美国民权运动

Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. Enacted by white Democrat-dominated state legislatures after the Reconstruction period, in the late 19th century, the laws were enforced until 1965. In practice, Jim Crow laws mandated racial segregation in all public facilities in the states of the former Confederate States of America, starting in the 1870s and 1880s, and were upheld in 1896, by the U.S. Supreme Court's "separate but equal" legal doctrine for African Americans. Moreover, public education had essentially been segregated since its establishment in most of the South, after the Civil War (1861–65). Facilities for African Americans were consistently inferior and underfunded, compared to the facilities for white Americans; sometimes there were no black facilities. As a body of law, Jim Crow institutionalized economic, educational, and social disadvantages for African Americans.
American Civil War &
Civil Rights Movement
Brief Introduction
Brief Introduction
The civil rights movement (also known as the African-American civil rights movement, American civil rights movement and other terms) was a decades-long movement with the goal of securing legal rights for African Americans that other Americans already held. With roots starting in the Reconstruction era during the late 19th century, the movement resulted in the largest legislative impacts after the direct actions and grassroots protests organized from the mid-1950s until 1968. Encompassing strategies, various groups, and organized social movements to accomplish the goals of ending legalized racial segregation and discrimination in the United States, the movement, using major nonviolent campaigns, eventually secured new recognition in federal law and federal protection of all Americans.
Main Events
1954
Brown v. Board of Education (1954), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. The decision effectively overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which allowed state-sponsored segregation, insofar as it applied to public education.

Plessy v. Ferguson On June 7,1892, Plessy bought a first-class ticket and boarded a whites only car in New Orleans, Louisiana. The railroad company had been previously informed of Plessy’s racial lineage, and the intent to challenge the law. After Plessy took a seat in the whites-only railway car, he was asked to vacate it and sit instead in the blacks only car. Plessy refused and was arrested immediately by the detective. He was charged with violating the 1890 Separate Car Act that separated rated railroad passengers by race. 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". This 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).
Characteristics of the post-Reconstruction period:
Racial segregation. By law, public facilities and government services such as education were divided into separate "white" and "colored" domains. Disenfranchisement. When white Democrats regained power, they passed laws that made voter registration more restrictive, essentially forcing black voters off the voting rolls. The number of African-American voters dropped dramatically, and they were no longer able to elect representatives. Exploitation. Increased economic oppression of blacks through the convict lease system, Latinos, and Asians, denial of economic opportunities, and widespread employment discrimination. Violence. Individual, police, paramilitary, organizational, and mob racial violence against blacks.
Background
Before the American Civil War, almost four million blacks were enslaved in the South, only white men of property could vote, and the Naturalization Act of 1790 limited U.S. citizenship to whites only.Following the Civil War, three constitutional amendments were passed, including the 13th Amendment (1865) that ended slavery; the 14th Amendment (1868) that gave African-Americans citizenship, adding their total population of four million to the official population of southern states for Congressional apportionment; and the 15th Amendment (1870) that gave African-American males the right to vote (only males could vote in the U.S. at the time) From 1865 to 1877, the United States underwent a turbulent Reconstruction Era trying to establish free labor and civil rights of freedmen in the South after the end of slavery. Many whites resisted the social changes, leading to insurgent movements such as the Ku Klux Klan, whose members attacked black and white Republicans to maintain white supremacy.
1955
The 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 a federal ruling took effect, and led to a United States Supreme Court decision that declared the Alabama and Montgomery laws that segregated buses were unconstitutional. The United States Congress has called Rosa "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement“.