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Thurgood Marshall Named Supreme Court Justice
President Lyndon Johnson appoints U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Thurgood Marshall to fill the seat of retiring Supreme Court Associate Justice Tom C. Clark. -
Creation of the NAACP
The NAACP was created in 1909 by an interracial group consisting of W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, Mary White Ovington, and others concerned with the challenges facing African Americans, especially in the wake of the 1908 Springfield (Illinois) Race Riot. -
Scottsboro Boys
The Scottsboro Boys were nine black teenagers accused in Alabama of raping two White American women on a train in 1931. The landmark set of legal cases from this incident dealt with racism and the right to a fair trial. -
Jackie Robinson Breaks the Color Barrier
Jack Roosevelt "Jackie" Robinson was an American Major League Baseball second baseman who became the first African American to play in the major leagues in the modern era. -
Brown vs. Board of Education
The case that came to be known as Brown v. Board of Education was actually the name given to five separate cases that were heard by the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the issue of segregation in public schools. These cases were Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Briggs v. Elliot, Davis v. Board of Education of Prince Edward County (VA.), Boiling v. Sharpe, and Gebhart v. Ethel. While the facts of each case are different, the main issue in each was the constitutionality of state-sponsored segr -
The Murder of Emmitt Till
While visiting family in Money, Mississippi, 14-year-old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago, is brutally murdered for flirting with a white woman four days earlier. ... The two men then beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head, and then threw his body in th river. -
Montgomery Bus Boycott
On December 1, 1955, four days before the boycott began, Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, refused to yield her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus. She was arrested and fined. The boycott of public buses by blacks in Montgomery began on the day of Parks' court hearing and lasted 381 days. -
The Little Rock 9
The Little Rock Nine was a group of nine African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas. -
Ruby Bridges desegregate elementary school
Ruby Nell Bridges Hall (born September 8, 1954) is an American activist known for being the first black child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School -
Letter from a Birmingham Jail
The Letter from Birmingham Jail, also known as the Letter from Birmingham City Jail and The Negro Is Your Brother, is an open letter written on April 16, 1963, by Martin Luther King, Jr. The letter defends the strategy of nonviolent resistance to racism. It says that people have a moral responsibility to break unjust laws and to take direct action rather than waiting potentially forever for justice to come through the courts. Responding to being referred to as an "outsider," King writes, "Injust -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
is a landmark piece of civil rights legislation in the United States[5] that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin -
Assassination of Malcolm X
On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was shot before he was about to deliver a speech about his new organization called the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Reporters inspect the scene of the assassination, inside the Audobon Ballroom in New York. -
Creation of the Black Panthers
Oakland California, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The Panthers practiced militant self-defense of minority communities against the U.S. government, and fought to establish revolutionary socialism through mass organizing and community based programs. -
Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Shortly after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and mortally wounded as he stood on the second-floor balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn. He was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. at St. Joseph Hospita -
Election of Obama
Obama defeated the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, making him the President-elect and the first African American elected President. He was the third sitting U.S. Senator, after Warren G. Harding and John F. Kennedy, to be elected President.
