While the Fourteenth Amendment declared that “no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” (“Fourteenth Amendment.” Constitution of the United States. Congress.gov), this was rarely true in practice. After the Civil War, the South passed a series of “Black Codes” to block Black Americans from voting, owning land, conducting business, and existing in public spaces. These developed into “Jim Crow laws,” which codified white supremacy into legislation.

Between the 1950s and 1970s, activists, civilians, and politicians worked to abolish segregation, racial disenfranchisement, and other aspects of systemic racism that upheld ideologies of white supremacy. This Civil Rights Movement was filled with high points—such as the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964, 1965, and 1968, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the emergence of the Black Power Movement—and low points—such as the assassinations of Medgar Evers and President Kennedy in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, and Fred Hampton in 1969.

One landmark Supreme Court Ruling in the Civil Rights Movement was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954. In 1951, the local Topeka school system refused to enroll Oliver Brown’s daughter because she was Black, requiring her to bus to a further away, all-Black school.