Context
Black Codes
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Black code, in U.S. history, any of numerous laws enacted in the states of the former Confederacy after the American Civil War and intended to assure the continuance of white supremacy. Enacted in 1865 and 1866, the laws were designed to replace the social controls of slavery that had been removed by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
Segregation
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Jim Crow law, in U.S. history, was any of the laws that enforced racial segregation in the South between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the beginning of the civil rights movement in the 1950s.
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Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life.
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For much of the 20th Century, African Americans in the South were barred from the voting booth, sent to the back of the bus, and walled off from many of the rights they deserved as American citizens. Until well into the 1960s, segregation was legal. The system was called Jim Crow. In this documentary, Americans—black and white—remember life in the Jim Crow times.
Civil Rights Movement
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Timeline for the Little Rock Crisis, during which the Governor of Arkansas refused to let black students enrol in the Little Rock Central High School, and used the National Guard to enforce his stance.
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Collection of primary documents relating to the Little Rock Crisis.
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The mass movement for racial equality in the United States known as the civil rights movement started in the late 1950s.
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The Montgomery bus boycott was a mass protest against the bus system of Montgomery, Alabama, by civil rights activists and their supporters that led to a 1956 Supreme Court decision declaring that Montgomery’s segregation laws on buses were unconstitutional.
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The Freedom Rides, in U.S. history, were a series of political protests against segregation by blacks and whites who rode buses together through the American South in 1961.
Similar Historical Cases
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On June 15, 1920, police arrest several young black men accused of raping a white woman. That evening, three of them – Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie – are taken from jail by a mob and lynched.
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The setting for the Scottsboro case was the rural American South in the 1930s, when whites feared racial fraternization as much as blacks feared the mobs that enforced segregation. The defendants in the case were known as the “Scottsboro Boys”.
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African American teenager Emmett Till was murdered while visiting the South in the 1950s. His death helped to bring about the civil rights movement in the U.S.
Emory University. (2012, February 13). The Scottsboro boys [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmsYLmqx3wg
Great Depression
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Australian perspective on the causes, and social and political impacts, of the great depression and the road to recovery.
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On Oct. 24, 1929, the complete collapse of the stock market began. The value of most shares fell sharply, leaving financial ruin and panic in its wake. Like a snowball rolling downhill, it gathered momentum and swept away the whole economy before it.
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During the 1930s the people of the US faced widespread economic hardship. We hear from two people who remember that time.
CrashCourse. (2013, October 10). The Great Depression: Crash Course US History #33 [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCQfMWAikyU