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Integration of the Armed Forces
On July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed an executive order establishing the President's Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services, committing the government to integrating the segregated military. This meant that blacks and whites would fight in wars together. Integrating the military helped to make it actually equal. -
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. This was a huge step in the Civil Rights Movement. -
Emmett Till murder
While visiting family in Mississippi, 14 year old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago, was brutally murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman four days earlier. His murderers were the white woman’s husband and his brother. They made Emmett carry a heavy cotton gin fan to the bank of a River and ordered him to take off his clothes. Then they beat him, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head and threw his body, tied to the cotton gin fan with barbed wire, into the river. -
Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott
Sparked by the arrest of Rosa Parks in December of 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott was a 13-month mass protest that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional. -
Central High School and the Little Rock Nine
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. -
Greensboro 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. This paved the way for more sit-ins at near colleges. -
Freedom Rides
Freedom Riders were groups of civil rights activists who participated in Freedom Rides, bus trips through the American South to protest segregated bus terminals. In May, the Greyhound bus was the first to arrive in Anniston, Alabama. There, an angry mob of about 200 white people surrounded the bus. When the tires on the bus blew out, someone threw a bomb into the bus. The Freedom Riders escaped the bus as it burst into flames, only to be brutally beaten by members of the surrounding mob. -
James Meredith and the integration of the University of Mississippi
James Meredith officially became the first African American student at the University of Mississippi on October 2, 1962. He was guarded twenty-four hours a day by reserve U.S. deputy marshals and army troops, and he endured constant verbal harassment from a minority of students. -
March on Washington, DC “I Have a Dream Speech.”
The March on Washington was a massive protest march that occurred in August 1963, when around 250,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. It was for jobs and freedom, the event aimed to draw attention to continuing challenges and inequalities faced by African Americans a century after emancipation. This was also when Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have A Dream” speech. -
Bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham
A dynamite bomb exploded in the back stairwell of the downtown 16th Street Baptist Church. The violent blast ripped through the wall, killing four, young, African-American girls on the other side and injuring more than 20 inside the church. The suspects were Robert E. Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Frank Cash, and Thomas E. Blanton, Jr., all KKK members. Witnesses were reluctant to talk and they lacked physical evidence. As a result, no federal charges were filed in the ‘60s. -
John F. Kennedy assassination and Lyndon Johnson becomes President
Kennedy’s assassination created moments of chaos in the federal government. Vice President Lyndon Johnson was in the same motorcade as Kennedy, and there were early, erroneous reports that Johnson was also wounded. Although he was alive, he still had some health issues that made didn't make him seem promising as a president. -
Twenty Fourth Amendment
The Twenty-fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution prohibits both Congress and the states from conditioning the right to vote in federal elections on payment of a poll tax or other types of tax. The amendment was proposed by Congress to the states on August 27, 1962, and was ratified by the states on January 23, 1964. -
Civil Rights Act
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. The Act prohibited discrimination in public accommodations and federally funded programs. It also strengthened the enforcement of voting rights and the desegregation of schools. -
Selma to Montgomery March
The Selma to Montgomery march was part of a series of civil rights protests that occurred in Alabama. In March of that year, in an effort to register Black voters in the South, protesters marching the 54-mile route from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery were confronted with deadly violence from local authorities and white vigilante groups. As the world watched, the protesters, under the protection of federalized National Guard troops, finally achieved their goal. -
Malcolm X is killed
In New York City, Malcolm X, an African American nationalist and religious leader, is assassinated while addressing his Organization of Afro-American Unity at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights.