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Enacted in 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act, formally titled “An Act to execute certain treaty stipulations relating to Chinese,” was one of the first laws limiting immigration into the United States.

Laura Vazquez, an analyst for the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), presented this statement to a Congressional subcommittee at the hearing “S. 952, DEVELOPMENT, RELIEF, AND EDUCATION FOR ALIEN MINORS (DREAM) ACT OF 2011” on June 28, 2011.

Gov. Orval E. Faubus of Arkansas delivered this speech on Sept. 18, 1958. In this speech, Faubus justifies his decision to shut down Little Rock’s public high schools for the year rather than complying with the Supreme Court’s order to continue with integration.

This 2005 news segment reports on a recently discovered recording from 1963, in which Kennedy responded to news of police violence against civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama.

During World War II, a young German girl, Rose Blanche, inadvertently discovers a concentration camp not far from her town. She travels there frequently, taking food to the children on the other side of the barbed wire and meets a haunted fate the day she discovers the camp is gone.

The announcement on November 20, 1969 from 89 American Indians – mostly students from colleges and universities – that they were taking over Alcatraz Island, set in motion what would become the longest occupation of a federal facility by Native Americans to date. This report aired a year later on NBC News, in December 1970, six months before the occupation ended.

When Leonard Peltier thinks of the massacre at Wounded Knee, he hears the screams of women and children. Although the vehicle for killing has changed, Peltier explains how American Indians are still being killed off in the modern day.

Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the opinion for Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, a groundbreaking case that overturned the "separate but equal" standard set forth in Plessy v. Ferguson. The Supreme Court decided this case unanimously on May 17, 1954.

In this excerpt from his memoir, Rodriguez provides a stirring recollection from his adolescence: the first time he experienced racism as a result of being an immigrant in America. As he says, the experience "stays with [him] like a foul odor."

Helen Tsuchiya, born a U.S. citizen, tells what it was like to move from her home to an internment camp surrounded by barbed wire after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.