Mother (Nettie Hunt) and daughter (Nickie) sit on steps of the Supreme Court building on May 18, 1954, the day following the Court's historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Nettie is holding a newspaper with the headline "High Court Bans Segregation in Public Schools." Reproduction courtesy of Corbis Images Brown v.

The modern Civil Rights Movement is often marked as beginning with the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision banning school segregation or the day in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to move from a bus seat in Montgomery, AL and ends with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act or with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Rosa Parks rode at the front of a Montgomery, Alabama, bus on the day the Supreme Court's ban on segregation of the city's buses took effect. A year earlier, she had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus.

Voting Rights Act The Voting Rights Act (VRA) bans racial discrimination in voting practices by the federal government as well as by state and local governments.