Liberty
Ratified in 1865, this amendment officially abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States.
What is the Thirteenth Amendment?
"...life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
What is the United States Declaration of Independence?
This U.S. Supreme Court decision ended legal racial segregation in public schools.
What is the Brown v. Board of Education?
It was declared in this speech "...that government of the people, by the people, FOR the people, shall not perish from the earth."
What is the Gettysburg Address?
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by this organization in 1948, stating that fundamental human rights should be universally protected.
What is the United Nations?
This term refers to the system of state and local statutes that legalized racial segregation in the American South, touching nearly every aspect of daily life from water fountains to schools.
What are the Jim Crow Laws?
A 1953 Executive Order signed by this U.S. President officially deemed homosexuals "security risks," leading to the purge of thousands of federal employees during the Red Scare.
Who is Dwight D. Eisenhower?
30 years after the British Abolition Act of 1833, the United States finally followed with this iconic Abraham Lincoln address.
What is the Emancipation Proclamation?
In this Thomas Paine refute of the idea that past generations could dictate the rights and laws of the future: "Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies."
What is "The Rights of Man"?
This 1965 law dismantled literacy tests and other barriers that denied millions the ballot.
What is the Voting Rights Act of 1965?
This ends "...with liberty and justice for all."
What is the Pledge of Allegiance?
This South African leader spent 27 years in prison for opposing apartheid before becoming the country's first Black head of state.
Who is Nelson Mandela?
With his Executive Order 9066 in 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt led the forced relocation and incarceration of over 110,000 _________ Americans, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens.
Who are Japanese?
For decades, Hollywood films performed cinematic denigration - portraying this ethnic group almost solely as terrorists, belly dancers, or oil-rich sheiks.
Who are Arabs (or Arab Americans)?
The 2015 Supreme Court ruling that established marriage equality, recognizing that the 14th Amendment guarantees same-sex couples the fundamental right to marry.
What is Obergefell v. Hodges?
In 1852 his speech asked the tough question: "This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today?"
Who is Frederick Douglass?
Found in the Fifth Amendment, this legal requirement ensures that the government must respect all of a person's legal rights.
What is due process?
He once commanded... "And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country."
Who is John F Kennedy?
This Pakistani activist became the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate in 2014 for her advocacy of female education and rights.
Who is Malala Yousafzai?
This 1882 federal law—the first significant law restricting immigration into the United States—specifically banned a targeted laborer group from entering the country based purely on their nationality.
What is the Chinese Exclusion Act?
During the Great Depression, the U.S. government orchestrated this mass deportation campaign, which unconstitutionally expelled an estimated one million people of Mexican descent—approximately 60% of whom were U.S. citizens.
What is the Mexican Repatriation?
In his Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, this Founding Father noted that "Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge ... of the characters and conduct of their rulers"
Who is John Adams?
The phrase "separation of church and state" comes from an 1802 letter written by this founding father and president to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut.
Who is Thomas Jefferson?
This international tribunal, established after World War II, affirmed that individuals—including heads of state—can be held accountable for crimes against humanity.
What are the Nuremberg trials?
In his BBC radio speech to his fellow Frenchpeople after Nazi invasion - "The same means that overcame us can bring us victory one day. For France is not alone! She is not alone! She is not alone!"
Who is Charles de Gaulle? (and may we remember that we are never alone)
This Polish trade union leader and human rights activist received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 for his efforts to secure workers' rights.
Who is Lech Walesa?
Signed by President Andrew Jackson in 1830, this legislation authorized the government to negotiate with Southern Native American tribes for their removal to federal territory west of the Mississippi River in exchange for their ancestral homelands.
What is the Indian Removal Act?
In 1928, this state officially became the last state legislation to ban convict leasing, though the practice informally persisted under other names.
What is Alabama?
In "The Spirit of Laws", this French philosopher argues that political Liberty isn't about "doing what one wants" but about being secure. The "government [must] be so constituted as one man need not be afraid of another."
Who is Montesqiueu - the most quoted non-biblical source of the Constitutional Convention. (Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu)
This 1896 Supreme Court case infamously established the "separate BUT equal" doctrine, legalizing state-mandated segregation.
What is Plessy v. Ferguson?
In 1963, this case ruled that states must provide an attorney for defendants in criminal cases who are too poor to afford one.
What is Gideon v. Wainwright?
Alexander Hamilton noted that religious diversity prevents tyranny in this essay:
A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for ... or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it.
What are the Federalist Papers?
In 1997, this organization and its founder won the Nobel Peace Prize for their ongoing campaign to ban anti-personnel landmines.
Who is the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL)?
This 1640 Virginia court decision sentenced an African indentured servant to lifelong servitude for running away, a penalty not applied to his white co-escapees, marking it as the first recorded permanent enslavement of an African in the British colonies.
Who is John Punch?
This 1875 Supreme Court case unanimously ruled that while women were citizens, they did not have an automatic right to vote, denying women's suffrage under the 14th Amendment.
What is Minor v. Happersett?