Early Civil Rights Struggles: Introduction

After decades of silently enduring second-class citizenship, blacks in the late 1940s and early 1950s began to challenge the injustices they faced on a daily basis. The earliest school segregation cases demanded that the Supreme Court re-examine the "separate but equal" doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson, and the murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till had a tremendous impact on blacks in both the North and the South. Although segregation in public facilities other than schools was rarely questioned during this time period, blacks were slowly gaining the resolve to finally stand up to Jim Crow.

1. Integration in Universities
2. Brown v. Board of Education
3. The Murder of Emmett Till