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1526
Georgia History: First enslaved Africans arrive.
The first enslaved Africans arrived with Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón's establishment of San Miguel de Gualdape on the current Georgia coast, after failing to establish the colony on the Carolina coast. They staged the first slave revolt. Once free, they left to live with indigenous people. The colony was destroyed in less than two months.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/23622193 -
1526
World History:
Putting the timeline into perspective: The Battle of Panipat: Babur becomes Mughal emperor, invades northern India and captures Delhi, beginning the richest dynasty in the world, the Mughal Empire, which lasts until 1857. King Henry VIII becomes obsessed with Anne Boleyn. -
US History:
The Virginia courts had sentenced at least one black servant to slavery. -
US History:
A law directed at white servants (those who ran away with a black servant) was the first reference to slavery entered into Virginia law. -
US History:
The Virginia colony wrote a law stating that children born would be bonded or free according to the status of the mother. -
US History:
South Carolina creates the nations first slave patrols. -
US History:
The Slave Codes of 1705 sealed the status of African Americans. -
US History:
Virginia forms their first slave patrols. -
US History:
The Stono Rebellion takes place. It is the largest slave insurrection in British North American, -
US History:
In response to the Stono Rebellion, the South Carolina Assembly enacted the “Bill for the better ordering and governing of Negroes and other slaves in this province,” also known as the Negro Act of 1740. The law prohibited enslaved African people from growing their own food, learning to read, moving freely, assembling in groups, or earning money. It also authorized white enslavers to whip and kill enslaved Africans for being "rebellious." -
Georgia History: Georgia creates their first slave patrols.
Georgia’s colonial assembly required white landowners and residents to serve as slave patrols. To prevent slave insurrections, the legislature stipulated in “An Act for Establishing and Regulating of Patrols” that groups “not exceeding seven” would work in districts twelve miles square. The statute, modeled on South Carolina’s earlier patrol law, ordered white adults to patrol the roads at night. These Patrollers were required to validate enslaved Blacks travel passes. -
US History:
The U.S. Constitution is written. Article I, Section 9 specifically prohibits Congress from legislating in certain areas. In the first clause, the Constitution bars Congress from banning the importation of slaves before 1808. -
Georgia History: Ratified Constitution guarantees slavery protection for Southern states.
Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1, prohibited the federal government from limiting the importation of “persons” (understood at the time to mean primarily enslaved African persons) where the existing state governments saw fit to allow it, until 1808. It was a compromise between Southern states (like Georgia), where slavery was pivotal to the economy, and states where the abolition of slavery had been accomplished or was contemplated. -
US History:
The Naturalization Bill set the new nation’s naturalization procedures. It limited access to U.S. citizenship to white immigrants (meaning people from Western Europe), who had resided in the U.S. at least two years and their children under 21 years of age. It also granted citizenship to children born abroad to U.S. citizens. -
World History:
Haitian Revolution starts when a slave revolt erupted on the French colony, and Toussaint Louverture, a formerly enslaved man, took control of the rebels -
Georgia History: Enslaved are kept from worshipping God.
Georgia law protected religious assemblies from being disturbed, but enslaved and free African Americans could not gather “under pretence of divine worship,” even with regular slave patrols. Paranoia over unrest after the Saint Domingue slave rebellion of 1791 led to a Savannah ordinance that no enslaved congregants could meet for religious services without a white preacher present. -
US History:
Outbreak of the Civil War. -
US History:
U.S. president Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. -
Georgia History: Emancipation Proclamation causes apprehension.
With the Emancipation Proclamation going into effect the movement and behavior of enslaved people were more strictly regulated. In Atlanta patrols began arresting any Blacks found on the streets after nine o’clock at night, whether or not they had passes. City authorities also prevented social gatherings of African Americans unless patrollers or policemen were present. -
US History:
U.S. Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to aid African Americans undergoing the transition from slavery to freedom in the aftermath of the Civil War. The Freedmen’s Bureau, as it was more commonly known, was the first organization of its kind, a federal agency established solely for the purpose of social welfare. -
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Georgia History: Congressional Reconstruction
As a defeated Confederate state, Georgia underwent Reconstruction from when the Civil War ended, until 1871, when Republican government and military occupation in the state ended. Though relatively brief, Reconstruction transformed the state politically, socially, and economically. -
US History:
The Thirteenth Amendment to the constitution is passed abolishing slavery. -
US History:
The KKK was formed as a social group in Tennessee. The Ku Klux Klan functioned as a loosely organized group of political and social terrorists. The Klan’s goals included the political defeat of the Republican Party and the maintenance of absolute white supremacy in response to newly gained civil and political rights by southern Blacks after the Civil War. -
US History:
The Senate passed two more Force acts, also known as the Ku Klux Klan acts, designed to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. The Second Force Act, which became law in February 1871, placed administration of national elections under the control of the federal government and empowered federal judges and United States marshals to supervise local polling places. -
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Georgia History: Black men participate in Georgia politics
Sixty-nine African Americans served as delegates to the constitutional convention (1867-68) or as members of the state legislature. -
US History:
Within a year of the Reconstruction Acts, more than seven hundred thousand African Americans were added to the voter rolls and by 1868, they were voting in large numbers throughout the South. In five Southern states—Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina— African Americans made up the majority of the electorate. But other parts of the country were divided, only seven states outside of the region permitted Black people to vote. -
Georgia History: Black legislatures help the state to adopt public education.
The Georgia legislature, dominated by Republicans, expelled its African American members. However, the Black legislators successfully lobbied the federal government to reseat them. They continued to concentrate on political and civil rights and with their solid support, Georgia adopted public education. -
Georgia History: The KKK spreads to the state.
Conservative whites, frustrated with their political failures, began to look for new ways to defeat their Republican enemies and control the recently enfranchised freed people. For many, the KKK offered a chance to take action. In February and March, General Forrest visited Atlanta from Tennessee several times and met with prominent Georgia conservatives. Forrest probably helped organize a statewide Klan structure during these visits. By the summer, the Klan was widespread across Georgia. -
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Georgia History: KKK violence increases and freedmen are murdered.
Attacks from the KKK became increasingly violent, ranging from whippings of Black women perceived as insolent to the assassination of Republican leaders. Freedmen’s Bureau agents reported 336 cases of murder or assault with intent to kill on freedmen across the state. -
Georgia History: The Ku Klux Klan takes action.
The Klan’s organized terrorism began most notably on this day when Republican organizer George Ashburn was murdered in Columbus, Georgia. Over the following months Klan-inspired violence spread throughout Georgia’s Black Belt and into the northwestern corner of the state. Most Klan action was designed to intimidate Black voters and white supporters of the Republican Party. -
US History:
The Fourteenth Amendment is ratified, guaranting equal citizenship—including former enslaved people— and providing strong new protections for civil rights. -
Georgia History: The Camilla Massacre
Two months earlier, Georgia had fulfilled the requirements of Congress’s Radical Reconstruction plan and been readmitted to the Union. Yet, the state legislature expelled twenty-eight newly elected black members. Mitchell County whites were determined to stop the resulting rally and as marchers entered the courthouse square in Camilla, whites stationed in various storefronts opened fire, killing about a dozen and wounding possibly thirty others. -
Georgia History: Georgia is kicked out of the Union
In response to the Camilla Massacre, Congress once again barred Georgia’s representatives from holding seats and Georgia had to once more undergo military rule and Radical Reconstruction. -
US History:
The 15th Amendment was ratified. It states that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or by any State, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” However, the drafters of the Fifteenth Amendment left states in charge of their own voting rules, with consequences that reverberate to this day. -
Georgia History: Georgia is readmitted to the Union.
Georgia became the last former Confederate state to be readmitted into the Union after agreeing to seat some black members in the state Legislature. -
US History:
The Third Force Act, is passed, empowering the president to use the armed forces to combat those who conspired to deny equal protection of the laws (this is the KKK) and to suspend habeas corpus, if necessary, to enforce the act. -
Georgia History: The birth of Jim Crow.
Southern Democrats accepted Republican Rutherford B. Hayes' election in exchange for the promise of more federal aid for rebuilding the Southern infrastructure and less federal intervention in Southern politics. As a result, many of the civil rights blacks enjoyed during the Reconstruction era (1865-1877) were revoked. -
US History:
The Compromise of 1877, in which election-winning electoral votes were exchanged for the end of federal intervention in the Southern states of Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida, marked an era of complicity between Northern and Southern politicians in the abandonment of the issue of civil rights for blacks. -
US History:
A Black man named Eli Pigot was lynched by a mob of more than 2,000 white people in Brookhaven, Mississippi. Mr. Pigot was accused of assaulting a white woman and was brutally killed before he could be tried in a court of law. -
Georgia History: Forsyth County drives out every black resident
The northern county of Forsyth, one of Georgia’s 10 most populous, leans heavily white and conservative. Its demographics are shaped by this event, when white people forced out all 1,098 of Forsyth’s black residents, who comprised about 10 percent of the population at the time. -
US History:
The Red Summer of 1919, refers to the summer and fall of 1919, in which race riots exploded in a number of cities in both the North and South. The three most violent episodes occurred in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Elaine, Arkansas. -
Georgia History: Peak year of Klans power
At this point in time, the Klan had 5 million members. The headquarters of the Klan (the Imperial Palace) was moved to Atlanta. No other state had the Klan infiltrate its politics and government like Georgia. And so, Georgia became the birthplace of a new revived Klan.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40579519?read-now=1&seq=2#page_scan_tab_contents -
Georgia History: Lint Shaw lynched eight hours before trial.
On April 28, 1936, a 45-year-old Black farmer named Lint Shaw was shot to death by a mob of 40 white men in Colbert, Georgia, just eight hours before he was scheduled to stand trial on allegations of attempting to assault two white women. -
Georgia History: Black woman and her children sentenced to die for defending themselves.
Rosa Lee Ingram, a Black woman, and two of her children, Wallace, 17, and Sammie Lee, 14, were convicted by an all-white jury in a one-day trial in Ellaville, Georgia. The three family members were sentenced to death by electric chair for killing an armed white man in self-defense after he violently assaulted and threatened them. -
Georgia History: White residents wage a terror campaign of violent intimidation to keep registered black voters from voting.
On the eve of a primary election in Wrightsville, Johnson County, Georgia, at least 300 white men and women belonging to the KKK held a parade in the town’s center. The event was organized to threaten and intimidate the county’s 400 registered Black voters into not voting in the next day’s primary. The terror tactics worked: not a single Black citizen of Wrightsville cast a vote in the primary. -
Georgia History: Governor proposes abolition of public school system to avoid integration.
Anticipating that the United States Supreme Court would soon strike down racial segregation in public schools, Georgia Governor and ardent segregationist Herman Talmadge announced he would end public education in the state rather than integrate. “There is only one solution in the event segregation is banned by the Supreme Court,” Talmadge declared at a press conference, “And that is abolition of the public school system.” -
Georgia History: White mobs riot after integration of University of Georgia
Thousands of white people violently rioted because Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes registered at the University of Georgia, becoming the university's first Black students. Their enrollment came days after federal judge William Bootle ordered the university to admit them, ending a two-year administrative and legal fight to integrate the school. -
US History:
After being overwhelmingly elected by white Alabama voters, George Wallace, the infamous segregationist and white supremacist, delivered his inaugural address as the governor of Alabama, and called for “segregation now... segregation tomorrow... segregation forever!” Throughout his speech he condemned integration and criticized federal intervention in state affairs. -
US History:
Martin Luther King Jr. led more than 250 activists to the Dallas County Courthouse to register to vote. All of them were arrested during the peaceful demonstration and charged with parading without a permit. -
US History:
White state troopers fired into a mostly African American crowd on the campus of South Carolina State College, a historically Black college in Orangeburg, South Carolina. In what became known as the “Orangeburg Massacre,” the troopers shot and wounded 28 people and killed three Black male students. -
Georgia History: Supreme Court upholds plan to close rather than integrate park
On January 26, 1970, the United States Supreme Court issued a decision upholding the Georgia Supreme Court’s decision to close, rather than integrate, a local public park in Macon, Georgia. -
Georgia History: U.S. Supreme court rules racial bias "inevitable" in criminal justice system.
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a Black man's death penalty appeal grounded in claims of racial inequality and instead accepted proven racial sentencing disparities as "an inevitable part of our criminal justice system." -
Georgia History: White parents protest high school holding first racially integrated prom.
Turner County High School students attended the school's first racially integrated prom. Located in Ashburn, Georgia, a small, rural, peanut-farming town. The school's racial demographics reflected those of the local community: 55% Black and 45% white. The prom theme, "Breakaway," was chosen to signify a break from the tradition of privately-funded, separate "white" and "Black" proms sponsored by parent groups. Some parents refused to allow their children to attend the integrated prom -
Georgia History: Troy Davis executed despite evidence of innocence.
The State of Georgia executed Troy Davis despite evidence of his innocence. Mr. Davis was sentenced to death in the 1989 fatal shooting of white off-duty police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah, Georgia. A 2009 U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowed Mr. Davis to present evidence of his innocence in court. But when the federal trial judge denied relief, the Supreme Court refused to review the case and an execution date was set. -
US History:
17-year-old Trayvon Martin was fatally shot while walking home from a convenience store. George Zimmerman, a local resident and neighborhood watch coordinator, saw Trayvon and decided the Black youth in a hooded sweatshirt was "suspicious." Zimmerman called 911 to report Trayvon's presence while following him at a close distance and, despite the dispatcher's contrary instructions, confronted the teen and fatally shot him. He was carrying only iced tea and a bag of Skittles. -
US History:
The Black Lives Matter is a movement that was founded by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. The movement aims to end systemic racism, gun violence, and police brutality against African Americans. And although it started in the United States, BLM has quickly gained traction around the world. -
Georgia History: Two white men kill ahmaud arbery; police decline to arrest them for months.
Ahmaud Arbery was shot and killed by two white men while he was out jogging in Satilla Shores, Georgia, the suburban neighborhood he had been living in with his mother. After the shooting, Mr. Arbery’s killers (an ex-police officer and his son) were allowed to leave the scene and faced no consequences for months, as local officials refused to fully investigate, misrepresented the circumstances surrounding the shooting, and rejected efforts to hold the men accountable.