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The Start
The Civil Rights Movement was a social movement in the United States whose goals were to end racial segregation and discrimination against African-Americans and to secure legal recognition and federal protection of the citizenship rights enumerated in the Constitution and federal law. -
Brown vs. Board of Education
The U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education was a watershed event in the history of the United States. -
Emmett Till Murder
Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was kidnapped and murdered in Money, Mississippi, galvanizing support for racial reform in the South. -
Montgomery Bus Boycott
Local authorities in Montgomery, Alabama, arrested Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, when she refused to vacate her seat in the white section of a city bus. The boycott of public buses by blacks in Montgomery began on the day of Parks' court hearing and lasted 381 days. -
New Orleans school Integration
Two years following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Federal District Court Judge, J. Skelly Wright, ordered the Orleans Parish School Board to design an effective plan for the desegregation of New Orleans' public schools. -
Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, Washington, D.C.
The Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington for Freedom took place on May 17, 1957, when a crowd of over thirty thousand nonviolent demonstrators, from more than thirty states, gathered at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. to commemorate the third anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling. -
Little Rock Central High School Integration
The desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, gained national attention on September 3, 1957, when Governor Orval Faubus mobilized the Arkansas National Guard in an effort to prevent nine African American students from integrating the high school. -
Civil Rights Act of 1957
On September 9, 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1957. This waws a primarily a voting rights bill, and was the first civil rights legislation passed by Congress in the United States since the 1866 and 1875 Acts. -
Sit-ins: Greensboro, N.C.
On February 1, 1960 four North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College students entered the F. W. Woolworth Co. department store in Greensboro, North Carolina and staged a sit-in at the store's segregated lunch counter. -
Sit-ins: Atlanta, Ga.
In March 1960, students representing Atlanta's six historically black colleges organized a series of sit-ins at area lunch counters to protest the city's legally sanctioned segregation. -
Augusta Movement
In March 1960, students from Augusta's historically black Paine College initiated the direct action phase of the city's Civil Rights movement when they organized sit-ins at area department stores. -
Sit-ins: Nashville, Tenn.
The Nashville sit-in movement is widely regarded as one of the most successful and sustained student-directed sit-in campaigns of the Civil Rights movement. -
University of Georgia Integration
On January 6, 1961, federal district court Judge W. A. Bootle ordered the immediate admission of Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter to the University of Georgia, ending 160 years of segregation at the school. -
Freedom Rides
On May 4, 1961, an interracial group of student activists under the auspices of the Congress of Racial Equality departed Washington D.C. by bus to test local compliance throughout the Deep South with two Supreme Court rulings banning segregated accommodations on interstate buses and in bus terminals that served interstate routes. -
NCAAP Convention in Atlanta
In July 1962, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People held its annual convention in Atlanta. -
March on Washington
On August 28, 1963, a quarter of a million Americans from across the United States converged on the nation's capitol in what was to become a defining moment in the Civil Rights movement. -
Birmingham Bombing
The bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was one of the deadliest acts of violence to take place during the Civil Rights movement and evoked criticism and outrage from around the world. -
John F. Kennedy's Assassination
On November 22, 1963 President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while traveling through Dallas, Texas, in a presidential motorcade. -
Freedom Summer
During the summer of 1964, hundreds of Northern college students traveled to Mississippi to help register black voters and encourage participation in the Civil Rights movement. -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson just a few hours after House approval on July 2, 1964. -
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Nobel Prize
In 1964 Martin Luther King, Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his dynamic leadership of the Civil Rights movement and steadfast commitment to achieving racial justice through nonviolent action. -
Selma-Montgomery March
To protest local resistance to black voter registration in Dallas County, Alabama, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organized a mass march from Selma to Montgomery on March 7, 1965. -
SCOPE Project
On June 14, 1965, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) launched an innovative grassroots organizing campaign, the Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) project. SCOPE sought to build upon the momentum of the 1964 Freedom Summer, as well as the Selma-Montgomery March. SCOPE successfully encouraged political activism, along with developing political education programs for some of the counties that the campaign served. -
Memphis Station Workers Strike
Longstanding tensions between disgruntled African American sanitation workers and Memphis city officials erupted on February 12, 1968 when nearly one thousand workers refused to report to work demanding higher wages, safer working conditions, and recognition of their union, local 1733 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. -
Dr. King's Assassination
On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated by a sniper's bullet while standing on the second-floor balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. -
Poor People's Campaign
In the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, the fate of his final cause, the Poor People's Campaign, faced an uncertain future.
