Question

Create a digital timeline evaluating the significance of five legislative policies or Supreme Court decisions that impacted a specific racial, ethnic, or religious group. Include both text and visuals to share your evaluation with an audience. All timelines should include an introductory slide, five key policies or Supreme Court decisions, a concluding slide, and a works-cited slide. Be sure to include citation information for images as well as text.

Prompt
Create a digital timeline evaluating the significance of five legislative policies or Supreme Court decisions that impacted a specific racial, ethnic, or religious group.

Answer 1

Timeline

• Reconstruction amendments to the US Constitution: 14th and 15th Amendments enacted in 1868 and 1870 respectively, already contained provisions to ensure equality of rights for all US citizens (including voting rights), without discrimination in terms on race.
• Jim Crow Laws were enacted in Sourthern states mostly between 1890 and 1910. These laws aimed to set limits to the voting rights of  African American sectors of the population. They established requirements that citizens who wanted to vote needed to fulfill, for example, a minimum income requeriment or passing a literacy test. They did not explicitly exclude black citizens, as the requirements were set for everybody, but the result of these measures was that large sectors of black people were mostly the ones who did not meet the standards and in turn, that could not vote.

• Plessy v. Ferguson was a landarmark decision enacted by the US Supreme Court of 1896 which allowed segregation in public schools, declaring that it did not violate the Equal Protection Clause guaranteed by the Reconstruction amendments as long as the facilities provided for black and white students were equal in terms of quality hence, as long as the "separate but equal" criteria was fulfilled.
• Brown v. Board of Education was a landmark decision issued by the US Supreme Court in 1954, which  declared segregation to be unconstitutional and overturned the decision reached in Plessy v. Ferguson. It was considered a major victory connected to the Civil Rights Movement.

• The Voting Rights Act (VRA)  was a piece of federal legislation enacted in 1965, to enforce in practice the provisions contained in the Reconstruction amendments and to ensure access to voting to all US citizens.