What were the four most significant events which led to expanded rights for racial minorities and/or women in the United States? Why were they crucial to the expansion of rights for all people in the United States?

Here's one citizen's list of the four most significant events contributing to social advances for women and racial/ethnic minorities in the United States:
1) The Civil War, fought over sectional arguments revolving around slavery, brought about the emancipation of Southern slaves and the granting of titular citizenship to African Americans and suffrage to African American males through the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. Women of all ethnicities, however, were not permitted to take advantage of this expansion of the body politic in the mid-nineteenth century. That task required...
2) The women's suffrage movement, which made slow gains over the decades in seeking the vote for women. These campaigns brought fruit state by state and eventually, after World War I, led to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, guaranteeing formal voting rights to both genders. In practice, racial minorities of both sexes often faced severe obstacles to gaining true and equal access to the ballot, especially in the South. Therefore the next major movement was...
3) The African American-led civil rights movement recognized the ongoing, vicious racial oppression that persisted one hundred years after emancipation—not only in the South but throughout the country. (Martin Luther King Jr. never faced a crowd more hostile than the one that greeted him in Chicago in 1966 when he tried campaigning for desegregation in housing.) The heroic struggles of the freedom movement, from the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, through the Freedom Rides, the lunch counter sit-ins, and the 1963 March on Washington, culminated in Congressional passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act a year later. (In 2012, the Supreme Court struck down the most effective provisions of the Voting Rights Act in the case of Shelby County v. Holder.) The upsurge of radical civil rights activism in the 1960s coincided with and helped to inspire...
4) The women's liberation and gay rights movements, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s. These movements have succeeded in bringing about vast cultural changes in the United States in many areas, such as reproductive rights, women's educational and professional opportunities, gradually eliminating criminal penalties for homosexual activity, and winning the fight for same-sex marriage.
Our current moment in US history could potentially become one of historic expansion in human rights—but could just as easily result in colossal setbacks for social justice.