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Jackie Robinson became the first African American to play professional sports in the major leagues.
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President Truman issues an executive order that desegregates the military.
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Brown v. Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas. The Supreme Court rules unanimously against school segregation.
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Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to a white person, triggering a successful, year-long African American boycott of the bus system.
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The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) begins to organize Freedom Rides throughout the South to try to de-segregate interstate public bus travel.
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African American radical Malcolm X becomes national minister of the Nation of Islam. He rejects the nonviolent civil-rights movement and integration, and becomes a champion of African American separatism and black pride. At one point he states that equal rights should be secured "by any means necessary."
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More than 200,000 people march on Washington, D.C., in the largest civil rights demonstration ever; Martin Luther King, Jr., gives his "I Have a Dream" speech.
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Martin Luther King, Jr. is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
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Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. His murder sparks a week of rioting across the country.
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The Equal Employment Opportunity Act is passed, prohibiting job discrimination on the basis of, among other things, race, and laying the groundwork for affirmative action.
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The Philadelphia State Police bomb a house in Philadelphia occupied by an African American activist organization, MOVE. The bombing kills 11 occupants of the house and triggers a fire that destroys a neighborhood and leaves over 300 people homeless.
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The Civil Rights Act of 1991 makes it easier for employees to sue their employers for job discrimination.
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Amid growing racial tension in the South, nearly 40 primarily African American churches are burned there.
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In the largest settlement ever in a U.S. racial discrimination suit, the Coca-Cola Company agrees to pay out $192.5 million to roughly 2,000 African American employees.
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Barrack Obama, An African American becomes the first black U.S. presedent.