Between the Brown decision in 1954 and the Fair Housing Act in 1968, ordinary people changed American law. A teenager kept her bus seat, students sat at lunch counters, a mortally ill senator voted by pointing to his eye, and a barbecue restaurant's meat supply went before the Supreme Court. These stories follow the organizers, the places and the rulings, including several that the famous accounts leave out.
Every tile in a Civil Rights Movement game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
People
nine stories
1Nine months before Rosa Parks, a 15-year-old said no
On the tile: C. ColvinMarch 2, 1955
Nine months before Rosa Parks, a 15-year-old named Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. She was arrested on March 2, 1955, and sentenced to probation, and her stand was long overshadowed by Parks's. But Colvin became one of the plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, the federal lawsuit that struck down bus segregation in Montgomery, and the Supreme Court affirmed that ruling in November 1956. In 2021, at 82, she petitioned a juvenile court to clear her record, and a judge granted it. She died in January 2026.
The March on Washington in August 1963 drew more than 200,000 people, and its deputy director, Bayard Rustin, organized it in less than two months. He had been challenging segregation for years. In 1947 he helped organize the Journey of Reconciliation, which the Park Service calls the first of the Freedom Rides, and served twenty-two days on a North Carolina chain gang after his arrest. During the Montgomery bus boycott he advised Martin Luther King Jr. on nonviolent tactics. Because Rustin lived openly as a gay man, he often worked behind the scenes.
In 1949 a Montgomery bus driver ordered Jo Ann Robinson, an English teacher at Alabama State College, off a nearly empty bus for sitting in the fifth row. As president of the Women's Political Council from 1950, she complained repeatedly to city officials about bus seating. When Rosa Parks was arrested in December 1955, Robinson and a small team worked late into the night at the college, mimeographing tens of thousands of leaflets calling for a boycott. On December 5, about 90 percent of Montgomery's Black citizens stayed off the buses.
On April 23, 1951, sixteen-year-old Barbara Johns called an assembly at Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia, and persuaded her classmates to strike over the school's poor conditions. The Park Service describes it as a 400-student strike. The NAACP agreed to help the students sue against segregation itself, and their case, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, became one of the cases decided together as Brown v. Board of Education. In December 2025 her statue was unveiled at the U.S. Capitol as Virginia's contribution to the National Statuary Hall Collection.
On the tile: Rosa ParksDecember 1, 1955Myth busted
The popular picture is a tired seamstress who sat in a whites-only seat. Rosa Parks did work as a seamstress, but she had been elected secretary of Montgomery's NAACP branch in 1943. On December 1, 1955, she was sitting in the first row behind the ten seats reserved for white riders. When the driver told her row to give up their seats to boarding white passengers, the other three moved and she did not. She later wrote that she was not physically tired, and that "the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."
6She gave the student sit-in movement its own home
On the tile: Ella BakerApril 1960
When student sit-ins spread across the South in early 1960, Ella Baker was running the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Atlanta office. She organized a conference for the young activists at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, the school she had graduated from in 1927. In April about 120 students from 12 southern states voted to form a youth-centered organization, which became the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Baker urged group-centered leadership, and in 1968 she said "the movement made Martin rather than Martin making the movement."
7Killed on the night Kennedy spoke for civil rights
On the tile: Medgar EversJune 1963
On the evening of June 11, 1963, President Kennedy went on national television to announce a civil rights bill, calling civil rights a moral issue. That same night in Jackson, Mississippi, Medgar Evers was murdered in front of his home. Evers had been drafted into the Army in 1943, had been turned away by the University of Mississippi's law school, and in 1954 became the NAACP's first field secretary in Mississippi. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. His killer, Byron De La Beckwith, was not convicted until 1994.
8Fired after 40 years, she built schools for 100,000
On the tile: Septima Clark1956
Septima Clark taught in South Carolina schools for decades, beginning at a Black school on Johns Island. In 1956, after 40 years of teaching, her contract was not renewed because she refused to resign from the NAACP. She went to work full time at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, directing workshops. With Esau Jenkins and Bernice Robinson she built citizenship schools that taught Black adults basic literacy and their rights as citizens. After the Southern Christian Leadership Conference took them over, the schools trained about 100,000 adults.
9The 1941 march threat that changed federal policy
On the tile: A.P. Randolph1941
Long before 1963, A. Philip Randolph showed what the threat of a march could do. His union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, was founded in 1925 and won recognition from the Pullman company in 1937. In 1941 Randolph threatened a march on Washington unless the government confronted racial discrimination in the defense industry, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded with Executive Order 8802, banning it. Randolph's later campaign against military segregation influenced President Truman's 1948 decision to desegregate the armed services. In 1963 he helped launch the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Two and a half years before Montgomery, Black riders in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, boycotted the city's buses for eight days in June 1953. The Rev. T. J. Jemison helped lead the protest, and Black car owners gave people free rides. It ended in a compromise that reduced the seats reserved for white riders. The Louisiana encyclopedia 64 Parishes calls it the first large-scale boycott of a southern city's segregated bus system. Three days after the Montgomery boycott began, Martin Luther King Jr. telephoned Jemison and took his advice on organizing carpools.
2The graduation Martin Luther King Jr. came to see
On the tile: Ernest GreenMay 27, 1958
The Little Rock Nine needed soldiers to get through the door. On September 25, 1957, more than 20 members of the 101st Airborne Division escorted them through the front doors of Central High School. By spring one of them, senior Ernest Green, was ready to finish. On May 27, 1958, he became the first African American student to graduate from Central High, and Martin Luther King Jr. attended the ceremony. Then, before schools opened that fall, Governor Orval Faubus closed all four of Little Rock's public high schools rather than continue desegregation.
On February 1, 1960, four students from North Carolina A&T College, Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair, Franklin McCain and David Richmond, bought several items at the Woolworth store in downtown Greensboro and then sat down at the lunch counter reserved for white customers. Asked to leave, they politely refused, and they stayed almost an hour, until the store closed. The idea spread fast: by the end of February, sit-ins had taken place at more than 30 locations in seven states, and by the end of April more than 50,000 students had taken part.
4The Freedom Riders who filled a Mississippi prison
On the tile: Parchman1961
In May 1961, after mobs attacked the Freedom Riders in Alabama, students from Nashville chose to keep the rides going, and students from all over the country bought bus tickets south. In Jackson, Mississippi, they were arrested by the hundreds. Governor Ross Barnett meant to intimidate them by sending riders to the state prison at Parchman, but they kept coming, and about 300 ended up there. More than 430 people rode in all. The Interstate Commerce Commission issued a desegregation order on September 22, and it took effect on November 1, 1961.
Albany, Georgia, was a hard lesson. By December 1961 more than 500 protesters had been jailed, and Police Chief Laurie Pritchett answered with mass arrests while avoiding public brutality, which kept bad publicity to a minimum. On July 10, 1962, Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy were found guilty of parading without a permit and chose 45 days in jail over a $178 fine. Two days later Pritchett told them an unidentified Black man had paid their bail, and they were released. King left Albany that August with the movement's goals unmet.
Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, on Good Friday, April 12, 1963, for defying a court order against protests. Eight local clergymen published a statement in the Birmingham News calling the demonstrations unwise and untimely, and King answered from jail. He began writing in the margins of the newspaper, continued on scraps of paper from a Black trustee, and finished on paper his lawyers brought. The Letter from Birmingham Jail, dated April 16, was reprinted in pamphlets and magazines and became a chapter of his 1964 book Why We Can't Wait.
The best-known words of the March on Washington were not in the text reporters were handed. Martin Luther King Jr. finished his speech at 3:30 that morning, and a typescript went to the press. At the Lincoln Memorial he started reading, then a refrain he had used many times before came to him. As he later described it, "I used it, and at that point I just turned aside from the manuscript altogether." He had used the dream theme in Detroit two months earlier. The improvised passage gave the speech its name.
841 Freedom Schools and 17,000 attempts to register
On the tile: Freedom SummerSummer 1964
In the summer of 1964 about 1,000 volunteers, most of them white northern college students, came to Mississippi. Training began in Ohio on June 14. The project set up 41 Freedom Schools attended by more than 3,000 young Black students, and about 17,000 Black Mississippians attempted to register to vote that summer, though only 1,600 of the completed applications were accepted. Early on, three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, disappeared while investigating a church burning in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and were later found murdered.
On February 1, 1968, two Memphis sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death by a malfunctioning garbage truck. On February 12, about 1,300 sanitation workers went on strike, and marchers carried signs reading "I Am a Man." Martin Luther King Jr. came to help, speaking to about 25,000 people at Mason Temple on March 18. He returned on April 3 to give his I've Been to the Mountaintop speech and was assassinated the next day. On April 16 the city agreed to recognize the union and raise wages.
The Montgomery church where Martin Luther King Jr. served as pastor from 1954 to 1960 has deep roots. It was founded in 1877 in a slave trader's pen as the Second Colored Baptist Church. In 1879 its trustees paid $270 for a lot on Dexter Avenue near the Capitol, and the red brick church that stands there was built between 1883 and 1889. King was its twentieth pastor, and the church served as headquarters for much of Montgomery's early civil rights activity. In 1978 it was renamed in his memory.
Brown v. Board of Education was really five cases, from South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, Kansas and Washington, D.C. Some began over plainly unequal schools; in South Carolina, parents went to court after their petition for school buses was ignored. The famous name came from Topeka, Kansas, where 13 parents tried to enroll their children in white schools and were refused. Monroe Elementary, one of four segregated elementary schools for Black children in the city, was what the Park Service calls a seemingly equal facility. The building now houses the national park's visitor center.
3Famous for desegregation, but not first in Arkansas
On the tile: Central High1957Myth busted
Little Rock Central High School is so tied to the 1957 crisis that it is easy to assume it was the first school in Arkansas to desegregate. It was not. The National Park Service notes that schools in Charleston and Fayetteville desegregated in 1954, and Hoxie followed in 1955. Central High's fame comes from 1957, when Governor Orval Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to keep Black students out. The building, begun in 1926 at a cost of $1.5 million, is still a working public high school with about 2,500 students.
4A monument in two states, proclaimed on his birthday
On the tile: Emmett TillJuly 25, 2023
Emmett Till was 14 when he was kidnapped and murdered while visiting relatives in Mississippi in August 1955. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted on an open-casket funeral in Chicago so the world could see what had been done to her son. The national monument named for them both was proclaimed on July 25, 2023, the anniversary of Emmett's birth in 1941. It joins three sites: Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, Graball Landing on the Tallahatchie River, and the courthouse in Sumner where an all-white jury acquitted the two accused men.
Myles Horton founded the Highlander Folk School at Monteagle, Tennessee, in 1932 for labor and adult education, and by the early 1950s it had turned to race relations. Rosa Parks attended a workshop there in 1955, four months before her arrest in Montgomery. In 1957 an undercover agent sent by the Georgia Commission on Education photographed Martin Luther King Jr. at Highlander's anniversary celebration, and the picture was spread across the South with claims that it showed a Communist training school. In 1961 Tennessee revoked the school's charter on falsified charges.
On September 15, 1963, Ku Klux Klan members bombed Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young girls. Help with rebuilding came from across the Atlantic. Welsh artist John Petts designed a stained-glass window for the church, and a fundraising campaign led by the Western Mail newspaper in Wales supported it. The Wales Window, given to the church in 1965, shows a Black Christ on the cross. Decades later, on the 60th anniversary of the bombing, the Welsh government called it a moving symbol of solidarity.
The Selma bridge where voting rights marchers were attacked on Bloody Sunday carries the name of Edmund Winston Pettus. He was promoted to brigadier general in the Confederate army in 1863, served as Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama in 1877, and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1896, serving until his death in 1907. On March 7, 1965, state troopers met about 600 marchers on his bridge with clubs and tear gas. Five months later, the Voting Rights Act became law.
8Room 30, where the Birmingham campaign was planned
On the tile: Gaston Motel1963
The A. G. Gaston Motel opened in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1954, and in 1963 its Room 30 served as the planning center for the Birmingham campaign led by Martin Luther King Jr. By May 10, negotiators had reached an agreement to begin desegregating the city. Soon after, a bomb blew a hole in the motel's first floor, directly beneath Room 30. In January 2017 the motel was protected as part of the new Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument, and after rehabilitation it reopened to visitors in June 2023.
In November 1967 Martin Luther King Jr. announced the Poor People's Campaign, planning to bring an initial group of 2,000 poor people to Washington. He was killed before it began, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference carried on under his successor, Ralph Abernathy. On Mother's Day, May 12, 1968, thousands of women led by Coretta Scott King formed the first wave. The next day demonstrators began building Resurrection City on the National Mall. They stayed more than a month, until the Department of the Interior closed the camp on June 24, 1968.
1The equal protection ruling two weeks before Brown
On the tile: HernandezMay 3, 1954
In Jackson County, Texas, no person with a Mexican or Latin American name had served on a jury commission, grand jury or trial jury in 25 years, though more than 6,000 jurors had been summoned. Pete Hernandez, convicted there, appealed. On May 3, 1954, a unanimous Supreme Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice Earl Warren, ruled that systematically excluding people of Mexican descent from juries violated equal protection. Two weeks later, on May 17, Warren announced another unanimous decision: Brown v. Board of Education.
2The county that closed its public schools for years
On the tile: Prince Edward1959 to 1964
Rather than desegregate, Prince Edward County, Virginia, shut its public schools, which did not reopen in the fall of 1959. A private foundation ran schools for white children. Black children in the county went without formal education until 1963, when federal, state and county officials arranged temporary classes. On May 25, 1964, in Griffin v. County School Board, the Supreme Court ruled that the closing denied equal protection, writing that "the time for mere 'deliberate speed' has run out." The county's schools reopened that year.
Bruce Boynton, a Black law student traveling by bus, was refused service in the white section of the restaurant at the Trailways terminal in Richmond, Virginia, and was convicted and fined $10. On December 5, 1960, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction in Boynton v. Virginia, holding that he had a federal right to remain there. The ruling meant segregated facilities serving interstate travelers, such as terminals, restaurants and restrooms, were unlawful. In May 1961 the Freedom Riders boarded buses in Washington to test whether the South would comply.
On June 10, 1964, the Senate did something it had never managed on a civil rights bill: it voted to cut off a filibuster. The Civil Rights Act had occupied the Senate for 60 working days, and Senator Robert Byrd had just finished a speech of 14 hours and 13 minutes. California's Clair Engle, mortally ill and unable to speak because of a brain tumor, signaled his yes vote by pointing to his eye. Cloture passed 71 to 29, above the 67 votes then required, and the Senate approved the bill nine days later.
5A barbecue joint and meat that crossed state lines
On the tile: Ollie's BBQDecember 14, 1964
Ollie's Barbecue in Birmingham, Alabama, seated 220 customers but served Black customers only through take-out. Could the Civil Rights Act of 1964 reach a local family restaurant? The Supreme Court looked at the meat. In the year before the act, Ollie's bought about $150,000 worth of food, and $69,683 of it, or 46 percent, was meat its supplier had brought in from outside the state. On December 14, 1964, in Katzenbach v. McClung, the Court upheld the law under Congress's power over interstate commerce. The same day it ruled against an Atlanta motel.
Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving married in Washington, D.C., in June 1958 and went home to Caroline County, Virginia, where a marriage between a white person and a Black person was a crime. In January 1959 they pleaded guilty and were sentenced to one year in jail, suspended for 25 years on condition that they leave Virginia and not return together. On June 12, 1967, in Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court struck down Virginia's law, ruling that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantees of equal protection and due process.
7A stalled housing bill passed a week after King died
On the tile: Fair HousingApril 11, 1968
In 1966 President Lyndon Johnson asked Congress to guarantee the right to secure a home regardless of the color of one's skin, and two years later it still had not become law. On April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Johnson wrote to the Speaker of the House urging passage: "The time for action is now." Congress acted within days. On April 11, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, saying it made fair housing for all part of the American way of life.
In 1957 the Fellowship of Reconciliation published a comic book called Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story. Nearly half a century later, in 2006, Egyptian activist Dalia Ziada came across it. Deciding that nonviolent protest should be the preferred path to reform, she translated it into Arabic, won approval from government censors and published it in 2008. The Library of Congress, which holds the Arabic edition, notes that the comic is credited with helping to inspire the 2011 protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square.
9A hospital-room phone call, and $54,000 given away
On the tile: Nobel PrizeOctober 14, 1964
On the morning of October 14, 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. was asleep in an Atlanta hospital, where he had checked in for rest, when Coretta Scott King called to tell him he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. At 35 he was the youngest person to receive it up to that time. He accepted in Oslo on December 10 in the name of the movement, and gave away the $54,000 in prize money to civil rights groups, including $25,000 to the Gandhi Society for Human Rights and $12,000 to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.