'We Shall Overcome': The Civil Rights Movement Quiz (2024)

Believe it or not, Martin Luther King Jr.'s name was changed at age 5. His father was blown away by the legacy of Protestant Reformation leader Martin Luther while on a trip to Germany. When King returned, he changed his name and his son's to reflect it.

The civil rights icon was unceremoniously thrown in jail nearly 30 times. Famously, one of those times was for driving 30 miles per hour in a 25 mph zone (48 kph in a 40 kph zone), while in Montgomery, Alabama.

Known as a racial caste system, the Jim Crow era saw a vast collection of rigid laws, etiquette and practices that treated Black people as inferior, second-class citizens.

Although Malcolm brought the Nation of Islam (NOI) extreme popularity, he fell out with its leader, Elijah Muhammad when he found out the latter had several illegitimate children, in direct violation of the religion's teachings, and began to criticize him publicly. Malcolm was killed by NOI members in 1965.

In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court said that racial segregation laws didn't violate the U.S. Constitution provided the facilities for each race were of equal quality. Thankfully, this ruling was overturned some 55 years later by Brown v. Board of Education. The Brown ruling said that segregation on the basis of race is unconstitutional and "inherently unequal."

The activist was called the "mother of the civil rights movement" when her refusal to give her bus seat up to a white man in 1955 started a boycott of the Montgomery bus system in Alabama that lasted 381 days, until the Supreme Court ruled segregated seating was unconstitutional.

John Lewis, who later became a popular congressman, was one of the leaders of the march to bring awareness to the lack of voting rights for African Americans. The march took them across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where police officers beat them severely, sending 58 people to the hospital, including Lewis.

Literacy tests often kept Black people from exercising their right to vote. Many African Americans were illiterate thanks to Jim Crow segregation and the tests were often deliberately confusing. Clark, a former teacher who was fired because of her NAACP affiliation, designed a curriculum to teach reading and writing. (Literacy tests were banned by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.)

The group set the gold standard as the U.S. Army Air Corps' first Black aviators. Between them, they earned 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses for their heroic missions and inspired integration within the armed forces.

The 1954 Supreme Court decision on Brown v. Board of Education (which outlawed segregation) is often considered to be the beginning of the modern civil rights movement, which lasted through the 1960s. However, African Americans had been agitating for their civil rights long before this period and in some ways, the fight still continues.