20th Century Timeline (Civil Rights Movement/The Butler)

  • National Association for the Advancement of Colored People(NAACP)

    National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is a civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909 as a bi-racial endeavor to advance justice for African Americans by a group including W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, Moorfield Storey and Ida B. Wells.
  • Universal Negro Improvement Association(UNIA)

    The Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League is a black nationalist fraternal organization founded by Marcus Mosiah Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant to the United States
  • Executive Order 8802(FDR)

    Executive Order 8802 was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 25, 1941, to prohibit ethnic or racial discrimination in the nation's defense industry. It also set up the Fair Employment Practice Committee.
  • Congress Of Racial Equality(CORE)

    The Congress of Racial Equality is an African-American civil rights organization in the United States that played a pivotal role for African Americans in the Civil Rights Movement.
  • Executive Order 9981(HST)

    Executive Order 9981 is an executive order issued on July 26, 1948, by President Harry S. Truman. It abolished discrimination "on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin" in the United States Armed Forces. The executive order eventually led to the end of segregation in the services.
  • Brown vs. Board of Education Topeka,Ka

    Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483, was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that American state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality.
  • Emmett Till

    Emmett Louis Till was a 14-year-old African American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store.
  • Southern Christian Leadership Council/James Lawson

    The Southern Christian Leadership Conference is an African-American civil rights organization. SCLC, which is closely associated with its first president, Martin Luther King Jr., had a large role in the American civil rights movement.
  • Little Rock Central High School. Ar

    Little Rock Central High School is an accredited comprehensive public high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, United States. The school was the site of forced desegregation in 1957 after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional three years earlier.
  • Greensboro 4

    The Greensboro sit-ins were a series of nonviolent protests in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960, which led to the Woolworth department store chain removing its policy of racial segregation in the Southern United States.
  • Kennedy-Nixon Debates

    In a closely contested election, Democrat John F. Kennedy defeated incumbent Vice President Richard Nixon, the Republican Party nominee. This was the first election in which all fifty states participated, and the last in which the District of Columbia did not.
  • Freedom Riders attack in Anniston, AL

    Freedom Riders attack in Anniston, AL
    On May 14, 1961, Freedom Riders were brutally attacked by violent, well-armed and organized mobs of Klansmen and other terrorists in Anniston and Birmingham, Ala. The vicious beatings and a firebombing of the Anniston-bound bus by the Ku Klux Klan had the support of local law enforcement and politicians
  • Birmingham Children's Crusade

    Birmingham Children's Crusade
    The Children's March was a protest march by thousands of school students in Birmingham, Alabama, from May 2-5, 1963. They left school to march for civil rights. Police officers tried to stop them by using fire hoses and police dogs to attack the children
  • I Have a Dream Speech

    I Have a Dream Speech
    "I Have a Dream" is a public speech that was delivered by American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, in which he called for civil and economic rights and an end to racism in the United States.
  • Assassination of John F. Kennedy

    Assassination of John F. Kennedy
    John Fitzgerald Kennedy, often referred to by the initials JFK and Jack, was an American politician who served as the 35th president of the United States from January 1961 until his assassination in November 1963.
  • Chaney, Goodman, & Schwerner murders in Mississippi

    Chaney, Goodman, & Schwerner murders in Mississippi
    The murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, also known as the Freedom Summer murders, the Mississippi civil rights workers' murders or the Mississippi Burning murders, involved three activists who were abducted and murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi in June 1964 during the Civil Rights Movement.
  • Selma Voting Rights March

    Selma Voting Rights March
    The Selma to Montgomery marches were three protest marches, held in 1965, along the 54-mile highway from Selma, Alabama to the state capital of Montgomery.
  • Watts Riots

    Watts Riots
    The Watts riots, sometimes referred to as the Watts Rebellion, took place in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles from August 11 to 16, 1965. On August 11, 1965, Marquette Frye, an African-American motorist on parole for robbery, was pulled over for reckless driving.
  • Huey Newton/Black Panther

    Huey Newton/Black Panther
    Huey Percy Newton was a revolutionary African-American political activist who, along with fellow Merritt College student Bobby Seale, co-founded the Black Panther Party in 1966.
  • Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

    Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
    Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Christian minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the Civil Rights Movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968.
  • Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy

    Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy
    Robert Francis Kennedy was an American politician and lawyer who served as the 64th United States Attorney General from January 1961 to September 1964, and as a U.S. Senator from New York from January 1965 until his assassination in June 1968.
  • Southern Poverty Law Center

    Southern Poverty Law Center
    The Southern Poverty Law Center is an American nonprofit legal advocacy organization specializing in civil rights and public interest litigation.