joined with existing suits challenging school segregation on behalf of hundreds of students in Virginia, Washington, D.C., South Carolina, and Delaware. The case, known as Oliver L. Brown et al. v. The Board of Education of Topeka, was presented by attorney Thurgood Marshall.
             In May 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that separating educational facilities was unequal and unconstitutional, and ordered the desegregation of schools across the country.
             In the century following Reconstruction, African Americans in the South faced overwhelming obstacles to voting. Despite the 15th and 19th amendments to the Constitution of the United States, which had enfranchised black men and women, southern voter registration boards used poll taxes, literacy tests, and other bureaucratic impediments to deny African Americans their legal rights. Southern blacks also risked harassment, intimidation, economic reprisals, and physical violence when they tried to register or vote. As a result, African Americans had little, if any, political power, either locally or nationally. In Mississippi, for instance, only 5 percent of eligible blacks were registered to vote in 1960. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, meant to reverse this disenfranchisement, grew out of both public protest and private political negotiation. Starting in 1961, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference(SCLC), led by Martin Luther King Jr., staged nonviolent demonstrations in Albany, Georgia, and Birmingham, Alabama.
             King and the SCLC hoped to attract national media attention and pressure the U.S. government to protect African Americans' constitutional rights. The strategy worked. Newspaper photos and television broadcasts of Birmingham's notoriously racist police commissioner, Eugene "Bull" Connor, and his men violently attacking the SCLC's peaceful protesters with water hoses, police dogs, and nightsticks awakened the consciences of white Americans.
             The site of the next campaign was Selm...