spot on the bus to a white woman. She was arrested and charged with Civil Disobedience. • This was significant because she was one of the first to start the “Civil Rights Movement”

6. Montgomery Bus Boycott • The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a political and social protest campaign started in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, intended to oppose the city's policy of racial segregation on its public transit system. • This led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws requiring segregated buses unconstitutional.

7. Confrontation • September 1957 – Arkansas tested federal government policies on civil rights • A federal court ordered that 9 African American students be admitted into an all white high school, in Arkansas. • Dwight Eisenhower federalized the conflict and put the school under federal control. Sent 10 000 members of the Arkansas National Guard to surround the school and help the students in.

8. The 9 students allowed into the all white high school.

9. African American Churches and Civil Rights Movement • They played a crucial role in devising strategies and mobilizing volunteers • The churches called for protest without retaliatory violence and confrontation without conflict • The Southern Christian Leadership Conference or the SCLC played a leading role challenging segregation on public transportation and other public accommodations

10. Student Sit-ins • In February of 1960, four African American students sat down at a segregated lunch counter in North Carolina. They refused to move until they were served. • This action was known as a sit-in and within a very short amount of time, this was a very popular thing to do. By September of 1961 over 70,000 students were using this tactic in an attempt to produce social change.