Discrimination in the United States

Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister, civil rights activist and political philosopher who was a leader of the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. He advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through the use of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws and other forms of legalized discrimination, which most commonly affected African Americans.

A Black church leader, King participated in and led marches for the right to vote, desegregation, labor rights, and other civil rights. He oversaw the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and became the first president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). As president of the SCLC, he led the unsuccessful Albany Movement in Albany, Georgia, and helped organize nonviolent 1963 protests in Birmingham, Alabama. King was one of the leaders of the 1963 March on Washington, where he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and helped organize two of the three Selma to Montgomery marches during the 1965 Selma voting rights movement. There were dramatic standoffs with segregationist authorities, who often responded violently. The civil rights movement achieved pivotal legislative gains in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

The Treaty of Fifth Avenue refers to the agreement reached between two Republicans, U.S. vice president Richard Nixon and New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, in July 1960.

Although Rockefeller had little influence over the Republican Party's conservative wing, he was the de facto leader of the liberal Republicans. Nixon felt he needed the support of Rockefeller to secure the Republican Party nomination. Nixon feared that Rockefeller, who had recently written an indictment of the Republican Party, would refuse to support him unless the party platform was changed. Nixon and Rockefeller met at Rockefeller's Fifth Avenue apartment in New York City where, over the course of four hours, and with other participants joining by phone, they agreed to this fourteen-point compact of security and economic issues. The compact called for increased defense spending on U.S. nuclear capability as well as the establishment of a flexible response force to deal with armed conflicts. In addition, the document supports planks to the party platform that stimulate economic growth, "remove the last vestiges of segregation or discrimination", and provide government funding for education. While the compromise might not have profoundly changed the party's platform, it strained Nixon's relations with the party's conservative members who disagreed with Rockefeller's more liberal views.

Passing, in the context of race, occurs when one conceals their socially applied racial identity or ethnicity in order to be perceived as another race for acceptance and/or other benefits. Historically, the term has been used primarily in the United States to describe a person of mixed race who has assimilated into the white majority to escape the legal and social consequences of racial segregation and discrimination. In the Antebellum South, passing as White was sometimes a temporary disguise used as a means of escaping slavery, which had become a racial caste.