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48 free DEI Trivia: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
42 free DEI Trivia: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion questions with answers. Forty questions on diversity, equity and inclusion, put together for workplace DEI events, classrooms and quiz nights. The set is factual and neutral. It runs through the landmark American laws and court cases, from the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act to Brown v. Board, Loving v. Virginia, Title IX, the Americans with Disabilities Act and Obergefell. It also covers the people who broke barriers, including Thurgood Marshall, Sandra Day O'Connor, Sonia Sotomayor, Jackie Robinson, Sally Ride, Katherine Johnson, Kamala Harris and Barack Obama, plus activists such as Rosa Parks, Harvey Milk, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Judith Heumann, Marsha P. Johnson and Malala. A final stretch covers heritage months and key terms like intersectionality, microaggression and neurodiversity. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the laws, people and observances involved, and the sentence that establishes it is shown under each explanation.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the 1964 US law outlawing discrimination by race, colour, religion, sex and national origin called?
The Civil Rights Act
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed by President Lyndon Johnson on 2 July 1964; its Title VII bars employment discrimination and Title II desegregated public accommodations.
Q 02The landmark 1965 election law was designed to stop what?
Racial discrimination at the polls
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 targeted racial discrimination at the polls, banning literacy tests and other tactics that had kept Black Americans from voting in the South.
Q 03Brown v. Board of Education (1954) ruled racial segregation unconstitutional in what?
Public schools
It overturned the 'separate but equal' doctrine for education.
Q 04The 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia struck down laws banning what?
Interracial marriage
Richard and Mildred Loving had been prosecuted in Virginia for their marriage.
Q 05In which year was the ADA, the landmark US law protecting disabled people from discrimination, passed?
1990
The Americans with Disabilities Act was signed by President George H. W. Bush in 1990, requiring accessible public spaces and workplaces and barring employment discrimination.
Q 06The Equal Pay Act of 1963 aimed to abolish wage differences based on what?
Sex
The Equal Pay Act of 1963, signed by President Kennedy, bars paying men and women differently for equal work, targeting wage gaps based on sex.
Q 07Title IX, passed in 1972, prohibits sex-based discrimination in which area of public life?
Schools and colleges
It is best known for expanding girls' and women's sports in schools and colleges.
Q 08The 1969 uprising seen as the start of the modern LGBTQ rights movement broke out at which New York bar?
The Stonewall Inn
The Stonewall Inn riots marked a new beginning for gay rights in the United States; the first Pride marches, a year later, marked their anniversary.
Q 09Juneteenth, made a US federal holiday in 2021, commemorates the end of what?
Slavery
Juneteenth marks 19 June 1865, when Union troops in Galveston, Texas, announced the end of slavery there, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
Q 10Who was the first woman to serve as a US Supreme Court justice?
Sandra Day O'Connor
Sandra Day O'Connor, nominated by President Reagan in 1981, was the first woman on the Court and served until 2006.
Q 11Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the first woman of which faith on the Supreme Court?
Jewish
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, appointed in 1993, was the first Jewish woman on the Supreme Court; Louis Brandeis had been the first Jewish justice in 1916.
Q 12Who was the first African American justice on the US Supreme Court, appointed in 1967?
Thurgood Marshall
Thurgood Marshall, who as NAACP counsel had argued and won Brown v. Board of Education, was appointed by President Johnson in 1967 and served until 1991.
Q 13Sonia Sotomayor, appointed in 2009, was the first Supreme Court justice of which heritage?
Latina
Sonia Sotomayor, raised in the Bronx by a Puerto Rican family, became the first Latina and first Hispanic justice when confirmed in August 2009.
Q 21Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta co-founded a union to fight for the rights of which group?
Farm workers
Their group grew into the United Farm Workers.
Q 22Dolores Huerta is credited with coining which rallying cry of the farm workers' movement?
Sí se puede
Dolores Huerta coined 'Sí se puede' ('Yes, it can be done') during the United Farm Workers' 1972 Arizona campaign; Barack Obama's 2008 'Yes we can' echoed it.
Q 23Judith Heumann, 'Mother of the Disability Rights Movement', helped lead which 1977 protest?
504 Sit-in
The 504 Sit-in occupied San Francisco's federal building for 26 days in April 1977 until regulations enforcing Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act were signed.
Q 14Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's colour line on April 15, 1947, starting at first base for which team?
The Brooklyn Dodgers
The Brooklyn Dodgers started Robinson at first base that day; his number 42 is now retired across all of baseball.
Q 15Sally Ride made history in 1983 by becoming the first American woman to do what?
Fly in space
Sally Ride was the first American woman, and only the third woman anywhere, to fly in space; at 32 she was also the youngest American to do so at the time.
Q 16In 2021 Kamala Harris became the first woman, first African American and first Asian American to hold which office?
Vice President
Kamala Harris was sworn in as Vice President on 20 January 2021; her mother was Indian and her father Jamaican.
Q 17Barack Obama, elected in 2008, broke which barrier as the 44th holder of his office?
First African American president
Barack Obama, son of a Kenyan father and a Kansan mother, became the first African American president, serving as the 44th president from 2009 to 2017.
Q 18Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician celebrated in the film Hidden Figures, calculated what for Project Mercury?
Spaceflight trajectories
Spaceflight trajectories, launch windows and emergency return paths were her work; John Glenn reportedly asked her to double-check the computer before his orbital flight.
Q 19Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 by refusing to do what?
Give up her bus seat
On 1 December 1955 Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama; her arrest launched a 381-day boycott of the city's buses.
Q 20In which city was Harvey Milk, an early openly gay US official, elected in 1977?
San Francisco
Harvey Milk won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in November 1977 and was assassinated at City Hall in November 1978.
Q 24Stonewall figure Marsha P. Johnson was a leading early activist for the LGBTQ community and which group in particular?
Transgender individuals
Marsha P. Johnson co-founded STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) with Sylvia Rivera in 1970 to house homeless transgender individuals and gender-nonconforming youth in New York.
Q 25Malala Yousafzai became the youngest ever recipient of which honour in 2014?
The Nobel Peace Prize
Malala Yousafzai received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, shared with Kailash Satyarthi, aged 17, two years after surviving a Taliban gunman's attack in Pakistan's Swat Valley.
Q 26Who coined the concept of 'intersectionality' in 1989?
Kimberlé Crenshaw
Kimberlé Crenshaw coined it in 1989; the law professor later founded a research centre on the idea at Columbia.
Q 27The term 'microaggression' was coined in 1970 by Harvard psychiatrist Chester Pierce to describe what?
Small everyday slights and snubs
Chester Pierce used 'microaggression' in 1970 for the small everyday slights and snubs he saw white Americans direct at Black Americans; Derald Wing Sue broadened the term in 2007.
Q 28Which president desegregated the US armed forces by executive order in 1948?
Harry Truman
Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981 on 26 July 1948, ordering equal treatment and opportunity in the armed forces regardless of race, colour, religion or national origin.
Q 29Who became the first Black woman elected to the US Congress, in 1968?
Shirley Chisholm
Shirley Chisholm won New York's 12th district in November 1968, becoming the first Black woman in Congress; in 1972 she sought the Democratic presidential nomination.
Q 30Which US president first officially recognised Black History Month, in 1976?
Gerald Ford
Gerald Ford urged Americans to mark Black History Month in February 1976, during the bicentennial; it grew out of historian Carter G. Woodson's Negro History Week, begun in 1926.