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Four young girls, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins, attending Sunday school were killed when a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a popular location for civil rights meetings. Riots erupted in Birmingham, Ala., leading to the deaths of two more black youth.
#BlackLivesMatter: the birth of a new civil rights movement
President Lyndon Johnson issued Executive Order 11246 to enforce affirmative action for the first time because he believed asserting civil rights laws were not enough to remedy discrimination. It required government contractors to "take affirmative action" toward prospective minority employees in all aspects of hiring and employment. This represented the first time "affirmative action" entered the federal contracting lexicon and sought to ensure equality of employment. (Presidential Executive Order 11375 extends this language to include women on October 13, 1968.)
The Selma to Montgomery marches, which included Bloody Sunday, were actually three marches that marked the political and emotional peak of the American civil rights movement.
Civil Rights Movement: An Overview | Scholastic
The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery. However, Southern states managed to revive slavery era codes creating unattainable prerequisites for blacks to live, work or participate in society. The following year, the First Civil Rights Act invalidated these "Black Codes," conferring the "rights of citizenship" on all black people.
Civil Rights Movement | Black History & Culture | PBS
An important constitutional issue that has caused publiccontroversy is whether, and to what degree, public and privateinstitutions may use "affirmative action" or "reversediscrimination" to help members of minority groups obtain betteremployment or schooling. In the 1978 Bakke case, the Supreme Courtheld that it was unconstitutional for the University of CaliforniaMedical School at Davis to set an absolute quota for the admission ofminority candidates, but the Court approved a Harvard University planthat took race into account for the setting of numerical goals thatwere not disguised quotas. The Court later ruled that racialpreferences by a private corporation designed to remedy priordiscrimination did not violate the Civil Rights Act, and it upheld afederal statute that requires a certain percentage of governmentcontracts to be given to minority-owned businesses.
The Birmingham Campaign | Civil Rights Movement | …
The Mississippi Freedom Summer Project was organized in 1964 by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a coalition of four civil rights organizations: the Student NonViolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE); the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The project was to carry out a unified voter registration program in the state of Mississippi. Both COFO and the Summer Project were the result of the "Sit-In" and "Freedom Ride" movements of 1960 and 1961, and of SNCC's earlier efforts to organize voter registration drives throughout Mississippi.
Civil Rights Movement - US History
Civil rights for blacks became a major national political issue inthe 1950s. The first federal civil rights law since theReconstruction period was enacted in 1957. It called for theestablishment of a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights andauthorized the U.S. attorney general to enforce voting rights. In1960 this legislation was strengthened, and in 1964 a moresweeping civil rights bill outlawed racial discrimination in publicaccommodations and by employers, unions, and voting registrars.Deciding that normal judicial procedures were too slow in assuringminority registration and voting, Congress passed a voting rightsbill in 1965. The law suspended (and amendments later banned) useof literacy or other voter-qualification tests that had sometimesserved to keep blacks off voting lists, authorized appointment offederal voting examiners in areas not meeting certainvoter-participation requirements, and provided for federal courtsuits to bar discriminatory poll taxes, which were ended by a SupremeCourt decision and the 24th Amendment (ratified in 1964). Inthe aftermath of the assassination of the civil rights leader MartinLuther King, Jr., Congress in 1968 prohibited racialdiscrimination in federally financed housing, but later effortsto strengthen the law failed.