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Brown vs The Board of Education
On May 17, 1954 the court declared that racial segregation in public schools violated the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment effectively overturning the 1896 Plessy vs Ferguson decision mandating "separate but equal." The Brown ruling directly affected legally segregated schools in twenty-one states -
Emmett Till Murder
On August 28,1955, while visiting family in Money, Mississippi, 14-year-old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago, was brutally murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman four days earlier.
The Emmett Till murder trial brought to light the brutality of Jim Crow segregation in the South was an early start of the civil rights movement. In 2017, Tim Tyson revealed that Carolyn Bryant recanted her testimony, admitting that Till had never touched, threatened or harassed her. -
Rosa Parks & the Montgomery Bus Boycott
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The Little Rock Nine and Integration
The Little Rock Nine were a group of nine Black students who enrolled at formerly all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in Sep. 1957 their attendance at the school was a test of Brown v. Board of Education, a landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional. On 9/4/1957, the first day of classes at Central High, Governor Orval Faubus called in the Arkansas National Guard to block the Black students’ entry into the high school. -
Greensboro Woolworth's 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. Though many of the protesters were arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace, their actions made an immediate and lasting impact, forcing Woolworth’s and other establishments to change their segregationist policies. -
Freedom Rides
Freedom Rides, in U.S. history, was a series of political protests against segregation by Blacks and whites who rode buses together through the American South in 1961. -
MLK’s Letter From Birmingham Jail
Martin Luther King, Jr., composed a letter from his prison cell in Birmingham in response to local religious leaders’ criticisms of the campaign: “Never before have I written so long a letter. I’m afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers." -
March on Washington
The March on Washington was a massive protest march that occurred in August 1963, when some 250,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Also known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the event aimed to draw attention to continuing challenges and inequalities faced by African Americans a century after emancipation. It was also the occasion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s now-iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. -
Birmingham Baptist Church Bombing
A bomb exploded before Sunday morning services at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama—a church with a predominantly Black congregation that also served as a meeting place for civil rights leaders. Four young girls were killed and many other people injured. Outrage over the incident and the violent clash between protesters and police that followed helped draw national attention to the hard-fought, often-dangerous struggle for civil rights for African Americans. -
24th Amendment
The House passed the Twenty-fourth Amendment, outlawing the poll tax as a voting requirement in federal elections, by a vote of 295 to 86. At the time, five states maintained poll taxes which disproportionately affected African-American voters: Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas. -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Provisions of this civil rights act forbade discrimination on the basis of sex, as well as, race in hiring, promoting, and firing. -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Provisions of this civil rights act forbade discrimination on the basis of sex, as well as, race in hiring, promoting, and firing. -
“Bloody Sunday”/Selma to Montgomery March
Hundreds of people gathered in Selma, Alabama to march to the capital city of Montgomery. They marched to ensure that African Americans could exercise their constitutional right to vote — even in the face of a segregationist system that wanted to make it impossible. -
Voting Rights Act of 1965
President Lyndon Johnson. Outlawed the discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states after the Civil War, including literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting -
Loving v. Virginia
This was a Supreme Court case that struck down state laws banning interracial marriage in the United States. A white man and Black woman whose marriage was deemed illegal according to Virginia state law. with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union the Lovings appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously that so-called “anti-miscegenation” statutes were unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment.