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Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system, the 43rd largest in the nation, includes the city of Charlotte and the surrounding Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. The situation for Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education came about under a desegregation plan that was approved by the District Court.
April 20, 1971, the Supreme Court upholds that busing was a legitimate plan for achieving the integration of public schools. Although largely unwelcome (and sometimes violently opposed) in local school districts, court-ordered busing plans continued until the late 1990s.
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Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
The SNCC, a political organization formed in April of 1960 by black college students in the United States dedicated to overturning segregation in the South and giving young blacks a stronger voice in the civil rights movement. SNCC organized and used the non-violent tactic of protest called "sit-ins", the first when four young black men sat at a segregated "whites only" lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. This sparked a wave of other "sit-ins", lead by Ella Baker and Stokley Carmichael.
During the formative days of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other SCLC leaders had hoped that SNCC would serve as the youth-wing of SCLC, appealing to a younger generation of civil rights activists. The students, however, remained fiercely independent of King and the SCLC, generating their own projects and tactics. Although their ideological differences eventually caused SNCC and SCLC to be at odds, the two organizations worked side-by-side throughout the early years of the civil rights movement.
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Sit-In for Disability Rights
On April 5, 1977, a group of disabled people took over the San Francisco offices of Health, Education, and Welfare Department to protest Secretary Joseph Califano's refusal to sign meaningful regulations for Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. No one expected to live there for almost a month, but they did. The action became the longest sit-in of a federal building. The historic demonstrations were successful and the Section 504 regulations were finally signed.
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