civil rights timeline

  • Sweatt v. Painter

    Sweatt v. Painter
    the Supreme Court began to overturn the separate but equal law in public education by making schools let black students in.
  • emmett tills murder

    emmett tills murder
    14-year-old black Emmett Till was kidnapped, beaten, shot in the head, had a large metal fan tied to his neck with barbed wire, and was thrown into the Tallahatchie River because he possibly whistled at a white woman. His body was later recovered, and an investigation was launched.
  • montgomery bus boycott

    montgomery bus boycott
    kindled by the arrest of Rosa Parks on the 1st of December in 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott was a 13-month mass protest that concluded with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses was unconstitutional.
  • civil rights act

    civil rights act
    Congress passed Public Law 88-352. The Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
  • cooper v aaron

    cooper v aaron
    the Supreme Court said that Arkansas could not pass legislation undermining the Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional.
  • greensboro sit in

    greensboro sit in
    four black students sat at a white-only lunch counter inside a Greensboro, North Carolina, and would not move until hours later
  • assassination of medger evars

    assassination of medger evars
    Medgar Wiley Evers was an American civil rights activist but a white supremacist killed him in the driveway outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi.
  • march from selma to montgomery

    march from selma to montgomery
    A march that took place in 1965 from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. These marches were organized By MLK to protest the blocking of Black Americans' right to vote.
  • birmingham movement

    birmingham movement
    MLK and the (SCLC) joined with Birmingham, Alabama’s local movement, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), in a massive direct action campaign to attack the city’s segregation system by putting pressure on Birmingham’s merchants during the Easter season.
  • assassination of MLK

    assassination of MLK
    Martin Luther King was shot while standing on a balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
  • fair housing act

    fair housing act
    made discrimination illegal in housing because of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, or physical or mental handicaps.
  • swann v charlotte mecklenburg schools

    swann v charlotte mecklenburg schools
    the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously upheld busing programs that aimed to speed up the racial integration of public schools in the United States
  • hank aarons home run record

    hank aarons home run record
    Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's home run record while playing for the Atlanta Braves.
  • university of california regents v bakke

    university of california regents v bakke
    A Supreme Court case which held that a university's admissions criteria which used race as a determining factor for an admission decision violated the 14th ammendment
  • Barbra jordans adress at the democratic national convention

    Barbra jordans adress at the democratic national convention
    Jordan got recognition for delivering a powerful opening statement at the House Judiciary Committee hearings during the impeachment process against Richard Nixon. In 1976, she became the first black woman to deliver a keynote address at a Democratic National Convention