1. Images of the Struggle for Racial Equality in America
Photos & Facts courtesy of:
Oklahoma State University
New York University
America.gov
TIME Photos:

2. Separate but Equal?
Under old U.S. laws, local governments and businesses could offer separate facilities for “colored” people as long as they were equal. Obviously, people of color were not treated equally.

3. Peaceful demonstrators hold sit-in at drugstore
“Colored” customers were not allowed to sit and be served at many restaurants in the South. They had to pick up their food in the kitchen or at the back door.

4. Peaceful sit-in turns violent
Black men who tried demonstrating at this Nashville lunch counter are yanked away by angry white citizens.

5. Arrested for sitting in “whites” section of a bus
Rosa Parks refused to stand up so that a white male passenger could take her bus seat, as the Alabama law required.

6. Black students unwelcome at all-white school
Southern states fought back when a U.S. law made it illegal to have segregated schools. Rioters attacked students and news reporters because 9 blacks were integrated into an all-white school in Little Rock, Arkansas.

7. Explosion on Freedom Riders’ bus
One of 2 busses carrying civil rights demonstrators was firebombed as it arrived from Georgia to Aniston, Alabama. 12 riders were seriously injured.

8. White and black demonstrators beaten
Passengers of the 2nd Freedom Rider bus were dragged out of the bus and savagely beaten by Ku Klux Klansmen when the bus arrived in Birmingham, Alabama.

9. Bloody Sunday
Nonviolent protestors marching in Selma, Alabama, were attacked by state police using tear gas and wooden clubs. The event came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”

10. Children attacked by police
Alabama Police attacked teenage demonstrators with firehoses, which had enough force to rip bark away from trees.

11. Killed for whistling
Emmett Till, 14, had come from Chicago to visit relatives in Mississippi. He did not know how much blacks were hated in the South, and he whistled at an attractive white woman. He was later kidnapped, stripped of his clothes, beaten, and strangled with barbed wire before he was drowned. His body was recognized only because of the ring he wore.