A difficult conversation: Beyond the Civil Rights Act

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Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

President Barack Obama signs a photograph as he greets people on the tarmac upon arrival at Louis Armstrong International Airport in New Orleans, July 25, 2012.

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Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Students at Louisville High School in Mississippi rehearse the play 'He Calls Me By the Thunder' in Jan. 2008. The play is about the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church where four little black girls died. Drama teacher M.J. Etua wrote the play hoping to inspire her students to work for change by learning about the civil rights movement.

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Allen G. Breed/AP

Fifty years after 'Freedom Summer,' when hundreds of volunteers descended on Mississippi to focus national attention on segregation, the state flag, with its Confederate emblem, flies outside the Marshall County Courthouse in Holly Springs, Miss., April 15, 2014.

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Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Barbara Anderson, whose parents were a part of the civil rights movement, walks through the sculpture 'Police Dog Attack' in the Civil Rights District in Birmingham, Ala., in Aug. 2010.

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Alex Menendez/AP

A young boy wears a Barack Obama 'Hope' shirt as protesters march and hold signs in the No Justice No Peace 'March Against Gun Violence' walk in Orlando, Fla., July 17, 2013. The march was organized by one of the attorneys for Trayvon Martin's parents.

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Pat Sullivan/AP

Attorney General Eric Holder is welcomed at the NAACP annual convention, July 10, 2012, in Houston. Holder says he opposes a new photo ID requirement in Texas elections because it would be harmful to minority voters.

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Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

Los Angeles Clippers players listen to the national anthem wearing their warmup jerseys inside out to protest alleged racial remarks by team owner Donald Sterling before Game 4 of an opening-round NBA basketball playoff series against the Golden State Warriors on Sunday, April 27, 2014, in Oakland, Calif.

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John Locher/Las Vegas Review-Journal/AP

Rancher Cliven Bundy (c.) walks off stage after speaking at a news conference near Bunkerville, Nev., April 24, 2014. Bundy, a Nevada rancher who became a conservative folk hero for standing up to the government in a fight over grazing rights, lost some of his staunch defenders after wondering aloud whether blacks might have had it better under slavery.

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Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Whitney Brown (c.) looks at jewelry in a shop while her brother, Shaun, and mother, Tracy (background left), watch, on March 3, 2014 in Atlanta. A reverse migration of blacks to the southern US is under way. African-Americans are heading south to experience the culture and because race relations in the South have improved.

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Mark Almond/AL.com/AP

Erynias Tribe dancers move to the music of Juka Tribe at the Darter Festival in Railroad Park in Birmingham Ala, in 2013. Long haunted by black-and-white newsreel footage of the fire hoses and police dogs that city leaders turned on blacks during the civil rights struggle, the city 50 years later has a new vibe that's generating buzz all its own.

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Bob Gathany/ al.com/AP

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley (c.) hands the pen to Clarence Norris Jr., son of Clarence Norris, one of the Scottsboro Boys, after signing legislation that establishes a framework for posthumous pardons for the Scottsboro Boys, April 19, 2013, in Scottsboro, Ala. The Scottsboro Boys were nine black youths wrongfully convicted of raping two white women more than 80 years ago.

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Jim Young/Reuters

President Obama (r.) sits down for a beer at the White House Rose Garden with Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates (2nd l.), Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley (2nd r.), and Vice President Joe Biden to try to start a dialogue on better race relations, July 30, 2009. Crowley arrested Gates for disorderly conduct in his own home July 16 while investigating a report of a burglary in process. Obama inflamed tensions by saying police had 'acted stupidly,' prompting him to back down from the remark.

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Richard Drew/AP

Morning commuters fill the platform as they exit a train in New York's Times Square subway station, in 2013. A historic decline in the share of the US population that is white and the fast growth of the Latino population are blurring traditional black-white color lines, testing the limits of civil rights laws and reshaping political alliances as 'whiteness' loses its numerical dominance.

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Douglas Zimmerman/Reuters

Nathan Pitts (l.) and Qinton Pitts of Brentwood, Calif., listen to speakers in Oakland, Calif., before a 2013 march to protest the verdict in the George Zimmerman trial. Protesters see a miscarriage of justice in the verdict reached by Florida jurors, who found Zimmerman, the white-Hispanic man who shot Trayvon Martin, not guilty of murder or manslaughter of the unarmed black teenager.

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Jose Luis Magana/Reuters

Students calling for diversity protest outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, 2012. The US Supreme Court in 2013 returned to a lower court the closely watched case on the affirmative action admissions policy at the University of Texas at Austin, thereby avoiding a major ruling on the issue.

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Lauren Justice/The Flint Journal/AP

Cecilia Rutherford joins protesters in 2013 outside Hurley Medical Center in Flint, Mich., after a nurse filed a complaint against the hospital claiming it had agreed to a man's request that no African-American nurses care for his newborn baby. The case involving a white, swastika-tattooed Michigan father and a black nurse at the hospital highlights one of medicine’s 'open secrets' – allowing patients to refuse treatment by a doctor or nurse of another race. The nurse is now suing the hospital, claiming it bowed to the father's illegal demands.

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AP

Smouldering ruins remain where a building stood on 7th Street, N.W., in Washington, April 6, 1968. Numerous fires accompanied the second night of turmoil in the nation's capital following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis, Tenn., April 4.

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AP

The basement room of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church is shown following a bombing that killed four black girls in Birmingham, Ala., Sept. 15, 1963.

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AP

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, addresses marchers during his 'I Have a Dream' speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, Aug. 28, 1963.

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AP

Freedom Riders stand at the bus station in downtown Montgomery, Ala., in 1961. The bus station has become a civil-rights-era landmark.

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Will Counts/Arkansas Democrat Gazette/AP

Students from Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., shout insults at Elizabeth Eckford, 16, as she calmly marches down to a line of National Guardsmen who blocked the main entrance and would not let her enter, Sept. 4, 1957. Black students made civil rights history when they integrated Central High School.

A difficult conversation: Beyond the Civil Rights Act

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