Social Justice
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50 free Social Justice trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Social justice is the idea that a fair society shares its rights and opportunities with everyone, and its history is a long run of people who refused to wait. A bus passenger kept her seat, a schoolgirl kept writing, a group of students sat down at a lunch counter and would not get up. This quiz covers the movements a class or a quiz night would expect: the campaign against slavery, votes for women, the American civil rights era, workers' rights, gay rights, disability rights and Indigenous protest, along with the landmark court rulings and the thinkers who gave the cause its vocabulary. The questions travel well beyond one country. It works for teachers planning a lesson or an awareness day, for students revising, and for anyone who likes history told through its turning points. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches you something.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which European country did not let women vote in national elections until a referendum in 1971?
Switzerland
Switzerland gave women the federal vote in February 1971, after its male voters approved the change. One canton, Appenzell Innerrhoden, kept women out of local votes until a court forced its hand in 1990.
Q 02What everyday commodity did Mahatma Gandhi lead a 240-mile march to make in 1930, defying British tax law?
Salt
Salt was a British monopoly in colonial India, so gathering it from the shore was a crime. Gandhi's walk to the coast at Dandi took 24 days and set off a wave of civil disobedience.
Q 03Which country in June 2018 became the last in the world to lift a legal ban on women driving?
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia ended the ban on 24 June 2018, following a royal order from King Salman. Several of the women who had campaigned for the change were in detention on the day it took effect.
Q 04Off the coast of Cape Town, where did Nelson Mandela spend 18 of his 27 years as a prisoner?
Robben Island
Robben Island takes its name from the Dutch word for seals, and it had earlier been used as a leper colony. Two later South African presidents were also held there.
Q 05Which Montgomery seamstress was arrested in December 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger?
Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks was not the first to refuse: a 15-year-old student had been arrested on a city bus earlier that year. Her case was the one that set off a boycott lasting 381 days.
Q 06From the steps of which Washington landmark did Martin Luther King Jr. address over 250,000 marchers in August 1963?
Lincoln Memorial
The Lincoln Memorial crowd heard King leave his prepared text: the best-known passage of the speech was improvised, after singer Mahalia Jackson urged him on from her seat behind him.
Q 07Which country, then a British colony, became the first in the world to give all women the vote in 1893?
New Zealand
New Zealand passed the law after years of petitions organized by Kate Sheppard, and women voted that November. They could not stand for parliament themselves until 1919.
Q 08Which Mafia-owned bar in Greenwich Village was raided by police in June 1969, sparking days of riots?
Stonewall Inn
The Stonewall Inn raid broke the usual pattern: nobody had tipped off the owners, and the crowd fought back. The first Gay Pride marches in the United States marked its anniversary a year later.
Q 09Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, founded a Kenyan movement that paid rural women to do what?
Plant trees
Plant trees, and they did: her Green Belt Movement has put more than 51 million in the ground since 1977. Maathai was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Q 10Which famous author and lecturer, a Socialist Party member from 1909, helped found the ACLU in 1920?
Helen Keller
Helen Keller is remembered for learning to communicate without sight or hearing, but as an adult she campaigned for labor rights, women's suffrage and world peace.
Q 11Which lawyer won Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and later became the first Black Supreme Court justice?
Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall won 29 of the 32 civil rights cases he argued before the Supreme Court. Lyndon Johnson appointed him to its bench in 1967.
Q 12Which six-year-old needed federal marshals to enter William Frantz Elementary in New Orleans in November 1960?
Ruby Bridges
Ruby Bridges was taught alone for more than a year, because only one teacher, Barbara Henry from Boston, agreed to have her in class. Norman Rockwell painted her walk to school in 1964.
Q 13Which state's ban on interracial marriage did Richard and Mildred Loving overturn at the Supreme Court in 1967?
Virginia
Q 21Which New York town hosted the first women's rights convention, planned by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and local Quakers?
Seneca Falls
Seneca Falls drew about 300 people in 1848. One hundred of them, 68 women and 32 men, signed the meeting's Declaration of Sentiments.
Q 22Which suffragist was arrested in Rochester for voting in the 1872 presidential election and fined $100?
Susan B. Anthony
Susan B. Anthony told the judge she would never pay. He declined to jail her for it, a move that stopped her from taking the case to the Supreme Court.
Q 23Which Manchester-born campaigner founded the militant Women's Social and Political Union in 1903?
Emmeline Pankhurst
Virginia police had raided the couple's home before dawn in 1958, and a judge suspended their jail term only if they left the state for 25 years. The ruling in their favor was unanimous.
Q 14From which Alabama city did about 600 voting rights marchers set out on Bloody Sunday in March 1965?
Selma
Selma's marchers were attacked by state troopers with batons and tear gas as they left for the state capital, 54 miles away. The outcry helped pass the Voting Rights Act that year.
Q 15At which store chain's lunch counter in Greensboro did four Black students begin a sit-in in February 1960?
Woolworth's
Woolworth's ended segregation in its Southern stores after protests that ran from February to July. The Greensboro branch is now the International Civil Rights Center and Museum.
Q 16In which state capital did soldiers of the 101st Airborne escort nine Black students into Central High School in 1957?
Little Rock
Little Rock's nine students had first been kept out by the Arkansas governor, Orval Faubus. President Eisenhower sent in the army and took the state's National Guard out of the governor's control.
Q 17Which Underground Railroad guide, born into slavery in Maryland, led a Civil War raid that freed over 700 people?
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman had already made some 13 trips back to the South, guiding about 70 people to freedom. She was known as Moses, and she said she never lost a passenger.
Q 18Which abolitionist escaped slavery in Baltimore disguised as a sailor and later published the North Star newspaper?
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass traveled north carrying papers borrowed from a free Black seaman. His first autobiography, published seven years later, became a bestseller.
Q 19Which US holiday marks the day in 1865 when a Union general in Galveston ordered slavery ended in Texas?
Juneteenth
Juneteenth blends the words June and nineteenth, the date of the general's order. Congress made it a federal holiday in 2021.
Q 20Which civil rights organization, formed in 1909, publishes The Crisis, a magazine first edited by W. E. B. Du Bois?
NAACP
The NAACP is the oldest and largest civil rights group in the United States. Du Bois edited its magazine for the first 24 years.
Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters were sent to prison again and again for the union's protests. Jailed suffragettes staged hunger strikes, and the authorities force-fed many of them.
Q 24Which English horse race did suffragette Emily Davison disrupt in 1913 by walking in front of King George V's horse?
Epsom Derby
The Epsom Derby collision killed her: Davison died four days later of a fractured skull. She had hidden overnight in the Palace of Westminster three times, once on the night of the 1911 census.
Q 25Which state became the 36th and final one needed to ratify the amendment giving American women the vote in 1920?
Tennessee
Tennessee's vote turned on Harry Burn, the youngest member of its legislature. He switched sides with a letter from his mother in his coat pocket, urging him to back the amendment.
Q 26Which 1972 US law against sex discrimination in federally funded schools is best known for its effect on college sports?
Title IX
Title IX never mentions sports: its text bars sex discrimination in any education program that takes federal money. It was later renamed in honor of Representative Patsy Mink.
Q 27For which broadcaster did 11-year-old Malala Yousafzai write an anonymous blog about life under the Taliban in Swat?
BBC
The BBC ran her diary on its Urdu service under the pseudonym Gul Makai. In 2012 a Taliban gunman shot her on a bus, and at 17 she won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Q 28Which activist began the Me Too movement in 2006, more than a decade before the phrase became a viral hashtag?
Tarana Burke
Tarana Burke started it as a youth program to tackle sexual violence in her community. Actor Alyssa Milano's 2017 tweet turned the two words into a worldwide hashtag.
Q 29In which Nordic country did about 90 percent of women refuse to work, cook or mind children for a day in 1975?
Iceland
Iceland's organizers called it a day off, because women could be fired for striking but not for taking leave. Five years later the country chose the world's first democratically elected woman president.
Q 30Which African country elected the world's first national parliament with a female majority in 2008?
Rwanda
Rwanda sets aside 24 of the 80 seats in its Chamber of Deputies for women. In 2008 women also won enough of the openly contested seats to pass the halfway mark.