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Sweatt v. Painter
Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950), was a U.S. Supreme Court case that successfully challenged the "separate but equal" doctrine of racial segregation established by the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson. The case involved a black man, Heman Marion Sweatt, who was refused admission to the School of Law of the University of Texas, whose president was Theophilus Painter, on the grounds that the Texas State Constitution prohibited integrated education. -
First Universal Credit Card Issued
The credit card is a card containing a means of identification, such as a signature or picture, that authorizes the person named on it to charge goods or services to an account, for which the cardholder is billed periodically. The first universal credit card, which could be used at a variety of establishments, was introduced by the Diners' Club, Inc., in 1950. Another major card of this type, known as a travel and entertainment card, was established by the American Express Company in 1958. -
Korean War
The Korean War started when North Korea attacked South Korea and the U.S. came to the aid of South Korea. The aftermath of the Korean War set the tone for Cold War tension between all the superpowers. The Korean War was important in the development of the Cold War, as it showed that the two superpowers, United States and Soviet Union, could fight a "limited war" in a third world country. The Korean War cost the US$30 billion in 1953, which is equivalent to US$341 billion in 2011. -
"Peanuts" First Published
Peanuts is a syndicated daily and Sunday American comic strip written and illustrated by Charles M. Schulz that ran from October 2, 1950, to February 13, 2000, continuing in reruns afterward. Peanuts is among the most popular and influential in the history of comic strips, with 17,897 strips published in all,[1] making it "arguably the longest story ever told by one human being". -
Second Assassination Attempt on President Harry S. Truman
The second of two assassination attempts on U.S. President Harry S. Truman occurred on November 1, 1950.[1][2] It was carried out by militant Puerto Rican pro-independence activists Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola while the President resided at Blair House during the renovation of the White House. -
Twenty-Second Amendment Ratified
The Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution sets a limit on the number of times an individual is eligible for election to the office of President of the United States, and also sets additional eligibility conditions for presidents who succeed to the unexpired terms of their predecessors. When Franklin Roosevelt became the first U.S President to serve more than two terms, the government worried about an unlimited amount of terms a President can serve. -
General Douglas MacArthur Fired by President Truman
Douglas MacArthur (January 26, 1880 – April 5, 1964) was an American five-star general and Field Marshal of the Philippine Army. He was Chief of Staff of the United States Army during the 1930s and played a prominent role in the Pacific theater during World War II. This effected America's military by putting them more on the defensive side rather than the offensive. -
ANZUS Formed
The Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty is the 1951 collective security non-binding agreement between Australia and New Zealand and, separately, Australia and the United States, to co-operate on military matters in the Pacific Ocean region, although today the treaty is taken to relate to conflicts worldwide. It provides that an armed attack on any of the three parties would be dangerous to the others, and that each should act to meet the common threat. -
Treaty of Peace with Japan
The Treaty of Peace with Japan was officially signed by 49 nations on September 8, 1951, in San Francisco, California. This treaty served to officially end Japan's position as an imperial power, to allocate compensation to Allied civilians and former prisoners of war who had suffered Japanese war crimes during World War II, and to end the Allied post-war occupation of Japan and return sovereignty to that nation. -
"I Love Lucy" Premieres on Television
When "I Love Lucy" first premiered, it sparked the rise of television in the American home and the Golden Age of Television. The first Golden Age of Television is the era of live television production in the United States, roughly from the late 1940s through the late 1950s. The Golden Age is universally recognized to have ended by 1960, as the television audience and programming had shifted to less critically acclaimed fare, almost all of it taped or filmed. -
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 was debated and passed in the context of Cold War-era fears and suspicions of infiltrating Communist and Soviet spies and sympathizers within American institutions and federal government. Anticommunist sentiment associated with the Second Red Scare and McCarthyism in the United States led restrictionists to push for selective immigration to preserve national security. -
Dwight D. Eisenhower Elected as President
The 1952 United States presidential election was the 42nd quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 4, 1952. Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower won a landslide victory over Democrat Adlai Stevenson, ending a string of Democratic Party wins that stretched back to 1932. -
Korean Armistice Agreement
The Korean Armistice Agreement is the armistice which brought about a complete cessation of hostilities of the Korean War. It was signed by U.S. Army Lieutenant General William Harrison, Jr. representing the United Nations Command, North Korean General Nam Il representing the Korean People's Army , and the Chinese People's Volunteer Army. -
Brown vs. Board of Education
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 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. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Court's unanimous decision stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," and violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. -
Little Rock, Arkansas School Desegregation
In its Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation of America’s public schools was unconstitutional. Until the court’s decision, many states across the nation had mandatory segregation laws, requiring African-American and white children to attend separate schools. Resistance to the ruling was so widespread that the court issued a second decision in 1955, known as Brown II, ordering school districts to integrate “with all deliberate speed.” -
SEATO Formed
The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) was an international organization for collective defense in Southeast Asia created by the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty, or Manila Pact, signed in September 1954 in Manila, Philippines. The formal institution of SEATO was established on 19 February 1955 at a meeting of treaty partners in Bangkok, Thailand.[1] The organization's headquarters were also in Bangkok. Eight members joined the organization. -
"Space Race" Begins
The Space Race began on August 2, 1955, when the Soviet Union responded to the US announcement four days earlier of intent to launch artificial satellites for the International Geophysical Year, by declaring they would also launch a satellite "in the near future". The Soviet Union beat the US to the first successful launch, with the October 4, 1957, orbiting of Sputnik 1, and later beat the US to have the first human in earth orbit, Yuri Gagarin, on April 12, 1961. -
Vietnam War Begins
The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. The conflict was intensified by the ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. More than 3 million people (including over 58,000 Americans) were killed in the Vietnam War, and more than half of the dead were Vietnamese civilians. -
Rosa Parks Refuses to Leave Her Seat on Bus
On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks rejected bus driver James F. Blake's order to relinquish her seat in the "colored section" to a white passenger, after the whites-only section was filled. Parks was not the first person to resist bus segregation, but the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) believed that she was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws. -
Montgomery Bus Boycott
The Montgomery bus boycott was a political and social protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the public transit system of Montgomery, Alabama. It was a seminal event in the civil rights movement. The campaign lasted from December 5, 1955 — the Monday after Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, was arrested for refusing to surrender her seat to a white person — to December 20, 1956. -
Southern Manifesto
The Declaration of Constitutional Principles (known informally as the Southern Manifesto) was a document written in February and March 1956, in the United States Congress, in opposition to racial integration of public places. The document was drafted to counter the landmark Supreme Court 1954 ruling Brown v. Board of Education, which determined that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. -
Supreme Court Rules the Desegregation of Buses in Montgomery, AL
In April the Supreme Court ruled against bus segregation and the Montgomery bus company, which was losing money, tried to comply, but was overruled by the local police chief. In June the federal district court in Montgomery ruled that the city's segregation ordinances were unconstitutional. -
Civil Rights Act of 1957
The Supreme Court's 1954 ruling in the case of Brown v. Board of Education brought the issue of school desegregation to the fore of public attention, as Southern leaders began a campaign of "massive resistance" against desegregation. In the midst of this campaign, President Eisenhower proposed a civil rights bill designed to provide federal protection for African-American voting rights. -
NASA Founded
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. NASA science is focused on better understanding Earth through the Earth Observing System and exploring bodies throughout the Solar System with advanced robotic spacecraft missions such as New Horizons -
The Kitchen Debate
The Kitchen Debate was a series of impromptu exchanges between the U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev at the opening of the American National Exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow on July 24, 1959. For the exhibition, an entire house was built that the American exhibitors claimed anyone in America could afford. It was filled with labor-saving and recreational devices meant to represent the fruits of the capitalist American consumer market. -
Ohio Civil Rights Act of 1959
This legislation replaced the Ohio Public Accommodations Law of 1884, which had prohibited discriminatory practices in public facilities. The State of Ohio had failed to enforce the earlier act's provisions. The Ohio Civil Rights Act of 1959 was passed to "prevent and eliminate the practice of discrimination in employment against persons because of their race, color, religion, national origin, or ancestry." Intending to end segregated restaurants, movie theaters, and other businesses. -
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
SCLC was governed by an elected Board, and established as an organization of affiliates, most of which were either individual churches or community organizations such as the Montgomery Improvement Association and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR). This organizational form differed from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) who recruited individuals and formed them into local chapters. -
Greensboro Sit-ins
The Greensboro sit-in was a civil rights protest that started in 1960, when young African-American students staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave after being denied service. The sit-in movement soon spread to college towns throughout the South. -
Hippie Movement Starts
The hippie subculture began its development as a youth movement in the United States during the early 1960s and then developed around the world. From around 1967, its fundamental ethos — including harmony with nature, communal living, artistic experimentation particularly in music, and the widespread use of recreational drugs — spread around the world during the counterculture of the 1960s, which has become closely associated with the subculture. -
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Founded
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was one of the major American Civil Rights Movement organizations of the 1960s. It emerged from the first wave of student sit-ins and formed at a May 1960 meeting organized by Ella Baker at Shaw University. -
Viet Cong Formed
The Viet Cong, also known as the National Liberation Front, was a mass political organization in South Vietnam and Cambodia with its own army – the People's Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam (PLAF) – that fought against the United States and South Vietnamese governments during the Vietnam War, eventually emerging on the winning side. It had both guerrilla and regular army units, as well as a network of cadres who organized peasants in the territory it controlled. -
Kennedy Sworn in as President
John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy, often referred to by his initials JFK, was an American politician and journalist who served as the 35th president of the United States from January 1961 until his assassination in November 1963. He served at the height of the Cold War, and the majority of his presidency dealt with managing relations with the Soviet Union. A member of the Democratic Party, Kennedy represented Massachusetts in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate prior to becoming president. -
Green Beret 'Special Advisors' Sent to Vietnam
President Kennedy sends 400 American Green Beret "Special Advisors" to South Vietnam to train South Vietnamese soldiers in methods of 'counter-insurgency' in the fight against Viet Cong guerrillas. The role of the Green Berets soon expands to include the establishment of Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDG) made up of fierce mountain men known as the Montagnards. These groups establish a series of fortified camps strung out along the mountains to thwart infiltration by North Vietnamese. -
Special Forces Sent to South Vietnam
President Kennedy approved sending 400 Special Forces troops and 100 other U.S. military advisers to South Vietnam. On the same day, he ordered the start of clandestine warfare against North Vietnam to be conducted by South Vietnamese agents under the direction and training of the CIA and U.S. Special Forces troops. Kennedy’s orders also called for South Vietnamese forces to infiltrate Laos to locate and disrupt communist bases and supply lines there. -
Peace Corps is Established
On March 1, 1961, President John F. Kennedy issues Executive Order #10924, establishing the Peace Corps as a new agency within the Department of State. The same day, he sent a message to Congress asking for permanent funding for the agency, which would send trained American men and women to foreign nations to assist in development efforts. -
Bay of Pigs Invasion
The disaster at the Bay of Pigs had a lasting impact on the Kennedy administration. Determined to make up for the failed invasion, the administration initiated Operation Mongoose—a plan to sabotage and destabilize the Cuban government and economy, which included the possibility of assassinating Castro. -
CORE Stages First Freedom Ride
Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated southern United States in 1961 and subsequent years to challenge the non-enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decisions Morgan v. Virginia (1946) and Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional.The first Freedom Ride left Washington, D.C. on May 4, 1961, and was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans on May 17. -
Vienna Summit
The Vienna summit was a meeting held on June 4, 1961, in Vienna, Austria, between President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union. The leaders of the two superpowers of the Cold War era discussed numerous issues in the relationship between their countries. In the wake of the failed summit, Kennedy won congressional approval for an additional $3.25 billion in defense spending, a tripling of draft calls, a call-up of reserves and a beefed-up civil defense program. -
John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe
On May 19, 1962, President John F. Kennedy and celebrity Marilyn Monroe supposedly had an affair. It was suspected by many that the affair was already going on and when Marilyn performed a quite seductive version of "Happy Birthday" to the President, many were lead to believe that their suspicions were possibly accurate. -
Cuban Missile Crisis Begins
It happened when the Soviet Union (USSR) began building missile sites in Cuba in 1962. Together with the earlier Berlin Blockade, this crisis is seen as one of the most important confrontations of the Cold War. It may have been the moment when the Cold War came closest to a nuclear war. For fourteen days during October 1962, the world held its breath as John F Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev tried to reach a compromise and avoid nuclear war. -
Kennedy Takes Aggressive Stance in Vietnam Against Communism
Kennedy had outlined his plan for stopping the spread of communism in his inauguration speech two years before. America would, he said, "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty." Developing nations could expect America to "help them help themselves." -
White vs. Regester
The case of White v. Regester helped define modern attitudes about voting rights as well as the rights of state governments. Even without evidence of intentional racial discrimination by the state of Texas, the Supreme Court ruled in White v. Regester that the huge Bexar County voting district violated the Fourteenth Amendment equal protection rights of Mexican American voters. -
Beatlemania Begins
Beatlemania was the intense fan frenzy directed towards the English rock band the Beatles in the 1960s. Their popularity grew in the United Kingdom throughout 1963, and by the end of the year the press had adopted the term "Beatlemania" to describe the scenes of adulation that attended the group's concert performances. -
Kennedy Orders National Guard to stop Wallace's Racist Agenda
President John F. Kennedy issued presidential proclamation 3542, forcing Alabama Governor George Wallace to comply with federal court ordered allowing two African-American students to register for the summer session at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. The proclamation ordered Wallace and all persons acting in concert with him to cease and desist from obstructing justice. -
U.S., Britain, and Soviet Union Sign Nuclear Test Ban Treaty
On August 5, 1963, representatives of the United States, Soviet Union and Great Britain signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited the testing of nuclear weapons in outer space, underwater or in the atmosphere. The treaty, which President John F. Kennedy signed less than three months before his assassination, was hailed as an important first step toward the control of nuclear weapons. -
"I Have a Dream" Speech Delivered by Martin Luther King Jr.
The speech, delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington, remains one of the most famous speeches in history. Weaving in references to the country’s Founding Fathers and the Bible, King used universal themes to depict the struggles of African Americans, before closing with an improvised riff on his dreams of equality. The speech was immediately recognized as a highlight of the protest, and has endured as one of the signature moments of the civil rights movement. -
Kennedy Assassinated
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza.Kennedy was riding with his wife Jacqueline, Texas Governor John Connally, and Connally's wife Nellie when he was fatally shot by former U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald firing in ambush from a nearby building. The motorcade rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital where President Kennedy was pronounced dead about thirty minutes after the shooting. -
Twenty-Fourth Amendment Ratified
The Twenty-fourth Amendment (Amendment XXIV) of the United States Constitution prohibits both Congress and the states from conditioning the right to vote in federal elections on payment of a poll tax or other types of tax. The amendment was proposed by Congress to the states on August 27, 1962, and was ratified by the states on January 23, 1964. -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a landmark civil rights and labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It prohibits unequal application of voter registration requirements, and racial segregation in schools, employment, and public accommodations. -
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution Passed
The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution is of historical significance because it gave U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson authorization, without a formal declaration of war by Congress, for the use of conventional military force in Southeast Asia. Specifically, the resolution authorized the President to do whatever necessary in order to assist "any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty". This included involving armed forces. -
Water Quality Act
Water Quality Act of 1965 required states to issue water quality standards for interstate waters, and authorized the newly created Federal Water Pollution Control Administration to set standards where states failed to do so. -
"Bloody Sunday" Selma, Alabama
The demonstrators marched undisturbed through downtown Selma, where the ghosts of the past constantly permeated the present. As they began to cross the steel-arched bridge spanning the Alabama River, the marchers who gazed up could see the name of a Confederate general and reputed grand dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, Edmund Pettus, staring right back at them in big block letters emblazoned across the bridge’s crossbeam. The protesters were warned, but attacked when they ignored the warning. -
Protest Confrontations on Edmund Pettus Bridge
The Edmund Pettus Bridge was the site of the conflict of Bloody Sunday on March 7, 1965, when armed police attacked and brutally beat Civil Rights Movement demonstrators with horses, billy clubs, and tear gas as they were attempting to march to the state capital, Montgomery. -
Voting Rights Act Passed
This act was signed into law on August 6, 1965, by President Lyndon Johnson. It outlawed the discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states after the Civil War, including literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting. -
Black Panther Party Formed
The Black Panther Party (BPP), originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was a political organization founded by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton in October 1966 in Oakland, California. The party was active in the United States from 1966 until 1982, with chapters in numerous major cities, and international chapters operating in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s, and in Algeria from 1969 until 1972. -
Clean Water Restoration Act
President Lyndon Johnson signed the Clean Waters Restoration Act. The previous year’s Water Quality Act required the states to establish and enforce water quality standards for all interstate waters that flowed through their boundaries. To make that possible, the Clean Waters Restoration Act provided federal funds for the construction of sewage treatment plants. This act and others that followed over the next decade had a significant impact in reducing pollution and restoring rivers. -
Air Quality Act
The Clean Air Act (CAA) is a comprehensive Federal law that regulates all sources of air emissions. The 1970 CAA authorized the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to establish National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) to protect public health and the environment. -
The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Open for Signature
The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, commonly known as the Non-Proliferation Treaty, is an international treaty whose objective is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology, to promote cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and to further the goal of achieving nuclear disarmament and general and complete disarmament. -
The Kerner Commision
The report recommended for government programs to provide needed services, to hire more diverse and sensitive police forces and, most notably, to invest billions in housing programs aimed at breaking up residential segregation. President Johnson, who had already pushed through the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, ignored the report and rejected the Kerner Commission's recommendations. -
My Lai Massacre
The My Lai massacre was one of the most horrific incidents of violence committed against unarmed civilians during the Vietnam War. A company of American soldiers brutally killed most of the people—women, children and old men—in the village of My Lai on March 16, 1968. More than 500 people were slaughtered in the My Lai massacre. The brutality of the My Lai killings and the official cover-up fueled anti-war sentiment and further divided the United States over the Vietnam War. -
Martin Luther King Jr. Assasinated
In 1968, King was planning a national occupation of Washington, D.C., to be called the Poor People's Campaign, when he was assassinated on April 4 in Memphis, Tennessee. His death was followed by riots in many U.S. cities. Allegations that James Earl Ray, the man convicted of killing King, had been framed or acted in concert with government agents persisted for decades after the shooting. -
Nixon Elected President
The 1968 United States presidential election was the 46th quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 5, 1968. The Republican nominee, former Vice President Richard Nixon, defeated the Democratic nominee, incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Analysts have argued the election of 1968 was a major realigning election as it permanently disrupted the New Deal Coalition that had dominated presidential politics for 36 years. -
First Man on the Moon
Apollo 11 was the spaceflight that landed the first two people on the Moon. Commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin, both American, landed the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle on July 20, 1969, at 20:17. Armstrong became the first person to step onto the lunar surface six hours later on July 21 at 02:56:15; Aldrin joined him 19 minutes later. They spent about two and a quarter hours together outside the spacecraft, and collected 47.5 pounds of lunar material to bring back to Earth. -
United States Environmental Protection Agency Founded
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government for environmental protection.[3] President Richard Nixon proposed the establishment of EPA on July 9, 1970[4] and it began operation on December 2, 1970, after Nixon signed an executive order. The order establishing the EPA was ratified by committee hearings in the House and Senate. The agency is led by its Administrator, who is appointed by the President and approved by Congress.
