Intro to African American Studies Midterm

Minor vs Happersett

(1875), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the Constitution did not grant anyone, and in this case specifically a female citizen of the state of Missouri, a right to vote even when a state law granted rights to vote to a certain class of citizens. The Supreme Court upheld state court decisions in Missouri, which had refused to register a woman as a lawful voter because that state's laws allowed only men to vote. The Minor v. Happersett ruling was based on an interpretation of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court readily accepted that Minor was a citizen of the United States, but it held that the constitutionally protected privileges of citizenship did not include the right to vote.

US vs Cruikshank

(1876),[1] was an important United States Supreme Court decision in United States constitutional law, one of the earliest to deal with the application of the Bill of Rights to state governments following the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment. The case arose during the Reconstruction Era from the 1872 Louisiana gubernatorial election which was hotly disputed, and led to both major political parties certifying their slates of local officers.

13th Amendment

- Ratified in 1865 in the aftermath of the Civil War, abolished slavery in the United States.

14th Amendment

- Ratified in 1868, granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States - including former slaves - and guaranteed all citizens "equal protection of the laws."

Reconstruction Act of 1867

-The South was divided into five military districts and governed by military governors until acceptable state constitutions could be written and approved by Congress. - All males, regardless of race, but excluding former Confederate leaders, were permitted to participate in the constitutional conventions that formed the new governments in each state. -New state constitutions were required to provide for universal manhood suffrage (voting rights for all men) without regard to race. -States were required to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment in order to be readmitted to the Union.

Up from Slavery

1901 autobiography of American educator Booker T. Washington (1856-1915). The book describes his personal experience of having to work to rise up from the position of a slave child during the Civil War, to the difficulties and obstacles he overcame to get an education at the new Hampton Institute, to his work establishing vocational schools—most notably the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama—to help black people and other disadvantaged minorities learn useful, marketable skills and work to pull themselves, as a race, up by the bootstraps. He reflects on the generosity of both teachers and philanthropists who helped in educating blacks and Native Americans. He describes his efforts to instill manners, breeding, health and a feeling of dignity to students. His educational philosophy stresses combining academic subjects with learning a trade (something which is reminiscent of the educational theories of John Ruskin). Washington explained that the integration of practical subjects is partly designed to reassure the white community as to the usefulness of educating black people.

Souls of Black Folks

1903 work of American literature by W. E. B. Du Bois. It is a seminal work in the history of sociology, and a cornerstone of African-American literature. Du Bois used the term "double consciousness", perhaps taken from Ralph Waldo Emerson ("The Transcendentalist" and "Fate"), applying it to the idea that black people must have two fields of vision at all times. They must be conscious of how they view themselves, as well as being conscious of how the world views them.

Grandfather Clause

A grandfather clause (or grandfather policy or grandfathering) is a provision in which an old rule continues to apply to some existing situations while a new rule will apply to all future cases. Those exempt from the new rule are said to have grandfather rights or acquired rights, or to have been grandfathered in. Frequently, the exemption is limited; it may extend for a set time, or it may be lost under certain circumstances. - The term originated in late nineteenth-century legislation and constitutional amendments passed by a number of U.S. Southern states, which created new requirements for literacy tests, payment of poll taxes, and/or residency and property restrictions to register to vote. States in some cases exempted those whose ancestors (grandfathers) had the right to vote before the Civil War, or as of a particular date, from such requirements. The intent and effect of such rules was to prevent poor and illiterate African-American former slaves and their descendants from voting, but without denying poor and illiterate whites the right to vote. Although these original grandfather clauses were eventually ruled unconstitutional, the terms grandfather clause and grandfather have been adapted to other uses.

Literacy Tests

A literacy test 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[1] and 1960s, literacy tests were administered to prospective voters, and this had the effect of disenfranchising African Americans and others.

Poll Taxes

A poll tax is a [tax] levied as a fixed sum on every liable individual. Although often associated with states of the former Confederate States of America Confederacy - Payment of a poll tax was a prerequisite to the registration for voting in a number of states until 1966. The tax emerged in some states of the United States in the late 19th century as part of the Jim Crow laws. After the right to vote was extended to all races by the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, a number of states enacted poll tax laws as a device for restricting voting rights.

Vagrancy Laws

After the American Civil War, some southern states passed Black Codes, laws that tried to control the hundreds of thousands of freed slaves. In 1866, the State of Virginia, fearing that it would be "overrun with dissolute and abandoned characters", passed an Act Providing for the Punishment of Vagrants. Homeless or unemployed persons could be forced into labour on public or private works, for very low pay, for a statutory maximum of three months; if fugitive and recaptured, they must serve the rest of their term at minimum subsistence, wearing ball and chain. In effect, though not in declared intent, the Act criminalized attempts by impoverished freedpeople to seek out their own families and rebuild their lives.

The Daily Record

Alex Manly and his brother Frank G. Manly as co-owner, he published the Daily Record (Wilmington, North Carolina), the state's only daily African-American newspaper and possibly the nation's only black-owned daily newspaper. his progressive newspaper was for blacks in the Wilmington community, and it was heralded as "The Only Negro Daily in the World".[6] The Daily Record advocated for black civil rights, better healthcare, roads, and bicycle paths.[7] Its success attracted white advertisers, and the newspaper and its editors were well respected in Wilmington.

Diane Nash

American civil rights activist, and a leader and strategist of the student wing of the Civil Rights Movement. Nash's campaigns were among the most successful of the era. Her efforts included the first successful civil rights campaign to integrate lunch counters (Nashville);[1] the Freedom Riders, who desegregated interstate travel;[2] co-founding the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); and co-initiating the Alabama Voting Rights Project and working on the Selma Voting Rights Movement. This helped gain Congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which authorized the federal government to oversee and enforce state practices to ensure that African Americans and other minorities were not prevented from registering and voting.

Kathleen Cleaver

American professor of law, known for her involvement with the Revolutionary movement and the Black Panther Party.Cleaver was in charge of organizing a student conference at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. At the conference, Cleaver met the minister of information for the Black Panther Party, Eldridge Cleaver, who was speaking at the conference. Exiled to Cuba

Differences between Abolitionists vs. Anti-Slavery position on American Slavery

Anti-slavery advocates were outraged by the murder of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, a white man and editor of an abolitionist newspaper on 7 November 1837, by a pro-slavery mob in Illinois. Nearly all Northern politicians rejected the extreme positions of the abolitionists; Abraham Lincoln, for example. Indeed, many Northern leaders including Lincoln, Stephen Douglas (the Democratic nominee in 1860), John C. Fremont (the Republican nominee in 1856), and Ulysses S. Grant married into slave-owning Southern families without any moral qualms. Lysander Spooner (1808-1887), an individualist anarchist who wrote The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1845). Antislavery as a principle was far more than just the wish to limit the extent of slavery. Most Northerners recognized that slavery existed in the South and the Constitution did not allow the federal government to intervene there. Most Northerners favored a policy of gradual and compensated emancipation. After 1849, abolitionists rejected this and demanded that slavery end immediately and everywhere. John Brown was the only abolitionist known to have actually planned a violent insurrection, though David Walker promoted the idea. The abolitionist movement was strengthened by the activities of free African-Americans, especially in the black church, who argued that the old Biblical justifications for slavery contradicted the New Testament.

Daisy Bates

Arkansas President of the NAACP. Supported integration in Central High.was an American civil rights activist, publisher, journalist, and lecturer who played a leading role in the Little Rock Integration Crisis of 1957.

Charlotte Hawkins Brown

Charlotte Hawkins Brown, born on June 11, 1883 in Henderson, North Carolina, was educated in Massachusetts before returning to the South to teach African-American children. In 1902, she opened the Palmer Memorial Institute, named after a benefactor; it went on to become a famed 200-acre prep school offering black students rich course offerings. Brown was also a world-traveler and suffragist.

De Facto Segregation

De facto segregation is the direct manifestation of de jure segregation, because the U.S. government could mandate that laws that segregated the races were unconstitutional, but it couldn't change the hearts and minds of its people. If people didn't want to be in the presence of another ethnicity or race, they could certainly make this a reality. So, de jure segregation was implemented by law; de facto segregation, by common understanding and personal choice.

De Jure Segregation

De jure segregation, or legalized segregation of Black and White people, was present in almost every aspect of life in the South during the Jim Crow era: from public transportation to cemeteries, from prisons to health care, from residences to libraries. Under segregation, Black and White people were to be separated, purportedly to minimize violence. De jure segregation, or "Jim Crow," lasted from the 1880s to 1964. Jim Crow laws were efficient in perpetuating the idea of "White superiority" and "Black inferiority."

Motto: "Lifting as we Climb"

From 1896 to 1904 it was known as the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). It adopted the motto "Lifting as we climb", to demonstrate to "an ignorant and suspicious world that our aims and interests are identical with those of all good aspiring women." When incorporated in 1904, NACW became known as the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC).

"Segregation Now! Segregation Tomorrow! Segregation Forever!"

George Wallace's 1963 Inaugural Address was delivered January 14, 1963, following his election as Governor of Alabama.[1] Wallace at this time in his career was an ardent segregationist, and as Governor he challenged the attempts of the federal government to enforce laws prohibiting racial segregation in Alabama's public schools and other institutions. The speech is most famous for the phrase "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever", which became a rallying cry for those opposed to integration and the Civil Rights Movement.

Boston Guardian (newspaper)

Guardian was founded in November 1901 and published in the same building that had once housed William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator. In March 1901, Trotter helped organize the Boston Literary and Historical Association, a forum for militant race opinion. The paper enjoyed broad appeal with readers outside of Massachusetts, featuring news of interest to people of color from across the nation, as well as social notes, church news, sports, and fiction. Within its editorial opinion columns, Trotter often assailed the conservative accommodationist ideology of Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute.[1] The Guardian reached the peak of its circulation and prestige about the year 1910, roughly coinciding with the establishment of the National Association of Colored People, of which Trotter was a co-founder along with W. E. B. DuBois, et al. Trotter and Du Bois had previously joined with others in the formation of the Niagara Movement, immediate predecessor to the NAACP. Within the pages of the Guardian, Trotter criticized the slow progress in Negro social advancement in the face of institutional racism, discriminatory practices, and de jure segregation. When Thomas Dixon's 1905 play The Clansman (based on Dixon's novel of the same name) was performed in Boston, the Guardian mounted a campaign that forced it from the stage.

Greensboro Four

On February 1, 1960, David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. (Jibreel Khazan), and Joe McNeil, four African American students from North Carolina A&T State University, staged a sit-in in Greensboro at Woolworth, a popular retail store that was known for refusing to serve African Americans at its lunch counter. Not long after their protest, sit-ins began occurring across the South, including the North Carolina cities of Charlotte, Durham, and Winston-Salem. These young men came to be known as the Greensboro Four. In 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students denied black children equal educational opportunities were unconstitutional. Six years later, the segregation was still present in public places throughout the South. The four seventeen year olds determined that they would enter the store, purchase some school supplies, and then sit down at the lunch counter to eat. They would argue that if the store would take their money for school supplies then they should serve them at the lunch counter.

1974 UNESCO Conference

In 1974, Cheikh Anta Diop was one of about 20 participants in a UNESCO symposium in Cairo, where alongside Theophile Obenga from DRC, still alive, and a few others he established the African origin of the ancient Egyptian civilization and led all the egyptologists and anthropologists to surrender. However, Diop's contribution was subject to the editorial comment that "[t]he arguments put forward in [the] chapter have not been accepted by all the experts interested in the problem", a comment coming from the Arab scientist now occupying the land.

Reconstruction (1865-77)

It was a significant chapter in the history of American civil rights. The term has two applications: the first applies to the complete history of the entire country from 1865 to 1877 following the American Civil War; the second, to the attempted transformation of the 11 ex-Confederate states from 1863 to 1877, as directed by Congress. Reconstruction ended the remnants of Confederate secession and ended slavery, making the newly-free slaves citizens with civil rights ostensibly guaranteed by three new Constitutional amendments.

Peonage

Peonage, also called debt slavery or debt servitude, is a system where an employer compels a worker to pay off a debt with work. Legally, peonage was outlawed by Congress in 1867. However, after Reconstruction, many Southern black men were swept into peonage though different methods, and the system was not completely eradicated until the 1940s.

Ruby Doris Smith Robinson

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from its earliest days in 1960 until her death in October 1967.[2] She served the organization as an activist in the field and as an administrator in the Atlanta central office. She eventually succeeded James Forman as SNCC's executive secretary and was the only woman ever to serve in this capacity. When Ruby Smith entered Spelman College in 1959, she quickly became involved in the Atlanta Student Movement after being inspired by the Greensboro North Carolina lunch counter sit-in, She participated in many sit-ins. She became involved in the national movement and joined activities sponsored by the fledgling SNCC such as Freedom Rides, community-action organizing, and voter registration drives and was arrested many times for participating in those activities.

Shelby County vs Holder

Supreme Court case regarding the constitutionality of two provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965: Section 5, which requires certain states and local governments to obtain federal preclearance before implementing any changes to their voting laws or practices; and Section 4(b), which contains the coverage formula that determines which jurisdictions are subjected to preclearance based on their histories of discrimination in voting.[2][3] On June 25, 2013, the Court ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that Section 4(b) is unconstitutional because the coverage formula is based on data over 40 years old, making it no longer responsive to current needs and therefore an impermissible burden on the constitutional principles of federalism and equal sovereignty of the states.[2][3] The Court did not strike down Section 5, but without Section 4(b), no jurisdiction will be subject to Section 5 preclearance unless Congress enacts a new coverage formula.[4] Some critics have said that the ruling has made it easier for state officials to make it harder for black and other minority voters to vote.[5] Five years after the ruling, nearly 1000 polling places had been closed in the U.S., with many of the closed polling places in predominantly African-American counties.

Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale

The Black Panther Party was originally created as an organization that used force to protect African-Americans from the local police, but in time, they expanded. As they expanded the scope of their organization, the reputation of the Black Panthers grew and soon they became a new voice in the Black Power and Civil Rights Movements. Newton and Seale created a series of guidelines and descriptions of the ideal way to operate the Black Panther Party and called it the Ten-Point Program. The Program served as a description of the goals of the Black Panther Party. The Program was also an attempt to shape how they party was viewed both by its members and administrators as well as the American public.

Melanin Dosgage Test

The Melanin Dosage test was unveiled at the Cairo Symposium in 1977. The test can determine a persons race by taking a sample from their bone. He performed this test on the bone of a Egyptian Pharaoh and proved that ancient Egyptians were black. The Melanin Dosage Test is a test developed by Cheikh Anta Diop in 1977 to determine the race of ancient Egyptian Pharaohs.

National Association of Colored Women

The National Association of Colored Women Clubs (NACWC) is an American organization that was formed in July 1896 at the First Annual Convention of the National Federation of Afro-American Women in Washington, D.C., United States, by a merger of the National Federation of African-American Women, the Woman's Era Club of Boston, and the National League of Colored Women of Washington, DC, at the call of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin.[1] From 1896 to 1904 it was known as the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). It adopted the motto "Lifting as we climb", to demonstrate to "an ignorant and suspicious world that our aims and interests are identical with those of all good aspiring women." When incorporated in 1904, NACW became known as the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACWC).

The Revolution

The Revolution was a newspaper established by women's rights activists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in New York City. It was published weekly between January 8, 1868 and February 17, 1872. With a combative style that matched its name, it primarily focused on women's rights, especially prohibiting discrimination against women voting, women's suffrage. It also covered other topics, however, such as politics, the labor movement and finance. Anthony managed the business aspects of the paper while Stanton was co-editor along with Parker Pillsbury, an abolitionist and a supporter of women's rights.

1867 Kansas Suffrage Campaign

The U.S. state of Kansas held a referendum on November on a proposed constitutional amendment to grant women the full right to vote on November 5, 1867. It was the first-ever referendum on women's suffrage in U.S. history, and specifically sought to amend Section 1, Article 5 of the state constitution to "eliminate the word "male" from the clause defining the qualifications of an elector." The amendment had been approved by the legislature, but had to be ratified by the all-white-male electorate of the state; the proposed amendment shared the November ballot with a proposition to "eliminate the word "white" from the clause defining the qualifications of an elector" and allow African-American males the right to vote

19th Amendment (1920)

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex

15th Amendment

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridges by the US or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude

James Meredith

a Civil Rights Movement figure, writer, political adviser and Air Force veteran. In 1962, he became the first African-American student admitted to the segregated University of Mississippi,[1] after the intervention of the federal government, an event that was a flashpoint in the Civil Rights Movement. Inspired by President John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, Meredith decided to exercise his constitutional rights and apply to the University of Mississippi.[2] His goal was to put pressure on the Kennedy administration to enforce civil rights for African Americans.[2] In 1966 Meredith planned a solo 220-mile March Against Fear from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi; he wanted to highlight continuing racism in the South and encourage voter registration after passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He did not want major civil rights organizations involved. The second day, he was shot by a white gunman and suffered numerous wounds. Leaders of major organizations vowed to complete the march in his name after he was taken to the hospital.

Sharecropping

a form of agriculture in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on their portion of land. Sharecropping has a long history and there are a wide range of different situations and types of agreements that have used a form of the system. Sharecropping became widespread in the South as a response to economic upheaval caused by the end of slavery during and after Reconstruction.[17][18] Sharecropping was a way for very poor farmers, both white and black, to earn a living from land owned by someone else.

Rosetta Stone

a granodiorite stele, found in 1799, inscribed with three versions of a decree issued at Memphis, Egypt in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphic script and Demotic script, respectively, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek. As the decree has only minor differences between the three versions, the Rosetta Stone proved to be the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, thereby opening a window into ancient Egyptian history.

Separate Spheres Ideology (public vs private spheres)

a social phenomenon, within modern societies that feature, to some degree, an empirical separation between a domestic or private sphere and a public or social sphere. This observation may be controversial, and is often also seen as supporting patriarchal ideologies that seek to create or strengthen, any such separation between spheres, and to confine women to the domestic/private sphere. The patriarchal ideology of separate spheres, based primarily on notions of biologically determined gender roles and/or patriarchal religious doctrine, claims that women should avoid the public sphere - the domain of politics, paid work, commerce and law. Women's "proper sphere", according to the ideology, is the realm of domestic life, focused on childcare, housekeeping, and religion.

Dred Scott vs Sandford (1857)

also known as the Dred Scott case or Dred Scott decision, was a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court on U.S. labor law and constitutional law. It held that "a negro, whose ancestors were imported into [the U.S.], and sold as slaves,"[2][3] whether enslaved or free, could not be an American citizen, and therefore had no standing to sue in federal court,[4][5] and that the federal government had no power to regulate slavery in the federal territories acquired after the creation of the United States. Dred Scott, an enslaved man of "the negro African race"[3] who had been taken by his owners to free states and territories, attempted to sue for his freedom.

SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference)

an African-American civil rights organization. SCLC, which is closely associated with its first president, Martin Luther King Jr., had a large role in the American civil rights movement.After the Birmingham Campaign, SCLC called for massive protests in Washington, DC, to push for new civil rights legislation that would outlaw segregation nationwide.

Bob Moses

an American educator and civil rights activist, known for his work as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee on voter education and registration in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement, and his founding of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. He is a graduate of Hamilton College and completed a master's in philosophy at Harvard University. Since 1982 Moses has developed the nationwide Algebra Project in the United States. He has received a MacArthur Fellowship and other awards for this work, which emphasizes teaching algebra skills to minority students based on broad-based community organizing and collaboration with parents, teachers and students.

Claudette Colvin

an American nurse and was a pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement. On March 2, 1955, she was arrested at the age of 15 in Montgomery, Alabama for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a crowded, segregated bus. Colvin acted a few months before the more widely known incident in which Rosa Parks, secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP, played the lead role, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott that began that year. Colvin was among the five plaintiffs originally included in the federal court case filed by civil rights attorney Fred Gray on February 1, 1956, as Browder v. Gayle, to challenge bus segregation in the city.

Theophile Obenga

an Egyptologist originally from CONGO, who is professor emeritus in the Africana Studies Center at San Francisco State University. He is a politically active proponent of Pan-Africanism. - Obenga has advocated a number of ideas such as a "Negro-Egyptian" language family (négro-égyptien), which includes all languages of Africa, an approach that he shares with Cheikh Anta Diop. Obenga takes issue with the term Afro-Asiatic and states that the term is only a scientific invention and that the Egyptian language was never reconstructed following the methods of comparative historical linguistics, the very aim of which is to link genetically the languages concerned

Mdw Ntr

an ancient Egyptian writing system. It contains Logographic scripts that are pictographic in form[2][self-published source?] in a way reminiscent of ancient Egyptian are also sometimes called hieroglyphics.[3] In Neoplatonism, especially during the Renaissance, a "hieroglyph" was an artistic representation of an esoteric idea, which Neoplatonists believed actual Egyptian hieroglyphs to be.

Thurgood Marshall

as an American lawyer, serving as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from October 1967 until October 1991. Marshall was the Court's 96th justice and its first African-American justice. Prior to his judicial service, he successfully argued several cases before the Supreme Court, including Brown v. Board of Education. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Marshall graduated from the Howard University School of Law in 1933. He established a private legal practice in Baltimore before founding the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where he served as executive director. In that position, he argued several cases before the Supreme Court, including Smith v. Allwright, Shelley v. Kraemer, and Brown v. Board of Education, which held that racial segregation in public education is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.

UNIA

black nationalist fraternal organization founded in 1914 in the United States by Marcus Mosiah Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant. The Pan-African organization enjoyed its greatest strength in the 1920s, and was influential in the United States prior to Garvey's deportation to Jamaica in 1927. After that its prestige and influence declined, but it had a strong influence on African-American history and development. The UNIA was said to be "unquestionably, the most influential anticolonial organization in Jamaica prior to 1938." (Honor Ford-Smith) The organization was founded to work for the advancement of people of African ancestry around the world. Its motto is "One God! One Aim! One Destiny!" and its slogan is "Africa for the Africans, at home and abroad!"

The New York Age (newspaper)

black newspaper produced from 1887 to 1960, and was one of the most influential black newspapers of its time. The paper had its origins as the weekly New York Globe (not to be confused with the daily The New York Globe founded in 1904), an African-American newspaper that was published weekly from at least 1880 to November 8, 1884. Co-founded by editor Timothy Thomas Fortune,[2] a former slave,[3] it became The [New York] Freeman

Freedom Riders

civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated southern United States in 1961 and subsequent years to challenge the non-enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decisions Morgan v. Virginia (1946) and Boynton v. Virginia (1960),[3] which ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional.[4] The Southern states had ignored the rulings and the federal government did nothing to enforce them. The first Freedom Ride left Washington, D.C. on May 4, 1961,[5] and was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans on May 17.[6]

NAACP

civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909 as a bi-racial endeavor to advance justice for African Americans by a group including W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington and Moorfield Storey. ts mission in the 21st century is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate race-based discrimination." National NAACP initiatives include political lobbying, publicity efforts and litigation strategies developed by its legal team.[4] The group enlarged its mission in the late 20th century by considering issues such as police misconduct, the status of black foreign refugees and questions of economic development.

Universal Suffrage

consists of the right to vote of all adult citizens, regardless of property ownership, income, race, or ethnicity, subject only to minor exceptions.[1][2] In its original 19th-century usage by political reformers, universal suffrage was understood to mean only universal manhood suffrage; the vote was extended to women later, during the women's suffrage movement.

Cult of domesticity/true womanhood

describe what they consider to have been a prevailing value system among the upper and middle classes during the 19th Century in the United States[2] and the United Kingdom. This value system emphasized new ideas of femininity, the woman's role within the home and the dynamics of work and family. "True women", according to this idea, were supposed to possess four cardinal virtues: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. The idea revolved around the woman being the center of the family; she was considered "the light of the home".[3][4] The Cult of Domesticity affected married women's labor market participation in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Century.[28] "True Women" were supposed to devote themselves to unpaid domestic labor and refrain from paid, market-oriented work.

Declaration of Sentiments

document signed in 1848 by 68 women and 32 men—100 out of some 300 attendees at the first women's rights convention to be organized by women. Held in Seneca Falls, New York, the convention is now known as the Seneca Falls Convention. The principal author of the Declaration was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who modeled it upon the United States Declaration of Independence.

Women's Political Council (WPC)

founded in Montgomery, Alabama, was an organization that was part of the Civil Rights Movement that was formed to address the racial issues in the city. Members included Mary Fair Burks, Jo Ann Robinson, Irene West, Thelma Glass, and Uretta Adair. The WPC was the first group to officially call for a boycott of the bus system during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, beginning in December 1955. The group led efforts in the early 1950s to secure better treatment for Black bus passengers, and in December 1955 it initiated the thirteen month bus boycott.[1][2] They helped organize communications to get it started, as well as to support it, including giving people rides who were boycotting the buses. The African Americans of Montgomery upheld the boycott for more than a year. It ended in late December 1956, after the United States Supreme Court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that the state and local laws for bus segregation were unconstitutional, and ordered the state to desegregate public transportation.[3]

Little Rock Nine/Central High School

group of nine African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas. They then attended after the intervention of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The U.S. Supreme Court issued its historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 347 U.S. 483, on May 17, 1954. Tied to the 14th Amendment, the decision declared all laws establishing segregated schools to be unconstitutional, and it called for the desegregation of all schools throughout the nation.[1] After the decision, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) attempted to register black students in previously all-white schools in cities throughout the South. In Little Rock, Arkansas, the school board agreed to comply with the high court's ruling. When integration began in September 4, 1957, the Arkansas National Guard was called in to "preserve the peace". Originally at orders of the governor, they were meant to prevent the black students from entering due to claims that there was "imminent danger of tumult, riot and breach of peace" at the integration. However, President Eisenhower issued Executive order 10730, which federalized the Arkansas National Guard and ordered them to support the integration on September 23 of that year, after which they protected the African American students.[3]

Industrial Education

industrial education from its beginnings during the Reconstruction years, was hailed by its supporters as a means of making education practical and relevant to the lives of its black students. Its detractors, however, felt that industrial education was intentionally designed to prevent blacks from attaining economic and educational parity with whites.

Seneca Falls Convention of 1848

irst women's rights convention.[1] It advertised itself as "a convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman".[2][3] Held in Seneca Falls, New York, it spanned two days over July 19-20, 1848. Attracting widespread attention, it was soon followed by other women's rights conventions,

Negroes with Guns (Book)

is a 1962 book by civil rights activist Robert F. Williams.[1][2] has been reprinted many times, most recently in 2013. It details his experience with violent racism and his disagreement with the non-violent wing of the Civil Rights Movement.

Civil Rights Act of 1964

is a landmark civil rights and labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.[5] It prohibits unequal application of voter registration requirements, and racial segregation in schools, employment, and public accommodations. Initially, powers given to enforce the act were weak, but these were supplemented during later years. Congress asserted its authority to legislate under several different parts of the United States Constitution, principally its power to regulate interstate commerce under Article One (section 8), its duty to guarantee all citizens equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment, and its duty to protect voting rights under the Fifteenth Amendment.

Bobby Seale

is an American political activist. He and fellow activist Huey P. Newton co-founded the Black Panther Party Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton were heavily inspired by the teachings of activist Malcolm X, who was assassinated in 1965. The two joined together in October 1966 to create the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which adopted the late activist's slogan "freedom by any means necessary" as their own. Before the Black Panther Party, Seale and Newton created a group known as the Soul Students Advisory Council. The group was organized so to allow it to function through "ultra-democracy," defined as individualism manifesting itself as an aversion to discipline. .

Voting rights Act 1965

landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting.[7][8] It was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the height of the Civil Rights Movement on August 6, 1965, and Congress later amended the Act five times to expand its protections.[7] Designed to enforce the voting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the Act secured the right to vote for racial minorities throughout the country, especially in the South. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the Act is considered to be the most effective piece of federal civil rights legislation ever enacted in the country.[9]

Lifting as we climb

motto of the National Association of Colored Women. It adopted the motto "Lifting as we climb", to demonstrate to "an ignorant and suspicious world that our aims and interests are identical with those of all good aspiring women."

Wilmington Massacre

occurred in Wilmington, North Carolina on November 10, 1898. It is considered a turning point in post-Reconstruction North Carolina politics. The event initiated an era of more severe racial segregation and effective disenfranchisement of African Americans throughout the South, a shift already underway since passage by Mississippi of a new constitution in 1890, raising barriers to voter registration. Laura Edwards wrote in Democracy Betrayed (2000): "What happened in Wilmington became an affirmation of white supremacy not just in that one city, but in the South and in the nation as a whole", as it affirmed that invoking "whiteness" eclipsed the legal citizenship, individual rights, and equal protection under the law of blacks.

SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee)

one of the major American Civil Rights Movement organizations of the 1960s.[1][2] It emerged from the first wave of student sit-ins and formed at a May 1960 meeting organized by Ella Baker at Shaw University. Many unpaid grassroots organizers and activists also worked with SNCC on projects in the Deep South, often becoming targets of racial violence and police brutality. SNCC played a seminal role in the freedom rides, the 1963 March on Washington, Mississippi Freedom Summer, the Selma campaigns, the March Against Fear and other historic events. SNCC may be best known for its community organizing, including voter registration, freedom schools, and localized direct action all over the country, but especially in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

Jo Ann Robinson

organized Women's Political Council in Montgomery to boycott busses in 1955 after Rosa Parks removed from bus. Year long boycott successfully lead to desegregation and to national attention and support for Civil Rights Act 1963

Black Power

political slogan and a name for various associated ideologies aimed at achieving self-determination for people of African descent.[1] It is used primarily, but not exclusively, by African Americans in the United States.[2][3] The Black Power movement was prominent in the late 1960s and early 1970s, emphasizing racial pride and the creation of black political and cultural institutions to nurture and promote black collective interests[4] and advance black values.

Kemet (Ancient Egypt)

popular ancient name for Egypt was "Kemet," which means the "black land."

24th Amendment

prohibits both Congress and the states from conditioning the right to vote in federal elections on payment of a poll tax or other types of tax. The amendment was proposed by Congress to the states on August 27, 1962, and was ratified by the states on January 23, 1964. Southern states of the former Confederate States of America adopted poll taxes in laws of the late 19th century and new constitutions from 1890 to 1908, after the Democratic Party had generally regained control of state legislatures decades after the end of Reconstruction, as a measure to prevent African Americans and often poor whites from voting. Use of the poll taxes by states was held to be constitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in the 1937 decision Breedlove v. Suttles. When the 24th Amendment was ratified in 1964, five states still retained a poll tax: Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas and Virginia. The amendment prohibited requiring a poll tax for voters in federal elections. But it was not until 1966 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections that poll taxes for any level of elections were unconstitutional. It said these violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Berlin Conference

regulated European colonization and trade in Africa during the New Imperialism period and coincided with Germany's sudden emergence as an imperial power. The conference was organized by Otto von Bismarck, first Chancellor of Germany; its outcome, the General Act of the Berlin Conference, can be seen as the formalisation of the Scramble for Africa, although some scholars of history warn against an overemphasis of its role in the colonial partitioning of Africa, drawing attention to bilateral agreements concluded before and after the conference.[2][3] The conference ushered in a period of heightened colonial activity by European powers, which eliminated or overrode most existing forms of African autonomy and self-governance.[4]

Gloria Richardson

s best known as the leader of the Cambridge Movement, a civil rights struggle in the early 1960s in Cambridge, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore. Recognized as a major figure in the Civil Rights Movement at the time, she was one of the signatories to "The Treaty of Cambridge", signed in July 1963 with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and state and local officials after the riot the month before. Richardson was honored with five other women leaders by being seated on the stage at the August 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, but none was allowed to speak to the crowd. Later Richardson married again and moved to New York City, where she worked locally in Harlem on civil rights and economic development.

The Kissing Case

s the arrest, conviction and lengthy sentencing of two young African-American boys that year in Monroe, North Carolina. They were charged with rape, ostensibly for being kissed by a white girl their age on the cheek. Civil rights activists became involved in representing the boys. The boys were arrested on October 1958, separated from their parents for a week, beaten and threatened by investigators, then sentenced by a Juvenile Court judge.[1] Leaders and members of the local NAACP, Eleanor Roosevelt, President Eisenhower, and other civil rights organizations, such as the New-York-based The Committee to Combat Racial Injustice CCRI, protested the charges, trial and sentencing. The United States was embarrassed by protests from other governments, demonstrations in major cities, and strong criticism in the international press. North Carolina Governor Luther H. Hodges finally granted clemency to the boys, releasing them from the reformatory in early 1959 after they had been there for three months.[2] Neither he nor authorities in Monroe ever officially apologized to the boys or their families.

Memphis "Free Speech" (Newspaper)

she bought a third share of the newspaper. The Free Speech and Headlight quickly became the most radical and talked about newspaper in Memphis. In the late 1880s, as the de jure segregation and black male disfranchisement movements hardened racial lines in Memphis, the editors often railed against the loss of black rights. These attacks against white rule did not go unnoticed by city authorities. Wrongly blaming the moderate Nightingale for the attacks, city authorities used an internal church squabble to have him arrested in 1891. Nightingale understood the message and fled the city, leaving Wells and Fleming to express their more radical views on racial issues. Using the columns of the Free Speech, Wells launched her antilynching campaign. In one of her most famous columns, Wells attacked the supposed reason for the lynching of black men, the rape of white women. Suggesting that white women only claimed rape after their illicit affairs with black men had been discovered, she cautioned the lynchers that their activities threatened to sully the reputations of the South's fairer sex. The Free Speech received national attention in 1892 for its coverage of the so-called Curve Riot.

Voting Rights Act of 1965

signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, aimed to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote as guaranteed under the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The Missouri Compromise

the legislation that provided for the admission of Maine to the United States as a free state along with Missouri as a slave state, thus maintaining the balance of power between North and South in the United States Senate. - Southerners objected to any bill which imposed federal restrictions on slavery, believing that slavery was a state issue settled by the Constitution. However, with the Senate evenly split at the opening of the debates, both sections possessing 11 states, the admission of Missouri as a slave state would give the South an advantage. Northern critics including Federalists and Democratic-Republicans objected to the expansion of slavery into the Louisiana Purchase territory on the Constitutional inequalities of the three-fifths rule, which conferred Southern representation in the federal government derived from a states' slave population.

Samuel Chapman Armstrong

the son of Hawaiian missionaries, rose through the Union Army during the American Civil War, to become a General leading units of African American soldiers.[1] He became best known as an American educator, founding and becoming the first principal of the normal school for African-American and later Native American pupils in Virginia which later became Hampton University.[2] He also founded the university's museum, the Hampton University Museum, which is the oldest African-American museum in the country, and the oldest museum in Virginia.

Jean Francois Champollion

was a French scholar, philologist and orientalist, known primarily as the decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs and a founding figure in the field of Egyptology. A child prodigy in philology, he gave his first public paper on the decipherment of Demotic in 1806, and already as a young man held many posts of honor in scientific circles, and spoke Coptic and Arabic fluently. During the early 19th-century French culture experienced a period of 'Egyptomania', brought on by Napoleon's discoveries in Egypt during his campaign there (1798-1801) which also brought to light the trilingual Rosetta Stone.

Marcus Garvey

was a Jamaican-born political leader, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator.[2] He was first President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL).[2][3] He also was President and one of the directors of the Black Star Line, a shipping and passenger line incorporated in Delaware. The Black Star Line went bankrupt and Garvey was imprisoned after a trial that was "probably politically motivated" for mail fraud in the selling of its stock.[4] Even though Garvey's conviction was upheld on appeal, his sentence was commuted in 1927.[5] Advocates of African Redemption have openly sought to have him exonerated since 1987, continuing to the present day.

Cheikh Anta Diop

was a Senegalese historian, anthropologist, physicist, and politician who studied the human race's origins and pre-colonial African culture. Though Diop is sometimes referred to as an Afrocentrist, he predates the concept and thus was not himself an Afrocentric scholar. However, Diopian thought, as it is called, is paradigmatic to Afrocentricity.[2] His work was greatly controversial and throughout his career, Diop argued that there was a shared cultural continuity across African peoples that was more important than the varied development of different ethnic groups shown by differences among languages and cultures over time.

Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)

was a Trinidadian-American prominent socialist organizer in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the global Pan-African movement. Born in Trinidad, he grew up in the United States from the age of 11 and became an activist while attending Howard University. He eventually developed the Black Power movement, first while leading the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), later serving as the "Honorary Prime Minister" of the Black Panther Party (BPP), and lastly as a leader of the All-African People's Revolutionary Party (A-APRP).[1] Carmichael was one of the original SNCC freedom riders of 1961 under Diane Nash's leadership. He became a major voting rights activist in Mississippi and Alabama after being mentored by Ella Baker and Robert Parris Moses. Like most young people in SNCC, he became disillusioned with the two-party system after the 1964 Democratic National Convention failed to recognize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as official delegates from the state. Carmichael chose to develop independent black political organizations, such as the Lowndes County Freedom Organization and, for a time, the national Black Panther Party. Inspired by Malcolm X's example, he articulated a philosophy of "black power", and popularized it both by provocative speeches and more sober writings. Carmichael became one of the most popular and controversial Black leaders of the late 1960s.

Lucretia Mott

was a U.S. Quaker, abolitionist, women's rights activist, and social reformer. She had formed the idea of reforming the position of women in society when she was amongst the women excluded from the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840. In 1848 she was invited by Jane Hunt to a meeting that led to the first meeting about women's rights. Mott helped write the Declaration of Sentiments during the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. Her speaking abilities made her an important abolitionist, feminist, and reformer. When slavery was outlawed in 1865, she advocated giving former slaves who had been bound to slavery laws within the boundaries of the United States, whether male or female, the right to vote. She remained a central figure in the abolition and suffrage movement until her death in 1880.

Browder vs Gayle (1956)

was a case heard before a three-judge panel of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Alabama on Montgomery and Alabama state bus segregation laws. The panel consisted of Middle District of Alabama Judge Frank Minis Johnson, Northern District of Alabama Judge Seybourn Harris Lynne, and Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Rives.[2] On June 5, 1956, the District Court ruled 2-1, with Lynne dissenting, that bus segregation is unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.[3] The state and city appealed, and the decision was summarily affirmed by the United States Supreme Court on November 13, 1956.[4] A motion for clarification and for rehearing was denied on December 17, 1956.

Southern Manifesto

was a document written in February and March 1956, in the United States Congress, in opposition to racial integration of public places.[1] The manifesto was signed by 101 congressmen (99 Southern Democrats and two Republicans) from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.[1] 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. School segregation laws were some of the most enduring and best-known of the Jim Crow laws that characterized the American South and border states at the 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."[4] It suggested that the Tenth Amendment should limit the reach of the Supreme Court on such issues.

Brown V Board of Education

was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that American state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Court's unanimous (9-0) decision stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," and therefore violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. However, the decision's 14 pages did not spell out any sort of method for ending racial segregation in schools, and the Court's second decision in Brown II (349 U.S. 294 (1955)) only ordered states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed". The case originated with a lawsuit filed by the Brown family, a family of black Americans in Topeka, Kansas, after their local public school district refused to enroll their daughter in the school closest to their home, instead requiring her to ride a bus to a blacks-only school further away. A number of other black families joined the lawsuit, and the Supreme Court later combined their case with several other similar lawsuits from other areas of the United States. At trial, the district court ruled in favor of the school board based on the Supreme Court's precedent in the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the Court had ruled that racial segregation was not in itself a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause if the facilities in question were otherwise equal, a doctrine that had come to be known as "separate but equal". The Browns appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case.

Plessy vs Ferguson (1896)

was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court issued in 1896. It upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws for public facilities as long as the segregated facilities were equal in quality - a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal".[3][4] The decision legitimized the many state laws re-establishing racial segregation that had been passed in the American South after the end of the Reconstruction Era (1865-1877). - However, a series of subsequent decisions beginning with the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education—which held that Plessy's "separate but equal" doctrine is unconstitutional

William Monroe Trotter

was a newspaper editor and real estate businessman based in Boston, Massachusetts, and an activist for African-American civil rights. He was an early opponent of the accommodationist race policies of Booker T. Washington, and in 1901 founded the Boston Guardian, an independent African-American newspaper he used to express that opposition. Active in protest movements for civil rights throughout the 1900s and 1910s, he also revealed some of the differences within the African-American community. He contributed to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Montgomery Bus Boycott

was a political and social protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the public transit system of Montgomery, Alabama. It was a seminal event in the civil rights movement. The campaign lasted from December 5, 1955 — the Monday after Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, was arrested for refusing to surrender her seat to a white person — to December 20, 1956, when the federal ruling Browder v. Gayle took effect, and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws that segregated buses were unconstitutional.[1] Many important figures in the civil rights movement took part in the boycott, including Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy.

The Black Panther Party

was a political organization founded by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton in October 1966 in Oakland, California.[1][2] The party was active in the United States from 1966 until 1982, with chapters in numerous major cities, and international chapters operating in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s,[3] and in Algeria from 1969 until 1972.[4] At its inception on October 15, 1966,[5] the Black Panther Party's core practice was its armed citizens' patrols to monitor the behavior of officers of the Oakland Police Department and challenge police brutality in the city. In 1969, community social programs became a core activity of party members.[6]

Emancipation Proclamation

was a presidential proclamation and executive order issued by United States President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863. It changed the federal legal status of more than 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in the designated areas of the South from slave to free. As soon as a slave escaped the control of the Confederate government, by running away or through advances of federal troops, the former slave became free. Ultimately, the rebel surrender liberated and resulted in the proclamation's application to all of the designated former slaves. It did not cover slaves in Union areas that were freed by state action (or three years later by the 13th amendment in December 1865). It was issued as a war measure during the American Civil War, directed to all of the areas in rebellion and all segments of the executive branch (including the Army and Navy) of the United States.

Charles Hamilton Houston

was a prominent African-American lawyer, Dean of Howard University Law School, and NAACP first special counsel, or Litigation Director. A graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School, Houston played a significant role in dismantling Jim Crow laws, especially attacking segregation in schools and racial housing covenants. He earned the title "The Man Who Killed Jim Crow".[2] Houston is also well known for having trained and mentored a generation of black attorneys, including Thurgood Marshall, future director of the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund and appointed as Supreme Court Justice.[3] He recruited young lawyers to work on the NAACP's litigation campaigns, building connections between Howard's and Harvard's university law schools.

Lucy Stone

was a prominent U.S. orator, abolitionist, and suffragist, and a vocal advocate and organizer promoting rights for women.[1] In 1847, Stone became the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree. She spoke out for women's rights and against slavery at a time when women were discouraged and prevented from public speaking. Stone was known for using her birth name after marriage, the custom being for women to take their husband's surname. Stone's organizational activities for the cause of women's rights yielded tangible gains in the difficult political environment of the 19th century She assisted in establishing the Woman's National Loyal League to help pass the Thirteenth Amendment and thereby abolish slavery, after which she helped form the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), which built support for a woman suffrage Constitutional amendment by winning woman suffrage at the state and local levels.

Radio Free Dixie

was a radio program started by Robert F. Williams when he was forced in exile to Cuba from Monroe, North Carolina during the American Civil Rights Movement. It broadcast from 1961 to 1965. It broadcast soul music, news, and commentary from Havana. The program reached the entire continental United States using 50,000 watts at 690 kHz AM, and ran the hour before midnight Eastern time.[1][2] "Radio Free Dixie is proud to present the seldom-heard songs of brutal oppression and dehumanization that no American radio station dares broadcast," an announcer touted. The station played tunes like Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man" and Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddam". Amid the climate of the 1965 Watts riots, Williams used the station to call for assertive action: "In the spirit of 76, in the Spirit of Los Angeles, let our people take to the streets in fierce numbers, and in the cause of freedom and justice, let our battle cry be heard around the world. Freedom! Freedom! Freedom now, or death!"

Huey P Newton

was a revolutionary African-American political activist who, along with Bobby Seale, co-founded the Black Panther Party in 1966. He continued to pursue graduate studies, eventually earning a Ph.D. in social philosophy.[1][2] In 1989 he was murdered in Oakland, California by Tyrone Robinson, a member of the Black Guerrilla Family.

Alice Freeman Palmer Memorial Institute

was a school for upper class African Americans. It was founded in 1902 by Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown at Sedalia, North Carolina near Greensboro. Palmer Memorial Institute was named after Alice Freeman Palmer, former president of Wellesley College and benefector of Dr. Brown. - Palmer Memorial Institute, was a school for upper class African Americans. It was founded in 1902 by Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown at Sedalia, North Carolina near Greensboro.

Black Star Line Steamship Company

was a shipping line incorporated by Marcus Garvey, the organizer of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and other members of the UNIA. The shipping line was created to facilitate the transportation of goods and eventually African Americans throughout the African global economy. It derived its name from the White Star Line, a line whose success Garvey felt he could duplicate.[1] Black Star Line became a key part of Garvey's contribution to the Back-to-Africa movement. It was one among many businesses which the UNIA originated, such as the Universal Printing House, Negro Factories Corporation, and the widely distributed and highly successful Negro World weekly newspaper.

American Woman Suffrage Association

was a single-issue national organization formed in 1869 in Boston.[1] The AWSA lobbied state governments to enact laws granting or expanding women's right to vote in the United States. Its most prominent leader, Lucy Stone, began publishing a newspaper in 1870 called the Woman's Journal. Designed as the voice of the AWSA, it eventually became a voice of the women's movement as a whole. In 1890, the AWSA merged with a rival organization, the National Woman Suffrage Association. The new organization, called the National American Woman Suffrage Association, was initially led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had been the leaders of the NWSA.

Convict Leasing

was a system of penal labor practiced in the Southern United States. Convict leasing provided prisoner labor to private parties, such as plantation owners and corporations (e.g. Tennessee Coal and Iron Company). The lessee was responsible for feeding, clothing, and housing the prisoners. The state of Louisiana leased out convicts as early as 1844,[1] but the system expanded all through the South with the emancipation of slaves at the end of the American Civil War in 1865.

Freedom Summer (1964)

was a volunteer campaign in the United States launched in June 1964 to attempt to register as many African-American voters as possible in Mississippi. Blacks had been cut off from voting since the turn of the century due to barriers to voter registration and other laws. The project also set up dozens of Freedom Schools, Freedom Houses, and community centers in small towns throughout Mississippi to aid the local black population. The project was organized by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a coalition of the Mississippi branches of the four major civil rights organizations (SNCC, CORE, NAACP and SCLC).

Mississippi Freedom Summer Project (MFDP)

was a volunteer campaign in the United States launched in June 1964 to attempt to register as many African-American voters as possible in Mississippi. Blacks had been cut off from voting since the turn of the century due to barriers to voter registration and other laws. The project also set up dozens of Freedom Schools, Freedom Houses, and community centers in small towns throughout Mississippi to aid the local black population. The project was organized by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a coalition of the Mississippi branches of the four major civil rights organizations (SNCC, CORE, NAACP and SCLC). Most of the impetus, leadership, and financing for the Summer Project came from the SNCC. Robert Parris Moses (Bob Moses), SNCC field secretary and co-director of COFO, directed the summer project.[1]

US vs Reese

was a voting rights case in which the United States Supreme Court narrowly construed the 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which provides that suffrage for citizens can not be restricted due to race, color or the individual having previously been a slave.

Civil war (1861-1865)

was a war fought in the United States from 1861 to 1865, between the North and the South.[c] The Civil War is the most studied and written about episode in U.S. history.[16] Primarily as a result of the long-standing controversy over the enslavement of black people, war broke out in April 1861 when secessionist forces attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina shortly after Abraham Lincoln had been inaugurated as the President of the United States. The loyalists of the Union in the North proclaimed support for the Constitution. They faced secessionists of the Confederate States in the South, who advocated for states' rights to uphold slavery.

Negro World Newspaper

was a weekly newspaper, established in 1918 in New York City, that served as the voice of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA), an organization founded by Marcus Garvey and Amy Ashwood in 1914.

Emmett Till

was a young African-American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 at the age of 14, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store. The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Till posthumously became an icon of the Civil Rights Movement.[1

Medgar Evans

was an African American civil rights activist in Mississippi, the state's field secretary for the NAACP, and a World War II veteran, who had served in the United States Army. He worked to overturn segregation at the University of Mississippi, end the segregation of public facilities, and expand opportunities for African Americans, which included the enforcement of voting rights. He was assassinated by Byron de la Beckwith, a white supremacist and Klansman. A college graduate, Evers became active in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s. Following the 1954 ruling of the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, Evers challenged the segregation of the state-supported public University of Mississippi, applying to law school there. He also worked for voting rights, economic opportunity, access to public facilities, and other changes in the segregated society. Evers was awarded the 1963 NAACP Spingarn Medal.

Sojourner Truth

was an African-American abolitionist and women's rights activist. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, Ulster County, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son in 1828, she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man. he speech became widely known during the Civil War by the title "Ain't I a Woman?," a variation of the original speech re-written by someone else using a stereotypical Southern dialect; whereas Sojourner Truth was from New York and grew up speaking Dutch as her first language. During the Civil War, Truth helped recruit black troops for the Union Army; after the war, she tried unsuccessfully to secure land grants from the federal government for former slaves (summarised as the promise of Forty acres and a mule).

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

was an African-American abolitionist, suffragist, poet, teacher, public speaker, and writer. The topics she wrote and spoke about include: "enslavement and abolitionism, human rights and dignity, women's rights and equality, racial and social justice, lynching and mob violence, voting rights, moral character, racial self-help and uplift, and multiracial cooperation for common good."[1] She was active in social reform and was a member of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, which advocated the federal government taking a role in progressive reform. She is considered "the mother of African-American journalism."

Ella Baker

was an African-American civil rights and human rights activist in the United States. She was a largely behind-the-scenes organizer whose career spanned more than five decades. In New York City and the South, she worked alongside some of the most noted civil rights leaders of the 20th century, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King Jr. She also mentored many emerging activists, such as Diane Nash, Stokely Carmichael, Rosa Parks, and Bob Moses, whom she first mentored as leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).[1] Baker criticized professionalized, charismatic leadership; she promoted grassroots organizing, radical democracy, and the ability of the oppressed to understand their worlds and advocate for themselves. She realized this vision most fully in the 1960s as the primary advisor and strategist of the SNCC.

E.D. Nixon

was an African-American civil rights leader and union organizer in Alabama who played a crucial role in organizing the landmark Montgomery Bus Boycott there in 1955. The boycott highlighted the issues of segregation in the South, was upheld for more than a year by black residents, and nearly brought the city-owned bus system to bankruptcy. It ended in December 1956, after the United States Supreme Court ruled in the related case, Browder v. Gayle (1956), that the local and state laws were unconstitutional, and ordered the state to end bus segregation. A longtime organizer and activist, Nixon was president of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Montgomery Welfare League, and the Montgomery Voters League. At the time, Nixon already led the Montgomery branch of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union, known as the Pullman Porters Union, which he had helped organize.

Ida B Wells

was an African-American investigative journalist, educator, and an early leader in the Civil Rights Movement. She was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).[1] She arguably became the most famous black woman in America, during a life that was centered on combating prejudice and violence, who fought for equality for African Americans, especially women.[2] Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi. She was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation during the American Civil War. At the age of 16, she lost both her parents and her infant brother in the 1878 yellow fever epidemic. She went to work and kept the rest of the family intact with the help of her grandmother. Wells moved with some of her siblings to Memphis, Tennessee, where she found better pay as a teacher. Soon she co-owned the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight newspaper.

Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin

was an African-American publisher, journalist, civil rights leader, suffragist, and editor of the Woman's Era, the first national newspaper published by and for African-American women. - Ruffin supported women's suffrage and, in 1869, joined with Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone to form the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) in Boston.[4] A group of these women, Howe and Stone also founded the New England Women's Club in 1868. Josephine Ruffin was its first bi-racial member when she joined in the mid-1890s. Ruffin also wrote for the black weekly paper, The Courant and became a member of the New England Woman's Press Association.

Maggie Lena Walker

was an African-American teacher and businesswoman. Walker was the first American female bank president to charter a bank in the United States.[1] As a leader, she achieved successes with the vision to make tangible improvements in the way of life for African Americans and women. Disabled by paralysis and limited to a wheelchair later in life, Walker also became an example for people with disabilities.

Martin Luther King Jr

was an American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the civil rights movement from 1954 until his assassination in 1968. Born in Atlanta, King is best known for advancing civil rights through nonviolence and civil disobedience, tactics his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi helped inspire. King led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and in 1957 became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). With the SCLC, he led an unsuccessful 1962 struggle against segregation in Albany, Georgia, and helped organize the nonviolent 1963 protests in Birmingham, Alabama. He also helped organize the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. On October 14, 1964, King won the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolent resistance. In 1965, he helped organize the Selma to Montgomery marches. The following year, he and the SCLC took the movement north to Chicago to work on segregated housing.

Malcom X

was an American Muslim minister and human rights activist who was a popular figure during the civil rights movement. He is best known for his controversial advocacy for the rights of blacks; some consider him a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against black Americans, while others accused him of preaching racism and violence. During the civil rights movement, Malcolm X served as the public face of the controversial group for a dozen years, where he advocated for black supremacy, the separation of black and white Americans, and rejected the notion of the civil rights movement for its emphasis on racial integration. He also expressed pride in some of the social achievements he made with the Nation, particularly its free drug rehabilitation program. In the 1950s, Malcolm X endured surveillance from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for the Nation's supposed links to communism.

Rosa Parks

was an American activist in the civil rights movement best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery bus boycott. The United States Congress has called her "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement".[1] On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks rejected bus driver James F. Blake's order to relinquish her seat in the "colored section" to a white passenger, after the whites-only section was filled. Parks was not the first person to resist bus segregation, but the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) believed that she was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws. Parks' prominence in the community and her willingness to become a controversial figure inspired the black community to boycott the Montgomery buses for over a year, the first major direct action campaign of the post-war civil rights movement. Her case became bogged down in the state courts, but the federal Montgomery bus lawsuit Browder v. Gayle succeeded in November 1956.[2][3] Parks' act of defiance and the Montgomery bus boycott became important symbols of the movement. She became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. She organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including Edgar Nixon, president of the local chapter of the NAACP; and Martin Luther King, Jr., a new minister in Montgomery who gained national prominence in the civil rights movement and went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

Dwight D Eisenhower

was an American army general and statesman who served as the 34th president of the United States from 1953 to 1961. Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and sent Army troops to enforce federal court orders that integrated schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. "I propose to use whatever authority exists in the office of the President to end segregation in the District of Columbia, including the Federal Government, and any segregation in the Armed Forces" n 1957, the state of Arkansas refused to honor a federal court order to integrate their public school system stemming from the Brown decision. Eisenhower demanded that Arkansas governor Orval Faubus obey the court order. When Faubus balked, the president placed the Arkansas National Guard under federal control and sent in the 101st Airborne Division. They escorted and protected nine black students' entry to Little Rock Central High School, an all-white public school, for the first time since the Reconstruction Era.[206] Martin Luther King Jr. wrote to Eisenhower to thank him for his actions, writing "The overwhelming majority of southerners, Negro and white, stand firmly behind your resolute action to restore law and order in Little Rock".[207]

Herbert Lee

was an American civil rights activist remembered as a proponent of black voting rights in Mississippi. He was a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Amite County and sought to enfranchise black Americans by encouraging voter registration. In 1961, Lee assisted Bob Moses in his efforts to persuade locals to register. His activities were met with threats of reprisal by the white community, and Lee became one of the movement's earliest victims to white violence: he was murdered by Mississippi state representative E. H. Hurst while delivering cotton near Liberty.

Robert F Williams

was an American civil rights leader and author best known for serving as president of the Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP in the 1950s and into 1961. He succeeded in integrating the local public library and swimming pool in Monroe. At a time of high racial tension and official abuses, Williams promoted armed black self-defense in the United States. In addition, he helped gain support for gubernatorial pardons in 1959 for two young African-American boys who had received lengthy reformatory sentences in what was known as the Kissing Case of 1958. It generated national and international attention and criticism of the state. Williams obtained a charter from the National Rifle Association and set up a rifle club to defend blacks in Jonesboro from Ku Klux Klan or other attackers. The local chapter of the NAACP supported Freedom Riders who traveled to Monroe in the summer of 1961 in a test of integrating interstate buses. In August 1961 he and his wife left the United States for several years to avoid state charges for kidnapping related to actions during violence after the Riders had reached Monroe. Williams' book Negroes with Guns (1962) has been reprinted many times, most recently in 2013. It details his experience with violent racism and his disagreement with the non-violent wing of the Civil Rights Movement.

Booker T Washington

was an American educator, author, orator, and advisor to presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African-American community. Washington was from the last generation of black American leaders born into slavery and became the leading voice of the former slaves and their descendants. They were newly oppressed in the South by disenfranchisement and the Jim Crow discriminatory laws enacted in the post-Reconstruction Southern states in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Washington was a key proponent of African-American businesses and one of the founders of the National Negro Business League. His base was the Tuskegee Institute, a historically black college in Tuskegee, Alabama. As lynchings in the South reached a peak in 1895, Washington gave a speech, known as the "Atlanta compromise", which brought him national fame. He called for black progress through education and entrepreneurship, rather than trying to challenge directly the Jim Crow segregation and the disenfranchisement of black voters in the South.

George Francis train

was an American entrepreneur who organized the clipper ship line that sailed around Cape Horn to San Francisco; he also organized the Union Pacific Railroad and the Credit Mobilier in the United States in 1864 to construct the eastern portion of the Transcontinental Railroad, and a horse tramway company in England while there during the American Civil War. In 1870 Train made the first of three widely publicized trips around the globe. In 1872 he ran for President of the United States as an independent candidate.

Carter G Woodson

was an American historian, author, journalist and the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. He was one of the first scholars to study African-American history. A founder of The Journal of Negro History in 1916, Woodson has been cited as the "father of black history".[2] In February 1926 he launched the celebration of "Negro History Week", the precursor of Black History Month.[3]

John Henrik Clarke

was an American historian, professor, and a pioneer in the creation of Pan-African and Africana studies, and professional institutions in academia starting in the late 1960s. Becoming prominent during the Black Power movement in the 1960s, which began to advocate a kind of black nationalism, Clarke advocated for studies of the African-American experience and the place of Africans in world history. He challenged the views of academic historians and helped shift the way African history was studied and taught. Clarke was "a scholar devoted to redressing what he saw as a systematic and racist suppression and distortion of African history by traditional scholars".

Abraham Lincoln

was an American lawyer and politician who served as the 16th president of the United States from 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln led the nation through the American Civil War, its bloodiest war and its greatest moral, constitutional, and political crisis.[1][2] He preserved the Union, abolished slavery, strengthened the federal government, and modernized the U.S. economy.

Timothy Thomas Fortune

was an American orator, civil rights leader, journalist, writer, editor and publisher. He was the highly influential editor of the nation's leading black newspaper The New York Age and was the leading economist in the black community. He was a long-time adviser to Booker T. Washington and the editor of Washington's first autobiography, The Story of My Life and Work.[1] Fortune's philosophy of militant agitation on behalf of the rights of black people laid one of the foundations of the Civil Rights Movement.

MFDP (Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party)

was an American political party created in 1964 as a branch of the populist Freedom Democratic organization in the state of Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement. It was organized by African Americans and whites from Mississippi to challenge the established power of the Mississippi Democratic Party, which at the time allowed participation only by whites, when African-Americans made up 40% of the state population.

Governor Orval Faubus

was an American politician who served as 36th Governor of Arkansas from 1955 to 1967. In 1957, he refused to comply with a unanimous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, and ordered the Arkansas National Guard to prevent black students from attending Little Rock Central High School. This event became known as the Little Rock Crisis.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

was an American politician, sociologist, and diplomat. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented New York in the United States Senate and served as an adviser to Republican U.S. President Richard Nixon. In 1969, he accepted Nixon's offer to serve as an Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, and he was elevated to the position of Counselor to the President later that year. He left the administration at the end of 1970, and accepted appointment as United States Ambassador to India in 1973. He accepted President Gerald Ford's appointment to the position of United States Ambassador to the United Nations in 1975, holding that position until 1976, when he won election to the Senate.

Endesha Ida Mae Holland

was an American scholar, playwright, and civil rights activist.[2]Upon hearing that members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had come to Greenwood, Holland sought out one of the male members in hopes of soliciting him for prostitution. The man, however, led her directly to the committee's office hoping to convince her to become involved. On witnessing the office operations, Holland found herself deeply impressed by the sight of African-Americans conducting themselves in such a businesslike manner and she began volunteering there.

Susan B Anthony

was an American social reformer and women's rights activist who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. Born into a Quaker family committed to social equality, she collected anti-slavery petitions at the age of 17. In 1856, she became the New York state agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1851, she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who became her lifelong friend and co-worker in social reform activities, primarily in the field of women's rights. In 1866, they initiated the American Equal Rights Association, which campaigned for equal rights for both women and African Americans. In 1868, they began publishing a women's rights newspaper called The Revolution.

Fredrick douglass

was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, gaining note for his oratory[6] and incisive antislavery writings. In his time, he was described by abolitionists as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Douglass also actively supported women's suffrage, and held several public offices. Without his approval, Douglass became the first African American nominated for Vice President of the United States as the running mate and Vice Presidential nominee of Victoria Woodhull, on the Equal Rights Party ticket

WEB Du Bois

was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, writer and editor. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community, and after completing graduate work at the University of Berlin and Harvard, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. Before that, Du Bois had risen to national prominence as the leader of the Niagara Movement, a group of African-American activists who wanted equal rights for blacks. Du Bois and his supporters opposed the Atlanta compromise, an agreement crafted by Booker T. Washington which provided that Southern blacks would work and submit to white political rule, while Southern whites guaranteed that blacks would receive basic educational and economic opportunities. Instead, Du Bois insisted on full civil rights and increased political representation, which he believed would be brought about by the African-American intellectual elite. He referred to this group as the Talented Tenth and believed that African Americans needed the chances for advanced education to develop its leadership.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

was an American suffragist, social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early women's rights movement. Her Declaration of Sentiments, presented at the Seneca Falls Convention held in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, is often credited with initiating the first organized women's rights and women's suffrage movements in the United States.[1][2] Stanton was president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1890 until 1892. Before Stanton narrowed her political focus almost exclusively to women's rights, she was an active abolitionist After the American Civil War, Stanton's commitment to female suffrage caused a schism in the women's rights movement when she, together with Susan B. Anthony, declined to support passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. She opposed giving added legal protection and voting rights to African American men while women, black and white, were denied those same rights. Her position on this issue, together with her thoughts on organized Christianity and women's issues beyond voting rights, led to the formation of two separate women's rights organizations that were finally rejoined, with Stanton as president of the joint organization, about twenty years after her break from the original women's suffrage movement.

Fannie Lou Hamer

was an American voting and women's rights activist, community organizer, and a leader in the civil rights movement. She was the co-founder and vice-chair of the Freedom Democratic Party, which she represented at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Hamer also organized Mississippi's Freedom Summer along with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She was also a co-founder of the National Women's Political Caucus, an organization created to recruit, train, and support women of all races who wish to seek election to government office.[1] Hamer began civil rights activism in 1962, continuing until her health declined nine years later. She was known for her use of spiritual hymnals and quotes and her resilience in leading the civil rights movement for black women in Mississippi. She was extorted, threatened, harassed, shot at, and assaulted by white supremacists and police while trying to register for and exercise her right to vote. She later helped and encouraged thousands of African-Americans in Mississippi to become registered voters, and helped hundreds of disenfranchised people in her area through her work in programs like the Freedom Farm Cooperative.

Atlanta Compromise Speech

was an agreement struck in 1895 between Booker T. Washington, president of the Tuskegee Institute, other African-American leaders, and Southern white leaders.[1][2] It was first supported[citation needed], and later opposed by W. E. B. Du Bois and other African-American leaders. The agreement was that Southern blacks would work and submit to white political rule, while Southern whites guaranteed that blacks would receive basic education and due process in law.[3][4] Blacks would not focus their demands on equality, integration, or justice, and Northern whites would fund black educational charities.

American Equal Rights Association

was formed in 1866 in the United States. According to its constitution, its purpose was "to secure Equal Rights to all American citizens, especially the right of suffrage, irrespective of race, color or sex."[1] Some of the more prominent reform activists of that time were members, including women and men, blacks and whites. The AERA was created by the Eleventh National Women's Rights Convention, which transformed itself into the new organization. Leaders of the women's movement had earlier suggested the creation of a similar equal rights organization through a merger of their movement with the American Anti-Slavery Society, but that organization did not accept their proposal.

Montgomery improvement Association

was formed in the days following the December 1955 arrest of Rosa Parks, to oversee the Montgomery bus boycott. The organization would play a leading role in fighting segregation in the city and produce some of the civil rights movement's most well-known figures.

National Woman Suffrage Association

was formed on May 15, 1869 in New York City [1] The National Association was created in response to a split in the American Equal Rights Association[2] over whether the woman's movement should support the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.[3] Its founders, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, opposed the Fifteenth Amendment unless it included the vote for women.[4] Men were able to join the organization as members; however, women solely controlled the leadership of the group.[5] The NWSA worked to secure women's enfranchisement through a federal constitutional amendment.

March on Washington

was held in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, August 28, 1963. The purpose of the march was to advocate for the civil and economic rights of African Americans. At the march, Martin Luther King Jr., standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech in which he called for an end to racism.[3] The march was organized by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, who built an alliance of civil rights, labor, and religious organizations[4] that came together under the banner of "jobs and freedom."[5] Estimates of the number of participants varied from 200,000 to 300,000;[6] the most widely cited estimate is 250,000 people.[7] Observers estimated that 75-80% of the marchers were black.[8] The march was one of the largest political rallies for human rights in United States history.[5] The march is credited with helping to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964[9][10] and preceded the Selma Voting Rights Movement which led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Alex Manly

was notable as an African-American newspaper owner and editor in Wilmington, North Carolina in the late 19th century.[1] With his brother Frank G. Manly as co-owner, he published the Daily Record (Wilmington, North Carolina), the state's only daily African-American newspaper and possibly the nation's only black-owned daily newspaper. At the time, the port of Wilmington had 10,000 residents and was the state's largest city; its population was majority black, with a rising middle class.

Elizabeth Eckford

was one of the Little Rock Nine, a group of African-American students who, in 1957, were the first black students ever to attend classes at Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The integration came as a result of Brown v. Board of Education. Eckford's public ordeal was captured by press photographers on the morning of September 4, 1957, after she was prevented from entering the school by the Arkansas National Guard. A dramatic snapshot by Johnny Jenkins of the United Press (UP) showed the young girl being followed and threatened by an angry white mob; this and other photos of the day's startling events were circulated around the US and the world by the print press.

Andrew Johnson

was the 17th president of the United States, serving from 1865 to 1869. Johnson assumed the presidency as he was vice president of the United States at the time of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. A Democrat who ran with Lincoln on the National Union ticket, Johnson came to office as the Civil War concluded. He favored quick restoration of the seceded states to the Union. His plans did not give protection to the former slaves; he came into conflict with the Republican-dominated Congress, culminating in his impeachment by the House of Representatives. He was acquitted in the Senate by one vote. Johnson's main accomplishment as president is the Alaska purchase.

Governor George Wallace

was the 45th Governor of Alabama, a position he occupied for four terms, during which he promoted "low-grade industrial development, low taxes, and trade schools".[1] He sought the United States presidency as a Democrat three times, and once as an American Independent Party candidate, unsuccessfully each time. He is best remembered for his staunch segregationist and populist views.[2][3][4] Wallace was known as "the most dangerous racist in America"[5] and notoriously opposed desegregation and supported the policies of "Jim Crow" during the Civil Rights Movement, declaring in his 1963 inaugural address that he stood for "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever".

Partition of Africa (Scramble for Africa)

was the occupation, division, and colonisation of African territory by Western European powers during the period of the New Imperialism, between 1881 and 1914. In 1870, only 10 percent of Africa was under formal European control; by 1914 it had increased to almost 90 percent of the continent, with only Ethiopia (Abyssinia) and Liberia remaining independent. With the Italian occupation of Ethiopia in 1936, only Liberia remained independent. There were multiple motivations for European colonizers, including the quest for national prestige, tensions between pairs of European powers, religious missionary zeal[citation needed] and internal African native politics. The Berlin Conference of 1884, which regulated European colonisation and trade in Africa, is usually referred to as the ultimate point of the Scramble for Africa.[1] Consequent to the political and economic rivalries among the European empires in the last quarter of the 19th century, the partitioning, or splitting up of Africa was how the Europeans avoided warring amongst themselves over Africa.[2] The later years of the 19th century saw the transition from "informal imperialism" by military influence and economic dominance, to direct rule, bringing about colonial imperialism.[3]

The Nadir

was the period in the history of the United States from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 through the early 20th century, when racism in the country was worse than in any other period after the American Civil War. During this period, African Americans lost many civil rights gained during Reconstruction. Anti-black violence, lynchings, segregation, legal racial discrimination, and expressions of white supremacy increased.

White Citizens Council

were an associated network of white supremacist, extreme right[1] organizations in the United States, concentrated in the South. The first was formed on July 11, 1954.[2] After 1956, it was known as the Citizens' Councils of America. With about 60,000 members across the United States,[3] mostly in the South, the groups were founded primarily to oppose racial integration of schools following the US Supreme Court ruling in 1954 that segregated public schools were unconstitutional. They also opposed voter registration efforts in the South, where most blacks had been disenfranchised since the turn of the 20th century, and integration of public facilities during the 1950s and 1960s. Members used intimidation tactics including economic boycotts, firing people from jobs, propaganda, and committing violence against citizens and civil-rights activists.

Black Codes

were laws passed by Southern states in 1865 and 1866 in the United States after the American Civil War with the intent and the effect of restricting African Americans' freedom, and of compelling them to work in a labor economy based on low wages or debt. Black Codes were part of a larger pattern of Southern whites, who were trying to suppress the new freedom of emancipated African-American slaves, the freedmen. Black codes were essentially replacements for slave codes in those states. Before the war in states that prohibited slavery, some Black Codes were also enacted.

Border States

were slave states that did not declare a secession from the Union and did not join the Confederacy. To their north they bordered free states of the Union and to their south they bordered Confederate slave states.