Q 01/05

Who refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, sparking a Civil Rights milestone?

A) Rosa Parks

B) Dorothy Height

C) Coretta Scott King

D) Daisy Bates

Answer · why

A) Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks later insisted she had not been physically tired that day: 'the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.' Her arrest on December 1, 1955, ...

Q 02/05

What was the name of the clandestine network of routes and safe houses used by enslaved African Americans to escape to free states and Canada?

A) The Freedom Trail

B) The Liberty Line

C) The Underground Railroad

D) The Emancipation Express

Answer · why

C) The Underground Railroad

Its 'conductors' included Harriet Tubman, and the railway jargon of stations, agents and passengers was a code that dated to the 1830s.

Q 03/05

Which 1896 Supreme Court case established the 'separate but equal' precedent?

A) Dred Scott v. Sandford

B) Gibbons v. Ogden

C) Plessy v. Ferguson

D) Miranda v. Arizona

Answer · why

C) Plessy v. Ferguson

Plessy v. Ferguson began as a planned test case: Homer Plessy, who was one-eighth Black, deliberately boarded a whites-only train car in 1892 so that ...

Q 04/05

Who authored the influential autobiography 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'?

A) Maya Angelou

B) Alice Walker

C) Toni Morrison

D) Zora Neale Hurston

Answer · why

A) Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou's 1969 memoir of her childhood made her name; in 1993 she recited her poem 'On the Pulse of Morning' at Bill Clinton's presidential inaug...

Q 05/05

Which 1863 Lincoln document declared enslaved people in rebelling states free?

A) Gettysburg Address

B) Emancipation Proclamation

C) Thirteenth Amendment

D) Homestead Act

Answer · why

B) Emancipation Proclamation

The Emancipation Proclamation applied only to the ten states still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, so it freed no one in the loyal border states.