The civil rights movement was a social movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement in the country. The movement had its origins in the Reconstruction era during the late 19th century and had its modern roots in the 1940s, although the movement 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.
Carol Lani Guinier was an American educator, legal scholar, and civil rights theorist. She was the Bennett Boskey Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and the first woman of color appointed to a tenured professorship there. Before coming to Harvard in 1998, Guinier taught at the University of Pennsylvania Law School for ten years. Her scholarship covered the professional responsibilities of public lawyers, the relationship between democracy and the law, the role of race and gender in the political process, college admissions, and affirmative action. In 1993 President Bill Clinton nominated Guinier to be United States Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, but withdrew the nomination.
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. is an American civil rights organization and law firm based in New York City.
Lawrence Guyot Jr. was an American civil rights activist and the director of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964.
John Michael Doar was an American lawyer and senior counsel with the law firm Doar Rieck Kaley & Mack in New York City.
Fred David Gray is an American civil rights attorney, preacher, activist, and state legislator from Alabama. He handled many prominent civil rights cases, such as Browder v. Gayle, and was elected to the Alabama House of Representatives in 1970, along with Thomas Reed, both from Tuskegee. They were the first black state legislators in Alabama in the 20th century. He served as the president of the National Bar Association in 1985, and in 2001 was elected as the first African-American President of the Alabama State Bar.
In the United States, affirmative action consists of government-mandated, government-approved, and voluntary private programs granting special consideration to groups considered or classified as historically excluded, specifically racial minorities and women. These programs tend to focus on access to education and employment in order to redress the disadvantages associated with past and present discrimination. Another goal of affirmative action policies is to ensure that public institutions, such as universities, hospitals, and police forces, are more representative of the populations they serve.
The Thurgood Marshall School of Law (TMSL) is an ABA-accredited law school at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas. It awards Juris Doctor and Master of Law degrees. Thurgood Marshall School of Law is a member-school of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund and Association of American Law Schools.
Thomas Edward Perez is an American politician and attorney currently serving as senior advisor to the president of the United States and director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, holding both positions since June 2023. Perez previously served as the United States Secretary of Labor (2013–2017), the chair of the Democratic National Committee (2017–2021), and United States Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights (2009–2013).
The Boston Bar Association (BBA) is a volunteer non-governmental organization in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. With headquarters located at 16 Beacon Street in the historic Chester Harding House, across from the Massachusetts State House on Beacon Hill, the BBA has 13,000 members drawn from private practice, corporations, government agencies, legal aid organizations, the courts and law schools.
John A. Payton was an African-American civil rights attorney. In 2008, he was appointed the sixth president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund serving in that post until his death. Prior to this, he was a partner at the law firm WilmerHale for 20 years.
Marvin E. Aspen is a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
Eva Jefferson Paterson is the president and founder of the Equal Justice Society, a national legal organization focused on civil rights and anti-discrimination.
Susan L. Burke is an American lawyer noted for her work to reform the military system of prosecuting rape and assault and in representing plaintiffs suing the American military or military contractors, such as the Abtan v. Blackwater case. She represented former detainees of Abu Ghraib prison in a suit against interrogators and translators from CACI and Titan Corp. who were tasked with obtaining military intelligence from them during their detention. Her work was featured in the documentaries The Invisible War and Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. In 2015, the National Law Journal named Burke one of the top 75 female attorneys in the nation.
The New York County Lawyers Association (NYCLA) is a bar association located in New York City.
This is a timeline of the civil rights movement in the United States, a nonviolent mid-20th century freedom movement to gain legal equality and the enforcement of constitutional rights for people of color. The goals of the movement included securing equal protection under the law, ending legally institutionalized racial discrimination, and gaining equal access to public facilities, education reform, fair housing, and the ability to vote.
Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. 181 (2023), is a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in which the court held that race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions processes violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. With its companion case, Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, the Supreme Court effectively overruled Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), which validated some affirmative action in college admissions provided that race had a limited role in decisions.
The following is a list of notable lawsuits involving former United States president Donald Trump. The list excludes cases that only name Trump as a legal formality in his capacity as president, such as habeas corpus requests.
Taylor Dumpson is an American attorney and associate counsel at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. After she became the first Black woman president of the student government at American University, she was the target of hate crimes, and responded to an online troll storm with a successful lawsuit.
