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Jackie Robinson integrating Major League Baseball (1947)
In 1947, The United States was still legally segregated throughout the south and tradition and custom segregated much of the rest of the country. Jackie Robinson would not only integrate baseball that spring, but by the fall of 1947 he would play in the World Series and was named the Rookie of the Year for the season. -
The Supreme Court case of Sweatt v. Painter (1950)
A U.S. Supreme Court case that successfully challenged the "separate but equal" doctrine of racial segregation established by the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson. -
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. The decision effectively overturned the “separate but equal” ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), that allowed Jim Crow laws that mandated separate public facilities for whites and African Americans to prevail throughout the South during the first half of the 20th century. While the Brown ruling applied only to schools, it implied that segregation in other public facilities was unconstitutional. -
Emmett Till Case
While visiting family in Mississippi, fourteen-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till was kidnapped, brutally beaten, shot and dumped in the Tallahatchie River for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Two white men, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, were arrested for the murder and acquitted by an all-white jury. They later boasted about committing the murder in a Look magazine interview. The case became a cause célèbre of the civil rights movement. -
President Kennedy's Executive Order 10925
President Kennedy issued Executive Order 10925, prohibiting discrimination in federal government hiring on the basis of race, religion or national origin and establishing The President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity , the EEOC. They were immediately directed to scrutinize and study employment practices of the United States government and to consider and recommend additional affirmative steps for executive departments and agencies. -
The Civil Right Act of 1964
President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination of all kinds based on race, color, religion or national origin and transform American society. The law allowed the federal government to enforce desegregation and prohibits discrimination in public facilities, in government and in employment. -
Loving v. Virginia
In Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court ruled that prohibiting interracial marriage was unconstitutional. Sixteen states that still banned interracial marriage at the time were forced to revise their laws. -
Civil Right Act of 1968
A landmark part of legislation in the United States that provided for equal housing opportunities regardless of race, religion, or national origin and made it a federal crime to "by force or by threat of force, injure, intimidate, or interfere with anyone … by reason of their race, color, religion, or national origin, handicap or familial status
