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Grade 6Civil Rights Leaders

Civil Rights Leaders and Their Impact

Covers Grade 6 civil rights history: key leaders, landmark laws, and strategies for equality, using matching, fill-blank, and analytical short-answer exercises.

18 questions · Matching · Multiple choice · Fill in the blank · Short answer · Analysis

This worksheet guides Grade 6 students through the lives and legacies of the people who shaped the American civil rights movement, from Thurgood Marshall's courtroom victories to the grassroots organizing of Fannie Lou Hamer. Four sections move students from recognition to analysis: they begin by matching leaders to their documented actions, then sharpen their thinking with multiple-choice and fill-blank questions that demand precise recall without a word bank. The final section asks students to write analytically — comparing competing strategies and tracing cause and effect across specific events. The sheet works well within a 20th-century US history unit and can be used as a class exercise, independent practice, or structured review before a test.

Civil Rights Leaders and Their Impact — Grade 6

Read each section's directions carefully, then complete every question. Support your answers with specific names, dates, and events from the civil rights movement.

Remember

  • The civil rights movement was a sustained campaign, roughly 1954 to 1968, to end racial segregation and discrimination in the United States.
  • Landmark federal legislation passed in the mid-1960s banned segregation in public places and prohibited discriminatory voting practices.
  • Key organizations included the NAACP, SCLC, SNCC, and CORE; leaders used strategies ranging from legal challenges to nonviolent protest.

Part A — Match each civil rights leader to the action or achievement they are known for

Draw a line connecting each name in the left column to the matching description in the right column.

Choose from

  • A. Argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court, securing the 1954 ruling against school segregation
  • B. NAACP field secretary in Mississippi who was assassinated at his home on June 12, 1963
  • C. Mississippi sharecropper who co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964
  • D. Refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus on December 1, 1955
  • E. Chaired the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and helped lead the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches
  1. 1.

    Rosa Parks

  2. 2.

    Thurgood Marshall

  3. 3.

    John Lewis

  4. 4.

    Medgar Evers

  5. 5.

    Fannie Lou Hamer

Part B — Choose the best answer for each question

Circle the letter of the best answer for each question.

  1. 6.

    What was the Supreme Court case that declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional?

    1. A.Plessy v. Ferguson
    2. B.Brown v. Board of Education
    3. C.Marbury v. Madison
    4. D.Dred Scott v. Sandford
  2. 7.

    In which year did Martin Luther King Jr. deliver the "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington?

    1. A.1955
    2. B.1960
    3. C.1963
    4. D.1965
  3. 8.

    Which characteristic, besides race, color, religion, and sex, was protected by the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

    1. A.Age
    2. B.National origin
    3. C.Disability
    4. D.Marital status
  4. 9.

    Which organization did Ella Baker help found in 1960 to coordinate student sit-in protests across the South?

    1. A.NAACP
    2. B.CORE
    3. C.SCLC
    4. D.SNCC
  5. 10.

    With which organization was Malcolm X most closely associated during the early 1960s?

    1. A.NAACP
    2. B.Nation of Islam
    3. C.SNCC
    4. D.CORE

Part C — Fill in each blank with the correct term

Write the correct word or phrase on each blank line to complete the statement.

  1. 11.

    Martin Luther King Jr. wrote the "Letter from Birmingham ____" from an Alabama jail cell in April 1963.

  2. 12.

    The Voting Rights Act of ____ banned literacy tests used to prevent Black Americans from registering to vote.

  3. 13.

    Before her arrest in 1955, Rosa Parks served as secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the ____.

  4. 14.

    The 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education overturned the ____ doctrine from Plessy v. Ferguson.

  5. 15.

    Thurgood Marshall became the first African American Justice when he joined the U.S. Supreme Court in ____.

Part D — Answer each question in two to three sentences

Write two to three sentences to answer each question; use specific names, dates, and events in your response.

  1. 16.

    How did the strategies of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X differ? What might explain why each leader chose a different approach?

  2. 17.

    How did the actions of specific civil rights leaders help bring about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965?

  3. 18.

    What campaign did Rosa Parks's arrest in December 1955 spark, and what legal change resulted from that campaign?

Answer key

Part A — Match each civil rights leader to the action or achievement they are known for

  1. 1.Refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus on December 1, 1955
  2. 2.Argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court, securing the 1954 ruling against school segregation
  3. 3.Chaired the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and helped lead the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches
  4. 4.NAACP field secretary in Mississippi who was assassinated at his home on June 12, 1963
  5. 5.Mississippi sharecropper who co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964

Part B — Choose the best answer for each question

  1. 6.Brown v. Board of Education
  2. 7.1963
  3. 8.National origin
  4. 9.SNCC
  5. 10.Nation of Islam

Part C — Fill in each blank with the correct term

  1. 11.Jail
  2. 12.1965
  3. 13.NAACP
  4. 14.separate but equal
  5. 15.1967

Part D — Answer each question in two to three sentences

  1. 16.Example: Martin Luther King Jr. believed in nonviolent direct action, using marches and peaceful protest to pressure lawmakers and shift public opinion. Malcolm X argued that Black Americans had the right to defend themselves and should build independent institutions rather than seeking integration. Their different backgrounds — King rooted in the Southern church tradition, Malcolm X shaped by life in the North and his years with the Nation of Islam — help explain why each reached a different conclusion about how racial equality could be achieved.
  2. 17.Example: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized the 1963 Birmingham campaign, during which peaceful marchers faced fire hoses and police dogs on national television. The resulting public outrage pressured President Kennedy to send a civil rights bill to Congress, which became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 after his assassination. Without the sustained protest led by King and others willing to face arrest and violence, Congress might not have acted when it did.
  3. 18.Example: Rosa Parks's arrest on December 1, 1955, prompted Black residents of Montgomery to organize a boycott of the city's bus system within days. For 381 days, tens of thousands of people walked or carpooled rather than ride the buses, causing serious financial harm to the transit company. In 1956, the Supreme Court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that bus segregation in Montgomery was unconstitutional, showing that sustained nonviolent economic pressure could produce real legal change.

What this sheet teaches

  • Identify key civil rights leaders and match each to a specific action or achievement they are known for.
  • Analyze how nonviolent direct action and legal strategies contributed to landmark civil rights legislation.
  • Compare the approaches of different civil rights leaders and explain how their methods shaped the movement.

Notes for the adult

  • Students often conflate all civil rights leaders into a single strategy; stress that King, Marshall, and others used distinct methods.
  • When students confuse court cases, connect Thurgood Marshall by name to Brown v. Board and note Plessy v. Ferguson as the prior ruling.
  • A student is ready to advance when they can explain cause and effect across at least two events without prompting, not just list names.

What is on the page

Printed on one side, Civil Rights Leaders and Their Impact runs to four parts and 18 exercises. Matching, multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank and short-answer work, in that order, so a student who has understood the material has to show it in more than one form before the page is finished.

Part A Match each civil rights leader to the action or achievement they are known for sets five items against five lettered options, one lettered option per item, which means the last pair can be reached by elimination. Part B Choose the best answer for each question asks five multiple-choice questions with four printed options each. Part C Fill in each blank with the correct term gives five sentences with a blank each and no word bank, so the wording has to come from the student. Part D Answer each question in two to three sentences is three short-answer questions with nine ruled lines between them, which is the part of the sheet that takes the longest.

Nine ruled lines are printed for written answers on Civil Rights Leaders and Their Impact, which decides how long it takes more than the question count does. The answer key prints on its own page at the end, so the sheet can be handed out without it.

What it asks of the student

Civil Rights Leaders and Their Impact puts about 471 words of reading in front of the student — the fact box, the directions, every question, and every printed option. That is the number worth checking against a class before it goes out, because a sheet that is pitched right on the history and wrong on the reading fails for the same child either way. The longest single prompt on it runs to 25 words.

Writing runs the other way on Civil Rights Leaders and Their Impact: nine ruled lines for three of the 18 exercises, and the full answer key comes to 332 words. Everything else is answered in a blank, in a box, or on the map itself, which is why the sheet takes a lesson rather than a homework slot.

Where this one sits

Civil Rights Leaders and Their Impact is one of ten US History: Key Figures sheets on this site and one of 16 written for grade 6. two of them share its topic, civil rights leaders, which is worth knowing before printing two that overlap.

The closest things to it are Early US Presidents Worksheet (grade 4) and Civil Rights Leaders and Their Impact (grade 5). If Civil Rights Leaders and Their Impact lands well, those are the ones to reach for next; if it lands badly, the analysis sheets a grade either side are usually the adjustment rather than a different topic altogether.

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Civil Rights Leaders at other grades

This sheet: Grade 6, 18 questions — matching, multiple choice, fill in the blank, short answer. The same topic is also written for:

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