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The Scottsboro Boys were nine Black teenagers wrongly accused of raping two white women on a train in Alabama in 1931, leading to highly publicized, racially charged trials that exposed systemic racism and denied them fair legal processes, becoming a significant symbol of racial injustice in the U.S. legal system.
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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483, was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court which ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, even if the segregated facilities are equal in quality.
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In August 1955, a 14-year-old Black boy allegedly flirted with a white woman in a grocery store in Money, Mississippi. Emmett Till, a teen from Chicago, didn't understand that he had broken the unwritten laws of the Jim Crow South until three days later, when two white men dragged him from his bed in the dead of night, beat him brutally and then shot him in the head.
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The Montgomery bus boycott was a political and social protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the public transit system of Montgomery, Alabama. It was a foundational event in the civil rights movement in the United States.
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The Little Rock Nine were nine African American students who courageously integrated Little Rock Central High School in 1957, becoming pivotal figures in the American Civil Rights Movement by facing extreme hostility, mobs, and armed resistance to challenge school segregation
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Ruby Bridges desegregated William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans on November 14, 1960, becoming one of the first Black children in the South to attend an all-white elementary school, a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement against segregation.
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The "Letter from Birmingham Jail", also known as the "Letter from Birmingham City Jail" and "The Negro Is Your Brother", is an open letter written on April 16, 1963, by Martin Luther King Jr.
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The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 2, 1964, making it illegal to discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, ending segregation in public places, and banning employment discrimination, a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement.
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Malcolm X was an African American revolutionary and human rights activist who founded Muslim Mosque, Inc. and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. He was also a prominent figure during the civil rights movement until his assassination in 1965.
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Martin Luther King Jr. was an American civil rights activist and Baptist minister who was a leader of the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968.