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Dred Scott v. Sandford
Dred Scott lived in a free state, Illinois, and was therefore a free man. He moved to Missouri which is not a free state and was no longer free. He filed a lawsuit saying he should still be free since he was before he moved, but he lost the case. -
13th Amendment
Slavery or involuntary servitude is no longer permitted in the United States, unless as a punishment for a crime of which they were duly convicted. -
14th Amendment
All people born within the United States are automatically citizens, as well as all persons naturalized as citizens. They all have the same rights as citizens and cannot have them taken away. -
15th Amendment
The right to vote shall not be denied to any citizens of the United States based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude. -
White Primaries
Primary elections held in the Southern United States in which only whites were permitted to vote. -
Plessy v. Ferguson
Homer Plessy, who was 7/8 Caucasian, purposefully violated the Separate Cars Act, which required separate railway cars for whites and blacks, in order to get arrested and challenge the Act. The Act was repealed in order to save on costs to have double the amount of cars for blacks and whites. -
19th Amendment
The right to vote shall not be denied to any United States citizen based on their sex. -
Brown v. Board of Education
African American students were being denied the right to go to certain public schools based on laws allowing public schools to be segregated by race. They argued that it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. -
Affirmative Action
A policy in which an individual's color, race, sex, religion or national origin are given special rights or hiring to increase opportunities provided to the minority parts of society. -
24th Amendment
There shall be no tax to be paid before being able to vote, so no one should be denied the right to vote because of a lack of payment of some sort. -
Civil Rights Act
This Act ended segregation in all public places and banned employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. -
Poll Taxes
Poll Taxes allowed for disenfranchisement for many blacks and poor people. These taxes were required to be paid before being able to vote, which naturally prevented anyone without much money, such as blacks or any poor person, from voting. -
Voting Rights Act
This removed barriers that prevented blacks from voting in the South such as banning poll taxes, literacy tests, and other measures that effectively prevented African Americans from voting. -
Reed v. Reed
Sally and Cecil Reed, a divorced couple, both wanted to be named the administrator of their son's estates after he had died. The Idaho Probate Code claims that "males must be preferred to females", so Cecil won the estates, but Sally challenged. -
Equal Rights Amendment
A proposed amendment to the US Constitution stating that civil rights should not be denied to a person on the basis of their sex. -
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke
Allan Bakke was a white man that was rejected from admission to a University two years in a row. The University reserves sixteen spaces for qualified minorities to help apply the affirmative action program. However, Bakke was much more qualified in his test scores and GPA than the all of the minority students admitted in the two years that he applied. Bakke claimed that he was excluded from admission solely on the basis of his race. -
Bowers v. Hardwick
A police officer spotted Michael Hardwick in his own bedroom taking part in consensual homosexual sodomy with another adult. Hardwick was charged with violating a Georgia statute that criminalized sodomy. Hardwick challenged the constitutionality of the statute and eventually won. Georgia's Attorney General, Michael J. Bowers, appealed to the Supreme Court and they reviewed the case. -
Americans with Disabilities Act
A civil rights law that prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life. This includes for jobs, schools, transportation, and all public and private places that are open to the general public. -
Lawrence v. Texas
Houston police were responding to a reported weapons disturbance and entered John Lawrence's apartment. Once inside they saw him and another adult man, Tyron Garner, engaging in a private, consensual sexual act. Both men were arrested and convicted of deviate sexual intercourse that violated a Texas statute forbidding two people of the same sex to engage in certain intimate sexual conduct. The State Court of Appeals ruled the statute was not unconstitutional under the Due Process clause. -
Obergefell v. Hodges
Different groups of same-sex couples sued their respective state's agencies to challenge the constitutionality of those states' bans on same-sex marriage or the refusal to recognize legal same-sex marriages that occurred in jurisdictions that provided for such marriages. The plantiffs argued that the statutes violated the Equal Protection Clause and Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The U.S. Court of Appeals disagreed and withheld the ban.
