Civil Rights and Demographics - GED Social Studies

The Democratic National Convention of 1968 is notable primarily for the fact that the delegates in attendance voted against a resolution to end the war in Vietnam—refusing to make it part of their electoral platform. This sparked a massive conflagration between protesters and armed police, as well as national guardsmen. Although Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, this did not take place at the Democratic National Convention.

The Kent State Massacre took place in 1970. The late 1960s and early 1970s was a period of intense student activism in the United States. Students were protesting for advances in civil rights and equality, but also for an end to American involvement in the Vietnam War. Many students believed that it was absurd and immoral that so many young people should die in a war that did not directly affect American lives. The Kent State Massacre involved the killing of four students by the Ohio National Guard and furthered the divide between the mainstream and the counter-culture in American society.

The Warren Court of the 1950s and 1960s was lead by Chief Justice Earl Warren. During this era, the Supreme Court overturned many laws and precedents that had entrenched racial and gender divides in society. The most famous ruling of this time period is Brown v. Board of Education which ruled that the doctrine in place in much of the South and Midwest “Separate, but equal” was inherently unconstitutional. This overturned decades of precedent which had been established in 1896 with the Supreme Court case, Plessy v. Ferguson.

The Supreme Court case, Roe v. Wade (1973), decided that the right to abortion was a fundamental right of all women in the United States. The court case has ramifications to this day, and despite the issue presumably having been settled in the courts, it remains extremely polarizing in America—dividing many people into pro-life and pro-choice camps, and inspiring a seemingly endless number of grassroots movements and campaigns.

Rosa Parks was a United States Civil Rights leader who famously refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. In the majority of the South at this time blacks and whites were segregated in public, and in refusing to give up her seat Rosa Parks was violating the law. Her refusal helped spark and give momentum to the burgeoning civil rights movement. The first African American on the Supreme Court was Thurgood Marshall.

The Supreme Court case, Dred Scott v. Sandford took place in 1857, in the build-up to Civil War. The court ruled that Scott did not have the right to bring a case before the United States government, as he was an African American and thus not a citizen of the United States. The court also ruled that Congress could make no laws preventing the extension of slavery into the territories. Unsurprisingly, it was a controversial court case, even at the time, yet was mostly ignored by those in the North.

The Equal Protection clause states that no state within the union can deny any person the full and equal protection of its laws, particularly on the basis of race or other "arbitrary distinctions." It was passed in 1868, as part of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Seneca Falls Convention took place in 1848. It was the first large-scale organized meeting promoting the advancement of women’s rights.

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 attempted to prohibit the disparity that existed in almost all businesses between the wages given to men and women. It made it illegal to pay a woman less than a man if they did the same amount of work in the same position. It is an important early law of the Civil Rights Era.

The Pill was made widely available for the first time in 1960. The release of a daily oral female contraceptive is perhaps one of the most significant turning points in the movement towards gender equality. For the first time women had near complete control over their own bodies, when they would have children, and their sexual freedom (at least in theory). It allowed women to plan when (and if) they would have children around their careers and life decisions. It led to a dramatic increase in women in the workplace, especially in technical and skilled career paths, and provided much of the impetus for later legal amendments to provide for guaranteed female equality.

Although the birth-control pill was not legally available to women until 1960, the first birth-control clinic in the United States was opened in New York City in 1916. This was a major development in the improvement of women’s rights and in the autonomy available to women in society as for the first time some women could control if and when they would have children.