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Death of Emmett Till
Emmett Till, a 14 year old black boy was brutally murdered by white men and thrown into a river in Mississippi because he whistled at a white woman. -
Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat at the front of the colored section of a bus to a white passenger. -
Little Rock Nine
The Little Rock Nine were a group of African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. The ensuing Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, and then attended after the intervention of President Eisenhower. -
Freedom Rides
Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated southern United States in 1961 and following years to challenge the non-enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decisions which ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional. The Southern states had ignored the rulings and the federal government did nothing to enforce them. -
James Meredith
James H. Meredith became the first black student at the University of Mississippi, after being barred from entering on September 20 and several other occasions in the following days. His enrollment, publicly opposed by segregationist Governor Ross Barnett, sparked riots on the Oxford campus, which required the U.S. Marshals. -
March on Washington/I have a dream speech
More than 200,000 demonstrators took part in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in the nation’s capital. The march was successful in pressuring the administration of John F. Kennedy to initiate a strong federal civil rights bill in Congress. During this event, Martin Luther King delivered his memorable ‘‘I Have a Dream’’ speech. -
Ciivil Rights Act of 1964
President Johnson signs the civil rights act of 1964, that outlawed major forms of discrimination against racial, ethnic, national and religious minorities, and also women. It ended unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and by facilities that served the general public. -
Bloody Sunday
600 civil rights marchers headed east out of Selma on U.S. Route 80. They got only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge six blocks away, where state and local lawmen attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas and drove them back into Selma. -
Black Panther Party
The Black Panther Party was founded in 1996. They were an African-American revolutionary socialist organization active in the United States from 1966 until 1982. The Black Panther Party achieved national and international notoriety through its involvement in the Black Power movement and U.S. politics of the 1960s and 1970s. -
MLK Death
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on the balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968, at the age of 39.