Civil Rights Movement
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99 free Civil Rights Movement trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This civil rights trivia quiz covers the American civil rights movement from Plessy v. Ferguson to the Fair Housing Act in 99 free questions with answers: Brown v. Board of Education, the murder of Emmett Till, Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks and the 381-day Montgomery bus boycott, the Little Rock Nine, the Greensboro sit-ins and the birth of SNCC, the Freedom Rides, James Meredith at Ole Miss, Birmingham and the Children's Crusade, the March on Washington, the Sixteenth Street church bombing, Freedom Summer, Fannie Lou Hamer at the 1964 convention, Selma and the Voting Rights Act, Loving v. Virginia, Thurgood Marshall, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and the assassination of Dr. King. About a third of the questions are the ones taught in school; the rest go deeper into names, dates and details for people who have read the histories. It works as a Black History Month classroom round, a family quiz or a solo test. Every answer has been checked against a reference source, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The 1896 Supreme Court case that established the "separate but equal" doctrine was Plessy v. what?
Ferguson
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.
Q 02Which phrase did Justice John Marshall Harlan use for the Constitution in his lone Plessy dissent?
Color-blind
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.
Q 03Which Chief Justice delivered the unanimous Brown ruling against segregated public schools?
Earl Warren
Earl Warren, California's governor until months before, worked to make the ruling unanimous, believing a divided court would feed Southern resistance.
Q 04Which president desegregated the US armed forces by executive order?
Harry Truman
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.
Q 05What did Mamie Till insist on for Emmett Till's funeral?
An open casket
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.
Q 06After their acquittal, Emmett Till's killers sold their confession to which magazine?
Look
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.
Q 07Nine months before Rosa Parks, which 15-year-old was arrested for refusing to give up her Montgomery bus seat?
Claudette Colvin
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.
Q 08How long did the Montgomery bus boycott last?
About a year
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.
Q 09Which Supreme Court case desegregated the buses and ended the Montgomery boycott?
Browder v. Gayle
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.
Q 10Rosa Parks was secretary of the local chapter of which organisation when she was arrested?
The NAACP
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.
Q 11Which president sent the 101st Airborne to escort the Little Rock Nine into Central High School?
Dwight Eisenhower
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.
Q 12Which of the Little Rock Nine became the first Black graduate of Central High School in 1958?
Ernest Green
Ernest Green was the only senior among the nine, and Martin Luther King Jr. came to Little Rock to watch him collect his diploma.
Q 13The Greensboro sit-in of February 1, 1960 began at the lunch counter of which chain store?
Woolworth's
Q 21The Birmingham march by more than a thousand school students in May 1963 became known as what?
The Children's Crusade
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.
Q 22Which Mississippi civil rights leader was shot dead in his driveway in Jackson on June 12, 1963?
Medgar Evers
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.
Q 23The 1963 March on Washington ended with speeches from the steps of which landmark?
Lincoln Memorial
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.
Q 14SNCC was founded in April 1960 at a conference called by which veteran organiser?
Ella Baker
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.
Q 15Which group organised the first Freedom Ride of May 1961 to test a Supreme Court ruling on interstate travel?
CORE
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.
Q 16In which Alabama town was a Freedom Riders bus firebombed on Mother's Day 1961?
Anniston
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.
Q 17Arrested Freedom Riders in Mississippi were sent to which notorious prison?
Parchman Farm
Parchman Farm officials took away the riders' mattresses as punishment when they would not stop singing freedom songs in the maximum-security wing.
Q 18Who became the first Black student admitted to the University of Mississippi in 1962?
James Meredith
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.
Q 19What was the Birmingham commissioner who turned dogs and fire hoses on young marchers in 1963 known as?
Bull Connor
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.
Q 20On what did Martin Luther King Jr. begin his "Letter from Birmingham Jail"?
The margins of a newspaper
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 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.
Q 24Who was the chief organiser of the March on Washington, working alongside A. Philip Randolph?
Bayard Rustin
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.
Q 25Who was the youngest speaker at the March on Washington?
John Lewis
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".
Q 26Four girls died when Klansmen bombed which Birmingham church in 1963?
16th Street Baptist
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.
Q 27Which Republican presidential nominee voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a senator?
Barry Goldwater
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.
Q 28The civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi in June 1964 were James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and whom?
Michael Schwerner
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.
Q 29Which sharecropper-turned-activist asked 'Is this America?' at the 1964 Democratic convention?
Fannie Lou Hamer
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.
Q 30What compromise did President Johnson's allies offer the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic convention?
Two at-large seats
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.