Civil Rights
By: Zoe Vega Ponton
Vocabulary:
- Civil Rights - basic rights, privileges and protections which belong to every citizen
- Social Movement - group of people organized to promoted or resist a social change
- Civil disobedience - refusing to obey a law as a way of making the government to change it
- De Jure Segregation - segregation imposed by law
- Desegregation - process of ending segregation
- Boycott - formal nonviolent protest refusing to do something
- Sit-in - nonviolent civil obedience technique employed to desegregate lunch counters and businesses
- Nonviolent Protest - MLK believed nonviolent protesting was the way of getting the word across
- SCLC - after the success of the bus boycotts African American ministers continued to fight segregation by forming the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
- SNCC - student-made group, led the civil rights organization that worked for desegregation through sit-ins, freedom riders and civil disobedience
- CORE - group that organized the sit-ins led by James Farmer
- Little Rock Nine - in 1957 the school board in Little Rock, Arkansas won a court order to admit 9 African American students to Central High, a school with 2,000 white students
- Black Panthers - organization of militant African Americans founded in 1966
- Montgomery Bus Boycott - 1955-1956 protest by African Americans in Montgomery, Alabama against racial segregation in the bus system
- March on Washington - 1963 demostration in which more than 200,000 people rallied for economic equality and civil rights
- Civil rights Act of 1957 - law that established a federal Civil Rights Commission
- Civil Rights Act of 1960 - law established to secure the right to vote of African Americans and to meet problems arising from racial upheavals from the South
- Civil Rights Act of 1964 - outlawed discrimination in public places and employment based on race, religion or national origin
- Voting Rights Act of 1965 - law that banned literacy test and empowered the federal government to oversee voter segregation
- Equal Employment Opportunity Commission - consist of 5 members appointed by the president to establish equal employment opportunity policy under the laws in administers
- Watts Riot - riots in LA which happened due to the police brutality and prejudice
- 24th Amendment - banned poll taxes on elections
- Emmeet Till - 14 y/o African American who was kidnapped and brutaly murdered for whisteling at a white lady
- Rosa Parks - refused to give up her seat on the bus which led to the bus boycotts
- Dr. MLK Jr. - encouraged people to not follow unjust laws, head of the NAACP
- Malcom X - black muslim who argued separation not integration
- James Meredith - first African American to integrate the University of MS
- George Wallace - racist Alabama governor who refused to integrate the schools and businesses in the state
- Stokely Carmichael - coined the saying "black power" and led the SNCC away from a violent approach
- Earl Warren - chairman of Warren commision that was formed to investigate the murder of JFK
- Dwight D. Eishenhowen - personally disagreed with segregation but also believed that protesting wasn't the way of changing segregation laws
- Lyndon B. Johnson - JFK's vice president who signed the 3 biggest civil rights acts of the 1960's