Civil Rights Movement Jeopardy

Court cases, marches, and the laws they won: a Civil Rights Movement review board any teacher can copy at no cost and run with phones as buzzers.

6 categories · 30 clues · Final Jeopardy · everyone buzzes in from their phone

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Every clue on this board

This page is public, so anyone can read the answers — copy the board and swap a few clues before game day.

Landmark Court Cases

$200
This 1896 Supreme Court decision upheld racial segregation under the doctrine of separate but equal.
What is Plessy v. Ferguson?
$400
This 1967 Supreme Court decision struck down state laws banning interracial marriage.
What is Loving v. Virginia?
$600
This 1971 Supreme Court decision upheld busing as a tool to desegregate public schools.
What is Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg?
$800
This 1954 case is often paired with the school segregation ruling because it struck down segregation in the nation's capital using the Fifth Amendment.
What is Bolling v. Sharpe?
$1,000
This 1964 Supreme Court decision upheld the Civil Rights Act's ban on discrimination by private businesses that serve interstate travelers.
What is Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States?

Boycotts and Sit-Ins

$200
This 1955-1956 boycott of a city's buses began after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat.
What is the Montgomery Bus Boycott?
$400
This nonviolent tactic, in which activists occupied segregated lunch counters and refused to leave, began famously in North Carolina in 1960.
What is a sit-in?
$600
This 1963 campaign in an Alabama city used sit-ins and marches to challenge segregation and provoked a violent police response caught on national television.
What is the Birmingham Campaign?
$800
This organization ran the Montgomery Bus Boycott and elected a young pastor as its first president.
What is the Montgomery Improvement Association?
$1,000
The Montgomery Bus Boycott ended after this Supreme Court decision ruled Alabama's bus segregation laws unconstitutional.
What is Browder v. Gayle?

Marches and Speeches

$200
This 1963 gathering on the National Mall drew over 200,000 people and featured Martin Luther King Jr.'s most famous address.
What is the March on Washington?
$400
This speech, delivered by King at the Lincoln Memorial, imagined a future where his children would be judged by the content of their character.
What is "I Have a Dream"?
$600
This 1965 march from an Alabama city to its state capital was violently attacked by state troopers on a bridge, a day now remembered as Bloody Sunday.
What is the Selma to Montgomery march?
$800
This bridge in Selma, Alabama, was the site of the Bloody Sunday attack on peaceful marchers.
What is the Edmund Pettus Bridge?
$1,000
This 1963 open letter, written by King from an Alabama jail cell, defended nonviolent direct action against critics who called it too impatient.
What is the "Letter from Birmingham Jail"?

Key Leaders

$200
This Baptist minister became the most prominent leader of the civil rights movement and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.
Who is Martin Luther King Jr.?
$400
This seamstress and NAACP secretary refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery in 1955.
Who is Rosa Parks?
$600
This NAACP lawyer argued the winning side of a landmark school segregation case before later becoming the first Black Supreme Court justice.
Who is Thurgood Marshall?
$800
This Nation of Islam minister and human rights activist advocated Black self-reliance before moderating his views shortly before his 1965 assassination.
Who is Malcolm X?
$1,000
This civil rights organizer, often called the movement's unsung hero, planned the March on Washington and was openly gay at a time that fact was suppressed from public credit.
Who is Bayard Rustin?

Laws That Changed America

$200
This landmark 1964 law banned discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in public places and employment.
What is the Civil Rights Act of 1964?
$400
This 1965 law banned literacy tests and other discriminatory barriers that had kept many Black Americans from voting.
What is the Voting Rights Act of 1965?
$600
This 1968 law banned discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing.
What is the Fair Housing Act?
$800
This 1964 constitutional amendment banned poll taxes in federal elections.
What is the Twenty-Fourth Amendment?
$1,000
This 1965 law abolished the national-origin quota system that had long restricted immigration from outside Europe.
What is the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965?

Students and Freedom Riders

$200
This 1960 sit-in at a segregated lunch counter in North Carolina was launched by four Black college students and sparked a wave of similar protests.
What is the Greensboro sit-in?
$400
This organization, founded in 1960 by student activists from the sit-in movement, coordinated voter registration drives across the South.
What is the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee?
$600
These integrated groups of activists rode interstate buses into the segregated South in 1961 to test compliance with desegregation rulings.
Who are the Freedom Riders?
$800
This 1964 campaign brought hundreds of mostly white, Northern college students to Mississippi to register Black voters and teach in makeshift schools.
What is Freedom Summer?
$1,000
These three civil rights workers, two white and one Black, were murdered by Klansmen in Mississippi during Freedom Summer in 1964.
Who are Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner?

Final Jeopardy — Landmark Decisions

This unanimous 1954 Supreme Court decision declared segregated public schools unconstitutional, rejecting the doctrine of separate but equal.

What is Brown v. Board of Education?

How to run this board

Covering roughly 1954 to 1968, this board moves from the courtroom victories through the boycotts, sit-ins, and marches to the legislation they produced, with a category on the students and Freedom Riders whose ages will land with your class.

The material deserves more than speed-trivia in places, so pause after clues about Birmingham or Selma and ask a team to add one sentence of context for the point.

A workable rhythm is 35 minutes of board play, then Final Jeopardy, then five minutes connecting the movement's tactics to a current events example the students choose.

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