civil rights

1. Of or relating to such rights or privileges: civil rights legislation.
2. Of or relating to a political movement, especially during the 1950s and 1960s, devoted to securing equal opportunity and treatment for members of minority groups.

Rights protected by the U.S. Constitution. These rights can be enforced by court action. Among them are the right to own property, to utilize the courts, to marry, to contract, and to obtain other benefits set out by law, including all rights set out in federal statutes.

The political, social, and economic rights that each citizen has by virtue of simply being a citizen, and which are usually upheld by law. The meaning of the phrase is shaded by its commonest reference: to the civil rights of ethnic minorities in the United States. In this and similar usages, there is at least as much stress on the rights of a (minority) group as on the rights of the individual.

Nevertheless the phrase is older and more general than the American Civil War. Any state which gives constitutional or legal guarantees to its citizens confers civil rights. However, constitutions sometimes state rights without giving the citizen any means of enforcing them against the state. In the French Revolution for instance, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789) was modelled on contemporary American attempts to guarantee certain individual freedoms, which appear in the US Constitution (1787) and its first ten amendments, collectively known as the bill of rights (1791). The French Declaration remains in force in that it was incorporated into the preamble to the constitutions of the Fourth and Fifth Republics. However, French practice, unlike American, gives the citizen no legal channel to claim the rights guaranteed in 1789.

Both the French and the American declarations guarantee the citizen freedom of speech, assembly, and religion, and also offer procedural guarantees of fair trials and fair taxation. But the American Bill of Rights is part of the Federal Constitution; therefore from 1787 to 1865 it protected citizens only from the federal authorities, not from states or other levels of government. Indeed the Tenth Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights, specifies that ‘the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people’. Not until the end of the Civil War were any civil rights against the states guaranteed. Then, the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) outlawed slavery; the Fourteenth (1868) extended the rights guarantees in the original constitution and Bill of Rights to the states; and the Fifteenth (1870) forbade the United States or any state to restrict voting rights on the grounds of ‘race, color, or previous condition of servitude’. It is the programme of these three amendments that has come to summarize ‘civil rights’ in the United States.

Despite the unambiguous language of the three ‘Reconstruction Amendments’, civil rights were not protected for almost a century longer. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, those who had supported the ‘rebellion’ in the Southern states were disenfranchised, and the state governments were run by ‘carpet-baggers’: politicians from the North who packed their belongings in capacious carpet-bags and went to run the Southern states, supported by black votes. Their enemies alleged that they put as much into their carpet-bags to take north with them again. A bargain was struck in 1876 whereby the Republicans were allowed to claim victory in the disputed presidential election of that year on condition that Northern troops were withdrawn from the South. That marked the end for the carpet-baggers, but also for Southern blacks. A succession of discriminatory laws and practices in Southern state laws were upheld by the courts, in spite of their apparently blatant in- consistency with the Reconstruction Amendments. In the key case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court upheld a Louisiana segregation law on the grounds that segregation does not mark ‘the colored race with a badge of inferiority’ unless ‘the colored race chooses to put that construction on it’. The judgment in Plessy v. Ferguson was not reversed until the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) that separate facilities were inherently unequal. Brown and Baker v. Carr (1962, enforcing equal-sized electoral districts) were the most important of a series of Supreme Court judgments that restored civil rights in law to what a non-lawyer would believe the Reconstruction Amendments meant. These cases also helped to solidify the doctrine of the incorporation of the Bill of Rights into the Fourteenth Amendment, thereby extending its guarantees to the state and local levels.

But the Supreme Court commands no armies. Civil rights could not become effective until both the executive and the legislature had also put their weight behind them. The executive did so by sending federal forces to the South to enforce desegregation; the legislature did so by passing, especially, the Civil Rights Act 1964 and the Voting Rights Act 1965. Voting rights have become self-enforcing: now that black citizens have the vote, politicians have to balance their votes against those of white supremacists. Voting rights are now safe, but not all civil rights are. Some parts of the Deep South remain segregated.

A difficult problem in civil rights is whether all minorities can, or should, receive equal protection. In 1978 a would-be student, Alan Bakke, complained that his Fourteenth Amendment rights had been violated because he had been refused a place whereas minority ethnic group students with poorer qualifications had gained places in the quota which had been set aside for them. In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) a divided Supreme Court held that Bakke had been unlawfully excluded but that affirmative action to redress past racial discrimination was not unlawful. Affirmative action continues, notably in higher education, but much more cautiously than before Bakke.

In the United Kingdom, the currency of the term ‘civil rights’ is largely due to the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, which copied American methods in its protests against religious discrimination in the 1960s. Unlike their American counterparts, the Northern Ireland protesters had no constitutionally guaranteed rights, because nobody in the United Kingdom then did. However, UK legislation now bans discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, or (in Northern Ireland only) religion. Thus citizens may enforce some rights against the state, an example being the embarrassment of the UK armed services in the 1990s at having to pay substantial sums in compensation to servicewomen who had been unlawfully dismissed on becoming pregnant. The European Convention on Human Rights has now been incorporated into UK law.

Civil rights and civil liberties often mean the same thing. The words are frequently used interchangeably to signify the protection of rights to liberty and equality under the Constitution, such as freedom of speech, protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” and the right to due process of law. The term civil rights, however, is also used to refer to positive actions by the government to protect or extend the rights of people—to provide for individuals or groups opportunities that were previously denied to them. These kinds of civil rights guarantees usually are provided through statutes, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which gives the federal government the power to prevent an employer from denying a job to someone because of the person's race, gender, religion, or ethnic origin.

Civil rights movements are organized efforts to obtain long-denied constitutional rights for individuals and groups such as African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and women. These segments of the American population have not always enjoyed their full rights of citizenship under the U.S. Constitution.

Civil rights legislation

For a century after the Civil War, Congress debated, filibustered against, and finally enacted significant civil rights legislation to guarantee the equal rights of African Americans and other minorities. In 1866, Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act over President Andrew Johnson's veto. This act granted African Americans full citizenship, thereby reversing the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision of 1857, which had stated that blacks, whether slave or free, were not citizens.

When Southern states passed laws requiring segregation by race, Senator Charles Sumner (Republican-Massachusetts) sponsored the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which provided for equal accommodations in hotels, restaurants, trains, and other public facilities. In 1896, the Supreme Court, ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, declared this act unconstitutional and upheld racial segregation. The Court ruled that “laws permitting, and even requiring their separation in places where they are liable to be brought into contact do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other.” Although segregationists never had the votes in Congress to write segregation into national law, they were able to protect it by filibustering.

During most of the 20th century, the civil rights movement of African Americans has had a strong impact on the advancement of constitutional rights for all Americans, especially those who had been long-suffering victims of unjust discrimination and unfair treatment under the law. The early leader of this civil rights movement was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909. After the formation in 1939 of its Legal Defense Fund (LDF), directed by Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP began to have a steady and significant effect on federal court rulings to obtain and expand the civil rights of African Americans with regard to voting and education. In Smith v. Allwright (1944) the Court ruled that a political party (the Democrats in this case) could not exclude blacks from voting in a primary election to nominate party candidates for a subsequent general election. In Sweatt v. Painter (1950) the Court decided that a state may not deny admission of qualified blacks to a state law school on the grounds that a separate law school for blacks is available. The biggest breakthrough came with the legal victory, led by Thurgood Marshall and other NAACP attorneys, in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which established that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional.

After the Brown decision, various African-American civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, launched political protest movements to influence enforcement of the Brown decision and to demand that the federal government pass laws to protect and promote civil rights for African Americans. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which he led, moved to the forefront.

In 1957, Senate majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson (Democrat–Texas) took credit for passing the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction, but Southern opponents had severely weakened this measure by adding an amendment that required jury trials for offenders. Since Southern juries were still likely to be all white, few convictions could be expected.

As President in 1964, Johnson led the effort to achieve cloture and stop the filibuster against a much stronger civil rights bill that outlawed discrimination in any form of interstate commerce. The next year Johnson proposed, and Congress enacted, the Voting Rights Act to provide federal protection for African Americans’ right to vote. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 had a profound impact on American politics, especially in the South, where Southern Democratic officeholders became more attuned to minority constituents, where African Americans were elected to Congress, and where the Republican party once again became a real challenge to the once solid Democratic South.

The Civil Rights Act forbids discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, and, in employment, sex. The law provides protection from unfair discrimination in employment and in the use of public facilities. It also requires desegregation of public schools and facilities.

The Supreme Court has upheld as constitutional the major provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And the Court has interpreted this law broadly to expand the opportunities available to racial minorities often victimized by past discriminatory practices. In Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States (1964), for example, the Court established beyond challenge that no person can be excluded, because of race or color, from any facility that is open to the general public. Further, the Court has upheld programs of employers to emphasize recruitment of racial minorities that have suffered from the employer's racial discrimination in hiring in the past.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act outlawed discrimination by state governments against African Americans and other minority groups in voter registration and voting in state and federal elections. The Supreme Court upheld the law in South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966), ruling that the law is a constitutional use of Congress's power to enforce the 15th Amendment ban on denying a citizen the right to vote because of the person's race or color. Congress renewed and reinforced this voting rights legislation in 1970, 1975, and 1982. The result has been a dramatic increase in the participation of African Americans in public elections as voters and candidates for government offices.

The African-American civil rights movement has become a model for other groups seeking to end legal discrimination against them, such as women, Hispanics, gays, the elderly, and the physically disabled. These groups, too, have tried to bring about favorable legislative acts and judicial decisions.

During the 1980s and 1990s, civil rights advocates have promoted affirmative action programs—the use of preferential treatment of racial, ethnic, or gender groups to provide access to education, employment, and other social benefits. The groups seeking and receiving these benefits are seen as having been victims of persistent and unfair discrimination. They look to affirmative action as a temporary means to overcome the harmful consequences of systematic discrimination in the past, which has unfairly denied opportunities to some people.

Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1991 to amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The purpose was to strengthen the scope of federal civil rights protections, which had been weakened by the Supreme Court's decision in Ward's Cove Packing Company v. Atonio (1989). In the Ward's Cove decision, the Court determined that those claiming discrimination by employers had to prove that a specific employment practice had been discriminatory. Even if the plaintiff were to provide the proof required, the employer could still claim that the discriminating practice was necessary to maintain his or her business.

The Civil Rights Act of 1991 over turned the Ward's Cove decision by eliminating, as illegal, an employer's claim of “business necessity” as a justification for intentional discrimination against an individual based on race, color, ethnic origin, and gender. Further, the Civil Rights Act of 1991 protects an employee against racial harassment after being hired. Finally, the 1991 law limits the opportunities to legally challenge employers’ affirmative action programs.

See also Affirmative action; Brown v. Board of Education; Civil Rights Cases; Equality under the Constitution; Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States; Johnson, Lyndon B.; Johnson v. Transportation Agency of Santa Clara County; Liberty under the Constitution; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Smith v. Allwright; Sumner, Charles; Sweatt v. Painter

Sources

• Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988).
• John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1988).
• Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom (New York: Harper & Row, 1958).
• Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can't Wait (New York: Signet, 1964).
• Milton R. Konvitz, Century of Civil Rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961).
• Charles Whalen and Barbara Whalen, The Longest Debate: A Legislative History of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Washington, D.C.: Seven Locks Press, 1985)

Personal liberties that belong to an individual owing to his or her status as a citizen or resident of a particular country or community.

The most common legal application of the term civil rights involves the rights guaranteed to U.S. citizens and residents by legislation and by the Constitution. Civil rights protected by the Constitution include freedom of speech and press and freedom from certain types of discrimination.

Not all types of discrimination are unlawful and most of an individual's personal choices are protected by the freedom to choose personal associates, to express herself or himself, and to preserve personal privacy. Civil rights legislation comes into play when the practice of personal preferences and prejudices of an individual, a business entity, or a government interferes with the protected rights of others. The various civil rights laws have made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, age, handicap, or national origin. Discrimination that interferes with voting rights and equality of opportunity in education, employment, and housing is unlawful.

The term privileges and immunities is related to civil rights. Privileges and immunities encompass all rights of individuals that relate to people, places, and real and personal property. Privileges include all the legal benefits of living in the United States, such as the freedom to sell land, draft a will, or obtain a divorce. Immunities are the protections afforded by law that prevent the government or other people from hindering another's enjoyment of his or her life, such as the right to be free from illegal searches and seizures and the freedom to practice religion without government persecution. The Privileges and Immunities Clause in Article IV of the U.S. Constitution states, "The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States." The clause is designed to prevent each state from discriminating against the people in other states in favor of its own citizens.

The Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, delineates specific rights reserved for U.S. citizens and residents. No state can remove or abridge rights that are guaranteed by the Constitution.

In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court held, in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 15 L. Ed. 691, that the Constitution did not apply to African Americans because they were not citizens when the Constitution was written. After the Civil War, therefore, new laws were necessary for the purpose of extending civil liberties to the former slaves.

In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was enacted to make slavery and other forms of involuntary servitude unlawful. In addition, Congress was given the power to enact laws that were necessary to enforce this new amendment.

The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, provides that every individual who is born or naturalized in the United States is a citizen and ensures that a state may not deprive a citizen or resident of her or his civil rights, including due process of law and equal protection of the laws. Congress is also empowered to enact laws for the enforcement of these rights.

The Origin of Federal Civil Rights Laws

In the period immediately following the Civil War civil rights legislation was originally enacted by Congress, based upon its power under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to pass laws to enforce these rights. The first two of these laws were based upon the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (42 U.S.C.A. § 1982), which had preceded the Fourteenth Amendment.

The first civil rights law guaranteed equal rights under the law for all people who lived within the jurisdiction of the United States. The second guaranteed each citizen an equal right to own, inherit, rent, purchase, and sell real property as well as personal property. The third original civil rights law, the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 (17 Stat. 13), provided citizens with the right to sue in civil action for a violation of protected rights. The fourth law made violation of such rights a criminal offense.

Subsequent Legislation

Although these initial laws supposedly guaranteed the civil rights of all citizens, including African Americans and other minorities, they were effectively negated for most African Americans in the late nineteenth century by the passage of Jim Crow laws, or Black Codes, in the South. These laws made it illegal for African Americans to use the same public facilities as whites, restricted their travel, impeded their ability to vote, forbade interracial marriage, and generally relegated them to a legallly inferior position.

In the 1896 landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 16 S. Ct. 1138, 41 L. Ed. 256, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Jim Crow law that required the segregation, or separation, of the races on railroad cars. The Court held that the Louisiana law in question was not a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as long as the facilities provided for each race were " separate but equal." This separate-but-equal doctrine was used to support other segregation laws applying to public schools and public facilities.

No significant civil rights legislation was enacted until many decades later when the Commission on Civil Rights was established by Congress in the Civil Rights Act of 1957 (42 U.S.C.A. § 1975) to monitor and collect facts regarding race relations for consideration by Congress and the president. Subsequently, the Civil Rights Act of 1960 (42 U.S.C.A. § 1971) was passed by Congress. It guarantees that qualified voters have the right to register to vote in any state and that they have the right to sue any person who prevents them from doing so. Voters possess this right to sue regardless of whether the individual who so prevents them is a state official or merely an individual acting like one.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C.A. § 2000a et seq.) is the most comprehensive civil rights legislation in the history of the United States. It contains provisions for parity in the use and enjoyment of public accommodations, facilities, and education as well as federally assisted programs and employment. Title VII of that act, which prohibits employment discrimination based on an employee's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, is regarded as the most inclusive source of employment rights. All employers who have at least fifteen employees, including state and local governments and labor unions, are subject to its provisions, but it does not apply to the federal government, American Indian tribes, clubs, and religious organizations.

The Civil Rights Act of 1968 (25 U.S.C.A. § 1301 et seq.) proscribes discrimination in the sale and rental of most U.S. housing. It also prohibits discrimination in financing arrangements and extends to agents, brokers, and owners. Both the 1964 and 1968 Civil Rights Acts establish the right of an injured party to sue and obtain damages from any individual who illegally infringes with a person's civil rights, conspires to deprive others of their civil rights, or abuses either government authority or public office to accomplish such unlawful acts.

In the area of education, a significant civil rights milestone was achieved in 1954 with the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873. In Brown, the justices unanimously rejected the separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy. They found that segregating black and white children in different public schools violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Segregation, the Court held, effectively discriminates against African American children by promoting in them a sense of inferiority that limits their opportunities in life. The Court also required that school districts desegregate "with all deliberate speed." Integration, or desegregation, of public schools has been a divisive issue ever since. In particular, arguments arise over the practice of busing students a distance to school, a method that has been used, often by court order, to create a better racial balance.

In employment, common law permits an employer or labor union to discriminate for a valid reason in its relations with employees, unless otherwise provided by federal or state statute. The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (29 U.S.C.A. § 151 et seq.) initially restrained discrimination against employees or job applicants who engage in union activities. Subsequently, the act has been extended through various amendments to prohibit other forms of discrimination, including race and sex discrimination. In 1963, Congress enacted the Equal Pay Act (29 U.S.C.A. § 206), which requires that men and women be paid the same wages when they do substantially similar work. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is the initial forum for claims of illegal employment discrimination. It also publishes advisory guidelines that explain or define the law. Many states have agencies or human rights commissions similar to the EEOC.

The 1980s and Beyond

One result of civil rights legislation is affirmative action, which is the effort to enforce race and sex classifications when necessary to correct past discriminatory patterns. The ordering of affirmative action requires employers or labor unions to make concerted efforts to hire minorities who have traditionally been discouraged from seeking employment with them. The basis for affirmative action is that if such efforts are not made, discrimination will be perpetuated.

Affirmative action and other attempts to end discrimination raise new questions. For example, have efforts to help minorities and women begun to infringe on the rights of individuals outside of those groups, such as white men? Some argue that affirmative action results in reverse discrimination, which is prejudice or bias practiced against a particular person or class of people in order to remedy a pattern of past discrimination against another individual or group of individuals.

After President Ronald Reagan appointed three justices to the Supreme Court during his two presidential terms between 1981 and 1989, the Court proceeded to render more conservative opinions regarding civil rights. For example, in Patterson v. McLean Credit Union, 491 U.S. 164, 109 S. Ct. 2363, 105 L. Ed. 2d 132 (1989), the Court dealt with the issue of discrimination in the private sector. The Court held that section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 barred only racial discrimination in hiring, not racial harassment while on the job. Minority rights groups were disappointed by the ruling, and saw it as part of a general trend toward making civil rights violations more difficult to prove. However, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who wrote the Court's opinion, stated, "Neither our words nor our decisions should be interpreted as signaling one inch of retreat from Congress's policy to forbid discrimination in the private, as well as the public, sphere."

Less controversial have been developments in the area of civil rights for handicapped people. In 1990, President George Bush signed into law the Americans with Disabilities Act (Pub. L. No. 101-336, 104 Stat. 327 [codified in scattered sections of 42, 29, 47 U.S.C.A.] [effective 1992]), which was quickly hailed as the most significant civil rights legislation since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The 1990 act prohibits discrimination against disabled persons in employment, public accommodations, transportation, and telecommunications. Referred to as the bill of rights for physically and mentally disabled citizens — who were estimated to number 43 million at the time of the act's passage— the act supersedes previous state and local laws and extends protection to any person with a physical or mental impairment that "substantially limits one or more of the major life activities of such individual."

The act includes many features intended to improve living conditions for those with disabilities. For example, employers, providers of public transportation, and private businesses with public accommodation (such as theaters, restaurants, hotels, and banks) must make "reasonable accommodations" for disabled persons. Often such accommodations must include wheelchair access. Also, all commuter and intercity trains are required to have at least one car that is handicapped accessible, and telephone companies must provide relay operators for hearing impaired individuals who use special telecommunications devices.

The Civil Rights Act of 1991 (Pub. L. No. 102-166, 105 Stat. 1071 [codified in scattered sections of 42, 29, 2 U.S.C.A.]) marked another important step in civil rights legislation. The act repudiated several U.S. Supreme Court decisions on civil rights; granted women and disabled persons the right to recover money damages under title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; and granted congressional employees the protection of title VII. Among the Supreme Court decisions overturned by the 1991 act was Patterson. Section 101 of the act states that employees may sue for damages experienced through racial discrimination in hiring, promotion, dismissal, and all other terms of employment. The changes in title VII employee discrimination cases entitle plaintiffs to jury trials and allow them to receive damages in addition to back pay.

See: Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas; Civil Rights Acts; Dred Scott v. Sandford; Ku Klux Klan Act; Plessy v. Ferguson; Section 1983; Voting Rights Act of 1965.

A broad range of privileges and rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and subsequent amendments and laws that guarantee fundamental freedoms to all individuals. These freedoms include the rights of free expression and action (civil liberties); the right to enter into contracts, own property, and initiate lawsuits; the rights of due process and equal protection of the laws; opportunities in education and work; the freedom to live, travel, and use public facilities wherever one chooses; and the right to participate in the democratic political system.

Quotes:

"The modern state no longer has anything but rights; it does not recognize duties any more." - Georges Bernanos

"Anglo-Saxon civilization has taught the individual to protect his own rights; American civilization will teach him to respect the rights of others." - William Jennings Bryan

"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves." - Edmund Burke

"The government of the United States is a device for maintaining in perpetuity the rights of the people, with the ultimate extinction of all privileged classes." - Calvin Coolidge

"Ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of the rights of man are the only causes of public misfortunes and of the corruption of governments." - French National Assembly

"Civil Rights: What black folks are given in the U.S. on the installment plan, as in civil-rights bills. Not to be confused with human rights, which are the dignity, stature, humanity, respect, and freedom belonging to all people by right of their birth." - Dick Gregory

See more famous quotes about Civil Rights

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)