The Civil Rights Movement Study Guide

(Test: Wednesday, April 26th)

  1. The U.S. Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling.
  1. Emmett Till was an African American boy from Chicago, who was murdered at the age of 14 in Mississippi after reportedly whistling at a white woman.
  1. Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus as required by city ordinance.
  1. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a political and social protest campaign in Montgomery, Alabama intended to oppose the city's policy of racial segregation on its public transit system.
  1. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was an organization whose main aim was to advance the cause of civil rights in America but in a non-violent manner.
  1. The Clinton 12 were the first African- American students to desegregate a state-supported high school in the south.
  1. Arkansas Gov. OrvalRubusused National Guard to block nine black students from attending a Little Rock High School.
  1. The Greensboro Four were a group of African American college students that began a sit-ins at a lunch counter in a Greensboro, North Carolina, restaurant where black patrons are not served.
  1. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) a U.S. civil-rights organization formed by students and active especially during the 1960s, whose aim was to achieve political and economic equality for blacks through local and regional action groups.
  1. “Freedom Riders” were a group of people, both black and white, who were civil rights activists from the North who “meant to demonstrate that segregated travel on interstate buses.
  1. The Children's Crusade was a march by hundreds of school students in Birmingham during the Civil Rights Movement's Birmingham campaign whose was to walk downtown to talk to the mayor about segregation in their city.
  1. Eugene "Bull" Connor was the Birmingham public safety commissioner whose ideologies and orders were in direct opposition to the Civil Rights Movement.
  1. Malcolm X was a prominent civil rights leader and Muslim minister who quickly became the national voice for the Black Nationalist Nation of Islam.
  1. James Meredithwas an Air Force veteran and civil rights activist who became the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi.
  1. George Wallace stood in the doorway at the University of Alabama in an attempt to prevent African American students from attending.
  1. March on Washington was a political demonstration held inWashington, D.C., in 1963 by civil rights leaders to protest racial discrimination and to show support for major civil rights legislation that was pending in Congress.
  1. The Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16thStreet Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four girls.
  1. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a law that outlawed unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public.
  1. Freedom Summer was a nonviolent effort by civil rights activists to integrate Mississippi's segregated political system during 1964.
  1. "Bloody Sunday" refers to civil rights march that was supposed to go from Selma to the capitol in Montgomery.
  1. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed unfair voting practices that had been responsible for the widespread disenfranchisement of African Americans in the United States.
  1. Watts Riotswas a large-scale riot which lasted 6 days in Los Angeles, California, as a reaction to the perceived record of police brutality by the LAPD.
  1. The Black Pantherswas an African-American revolutionary left-wing organization working for the self-defense for black people.
  1. Thurgood Marshall became the first African American Supreme Court Judge.
  1. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tennessee.