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John Lewis
John Robert Lewis (February 21, 1940 – July 17, 2020) was an American politician and civil rights activist who served in the United States House of Representatives for from 1987 until his death in 2020. He participated in the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, was the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from 1963 to 1966, and was one of the " Big Six" leaders of groups who organized the 1963 March on Washington. Fulfilling many key roles in the civil rights movement and its actions to end legalized racial segregation in the United States, in 1965 Lewis led the first of three Selma to Montgomery marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge where, in an incident which became known as Bloody Sunday, state troopers and police attacked Lewis and the other marchers. A member of the Democratic Party, Lewis was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1986 and served 17 terms. The district he represented included most of Atlanta. Due to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chief Deputy Whips Of The United States House Of Representatives
Party leaders of the United States House of Representatives, also known as floor leaders, are congresspeople who coordinate legislative initiatives and serve as the chief spokespersons for their parties on the House floor. These leaders are elected every two years in secret balloting of their Party caucuses and conferences in the United States Congress, party caucuses or conferences: the House Democratic Caucus and the House Republican Conference. Depending on which party is in power, one party leader serves as majority leader and the other as minority leader. Unlike the Party leaders of the United States Senate, Senate Majority Leader, the House Majority Leader is the second highest-ranking member of their party's House caucus, behind the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Speaker of the House. The Majority Leader is responsible for setting the annual legislative agenda, scheduling legislation for consideration, and coordinating committee activity. The Mino ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fisk University
Fisk University is a private historically black liberal arts college in Nashville, Tennessee. It was founded in 1866 and its campus is a historic district listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1930, Fisk was the first African-American institution to gain accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). Accreditations for specialized programs soon followed. It is the oldest institution for higher education in Nashville. History Founding Fisk Free Colored School opened on January 9, 1866, shortly after the end of the Civil War. It was founded by John Ogden, Erastus Milo Cravath, and Edward Parmelee Smith of the American Missionary Association for the education of freedmen in Nashville. Fisk was one of several schools and colleges that the association helped found across the South to educate freed slaves following the Civil War. The school is named for Clinton B. Fisk, a Union general and assistant commissioner of the Freedme ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Senior Chief Deputy Whip
A whip is an official of a political party whose task is to ensure party discipline in a legislature. This means ensuring that members of the party vote according to the party platform, rather than according to their own individual ideology or the will of their donors or constituents. Whips are the party's "enforcers". They try to ensure that their fellow political party legislators attend voting sessions and vote according to their party's official policy. Members who vote against party policy may "lose the whip", being effectively expelled from the party. The term is taken from the " whipper-in" during a hunt, who tries to prevent hounds from wandering away from a hunting pack. Additionally, the term "whip" may mean the voting instructions issued to legislators, or the status of a certain legislator in their party's parliamentary grouping. Etymology The expression ''whip'' in its parliamentary context, derived from its origins in hunting terminology. The ''Oxford Engli ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bloody Sunday (1965)
The Selma to Montgomery marches were three protest marches, held in 1965, along the 54-mile (87 km) highway from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery. The marches were organized by nonviolent activists to demonstrate the desire of African-American citizens to exercise their constitutional right to vote, in defiance of segregationist repression; they were part of a broader voting rights movement underway in Selma and throughout the American South. By highlighting racial injustice, they contributed to passage that year of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark federal achievement of the civil rights movement. Southern state legislatures had passed and maintained a series of discriminatory requirements and practices that had disenfranchised most of the millions of African Americans across the South throughout the 20th century. The African-American group known as the Dallas County Voters League (DCVL) launched a voter registration campaign in Selma in 1963. Joine ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edmund Pettus Bridge
The Edmund Pettus Bridge carries U.S. Route 80 Business (US 80 Bus.) across the Alabama River in Selma, Alabama. Built in 1940, it is named after Edmund Pettus, a former Confederate brigadier general, U.S. senator, and state-level leader ("Grand Dragon") of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. The bridge is a steel through arch bridge with a central span of . Nine large concrete arches support the bridge and roadway on the east side. The Edmund Pettus Bridge was the site of the conflict of Bloody Sunday on March 7, 1965, when police attacked Civil Rights Movement demonstrators with horses, billy clubs, and tear gas as they were attempting to march to the state capital, Montgomery. The marchers crossed the bridge again on March 21 and walked to the Capitol building. The bridge was declared a National Historic Landmark on February 27, 2013. Design The bridge carries four lanes of U.S. Route 80 Business (formerly the mainline U.S. Route 80) over the Alabama River, fr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Selma To Montgomery Marches
The Selma to Montgomery marches were three protest marches, held in 1965, along the 54-mile (87 km) highway from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery. The marches were organized by nonviolent activists to demonstrate the desire of African-American citizens to exercise their constitutional right to vote, in defiance of segregationist repression; they were part of a broader voting rights movement underway in Selma and throughout the American South. By highlighting racial injustice, they contributed to passage that year of the Voting Rights Act, a landmark federal achievement of the civil rights movement. Southern state legislatures had passed and maintained a series of discriminatory requirements and practices that had disenfranchised most of the millions of African Americans across the South throughout the 20th century. The African-American group known as the Dallas County Voters League (DCVL) launched a voter registration campaign in Selma in 1963. Joine ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Racial Segregation In The United States
In the United States, racial segregation is the systematic separation of facilities and services such as housing, healthcare, education, employment, and transportation on racial grounds. The term is mainly used in reference to the legally or socially enforced separation of African Americans from whites, but it is also used in reference to the separation of other ethnic minorities from majority and mainstream communities. While mainly referring to the physical separation and provision of separate facilities, it can also refer to other manifestations such as prohibitions against interracial marriage (enforced with anti-miscegenation laws), and the separation of roles within an institution. Notably, in the United States Armed Forces up until 1948, black units were typically separated from white units but were still led by white officers. Signs were used to indicate where African Americans could legally walk, talk, drink, rest, or eat. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the con ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Civil Rights Movement
The civil rights movement was a nonviolent social and political movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized institutional racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement throughout the United States. The movement had its origins in the Reconstruction era during the late 19th century, although it made its largest legislative gains in the 1960s after years of direct actions and grassroots protests. The social movement's major nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience campaigns eventually secured new protections in federal law for the civil rights of all Americans. After the American Civil War and the subsequent abolition of slavery in the 1860s, the Reconstruction Amendments to the United States Constitution granted emancipation and constitutional rights of citizenship to all African Americans, most of whom had recently been enslaved. For a short period of time, African American men voted and held political office, but ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
March On Washington
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, also known as simply the March on Washington or The Great March on Washington, was held in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963. The purpose of the march was to advocate for the civil and economic rights of African Americans. At the march, final speaker Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, delivered his historic " I Have a Dream" speech in which he called for an end to racism. The march was organized by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, who built an alliance of civil rights, labor, and religious organizations that came together under the banner of "jobs and freedom." Estimates of the number of participants varied from 200,000 to 300,000, but the most widely cited estimate is 250,000 people. Observers estimated that 75–80% of the marchers were black. The march was one of the largest political rallies for human rights in United States history. Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Big Six (activists)
The Big Six—Martin Luther King Jr., James Farmer, John Lewis, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young—were the leaders of six prominent civil rights organizations who were instrumental in the organization of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. In his autobiography, ''Lay Bare the Heart'' (1985), James Farmer identified the term "Big Six" as having originated with the founding of the Council for United Civil Rights Leadership. He did not include A. Philip Randolph in his list of the "Big Six", instead listing Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women as the sixth member of the group. He also noted that the press often referred to the group as the "Big Four", excluding Height and John Lewis, which he attributed to sexism and age bias, respectively. Patrick Henry Bass, journalist and historian of the March on Washington, described the rise of these leaders to ce ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Freedom Rides
Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated Southern United States in 1961 and subsequent years to challenge the non-enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decisions '' Morgan v. Virginia'' (1946) and '' Boynton v. Virginia'' (1960), which ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional. The Southern states had ignored the rulings and the federal government did nothing to enforce them. The first Freedom Ride left Washington, D.C. on May 4, 1961, and was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans on May 17. ''Boynton'' outlawed racial segregation in the restaurants and waiting rooms in terminals serving buses that crossed state lines. Five years prior to the ''Boynton'' ruling, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) had issued a ruling in '' Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company'' (1955) that had explicitly denounced the ''Plessy v. Ferguson'' (1896) doctrine of separate but equal in interstate bus travel. The ICC failed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
