99 Fun Facts About Civil Rights Movement

The 1896 Supreme Court case that established the "separate but equal" doctrine was Plessy v. what?

Ferguson was John H. Ferguson, the Louisiana judge who first ruled against Homer Plessy, whose arrest a citizens' committee had arranged to test the state's separate railway-car law.

Which phrase did Justice John Marshall Harlan use for the Constitution in his lone Plessy dissent?

Color-blind was the word of a former Kentucky slaveholder who had once opposed emancipation; Harlan warned the ruling would prove as pernicious as the Dred Scott decision.

Which Chief Justice delivered the unanimous Brown ruling against segregated public schools?

Earl Warren, California's governor until months before, worked to make the ruling unanimous, believing a divided court would feed Southern resistance.

Which president desegregated the US armed forces by executive order?

Harry Truman signed the order in 1948 after learning how a South Carolina police chief had blinded Sergeant Isaac Woodard hours after his Army discharge.

What did Mamie Till insist on for Emmett Till's funeral?

An open casket let thousands of mourners see what the killers had done to her son, and Jet magazine printed photographs that spread the outrage across the country.

After their acquittal, Emmett Till's killers sold their confession to which magazine?

Look ran their story in January 1956: shielded by double jeopardy, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam told journalist William Bradford Huie how they had killed Till.

Nine months before Rosa Parks, which 15-year-old was arrested for refusing to give up her Montgomery bus seat?

Claudette Colvin said she felt Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth pushing her down into the seat; movement leaders judged the teenager the wrong symbol for a test case.

How long did the Montgomery bus boycott last?

About a year: boycotters rode in a carpool system with volunteer drivers and dispatchers, set up after the city moved to penalise Black taxi drivers charging them the ten-cent bus fare.

Which Supreme Court case desegregated the buses and ended the Montgomery boycott?

Browder v. Gayle was brought by other Black women who had been mistreated on the city's buses; attorney Fred Gray deliberately left Rosa Parks out of the federal suit.

Rosa Parks was secretary of the local chapter of which organisation when she was arrested?

The NAACP's Montgomery chapter made Parks its secretary in 1943; in that role she investigated the 1944 gang rape of Recy Taylor, a decade before her own arrest.

Which president sent the 101st Airborne to escort the Little Rock Nine into Central High School?

Dwight Eisenhower acted after Governor Orval Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to bar the students; a year later Faubus closed all of Little Rock's high schools.

Which of the Little Rock Nine became the first Black graduate of Central High School in 1958?

Ernest Green was the only senior among the nine, and Martin Luther King Jr. came to Little Rock to watch him collect his diploma.

The Greensboro sit-in of February 1, 1960 began at the lunch counter of which chain store?

Woolworth's gave way that July: after months of sit-ins the Greensboro store quietly integrated its lunch counter, and its own Black employees were the first to be served.

SNCC was founded in April 1960 at a conference called by which veteran organiser?

Ella Baker, then an SCLC official, encouraged the students at Shaw University to stay independent of King's group, then left the SCLC herself to advise SNCC.

Which group organised the first Freedom Ride of May 1961 to test a Supreme Court ruling on interstate travel?

CORE had tried the idea in 1947 with its Journey of Reconciliation; when mob violence led director James Farmer to call off the 1961 ride, Nashville students carried on.

In which Alabama town was a Freedom Riders bus firebombed on Mother's Day 1961?

Anniston's mob chased the Greyhound out of town and firebombed it when its slashed tyres gave out; photographs of the burning bus were printed around the world.

Arrested Freedom Riders in Mississippi were sent to which notorious prison?

Parchman Farm officials took away the riders' mattresses as punishment when they would not stop singing freedom songs in the maximum-security wing.

Who became the first Black student admitted to the University of Mississippi in 1962?

James Meredith's arrival set off a campus riot that left two men dead; in 1966 a sniper wounded him on the second day of his solitary March Against Fear.

What was the Birmingham commissioner who turned dogs and fire hoses on young marchers in 1963 known as?

Bull Connor, born Theophilus Eugene Connor, had just lost a run for mayor and was refusing to leave office; pictures of his dogs and hoses brought a Kennedy negotiator to Birmingham.

On what did Martin Luther King Jr. begin his "Letter from Birmingham Jail"?

The margins of a newspaper held his first lines, and that paper carried the eight white clergymen's criticism he was answering; he finished on pads his lawyers were later allowed to leave.

The Birmingham march by more than a thousand school students in May 1963 became known as what?

The Children's Crusade was James Bevel's idea for keeping the campaign alive: students had no jobs to lose, the fear that kept many of their parents from risking arrest.

Which Mississippi civil rights leader was shot dead in his driveway in Jackson on June 12, 1963?

Medgar Evers was shot hours after President Kennedy's televised civil rights address; his killer, freed when two all-white juries deadlocked, was finally convicted in 1994.

The 1963 March on Washington ended with speeches from the steps of which landmark?

The Lincoln Memorial heard a partly improvised finale: King set aside his prepared text and turned to a dream passage he had used in earlier speeches.

Who was the chief organiser of the March on Washington, working alongside A. Philip Randolph?

Bayard Rustin built the march in under two months, but because he was gay and a former Communist, Roy Wilkins would not have him at its head, so Randolph took the title of director.

Who was the youngest speaker at the March on Washington?

John Lewis, the 23-year-old chairman of SNCC, agreed shortly before speaking to cut lines from his draft, including a threat to march through Dixie "the way Sherman did".

Four girls died when Klansmen bombed which Birmingham church in 1963?

16th Street Baptist Church had been the starting point for many of that spring's protest marches; the last of the Klansmen convicted of the bombing was not found guilty until 2002.

Which Republican presidential nominee voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a senator?

Barry Goldwater voted against ending the Southern filibuster and against the Act itself; that November he lost in a landslide, winning only Arizona and five Deep South states.

The civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi in June 1964 were James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and whom?

Michael Schwerner and his two colleagues were jailed for speeding by a deputy sheriff, who released them after dark and then joined the Klansmen chasing their car.

Which sharecropper-turned-activist asked 'Is this America?' at the 1964 Democratic convention?

Fannie Lou Hamer's televised testimony so worried President Johnson that he called a sudden press conference to pull the networks away; they aired her words that evening anyway.

What compromise did President Johnson's allies offer the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic convention?

Two at-large seats was the offer, and the party refused it; its delegates then borrowed passes and sat in the seats Mississippi's all-white delegation had walked out of.

In 1964 Martin Luther King Jr., 35, became the youngest man to win which award?

The Nobel Peace Prize came with about $54,000, and King kept none of it, sharing the money among civil rights groups.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born with what first name?

Michael King was five when his father, a pastor just back from a 1934 Baptist congress in Berlin, began using the name Martin Luther King for himself and his son.

Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21, 1965 at which New York venue?

The Audubon Ballroom was hosting a rally of his new Organization of Afro-American Unity; two of the three men convicted of the killing were exonerated in 2021.

What did Malcolm X say the "X" in his name replaced?

His slave-master surname was Little, which he wrote a white owner had imposed on his forebears; the X stood for the African family name he could never know.

The Selma marchers attacked by state troopers on March 7, 1965 were crossing what?

The Edmund Pettus Bridge carries the name of a Confederate general who became Grand Dragon of Alabama's Ku Klux Klan; troopers beat and tear-gassed the marchers there on "Bloody Sunday".

Which governor refused to protect the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers in 1965?

George Wallace had declared there would be no march; under federal guard the marchers walked the 54 miles to Montgomery, where leaders who tried to hand him a petition were rebuffed.

Whose death after being shot by a state trooper in Marion, Alabama, sparked the Selma marches?

Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old church deacon, was shot after he tried to shield his mother from a trooper's club; the trooper pleaded guilty to manslaughter 45 years later.

Which movement anthem did President Johnson quote to Congress?

We Shall Overcome, the marchers' own song, came from a Texan president on live television eight days after Bloody Sunday; two days later he sent Congress the voting rights bill.

The 24th Amendment of 1964 outlawed which barrier to voting in federal elections?

The poll tax was still charged in five states when the amendment was ratified; it covered only federal elections, so the Supreme Court finished the job for state elections two years later.

The Lovings, whose 1967 case ended interracial marriage bans, were from which state?

Virginia's local sheriff woke the couple in their bed at night, five weeks after their Washington wedding; a judge suspended their jail term if they left the state for 25 years.

Who became the first African American justice of the Supreme Court in 1967?

Thurgood Marshall already knew the court well: as a civil rights lawyer he had argued 32 cases there and won 29 of them, including Brown v. Board of Education.

The Black Panther Party was founded in October 1966 in which city?

Oakland was where Huey Newton and Bobby Seale met as college students; their first armed patrols trailed police cars, and free breakfasts for schoolchildren came later.

Which official called the Black Panthers "the greatest threat to the internal security" of the US?

J. Edgar Hoover's FBI ran a covert programme, COINTELPRO, to weaken the party, and it even worked to undermine the Panthers' free breakfasts for schoolchildren.

Whom had Martin Luther King Jr. come to Memphis to support when he was killed in April 1968?

Striking sanitation workers had walked out after two colleagues were crushed to death by a malfunctioning garbage truck; they marched with signs reading "I Am a Man".

Where in Memphis was Martin Luther King Jr. standing when he was shot?

The Lorraine Motel balcony was just outside King's own room; in 1991 the motel was turned into the National Civil Rights Museum.

Which law did President Johnson sign a week after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination?

The Fair Housing Act had stalled in the House until King's murder; President Johnson urged Congress to pass it as a tribute, and he signed it the day after the House vote.

Six-year-old Ruby Bridges integrated William Frantz Elementary in which city in November 1960?

New Orleans parents pulled their children out of her class, so for a year Ruby was taught alone by Barbara Henry, the one teacher who agreed to take her.

Who succeeded Martin Luther King Jr. as president of the SCLC in 1968?

Ralph Abernathy, King's closest friend, took over the SCLC and weeks later led its Poor People's Campaign to Washington.

What name was given to the 1964 drive that brought hundreds of student volunteers to Mississippi to register Black voters?

Freedom Summer volunteers, most of them white Northern students, trained on an Ohio college campus; a week after the first group arrived there, three of the project's workers went missing in Mississippi.

Which toys did psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark use in the race studies cited in Brown v. Board of Education?

Dolls identical except for skin and hair colour were offered to Black children, who showed a clear preference for the white one; the ruling cites the study in its 11th footnote.

With what was Martin Luther King Jr. stabbed in the chest at a Harlem book signing in 1958?

A letter opener's tip came to rest against his aorta, and a surgeon told him afterwards that a single sneeze would have killed him.

Which gospel star sang shortly before Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington, then urged him on mid-speech?

Mahalia Jackson is credited with calling out from behind him to tell the crowd about the dream, moments before King set aside his prepared text for the famous passage.

Which soul star wrote A Change Is Gonna Come after being turned away from a whites-only Louisiana motel?

Sam Cooke was arrested for disturbing the peace in Shreveport that night in 1963; the city's mayor apologised to his family in 2019 and awarded him its key.

What work did Rosa Parks do at the Montgomery Fair department store at the time of her 1955 arrest?

Seamstress Rosa Parks knew the driver: twelve years earlier the same man had ordered her off his bus after she boarded at the front, and she had avoided riding with him since.

Where were the 1968 Olympics at which sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised gloved fists on the medal podium?

Mexico City's crowd booed them and both were suspended from the US team; the Australian silver medallist beside them wore their human-rights badge, and they carried his coffin in 2006.

Which state lost the 1993 Super Bowl after its voters rejected a paid Martin Luther King Jr. holiday?

Arizona voters turned the holiday down in 1990, so the NFL moved the game to Pasadena; they approved it at a 1992 referendum, and the Super Bowl came to Tempe in 1996.

Which Motown star's 1980 song Happy Birthday campaigned for a national holiday honouring Martin Luther King Jr.?

Stevie Wonder also hosted a 1981 rally for the cause; six million people signed a petition to Congress, and President Reagan signed the holiday into law in 1983.

Martin Luther King Jr. spent five weeks in 1959 touring which country to study nonviolent resistance?

India was where Gandhi had led the campaigns King took as his model; he told reporters he came as a pilgrim, and in Delhi he discussed nonviolence with Prime Minister Nehru.

The segregation laws of the American South were nicknamed after which blackface stage character of the 1830s?

Jim Crow was a song and dance that white performer Thomas D. Rice toured in blackface from 1828; within a decade the name had become a slur, and it later stuck to the laws.

Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's colour line in April 1947 as a first baseman for which team?

Brooklyn Dodgers executive Branch Rickey had scouted the Negro leagues for the right man; fifty years on, baseball retired Robinson's number 42 across every team.

Emmett Till, the 14-year-old murdered in Mississippi in 1955, was visiting relatives from which northern city?

Chicago was where he was born and raised; an all-white, all-male Mississippi jury took just 67 minutes to acquit the two men tried for his murder.

Which Arkansas governor used the National Guard to keep nine Black students out of Little Rock Central High in 1957?

Orval Faubus answered the students' eventual admission by shutting Little Rock's high schools for the whole 1958–59 school year, a shutdown remembered as the Lost Year.

Which voter-registration hurdle, long used to turn away Black Southerners, did the Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlaw?

Literacy tests were suspended wherever under half of adults were registered or had voted in 1964, and federal examiners could be sent in to register voters themselves.

The 1963 March on Washington was officially a march for freedom and which other demand?

Jobs came first in the official title, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom; its demands included a public works programme and a $2-an-hour national minimum wage.

Which escaped convict, arrested at London's Heathrow Airport in 1968, pleaded guilty to killing Martin Luther King Jr.?

James Earl Ray had broken out of a Missouri prison a year earlier, hidden in a bread truck; he recanted his confession three days after giving it and never won the trial he then sought.

A 1964 pilgrimage to which holy city led Malcolm X to embrace Sunni Islam and rethink his views on race?

Mecca brought him among Muslims of every colour mixing as equals, which he said showed him that Islam could bridge racial division; he came home as el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born in which Southern city, where his tomb stands beside his family's church?

Atlanta keeps his boyhood home, the church where he and his father preached and his tomb together in a single national historical park.

Which illustrator painted Ruby Bridges's walk to school in the 1964 work The Problem We All Live With?

Norman Rockwell cropped her four marshals at the shoulders so that only the six-year-old is seen whole; in 2011 the canvas hung outside the Oval Office at her suggestion.

Which traditional wedding vow did Coretta Scott have removed when she married Martin Luther King Jr. in 1953?

To obey her husband was a promise she would not make, unusual for the time; King's father performed the ceremony on the lawn of her mother's house.

Which activist made Black Power a national rallying cry at a 1966 rally in Greenwood, Mississippi?

Stokely Carmichael had been arrested on the march that day and spoke after his release; the phrase itself is credited to novelist Richard Wright, who used it as a 1954 book title.

Which Merritt College student co-founded the Black Panther Party with Bobby Seale in 1966?

Huey Newton said he learned to read as a young man by studying Plato's Republic; in 1980 he completed a doctorate in social philosophy.

Which Nation of Islam leader did Malcolm X publicly break with in March 1964, a year before his assassination?

Elijah Muhammad had led the Nation since the 1930s and had barred Malcolm X from public speaking for 90 days over his remarks on President Kennedy's assassination.

Which journalist co-wrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X from interviews held between 1963 and 1965?

Alex Haley finished the book after the assassination, adding an epilogue on Malcolm X's last days; it was his first book, and Roots followed eleven years later.

Which novelist wrote the 1963 book The Fire Next Time, addressed in part to his 14-year-old nephew?

James Baldwin took the title from a spiritual about Noah's flood; the book's longer second essay weighs the Christian church of his youth against the Nation of Islam.

Which singer and pianist called Mississippi Goddam, released on a 1964 Carnegie Hall album, her first civil rights song?

Nina Simone composed it in less than an hour, in fury at the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, and several Southern states banned the record.

Which entertainer raised $50,000 to bail protesters out of jail during the 1963 Birmingham campaign?

Harry Belafonte also bailed King himself out of the Birmingham jail and quietly supported King's family, since the preacher earned only about $8,000 a year.

Who became the first Black woman elected to Congress in 1968 and sought the presidency four years later?

Shirley Chisholm, the daughter of immigrants, spent years of her childhood with her grandmother in Barbados and ran day-care centres before entering politics.

Which Southern senator spoke for more than 24 hours in 1957 in a bid to block a civil rights bill?

Strom Thurmond opened by reading out the election laws of all 48 states; Congress passed the bill anyway, and he stayed in the Senate until he was 100.

Which Los Angeles neighbourhood saw six days of rioting in August 1965 after a traffic stop turned violent?

Watts erupted five days after the Voting Rights Act was signed; 34 people died and nearly 14,000 National Guard troops were sent in.

Martin Luther King Jr. enrolled aged 15 at which historically Black institution, where his father had also studied?

Morehouse College had just begun admitting high-school juniors who passed its entrance exam, so King started in 1944 without finishing twelfth grade; his grandfather had studied there too.

Which of the Little Rock Nine walked alone past a screaming mob in a famous photograph from September 1957?

Elizabeth Eckford, 15, had no telephone at home, so she never heard that the meeting place had changed and reached the school on her own by public bus.

In 2005 Rosa Parks became the first woman to lie in honour in which Washington building?

The US Capitol rotunda drew some 40,000 mourners over two days, and Congress then voted to place her statue in the building's National Statuary Hall.

Robert F. Kennedy broke the news of Martin Luther King Jr.'s death to a campaign rally crowd in which city?

Indianapolis stayed calm that night while riots broke out in more than a hundred other cities, which is credited in part to the short speech he gave from the back of a flatbed truck.

Which secret FBI programme, exposed by a 1971 office burglary, targeted Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Panthers?

COINTELPRO stayed hidden until activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, on the night of an Ali–Frazier fight and passed the stolen files to the press.

Which protected category did Howard W. Smith, a fierce opponent of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, add to the bill?

Sex was added on the House floor at the last minute; historians debate whether he meant to sink the bill or widen it, but the amendment survived into law.

Which triple gold medallist of the 1960 Rome Olympics refused to attend her own segregated homecoming parade?

Wilma Rudolph, who had lost strength in one leg to childhood polio, got her way: the parade became the first integrated event her Tennessee hometown had ever held.

Which northern city saw years of protests after a federal judge ordered its schools desegregated by busing in 1974?

Boston's schools stayed under court control until 1988; Judge Arthur Garrity found the school committee had bused Black pupils past white schools with empty seats.

Linda Brown's father sued the school board of which Kansas city in the case that ended legal school segregation?

Topeka made third-grader Linda Brown ride a bus to a Black school a mile away although a white school stood seven blocks from her house; twelve other local families joined the suit.

Which white volunteer from Detroit was shot dead by Klansmen while driving Selma marchers in March 1965?

Viola Liuzzo, a mother of five, was killed by men a state court failed to convict of murder; a federal jury then found them guilty under an 1871 anti-Klan law, with an FBI informant testifying.

Which Birmingham minister survived a Christmas 1956 dynamite attack and invited Martin Luther King Jr. to the city?

Fred Shuttlesworth escaped unhurt when sixteen sticks of dynamite went off beneath his bedroom window, and the city's airport has carried his name since 2008.

Which Tennessee sit-in leader kept the 1961 Freedom Rides going by recruiting new riders after the first were beaten?

Diane Nash had a year earlier asked her city's mayor on the steps of city hall whether discriminating by race was wrong, and he publicly admitted that it was.

ABC interrupted its premiere of which Second World War film to show troopers beating Selma marchers in March 1965?

Judgment at Nuremberg dramatises the trial of German judges who served the Nazi state, so viewers cut from that story to footage of Alabama troopers clubbing peaceful marchers.

What name was given to the protest camp the Poor People's Campaign built on Washington's National Mall in 1968?

Resurrection City housed about 3,000 people for six weeks; days of rain left standing water inches deep, and its name was settled only two days before the marchers arrived.

Which 1956 declaration, signed by 101 members of Congress, pledged to resist the ruling against segregated schools?

Southern Manifesto signers were 19 senators and 82 representatives; just three senators from the old Confederacy held out, among them Senate leader Lyndon Johnson.

Which organiser of the March on Washington led the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years from 1957?

Dorothy Height was a chief organiser of the 1963 march yet was not called on to speak at it; she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994.

Which Georgia restaurateur, who met Black customers with a pickaxe handle in 1964, was elected governor two years later?

Lester Maddox closed his fried-chicken restaurant rather than serve Black diners as the new Civil Rights Act required, and the publicity helped carry him into the governor's office.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail answered a statement, A Call for Unity, signed by eight of whom?

White clergymen from Alabama had agreed that injustice existed but argued it should be fought only in the courts, not the streets; King's reply defended breaking unjust laws openly.

What carried Martin Luther King Jr.'s coffin in procession through the streets after his 1968 funeral?

A mule-drawn wagon, a plain wooden farm cart pulled by two mules named Belle and Ada, took him from his family's church to an outdoor service at his old college.

Which publisher of the Arkansas State Press guided the nine Black students through the 1957 Little Rock school crisis?

Daisy Bates paid for it: white advertisers boycotted the weekly she co-published over its support for desegregation, and its last issue appeared in October 1959.