Learning Objectives

By reading this chapter, you will be able to do the following:

5.1 Understand that securing civil rights requires both actions by individuals and groups to claim them and actions by governments to protect them.
5.2 Trace the history of racial segregation in America and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which laid the foundation for later struggles to secure civil rights.
5.3 Explain efforts to end legal segregation based on racial identity as well as the strategies used in those efforts.
5.4 Trace the history of efforts to secure civil rights for American women.
5.5 Evaluate the ways the diversity of Americans’ identities shapes efforts to secure civil rights in the twenty-first century.