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Redeemers

During the first half of the 1870s, white Southerners would exert a mighty effort to, as they called it, "redeem" their homeland, to return it to the control of white supremacists (those who believe that whites are superior and should be in charge). In place of the small but influential group of Radicals in Congress, there was now a group called the "stalwarts," extremely conservative men with close ties to business interests, who were in favor not of change or reform but of keeping things the way they were. Thus they favored "Home Rule" (local self-government) for the South. White Southerners were now determined to reclaim or "redeem" their state governments, and once again, they turned to violence and intimidation as weapons. Mississippi Democrats known as White Liners (white supremacists) organized rifle clubs and militia groups and began drilling and parading through black communities. They broke up Republican meetings and provoked bloody riots. At the polls, armed guards prevented blacks from voting or forced them to vote for Democrats. Economic forms of coercion were also used, as blacks were threatened with the loss of their jobs—or even the denial of medical treatment—if they voted for Republicans. On election day, scores of Mississippi blacks were either too scared to show up at the polls or driven away as soon as they arrived. In Aberdeen, the White Liners set up a cannon and sent armed thugs through the crowds of waiting voters, and the town's Republican sheriff actually locked himself in his own jail for safety. The town's election results typify what happened throughout the state: The Democrats won with a majority of 1,175 votes, even though in 1871 the Republicans had had a majority of 648. Mississippi had now been redeemed. Another outcome of the 1874 elections was that the Republicans lost control of the U.S. House of Representatives, which they had dominated for so many years. Responding to both the nationwide economic depression and the corruption of the Grant administration, voters turned against the ruling party. In South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, the Mississippi Plan was again put into effect, with similar results. The election was extremely close, and the results set off a political crisis: while Tilden won more popular votes, Hayes had a one-vote lead in the Electoral College. The Republicans immediately proclaimed many Southern votes invalid because of the widespread violence and intimidation used there, while the Democrats contested these charges. Rutherford B. Hayes won a close presidential election that ended with a compromise. Its terms meant that he would preside over the end of Reconstruction. When Hampton won the very close election, it was as much through the organized campaign of terror that white groups like the Ku Klux Klan had used to keep blacks away from the polls as through his popularity. When Republican governor Daniel Chamberlain and his supporters refused to concede the election to Hampton, a standoff began at the state capitol, with Chamberlain kept in office only through the presence of Union troops. It ended with the compromise by which Democrats agreed to accept the election of Republican presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes and the Hayes administration agreed to leave the South alone to manage its own affairs. The troops were withdrawn from South Carolina, and Hampton took office.

Hate crime

a crime motivated by racial, sexual, or other prejudice, typically one involving violence.

States' Rights Party

a far right, white supremacist party that briefly played a minor role in the politics of the United States. Founded in 1958 in Knoxville, Tennessee, by Edward Reed Fields, a 26-year-old chiropractor and supporter of J. B. Stoner, the party was based on antisemitism, racism and opposition to racial integration with AAs. Party officials argued for states' rights against the advance of the civil rights movement, and the organization itself established relations with the Ku Klux Klan and Minutemen. Although a white supremacist movement, its messaging was never openly neo-Nazi in the way that its successors in the American Nazi Party were.The national chairman of the party was Stoner, who served three years in prison for bombing the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The party produced a newspaper, Thunderbolt, which was edited by Fields. In 1958, the party's first year, five men with links to the NSRP were indicted for their participation in the bombing of a temple in Atlanta. On December 27, 1963 Edward Fields was brought to the US Secret Service's attention as a possible threat against protected individuals. This was divulged as part of the JFK file release. The FBI considered that Fields was "one step removed from being insane."The FBI deems Edward Fields, founder of the NSRP "one step removed from being insane" in 1963. During the 1960 presidential election, at a secret meeting held in a rural lodge near Dayton, Ohio, the NSRP nominated Governor of Arkansas Orval E. Faubus for President and retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral John G. Crommelin of Alabama for Vice President. Faubus, however, did not campaign on this ticket actively, and won only 0.07% of the vote (best in his native Arkansas: 6.76%). The party also ran in the 1964 presidential election, nominating John Kasper for President and J. B. Stoner for Vice President, although they won only 0.01%, i.e., less than 7,000 votes. The party began to expand its operations and moved to new headquarters in Birmingham in 1960. Supporters were soon kitted out in the party uniform of white shirts, black pants and ties and armbands bearing the Thunderbolt version of the Wolfsangel. Thunderbolt itself gained a circulation of 15,000 in the late 1960s and the party became active in rallies across the United States, with events in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1966 being particularly notorious because five leading members were imprisoned for inciting riots. The Federal Bureau of Investigation targeted the NSRP under its COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE program. The party attempted to gain international contacts, and during the 1970s took part in annual international neo-Nazi rallies at Diksmuide in Belgium, alongside such groups as the Order of Flemish militants and the United Kingdom-based League of Saint George. Before that, the party had been close to the British extremist leader John Tyndall and his Greater Britain Movement after Tyndall failed in his attempts to forge links with George Lincoln Rockwell. The party's influence declined in the 1970s, as Fields began to devote more of his energies to the Ku Klux Klan. As a result, in April 1976, U.S. Attorney General Edward H. Levi concluded an FBI investigation into the group after it was decided that they posed no threat. The NSRP began its terminal decline when Stoner was convicted for a bombing in 1980. Without his leadership, the party descended into factionalism, and in August 1983, Fields was expelled for spending too much time in the Klan. Without its two central figures, the NSRP fell apart, and by 1987, it had ceased to exist.

Women's Liberation

a political alignment of women and feminist intellectualism that emerged in the late 1960s, and continued to the 1980s, primarily in the industrialized nations of the Western world, and which effected great change (political, intellectual, cultural) throughout the world. The WLM branch of Radical feminism, based in contemporary philosophy, comprised women of racially- and culturally-diverse backgrounds who proposed that economic, psychological, and social freedom were necessary for women to progress from being second-class citizens in their societies. Towards achieving the equality of women, the WLM questioned the cultural and legal validity of patriarchy and the practical validity of the social and sexual hierarchies used to control and limit the legal and physical independence of women in society. Women's Liberationists proposed that sexism — legalised formal and informal gender discrimination — was the principal political problem with the power dynamics of their societies. In general, the WLM proposed socio-economic change from the political Left; rejected the idea that piece-meal equality, within and according to social class, would eliminate sexual discrimination against women; and fostered the tenets of humanism, especially the respect for human rights of all people. In the decades when the Women's Liberation Movement flourished, liberationists successfully changed how women were perceived in their cultures, redefined the socio-economic and the political roles of women in society, and transformed mainstream society. The wave theory of social development holds that intense periods of social activity are followed by periods of remission, in which the activists involved intensely in mobilization are systematically marginalized and isolated. After the intense period fighting for women's suffrage, the common interest which had united international feminists left the women's movement without a single focus upon which all could agree. Ideological differences between radicals and moderates, led to a split and a period of deradicalization, with the largest group of women's activists spearheading movements to educate women on their new responsibilities as voters. Organizations like the African National Congress Women's League, the Irish Housewives Association, the League of Women Voters, the Townswomen's Guilds and the Women's Institutes supported women and tried to educate them on how to use their new rights to incorporate themselves into the established political system. Still other organizations, involved in the mass movement of women into the workforce during World War I and World War II and their subsequent exit at the end of the war with concerted official efforts to return to family life, turned their efforts to labor issues. The World YWCA and Zonta International, were leaders in these efforts, mobilizing women to gather information on the situation of working women and organize assistance programs. Increasingly, radical organizations, like the American National Women's Party, were marginalized, by media which denounced feminism and its proponents as "severe neurotics responsible for the problems of" society. Those who were still attached to the radical themes of equality were typically unmarried, employed, socially and economically advantaged and seemed to the larger society to be deviant. In countries throughout Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, the Middle East and South America efforts to decolonize and replace authoritarian regimes, which largely began in the 1950s and stretched through the 1980s, initially saw the state overtaking the role of radical feminists. For example, in Egypt, the 1956 Constitution eliminated gender barriers to labour, political access, and education through provisions for gender equality. Women in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Nicaragua and other Latin American countries had worked for an end to dictatorships in their countries. As those governments turned to socialist policies, the state aimed to eliminate gender inequality through state action. As ideology in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean shifted left, women in newly independent and still colonized countries saw a common goal in fighting imperialism. They focused their efforts to address gendered power imbalances in their quest for respect of human rights and nationalist goals. This worldwide movement towards decolonization and the realignment of international politics into Cold War camps after the end of World War II, usurped the drive for women's enfranchisement, as universal suffrage and nationhood became the goal for activists. A Pan-African awareness and global recognition of blackness as a unifying point for struggle, led to a recognition by numerous marginalized groups that there was potential to politicize their oppression. In their attempt to influence these newly independent countries to align with the United States, in the polarized Cold War climate, racism in U.S. policy became a stumbling block to the foreign policy objective to become the dominant superpower. Black leaders were aware of the favorable climate for securing change and pushed forward the Civil Rights Movement to address racial inequalities. They sought to eliminate the damage of oppression, using liberation theory and a movement which sought to create societal transformation in the way people thought about others by infusing the disenfranchised with political power to change the power structures. The Black Power movement and global student movements protested the apparent double standards of the age and the authoritarian nature of social institutions. From Czechoslovakia to Mexico, in diverse locations like Germany, France, Italy, and Japan, among others, students protested the civil, economic and political inequalities, as well as involvement in the Vietnam War. Many of the activists participating in these causes would go on to participate in the feminist movement. Socially, the baby boom experienced after World War II, the relative world-wide economic growth in the post-war years, the expansion of the television industry sparking improved communications, as well as access to higher education for both women and men led to an awareness of the social problems women faced and the need for a cultural change. At the time, women were economically dependent on men and neither the concept of patriarchy nor a coherent theory about the power relationships between men and women in society existed. If they worked, positions available to women were typically in light manufacturing or agricultural work and a limited segment of positions in the service industries, such as bookkeeping, domestic labor, nursing, secretarial and clerical work, retail sales, or school teaching. They were expected to work for lower wages than men and upon marriage, terminate their employment. Women were unable to obtain bank accounts or credit, making renting housing impossible, without a man's consent. In many countries they were not allowed to go into public spaces without a male chaperone. Married women from countries founded the British colonial system and thus with a legal code based on English law were legally bound to have sex with their husbands upon demand. Marital rape was not a concept, as under law women had given consent to regular intercourse upon marrying. The state and church, placed enormous pressure on young women to retain their virginity. Introduction of the pill, gave many men a sense that as women could not get pregnant, they could not say no to intercourse. Though by the 1960s the pill was widely available, prescription was tightly controlled and in many countries, dissemination of information about birth control was illegal. Even after the pill was legalized, contraception remained banned in numerous countries, like Ireland where condoms were banned and the pill could only be prescribed to control menstrual cycles. The Catholic Church issued the encyclical Humanae vitae in 1968, reiterating the ban on artificial contraception. Abortion often required the consent of a spouse, or approval by a board, like in Canada, wherein the decisions often revolved around whether pregnancy posed a threat to the woman's health or life. As women became more educated and joined the work force, their home responsibilities remained largely unchanged. Though families increasingly depended on dual incomes, women carried most of the responsibility for domestic work and care of children. There had long been recognition by society in general of the inequalities in civil, socio-economic, and political agency between women and men. However, the Women's Liberation Movement was the first time that the idea of challenging sexism gained wide acceptance. Literature on sex, such as the Kinsey Reports, and the development and distribution of the birth control pill, created a climate wherein women began to question the authority others wielded over their decisions regarding their bodies and their morality. Many of the women who participated in the movement, were aligned with leftist politics and after 1960, with the development of Cold War polarization, took their inspiration from Maoist theory. Slogans such as "workers of the world unite" turned into "women of the world unite" and key features like consciousness-raising and egalitarian consensus-based policies "were inspired by similar techniques used in China". Into this backdrop of world events, Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949, which was translated into English in 1952. In the book, de Beauvoir put forward the idea that equality did not require women be masculine to become empowered. With her famous statement, "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman", she laid the groundwork for the concept of gender as a social construct, as opposed to a biological trait. The same year, Margaret Mead published Male and Female, which though it analyzed primitive societies of New Guinea, showed that gendered activities varied between cultures and that biology had no role in defining which tasks were performed by men or women. By 1965, de Beauvoir and Mead's works had been translated into Danish and became widely influential with feminists. Kurahashi Yumiko published her debut Partei in 1960, which critically examined the student movement. The work started a trend in Japan of feminist works which challenged the opportunities available to women and mocked conventional power dynamics in Japanese society. In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, voicing the discontent felt by American women. As the Women's Suffrage movement emerged from the Abolition Movement, the Women's Liberation Movement grew out of the struggle for civil rights. Though challenging patriarchy and the anti-patriarchal message of the Women's Liberation Movement was considered radical, it was not the only, nor the first, radical movement in the early period of second-wave feminism. Rather than simply desiring legal equality, those participating in the movement believed that the moral and social climate which perceived women as second-class citizens needed to change. Though most groups operated independently—there were no national umbrella organizations—there were unifying philosophies of women participating in the movement. Challenging patriarchy and the hierarchical organization of society which defined women as subordinate in both public and private spheres, liberationists believed that women should be free to define their own individual identity as part of human society. One of the reasons that women who supported the movement chose not to create a single approach to addressing the problem of women being treated as second-class citizens was that they did not want to foster an idea that anyone was an expert or that any one group or idea could address all of the societal problems women faced. They also wanted women, whose voices had been silenced to be able to express their own views on solutions. Rejecting authority and espousing participatory democracy as well as direct action, they promoted a wide agenda including civil rights, eliminating objectification of women, ethnic empowerment, granting women reproductive rights, increasing opportunities for women in the workplace, peace, and redefining familial roles, as well as gay and lesbian liberation. A dilemma faced by movement members was how they could challenge the definition of femininity without compromising the principals of feminism. Women's historical participation in the world was virtually unknown, even to trained historians. Women's roles in historic events were not covered in academic texts and not taught in schools. Even the fact that women had been denied the vote was something few university students were aware of in the era.[58][59] To understand the wider implications of women's experiences, WLM groups launched women's studies programs introducing feminist history, sociology and psychology to higher education and adult education curricula to counter gender biases in teaching these subjects. Writing women back into history became extremely important in the period with attention to the differences of experiences based on class, ethnic background, race and sexual orientation. The courses became widespread by the end of the decade in Britain, Canada and the United States, and were also introduced in such places as Italy and Norway. Key components of the movement were consciousness-raising sessions aimed at politicizing personal issues, small group and limited organizational structure and a focus on changing societal perception rather than reforming legislation. For example, liberationists did not support reforming family codes to allow abortion, instead, they believed that neither medical professionals nor the state should have the power to limit women's complete control of their own bodies. They favored abolishing laws which limited women's rights over their reproduction, believing such control was an individual right, not subject to moralistic majority views. Most liberationists banned the participation of men in their organizations. Though often depicted in media as a sign of "man-hating", separation was a focused attempt to eliminate defining women via their relationship to men. Since women's inequality within their employment, family and society were commonly experienced by all women, separation meant unity of purpose to evaluate their second-class status. Main article: Women's liberation movement in North America. In Canada and the United States, the movement developed out of the Civil Rights Movement, Anti-War sentiment toward the Vietnam War, the Native Rights Movement and the New Left student movement of the 1960s. Between 1965 and 1966, papers presented at meetings of the Students for a Democratic Society and articles published in journals, such as the Canadian Random began advocating for women to embark on a path of self-discovery free from male scrutiny. In 1967, the first Women's Liberation organizations formed in major cities like Berkeley, Boston, Chicago, New York City and Toronto. Quickly organizations spread across both countries. In Mexico, the first group of liberationists formed in 1970, inspired by the student movement and US women's liberationists. Organizations were loosely organized, without a hierarchical power structure and favored all-women participation to eliminate defining women or their autonomy by their association with men. Groups featured consciousness raising discussions on a wide variety of issues, the importance of having freedom to make choices, and the importance of changing societal attitudes and perceptions of women's roles. Canadian Women's Lib groups typically incorporated a class-based component into their theory of oppression which was mostly missing from U.S. liberation theory, which focused almost exclusively on sexism and a belief that women's oppression stemmed from their gender and not as a result of their economic or social class. In Quebec, women's and Quebec's autonomy were entwined issues with women struggling for the right to serve as jurors. Advocating public self-expression by participating in protests and sit-ins, liberationists demonstrated against discriminatory hiring and wage practices in Canada, while in the US liberationists protested the Miss America Beauty Pageant for objectifying women. In both countries Women's Liberation groups were involved protesting their legislators for abortion rights for women. In Mexico liberationists protested at the Monument to the Mother on Mother's Day to challenge the idea that all women were destined to be mothers. Challenging gender definitions and the sexual relationship to power drew lesbians into the movement in both the United States and Canada. Because liberationists believed that sisterhood was a uniting component to women's oppression, lesbians were not seen as a threat to other women. Another important aspect for North American women was developing spaces for women to meet with other women, offer counseling and referral services, provide access to feminist materials, and establish women's shelters for women who were in abusive relationships. Increasingly mainstream media portrayed liberationists as man-haters or deranged outcasts. To gain legitimacy for the recognition of sexual discrimination, the media discourse on women's issues was increasingly shaped by the liberal feminist's reformist aims. As liberationists were marginalized, they increasingly became involved in single focus issues, such as violence against women. By the mid-1970s, the Women's Liberation Movement had been effective in changing the worldwide perception of women, bringing sexism to light and moving reformists far to the left in their policy aims for women,] but in the haste to distance themselves from the more radical elements, liberal feminists attempted to erase their success and rebrand the movement as the Women's Movement.

White Supremacy

beliefs and ideas purporting natural superiority of the lighter-skinned, or "white," human races over other racial groups. In contemporary usage, the term white supremacist has been used to describe some groups espousing ultranationalist, racist, or fascist doctrines. White supremacist groups often have relied on violence to achieve their goals. From the 19th to the mid-20th century the doctrine of white supremacy was largely taken for granted by political leaders and social scientists in Europe and the United States. For example, in the four-volume Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (1853-55; Essay on the Inequality of Human Races), the French writer and diplomatist Arthur de Gobineau wrote about the superiority of the white race, maintaining that Aryans (Germanic peoples) represented the highest level of human development. According to 19th-century British writers such as Rudyard Kipling, Charles Kingsley, Thomas Carlyle, and others, it was the duty of Europeans—the "white man's burden"—to bring civilization to nonwhite peoples through beneficent imperialism. Several attempts were made to give white supremacy a scientific footing, as various institutes and renowned scientists published findings asserting the biological superiority of whites. Those ideas were bolstered in the early 20th century by the new science of intelligence testing, which purported to show major differences in intelligence between the races. In such tests northern Europeans always scored higher than Africans. In the United States—especially in the South—in the era of slavery and during the subsequent Jim Crow period of legal racial segregation, white supremacy enjoyed broad political support, as it did in contemporary European colonial regimes. The doctrine was especially associated with violent groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), which enjoyed some success in the United States (particularly in the 1920s), though many nonviolent individuals and groups also believed fervently in white supremacist ideas. By the mid-1950s, however, overtly racist doctrines fell into deep disfavour across much of the Western world, a development that was hastened by both desegregation (see racial segregation) and decolonization. As a result of hostility among some American whites toward the American civil rights movement, civil rights legislation, especially the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965), and Supreme Court decisions that invalidated many racially discriminatory laws, especially Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), white supremacy underwent a revival in the United States in the late 1950s and the '60s. It eventually manifested itself in the "White Power" movement, which arose in reaction to the "Black Power" doctrines of the 1960s and '70s. White supremacists, as well as many social conservatives, were troubled by the U.S. government's adoption of or acquiescence in measures such as affirmative action, school busing, and rules against racial discrimination in the housing market. Their resentment contributed to the growth of various groups and movements that actively preached white supremacy, including the traditional KKK, various neo-Nazi organizations, and the religious Christian Identity groups. Indeed, by the second half of the 20th century, the Christian Identity movement—which claimed that northwestern Europeans were directly descended from the biblical tribes of Israel and that the impending Armageddon will produce a final battle of whites against nonwhites—was the dominant religious viewpoint of white supremacists in the United States. Nevertheless, white supremacists in the United States and throughout the world ultimately were unable to defend the laws that ensured white domination. The last regimes to institutionalize doctrines of white supremacy through comprehensive legislation were Rhodesia, which changed its name to Zimbabwe after its white minority finally ceded power in 1980, and South Africa, whose apartheid system was dismantled in the 1990s. Despite the demise of segregationist and discriminatory laws throughout the Western world and in Africa, white supremacy has survived as a populist doctrine. During the 1970s and '80s the gradually uniform rhetoric and iconography of white supremacists in the United States became influential in Europe, where immigration, especially from former colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, contributed to a significant and growing nonwhite population. In some countries white supremacist ideas found expression in the programs of anti-immigrant political parties such as the National Front (Front National) in France, The Republicans (Die Republikaner) in Germany, and the Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs) and (since 2005) the Alliance for the Future of Austria (Bündnis Zukunft Österreich). In 2009, following the election the previous year of the first AA president of the United States, Barack Obama, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warned that white supremacist groups and right-wing militias in the country were winning new recruits by stoking fears of gun control and expanded welfare rolls and by exploiting resentment created by the economic recession that began in late 2007. Some observers of the movements, however, were skeptical of those claims. In early 2016 the presidential campaign of the real-estate developer Donald J. Trump, the eventual Republican nominee, attracted significant support from white supremacists and so-called white nationalists, who largely disavowed racism but celebrated "white" identity and lamented the alleged erosion of white political and economic power and the decline of white culture in the face of nonwhite immigration and multiculturalism. Other Trump admirers included members of the "alt-right" (alternative right) movement, a loose association of relatively young white supremacists, white nationalists, extreme libertarians, and neo-Nazis. Trump had earlier questioned the validity of Obama's American birth certificate and, during the campaign, attacked immigrants and ethnic minorities, vowing to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, to deport some 11 million persons living in the country illegally, and to ban immigration by Muslims. In the immediate aftermath of Trump's unexpected election as president in November 2016, reported hate crimes directed at minorities—including Muslims, Hispanics, and Jews—increased significantly.

NAACP

interracial American organization created to work for the abolition of segregation and discrimination in housing, education, employment, voting, and transportation; to oppose racism; and to ensure AAs their constitutional rights. The NAACP was created in 1909 by an interracial group consisting of W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, Mary White Ovington, and others concerned with the challenges facing AAs, especially in the wake of the 1908 Springfield (Illinois) Race Riot. Some of the founding members had been associated with the Niagara Movement, a civil rights group led by Du Bois. Many of the NAACP's actions have focused on national issues; for example, the group helped persuade President Woodrow Wilson to denounce lynching in 1918. Other areas of activism have involved political action to secure enactment of civil rights laws, programs of education and public information to win popular support, and direct action to achieve specific goals. In 1939 the NAACP established as an independent legal arm for the civil rights movement the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, which litigated to the Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the case that resulted in the high court's landmark 1954 school-desegregation decision. The organization had also won a significant victory in 1946, with Morgan v. Virginia, which successfully barred segregation in interstate travel, setting the stage for the Freedom Rides of 1961. The murder of NAACP field director Medgar Evers in 1963 gave the group national prominence, likely contributing to the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. In the 1980s the NAACP publicized opposition to apartheid policies in South Africa. The organization moved its headquarters from New York City to Baltimore, Maryland, in 1986. It also operates a bureau in Washington, D.C., and has branch offices in dozens of cities across the United States. At the turn of the 21st century, the NAACP sponsored campaigns against youth violence, encouraged economic enterprise among AAs, and led voter drives to increase participation in the political process. Organized a boycott of The Birth of a Nation, which portrayed blacks of the Reconstruction era in a distorted light.

Sit-in/Lunch Counter Sit-in

nonviolent movement of the U.S. civil rights era that began in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960. The sit-in, an act of civil disobedience, was a tactic that aroused sympathy for the demonstrators among moderates and uninvolved individuals. AAs (later joined by white activists), usually students, would go to segregated lunch counters (luncheonettes), sit in all available spaces, request service, and then refuse to leave when denied service because of their race. In addition to creating disruptions and drawing unwanted publicity, the action caused economic hardship for the owners of the businesses, because the sit-in participants took up spaces that normally were filled by paying customers. Although the first lunch-counter sit-in began with just four participants, the attention paid to the protest created a movement that spread across the South in 1960 and 1961 to include 70,000 black and white participants. It affected 20 states and resulted in the desegregation of many local businesses in those communities. During the Indian struggle for independence from the British, followers of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's teaching employed the sit-in to great advantage. A tactic similar to the sit-in, the sit-down strike, has been used by unions to occupy plants of companies that they were on strike against. The sit-down was first used on a large scale in the United States during the United Automobile Workers' strike against the General Motors Corporation in 1937. An early antisegregation sit-in was staged by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) at a Chicago coffee shop in 1942, and similar actions took place around the South. The lunch-counter sit-in that began the movement, however, took place in Greensboro, North Carolina, on the afternoon of February 1, 1960. Four freshmen from the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina (North Carolina A&T; now North Carolina A&T State University), a historically black college, made some purchases at the local F.W. Woolworth department store. They then sat down at the "whites only" lunch counter and placed an order but were refused service. They remained seated and were eventually asked to leave the premises; instead, they stayed until closing and returned the next day with more than a dozen other students. One of the students, David Richmond, acknowledged later that the action began "on impulse"—though the group, who were familiar with Gandhi's nonviolent protests against the British, had previously discussed taking action against Jim Crow laws—and that the students were surprised at the impact their local initiative had on the entire civil rights movement. Interest in participating in the sit-in spread quickly among the students of North Carolina A&T. The large supply of local students increased the effectiveness of the tactic; as demonstrators were arrested by local law enforcement and removed from the counter, others would take their place. Soon, as word about the Greensboro movement spread across the upper South, AA students from other historically black campuses began their own protests. In places such as Salisbury, North Carolina; San Antonio, Texas; and Chattanooga, Tennessee, local officials and business owners agreed to desegregate facilities after local sit-in movements took hold. The Woolworth in Greensboro was desegregated in July 1960. The sit-in movement destroyed a number of myths and stereotypes about Southern blacks that white segregationists had commonly used to support the Jim Crow system. For example, with widespread and spontaneous demonstrations across the South, it became clear to observers that Southern blacks were not content with Jim Crow segregation. The grassroots nature of the protest, arising locally from local black populations, also crushed the myth that all civil rights agitation came from outside the South. Moreover, the nonviolent and courteous behaviour of the black sit-in protesters played well on local and national television and showed them to be responsible people. The cruelty of the segregated system was further exposed when local ruffians attempted to break up the sit-ins with verbal abuse, assault, and violence. The local people who cooperated in sit-ins provided a community of black citizens willing to agitate for change and to suffer violence for a greater cause. As the movement grew and more students, both black and white, became involved, civil rights organizations such as CORE and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organized training sessions in nonviolence for participants. Expecting violence from whites, arrest, and abuse, CORE held workshops to instruct the students in the tactics and ideas of nonviolence so as to increase the power and scope of the movement. Key to the success of the sit-in movement was the moral high ground that the participants took. Their peaceful demonstrations for basic legal rights and respect increased favourable public opinion of their cause. Facing violence with nonviolent resistance required that the students take no action against white aggressors and police who physically harassed and assaulted them and arrested them on spurious charges. Student participants came to understand the higher moral purpose of their own movement, and they practiced those principles in hundreds of small encounters across the upper and middle South. Knowledge of the sit-in movements spread rapidly across the South as the local nonviolent action took on a regional character. By the end of February 1960, lunch-counter sit-ins had occurred in North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland, Kentucky, Alabama, Virginia, and Florida. They spread in March to Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Georgia and later to West Virginia, Ohio, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Illinois, Kansas, and Missouri. At nearly every historically black college, students organized and met with local officials from CORE and SCLC in workshops and conferences on nonviolence. Those meetings often brought together hundreds of students from communities in several states, who then began to form coordinated efforts at civil rights action. The creation of such communities of students led to greater coordination in the civil rights movement as the sit-ins phased out. In April 1960 Ella Baker, former executive director of the SCLC, organized a student leadership conference at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, that resulted in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Baker had long been active as a local leader in the civil rights movement, but she gained a new prominence with the student-led sit-in movement. MLK, spoke at the conference, emphasizing his philosophy of nonviolence. Demonstrating through nonviolence would force federal intervention, he argued, yet would permit the ultimate reconciliation between the races after the scourge of segregation had passed away. In an article published shortly after the conference, Baker crystallized the message of the students when she stated that those who participated in sit-ins were concerned with something "bigger than a hamburger." She encapsulated their goals by quoting a student newsletter of the historically black Barber-Scotia College (Concord, North Carolina): We want the world to know that we no longer accept the inferior position of second-class citizenship. We are willing to go to jail, be ridiculed, spat upon, and even suffer physical violence to obtain First Class Citizenship. Although the sit-in movement demonstrated success, the participants at the Raleigh conference clashed about the proper strategies for the civil rights movement. Activist and minister James Lawson argued that the legal strategy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was too slow to effect the major social change needed to bring about justice. CORE and SCLC had assisted in the sit-in movement, but mostly after the fact, and Lawson saw the need for an organization focused on developing local leaders in local communities that could operate outside the mainstream organizations. SNCC was formed with Lawson's advice serving as its founding principles. It began working to organize students and local black communities to advance the civil rights movement, often in tandem but sometimes at odds with the other civil rights movements and leaders. The sit-in movement produced a new sense of pride and power for AAs. By rising up on their own and achieving substantial success protesting against segregation in the society in which they lived, blacks realized that they could change their communities with local coordinated action. For many white Southerners, the sit-in movement demonstrated blacks' dissatisfaction with the status quo and showed that economic harm could come to white-owned businesses unless they desegregated peacefully. The sit-in movement proved the inevitability of the end of the Jim Crow system. Most of the success in actual desegregation came in the upper Southern states, such as in cities in Arkansas, Maryland, North Carolina, and Tennessee. On the other hand, no cities in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, or South Carolina desegregated as a result of the sit-in movement. The sit-in movement marked the first major effort by thousands of local blacks in civil rights activism. However, the sit-ins failed to create the kind of national attention necessary for any federal intervention. Although SNCC did develop out of the sit-in movement, becoming a permanent organization separate from CORE and the SCLC, the sit-ins faded out by the end of 1960. A new phase of black protest arose in the form of Freedom Rides, and new coordinated white resistance changed the tactics of civil rights leaders, dramatically raising the level and degree of violence by white civil rights opponents.

Selma-Montgomery March

political march from Selma, Alabama, to the state's capital, Montgomery, that occurred March 21-25, 1965. Led by MLK, the march was the culminating event of several tumultuous weeks during which demonstrators twice attempted to march but were stopped, once violently, by local police. As many as 25,000 people participated in the roughly 50-mile (80-km) march. Together, these events became a landmark in the American civil rights movement and directly led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 1963 the SNCC endeavoured to register AA voters in Dallas county in central Alabama. The focus of those efforts was the county seat, Selma, where only about 1 or 2 percent of eligible black voters were registered. Not only was the registration office open just two days per month, but cumbersome four-page forms and arbitrarily applied literacy tests were used to deter and prevent AAs from obtaining the vote. In late 1964, as SNCC intensified its registration campaign in response to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, local law enforcement—led by the county's militant segregationist sheriff, Jim Clark (who wore a button that read "Never!")—resisted with increasing violence (including the use of electric cattle prods against demonstrators). When the Dallas County Voters League, the principal local civil rights organization, requested help from the SCLC and its leader, MLK, Selma's recently elected mayor, Joseph Smitherman, sought to prevent local law-enforcement officers from employing violence, fearing that bad publicity would work against his attempt to lure new industry to Selma. Clark, however, failed to heed Smitherman's directive. By early February 1965, with the SCLC's organizing efforts in full swing, police violence had escalated and at least 2,000 demonstrators had been jailed in Dallas county. In January and February King pointed to the situation in Selma when he sought to persuade Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson to push for a voting rights act. Johnson, however, remained largely noncommittal. He hoped that court enforcement of the Civil Rights Act would bring about the necessary change, he doubted that there would be sufficient congressional support for a voting rights bill, and he was hesitant to further provoke white Southerners who were already up in arms over desegregation legislation. On February 18, 1965, in Marion, the county seat of Perry county, near Selma, a state trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, a young AA man, during a nighttime demonstration. After Jackson died of his wounds just over a week later in Selma, leaders called for a march to the state capital, Montgomery, to bring attention to the injustice of Jackson's death, the ongoing police violence, and the sweeping violations of AAs' civil rights. On March 6, George C. Wallace, Alabama's segregationist governor, forbade the march and ordered state troopers to "take whatever means necessary" to prevent it. In unilaterally scheduling the action for Sunday, March 7, King alienated a number of SNCC leaders, who resented the lack of a joint decision.See Bloody Sunday term. Meanwhile, lawyers for the SCLC went to court in an attempt to prevent Wallace and the state from intervening again in the demonstration. While U.S. District Court Judge Frank Johnson, Jr., agreed to hear the petition, he also issued a restraining order forbidding any further demonstrations in the interim. On March 9 King led more than 2,000 individuals on a march to the bridge. Reluctant to violate the restraining order, however, he turned the procession around, after leading it in prayer, when state troopers ordered it to halt. That was not the last dramatic event of "Turnaround Tuesday." That night three white clergymen who had traveled to Selma to join the protest were assaulted. One of them, Massachusetts Unitarian minister James J. Reeb, died of his wounds. On March 15, just over a week after Bloody Sunday, Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson introduced voting rights legislation in an address to a joint session of Congress. On March 17, after several days of testimony, Judge Johnson ruled in favour of the protestors, saying, The law is clear that the right to petition one's government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups...and these rights may be exercised by marching, even along public highways. Under the terms of the ruling, an unlimited number of people would be permitted to begin and finish the march (which was required to be completed in five days), but only 300 marchers were to be allowed to cover the 22-mile (35-km) two-lane portion of U.S. Highway 80 that passed through Lowndes county. In the days before the start of the renewed march, Governor Wallace indicated (or at least implied) in a phone call with President Johnson that the Alabama National Guard would protect the marchers. Then, addressing the state legislature, the governor announced that he expected the federal government to "provide for the safety and welfare of the so-called demonstrators." Ultimately, Wallace sent a telegram to the president saying that Alabama could not afford to provide protection for the marchers and asking the federal government to do so. On March 20 a furious President Johnson responded by federalizing the command of elements of the Alabama National Guard and dispatching the U.S. Army. On March 21 King led marchers (estimates of their number vary but generally fall between 3,000 and 8,000) out of Selma, over the Pettus Bridge, and on the road to Montgomery. En route protection was provided by more than 1,800 Alabama National Guardsmen and about 2,000 soldiers, as well as federal marshals and FBI agents. The marchers, whose numbers swelled to about 25,000 along the way, covered the roughly 50 miles (80 km) to Montgomery in five days, arriving at the state capital on March 25. Once adopted by Congress and signed into law (August 6), the Voting Rights Act of 1965 suspended literacy tests, provided for federal approval of proposed changes to voting laws or procedures in jurisdictions that had previously used tests to determine voter eligibility, and directed the attorney general of the United States to challenge the use of poll taxes for state and local elections.

Segregation

the enforced separation of different racial groups in a country, community, or establishment.

Race Baiting

the making of verbal attacks against members of a racial group

Second-wave-The term second wave was coined by Martha Lear and refers to the feminist movement that began in the 1960s. The leading issues were demands for employment and reproductive rights. In the United States the second wave rose out of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. Even within these "pro-rights" organizations, women were relegated to second-class status. In an effort to gain a voice, two branches of the feminist movement emerged

the women's liberation movement (WLM) and the National Organization for Women (NOW). The WLM evolved out of the New Left and encompassed more loosely organized radical groups that formed following their exclusion from other New Left politics. They gained great notoriety in 1968, when they demonstrated against the Miss America pageant for its sexist objectification of women. NOW was a more structured, liberal group founded in 1966 by Betty Friedan, Aileen Hernandez, and others. Although NOW grew to become more inclusive, in 1968 Ti-Grace Atkinson left it and created her own group, the Feminists, to protest NOW's hierarchical structure. NOW also lost members because of its pro-choice stance; some conservative women left and created the Women's Equity Action League. In spite of these early setbacks, NOW grew to become the largest women's organization in the United States and championed the ERA as its primary cause. Despite approval by the U.S. House and Senate, the ERA was not ratified by the requisite thirty-eight states by the 1982 deadline. This period was marked by a number of historic events, including the 1963 Commission on the Status of Women report that documented discrimination against women in all facets of life. The pervasiveness of discrimination was also the topic of Betty Friedan's best-selling book The Feminine Mystique (1963). In 1963 Congress passed the Equal Pay Act, which prohibited unequal pay for equal work. In 1964 Congress passed Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of sex, race, color, religion, and national origin. Ironically, the inclusion of "sex" was actually a last-minute attempt to kill the bill, but it passed anyway. Prohibitions against sexual discrimination were further extended in 1972 with the passage of Title IX of the Education Amendment, which prohibited discrimination in educational settings. In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade struck down state laws restricting a women's right to an abortion, thereby legalizing it in all fifty states. The sex wars of the 1980s were between antipornography feminists, who argued that pornography degrades and promotes violence against women, and sex-positive feminists who opposed limiting sexual expression. This conflict, along with the fact that many feminists felt that other sources of oppression, such as race and class, were being neglected, caused the already multipartite movement to become increasingly fractured, resulting in the birth of third-wave feminism.

Nonviolence

use of peaceful means to bring about political or social change

Suffragette

woman seeking the right to vote through organized protest

Integration

action or process of integrating

Ku Klux Klan

either of two distinct U.S. hate organizations that have employed terror in pursuit of their white supremacist agenda. One group was founded immediately after the Civil War and lasted until the 1870s; the other began in 1915 and has continued to the present. The 19th-century Klan was originally organized as a social club by Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866. They apparently derived the name from the Greek word kyklos, from which comes the English "circle"; "Klan" was added for the sake of alliteration and Ku Klux Klan emerged. The organization quickly became a vehicle for Southern white underground resistance to Radical Reconstruction. Klan members sought the restoration of white supremacy through intimidation and violence aimed at the newly enfranchised black freedmen. A similar organization, the Knights of the White Camelia, began in Louisiana in 1867.In the summer of 1867, the Klan was structured into the "Invisible Empire of the South" at a convention in Nashville, Tennessee, attended by delegates from former Confederate states. The 19th-century Klan reached its peak between 1868 and 1870. But Forrest ordered it disbanded in 1869, largely as a result of the group's excessive violence. Local branches remained active for a time, however, prompting Congress to pass the Force Act in 1870 and the Ku Klux Act in 1871. In United States v. Harris in 1882, the Supreme Court declared the Ku Klux Act unconstitutional, but by that time the Klan had practically disappeared. The revived Klan was fueled partly by patriotism and partly by a romantic nostalgia for the old South, but, more importantly, it expressed the defensive reaction of white Protestants in small-town America who felt threatened by the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and by the large-scale immigration of the previous decades that had changed the ethnic character of American society. This second Klan peaked in the 1920s, when its membership exceeded 4,000,000 nationally, and profits rolled in from the sale of its memberships, regalia, costumes, publications, and rituals. A burning cross became the symbol of the new organization. To the old Klan's hostility toward blacks the new Klan—which was strong in the Midwest as well as in the South—added bias against Roman Catholics, Jews, foreigners, and organized labour. The Klan enjoyed a last spurt of growth in 1928, when Alfred E. Smith, a Catholic, received the Democratic presidential nomination. During the Great Depression of the 1930s the Klan's membership dropped drastically, and the last remnants of the organization temporarily disbanded in 1944. For the next 20 years the Klan was quiescent, but it had a resurgence in some Southern states during the 1960s as civil-rights workers attempted to force Southern communities' compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Wounded Knee Protests

hamlet and creek on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwestern South Dakota, U.S. It was the site of two conflicts between NAs and representatives of the U.S. government. On December 29, 1890, more than 200 Sioux men, women, and children were massacred by U.S. troops in what has been called the Battle of Wounded Knee, an episode that concluded the conquest of the North American Indian. Reaching out for some hope of salvation from hard conditions, such as semistarvation caused by reduction in the size of their reservation in the late 1880s, the Teton Sioux responded affirmatively to Wovoka, a Paiute prophet who promised the disappearance of the white man and a return of native lands and buffalo if certain rites and dances were performed. These rites, known as the Ghost Dance, caused alarm among whites and led to federal military intervention. The army subdued the Ghost Dance movement, but Chief Sitting Bull was killed by reservation police while being arrested (December 14, 1890), and a few hundred Sioux left their reservation at Pine Ridge, seeking to hide in the Badlands. Technically classified as hostiles because they had left the reservation, the Indians gathered around Chief Big Foot (byname of Chief Spotted Elk), who was dying of pneumonia. However, they surrendered quietly to pursuing troops of the 7th Cavalry on the night of December 28. Following an overnight encampment near Wounded Knee Creek, the Sioux were surrounded and were nearly disarmed when a scuffle broke out over a young and possibly deaf brave's new rifle. A shot was fired from within the group of struggling men, and a trooper fell. From close range, the soldiers, supported by rapid-fire Hotchkiss guns, fired into the Indians. Accounts vary as to how many of the Sioux still possessed rifles, Fleeing Sioux were pursued, and some were killed miles from the camp. Although the number of Indians dead is unknown (the Sioux removed some of the dead later), 144 Indians, including 44 women and 16 children, were buried in a mass grave the following spring when the weather permitted the army to return. About 30 soldiers were killed during the hostilities. On February 27, 1973, some 200 members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), led by Russell Means and Dennis Banks, took the reservation hamlet of Wounded Knee by force, declared it the "Independent Oglala Sioux Nation," and vowed to stay until the U.S. government met AIM demands for a change in tribal leaders, a review of all Indian treaties, and a U.S. Senate investigation of treatment of NAs in general. The Indians were immediately surrounded by federal marshals, and a siege began, ending on May 8 when the Indians surrendered their arms and evacuated Wounded Knee in exchange for a promise of negotiations on Indian grievances. Two Indians were killed and one federal marshal was seriously wounded during the siege, which alternated between negotiation and exchanges of gunfire.

Women's Strike for Equality

was a strike which took place in the United States on August 26, 1970. It celebrated the 50th anniversary of the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, which effectively gave American women the right to vote. The rally was sponsored by the National Organization for Women (NOW). About 50,000 women gathered for the protest in New York City and even more throughout the country. At this time, the gathering was the largest on behalf of women in the United States. The strike, spearheaded by Betty Friedan, self-stated three primary goals: free abortion on demand, equal opportunity in the workforce, and free childcare. The strike also advocated for other second wave feminist goals more generally, such as political rights for women, and social equality in relationships such as marriage.At the time of the protest, women still did not enjoy many of the same freedoms and rights as men. Despite the passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which prohibited pay discrimination between two people who performed the same job, women comparatively earned 59 cents for every dollar a man made for similar work. In some areas of the country, women with college degrees earned significantly less than men with an eighth grade education. Women were further restricted in terms of their access to higher education, such as medical or law school, and the job market after receiving subsequent degrees. Only 5-10% of women were allowed in institutions of higher education. Sandra Day O'Connor, the first female Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, who graduated at the top of her class from Stanford Law School, was offered only secretarial jobs in Los Angeles law firms despite her prestigious degree. In 43 states, women were limited in the number of hours they could work and the amount of weight they could carry (generally no more than 25 pounds (11 kg), the size of a toddler, as some feminists noted). In many states, women were also unable to obtain credit cards, make wills, or own property without a husband. The right to serve on a jury was denied to women in some states. Feminist Betty Jameson Armistead sent a letter to Betty Friedan and others proposing the strike. Betty Friedan, writer of The Feminine Mystique, and a leader of second-wave feminism, then planned the protest to commemorate the anniversary of landmark legislation, and spotlight current battles. She said the movement was in need of "something big, something so big it will make national headlines". Friedan initially proposed the strike to the National Organization for Women, an organization which she had helped found. Members were hesitant, however, fearful that the protest would not be successful, and could create a mockery of their movement. Friedan continued to develop a strategy, months in advance, despite the negative reception. The initial planning meeting was small and chaotic; planners sat in a circle and discussed possible strategies without a real leader or any formal organization. The meeting produced nothing tangible or relevant. As the plans progressed, so did the controversy. In the final month leading up to the event, the group was significantly divided into two factions: the young "radical, crazies" and the "bourgeoisie" founders. Eventually, Friedan prevailed, avoiding deep divisions by recruiting women and men, liberals and conservatives alike. Friedan sought permission from the city of New York to close Fifth Avenue for the protest. The city refused. Despite the setback, women gathered on the streets at around 5 pm (chosen so that working women could attend) and began protesting. The New York action included chanting and speeches by prominent figures (including Friedan), as well as signs and posters. Crowd estimates put somewhere between ten[8] and twenty thousand people, mostly women, gathered on Fifth Avenue. Police attempted to keep the crowd restricted to one lane of traffic, but the sheer volume of people was impossible to control and they spread across the street from sidewalk to sidewalk. Thousands of politically and satirically charged signs dotted the crowd. "Don't iron while the strike is hot" set the stage as the protest's famous slogan. Others included: "Hardhats for Soft Broads," "I Am Not a Barbie Doll", "Storks Fly - Why Can't Mothers", "We are the 51% minority", and the sardonic "We have the right to vote for the man of our choice". Speeches were given to ignite the crowd and inform bystanders. Friedan spoke of the strength and ability of women to rise above their oppression. The strike's goals were to publicize the feminist movement and ideas and to expose the injustices experienced by women. In conjunction with the New York City action, individuals and groups throughout the nation staged protests, marches, and other various forms of revolt to honor the movement. One example occurred in Boston, where around 5,000 women gathered in Boston Common and 1,000 went on to march into downtown Boston. A noon rally also drew around 2,000 people in San Francisco's Union Square. About 125 women marched on City Hall in Syracuse, N. Y., and in Manhasset, L. I., women gathered signatures on a petition urging Senate passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. In Detroit, women staged a sit-in in a men's restroom protesting unequal facilities for men and women staffers. In Pittsburgh, four women threw eggs at a radio host who dared them to show their liberation. One thousand women in Washington, D.C. staged a march down Connecticut Avenue behind a banner reading "We Demand Equality"; in the same city, government workers organized a peaceful protest and staged a "teach-in", which educated people about the injustices done to women, mindful that it was against the law for government workers to strike. "Silent vigils" held in Los Angeles drew meager crowds of only 500. In Minneapolis, women gathered and staged guerrilla theater involving key figures in the national abortion debate, and stereotypical roles of women in American society. Women were portrayed as mothers and wives; doing dishes, rearing children and doting obnoxiously on their husbands, all while wearing heels and aprons. Approximately 100 women participating in the strike also marched down Kiener 5 Memorial Plaza in Saint Louis as well. Though gaining less media attention than the public demonstrations, another component of the protest was a one-day strike from work. Betty Friedan had asked that "the women who are doing menial chores in the offices as secretaries put the covers on their typewriters, [...] the waitresses stop waiting, cleaning women stop cleaning and everyone who is doing a job for which a man would be paid more stop [working]." Striking from work was intended to highlight unequal pay as well as limited job opportunities for women. In addition to refusing to perform paid labor on this day, women across the country were also asked to refrain from any household chores. By refusing to cook or clean, they were attempting to emphasize the unequal distribution of household work among the sexes. However, because of the nature of striking from unpaid labor, it is unclear how many women participated. Despite initial obstacles and setbacks, Friedan declared the event a success. Including the protests and demonstrations throughout the country, she proclaimed, "It exceeded my wildest dreams. It's now a political movement and the message is clear".

Proposition 187 (CA)

In 1994 MALDEF successfully challenged California's Proposition 187, a ballot initiative that denied public education, social services, and health services to undocumented immigrants. MALDEF has also argued successfully against at-large election systems—redistricting practices that minimize minority political influence—and (in state courts) against some school funding formulas. In the spring of 1963, activists in Birmingham, Alabama launched one of the most influential campaigns of the Civil Rights Movement: Project C, better known as The Birmingham Campaign. It would be the beginning of a series of lunch counter sit-ins, marches on City Hall and boycotts on downtown merchants to protest segregation laws in the city. Over the next couple months, the peaceful demonstrations would be met with violent attacks using high-pressure fire hoses and police dogs on men, women and children alike -- producing some of the most iconic and troubling images of the Civil Rights Movement. President John F. Kennedy would later say, "The events in Birmingham... have so increased the cries for equality that no city or state or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them." It is considered one of the major turning points in the Civil Rights Movement and the "beginning of the end" of a centuries-long struggle for freedom. The Birmingham Campaign ended with a victory in May of 1963 when local officials agreed to remove "White Only" and "Black Only" signs from restrooms and drinking fountains in downtown Birmingham; desegregate lunch counters; deploy a "Negro job improvement plan"; release jailed demonstrators; and create a biracial committee to monitor the agreement. Desegregation would take place slowly over the next few months coupled with violent attacks from angry segregationists, including the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that killed four young girls. Learn more about some of the events that followed the campaign and the city's continued push for integration.

I Can't Breathe Protests

In Dec., protests continued to grow throughout the country after a Staten Island grand jury decided not to indict Daniel Pantaleo, the police officer involved in the death of Eric Garner. While marching through streets, protesters shouted, "I can't breathe," the last words Garner said before he died after being placed in a chokehold by Pantaleo in July. These protests combined with the still ongoing nationwide demonstrations over last month's grand jury decision in Ferguson. Crowds of protesters gathered in New York, Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh. In most cases, these protests were not violent. However, protests in Berkeley, Calif., became violent as demonstrators shut down a freeway, threw rocks and other objects at police officers, and assaulted each other.

Black Muslims-religious minority among both the larger AA and Muslim population of the United States. They are represented in various self-described Muslim sects such as the Nation of Islam. The history of AA Muslims is similar to the broader AA history, and, too, goes back to the Revolutionary and Antebellum Eras. The Nation of Islam (NOI) was created in 1930 by Wallace Fard Muhammad. Fard drew inspiration for NOI doctrines from those of Timothy Drew's Moorish Science Temple of America. He provided three main principles which serve as the foundation of the NOI

"Allah is God, the white man is the devil and the so-called Negroes are the Asiatic Black People, the cream of the planet earth". In 1934 Elijah Muhammad became the leader of the NOI, he deified Fard, saying that he was an incarnation of God, and taught that he was a prophet who had been taught directly by God in the form of Fard. Two of the most famous people to join the NOI were Malcolm X, who became the face of the NOI in the media, and Muhammad Ali, who, while initially rejected, was accepted into the group shortly after his first world heavyweight championship victory. Both Malcolm X and Ali later became Sunni Muslims. Malcolm X was one of the most influential leaders of the NOI and, in accordance with NOI doctrine, advocated the complete separation of blacks from whites. He left the NOI after being silenced for 90 days (due to a controversial comment on the JFK assassination), and proceeded to form Muslim Mosque, Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity before his pilgrimage to Mecca and conversion to Sunni Islam. He is viewed as the first person to start the movement among AAs towards Sunni Islam. The Nation of Islam has received a great deal of criticism for its anti-white, anti-Christian, and anti-semitic teachings, and is listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Occupation

a job

Prejudice

preconceived opinion that is not based on reason

Oppression

prolonged or unjust treatment

Civil Disobedience-also called passive resistance, refusal to obey the demands or commands of a government or occupying power, without resorting to violence or active measures of opposition; its usual purpose is to force concessions from the government or occupying power. The philosophical roots of civil disobedience lie deep in Western thought

Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Henry David Thoreau. The modern concept of civil disobedience was most clearly formulated by Mohandas Gandhi. Drawing from Eastern and Western thought, Gandhi developed the philosophy of satyagraha, which centres on nonviolent resistance to evil. First in the Transvaal of South Africa in 1906 and later in India, via such actions as the Salt March (1930), Gandhi sought to obtain equal rights and freedom through satyagraha campaigns. Drawing in part on Gandhi's example, the American civil rights movement, which came to prominence during the 1950s, sought to end racial segregation in the southern United States by adopting the tactics and philosophy of civil disobedience through such protests as the Greensboro sit-in (1960) and the Freedom Rides (1961). MLK, came to be associated with the movement's nonviolent actions.

504 Sit-in

Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 is the most significant disability rights legislation prior to passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990. Opened up unprecedented opportunities for the disabled and introduced the concept of disability rights to American society. Section 504 states that no handicapped individual who is otherwise qualified shall be excluded from participating in any program that receives federal funds. The models for Section 504, however, were Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 that respectively outlawed discrimination against racial minorities and women. Legislators were concerned that disabled individuals who had completed vocational rehabilitation were unable to find work because of discrimination by employers. Disability activists rejoiced at Section 504, but the legislation could not make an impact until the provisions of the bill were spelled out. The regulations required that all new facilities built with federal money be accessible to people with disabilities and that all existing facilities had to be made accessible within two months, although the extension of three years could be granted where major alterations, such as the addition of ramps or elevators, were necessary. All public schools receiving federal funds were required to admit and educate children with disabilities and to make the necessary accommodations to do so. Within ten years of the signing of the Section 504 regulations, people with disabilities constituted seven percent of all first-year college students. Section 504 was limited in that it did nothing about groups or organizations that did not receive federal money. Enforcement of 504 was also spotty at best, and federal court decisions about its requirements were often contradictory, limiting its effectiveness. As a result, entire aspects of American public life continued to be inaccessible to people with disabilities. By 1983, the National Council for Disability had begun to push for a national law that would become the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973

The Rehabilitation Act of 1973 was its first milestone in the area. Section 504 of the act prohibited discrimination on the basis of handicap in any program or activity that received federal funds. Prior to the enactment of the Americans with Disabilities Act, section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act was the principal federal prohibition of discrimination on the basis of disability. Even with the ADA, the Rehabilitation Act remains an important protection for those with disabilities. The ADA expressly excludes from its coverage protection against discriminatory acts by the federal government, so the Rehabilitation Act provides the only private cause of action for disability discrimination by federal employers and agencies. The Rehabilitation Act also remains an alternative means of remedying discrimination even when a plaintiff concurrently invokes ADA protection.

Title VII (1964 Civil RIghts Act)

Title VII bans discrimination by trade unions, schools, or employers involved in interstate commerce or doing business with the federal government. The latter section also applies to discrimination on the basis of sex and established a government agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), to enforce these provisions. The act also calls for the desegregation of public schools (Title IV), broadens the duties of the Civil Rights Commission (Title V), and assures nondiscrimination in the distribution of funds under federally assisted programs (Title VI).

Ku Klux Klan Act (1871)

With passage of the Third Force Act, popularly known as the Ku Klux Act, Congress authorizes President Ulysses S. Grant to declare martial law, impose heavy penalties against terrorist organizations, and use military force to suppress the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Founded in 1865 by a group of Confederate veterans, the KKK rapidly grew from a secret social fraternity to a paramilitary force bent on reversing the federal government's progressive Reconstruction Era-activities in the South, especially policies that elevated the rights of the local AA population. Former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest was the KKK's first grand wizard and in 1869 unsuccessfully tried to disband it after he grew critical of the Klan's excessive violence. Most prominent in counties where the races were relatively balanced, the KKK engaged in terrorist raids against African-Americans and white Republicans at night, employing intimidation, destruction of property, assault, and murder to achieve its aims and influence upcoming elections. In a few Southern states, Republicans organized militia units to break up the Klan. In 1871, passage of the Ku Klux Act led to nine South Carolina counties being placed under martial law and thousands of arrests. In 1882, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Ku Klux Act unconstitutional, but by that time Reconstruction had ended, and the KKK had faded away. The 20th century would see two revivals of the KKK: one in response to immigration in the 1910s and '20s, and another in response to the African-American civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s.

Truman Committee

a United States Presidential Commission established by President Harry Truman in 1946. The committee was created by Executive Order 9808 on December 5, 1946 and instructed to investigate the status of civil rights in the country and propose measures to strengthen and protect them. After the committee submitted a report of its findings to President Truman, it disbanded in December 1947. The committee was charged with examining the condition of civil rights in the United States, producing a written report of their findings, and submitting recommendations on improving civil rights in the United States. In December 1947, the committee produced a 178 page report entitled To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President's Committee on Civil Rights. In the report, it proposed to establish a permanent Civil Rights Commission, Joint Congressional Committee on Civil Rights, and a Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice; to develop federal protection from lynching; a permanent fair employment practice commission; to abolish poll taxes; and urged other measures. Furthermore, the report raised the distinct possibility that the UN Charter from 1945 could also be used as a source of law to fight persistent racial discrimination in the US. On July 26, 1948, President Truman advanced the recommendations of the report by signing executive orders 9980 and 9981. Executive Order 9980 ordered the desegregation of the federal work force and Executive Order 9981 ordered the desegregation of the armed services[3]. He also sent a special message to Congress on February 2, 1948 to implement the recommendations of the President's Committee on Civil Rights.

#TimesUp

a movement against sexual harassment and was founded on January 1, 2018, by Hollywood celebrities in response to the Weinstein effect and #MeToo. As of February 2018, it has raised $20 million for its legal defense fund, and gathered over 200 volunteer lawyers. In November 2017, the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas wrote a letter of solidarity to the Hollywood women involved in exposing the sexual abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein. The letter, published in Time, described experiences of assault and harassment among female farmworkers. The letter stated that it was written on behalf of the approximately 700,000 female farmworkers in the United States. Partly in response, Time's Up was announced in The New York Times on January 1, 2018. The announcement cited the letter of support from the Alianza Nacional de Campesinas and the desire to support women, men, people of color, and the LGBT community who have less access to media platforms and funds to speak up about harassment. At its founding, the following initiatives were announced: A $13-million legal defense fund, administered by the National Women's Law Center, to support lower-income women seeking justice for sexual harassment and assault in the workplace, Advocating for legislation to punish companies that tolerate persistent harassment, A movement toward gender parity in studio and talent agencies, Calling for women on the red carpet at the 75th Golden Globe Awards to wear black and speak out about sexual harassment and assault, Some (including Lady Gaga, Lana Del Rey, Kesha and Cyndi Lauper) who attended the Grammys in 2018 wore white roses or all- black clothes to express solidarity with the Time's Up movement. Lorde wore an excerpt from a work by Jenny Holzer, printed on a card stitched onto the back of her dress; the excerpt read, "Rejoice! Our times are intolerable. Take courage, for the worst is a harbinger of the best. Only dire circumstance can precipitate the overthrow of oppressors. The old & corrupt must be laid to waste before the just can triumph. Contradiction will be heightened. The reckoning will be hastened by the staging of seed disturbances. The apocalypse will blossom." Lorde wrote, "My version of a white rose — THE APOCALYPSE WILL BLOSSOM — an excerpt from the greatest of all time, Jenny Holzer." As a movement focused on combatting sexual harassment in the workplace across many industries, the Time's Up "movement has received external criticism from a variety of sources. These critiques largely focus on the hypocrisy of the movement and its spokespeople, as well as the general response of Hollywood elites. Many writers have criticized Hollywood for espousing the messages of the movement without making the necessary changes in the industry that the movement is calling for. During awards season, writers called out the industry for "leaning hardest on the very women it has exploited" in order to convert their critiques and testimonies into "inspirational messages and digestible branding exercises". Others criticize the movement for a lack of diversity in its spokespeople. The majority of Times Up representatives are notably wealthy and of celebrity status. Many progressive commentators criticize the movement for its entrenchment in celebrity culture. They claim celebrities are not committed to the cause beyond their superficial involvement in the Times Up organization and that these (mostly) women do not represent the interests of women in real communities. As a movement intended to combat sexual harassment across many industries, critics fear that its focus on Hollywood detracts from other industries. As a counterpoint, many bring attention to the fact that the Movement allies itself with Alianza Nacional de Campesinas. Additionally, many cite that Times Up draws inspiration from the #MeToo movement, a campaign started and organized by activists of color like Tarana Burke. Similar critiques came to light during the Golden Globes in January 2018, when many actresses and signatories of the movement dressed in black brought prominent activists as their dates; for example, Tarana Burke arrived with Michelle Williams, and Meryl Streep brought Ai-jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance as her date. Other activists in attendance included Rosa Clemente, Saru Jayaraman, Billie Jean King, Marai Larasi, Calina Lawrence, and Monica Ramirez, co-founder of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas. Though many praised this choice as an opportunity to lend voices to prominent activists in the field, others heavily criticized these and other actresses for showcasing activists of color as moral accessories. In an interview with Variety, however, Tarana Burke herself commented that once she received an invitation from Michelle Williams to attend the awards, she thought this choice was "brilliant."

New Negro

a term popularized during the Harlem Renaissance implying a more outspoken advocacy of dignity and a refusal to submit quietly to the practices and laws of Jim Crow racial segregation. The term "New Negro" was made popular by Alain LeRoy Locke."

Seneca Falls Convention

assembly held on July 19-20, 1848, at Seneca Falls, New York, that launched the woman suffrage movement in the United States. Seneca Falls was the home of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who, along with Lucretia Mott, conceived and directed the convention. The two feminist leaders had been excluded from participating in the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, an event that solidified their determination to engage in the struggle. At the 1848 convention Stanton read the "Declaration of Sentiments," a statement of grievances and demands patterned closely after the Declaration of Independence. It called upon women to organize and to petition for their rights. The convention passed 12 resolutions—11 unanimously—designed to gain certain rights and privileges that women of the era were denied. The ninth resolution demanded the right to vote; passed narrowly upon the insistence of Stanton, it subjected the Seneca Falls Convention to subsequent ridicule and caused many backers of women's rights to withdraw their support. It nonetheless served as the cornerstone of the woman suffrage movement that culminated in passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

Neo-Nazi

consists of post-World War II militant social or political movements seeking to revive and implement the ideology of Nazism. Neo-Nazis seek to employ their ideology to promote hatred and attack minorities, or in some cases to create a fascist political state.

"Problem that has no name"

from feminine mystique by Betty Friedan, describes the widespread unhappiness of women in late 50s and early 60s.

Los Angeles Riots (1992)

major outbreak of violence, looting, and arson in Los Angeles that began on April 29, 1992, in response to the acquittal of four white Los Angeles policemen on all but one charge (on which the jury was deadlocked) connected with the severe beating of an AA motorist in March 1991. As a result of several days of rioting, more than 50 people were killed, more than 2,300 were injured, and thousands were arrested. About 1,100 buildings were damaged, and total property damage was about $1 billion, which made the riots one of the most-devastating civil disruptions in American history. Although many Angelenos in the late 20th century prided themselves on their city's ethnic diversity, there was a strong feeling that the city's police force practiced racial profiling. These suspicions seemed to be confirmed by a videotape shot on March 3, 1991, by a man who watched police officers brutally beat Rodney King, an AA motorist who had been pulled over for speeding after an eight-mile chase. When the officers' initial efforts to bring a noncompliant King to the ground failed, they clubbed him with their batons dozens of times. The videotape, which was broadcast across the United States, prompted a huge outpouring of protest. On April 29, 1992, protest and violence erupted almost immediately after the jury—composed of 10 whites, a Hispanic, and an Asian—acquitted the officers of charges that included assault with a deadly weapon and excessive use of force (though the jury was deadlocked on the excessive-force charge against one of the policemen). Hundreds of protesters congregated outside police headquarters in downtown Los Angeles, chanting, "No justice, no peace." At the intersection of Florence and Normandie avenues, in predominantly black South Central Los Angeles—not far from Watts, a growing crowd began harassing motorists. Live television coverage captured an assault on a white truck driver, Reginald Denny, who was pulled from the cab of his vehicle, beaten, and smashed with a cinder block (he was rescued by people from the neighbourhood who had been watching the event unfold on television). The overwhelmed police on the scene had retreated. That evening and over the ensuing days, violence, looting, and arson spread to encompass much of the Los Angeles region. Much of the worst rioting occurred in Koreatown, where relations between Korean merchants and their AA customers had already been tense. As firefighters battled blazes throughout the area, they became targets of snipers, and even air traffic was disrupted by safety concerns. On the first night of rioting, Mayor Tom Bradley declared a state of emergency, and California Gov. Pete Wilson mobilized a first contingent of National Guardsmen (eventually, some 6,000 guardsmen were deployed). On May 1 Rodney King, speaking on television, made a plea for calm, famously asking, "Can we get along?" That day, U.S. Pres. George Bush dispatched 3,000-4,000 army troops and marines, along with 1,000 riot-trained federal law officers, to help restore order. The next day he declared Los Angeles a federal disaster area. On May 4, with calm prevailing, the dusk-to-day curfew that had been imposed on the city was lifted, and Los Angeles businesses and schools reopened. In June Daryl Gates, Los Angeles's controversial police chief was forced to resign. Also in the wake of the riots, a dispirited Bradley, the city's first AA mayor, chose not to run for a sixth term. Ultimately, King received a $3.8 million settlement from Los Angeles after two of the officers who had beaten him were convicted in a civil suit of violating his civil rights.

Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Hate Crime Prevention Acts

Conceived as a response to the murders of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr., in 2009 Barack Obama signed it into law.The new legislation expanded the federal hate-crimes statute to include violent crimes motivated by disability, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation.

Project C

Despite energetic organization on the local level, Birmingham, Alabama remained a largely segregated city in the spring of 1963 when MLK and his colleagues at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) launched Project C (for confrontation), an ambitious program that wedded economic pressure and large scale direct action protest to undermine the city's rigid system of segregation. After conducting sit-ins, hosting mass meetings, and waging an economic boycott, the campaign received national media attention on April 7th when Public Safety Commissioner T. Eugene "Bull" Connor loosed police attack dogs on marchers undertaking nonviolent protest. King's decision to disregard a federal court injunction barring further demonstrations resulted in his arrest, along with local leader Fred L. Shuttlesworth, and many others on April 12th. While imprisoned, King penned "A Letter from Birmingham Jail," his eloquent response to critics of direct action protest. On May 3rd, Birmingham police used high pressure fire hoses to disrupt a peaceful demonstration composed largely of students, thereby provoking national outrage and prompting federal intervention. Officials from the Kennedy administration helped negotiate a settlement on May 10th, but rioting ensued the very next day in response to the bombing by Klansmen of the A.G. Gaston Motel and the home of the Reverend A.D. King. Despite the high cost, events in Birmingham helped galvanize national support for civil rights reform and contributed to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 briggingham was a success,

New York Times vs. Sullivan

During the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, the New York Times published an ad for contributing donations to defend MLK, on perjury charges. The ad contained several minor factual inaccuracies. The city Public Safety Commissioner, L.B. Sullivan, felt that the criticism of his subordinates reflected on him, even though he was not mentioned in the ad. Sullivan sent a written request to the Times to publicly retract the information, as required for a public figure to seek punitive damages in a libel action under Alabama law. When the Times refused and claimed that they were puzzled by the request, Sullivan filed a libel action against the Times and a group of AA ministers mentioned in the ad. A jury in state court awarded him $500,000 in damages. The state supreme court affirmed and the Times appealed. Question:Did Alabama's libel law unconstitutionally infringe on the First Amendment's freedom of speech and freedom of press protections? Conclusion:UNANIMOUS DECISION FOR NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY; To sustain a claim of defamation or libel, the First Amendment requires that the plaintiff show that the defendant knew that a statement was false or was reckless in deciding to publish the information without investigating whether it was accurate. In a unanimous opinion authored by Justice Brennan, the Court ruled for the Times. When a statement concerns a public figure, the Court held, it is not enough to show that it is false for the press to be liable for libel. Instead, the target of the statement must show that it was made with knowledge of or reckless disregard for its falsity. Brennan used the term "actual malice" to summarize this standard, although he did not intend the usual meaning of a malicious purpose. In libel law, "malice" had meant knowledge or gross recklessness rather than intent, since courts found it difficult to imagine that someone would knowingly disseminate false information without a bad intent.

South Carolina v. Katzenbach

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 prevented states from using a "test or device" (such as literacy tests) to deny citizens the right to vote. Under the Attorney General's jurisdiction, federal examiners were empowered to intervene to investigate election irregularities. Did the Act violate the states' rights to implement and control elections? The Fifteenth Amendment is a valid constitutional basis for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In an 8-1 decision authored by Justice Warren, the Court upheld the Act as constitutional. Noting that the enforcement clause of the Fifteenth Amendment gave Congress "full remedial powers" to prevent racial discrimination in voting, the Act was a "legitimate response" to the "insidious and pervasive evil" which had denied blacks the right to vote since the Fifteenth Amendment's adoption in 1870. Justice Black dissented in part. He argued that while he would have upheld most of the Act, he would have struck down certain provisions as beyond the scope of Congress's power.

Voting Rights Act (1965)

U.S. legislation (August 6, 1965) that aimed to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented AAs from exercising their right to vote under the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) to the Constitution of the United States. The act significantly widened the franchise and is considered among the most far-reaching pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S. history. In December 1955 NAACP activist Rosa Parks's impromptu refusal to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, sparked a sustained bus boycott that inspired mass protests elsewhere to speed the pace of civil rights reform.... Shortly following the American Civil War (1861-65), the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, guaranteeing that the right to vote would not be denied "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Soon afterward the U.S. Congress enacted legislation that made it a federal crime to interfere with an individual's right to vote and that otherwise protected the rights promised to former slaves under both the Fourteenth (1868) and Fifteenth amendments. In some states of the former Confederacy, AAs became a majority or near majority of the eligible voting population, and AA candidates ran and were elected to office at all levels of government. Nevertheless, there was strong opposition to the extension of the franchise to AAs. Following the end of Reconstruction in 1877, the Supreme Court of the United States limited voting protections under federal legislation, and intimidation and fraud were employed by white leaders to reduce voter registration and turnout among AAs. As whites came to dominate state legislatures once again, legislation was used to strictly circumscribe the right of AAs to vote. Poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, whites-only primaries, and other measures disproportionately disqualified AAs from voting. The result was that by the early 20th century nearly all AAs were disfranchised. In the first half of the 20th century, several such measures were declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1915, for example, grandfather clauses were invalidated, and in 1944 whites-only primaries were struck down. Nevertheless, by the early 1960s voter registration rates among AAs were negligible in much of the Deep South and well below those of whites elsewhere. In the 1950s and early 1960s the U.S. Congress enacted laws to protect the right of AAs to vote, but such legislation was only partially successful. In 1964 the Civil Rights Act was passed and the Twenty-fourth Amendment, abolishing poll taxes for voting for federal offices, was ratified, and the following year President Lyndon B. Johnson called for the implementation of comprehensive federal legislation to protect voting rights. The resulting act, the Voting Rights Act, suspended literacy tests, provided for federal approval of proposed changes to voting laws or procedures ("preclearance") in jurisdictions that had previously used tests to determine voter eligibility (these areas were covered under Sections 4 and 5 of the legislation), and directed the attorney general of the United States to challenge the use of poll taxes for state and local elections. An expansion of the law in the 1970s also protected voting rights for non-English-speaking U.S. citizens. Sections 4 and 5 were extended for 5 years in 1970, 7 years in 1975, and 25 years in both 1982 and 2006. The Voting Rights Act resulted in a marked decrease in the voter registration disparity between whites and blacks. In the mid-1960s, for example, the overall proportion of white to black registration in the South ranged from about 2 to 1 to 3 to 1 (and about 10 to 1 in Mississippi); by the late 1980s racial variations in voter registration had largely disappeared. As the number of AA voters increased, so did the number of AA elected officials. In the mid-1960s there were about 70 AA elected officials in the South, but by the turn of the 21st century there were some 5,000, and the number of AA members of the U.S. Congress had increased from 6 to about 40. In what was widely perceived as a test case, Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder, et al. (2009), the Supreme Court declined to rule on the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), however, the court struck down Section 4—which had established a formula for identifying jurisdictions that were required to obtain preclearance—declaring it to be unjustified in light of changed historical circumstances.

Religious Freedom Restoration Act

U.S. legislation that originally prohibited the federal government and the states from "substantially burden[ing] a person's exercise of religion" unless "application of the burden...is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest" and "is the least restrictive means of furthering that...interest." In response to City of Boerne v. Flores (1997), in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that the RFRA could not be applied to the states, the U.S. Congress amended the law (2000) to limit its applicability to the federal government. In enacting the RFRA, Congress codified a constitutional rule, the compelling-interest "balancing test," that the Supreme Court had used until 1990 to determine whether generally applicable and religiously neutral laws that incidentally place a substantial burden on a person's religious practices are inconsistent with the free-exercise clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ("Congress shall make no law...prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]"). According to the balancing test, such laws are unconstitutional unless they serve a compelling governmental interest. In 2000 Congress also added a new statute, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), which applied the principles of the RFRA to local and state governments. The RFRA and RLUIPA were the basis of a U.S. Supreme Court case, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014), in which the court held that the religious freedom of Hobby Lobby Stores, a for-profit corporation, and its owners had been illegally infringed under the RFRA by the so-called "contraceptive mandate," a regulation pursuant to the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010; PPACA) that required businesses employing 50 or more persons to provide health-insurance coverage of all contraceptive methods then approved by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration).

One, Inc. v, Olesen

a landmark United States Supreme Court decision for LGBT rights in the United States. It was the first U.S. Supreme Court ruling to deal with homosexuality and the first to address free speech rights with respect to homosexuality. ONE, Inc., a spinoff of the Mattachine Society, published the early pro-gay "ONE: The Homosexual Magazine" beginning in 1952. After a campaign of harassment from the U.S. Post Office Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Los Angeles Postmaster Otto Olesen declared the October 1954 issue "obscene, lewd, lascivious and filthy" and therefore unmailable under the Comstock laws. In that issue, the Post Office objected to "Sappho Remembered", a story of a lesbian's affection for a twenty-year-old "girl" who gives up her boyfriend to live with the lesbian, because it was "lustfully stimulating to the average homosexual reader"; "Lord Samuel and Lord Montagu", a poem about homosexual cruising that it said contained "filthy words"; and (3) an advertisement for The Circle, a magazine containing homosexual pulp romance stories, that would direct the reader to other obscene material. The magazine, represented by a young attorney who had authored the cover story in the October 1954 issue, Eric Julber, brought suit in U.S. District Court seeking an injunction against the Postmaster. In March 1956, U.S. District Judge Thurmond Clarke ruled for the defendant. He wrote: "The suggestion advanced that homosexuals should be recognized as a segment of our people and be accorded special privilege as a class is rejected." A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision unanimously in February 1957. Julber filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court on June 13, 1957. On January 13, 1958, that court both accepted the case and, without hearing oral argument, issued a terse per curiam decision reversing the Ninth Circuit. The decision, citing its June 24, 1957, landmark decision in Roth v. United States 354 U.S. 476 (1957), read in its entirety: 241 F.2d 772, reversed. Eric Julber for petitioner. Solicitor General Rankin, Acting Assistant Attorney General Leonard and Samuel D. Slade for respondent. PER CURIAM. The petition for writ of certiorari is granted and the judgment of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is reversed. Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476. Tne, Inc. v. Olesen was the first U.S. Supreme Court ruling to deal with homosexuality and the first to address free speech rights with respect to homosexuality. The justices supporting the reversal were Frankfurter, Douglas, Clark, Harlan, and Whittaker. As an affirmation of Roth, the case itself has proved most important for, in the words of one scholar, "its on-the-ground effects. By protecting ONE, the Supreme Court facilitated the flourishing of a gay and lesbian culture and a sense of community" at the same time as the federal government was purging homosexuals from its ranks. In its next issue, ONE told its readers: "For the first time in American publishing history, a decision binding on every court now stands. ... affirming in effect that it is in no way proper to describe a love affair between two homosexuals as constitut(ing) obscenity.

Separate-but-Equal doctrine

a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law according to which racial segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted during the Reconstruction Era, which guaranteed "equal protection" under the law to all citizens. Under the doctrine, as long as the facilities provided to each race were equal, state and local governments could require that services, facilities, public accommodations, housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation be segregated by race, which was already the case throughout the former Confederacy. The phrase was derived from a Louisiana law of 1890, although the law actually used the phrase "equal but separate". The doctrine was confirmed in the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision of 1896, which allowed state-sponsored segregation. In practice the separate facilities provided to AAs were rarely equal; usually they were not even close to equal, or they did not exist at all. The doctrine of separate but equal was overturned by a series of Supreme Court decisions, starting with Brown v. Board of Education of 1954. However, the overturning of segregation laws in the United States was a long process that lasted through much of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, involving federal legislation (especially the Civil Rights Act of 1964), and many court cases. Following the war, the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution guaranteed equal protection under the law to all citizens, and Congress established the Freedmen's Bureau to assist the integration of former slaves into Southern society. In 1892, Homer Plessy, who was of mixed ancestry and appeared to be white, boarded an all-white railroad car between New Orleans and Covington, Louisiana. The conductor of the train collected passenger tickets at their seats. When Plessy told the conductor he was 7/8ths white and 1/8th black, he was advised he needed to move to a coloreds-only car. Plessy said he resented sitting in a coloreds-only car and was arrested immediately. One month after his arrest, Plessy appeared in court before Judge John Howard Ferguson. Plessy's lawyer, Albion Tourgee, claimed Plessy's 13th and 14th amendment rights were violated. The 13th amendment abolished slavery, and the 14th amendment granted equal protection to all under the law. In Sweatt v. Painter, the Supreme Court addressed a legal challenge to the doctrine by a student seeking admission to a state-supported law school in Texas. Because Texas did not have a law school for blacks, the lower court delayed the case until Texas could create one. However, the Supreme Court ordered that the student be admitted to the white law school on the grounds that the separate school failed to qualify as being "equal", both because of quantitative differences in facilities and intangible factors, such as its isolation from most of the future lawyers with whom its graduates would interact.

Passive Resistance

a method of nonviolent protest against laws or policies in order to force a change or secure concessions it is also known as nonviolent resistance and is the main tactic of civil disobedience . Passive resistance typically involves such activities as mass demonstrations, refusal to obey or carry out a law or to pay taxes, the occupation of buildings or the blockade of roads, labor strikes, economic boycotts, and similar activities.

Strike

a refusal to work organized by a body of employees as a form of protest, typically in an attempt to gain a concession or concessions from their employer

Zoot Suits Riots

a series of conflicts that occurred in June 1943 in Los Angeles between U.S. servicemen and Mexican American youths, the latter of whom wore outfits called zoot suits. The zoot suit consisted of a broad-shouldered drape jacket, balloon-leg trousers, and, sometimes, a flamboyant hat. Mexican and Mexican American youths who wore these outfits were called zoot-suiters. These individuals referred to themselves as pachucos, a name linked to the Mexican American generation's rebellion against both the Mexican and American cultures. Pressures related to U.S. involvement in World War II contributed to the racial tensions that preceded the riots. Workers were needed in the agricultural and service sectors of the United States to fill the jobs vacated by those who were serving in the military. An agreement was reached with Mexico whereby temporary workers from Mexico were brought into the United States. This influx of Mexican workers was not particularly welcomed by white Americans. As part of the war effort, by March 1942 the United States had begun rationing various resources. Restrictions on wool had a direct effect on the manufacture of wool suits and other clothing. There were regulations prohibiting the manufacturing of zoot suits, but a network of bootleg tailors continued to manufacture them. This exacerbated racial tensions, as Mexican American youths wearing the zoot suits were seen as un-American because they were deliberately ignoring the rationing regulations. The Zoot Suit Riots are commonly associated with the Sleepy Lagoon murder, which occurred in August 1942. The Sleepy Lagoon, as it was nicknamed, was one of the larger reservoirs outside the city of Los Angeles. On the night of August 1, 1942, zoot-suiters were involved in a fight at a party near the Sleepy Lagoon. The next morning one of the partygoers, José Díaz, was dead. There was public outcry against the zoot-suiters, fueled by local tabloids. Citing concerns about juvenile delinquency, California Gov. Culbert Olson used Díaz's death as the impetus for a roundup by the Los Angeles Police Department of more than 600 young men and women, most of whom were Mexican American. Several of the zoot-suiters who were arrested were tried and, in January 1943, convicted of murder. However, many people denounced the circus atmosphere of the trial and attacked the verdict as a miscarriage of justice. The convictions of the Mexican American youths were later reversed on appeal in October 1944. During the period from 1942 through 1943, the news media continued to portray the zoot-suiters as dangerous gang members who were capable of murder. On the basis of the news reports, more and more people began to believe that the Mexican American youths, particularly the zoot-suiters, were predisposed to committing crime. It was in this racially charged atmosphere that the conflict between predominantly white servicemen stationed in southern California and Mexican American youths in the area began. Incidents initially took the form of minor altercations but later escalated. Within months of the Sleepy Lagoon convictions, Los Angeles erupted in what are commonly referred to as the Zoot Suit Riots. The riots began on June 3, 1943, after a group of sailors stated that they had been attacked by a group of Mexican American zoot-suiters. As a result, on June 4 a number of uniformed sailors chartered cabs and proceeded to the Mexican American community, seeking out the zoot-suiters. What occurred that evening and in the following days was a series of conflicts primarily between servicemen and zoot-suiters. Many zoot-suiters were beaten by servicemen and stripped of their zoot suits on the spot. The servicemen sometimes urinated on the zoot suits or burned them in the streets. One local paper printed an article describing how to "de-zoot" a zoot-suiter, including directions that the zoot suits should be burned. The servicemen were also portrayed in local news publications as heroes fighting against what was referred to as a Mexican crime wave. The worst of the rioting occurred on the night of June 7, when thousands of servicemen and citizens prowled the streets of downtown Los Angeles, attacking zoot-suiters as well as members of minority groups who were not wearing zoot suits. In response to these confrontations, police arrested hundreds of Mexican American youths, many of whom had already been attacked by servicemen. There were also reports of Mexican American youths requesting to be arrested and locked up in order to protect themselves from the servicemen in the streets. In contrast, very few sailors and soldiers were arrested during the riots. Shortly after midnight on June 8, military officials declared Los Angeles off-limits to all military personnel. Deciding that the local police were completely unable or unwilling to handle the situation, officials ordered military police to patrol parts of the city and arrest disorderly military personnel; this, coupled with the ban, served to greatly deter the servicemen's riotous actions. The next day the Los Angeles City Council passed a resolution that banned the wearing of zoot suits on Los Angeles streets. The number of attacks dwindled, and the rioting had largely ended by June 10. In the following weeks, however, similar disturbances occurred in other states. Remarkably, no one was killed during the riots, although many people were injured. The fact that considerably more Mexican Americans than servicemen were arrested—upward of 600 of the former, according to some estimates—fueled criticism of the Los Angeles Police Department's response to the riots from some quarters. As the riots died down, California Gov. Earl Warren ordered the creation of a citizens' committee to investigate and determine the cause of the Zoot Suit Riots. The committee's report indicated that there were several factors involved but that racism was the central cause of the riots and that it was exacerbated by the response of the Los Angeles Police Department as well as by biased and inflammatory media coverage. Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron, concerned about the riots' negative impact on the city's image, issued his own conclusion, stating that racial prejudice was not a factor and that the riots were caused by juvenile delinquents.

Sexual Revolution

a social movement that challenged traditional codes of behavior related to sexuality and interpersonal relationships throughout the United States and subsequently, the wider world, from the 1960s to the 1980s. Sexual liberation included increased acceptance of sex outside of traditional heterosexual, monogamous relationships (primarily marriage). The normalization of contraception and the pill, public nudity, pornography, premarital sex, homosexuality, and alternative forms of sexuality, and the legalization of abortion all followed.The term "sexual revolution" has been used at least since the late 1920s. Some early commentators believed the sexual revolution of 1960-1980 was in fact the second such revolution in America. They believed that the first revolution was during the Roaring Twenties after World War I and it included writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edna Saint Vincent Millay, and Ernest Hemingway. However, the age of changes in perception and practices of sexuality that developed from around 1960 was to reach mainstream America, most of western Europe, and parts of Asia. Indeed, the available quantitative evidence demonstrates that measures of non-traditional sexual behavior (e.g., gonorrhea incidence, births out of wedlock, and births to teenagers) began to rise dramatically in the mid to late 1950s. It brought about profound shifts in the attitudes to women's sexuality, homosexuality, pre-marital sexuality and the freedom of sexual expression. Psychologists and scientists such as Wilhelm Reich and Alfred Kinsey influenced the revolution, as well as literature and films, and the social movements of the period, including the counterculture movement, the women's movement, and the gay rights movement. The counterculture contributed to the awareness of radical cultural change that was the social matrix of the sexual revolution.

SNCC

after 1969, called student National Coordinating Committee. American political organization that played a central role in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Begun as an interracial group advocating nonviolence, it adopted greater militancy late in the decade, reflecting nationwide trends in black activism. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was founded in early 1960 in Raleigh, North Carolina, to capitalize on the success of a surge of sit-ins in Southern college towns, where black students refused to leave restaurants in which they were denied service based on their race. This form of nonviolent protest brought SNCC to national attention, throwing a harsh public light on white racism in the South. In the years following, SNCC strengthened its efforts in community organization and supported Freedom Rides in 1961, along with the March on Washington in 1963, and agitated for the Civil Rights Act (1964). In 1966 SNCC officially threw its support behind the broader protest of the Vietnam War. As SNCC became more active politically, its members faced increased violence. In response, SNCC migrated from a philosophy of nonviolence to one of greater militancy after the mid-1960s, as an advocate of the burgeoning "black power" movement, a facet of late 20th-century black nationalism. The shift was personified by Stokely Carmichael, who replaced John Lewis as SNCC chairman in 1966-67. While many early SNCC members were white, the newfound emphasis on AA identity led to greater racial separatism, which unnerved portions of the white community. More-radical elements of SNCC, such as Carmichael's successor H. Rap Brown, gravitated toward new groups, such as the Black Panther Party. SNCC was disbanded by the early 1970s. Other notable figures in SNCC included Ella Baker, Julian Bond, Rubye Robinson, and Fannie Lou Hamer.

The Olympic Project for Human Rights

an American organization established by sociologist Harry Edwards and others, including noted Olympians Tommie Smith and John Carlos, in October 1967. The aim of the organization was to protest against racial segregation in the United States and elsewhere (such as South Africa), and racism in sports in general. Smith said that the project was about human rights, of "all humanity, even those who denied us ours."[2] Most members of the OPHR were AA athletes or community leaders. The group advocated a boycott of the 1968 Summer Olympic Games in Mexico City unless four conditions were met: South Africa and Rhodesia uninvited from the Olympics (both countries were under white minority rule at the time). The restoration of Muhammad Ali's world heavyweight boxing title. Avery Brundage to step down as President of the International Olympic Committee. Hiring of more African-American assistant coaches. While the boycott largely failed to materialize, African-American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos and Australian sprinter Peter Norman wore OPHR patches during the medal ceremony for the 200-metre race. Tommie Smith and John Carlos also raised their hands in a "Black Power salute" during the playing of the United States national anthem. Despite being a primarily African-American organization, the OPHR was supported by white athletes such as Norman and members of the Harvard University rowing team.

Title IX (1972 Education Codes)

clause of the 1972 Federal Education Amendments, signed into law on June 23, 1972, which stated that "no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance." Although Title IX applies to a variety of programs, it has received the most attention for its impact on athletics, especially at the collegiate level. An amendment introduced in 1974 to exclude income-generating sports from Title IX coverage was rejected, and it was followed by like-minded amendments in 1975 and 1977, both of which also failed. In 1975 provisions that specifically prohibited sex discrimination in athletics and provided educational institutions with three years to fulfill the requirements of Title IX were signed into law. Attempts to curtail Title IX enforcement continued into 1978, but the following year the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) issued a final interpretation of Title IX's effect on intercollegiate athletics, in which HEW mandated that educational institutions provide equal opportunity to men and women in athletic programs. Upon its establishment in 1980, the Department of Education was given the responsibility of overseeing compliance with Title IX through its Office for Civil Rights. Opponents of Title IX achieved a short-lived victory in the 1984 lawsuit Grove City v. Bell, the decision of which stated that Title IX affected only those programs that directly receive federal assistance; this eliminated the clause's applicability to athletics programs. In 1988, however, the Civil Rights Restoration Act overrode Grove City v. Bell, stating that Title IX applied to all programs and activities of any educational institution receiving federal financial assistance. Beginning in 1996, under the terms of the 1994 Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act, all coeducational colleges and universities participating in federal student financial aid programs were required to submit annual reports with information about their intercollegiate athletics programs to determine Title IX compliance. Failure of educational institutions to comply with Title IX legislation led to various lawsuits, culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools (1992). The court ruled unanimously that punitive damages should be awarded to plaintiffs when it can be proved that an institution intentionally evaded compliance with Title IX. According to the Title IX clause, each college and university must have a ratio of male-to-female athletes that is equal to its ratio of male-to-female students, but a school is still in compliance with Title IX if it has a proven record of expansion in an effort to reach the correct ratios.

Scottsboro Boys

major U.S. civil rights controversy of the 1930s surrounding the prosecution in Scottsboro, Alabama, of nine black youths charged with the rape of two white women. The nine, after nearly being lynched, were brought to trial in Scottsboro in April 1931, just three weeks after their arrests. Not until the first day of the trial were the defendants provided with the services of two volunteer lawyers. Despite testimony by doctors who had examined the women that no rape had occurred, the all-white jury convicted the nine, and all but the youngest, who was 12 years old, were sentenced to death. The announcement of the verdict and sentences brought a storm of charges from outside the South that a gross miscarriage of justice had occurred in Scottsboro. The cause of the "Scottsboro Boys" was championed, and in some cases exploited, by Northern liberal and radical groups, notably the Communist Party. In 1932 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the convictions (Powell v. Alabama) on the grounds that the defendants had not received adequate legal counsel in a capital case. The state of Alabama then retried one of the accused and again convicted him. In a 1935 decision (Norris v. Alabama), the U.S. Supreme Court overturned this conviction, ruling that the state had systematically excluded blacks from juries. Alabama again tried and convicted another of the group, Haywood Patterson, this time sentencing him to 75 years in prison. Further trials of the rest of the defendants resulted in more reconvictions and successful appeals until, after persistent pressure from citizens' groups, the state freed the four youngest (who had already served six years in jail) and later paroled Charles Weems, Andy Wright, and Clarence Norris. Patterson, however, had escaped in 1948 and fled to Michigan, where, three years later, he was convicted of manslaughter in the stabbing death of another black. He died in prison. The last known surviving member of the group, Norris, who had fled to the North after his parole in 1946, was granted a full pardon by the governor of Alabama in 1976. Patterson, Weems, and Wright were pardoned by the state in 2013.

SCLC

nonsectarian American agency with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, established by the Reverend MLK, and his followers in 1957 to coordinate and assist local organizations working for the full equality of AAs in all aspects of American life. The organization operated primarily in the South and some border states, conducting leadership-training programs, citizen-education projects, and voter-registration drives. The SCLC played a major part in the civil rights march on Washington, D.C., in 1963 and in notable antidiscrimination and voter-registration efforts in Albany, Georgia, and Birmingham and Selma, Alabama, in the early 1960s—campaigns that spurred passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. After King was assassinated in April 1968, his place as president was taken by the Reverend Ralph David Abernathy. The SCLC maintained its philosophy of nonviolent social change, but, having lost its founder, it soon ceased to mount giant demonstrations and confined itself to smaller campaigns, predominantly in the South. The organization was further weakened by several schisms, including the departure in 1971 of the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson and his followers who had staffed Operation Breadbasket in Chicago, which was directed toward economic goals. The SCLC nonetheless sustained its mission by organizing voter drives and cultivating AA political candidates. It also lobbied for the designation of MLK's birthday as a national holiday (see MLK, Day). The SCLC has published the SCLC Magazine since 1971.

Niagara Movement

organization of black intellectuals that was led by W.E.B. Du Bois and called for full political, civil, and social rights for African Americans. This stance stood in notable contrast to the accommodation philosophy proposed by Booker T. Washington in the Atlanta Compromise of 1895. The Niagara Movement was the forerunner of the NAACP. In the summer of 1905, 29 prominent African Americans, including Du Bois, met secretly in Fort Erie, Ontario, near Niagara Falls, and drew up a manifesto calling for full civil liberties, abolition of racial discrimination, and recognition of human brotherhood. Subsequent annual meetings were held in such symbolic locations as Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and Boston's Faneuil Hall. Despite the establishment of 30 branches and the achievement of a few scattered civil rights victories at the local level, the group suffered from organizational weakness and lack of funds as well as a permanent headquarters or staff, and it never was able to attract mass support. After the Springfield (Illinois) Race Riot of 1908, however, white liberals joined with the nucleus of Niagara "militants" and founded the NAACP the following year. The Niagara Movement disbanded in 1910, with the leadership of Du Bois forming the main continuity between the two organizations.

Universal Negro Improvement Association

primarily in the United States, organization founded by Marcus Garvey (q.v.), dedicated to racial pride, economic self-sufficiency, and the formation of an independent black nation in Africa. Though Garvey had founded the UNIA in Jamaica in 1914, its main influence was felt in the principal urban black neighbourhoods of the U.S. North after his arrival in Harlem, in New York City, in 1916. Garvey had a strong appeal to poor blacks in urban ghettos, but most black leaders in the U.S. criticized him as an imposter, particularly after he announced, in New York, the founding of the Empire of Africa, with himself as provisional president. In turn, Garvey denounced the NAACP and many black leaders, asserting that they sought only assimilation into white society. Garvey's leadership was cut short in 1923 when he was indicted and convicted of fraud in his handling of funds raised to establish a black steamship line. In 1927, President Calvin Coolidge pardoned Garvey but ordered him deported as an undesirable alien. The UNIA never revived. Although the organization did not transport a single person to Africa, its influence reached multitudes on both sides of the Atlantic, and it proved to be a forerunner of black nationalism, which emerged in the U.S. after World War II.

Watts Riots

series of violent confrontations between Los Angeles police and residents of Watts and other predominantly AA neighbourhoods of South-Central Los Angeles that began August 11, 1965, and lasted for six days. The immediate cause of the disturbances was the arrest of an AA man, Marquette Frye, by a white California Highway Patrol officer on suspicion of driving while intoxicated. Although most accounts now agree that Frye resisted arrest, it remains unclear whether excessive force was used to subdue him. The riots resulted in the deaths of 34 people, while more than 1,000 were injured and more than $40 million worth of property was destroyed. Many of the most vivid images of the riots depict the massive fires set by the rioters. Hundreds of buildings and whole city blocks were burned to the ground. Firefighters were unable to work, because police could not protect them from the rioters. Public officials and the news media offered conflicting interpretations of the Watts Riots in their immediate aftermath. Some conservatives and many city officials claimed that the violence had resulted from wanton lawlessness, and they pointed to the large number of minority men living in the inner city who had criminal records and to the influx of "outsiders" from the South. They observed that looters took far more goods from stores than they could possibly find useful and that it was irrational to burn down one's "own" neighbourhood. Some suggested that the riots were an insurrection fostered by urban gangs or by the Black Muslim movement, which the mainstream press then regarded as a radical cult. Others suggested that police-community relations in South-Central Los Angeles had long been uneasy and that those tensions had exploded into rioting. Finally, many federal officials and some reporters explained the riots as a protest against the poverty and hopelessness of life in the inner city, and they described the challenges of joblessness and the lack of basic services in South-Central Los Angeles. That interpretation of the riots dovetailed effectively with President Lyndon B. Johnson's "war on poverty" programs, which were then being introduced in cities across the country. The war on poverty thus seemed to be a response to the Watts Riots, and the riots seemed to demonstrate the need for the war on poverty. Despite that apparent synergy, South-Central Los Angeles was slow to recover from the damage done during the riots. In later years some media reports suggested that the blight of the area was entirely due to the riots, ignoring the fact that the community's poverty and lack of infrastructure had long predated the violence. Nevertheless, today the Watts Riots are typically viewed as the community's angry response to deprivation and neglect, and they remain a vivid collective memory, particularly in Los Angeles but also nationally.

Stonewall Riots

series of violent confrontations that began in the early hours of June 28, 1969, between police and gay rights activists outside the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in the Greenwich Village section of New York City. As the riots progressed, an international gay rights movement was born. In 1969 the solicitation of homosexual relations was an illegal act in New York City (and indeed virtually all other urban centres). Gay bars were places of refuge where gay men and lesbians and other individuals who were considered sexually suspect could socialize in relative safety from public harassment. Many of those bars were, however, subject to regular police harassment. One such well-known gathering place for young gay men, lesbians, and transgender people was the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, a dark, seedy, crowded bar, reportedly operating without a liquor license. In the early morning hours of Saturday, June 28, 1969, nine policemen entered the Stonewall Inn, arrested the employees for selling alcohol without a license, roughed up many of its patrons, cleared the bar, and—in accordance with a New York criminal statute that authorized the arrest of anyone not wearing at least three articles of gender-appropriate clothing—took several people into custody. It was the third such raid on Greenwich Village gay bars in a short period. This time the people milling outside the bar did not retreat or scatter as they almost always had in the past. Their anger was apparent and vocal as they watched bar patrons being forced into a police van. They began to jeer at and jostle the police and then threw bottles and debris. Accustomed to more passive behaviour, even from larger gay groups, the policemen called for reinforcements and barricaded themselves inside the bar while some 400 people rioted. The police barricade was repeatedly breached, and the bar was set on fire. Police reinforcements arrived in time to extinguish the flames, and they eventually dispersed the crowd. The riots outside the Stonewall Inn waxed and waned for the next five days. Many historians characterized the uprising as a spontaneous protest against the perpetual police harassment and social discrimination suffered by a variety of sexual minorities in the 1960s. Although there had been other protests by gay groups, the Stonewall incident was perhaps the first time lesbians, gays, and transgender people saw the value in uniting behind a common cause. Occurring as it did in the context of the civil rights and feminist movements, the Stonewall riots became a galvanizing force. Stonewall soon became a symbol of resistance to social and political discrimination that would inspire solidarity among homosexual groups for decades. Although the Stonewall riots cannot be said to have initiated the gay rights movement as such, it did serve as a catalyst for a new generation of political activism. Older groups such as the Mattachine Society, which was founded in southern California as a discussion group for gay men and had flourished in the 1950s, soon made way for more radical groups such as the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA). In addition to launching numerous public demonstrations to protest the lack of civil rights for gay individuals, these organizations often resorted to such tactics as public confrontations with political officials and the disruption of public meetings to challenge and to change the mores of the times. Acceptance and respect from the establishment were no longer being humbly requested but angrily and righteously demanded. The broad-based radical activism of many gay men and lesbians in the 1970s eventually set into motion a new, nondiscriminatory trend in government policies and helped educate society regarding this significant minority. The event sparked the formation of scores of gay rights organizations, including the Human Rights Campaign, OutRage! (U.K.-based), GLAAD (formerly Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), PFLAG (formerly Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), and Queer Nation. In 1999 the U.S. National Park Service placed the Stonewall Inn on the National Register of Historic Places, and in 2016 Pres. Barack Obama designated the site of the Stonewall uprising a national monument. The 7.7-acre (3.1-hectare) monument included the Stonewall Inn, Christopher Park, and the surrounding streets and sidewalks.

Poll Tax

tax of a uniform amount levied on each individual. Of the poll taxes in English history, the most famous was the one levied in 1380, a main cause of the peasant's revolt of 1381 led by Wat Tyler. In the United States, most discussion of the poll tax centred on its use as a voting prerequisite in the Southern states. The origin of the tax is associated with the agrarian unrest of the 1880s and 1890s, which culminated in the rise of the Populist Party in the West and the South. The Populists, a low-income farmers' party, gave the Democrats in these areas the only serious competition that they had experienced since the end of Reconstruction. The intensity of competition led both parties to bring blacks back into politics and to compete for their vote. Once the Populists had been defeated, the Democrats amended their state constitutions or drafted new ones to include various disfranchising devices. When payment of the poll tax was made a prerequisite to voting, impoverished blacks and often poor whites, unable to afford the tax, were denied the right to vote. Poll taxes of varying stipulations lingered in Southern states into the 20th century. Some states abolished the tax in the years after World War I, while others retained it. Its use was declared unconstitutional in federal elections by the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, effective in 1964. In 1966 the Supreme Court, going beyond the Twenty-fourth Amendment, ruled that under the "equal protection" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, states could not levy a poll tax as a prerequisite for voting in state and local elections.By the 1940s some of these taxes had been abolished, and in 1964 the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution disallowed the poll tax as a prerequisite for voting in federal elections.In 1966 this prohibition was extended to all elections by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that such a tax violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

Outside Agitator

term which has been used to discount political unrest as being driven by outsiders rather than by internal discontent. The term was popularized during the early stages of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, when Southern authorities discounted African-American protests as being driven by Northern white radicals, rather than being legitimate expressions of grievances

16th St. Baptist Church Bombing

terrorist attack in Birmingham, Ala., on Sept. 15, 1963, on the predominantly AA 16th Street Baptist Church by local members of the KKK. Resulting in 14 injuries and the death of four girls, the attack garnered widespread national outrage. Throughout the civil rights movement, Birmingham was a major site of protests, marches, and sit-ins that were often met with police brutality and violence from white citizens. Homemade bombs planted by white supremacists in homes and churches became so commonplace that the city was sometimes known as "Bombingham." Local AA churches such as the 16th Street Baptist Church were fundamental in the organization of much of the protest activity. In 1963 the 16th Street Baptist Church hosted several meetings led by civil rights activists. In an effort to intimidate demonstrators, members of the KKK routinely telephoned the church with bomb threats intended to disrupt these meetings as well as regular church services. When a bomb made of dynamite detonated at 10:22 AM on Sept. 15, 1963, church members were attending Sunday school classes before the start of the 11 AM church service. The bomb exploded on the east side of the building, where five girls were getting ready for church in a basement restroom. The explosion sprayed mortar and bricks from the front of the building, caved in walls, and filled the interior with smoke, and horrified parishioners quickly evacuated. Beneath piles of debris in the church basement, the dead bodies of four girls—Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson, all age 14, and Denise McNair (age 11)—were discovered. A fifth girl who had been with them, Sarah Collins (the younger sister of Addie Mae Collins), lost her right eye in the explosion, and several other people were injured. Violence broke out across the city in the aftermath of the bombing. Two more young AAs died, and the National Guard was called in to restore order. The Rev. MLK, spoke at the funeral of three of the girls. Despite repeated demands that the perpetrators be brought to justice, the first trial in the case was not held until 1977, when former clan member Robert E. Chambliss was convicted of murder (Chambliss, who continued to maintain his innocence, died in prison in 1985). The case was reopened in 1980, in 1988, and finally again in 1997, when two other former clan members—Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry—were brought to trial. Blanton was convicted in 2001 and Cherry in 2002 (Cherry died two years later). A fourth suspect, Herman Frank Cash, died in 1994 before he could be tried. The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church was examined by director Spike Lee in the Oscar-nominated documentary 4 Little Girls (1997). In the film, Lee interviews witnesses to the bombing and family members of the victims while at the same time exploring the backdrop of segregation and white harassment that were central to the time period.

States' Rights

the rights or powers retained by the regional governments of a federal union under the provisions of a federal constitution. Doctrines asserting states' rights were developed in contexts in which states functioned as distinct units in a federal system of government. In the United States, for example, Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries often referred to the rights of states, implying that each state had inherent rights and sovereignty. Before and following the American Civil War (1861-65), the U.S. states—particularly the Southern states—shared the belief that each of them was sovereign and should have jurisdiction over its most important affairs.In the United States, states' rights proponents also have maintained that strong state governments are more consistent with the vision of republican government put forward by the Founding Fathers. They cite in support of their view the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which reserves for the states the residue of powers "not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States." In the United States, the term states' rights has been applied to a variety of political programs. Before the American Civil War, it was the rallying cry of Southern opponents of Northern-inspired tariffs and Northern proposals to abolish or restrict slavery. The doctrine also was used as an argument for the theory known as nullification, which claimed that states had the right to annul an act of the federal government within their boundaries, and for the claim that the states, by virtue of their sovereignty, had the right to secede from the Union. This constitutional question was resolved only by the victory of the North (federal government) in the Civil War. A century later the doctrine was used to justify opposition to the federal government's efforts to enforce racial desegregation. Such uses of the doctrine of states' rights in the United States and elsewhere prompted some critics to claim that it serves parochial interests. According to them, states' rights are invoked by majorities in the states to justify laws and practices that discriminate against various ethnic, religious, or other minority groups. They contend that a strong national govern

Third Wave-Third-wave feminism evolved out of the disillusionment of many feminists with the overemphasis on the experience of middle-class white women in the mainstream. Feminists of color (e.g., Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, Chela Sandoval, Cherrie Moraga, Audre Lorde, and Maxine Hong Kingston) emphasized the significance of race, class, sexual orientation, and other socially structured forms of bias on women's lives (Kinser 2004). Critical race theorist and law professor Kimberlé W. Crenshaw introduced the term intersectionalities to highlight the multiplicative effect of these different sites of oppression. Counter to postfeminist contentions that feminism was obsolete as women had gained equality, third-wavers contended that there was still work to be done, specifically related to the "micropolitics" of gender oppression.The term third-wave feminist was popularized by the 1992 Ms. magazine article titled "Becoming the Third Wave" by Rebecca Walker, who stated

"I am not a post-feminism feminist. I am the third wave" (Walker 1992, p. 40). In her article Walker describes her rage over the outcome of the Clarence Thomas hearings (in which Anita Hill testified that Thomas had sexually harassed her; Thomas was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, while Hill was repudiated) and her subsequent commitment to feminism. Walker's article generated a large response from young women, who indicated that they have not given up the cause but are feminists in their own way. That is, they embrace a more pluralistic definition of feminism; they are concerned with the intersectionalities of oppression and the impact of globalism, technology, and other forces, and they operate on a more grassroots level (Kinser 2004). Although both second- and third-wave feminists are still at work, their divergent concerns spawned different groups, including black feminists, critical feminists, and global feminists.

Eyes on the Prize

1954-1965-book by John Williams; From the Montgomery bus boycott to the Little Rock Nine to the Selma Montgomery march, thousands of ordinary people who participated in the American civil rights movement; their stories are told in Eyes on the Prize. From leaders such as MLK, to lesser-known figures.

The Crisis-American quarterly magazine published by the NAACP. It was founded in 1910 and, for its first 24 years, was edited by W.E.B. Du Bois. It is considered the world's oldest black publication. Du Bois played a key role in the creation of The Crisis

A Record of the Darker Races (the subtitle was later dropped). In his editorial for the first issue (November 1910), he wrote that the magazine would "show the danger of race prejudice, particularly as manifested today toward colored people." The Crisis was a huge success and by the end of its first decade had achieved a monthly circulation of 100,000 copies. In its pages, Du Bois displayed the evolution of his thought from his early, hopeful insistence on racial justice to his resigned call for black separatism. The Crisis was an important medium for the young black writers of the Harlem Renaissance, especially from 1919 to 1926, when Jessie Redmon Fauset was its literary editor. The writers she discovered or encouraged included the poets Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cullen and the novelist-poet Jean Toomer. Under Fauset's literary guidance The Crisis, along with the magazine Opportunity, was the leading publisher of young black authors. After Fauset's departure The Crisis was unable to sustain its high literary standards. In 1934 the magazine lost its guiding force when Du Bois stepped down as editor following frequent clashes with the NAACP's board members, who objected to his increasingly controversial opinions, such as his support for interracial marriage. In the ensuing decades, its readership declined, and the magazine briefly ceased publication in 1996. When it returned in July 1997, The Crisis carried the subtitle The Magazine of Opportunities and Ideas, though that was dropped in 2003. About this time the magazine also became a quarterly publication. Despite the various changes, The Crisis remained influential and was especially noted for its coverage of civil rights.

Mississippi Freedom

After President Lyndon B. Johnson formed a coalition between liberal Democrats and liberal and moderate Republicans to address issues of concern to AAs, conservative Southern Democrats openly encouraged their members to vote for the 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who opposed civil rights legislation. In response, AA Mississippians formed the MFDP as an alternative group that would represent their interests at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. With the support of MLK, the MFDP nominated three AA women—Fannie Lou Hamer (one of the cofounders of the party) and civil rights activists Annie Devine and Victoria Gray—to run against the traditional Democrats in the state's 1964 congressional elections. That year the national Democratic Party held its convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and the MFDP sent its delegation. President Johnson and other Democratic Party leaders, although largely sympathetic to the MFDP's civil rights stance, were dismayed by the negative publicity the group was causing at a time when Johnson wanted media attention focused on his presidential election campaign. While members of the MFDP demanded to be recognized as delegates to the national convention and gave speeches detailing the horrific conditions they dealt with in Mississippi, national party leaders sought to deal with MFDP representatives behind closed doors. They offered to allow the MFDP members to attend the convention as guests, with two MFDP members seated as at-large delegates, and promised that the Mississippi Democratic Party would be fully integrated in 1968. The MFDP rejected any efforts at compromise, and the attempt to be named the official Democratic delegation from Mississippi was defeated. Despite their failure at the 1964 convention, the MFDP had a profound influence on Democratic politics, both nationally and in Mississippi. While their efforts caused a number of white Democrats to switch to the Republican Party, their most notable achievement was the encouragement of AA voter registration. In 1968 the MFDP joined with a number of other Mississippi groups to form the Mississippi Loyal Democrats, which successfully deposed the Mississippi Democratic delegation to the national convention.

Declaration of Constitutional Principles (Southern Manifesto)-a document written in February and March 1956, in the United States Congress, in opposition to racial integration of public places. The manifesto was signed by 101 politicians (99 Southern Democrats and two Republicans) from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. The document was drafted to counter the landmark Supreme Court 1954 ruling Brown v. Board of Education, which determined that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. Senators led the opposition, with Strom Thurmond writing the initial draft and Richard Russell the final version. The manifesto was signed by 19 senators and 82 representatives, including the entire Congressional delegations of the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Virginia. All of the signatories were Southern Democrats except two Virginia Republicans, Joel Broyhill and Richard Poff. However, three Southern Senate Democrats refused to sign

Albert Gore Sr. and Estes Kefauver of Tennessee and LBJ. Their opposition earned them the enmity of their colleagues for a time. The Southern Manifesto accused the Supreme Court of "clear abuse of judicial power" and promised to use "all lawful means to bring about a reversal of this decision which is contrary to the Constitution and to prevent the use of force in its implementation." It suggested that the Tenth Amendment should limit the reach of the Supreme Court on such issues.

National Organization for Women

American activist organization that promotes equal rights for women. The National Organization for Women was established by a small group of feminists who were dedicated to actively challenging sex discrimination in all areas of American society but particularly in employment. The organization is composed of both men and women, and in the late 20th century it had some 250,000 members. Among the issues that NOW addresses by means of lobbying and litigation are child care, pregnancy leave, and abortion and pension rights. Its major concern during the 1970s was passage of a national Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution; the amendment failed to gain ratification in 1982. NOW has also campaigned for such issues as passage of state equal rights amendments and comparable-worth legislation (equal pay for work of comparable value) and has met with greater success on the state level.founder and first president was feminist leader Betty Friedan

National American Woman Suffrage Association

American organization created in 1890 by the merger of the two major rival women's rights organizations—the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association—after 21 years of independent operation. NAWSA was initially headed by past executives of the two merged groups, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and Susan B. Anthony. The strategy of the newly formed organization was to push for the ratification of enough state suffrage amendments to force Congress to approve a federal amendment. Although some radical factions continued to address corollary issues, NAWSA's new approach focused the group's energies exclusively on recruiting new members and winning the vote for women. From 1900 to 1904 NAWSA instigated what was known as the "society plan" to recruit college-educated, privileged, and politically influential members and to broaden its educational efforts. Despite the failure from 1896 to 1910 of a single new state to ratify a state suffrage amendment, much of the organizational groundwork had been laid. After a split led by Alice Paul and her formation of the National Woman's Party, NAWSA adopted the "Winning Plan" in an attempt to tap the energy and enthusiasm of the organization for a final push toward a federal amendment. Led by Carrie Chapman Catt, the organization coupled its drive for full woman suffrage with support of World War I and persuaded President Woodrow Wilson to throw his support behind what was to become the Nineteenth Amendment. Ratified by Congress in June 1919 and 36 states during 1919-20, the amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution on August 26, 1920, marking an end to a 72-year struggle.A publishing company prepared and printed literature of various kinds. Publicity, organization, data and educational departments constituted branches of the general administration, and a weekly 32-page magazine, the Woman Citizen, was maintained as the Association's official organ and mouthpiece.

National Urban League

American service agency founded for the purpose of eliminating racial segregation and discrimination and helping AAs and other minorities to participate in all phases of American life. By the late 20th century more than 110 local affiliated groups were active throughout the United States. It is headquartered in New York City. The Urban League traces its roots to three organizations—the Committee for the Improvement of Industrial Conditions Among Negroes in New York (founded in 1906), the National League for the Protection of Colored Women (founded 1906), and the Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes (founded 1910)—that merged in 1911 to form the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes. The new organization sought to help AAs, especially those moving to New York City from rural locations in the South (see Great Migration), to find jobs and housing and generally to adjust to urban life. The model organization established in New York City was imitated in other cities where affiliates were soon established. By 1920 the national organization had assumed the shorter name, National Urban League. From its founding, the league has been interracial; the organization's very establishment was led by George Edmund Haynes, the first AA to earn a Ph.D. from Columbia University, and Ruth Standish Baldwin, a white New York City philanthropist. The Urban League's primary task of helping migrants gradually evolved over the years into larger concerns. The organization emphasized employment rights for AAs during the directorship of Eugene Kinkle Jones (1918-41); and his successor, Lester Granger (1941-61), emphasized jobs for AAs in the defense industry and attempted to breech the colour barrier prevalent in labour unions during World War II. It was during the presidency of Whitney M. Young, Jr. (1961-71), that the league emerged as one of the strongest forces in the American civil rights struggle. Under his successor, Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. (1971-81), the league broadened its vision by embracing such causes as environmental protection, energy conservation, and the general problems of poverty. The league's interests at the turn of the 21st century included the concept of achievement as it relates to racial identity, international issues such as globalization and its economic effects on the AA community, and education. American service agency founded for the purpose of eliminating racial segregation and discrimination and helping AAs and other minorities to participate in all phases of American life. By the late 20th century more than 110 local affiliated groups were active throughout the United States. It is headquartered in New York City. The Urban League traces its roots to three organizations—the Committee for the Improvement of Industrial Conditions Among Negroes in New York (founded in 1906), the National League for the Protection of Colored Women (founded 1906), and the Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes (founded 1910)—that merged in 1911 to form the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes. The new organization sought to help AAs, especially those moving to New York City from rural locations in the South (see Great Migration), to find jobs and housing and generally to adjust to urban life. The model organization established in New York City was imitated in other cities where affiliates were soon established. By 1920 the national organization had assumed the shorter name, National Urban League. From its founding, the league has been interracial; the organization's very establishment was led by George Edmund Haynes, the first AA to earn a Ph.D. from Columbia University, and Ruth Standish Baldwin, a white New York City philanthropist. The Urban League's primary task of helping migrants gradually evolved over the years into larger concerns. The organization emphasized employment rights for AAs during the directorship of Eugene Kinkle Jones (1918-41); and his successor, Lester Granger (1941-61), emphasized jobs for AAs in the defense industry and attempted to breech the colour barrier prevalent in labour unions during World War II. It was during the presidency of Whitney M. Young, Jr. (1961-71), that the league emerged as one of the strongest forces in the American civil rights struggle. Under his successor, Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. (1971-81), the league broadened its vision by embracing such causes as environmental protection, energy conservation, and the general problems of poverty. The league's interests at the turn of the 21st century included the concept of achievement as it relates to racial identity, international issues such as globalization and its economic effects on the AA community, and education.

Moral Majority

Founded in 1979 by Jerry Falwell, a religious leader and televangelist, to advance conservative social values. The Moral Majority was formed in response to the social and cultural transformations that occurred in the United States in the 1960s and '70s. Christian fundamentalists were alarmed by a number of developments that, in their view, threatened to undermine the country's traditional moral values. These included the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the gay rights movement, the relatively permissive sexual morality prevalent among young people, and the teaching of evolution. Furthermore, they opposed the U.S. Supreme Court rulings that banned institutionally initiated group prayer and Bible reading in public schools and that affirmed the legal right to abortion. It advanced conservative social values, notably opposing abortion, pornography, the ERA, and gay rights. In addition, the organization supported increased defense spending, a strong anti-communist foreign policy, and continued American support for Israel. The organization energized the religious right—though some opposed its inclusion of Catholics, Mormons, and Jews—and it quickly grew to several million members. It was credited with helping Republican Ronald Reagan win the presidential election in 1980. The Moral Majority remained a political force during the first half of the 1980s. However, near the end of the decade, the organization faced internal difficulties and dwindling support. In 1987 Falwell resigned as president, and around this time several prominent evangelists became embroiled in scandal. Differences within the movement were apparent when Falwell backed George H.W. Bush rather than Pat Robertson, another televangelist, in the 1988 presidential campaign. In addition, the group saw its fund-raising dramatically decrease. In 1989 the Moral Majority was dissolved. Although Falwell declared that the organization had accomplished its mission, he admitted that a number of "problems" persisted, such as abortion.

Interposition Doctrine

In 1798, thomas jefferson and james madison proposed the virginia and kentucky resolves to clarify the role of states in checking the powers of the federal government. The resolutions were in response to passage of the alien enemies and sedition acts of 1798 (1 Stat. 570, 1 Stat. 596), which restricted a number of personal liberties. In proposing the Virginia and Kentucky Resolves of 1798, Jefferson argued that the "sovereign and independent states" had the right to "interpose" themselves between their citizens and improper national legislative actions and to "nullify" acts of Congress they deemed unconstitutional. The resolutions started the seed of the doctrines of nullification and interposition. Southern political leaders briefly and ineffectually exhumed interposition theories during efforts in the late 1950s to thwart desegregation in southern universities and schools. Jack Kilpatrick revived this belief. , in Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U.S. 1 (U.S. 1958) the interposition doctrine was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Longest Walk

In 1978, AIM participated in the "Longest Walk," a national march on Washington, D.C., in the continued attempt to air Native American grievances (in which AIM members occupied the office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs). AIM-led spiritual walk across the country to support tribal sovereignty and bring attention to 11 pieces of anti-Indian legislation; AIM believed that the proposed legislation would have abrogated Indian Treaties, quantified and limited water rights, etc. The first walk began on February 11, 1978, with a ceremony on Alcatraz Island, where a Sacred Pipe was loaded with tobacco. The Pipe was carried the entire distance. This 3,200-mile (5,100 km)-Walk's purpose was to educate people about the US government's continuing threat to Tribal Sovereignty; it rallied thousands representing many Indian Nations throughout the United States and Canada. Traditional spiritual leaders from many tribes participated, leading traditional ceremonies. International spiritual leaders, as Nichidatsu Fujii, also took part in the Walk. Over the following week, they held rallies at various sites to address issues: the 11 pieces of legislation, American Indian political prisoners, forced relocation at Big Mountain, the Navajo Nation, etc. Non-Indian supporters included the American boxer Muhammad Ali, US Senator Ted Kennedy and the actor Marlon Brando. The US Congress voted against a proposed bill to abrogate treaties with Indian Nations. During the week after the activists arrived, Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which allowed them the use of peyote in worship. President Jimmy Carter refused to meet with representatives of The Longest Walk. Thirty years later, AIM led the Longest Walk 2, which arrived in Washington in July 2008. This 8,200-mile (13,200 km)-walk had started from the San Francisco Bay area. The walk highlighted the need for protection. In Washington, the Southern Route delivered a 30-page manifesto, "The Manifesto of Change", and a list of demands, including mitigation for climate change, a call for environmental sustainability plans, protection of sacred sites, and renewal of improvement to NA sovereignty and health.

Indian Civil Rights Act

In order to assert rights against tribal governments, individual Indians would have to come to federal courts, and the empowerment of individual Indians comes at the expense of what is left of tribal sovereignty. These competing values led to the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968, which is designed to accomplish clean government by applying parts of the Bill of Rights to Indians against their own governments but also minimizes outside interference by limiting the remedy for a violation to a writ of habeas corpus in case the conferred rights are denied. A writ of habeas corpus in this context is an order to bring the person who claims his or her rights have been denied to federal court to decide whether the person's rights have in fact been denied. If the denial of rights is proven, the federal court orders a release from custody.The Indian Civil Rights Act does not allow a tribal member whose rights are violated to collect money damages against the tribal government. It does not even allow for an injunction. Because the only remedy is a writ of habeas corpus, a tribal member cannot even sue under the Indian Civil Rights Act unless he or she is being held in custody. The parts of the Bill of Rights not included in this extension are those that would make no sense in the Indian government context. For example, the free exercise of religion is protected to account for the conflict between Christians and traditional religions where such conflict exists, but there is no ban on establishment of religion, since some tribes had traditional theocracies. The right to a lawyer in a criminal case is absent because lawyers are absent from many reservations. The Second Amendment is absent because whether to have gun control is left to tribal government. The Third Amendment does not apply because Indian tribes do not have professional armies, and the Tenth Amendment does not apply because states have no power over Indian nations unless a particular power explicitly is conferred on states by Congress. However, the Indian Civil Rights Acts goes farther than the language of the Bill of Rights in that it guarantees "equal protection of the law,". It also denies tribal governments the power to pass ex post facto laws and bills of attainder, provisions that are contained in the main body of the U.S. Constitution rather than the Bill of Rights, and the power to imprison tribal members for a term greater than six months. Traditional tribal governments did not practice imprisonment at all. The Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968 also contains provisions directing the Secretary of the Interior to create a model code for courts of Indian offenses (courts on reservations not created by the tribal government) and requiring consent by tribal governments before states can assume and criminal or civil jurisdiction over Indians on Indian land.The impact of ICRA was greatly limited by the Supreme Court by the Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez court case (1978).

National Women's Conference (1977)

In the spirit of the United Nations' proclamation that 1975 was the International Women's Year, on January 9, 1975, U.S. President Gerald Ford issued Executive Order 11832 creating a National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year "to promote equality between men and women." Congress approved $5 million in total tax-payer contributions ($22.7 million in 2017 dollars) for both the state and national conferences as HR 9924 sponsored by Congresswoman Patsy Mink, which Ford signed into law. In 1977 President Jimmy Carter chose a new Commission and appointed Congresswoman Bella Abzug to head it. Numerous events were held over the next two years, culminating in the National Women's Conference in November 1977. Historian Marjorie J. Spruill argues that the anti-feminists led by Phyllis Schlafly had a more successful follow-up. They moved the Republican party to the right and defeated the Equal Rights Amendment.

Black Lives Matter-international activist movement, originating in the African-American community, that campaigns against violence and systemic racism toward black people. BLM regularly holds protests speaking out against police killings of black people, and broader issues such as racial profiling, police brutality, and racial inequality in the United States criminal justice system. In 2013, the movement began with the use of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on social media after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of African-American teen Trayvon Martin the preceding February. BLM became nationally recognized for its street demonstrations following the 2014 deaths of two AAs

Michael Brown—resulting in protests in Ferguson—and Eric Garner in New York City. Since the Ferguson protests, participants in the movement have demonstrated against the deaths of numerous other AAs by police actions or while in police custody. In the summer of 2015, BLM activists became involved in the 2016 United States presidential election. The overall BLM movement, however, is a decentralized network and has no formal hierarchy. Perception of BLM varies considerably by race. The phrase "All Lives Matter" sprang up as a response to the BLM movement, but has been criticized for misunderstanding the message of "BLM". Following the shooting of two police officers in Ferguson, the hashtag Blue Lives Matter was created by supporters of the police. Some black civil rights leaders have disagreed with tactics used by BLM activists. BLM generally engages in direct action tactics that make people uncomfortable enough that they must address the issue. BLM has also staged die-ins and held one during the 2015 Twin Cities Marathon.

Or is an American Act of Congress, passed on October 22, 2009,[1] and signed into law by President Barack Obama on October 28, 2009,[2] as a rider to the National Defense Authorization Act for 2010 (H.R. 2647). Conceived as a response to the murders of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr., both in 1998, the measure expands the 1969 United States federal hate-crime law to include crimes motivated by a victim's actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.[3] The bill also

Removes, in the case of hate crimes related to the race, color, religion, or national origin of the victim, the prerequisite that the victim be engaging in a federally protected activity, like voting or going to school; Gives federal authorities greater ability to engage in hate crimes investigations that local authorities choose not to pursue; Provides $5 million per year in funding for fiscal years 2010 through 2012 to help state and local agencies pay for investigating and prosecuting hate crimes;

Nashville Sit-Ins

The Nashville sit-in movement is widely regarded as one of the most successful and sustained student-directed sit-in campaigns of the Civil Rights movement. Contributing to its success was the leadership and organization provided by noted pacifist, James M. Lawson. During the late winter months of 1959, Lawson and the Nashville Student Movement, an organization comprised of students from the city's four AA colleges, made plans to launch a large-scale sit-in campaign targeting segregated restaurants and department stores in the city's downtown commercial district. Lawson prepared participants for the campaign by offering workshops where he instructed students on the importance of discipline and self-control through simulated sit-ins. Upon receiving word of the sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, the Nashville Student Movement launched their planned campaign into action. Local police officers responded to the staged sit-ins by arresting participating demonstrators. Despite the arrests, students continued to carry out the sit-ins by deploying multiple waves of demonstrators to occupy the lunch counters. The sit-in demonstrations continued until April 19 when a bomb exploded in the home of Z. Alexander Looby, a prominent AA attorney who served as one of the primary lawyers for students arrested during the sit-ins. The incident prompted thousands of demonstrators to stage a march on City Hall where Nashville Mayor, Ben West, met the marchers on the building's front steps to address their grievances. When publicly asked if he supported discrimination based on race, West voiced his opposition to segregation. Anxious to move the city forward and restore downtown commerce, city officials and local businesses agreed to desegregate Nashville's public facilities on May 10, 1960.

Black Power Book-a 1967 book co-authored by Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) and political scientist Charles V. Hamilton. The work defines Black Power, presents insights into the roots of racism in the United States and means of reforming the traditional political process for the future. Published originally as Black Power

The Politics of Liberation in America, the book has become a staple work produced during the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power movement. One of the main focuses of the book is describing the struggles that black communities faced with trying to get involved in politics. Consequently, the community faced problems with political participation as the community faced material consequences of systemic racism when attempting to vote or engaging with the political world. For instance, SNCC attempted to build organizational capacity within the Southern black community, offering a progressive alternative to the Democratic Party in Mississippi that would adopt the national party's platform. By creating regional campaigns and running black candidates, SNCC saw success within their own community. However, with the limited power that this and other organizations held, their efforts to engage in the political arena for the black community were often not fully realized. This led the authors to reconceptualize Black Power as a tool for confronting the totality of oppression, not exclusively that of political representation. The authors believe Black Power not only rests in dismantling white supremacy, but also in establishing camaraderie within the black community. In this way, Black Power disavows the legitimacy of liberal, conformist politics, and instead seeks a degree of sovereignty for black community.

Lynchings

a form of violence in which a mob, under the pretext of administering justice without trial, executes a presumed offender, often after inflicting torture and corporal mutilation. The term lynch law refers to a self-constituted court that imposes sentence on a person without due process of law. Both terms are derived from the name of Charles Lynch (1736-96), a Virginia planter and justice of the peace who, during the American Revolution, headed an irregular court formed to punish loyalists. Statistics of reported lynching in the United States indicate that, between 1882 and 1951, 4,730 persons were lynched, of whom 1,293 were white and 3,437 were black. Lynching continued to be associated with U.S. racial unrest during the 1950s and '60s, when civil rights workers and advocates were threatened and in some cases killed by mobs.Most blacks were lynched for outspokenness or other presumed offenses against whites, or in the aftermath of race riots. In many cases lynchings were not spontaneous mob violence but involved a degree of planning and law-enforcement cooperation. Racially motivated lynchings, which often involved the mutilation and immolation of the victim, might be witnessed by an entire local community as a diverting spectacle.

#metoo

a movement against sexual harassment and assault. #MeToo spread virally in October 2017 as a hashtag used on social media in an attempt to demonstrate the widespread prevalence of sexual assault and harassment, especially in the workplace. It followed soon after the sexual misconduct allegations against Harvey Weinstein. Tarana Burke, an American social activist and community organizer, began using the phrase "Me Too" as early as 2006, and the phrase was later popularized by American actress, Alyssa Milano, on Twitter in 2017. Congresswoman Jackie Speier has introduced a bill aimed at making sexual harassment complaints easier to report on Capitol Hill. Jackie Speier proposed the Member and Employee Training and Oversight on Congress Act (ME TOO Congress Act) on November 15, 2017. The full language of the bipartisan bill was revealed by the House on January 18, 2018 as an amendment to the Congressional Accountability Act of 1995. The purpose of the bill is to change how the legislative branch of the U.S. federal government treats sexual harassment complaints. Under the old system, complaints regarding the legislative branch were channeled through the Office of Compliance, which required complete confidentially through the process and took months of counseling and mediation before a complaint could actually be filed. Any settlement payments were paid using federal taxes. The bill would ensure future complaints could only take up to 180 days to be filed. The bill would also allow the staffers to transfer to a different department away from the presence of the alleged harasser without losing their jobs if they requested it. The bill would require Congressmen to pay for their own harassment settlements. The Office of Compliance would no longer be allowed to keep settlements secret, and would be required to publicly publish the settlement amounts and the associated employing offices. Soon after #MeToo started spreading in late 2017, several allegations from a 2016 Indianapolis Star article re-surfaced in the gymnastic industry against former U.S. Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar of Michigan State University. Nassar was called out via #MeToo for sexually assaulting gymnasts as young as 6 years old during "treatments". Rachael Denhollander was the first to accuse. After more than 150 women came forward, Nassar was sentenced to life in prison. The president of Michigan State University, Lou Anna Simon, resigned in the wake of the scandal.

New York City Race Riots (1964)

a six-day period of rioting that started on July 18, 1964, in the Manhattan neighbourhood of Harlem after a white off-duty police officer shot and killed an AA teenager. The rioting spread to Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville in Brooklyn and to South Jamaica, Queens, and was the first of a number of race riots in major American cities—including Rochester, New York; Jersey City, Paterson, and Elizabeth, New Jersey; Dixmoor (near Chicago), Illinois; and Philadelphia—in that year alone, not to mention the notorious Watts riots of 1965. Harlem experienced this, its third race riot, two decades after the riot of 1943. When veteran officer Thomas Gilligan fatally shot 15-year-old James Powell, violent protests erupted throughout the neighbourhood. A protest organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had originally been planned to address the disappearance of three civil rights workers in Mississippi, but its focus was quickly shifted to the Powell shooting in particular and police brutality in general. The march began peacefully, but emotions were running high. Some protesters became violent; police responded violently; and chaos quickly followed. Rioters looted stores, vandalized private property, and struggled against the police who had been called into the neighbourhood to restore order. The rioting continued for two nights and spread to other AA neighbourhoods and beyond. When the smoke cleared and peace had been restored, 1 person was dead, more than 100 had been injured, and more than 450 had been arrested.

Literacy Tests

assesses a person's literacy skills: their ability to read and write. Literacy tests have been administered by various governments to immigrants. In the United States, between the 1850s and 1960s, literacy tests were administered to prospective voters, and this had the effect of disenfranchising AAs and others.

International Women's Day

day (March 8) honouring the achievements of women and promoting women's rights. A national holiday in numerous countries, it has been sponsored by the United Nations (UN) since 1975. International Women's Day (IWD) grew out of efforts in the early 20th century to promote women's rights, especially suffrage. In its campaign for female enfranchisement, the Socialist Party of America in 1909 held the first National Woman's Day, which was highlighted by mass meetings across the United States; the day was observed until 1913. The International Socialist Congress agreed in 1910 to create an international version of the U.S. holiday. In the ensuing years the IWD was celebrated in additional countries and on varying dates. On March 8, 1917, women in Petrograd, Russia, marked the day by staging a strike to protest food shortages, living conditions, and WW1. This strike helped give rise to the Russian Revolution of 1917. In 1921 the date of the IWD was officially changed to March 8. In the following decades, the success of the suffrage movement contributed to a decline in the popularity of the IWD. However, aided by the growth of feminism in the 1960s and UN sponsorship, the IWD experienced a revitalization in the late 20th century.

Little Rock Nine

group of AA high-school students who challenged racial segregation in the public schools of Little Rock, Arkansas. The group—consisting of Melba Pattillo, Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Minnijean Brown, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls, Jefferson Thomas, Gloria Ray, and Thelma Mothershed—became the center of the struggle to desegregate public schools in the United States, especially in the South. Warned by the Little Rock board not to attend the first day of school, the nine AA students arrived on the second day accompanied by a small interracial group of ministers. They encountered a large white mob in front of the school, who began shouting, throwing stones, and threatening to kill the students. In addition, about 270 soldiers of the Arkansas National Guard, sent by Arkansas Gov. Orval Eugene Faubus, blocked the school's entrance. Faubus had declared his opposition to integration and his intention to defy a federal court order requiring desegregation. Eisenhower, Governor Faubus, and Little Rock's mayor, Woodrow Mann, discussed the situation over the course of 18 days, during which time the nine students stayed home. The students returned to the high school on September 23, entering through a side door to avoid the protesters' attention and wrath. They were eventually discovered, however, and white protesters became violent, attacking AA bystanders as well as reporters for northern newspapers. The students were sent home, but they returned on September 25, protected by U.S. soldiers. Despite Eisenhower's publicly stated reluctance to use federal troops to enforce desegregation, he recognized the potential for violence and state insubordination. He thus sent the elite 101st Airborne Division, called the "Screaming Eagles," to Little Rock and placed the Arkansas National Guard under federal command. The Little Rock Nine continued to face physical and verbal attacks from white students throughout their studies at Central High. One of the students, Minnijean Brown, fought back and was expelled. The remaining eight students, however, attended the school for the rest of the academic year. At the end of the year, in 1958, senior Ernest Green became the first AA to graduate from Little Rock Central High School. Governor Faubus was reelected in 1958, and rather than permit desegregation, he closed all of Little Rock's schools. Many school districts in the South followed Little Rock's example, closing schools or implementing "school-choice" programs that subsidized white students' attendance at private segregated academies, which were not covered by the Supreme Court's decision. Little Rock Central High School did not reopen with a desegregated student body until 1960, and efforts to integrate schools and other public areas throughout the country continued through the 1960s.

Jim Crow

in U.S. history, any of the laws that enforced racial segregation in the South between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the beginning of the civil rights movement in the 1950s. Jim Crow was the name of a minstrel routine (actually Jump Jim Crow) performed beginning in 1828 by its author, Thomas Dartmouth ("Daddy") Rice, and by many imitators, including actor Joseph Jefferson. The term came to be a derogatory epithet for AAs and a designation for their segregated life. From the late 1870s, Southern state legislatures, no longer controlled by carpetbaggers and freedmen, passed laws requiring the separation of whites from "persons of colour" in public transportation and schools. In 1954 the Supreme Court reversed Plessy in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. It declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional, and, by extension, that ruling was applied to other public facilities. From 1887 to 1892 nine states, including Louisiana, passed laws requiring separation on public conveyances, such as streetcars and railroads. The Supreme Court ruling that followed on May 18, 1896, and that bore the names of Plessy and Ferguson solidified the establishment of the Jim Crow era.

Justice Department Civil Rights Division

institution within the federal government responsible for enforcing federal statutes prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, sex, disability, religion, and national origin. The Division was established on December 9, 1957, by order of Attorney General William P. Rogers, after the Civil Rights Act of 1957 created the office of Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, who has since then headed the division. The head of the Civil Rights Division is an Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights (AAG-CR) appointed by the President of the United States. The current Acting AAG-CR is John M. Gore. The Division enforces: the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964, and 1968; the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as amended through 2006; the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974; the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990; the National Voter Registration Act of 1993; the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009; the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act of 1986; the Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act of 1984; the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act of 1980, which authorizes the Attorney General to seek relief for persons confined in public institutions where conditions exist that deprive residents of their constitutional rights; the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act of 1994; the Police Misconduct Provision of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000; the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 Section 102 of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), as amended, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of national origin and citizenship status as well as document abuse and retaliation under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. In addition, the Division prosecutes actions under several criminal civil rights statutes which were designed to preserve personal liberties and safety.

Montgomery Bus Boycott

mass protest against the bus system of Montgomery, Alabama, by civil rights activists and their supporters that led to a 1956 Supreme Court decision declaring that Montgomery's segregation laws on buses were unconstitutional. The 381-day bus boycott also brought the Rev. MLK, into the spotlight as one of the most important leaders of the American civil rights movement. Rosa Parks' arrest triggered the boycott took place in Montgomery on December 1, 1955. Local laws dictated that AA passengers sat at the back of the bus while whites sat in front. If the white section became full, AAs had to give up their seats in the back. When Parks refused to move to give her seat to a white rider, she was taken to jail; she was later bailed out by a local civil rights leader. Although Parks was not the first resident of Montgomery to refuse to give up her seat to a white passenger, local civil rights leaders decided to capitalize on her arrest as a chance to challenge local segregation laws. Shortly after Parks's arrest, Jo Ann Robinson, a leader of the WPC, and E.D. Nixon, president of the local NAACP, printed and distributed leaflets describing Parks's arrest and called for a one-day boycott of the city buses on December 5. Boycott could be effective because the Montgomery bus system was heavily dependent on AA riders, 75 percent of the ridership. Some 90 percent of the AA residents stayed off the buses that day. The boycott was so successful that it was extended indefinitely. A group of local ministers formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) to support and sustain the boycott and the legal challenge to the segregation laws. Martin Luther King, the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, was elected president of the MIA. The MIA initially asked for first-come, first-served seating, with AAs starting in the rear and white passengers beginning in the front of the bus. Asked that AA bus drivers be hired for routes primarily made up of AA riders. The bus companies refused to meet those demands. White retaliation: King's home was bombed, and many boycotters were fired from their jobs. Several times the police arrested protesters and took them to jail, once charging 80 leaders of the boycott with violating a 1921 law that barred conspiracies to interfere with lawful business without just cause. The MIA filed a federal suit against bus segregation, and on June 5, 1956, a federal district court declared segregated seating on buses to be unconstitutional. The Supreme Court upheld that ruling. The federal decision went into effect on December 20, 1956. The boycott made King well known.

League of Women Voters

nonpartisan American political organization that has pursued its mission of promoting active and unhampered participation in government since its establishment in 1920. First proposed by Carrie Chapman Catt at a convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1917, the League was organized at a national convention on March 24-29, 1919, in St. Louis, Missouri, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first suffrage grant. Following the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, Catt suggested the reorganization of the two million-strong NAWSA into the League of Women Voters, an organization that would work for progressive legislation on a national and local level. The League was conceived as a nonpartisan, nonsectarian organization with representation from every state. Its chief aims were to provide international support for woman suffrage, to watch over state legislatures and prevent any legal discrimination on the basis of sex, and to strive to make American democratic institutions safe for all those governed by them. The first convention of the League of Women Voters was held in Chicago in 1920. Continuing and broadening this mission, the League functions today as a multi-issue grassroots action group open to both men and women that promotes active participation in government and works to "influence public policy through education and advocacy." With a focus on registering people to vote, providing funding for education about political issues, and defending voting rights, the League is one of the largest nonpartisan political organizations in the United States and one of the only such organizations that successfully provides broad, comprehensive information on a wide variety of political issues.

League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC)

one of the oldest and largest Latino organizations in the United States. Since its founding in 1929, it has focused on education, employment, and civil rights for Hispanics. The LULAC was formally established in Corpus Christi, Texas, in February 1929. It was created through the merger of several community groups, and many of its leaders were middle-class Mexican Americans. At the time, Hispanics faced various forms of discrimination in the United States, which the organization sought to end. Often considered one of the more conservative Latino civil rights groups, LULAC initially restricted membership to U.S. citizens, made English its official language, and promoted assimilation. Its efforts included English-language instruction, assistance with citizenship requirements and exams, and scholarships for education. In addition, LULAC fought for equal treatment of Hispanics through negotiation with state and local leaders when possible but through the legal system when necessary. It was involved in such prominent cases as Mendez v. Westminster (1946), which ended the segregation of Mexican Americans in California schools. One of LULAC's most notable initiatives was the preschool program known as the Little School of the 400, which was designed to teach children 400 basic English words. Although its presence was traditionally strongest in Texas, LULAC grew to have operations throughout the United States and in Puerto Rico. The rise of more-radical groups in the 1960s brought changes to LULAC. It came to reject assimilation and adopted more confrontational strategies, such as public protests. The organization also sought funding from government and corporate grants. LULAC played a significant role in the creation of Operation SER (1964; Operation Service, Employment, and Redevelopment [later renamed SER-Jobs for Progress National]) and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (1968; MALDEF). LULAC's efforts against discrimination continued over the next four decades, and it remained active into the early 21st century.

American Civil Liberties Union

organization founded by Roger Baldwin and others(jane addams, helen keller, judah magnus and norman thomas) in New York City in 1920 to champion constitutional liberties in the United States. It works in three basic areas: freedom of expression, conscience, and association; due process of law; and equality under the law. The ACLU seeks to further particular aspects of civil liberties by affecting the outcome of specific legal cases in the courts. Since its founding the ACLU has initiated test cases as well as intervened in cases already in the courts. Thus, it may directly provide legal counsel in a case, or it may comment on a case by filing an amicus curiae brief. One of the ACLU's most famous test cases was the Scopes trial (1925), it supported the decision of a Tennessee science teacher, John Scopes, to defy a law forbidding the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution. Active in overturning censorship laws through test trials. As a result of its efforts, such books as James Joyce's Ulysses, among others, could be imported into the United States. The ACLU provided defense counsel in the Sacco-Vanzetti case in 1921 and the Scottsboro case of 1931-35. Defended Jehovah's Witnesses who refused, on the grounds of conscience, to allow their children to salute the flag in their public classrooms. It also played a role in SC decisions banning prayer in public schools. In the 1960s the ACLU participated in cases that established the right of indigent defendants to legal counsel in criminal prosecutions, and in the same period, decisions barring the use of evidence that was obtained illegally. In the late 1970s the ACLU defended the right of a neo-Nazi group to march in Skokie, Ill.

Ms. Magazine

periodical, launched in 1972 by American feminists Gloria Steinem, Patricia Carbine, and others, that was the first nationally circulated women's magazine to bring feminism and the issues of the women's movement into the mainstream. From the beginning, the editors of the magazine assumed that their readers were interested in more than new recipes and household hints. The magazine's chief purpose was to address the concerns of contemporary women and to provide coverage of national and international news of particular relevance to women. It also devoted pages to women's history and to stories and poetry written by women. Notably, the magazine initiated a policy of refusing advertising that depicted female stereotypes or was deemed demeaning to women. Ms. demonstrated its divergence from conventional women's magazines by printing in the first issue (before Roe v. Wade) a list of 50 well-known women who acknowledged having had abortions. The economic downturn of the early 1980s and the loss of key staff members threatened the magazine's continuation, and in the late 1980s the magazine was sold. In 1990 Ms. halted publication for seven months. The magazine was relaunched in 1991 as a reader-supported, advertisement-free bimonthly. It continued to publish the fiction and nonfiction of women writers and to report on social, political, and legislative news that pertains to women's issues.

March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

political demonstration held in Washington, D.C., in 1963 by civil rights leaders to protest racial discrimination and to show support for major civil rights legislation that was pending in Congress. On August 28, 1963, an interracial assembly of more than 200,000 people gathered peaceably in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial to demand equal justice for all citizens under the law. The crowd was uplifted by the emotional strength and prophetic quality of the address given by MLK, that came to be known as the "I Have a Dream" speech, in which he emphasized his faith that all men, someday, would be brothers. The rising tide of civil rights agitation greatly influenced national opinion and resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, guaranteeing equal voting rights, outlawing discrimination in restaurants, theatres, and other public accommodations involved in interstate commerce, and encouraging school desegregation.

FBI

principal investigative agency of the federal government of the United States. The bureau is responsible for conducting investigations in cases where federal laws may have been violated, unless another agency of the federal government has been specifically delegated that duty by statute or executive fiat. As part of the Department of Justice (DOJ), the FBI reports the results of its investigations to the attorney general. Although it is a federal agency, the FBI is not a national police force, and law enforcement in the United States remains principally the responsibility of state and local governments. The HQ in DC. The investigative jurisdiction of the FBI extends to most federal criminal laws in more than 200 areas, including computer crime, embezzlement, money laundering, organized crime, piracy and hijacking, sabotage, sedition, terrorism (including eco-terrorism), and treason. During the 1950s and '60s, the bureau used covert means to disrupt the activities of groups it considered subversive and to discredit their leaders; the operations, known as COINTELPRO (counterintelligence programs), were officially discontinued in 1971.In 1964 the investigative jurisdiction of the FBI was expanded by the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited racial and other forms of discrimination.In 2006 the American Civil Liberties Union revealed that the FBI had been spying on numerous political activism groups in the U.S., a charge that the FBI denied but that was confirmed by the DOJ Office of the Inspector General in 2010.

John Birch Society

private organization founded in the United States on Dec. 9, 1958, by Robert H.W. Welch, Jr. (1899-1985), a retired Boston candy manufacturer, for the purpose of combating communism and promoting various ultraconservative causes. The name derives from John Birch, an American Baptist missionary and U.S. Army intelligence officer who was killed by Chinese communists on Aug. 25, 1945, making him, in the society's view, the first hero of the Cold War. The society publishes the biweekly magazine The New American and the JBS Bulletin, a monthly newsletter for members. The Blue Book (1959; also published as The Blue Book of the John Birch Society), a transcript of Welch's presentation at the organization's founding meeting in 1958, outlines the nature and purposes of the society. . Its other objectives have included the abolition of the graduated income tax, the repeal of social security legislation, the impeachment of various high government officials, the end to busing for the purpose of school integration, the end to U.S. membership in the United Nations, cancellation of U.S.-Soviet summit talks, and the nullification of the treaty that turned over the Panama Canal to Panama. In his book, The Politician, Welch charged to the effect that Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles had actively aided the so-called Communist conspiracy. The society has also contended that an elite international cabal—the U.S. branch of which supposedly includes the Council on Foreign Relations, for many years led by David Rockefeller—was seeking to establish a world tyranny.Its headquarters are in Appleton, Wis.

Mendez V. Westminster School District

was a 1947 federal court case that challenged Mexican remedial schools in Orange County, California. In its ruling held that the forced segregation of Mexican American students into separate "Mexican schools" was unconstitutional and unlawful."Five Mexican-American fathers (Thomas Estrada, William Guzman, Gonzalo Mendez, Frank Palomino, and Lorenzo Ramirez) challenged the practice of Mexican school segregation. . In the 1940s, a small minority of school districts began to establish separate language-based "Mexican Schools", arguing that Mexican children had special needs because they were Spanish speakers. The schools existed only for elementary children (K-4) and were intended to prepare them for mainstream schools. Soledad Vidaurri went to the Westminster Elementary School District to enroll her children and those of her brother Gonzalo Mendez: Gonzalo, Geronimo, and Sylvia. The Westminster School informed Viduarri that her children could be admitted to the school. However, Gonzalo, Geronimo, and Sylvia could not be admitted on the basis of their skin color. (Viduarri's children had light complexions and French surnames and so would not be segregated into a different school.) Upon hearing the news, Viduarri refused to admit her children to the school if her brother's children were not admitted as well. The parents tried talking to the school administration, but both parties were not able to reach an agreement. Gonzalo dedicated the next year to a lawsuit against the Westminster School District of Orange County. The school district offered to compromise by allowing the Mendez children to attend the elementary school without any other student of Mexican-American descent. The Mendez family declined the offer and continued the lawsuit. Senior District Judge Paul J. McCormick, sitting in Los Angeles, ruled in favor of Mendez. The school district appealed to the Ninth Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld Judge McCormick's decision. After Mendez, racial minorities were still subject to legal segregation in schools and public places. Governor Earl Warren signed into law the repeal of remaining segregationist provisions in the California statutes.

Equal Pay Act-landmark U.S. legislation mandating equal pay for equal work, in a measure to end gender-based disparity. The National War Labor Board first advocated equal pay for equal work in 1942, and an equal pay act was proposed in 1945. Eighteen years later, on June 10, 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act into law. It was enacted as an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which regulates minimum wages, overtime, and child labour. Among the reasons given to justify unequal pay were these

working women had a higher turnover rate because of family obligations; some state laws prohibited women from working at night; and other laws limited the actual number of hours women could work and the amount of weight women could lift. The EPA requires, as a general rule, that men and women who work in jobs that are substantively equal in terms of skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions shall receive the same pay. The original bill that was proposed required equal pay for "comparable work." However, this stipulation was changed before the passage of the bill to "equal work." The EPA permits differences in wages based on seniority, merit, quality, or quantity of production, or other differentials not based on gender. In EPA cases, plaintiffs have the burden of proof to show that women were paid less than men and that the work involved was "substantively equal." From 1963 until the passage of the Educational Amendments in 1972, those employed in executive, administrative, or professional capacities were excluded from the protection of the EPA because of its incorporation with the Fair Labor Standards Act, which included those exemptions. As a result of the Reorganization Act of 1977, the enforcement of the EPA shifted to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1979, where it remains.