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13th Amendment
• The senate passed the 13th Amendment by a vote of 38 to 6.
• 13th Amendment was ratified by the states on December 6, 1865.
• The 13th Amendment abolished slavery. -
14th Amendment
• The 14th Amendment addresses citizenship rights and equal protection of the laws, and was proposed in response to issues related to former slaves following the American Civil War.
• The 14th Amendment was ratified during reconstruction era.
• The 14th Amendment also says no state would be allowed to abridge the "privileges and immunities" of citizens. -
15th Amendment
• The House of Representatives passed the 15th Amendment by a vote of 144 to 44.
• Ulysses S. Grant was the President of the United States during the ratification of the 15th Amendment
• The 15th Amendment says the Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. -
Jim Crow
• Jim Crow Laws were established in 1874 through 1975 to separate the white and black races in the American South.
• The Jim Crow Laws was created to be "separate but equal" treatment.
• Still till this day people struggle with racism -
Poll Taxes
• Started in southern states in 1889and though 1910 had the effect of blacks as well as poor whites, because payment of the tax was a prerequisite for voting.
• Many states required payment of the tax at a time separate from the election, and then required voters to bring receipts with them to the polls.
• The laws often included a grandfather clause, which allowed any adult male whose father or grandfather had voted in a specific year prior to the abolition of slavery to vote -
Plessy v Ferguson
• Louisiana law passed in 1890 "providing for separate railway carriages for the white and colored races.
• Duly arrested and imprisoned, Plessy was brought to trial in a New Orleans court and convicted of violating the 1890 law.
• The Court ruled that, while the object of the Fourteenth Amendment was to create "absolute equality of the two races before the law," such equality extended only so far as political and civil rights , not "social rights" -
19th Amendment
19th Amendment: (August 18th, 1920)
• The Nineteenth Amendment was first introduced in Congress in 1878 by Senator Aaron A. Sargent
• Forty-one years later, in 1919, Congress approved the amendment and submitted it to the states for ratification.
• The 19th Amendment is 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. -
Korematsu v. United States:
• The Supreme Court held that the wartime internment of American citizens of Japanese descent was constitutional.
• A 6-3 majority on the Court upheld Korematsu's conviction.
• In Korematsu's case, the Court accepted the U.S. military's argument that the loyalties of some Japanese Americans resided not with the United States. -
Sweatt v. Painter
• Sweatt v. Painter was a U.S. Supreme Court case that successfully challenged the "separate but equal" doctrine of racial segregation established by the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson.
• The case involved a black man, Heman Marion Sweatt, who was refused admission to the School of Law of the University of Texas, whose president was Theophilus Painter, on the grounds that the Texas State Constitution prohibited integrated education
• The Supreme Court reversed the lower c -
Brown v. Board of Education:
• Ended legal segregation in public schools.
• The case that came to be known as Brown v. Board of Education was actually the name given to five separate cases that were heard by the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the issue of segregation in public schools.
• Although Marshall raised a variety of legal issues on appeal, the most common one was that separate school systems for blacks and whites were inherently unequal, and thus violate the "equal protection clau -
Montgomery Bus Boycott
• African Americans refused to ride city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest segregated seating.
• The Bus Boycott lasted till December 20, 1956
• Four days before the boycott began Rosa Parks refused to yield her seat to a white man on the Montgomery bus and she was arrested and fined. -
24th Amendment
• The 24th Amendment is the right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President
• In section two of the 14th Amendment says the Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
• The Property qualifications extend back to colonial days. -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
• This outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sec, or national origin.
• It ended unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities.
• The act was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson -
Voting Right Acts of 1965
Voting Right Acts of 1965: (August 6th, 1965)
• President Johnson the legislation which closely followed the language of the 15th amendment.
• Congress determined that the existing federal anti-discrimination laws were not sufficient to overcome the resistance by state officials to enforcement of the 15th Amendment.
• After the unprovoked attack in Mississippi, the president issued a call for a strong voting rights law and hearing began soon thereafter on the bill that became the Voting Rights -
Robert Kennedy Speech in Indianapolis upon death of MLK
• The first intentions for this gathering were actually a planned campaign for Robert Kennedy.
• As he landed in Indianapolis he was informed that MLK was killed in Memphis and decided to change was he was going to say at this campaign.
• Police advised him that it wasn’t safe to go out but he insisted on going on and told a large gathering of African Americans that evening that MLK was assassinated. -
Reed v. Reed:
• Reed v. Reed was an Equal Protection case in the United States in which the Supreme Court ruled that the administrators of estates cannot be named in a way that discriminates between sexes.
• Before the Supreme Court decided the case, Idaho amended its statutes to eliminate the mandatory preference for males, effective July 1, 1972
• . Classifications based on gender must be substantially related to an important government interest in order to be upheld per the Equal Prote -
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke:
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke:
• Allan Bakke, a thirty-five-year-old white man, had twice applied for admission to the University Of California Medical School at Davis.
• He was rejected both times. The school reserved sixteen places in each entering class of one hundred for "qualified" minorities, as part of the university's affirmative action program, in an effort to redress longstanding, unfair minority exclusions from the medical profession
• Bakke contended, first in the -
Equal Rights Amendment: (March 22, 1979)
Equal Rights Amendment: (March 22, 1979)
• Designed to guarantee equal rights for women.
• Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
• The National Woman's Party already had tested its approach in Wisconsin, where it won the first state ERA in 1921. -
Literacy Tests:
• A literacy test, in the context of American political history from the 1890s to the 1960s, refers to state government practices of administering tests to prospective voters purportedly to test their literacy in order to vote.
• Southern state legislatures employed literacy tests as part of the voter registration process starting in the late 19th century.
• Literacy tests were used to keep people of color and, sometimes, poor whites from voting -
Bowers v. Hardwick:
• Bowers v. Hardwick is a United States Supreme Court decision, overturned in 2003, that upheld, in a 5–4 ruling, the constitutionality of a Georgia sodomy law criminalizing oral and anal sex in private between consenting adults when applied to homosexuals.
• The issue in Bowers involved the right of privacy. Since 1965's Griswold v. Connecticut the Court had held that a right to privacy was implicit in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United S -
Americans with Disabilities Act: (July 26, 1990)
Americans with Disabilities Act: (July 26, 1990)
• The ADA is a wide-ranging civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on disability.
• Unlike the Civil Rights Act, the ADA also requires covered employers to provide reasonable accommodations to employees with disabilities, and imposes accessibility requirements on public accommodations.
• ADA disabilities include both mental and physical medical conditions. -
Affirmative Action:
• Affirmative Action is the policy of favoring members of a disadvantaged group who are perceived to suffer from discrimination within a culture.
• Some countries, such as India, use a quota system, whereby a certain percentage of jobs or school vacancies must be set aside for members of a certain group.
• Affirmative action refers to equal opportunity employment measures that Federal contractors and subcontractors are legally required to adopt. -
Lawrence v. Texas:
Lawrence v. Texas: (2003)
• In the 6–3 ruling the Court struck down the sodomy law in Texas and, by extension, invalidated sodomy laws in 13 other states, making same-sex sexual activity legal in every U.S. state and territory.
• The Court overturned its previous ruling on the same issue in the 1986 case Bowers v. Hardwick, where it upheld a challenged Georgia statute and did not find a constitutional protection of sexual privacy.
• The Court held that intimate consensual sexual conduct was part -
Fisher v. Texas
• In 1997, the Texas legislature enacted a law requiring the University of Texas to admit all high school seniors who ranked in the top ten percent of their high school classes.
• Fisher filed suit against the university and other related defendants, claiming that the University of Texas' use of race as a consideration in admission decisions was in violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and a violation.
• The university argued that its use of -
Indiana Gay rights
• The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago has ordered Indiana to accept the marriage of a same-sex couple in an emergency ruling.
• Niki Quasney, who is battling ovarian cancer, and Amy Sandler were married last year in Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage is legal, but the couple lives in Munster, Indiana.
• The couple asked for the recognition so Sandler's name would be on Quasney's death certificate as her spouse.
