AP®︎ US History: Topic 8.6 Flashcards

State and local laws enforcing racial segregation and Black political and economic subordination, especially in the South

De jure segregation was imposed by law; de facto segregation resulted from customs, private discrimination, housing patterns, and economic practices

Constitutional guarantee that states provide equal protection of the laws; the principal basis for legal challenges to state-enforced segregation

Black press campaign during World War II demanding victory over fascism abroad and racism at home

Black labor leader whose threatened 1941 March on Washington pressured Roosevelt to prohibit discrimination in defense employment

Roosevelt’s 1941 order banning racial discrimination in defense industries and creating the Fair Employment Practice Committee

President who elevated civil rights nationally, created a civil rights committee, barred discrimination in federal employment, and ordered military desegregation

Truman’s 1948 order prohibiting racial discrimination in the federal civilian workforce

Truman’s 1948 order requiring equal treatment and opportunity in the armed forces, leading to gradual military desegregation

Segregationist southern Democrats who opposed the 1948 Democratic civil rights plank and nominated Strom Thurmond for president

Civil rights organization that used carefully selected lawsuits to make the Equal Protection Clause effective against state-enforced segregation

1896 ruling permitting state-enforced racial separation when facilities were supposedly equal; the main constitutional obstacle attacked by the NAACP.

NAACP lawyer who developed the incremental strategy of challenging unequal segregated facilities and building precedents against segregation

NAACP attorney who led the legal campaign against school segregation and argued Brown before the Supreme Court

1944 Supreme Court decision invalidating the white primary used to exclude Black voters from decisive southern elections

1946 Supreme Court decision striking down state-required segregation on interstate buses as a burden on interstate commerce

1948 Supreme Court decision holding that courts could not enforce racially restrictive housing covenants

1950 ruling requiring the University of Texas Law School to admit Heman Sweatt because its separate Black law school was unequal in tangible and intangible qualities

1950 ruling that Oklahoma could not admit George McLaurin to graduate school while isolating him from white students

Unanimous 1954 decision declaring state-mandated public-school segregation unconstitutional because separate educational facilities are inherently unequal

Chief justice who wrote Brown’s unanimous opinion and worked to prevent a dissent that could encourage resistance

1954 companion to Brown that invalidated school segregation in Washington, D.C., where the Fourteenth Amendment did not directly apply

1955 decision directing federal district courts to oversee school desegregation “with all deliberate speed,” language that permitted extensive delay

Organized southern campaign to obstruct school desegregation through delay, token plans, school closings, private academies, economic pressure, and violence

1956 declaration by 101 southern members of Congress condemning Brown and pledging resistance to school desegregation

White supremacist organizations that used economic retaliation, including firings, denied loans, and business boycotts, against civil rights activists

1957 confrontation in which nine Black students entered Central High School under federal military protection after Arkansas resisted integration

Arkansas governor who used the National Guard to block the Little Rock Nine from entering Central High School

President who federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent the 101st Airborne Division to enforce integration at Little Rock

1958 unanimous ruling that state officials were bound by the Supreme Court’s constitutional interpretation and could not nullify Brown

First federal civil rights law since Reconstruction; created the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and authorized voting-rights injunctions

Law requiring preservation of voting records and allowing federal court-appointed referees to assist qualified citizens denied registration

Fourteen-year-old Black Chicagoan whose brutal 1955 murder in Mississippi and his killers’ acquittal exposed the violence sustaining Jim Crow

Emmett Till’s mother, whose decision to hold an open-casket funeral publicized the brutality of her son’s murder

Experienced NAACP activist whose December 1955 refusal to surrender her bus seat triggered the Montgomery Bus Boycott

381-day nonviolent boycott that combined grassroots organizing, economic pressure, and litigation and ended with Montgomery’s buses desegregated

Women’s Political Council leader who rapidly circulated notices launching the Montgomery bus boycott and helped organize it

Organization created to direct the Montgomery Bus Boycott, with Martin Luther King Jr. selected as its president

Federal case holding Alabama’s bus-segregation laws unconstitutional, leading to the desegregation of Montgomery’s buses in 1956

Montgomery leader who became the leading national advocate of disciplined nonviolent resistance grounded in Christianity, democratic ideals, and Gandhian methods

Disciplined boycotts, demonstrations, and civil disobedience that disrupted injustice, exposed repression, and created pressure for government action

Organization founded by King and other ministers in 1957 to use Black churches to coordinate, train, and publicize southern civil rights campaigns

Civil rights organization founded in 1942 that applied Gandhian nonviolent methods to racial discrimination

CORE-led 1947 interracial bus trip through the upper South testing the ruling against segregation in interstate travel

1960 protest begun by four Black college students at a whites-only Woolworth lunch counter that spread to other cities

Student-led civil rights organization formed in 1960 out of the expanding sit-in movement, marking a new phase of nonviolent direct action

Committee established by Truman in 1946 that recommended stronger federal protection of civil rights

The committee’s 1947 report calling for voting protections, fair employment, an end to lynching and poll taxes, and desegregation

Reconstruction amendment prohibiting racial discrimination in voting, a promise civil rights activists sought to enforce

Black women’s organization whose leader Jo Ann Robinson helped launch and organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott