Black History Month

By anistonsierra

  • the first African slaves arrive in Virginia

  • Stono Rebellion

  • Crispus Attucks killed in Boston Massacre

  • Phillis Wheatley's book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral is published, making her the first African American to do so

  • Slavery is made illegal in the Northwest Territory. The U.S. Constitution states that Congress many not ban the slave trade until 1808

  • Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin greatly increases the demand for slave labor.

  • Gabriel Prosser, an enslaved African-American blacksmith, organizes a slave revolt intending to march on Richmond, Virginia. The conspiracy is uncovered, and Prosser and a number of the rebels are hanged. Virginia's slave laws are consequently tightened.

  • Congress bans the importation of slaves from Africa

  • The Missouri Compromise bans slavery north of the southern boundary of Missouri

  • Denmark Vesey, an enslaved African-American carpenter who had purchased his freedom, plans a slave revolt with the intent to lay siege on Charleston, South Carolina. the plot is discovered, and Vesey and 34 co-conspirators are hanged.

  • William Lloyd Garrison begins publishing The Liberator

  • Nat Turner's slave rebellion

  • The Wilmot Proviso, introduced by David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, attempts to ban slavery in territory gained in the Mexican War

  • Frederick Douglass launches his abolitionist newspaper

  • Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery and becomes one of the most effective and celebrated leaders of the Underground Railroad

  • The Compromise of 1850

  • A federal fugitive slave law is enacted, providing for the return of slaves who had escaped and crossed state lines

  • Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, is published

  • Kansas-Nebraska Act is passed by Congress

  • Lucy Terry, an enslaved person in 1746, becomes the earliest known black American poet when she writes about the last American Indian attack on her village of Deerfield, Massachusetts. Her poem, Bar's Fight, is not published until 1855.

  • The Dred Scott case holds that Congress does not have the right to ban slavery in states and, furthermore, that slaves are not citizens.

  • John Brown and 21 followers capture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, VA (now W. VA), in an attempt to launch a slave revolt

  • The Confederacy is founded when the deep South secedes, and the Civil War begins

  • President Lincoln issues the Emaciation Proclamation

  • The Ku Klux Klan is formed in Tennessee

  • slavery is ended in the United States

  • the 13th Amendment is ratified, prohibiting slavery

  • Black codes are passed by southern states

  • Freedman's Bureau is established

  • The Civil War ends

  • Lincoln is assassinated

  • A series of Reconstruction acts are passed, carving the former Confederacy into five military districts and guaranteeing the civil rights of freed slaves.

  • 14th Amendment is ratified, defining citizenship

  • 15th Amendment is ratified, giving black the right to vote

  • Hiram Revels of Mississippi is elected the country's first African-American senator.

  • Reconstruction ends in the south

  • Booker T. Washington founds the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama

  • Plessy v. Ferguson

  • The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is founded in New York by prominent black and white intellectuals and led by W.E.B. DuBois

  • Marcus Garvey and the UNIA

  • The Harlem Renaissance flourishes in the 1920s and 1930s

  • African Americans in WWII

  • Jackie Robinson is signed to the Brooklyn Dodgers by Branch Rickey

  • President Harry S. Truman issues an executive order integrating the U.S. armed forces

  • Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas declares that racial segregation in schools in unconstitutional

  • Emmett Till is murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi

  • Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat at the front of the "colored section" of a bus to a white passenger

  • Nine black students are blocked from entering the school on the order of Governor Orval Faubus

  • Four black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, begin a sit-in at a segregated Woolworths lunch counter. Six months later the ¨Greensboro Four¨ are served lunch at the same Woolworths counter.

  • Several groups of ¨freedom riders¨ are attacked by angry mobs along the way through the South as they were going to test out new laws that prohibit segregation in interstate travel facilities

  • Integration of Ole Miss

  • Birmingham Church bombed

  • The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is attended by about 250,000 people. Martin Luther King delivers his famous ¨I Have a Dream¨ speech.

  • Freedom Summer and the "Mississippi Burning murders

  • Martin Luther King receives the Nobel Peace Prize

  • President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968

  • Selma to Montgomery March

  • The Black Panthers are founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale

  • President Johnson appoints Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. He becomes the first black Supreme Court Justice.

  • Fair Housing Act

  • Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee

  • State troopers violently attack peaceful demonstrators led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., as they try to cross the Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. 50 marchers are hospitalized on ¨Bloody Sunday¨.

  • The first race riots in decades erupt in south-central Los Angeles after a jury acquits four white police officers for the videotaped beating of African-American Rodney King.

  • Barack Obama becomes the first African-American to be elected president of the United States