Chapter 5 Civil Rights

When did Civil Rights become part of the U.S. Constitution?

Civil rights were incorporated with the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Seneca Falls Convention was significant because it

was the first women right’s convention in the United States

Which amendments to the U.S. Constitution seemed to offer African Americans the most hope for achieving full citizenship rights in the United States?

the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments

Which statement about the Reconstruction era is false?

African American voters supported the Democratic Party

What was the Supreme Court’s response to the Civil Rights Act of 1875?

It declared the act unconstitutional because it protected against acts of private discrimination, not state discrimination.

What does the term Jim Crow refer to?

the system of racial segregation in the South after Reconstruction

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson

declared that segregation by race was unconstitutional.

What best explains the increased attention the federal government paid to the problem of racial discrimination during the 1940s?

Northern migration of African Americans increased their voting strength.

Suffragists called the Statue of Liberty "the greatest hypocrisy of the nineteenth century" because

it was supposed to represent "liberty," yet women could not vote in the United States.

Which statement best describes the path to women’s suffrage in the United States?

Some states granted women the right to vote first, and then a constitutional amendment gave all women the right to vote.

How did the Supreme Court justify its decision to strike down the southern practice of "white primaries?"

It claimed that parties were "an agency of the State," and therefore any practice of discrimination against blacks was a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment.

Which of the following was not used as a way to limit the electoral influence of African Americans?

restrictive covenants

Which of the following best summarizes the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education?

Racially segregated schools can never be equal.

"Strict scrutiny" is the level of judicial review the federal courts give to all cases that involve

racial classifications.

Legally enforced segregation in public schools is a form of ______ discrimination.

discrimination

What is the name for school segregation that results from racially divided neighborhoods rather than state laws?

de facto

Which area was not covered by the Civil Rights Act of 1964

school desegregation

In the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congress vastly expanded the role of the executive branch and the
credibility of court orders by

requiring that federal grants-in-aid to state and local governments for education be withheld from any school system practicing racial segregation.

Desegregating schools in northern states proved to be difficult because

segregation in the North was generally de facto, the product of both segregated housing and acts of private discrimination that were hard to prove.

One step taken toward the desegregation of public schools was

busing children from poor urban school districts to wealthier suburban ones.

The right to vote was strengthened in 1975 when Congress

made literacy tests illegal and mandated bilingual ballots or other assistance for non-English-speaking Americans.

To draw voting districts so that one group or party is unfairly advantaged is called

gerrymandering

Why did the Equal Rights Amendment fail to pass?

Not ratified by the necessary 38 states

In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court ruled that

quotas and separate admissions standards for minorities were constitutional but other forms of affirmative action were unconstitutional.

In the University of Michigan affirmative action cases, the Supreme Court

rejected mechanical point systems for university admissions but upheld highly individualized affirmative action policies that were designed to promote diversity.