Facts and Details in U.S. Social History from 1899 to the Present - SAT Subject Test in United States History

Black soldiers were almost exclusively placed in segregated units, away from their white compatriots. These regiments were usually commanded by white officers. Many black soldiers were held away from the primary areas of battle, this was generally a result of the racist view of many Americans that blacks were unfit or unwilling to fight with the same efficacy as their white peers.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott began in December 1955 when Rosa Parks protested the practice of African Americans being required to sit in the back portion of public buses. Led by a young Martin Luther King, Jr. in his first high profile civil rights campaign, the African American community of Montgomery refused to ride public transportation in the city. In 1956, a Supreme Court ruling ended the Alabama and Montgomery laws enabling segregation in buses.

The decision in Brown v. Board of Education stemmed from a case brought by an African American family from Topeka, Kansas, challenging that city’s policy of having two school systems, one for white children and one for African-Americans. The unanimous decision in Brown outlawed racial segregation in public schools throughout the nation as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

On July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981, fully integrating every branch and level of the United States Military. Secondary Schools and State College were not integrated by court order until the 1950s, while public transportation did not get fully integrated nationwide until the 1965 Civil Rights Act. Prisons in the south were generally segregated until the 1970s.

Prohibition was enacted following the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment. For many Americans it represented an unnecessary intrusion of rural, Protestant ideals on a key aspect of urban, working class life. The lax enforcement of the law, coupled with a significant demand for alcohol created, amongst other things, the rise of the American Mafia and widespread corruption in Politics and Civil Society. It was repealed thirteen years later, in 1933, with the passage of the Twenty-First Amendment.

That quote is an excerpt from the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) case. The case established that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional in practice, because it was inherently unequal. The case reversed a previous decision made by the Supreme Court, in 1896, in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, which had mandated that “separate but equal” was constitutional. It was a landmark case in the growing civil rights movement of the era.

Young women of the 1920s who dressed and behaved as such were collectively known as Flappers.

Migrants from Oklahoma and nearby states, like Arkansas, were lumped together and called "Okies."

The Gideon v. Wainwright case was presented to the Supreme Court during the extremely liberal era of Chief Justice Warren. It established that any citizen accused of a crime has the right to legal assistance, even in the event that the citizen is unable to afford the costs. Engel v. Vitale prohibited prayer in public schools. Miranda v. Arizona mandated that law enforcement officials had to inform suspects of their rights prior to questioning. Loving v. Virginia declared laws preventing interracial marriage as unconstitutional. Racial discrimination in property sale and rental was ended by the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

The Roe v. Wade case made abortion legal in the United States. It dictated that a woman had the right to termination provided she was in the first trimester of her pregnancy. That has since been extended to roughly seven months, or whenever the baby could potentially live outside of the woman’s body. The case remains important in the United States today. Throughout the last few decades it has been a major social issue for several different factions and interest groups.

Throughout the 1920s, controversies raged across the nation regarding whether Charles Darwin's theory of evolution should be taught in public schools. In 1925, the State of Tennessee passed the Butler Act, which specifically prohibited teaching evolution and allowed only creationism to be discussed in classrooms. In the tiny town of Dayton, a schoolteacher named John Scopes was convinced to challenge the law. After the American Civil Liberties Union and the famed lawyer Clarence Darrow came to Scopes' defence, William Jennings Bryan and various fundamentalist Christian groups defended the law. The subsequent trial, known popularly as the "Scopes Monkey Trial," became a celebrated national news story.

Before becoming the first African-American Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall had already made a name for himself in United States’ law and society. He argued convincingly for an end to segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, and many historians credit him with helping sway the Court in favor of ending segregation. He was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1967, having been nominated by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Marshall was a firm advocator for civil rights, constitutional amendment, and the reform of criminal procedure. He retired in 1991 and was replaced by Clarence Thomas, who became the second African-American Supreme Court Justice.

Gideon v. Wainwright took place in 1963. It is considered an extremely important case in the earlier stage of the Civil Rights movement. In the case the Supreme Court ruled, unanimously, that state courts were required to provide a defense attorney to any defendant who did not have the means to pay for one. According to the Supreme Court, the existing Fourteenth and Sixth Amendments dictated that such a law was both Constitutional and necessary for upholding the rights guaranteed to all American citizens.

The National Organization for Women was formed in 1966. It was not the first such institution to campaign for the advancement of women’s rights and equal status, but it has gained prominence in the years since, due to its effective campaigning. The Organization was formed in part by Betty Friedan, the author of The Feminine Mystique, and she went on to become its first acting President.

The original Ku Klux Klan, which existed in the Reconstruction era in the South, was a secret-society terrorist organization seeking to frighten newly freed slaves and did not last past the 1870s. The Klan was reformed in 1914 at Stone Mountain, Georgia, with a more political and populist appeal, adding Jews, Catholics, immigrants, anti-prohibitionists, communists, and atheists to its list of enemies. The Second Klan saw widespread popularity in not just the South, but the West and Midwest as well. Well-known Klansmen held political office in many states, and the conservative Evangelical spin on nativism gained much popular currency throughout the 1920s. After a series of scandals by Klan politicians, and a resumption of terror activity by certain Klan groups, the popularity of the Klan diminished.

On May 17th, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court declared racial segregation in schools is unconstitutional.

The excerpted words were delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from his famous "I have a dream" speech.

The Twenty-Sixth Amendment established that the voting age should be lowered from twenty-one to eighteen. The movement to lower the voting age grew out of student activism during the Vietnam War. Many students, along with many people aged younger than twenty-one, were being drafted to fight in the war, and the slogan “Old enough to fight, old enough to vote” caught on across the country. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment was passed by overwhelming majority in the Senate, the House, and a vote of the States and adopted on July 1st, 1971.

The Freedom Riders left Washington, D.C. on May 4, 1961, to head to New Orleans on Greyhound and Trailways buses. The Freedom Riders were made up of both black and white activists, led by Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Director James Farmer, seeking to integrate interstate bus lines throughout the South. The Supreme Court had ruled, in Boynton v. Virginia (1960), that racial segregation was illegal on interstate bus lines, but the order was widely ignored throughout the South. In Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama, both the Ku Klux Klan and police forces attacked the bus, while many Freedom Riders were arrested and sent to prison in Mississippi. The Kennedy Administration notably refused to involve itself either on behalf of the Freedom Riders or the local police. The action of the Freedom Riders brought national attention to segregation policies and the brutality of Southern police forces, initiating widespread change in service throughout the South.