Civil Rights Vocab. Flashcards
Civil Rights
The rights of an individual to political, social and legal equality
Abolitionism
The movement to end slavery
Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka
The court ruled in favor of desegregating all public-funded schools to comply with the 14th Amendment
Freedom Rides
White and black people got on buses and rode into the South to oppose segregation, were asphyxiated and firebombed
Voting Rights Act 1965
Effectively enforced the 15th Amendment and removed all the voting registry exams, 60% of blacks were voting as a result
Apartheid
A system of institutionalized racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s
The Great Migration
Was a movement of many rural southern African Americans to northern cities, beginning a transition to the urban centers that would continue through much of the 20th century.
Peonage
The use of laborers bound in servitude because of debt
Lynching
Illegal killing (usually hanging) of (usually black) people, was instigated largely by rape accusations.
Emmitt Till
A young boy who catcalled a white woman and was lynched as a result, a picture of the brutality was put in the magazine The Jet, which was on Rosa Parks’ mind when she didn’t give up her seat
Enforcement Act of 1870
An act passed by Congress to ban the use of terror, force, or bribery to prevent people from voting because of their race
Ku Klux Klan (KKK)
White supremacy organization that intimidated blacks out of their newly found liberties
Dick Rowland
An African American teenage shoeshiner whose arrest was the impetus for the Tulsa Race Massacre
Red Scare
The fear that communists were working to destroy American security.
Reconstruction
The period after the Civil War in the United States when the southern states were reorganized and reintegrated into the Union
Ballot Stuffing
filling polls with extra illegal votes to sway the vote
literacy tests and poll taxes
Ways that the government tried to prevent African-American men from voting.
Grandfather Clause
A black voter could only vote if his grandfather was a freedman before 1865
Jim Crow Laws
Once Reconstruction ended in the North and troops were removed, attention returned to maintaining white supremacy, and these were passed to effectively keep segregation legal, name is based off of a dumb comic character, did actually guarantee equal rights but these were never practiced
Abraham Lincoln
16th President of the United States saved the Union during the Civil War and emancipated the slaves; was assassinated by Booth (1809-1865)
New Deal Programs
President FDR’s federal relief programs during the Great Depression
Civil Rights Movement
Aimed to secure the civil rights of all peoples through changes in the law or in the way the law is interpreted, also incorporated gaining the support of the federal government
