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With the Emancipation Proclamation, President Lincoln freed all enslaved people in “rebellious” states, forbid the military from repressing their freedom and sanctioned their military service for Union forces. This decree made emancipation a clear objective of the American Civil War.

In this court case, the United States Supreme Court ruled Congress' act to ban slavery in federal territories unconstitutional and determined that no person of African descent was a citizen of the United States.

These two images depict segregated classrooms before the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

As a means to reduce and regulate child labor in the United States, the National Child Labor Committee composed a declaration, citing the current state of child labor and three resolutions to the situation.

President John F. Kennedy made these notes on May 12, 1963, in response to multiple bombings and subsequent rioting in Birmingham, Ala.

Richard L. Copley took this photograph in 1968 at the Memphis sanitation workers' strike -- the reason Martin Luther King Jr. was in Memphis on the day he was killed.

Deborah Walker recalls that, growing up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, fear and rage lived side by side. She credits her lifelong fight for equity to her guardian angels.

American Indian tribes across the United States are working to revive their lost languages.