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13th Amendment
Abolishes slavery and allocates power to congress to "enforce the article by appropriate legistlation"; ratified as a result of the Civil War
14th Amendment
"Equal protection under the law": defines rights of citizens; requires African Americans be fully counted in determining apportionment(changes Article I); sets punishment for leaders of confederacy; promises payment for federal debt in civil war.
15th Amendment
Rights to vote regardless or race, color, previous servitude. Civil War Amendment
19th Amendment
Grants Women the right to vote
Americans with Disabilities Act(1990) : antidiscrimination legislation pursued by veterans and other disabled people. Statute defines a disabled person as someone with a physical or mental impairment that limits one or more "life activities", or who has record of such impraiment. Extends protections of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to disabled people. 1999: Supreme Court dramitcally redefines definition of elidgible people for benifits.
affirmative action
Policies designed to give special attention or compensatory treatment to members of a perviously disadvantaged group
Black Codes
Laws denying most legal rights to newly freed slaves; passed by soiuthern states following the Civil War
Brown II
Court ruled that all racially segregated school systems had to be dismantled quickly and appointed federal district court judges were assinged to enforce the ruling
Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
School segergation is inherently unconstitutional because it violates Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection under the law and this was the end of legal segergation in the US
civil rights
Refers to the positive acts governments take to protect individuals against arbitrary or discriminatory treatment byvernmets or invite ba o categories such as race, national origin, age, or sexual orientation
Civil Rights Act of 1964
Legislation passed by Congress to outlaw segregation in public facilities and racial discrimination in employment, education and voting Created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
Civil Rights Cases (1883)
5 cases that came before the Supreme Court in which the court decided that discrimination in a variety of public accommodations, such as a theaters, hotels, and railroads, cound not be prohibited by an act because it was private, and not state, discrimination
Civil War Amendments
13th, which banned slavery. 14th which gaurantees equal protection and due process of the laws to all U.S. citizens and the 15th that guaranteed the right to vote to all citizens regardless of race, color or previous condition of servitude.
de facto discrimination
Racial discrimination that results from practice (such as housing patterns or other social factors) rather than the law. It is unintentional discrimination.
de jure discrimination
Racial segregation that is a direct result of law or official policy. It is state-imposed segregation that had to have been eliminated after Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District (1971).
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
A twenty six year old minister who was selected to lead the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association. He urged Montgomery's African American citizens to continue their protest during the Civil Rights Movement. After a year of bus boycott, the protest was ended and the African Americans were successful. Organized boycotts and other forms of nonviolent protest, including sit-ins at segregated restaurants and bus stations, were to follow. King launched the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957. He organized a series of massive nonviolent demonstrations in Birmingham and the famous march on Washington D.C. He delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech for more than 250,000 people.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 created the Equal Employment Opportunit Commission, which was a federal agency, to monitor and enforce the bans on employment discrimination on the basis of race, creed, national origin, religion, or sex. After the EEOC failed to enforce the law as it applied to sex discrimination, women in 1966 began NOW.
equal protection clause
The fourteenth amendment includes the equal protection clause that guarantees that all citizens receive "equal protection of the laws." It has been used to bar discrimination against blacks and women, particularly in Brown v. Board of Education.
Freedom Riders
Bands of college students and othe civil rights activists who traveled by bus through the South in an effort to force bus stations to desegregate.
grandfather clause
Voting qualification provision that allowed only those whose grandfathers had voted before Reconstruction to vote unless they passed a wealth or literacy test.
Jim Crow laws
anti-black laws in the South creating white-only theaters, schools, transportation
Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund; founded in 1968 (Great Society) to safeguard the legal rights of Latinos in the U.S.
Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955)
A step during the civil rights movement in which Rosa Parks, the local NAACP's Youth Council adviser, decided to challenge the constitutionality of the segregated bus system by refusing to leave her seat on a bus to make room for a while male passenger. Following this action, 35,000 handbills called for African Americans to boycott the bus system on the day of Parks's trial. Despite suffering personal hardship for their actions, the African Americans created the first ever successful nonviolent protest as in 1956, a federal court ruled the segregated bus system as violating the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
The National Assosciation for the Advancement of Colored People, led by Oswald Villard, Jane Addams, and W.E.B. DuBois.
NAACP Legal Defense Fund
A tax-exempt legal defense fund created in 1939 to devise a strategy to build on the Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada case which contested the principle of segregated schools. The fund was headed by Thurgood Marshall who later became the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court.
Plessy v. Fergusson (1896)
Plessy challenged a Louisianna statute requiring that railroads provide separate accomodations for blacks and whites. The Court found that separate but equal accomodations did not violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks, an NAACP employee, challenged the segregated bus system in Montgomery, Alabama. She refused to leave her seat and move to the back to make room for a white male passenger. She was arrested. The city clergy and others got together and called for a bus boycott. Martin Luther King, Jr. was selected to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association and the bus boycott
school bussing
Students would be bussed into different school districts in order for the schools to acieve greater integration.
Launched by Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights movement, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was rooted more closely to the roots of black culture and the south than the NAACP. Considered to be the older faction of the Civil Rights movement.
Seneca Falls Convention
Held in 1848, the convention was a gathering of people who believed that all men and women should be able to enjoy all rights of citizenship equally. Led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, the convention passed resolutions calling for the abolition of legal, economic, and social discrimination against women; interestingly, the call for women's suffrage was not unanimous. Most people who attended this convention were in favor of women's rights and were against slavery.
A form of symbolic speech, sit-ins are peaceful protests that usually involve a large gathering of people who refuse to leave an area until their voices are heard.
Part of the Civil Rights movement, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was considered the more radical Civil Rights group. It focused its activities on young people--both black and white-- and led the crusade to end busing segregation through "freedom rides" where bands of college students would ride buses through the South.
strict scrutiny
suffrage movement
The drive for voting rights for women that took place in the United States from 1890 to 1920 when women got the right to vote by the 19th Amendment.
suspect classification
Category or class, such as races, that triggers the highest standard of scrutiny from the Supreme Court.
Thurgood Marshall
the first african-american to serve as a supreme court justice
Title IX
provision of the educational amendments of 1972 that bars the educational institutions receiving federal funds from discrimination against female students

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