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Twelve thousand African Americans reside in Kansas, comprising 9 percent of the state's population. Only 627 blacks were in the territory at the time of the Census of 1860.
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Congress establishes the Freedmen's Bureau to protect the rights of newly emancipated blacks (March). Read more: African-American History Timeline (Civil Rights Movement, Facts, Events, Leaders) | Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmtimeline.html#ixzz2T35H3coF
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Black codes are passed by Southern states, drastically restricting the rights of newly freed slaves.
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Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, defining citizenship. Individuals born or naturalized in the United States are American citizens, including those born as slaves. This nullifies the Dred Scott Case (1857), which had ruled that blacks were not citizens.
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Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, giving blacks the right to vote. Hiram Revels of Mississippi is elected the country's first African-American senator. During Reconstruction, sixteen blacks served in Congress and about 600 served in states legislatures.
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Reconstruction ends in the South. Federal attempts to provide some basic civil rights for African Americans quickly erode.
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The Tuskegee Institute, an historic black university, is founded in Alabama to train African Americans as teachers and in agriculture and industry. Booker T. Washington is the first president.
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Crop failures, economic hardships, and the failures of Reconstruction stimulated a Great Migration of southern blacks to northern cities at the end of the nineteenth century.
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Hundreds of thousands of these formerly agrarian people arrived in cities already teeming with millions of European immigrants. Racism and a glutted labor market prevented many African Americans from attaining the better life they sought. Despite these setbacks, they established new cultural institutions and modified older
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Plessy v. Ferguson: This landmark Supreme Court decision holds that racial segregation is constitutional, paving the way for the repressive Jim Crow laws in the South.
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Louisiana tries to disenfranchise its African Americans by passing a grandfather clause limiting the right to vote to anyone whose fathers and grandfathers were qualified on January 1, 1867. (No African Americans had the right to vote at that time.)
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Robert S. Abbott begins publishing The Chicago Defender, Chicago's first African American newspaper. Within a decade, it is one of the country's most influential African American weekly papers.
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The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is founded in New York by prominent black and white intellectuals and led by W.E.B. Du Bois. For the next half century, it would serve as the country's most influential African-American civil rights organization, dedicated to political equality and social justice In 1910, its journal, The Crisis, was launched. Among its well known leaders were James Weldon Johnson, Ella Baker, Moorfield Storey, Walter White, Roy Wilkins, Benjamin Hoo
