Civil Rights
Explore the development of civil rights, focusing on the evolving civil rights of African-Americans and women, and also on some of the backlashes against African-Americans or women. In your essay, focus on the connection of the topics listed below with the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. (1-3 pages total single spaced). For example, how does Reconstruction relate to the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause? What are the connections?
Discuss the following: slavery; Reconstruction; lynching and mob violence; Plessy v. Ferguson and Jim Crow; Black Codes, literacy test, grandfather clause, white only primary; Civil Rights movement; Brown v. Board of Education; 1964 Civil Rights Act; 1965 Voting Rights Act; and Black Lives Matter.
Discuss the following: Women without rights under the law; Nineteenth Amendment; women’s movement in the 1970s; Roe v. Wade; Equal Pay Act; Title IX of the 1964 Civil Rights Act; Lily Ledbetter Act; 1992 year of the women (women elected to Congress); Me Too movement.
