DEI Trivia: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
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98 free DEI Trivia: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
42 free DEI Trivia: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion questions with answers. Forty questions on diversity, equity and inclusion, put together for workplace DEI events, classrooms and quiz nights. The set is factual and neutral. It runs through the landmark American laws and court cases, from the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act to Brown v. Board, Loving v. Virginia, Title IX, the Americans with Disabilities Act and Obergefell. It also covers the people who broke barriers, including Thurgood Marshall, Sandra Day O'Connor, Sonia Sotomayor, Jackie Robinson, Sally Ride, Katherine Johnson, Kamala Harris and Barack Obama, plus activists such as Rosa Parks, Harvey Milk, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Judith Heumann, Marsha P. Johnson and Malala. A final stretch covers heritage months and key terms like intersectionality, microaggression and neurodiversity. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the laws, people and observances involved, and the sentence that establishes it is shown under each explanation.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the 1964 US law outlawing discrimination by race, colour, religion, sex and national origin called?
The Civil Rights Act
The Civil Rights Act: in 2020 the Supreme Court ruled that its ban on sex discrimination at work also covers firing someone for sexual orientation or gender identity.
Q 02Televised beatings of marchers in which Alabama city helped push the Voting Rights Act through Congress?
Selma
Selma: on 'Bloody Sunday' in 1965, state troopers attacked marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the national outcry hastened the bill's passage.
Q 03Which 1896 Supreme Court case established 'separate but equal'?
Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy v. Ferguson: in 1892 Homer Plessy deliberately sat in a whites-only train car in New Orleans to test Louisiana's segregation law, and was arrested.
Q 04In 1967, which ban did the Supreme Court strike down in the Loving case?
Interracial marriage
Interracial marriage: the Lovings had been sentenced to a year in prison, suspended if they left Virginia for 25 years, so they moved to Washington, D.C.
Q 05Which US president signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law?
George H. W. Bush
George H. W. Bush: signing it in 1990, he declared, 'Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down.'
Q 06Which tennis star beat Bobby Riggs in 1973's 'Battle of the Sexes' match?
Billie Jean King
Billie Jean King, then 29, beat him while campaigning for equal prize money for women, and she also helped found the Women's Tennis Association.
Q 07Title IX, the 1972 law against sex discrimination in education, became best known for opening up what to girls?
Sports
Sports: the law never mentions them, but it covers any federally funded education program, and athletics count as one.
Q 08The 1969 uprising seen as the start of the modern LGBTQ rights movement broke out at which New York bar?
The Stonewall Inn
The Stonewall Inn riots marked a new beginning for gay rights in the United States; the first Pride marches, a year later, marked their anniversary.
Q 09Juneteenth, made a US federal holiday in 2021, commemorates the end of what?
Slavery
Juneteenth marks 19 June 1865, when Union troops in Galveston, Texas, announced the end of slavery there, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
Q 10Who was the first woman to serve as a US Supreme Court justice?
Sandra Day O'Connor
Sandra Day O'Connor joined the Court in 1981, about three decades after law firms had turned the Stanford Law graduate away because she was a woman.
Q 11Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the first woman of which faith on the Supreme Court?
Jewish
Jewish: before joining the Court in 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg had argued six sex-discrimination cases before it as an ACLU lawyer and won five.
Q 12Who was the first African American justice on the US Supreme Court, appointed in 1967?
Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall, who as NAACP counsel had argued and won Brown v. Board of Education, was appointed by President Johnson in 1967 and served until 1991.
Q 13Which Bronx-raised future Supreme Court justice helped end baseball's 1994-95 strike with an injunction?
Sonia Sotomayor
Q 21Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta co-founded a union to fight for the rights of which group?
Farm workers
Farm workers: their union joined the 1965 Delano grape strike, and a nationwide boycott of grapes finally won union contracts from growers in 1970.
Q 22Labor activist Dolores Huerta is credited with coining which rallying cry?
Sí se puede
Sí se puede: Huerta is credited with coining it, and when Obama gave her the Medal of Freedom he joked that he had stolen her slogan.
Q 23Judith Heumann, 'Mother of the Disability Rights Movement', helped lead which 1977 protest?
504 Sit-in
504 Sit-in: protesters held a federal building for weeks until the Section 504 rules were signed, and the Black Panther Party brought them hot meals.
Sonia Sotomayor, then a district judge, ruled against the team owners, and when Obama nominated her in 2009 he said 'some say that Judge Sotomayor saved baseball.'
Q 14Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's colour line on April 15, 1947, starting at first base for which team?
The Brooklyn Dodgers
The Brooklyn Dodgers started Robinson at first base that day; his number 42 is now retired across all of baseball.
Q 15Sally Ride made history in 1983 by becoming the first American woman to do what?
Fly in space
Fly in space: both of her missions flew aboard the shuttle Challenger, and after it exploded in 1986 she served on the commission investigating the disaster.
Q 16In 2021 Kamala Harris became the first woman, first African American and first Asian American to hold which office?
Vice President
Vice President: when Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 race, Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, but she lost to Donald Trump.
Q 17Barack Obama signed the 2010 repeal of which policy that kept gay troops from serving openly?
Don't Ask, Don't Tell
Don't Ask, Don't Tell: signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1993, it let gay troops serve only if they hid it, and thousands were discharged before its repeal took effect in 2011.
Q 18Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician celebrated in the film Hidden Figures, calculated what for Project Mercury?
Spaceflight trajectories
Spaceflight trajectories: she worked out Alan Shepard's in 1961, and before orbiting Earth John Glenn insisted she check the computer's numbers by hand.
Q 19Rosa Parks sparked the 1955 Montgomery boycott by refusing to do what?
Give up her bus seat
Give up her bus seat: Parks refused in December 1955, nine months after 15-year-old Claudette Colvin was arrested for the same act in Montgomery.
Q 20In which city was Harvey Milk, an early openly gay US official, elected in 1977?
San Francisco
Harvey Milk won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in November 1977 and was assassinated at City Hall in November 1978.
Q 24New York activist Marsha P. Johnson was a leading early advocate for which group in particular?
Transgender individuals
Transgender individuals: in 1970 she and Sylvia Rivera founded STAR, whose first shelter for homeless trans youth was an unused trailer truck.
Q 25Malala Yousafzai became the youngest ever recipient of which honour in 2014?
The Nobel Peace Prize
The Nobel Peace Prize: Malala won it at 17, two years after a Taliban gunman shot her on her school bus for campaigning for girls' education.
Q 26Who coined the concept of 'intersectionality' in 1989?
Kimberlé Crenshaw
Kimberlé Crenshaw coined it in a 1989 paper on cases like one where a court wouldn't let Black women sue General Motors as both Black and female.
Q 27Psychiatrist Chester Pierce, who coined 'microaggression' in 1970, advised which children's TV show?
Sesame Street
Sesame Street: Mississippi's public TV commission voted to keep it off the air over its integrated cast, then reversed after the vote made national news.
Q 28Which president desegregated the US armed forces by executive order in 1948?
Harry Truman
Harry Truman: the military resisted his 1948 order, and almost all of the armed forces were integrated only by the end of the Korean War.
Q 29Who became the first Black woman elected to the US Congress, in 1968?
Shirley Chisholm
Shirley Chisholm won New York's 12th district in November 1968, becoming the first Black woman in Congress; in 1972 she sought the Democratic presidential nomination.
Q 30Which US president first officially recognised Black History Month, in 1976?
Gerald Ford
Gerald Ford: it grew from Carter G. Woodson's 1926 Negro History Week, set in February when Black communities already marked Lincoln's and Frederick Douglass's birthdays.