Background and Introduction

On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation which freed the slaves held in the states still fighting in the Civil War. After the War, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, adopted in 1865, abolished slavery everywhere in the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in 1868, made the former slaves, and any other person born in the United States or naturalized, a citizen and required that all citizens be granted equal protection of the law. The Fifteenth Amendment, adopted in 1879, made it against the law to deny any citizen the right to vote because of his or her race or color or because he or she was formerly a slave.

Despite the promises of these new laws, the former slaves and their descendants, along with other racial and ethnic minorities, did not receive equal treatment under the law. In fact, in 1896, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that State governments could separate people of different races as long as the separate facilities were equal. This "separate but equal" doctrine lasted until 1954 when the Supreme Court overruled its previous decision in cases involving schools in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware. Also in the 1890s, African-Americans were kept from exercising their right to vote by taxes, called "poll taxes", that had to be paid before a person could cast a vote and by tests given by voting registrars who had the power to pass or fail an applicant based on the color of his or her skin. Poll taxes and voting tests were finally outlawed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man who had boarded the bus after she did. At that time, public buses in the South were segregated, and African-Americans not only had to ride in the back of the bus, but also had to give up their seats to any white person who wanted to sit. Ms. Parks was arrested and taken to jail for refusing to give up her seat. On December 5, 1955, African-Americans in Montgomery began a boycott of the public buses led by a minister who had recently come to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The peaceful boycott continued for 381 days during which time 90% of the African-Americans in Montgomery refused to ride the buses. At the end, the buses in Montgomery were desegregated.