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On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. -
On December 1, 1955, African American civil rights activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a public bus to a white passenger. -
In September 1957 nine African American students attended their first day at Little Rock Central High School, whose entire student population had until that point been white. -
In 1957, Luper escorted her Dunjee High School students to New York City, New York to perform a play she had written, Brother President: The Story of Dr. Martin Luther King, for a national freedom rally.
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On February 1, 1960, a group of four African American students from the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina, a historically Black college, began a sit-in movement in downtown Greensboro.
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On November 14, 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges was escorted to her first day at the previously all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans by four armed federal marshals.
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1960, Boynton v. Virginia was a decision by the United States Supreme Court. The case overturned a judgment convicting Bruce Boynton, a Black law student, for trespassing by being in a restaurant in a bus terminal that was "whites only."
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The Freedom Rides began on May 4, 1961, with a group of seven African Americans and six white people who boarded two buses bound for New Orleans.
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In the spring of 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the SCLC launched a campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, with local Pastor Fred Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) to undermine the city’s system of racial segregation.
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The demonstrations of 1963 culminated with the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28 to protest civil rights abuses and employment discrimination.
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On July 2, 1964, Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson, signed the Civil Rights Act into law, a stronger version of what his predecessor, President Kennedy, had proposed the previous summer before his assassination in November 1963.
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On February 21, 1965, the prominent Black leader Malcolm X was assassinated while lecturing at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, New York. An eloquent orator, Malcolm X spoke out on the civil rights movement, demanding it move beyond civil rights to human rights, and argued that the solution to racial problems was in orthodox Islam.
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On March 7, 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr., organized a march from Selma, Alabama, to the state’s capital, Montgomery, to call for a federal voting rights law that would provide legal support for disenfranchised African Americans in the South.
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A series of violent confrontations between the city police and residents of Watts and other predominantly African American neighborhoods of Los Angeles began on August 11, 1965, after a white police officer arrested a Black man, Marquette Frye, on suspicion of driving while intoxicated.
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In the wake of the assassination of Malcolm X and urban uprisings, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, to protect African American neighborhoods from police brutality.
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On June 12, 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the Virginia statutes prohibiting interracial marriage unconstitutional in the case Loving v. Virginia.
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A series of violent confrontations between residents of predominantly Black neighborhoods and city police in Detroit began on July 23, 1967, after a raid at an illegal drinking club where police arrested everyone inside, including 82 African Americans.
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On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed by a sniper while standing on the second-floor balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
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George Perry Floyd Jr. (October 14, 1973 – May 25, 2020) was an African-American man who was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an arrest made after a store clerk suspected Floyd may have used a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, on May 25, 2020.
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Black Lives Matter protests peaked on June 6, when half a million people turned out in nearly 550 places across the United States. That was a single day in more than a month of protests that still continue to today.