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Edward W. Brooke
Becomes the first African American U.S. Senator since
Reconstruction. He serves two terms as a Senator from Massachusetts. -
Joseph McCarthy- McCarthyism
In 1950, McCarthy created a national sensation by claiming to have a list of 205 names of known Communists inside the State Department.For the next four years, he continued to make more and more spectacular attacks on alleged Communists inside the government. -
Julius and Ethel's execution
These couples were exceuted because they passed nuclear weapons secrets to the Soviet Union. Many believed that the couples were victims of McCarthyism and it was cruel to choose death as their punishment. -
Brown V. Board Of Education
The U.S supreme court delivered its verdict in Brown V. Board of education, ruling unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the 14th amendment's mandate of equal protection of the laws of the U.S constitution to any person within its jurisdiction. -
Civil Rights Movement
Nearly 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans in Southern states still inhabited a starkly unequal world of disenfranchisement, segregation and various forms of oppression, including race-inspired violence. “Jim Crow” laws at the local and state levels barred them from classrooms and bathrooms, from theaters and train cars, from juries and legislatures. -
Emmett Till
A 14 year old boy who whistled at and made a flirtatious remark to the white woman behind the counter, violating the strict racial codes of the Jim Crow south. Three days later Till was beaten, shot to death and thrown into the Tallahatchie river by the white mens. -
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a long, costly armed conflict that pitted the communist regime of North Vietnam and its southern allies, known as the Viet Cong, against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. The war began in 1954 (though conflict in the region stretched back to the mid-1940s), after the rise to power of Ho Chi Minh and his communist Viet Minh party in North Vietnam, and continued against the backdrop of an intense Cold War between two global superpowers. -
Rosa Parks And The Montgomery Bus Boycott
Rosa Park refused to give up her seat on the bus after the white bus driver commanded to get up and go seat in the back. She was arrested for violating the city's racial segregation ordinances, which mandated that blacks sit in the back of public buses and give up their seats when the front seats were full. -
Dorothy Irene Height
Is appointed president of the National Council of Negro Women, a position she holds for 41 years. She later launches a crusade for justice for black women and works to strengthen the black family. -
Central High School Integrated
On the September, after a federal court ordered the desegregation of Central High School, located in the state capital of Little Rock, Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine African American students from entering the school. -
Sit-In Movement And Founding Of SNCC
Four balck students from the Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at the lunch counter in a local branch of Woolworth's and ordered coffee. Refused service due the counter's whits only policy, they stayed put until the store closed, then returned the next day with other students. -
Core And Freedom Rides
Sought to end discrimination and improve race relations through direct action. -
Integration Of Ole Miss
A crisis erupted when the state funded University Of Mississippi known as "ole miss" admitted a black man, James Meredith. -
James Meredith
Becomes the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi . President Kennedy sends 5,000 federal troops after rioting breaks out. -
Wendell Oliver Scott
Became the first black driver to win a major NASCAR race, the Grand National (now Winston Cup) race. -
" I Have A Dream"
After the civil rights march, Martin Luther King who was the Baptist preacher of the southern Christian Leadership Conference spoke about the struggle facing black African Americans ant the need for continued action and nonviolent resistance. " I have a dream," King Intoned, expressing his faith that one day whites and blacks would stand together as equals, and there would be harmony between the races. -
Birmingham Church Bombed
In mid-September , white supremacists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama during sunday services. Four young Afrian Ameriacn girls were killed in the explosion. -
Assassination of John F. Kennedy
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he rode in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas, Texas. By the fall of 1963, President John F. Kennedy and his political advisers were preparing for the next presidential campaign. -
FREEDOM SUMMER AND THE “MISSISSIPPI BURNING” MURDERS
The organizations believed the participation of white students in the so–called “Freedom Summer” would bring increased visibility to their efforts. The summer had barely begun, however, when three volunteers—Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, both white New Yorkers, and James Chaney, a black Mississippian—disappeared on their way back from investigating the burning of an African–American church by the Ku Klux Klan.After a massive FBI investigation (code–named “Mississippi Burning”) their bodi -
CIVIL RIGHTS ACT
At its most basic level, the act gave the federal government more power to protect citizens against discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex or national origin. It mandated the desegregation of most public accommodations, including lunch counters, bus depots, parks and swimming pools, and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to ensure equal treatment of minorities in the workplace. -
MALCOLM X SHOT TO DEATH
On February 21, 1965, during a speaking engagement in Harlem, three members of the NOI rushed the stage and shot Malcolm some 15 times at close range. After Malcolm’s death, his bestselling book The Autobiography of Malcolm X popularized his ideas, particularly among black youth, and laid the foundation for the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. -
SELMA TO MONTGOMERY MARCH
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) made Selma, Alabama, the focus of its efforts to register black voters in the South. Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, was a notorious opponent of desegregation, and the local county sheriff had led a steadfast opposition to black voter registration drives: Only 2 percent of Selma’s eligible black voters had managed to register. -
VOTING RIGHTS ACT
Less than a week after the Selma–to–Montgomery marchers were beaten and bloodied by Alabama state troopers in March 1965, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress, calling for federal legislation to ensure protection of the voting rights of African Americans. The result was the Voting Rights Act, which Congress passed in August 1965. -
RISE OF BLACK POWER
After the heady rush of the civil rights movement’s first years, anger and frustration was increasing among many African Americans, who saw clearly that true equality social, economic and political still eluded them. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, this frustration fueled the rise of the Black Power movement. -
Stokely Carmichael
a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), coins the phrase "black power" in a speech in Seattle (April 19).
Major race riots take place in Newark (July 12-16) and Detroit (July 23-30). -
MLK ASSASSINATED
The world was stunned and saddened by the news that the civil rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot and killed on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to support a sanitation workers’ strike. -
FAIR HOUSING ACT
The Fair Housing Act of 1968, meant as a follow–up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, marked the last great legislative achievement of the civil rights era. Originally intended to extend federal protection to civil rights workers, it was later expanded to address racial discrimination in the sale, rental or financing of housing units. -
Charles Gordone
Becomes the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize in Drama for his play, "No Place to Be Somebody." -
Leroy Satchel Paige
Becomes the first former Negro Leagues baseball player inducted int the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, New York. -
Beverly Johnson
Is the first black woman to appear on the cover of a major fashion magazine (Glamour). -
SHIRLEY CHISHOLM RUNS FOR PRESIDENT
The advances of the civil rights movement had combined with the rise of the feminist movement to create an African–American women’s movement. “There can’t be liberation for half a race,” declared Margaret Sloan, one of the women behind the National Black Feminist Organization, founded in 1973. A year earlier, Representative Shirley Chisholm of New York became a national symbol of both movements as the first major party African–American. -
Tuskegee Syphilis experiment
Begun in 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service's 40-year experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis has been described as an experiment that "used human beings as laboratory animals in a long and inefficient study of how long it takes syphilis to kill someone." -
Dr. Louis Sullivan
The Morehouse School of Medicine (Atlanta) becomes the only black medical school established in the United States in the 20th Century. The first dean and president of the Morehouse School of Medicine is Dr. Louis Sullivan who later becomes the U.S. Surgeon General. -
THE BAKKE DECISION AND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
The term “affirmative action” was used to refer to policies and initiatives aimed at compensating for past discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, religion or national origin. President John F. Kennedy first used the phrase in 1961, in an executive order calling on the federal government to hire more African Americans. -
HIV/AIDS
Scientists discovered the virus that causes AIDS. The virus was at first named HTLV-III/LAV (human T-cell lymphotropic virus-type III/lymphadenopathy-associated virus) by an international scientific committee. -
Guion Bluford Jr.
Was the first African-American in space. He took off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on the space shuttle Challenger on August 30. -
JESSE JACKSON GALVANIZES BLACK VOTERS
As a young man, Jesse Jackson left his studies at the Chicago Theological Seminary to join Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in its crusade for black civil rights in the South; when King was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968, Jackson was at his side. -
OPRAH WINFREY LAUNCHES SYNDICATED TALK SHOW
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the success of the long–running sitcom The Cosby Show—featuring popular comedian Bill Cosby as the doctor patriarch of a close–knit middle–class African–American family—helped redefine the image of black characters on mainstream American television. Suddenly, there was no lack of educated, upwardly mobile, family–oriented black characters for TV viewers to look to, both in fiction and in life. -
Bill Cosby
On November 4, Comedian Bill Cosby announces his gift of $20 million to Spelman College. This is the largest donation ever made by a black American to a college or university. -
SOUTH CENTRAL RIOTS
In March 1991, officers with the California Highway Patrol attempted to pull an African–American man named Rodney King over for speeding on a Los Angeles freeway. King, who was on probation for robbery and had been drinking, led them on a high–speed chase, and by the time the patrolmen caught up to his car, several officers of the Los Angeles Police Department were on the scene. -
MILLION MAN MARCH
In October 1995, hundreds of thousands of black men gathered in Washington, D.C. for the Million Man March, one of the largest demonstrations of its kind in the capital’s history. Its organizer, Minister Louis Farrakhan, had called for “a million sober, disciplined, committed, dedicated, inspired black men to meet in Washington on a day of atonement. -
COLIN POWELL BECOMES SECRETARY OF STATE
As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993—the first African American to hold that position—the Vietnam veteran and four–star U.S. Army general Colin Powell played an integral role in planning and executing the first Persian Gulf War under President George H.W. Bush. After his retirement from the military in 1993, many people began floating his name as a possible presidential candidate. -
Halle Berry
Becomes the first African American woman to win the Best Actress Oscar. She takes home the statue for her role in Monster's Ball. Denzel Washington, the star of Training Day, earns the Best Actor award, making it the first year that African-Americans win both the best actor and actress Oscars. -
BARACK OBAMA BECOMES 44TH U.S. PRESIDENT
On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States; he is the first African American to hold that office. The product of an interracial marriage—his father grew up in a small village in Kenya, his mother in Kansas—Obama grew up in Hawaii but discovered his civic calling in Chicago, where he worked for several years as a community organizer on the city’s largely black South Side. -
Ernie Davis
A running back at Syracuse University, becomes the first African American athlete to receive college football's Heisman Trophy.
