Affirmative Action

Black Power

This is a term originally coined coined by SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael in a speech delivered in June 1966 in Greenwood, Mississippi, and later popularized by militant civil rights organizations like the Black Panthers. 

Black Power came to be recognized as a specific wave of the Civil Rights Movement, one that emphasized race pride and Black autonomy over integration with white society.

Freedom Summer, Mississippi Freedom Summer

This term refers to the summer of 1964, during which young college-aged recruits, primarily Black activists and some white volunteers, traveled to Mississippi in order to help register Black Mississippians to vote. 

Their efforts were met with severe, often violent, resistance from white citizens, including members of the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan. Three young volunteers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—were killed in Mississippi during the first weeks of action.

Moynihan Report

In 1965, Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan released a controversial report on the "total breakdown" of Black society. In it, he concluded that the roots of the problems faced by Black families lay in the legacy of slavery, growing urbanization, racial discrimination in employment and education, and a tradition of matriarchy.

The report, nicknamed the "Moynihan Report," has sparked much debate among historians and sociologists.

Proposition 14, Prop 14

California Proposition 14 was an amendment to the California state constitution proposed by citizens of the state who wanted to nullify the Rumford Fair Housing Act, a 1963 law that forbade property owners from denying housing to someone on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, sex, marital status, or physical handicap.

Radical Reconstruction, Reconstruction

Also referred to as Congressional Reconstruction, this phase of post-Civil War Reconstruction began in 1867 when the U.S. Congress, dominated by Radical Republicans, passed a number of laws called the Reconstruction Acts. These acts mandated a number of major reforms to southern state governments, including the enfranchisement of all Black men and the ratification of the 14th Amendment, which secured equal protection rights for former slaves. 

Radical Reconstruction officially ended with the Compromise of 1877, in which the white South agreed to accept the Republican candidate for president in return for the withdrawal of all federal troops from the South. By the end of it all, the nation would be forever transformed, and the legacy of this era would be debated for over a century, until the modern Civil Rights Movement set out to finish what Radical Reconstruction had begun.