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The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) begins Freedom Rides in the South to try to de-segregate interstate public buses.
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Malcolm X becomes national minister of the Nation of Islam. he did not beleive in noviolence saying that equal rights should be secured "by any means necessary,"
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In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the Supreme Court rules unanimously against school segregation, overturning its 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.
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Fourteen-year-old Emmitt Till living in Chicago, is visiting family in Mississippi is kidnapped, beaten, shot, and body thrown in the Tallahatchie River. People said he was whistling at a white woman.
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Rosa Parks, a seamtress, refuses to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to a white person, starting the year long Montgomery Bus Boycott. She war arressted.
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The U.S. Supreme Court rules that the segregation of Montgomery, Ala., buses is unconstitutional.
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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., helps found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to fight for equal rights for Blacks.
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Little Rock Nine VideoThe federal government uses military soldiers to escort nine African American students to desegregate a school in Little Rock, Arkansas.
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Four African American college students hold a sit-in to integrate a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., starting other protests mostly in the the South.
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Four black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College begin a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter. They are refused service, they are allowed to stay at the counter.
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Sudent volunteers begin taking bus trips through the South to test out new laws to end segregation in interstate trave, buses and railway stations. Several of the groups of "freedom riders," are attacked by angry people.
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James Meredith becomes the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. This caused violence and riots to began; therefore, President Kennedy sent 5,000 federal troops.
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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., writes his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail,"
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More than 200,000 people march on Washington, D.C., where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gives his "I Have a Dream" speech.
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Four African American girls are killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
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President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibiting discrimination of all kinds based on race, color, religion, or national origin and the federal government could enforce desegregation.
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Malcolm X, black nationalist and founder of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, is shot to death in Harlem, N.Y.
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Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panthers party in Oakland, California. In the late 1960s party members became involved in violent shoot outs with the police resulting in deaths on both sides attempting in what they said was to liberate African Ameicans.
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Dr. Martin Luther King is assinated at age 39 while standing on the balcony outside the Lorraine Hotel by James Earl Ray in Memphis, TN.
