Civil Rights History

Americans reflected on Martin Luther King's legacy of racial equality and peace on a national holiday that marks what would have been the slain civil rights leader's 78th birthday. Here is a timeline of the modern civil rights movement.

May 17, 1954
School segregation is widely accepted throughout the United States until the U.S. Supreme Court makes a landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, deciding unanimously that separated educational facilities are inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional. The ruling overthrows the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that had set the "separate but equal" precedent