The 14th Amendment granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States. It also granted them equal protection under the laws and guaranteed due process of law. Those are considered its most important provisions today. That wasn't always the case, however. Why did it take so long for the Supreme Court to affirm these provisions of this significant Amendment, and what does that say about politics at the highest court in the land?

Our guide to the 14th Amendment is Aziz Huq, professor of law at the University of Chicago School of Law.

The following lesson is designed to help students explore the emergence of the American Indian Movement (c.1968 and beyond) in the context of the push for self-determination by native people, and within the broader movement for Civil Rights in American Society.

This resource would be appropriate for high school students, during a study of the Civil Rights Movement. It provides primary source materials for students to analyze using the APPARTS process.

This aligns to WI AIS Enduring Understanding #9 "American Indians and U.S. Citizenship".

The Voting Rights Act of 1965--called "the most successful civil rights law in the nation's history" by Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights--was enacted in order to force Southern states and localities to allow all citizens of voting age to vote in public elections. Although the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, guaranteed citizens the right to vote regardless of race, discriminatory requirements, such as literacy tests, disenfranchised many African Americans in the South. In 1965, following the murder of a voting rights activist by an Alabama sheriff's deputy and the subsequent attack by state troopers on a massive protest march in Selma, President Lyndon B. Johnson pressed Congress to pass a voting rights bill with "teeth". The Act, signed into law on August 6, applied to states or counties where fewer than half of the citizens of voting age were registered in 1964--Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia, and numerous counties in North Carolina. For these areas, the law banned literacy tests, appointed Federal examiners to oversee election procedures, and, according to the Act's controversial Section 5, required approval by the U.S. Attorney General of future changes to election laws. In the following letter to a 1969 Senate subcommittee hearing on extending the Act, New Jersey Senator Harrison A. Williams, Jr., provided statistics to show the law's effect. The position described in the letter was Attorney General John Mitchell's proposal to replace Section 5 with an oversight mechanism more amenable to the white South. Ultimately, on June 22, 1970, President Richard M. Nixon signed into law a bill that extended the Act's provisions--including Section 5--for five additional years, and in addition, lowered the voting age throughout the country to 18.

To assist students in developing analytical skills that will enable them to evaluate primary documents and images such as photographs, political cartoons, and posters related to African American women during World War II.
This lesson can be integrated into a classroom activity by individual students, cross-curricular with Language Arts, and/or as a cooperative learning endeavor. Students will analyze Internet websites and access links to a variety of primary and secondary documents.
Students will also be introduced students to the Stanford History Educational Group’s Reading Like A Historian teaching strategies to help them investigate historical questions by employing the following reading strategies:
Sourcing, Contextualizing, corroborating, and close reading.

These materials document the goals and activities of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights; from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

This collection uses primary sources to explore the American Indian Movement between 1968 and 1978. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

In this oral history from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, Audrey Hendricks recalls her arrest and jailing at the age of nine for participation in the Children's Crusade of 1963.

This lesson asks students to interrogate six historical documents that show differing opinions about the conflict in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Students are then asked to draw connections to modern day movements.

Objectives: At the end of the lesson, students will be able to:
1. Analyze written documents for position of writer and content
2. Synthesize a historical position based upon document analysis
3. Connect historical struggles for equality with current movements

Essential Questions:
1. What effect did the media have on public perception during the Birmingham protest of racial segregation in 1963?2
2. What equality struggles have the media brought into the national spotlight in recent times?

This collection uses primary sources to explore the Black Power Movement. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, African-American leaders debated different plans for achieving racial equality. Booker T. Washington believed the initial focus should be on educating African Americans. W. E. B. Du Bois insisted that achieving equal rights was essential. In this lesson, students read a speech of Washington’s and a selection from Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk to consider how their philosophies compared.

This excerpt from WGBH's Evening Compass news program summarizes events of the first year of the 1974 Boston school desegregation plan.

How can a shirt show us what people did for fun back in the day?

Bowling got its start at least as far back as the Middle Ages, but the game we know today became big in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, and Wisconsin got in on the game. Bowlers like Earlene Fuller made and wore custom-made shirts and sets that matched their team, showing fashion and cultural connections to bring them luck at the lanes.

This episode is part of The Look Back, a series made for learners in grades 4-6 that explores eras from Wisconsin’s history through artifacts. The collection is hosted by historians who model an inquiry process: sharing artifacts, asking questions, visiting archives and museums to learn more, telling the story of their findings as they go, and making connections to our lives today.

This 1954 statement, issued by a group of black educators, strongly endorses the Supreme Court's Brown ruling.

This sampling of newspaper editorials from the mid-1950s reflects the range of public opinion and responses to the Brown decision.

Zora Neale Hurston's 1955 letter to the editor expresses her belief that the Brown decision would prove detrimental to the educational interests of black students.

Students are given the background and facts of the Brown v. Board of Education case along with precedents. Their task is to sort through the arguments of the case and classify each as an argument for Brown or for the Board of Education.

As an assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, Burke Marshall played a key role in the federal government's efforts to desegregate the South. Representing the presidential administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, Marshall mediated conflicts between civil rights protesters and southern white officials. In this interview, Marshall recalls the 1961 Freedom Rides and the 1962 desegregation of the University of Mississippi.

This collection uses primary sources to explore school desegregation in Boston. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

The summer of 1919 saw over 20 race riots break out across the United States. Chicago was the site of particularly high violence. In this lesson, students deliberate the origins of the Chicago race riots by exploring five documents (both primary and secondary) that reflect different social, cultural, and economic causes.

This site provides a summary, history, and teaching activities related to the EEOC and this historic law, which forbade discrimination on the basis of sex as well as race in hiring, promoting, and firing.