Q 01/05

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

A) Rosa Parks

B) Sojourner Truth

C) Coretta Scott King

D) Harriet Tubman

Answer · why

A) Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus on December 1, 1955, led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a t...

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

Homer Plessy, who was one-eighth Black, deliberately boarded a whites-only train car in New Orleans in 1892 to create the test case.

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, writer and poet, chronicled her young and early years in it, and the 1969 book became a seminal work in American literature.

Q 05/05

In what year did President Abraham Lincoln issue the Emancipation Proclamation?

A) 1861

B) 1870

C) 1865

D) 1863

Answer · why

D) 1863

Lincoln issued the final Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863; it applied only to the ten states still in rebellion and freed no one in the lo...