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| Bloody Sunday |
March 7, 1965, the day on which American civil rights activists, led by John Lewis and others, marched onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama and were beaten and tear-gassed by waiting police officers and deputies on the other side. |
| Civil Rights Movement |
a movement in the United States particularly prominent during the 1950s and 1960s that sought to end racial discrimination, legal segregation of blacks and whites, and racial barriers to voting. The movement was led by black leaders such as Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis, and James Farmer. It mobilized tens of thousands of African Americans in protest against existing laws and practices. Activists, both black and white, endured harassment and violence from the police and others as the movement progressed. Eventually, the American civil rights movement brought about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and other measures. [1/2 definitions] |
| Eleanor Roosevelt |
civil rights activist, diplomat, and First Lady to President Franklin Roosevelt from 1933 to 1945; born Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (b.1884--d.1962). |
| Freedom Ride |
any of the bus trips taken by civil rights activists in the 1960s which served to highlight and challenge racial discrimination in the U.S. |
| Freedom Rider |
any of the American civil rights activists who participated in the Freedom Rides, which highlighted and challenged racial discrimination in the United States in the early 1960s. Freedom Riders made bus trips through southern states, demonstrating that public facilities that should have been desegregated according to law were not in fact desegregated. Freedom Riders encountered intense violence along their journeys and many suffered arrest by the police. |
| James Farmer |
American civil rights activist and strong believer in non-violent protest against injustice. Farmer was an initiator of the Freedom Rides in the early 1960s, which served to highlight and challenge racial segregation and discrimination in the U.S. (b.1920--d. 1999). |
| John Lewis |
American civil rights activist and U.S. Congress member from Georgia, who led, among other marches and demonstrations, the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in 1965, which galvanized the nation and quickened the passage of the Voting Rights Act (b. 1940--d. 2020). |
| Lyndon Baines Johnson |
U.S. politician, Vice-President to President John F. Kennedy, and later the 36th President of the United States, serving from 1963 to 1969. Under Lyndon Johnson, the nation saw the escalation of the Vietnam War. As president, Lyndon Johnson worked for the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act (b.1908--d.1973). |
| Medgar Evers |
American civil rights activist during the 1950s and early sixties. Evers worked to desegregate Mississippi schools, set up voter registration drives, helped organize economic boycotts of white businesses engaging in discrimination, and investigated crimes against black citizens. He was assassinated by a member of a white supremacist group in 1963. (b. 1925--d. 1963). |
| Rosa Parks |
U.S. civil rights activist and icon, whose arrest in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to obey segregation laws on a municipal bus inspired a wave of civil rights activism; born Rosa Louise McCauley (b.1913--d.2005). |
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