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Feb 5, 1570
Middle Passage (1570-1808)
The Middle Passage was the stage of the triangular trade in which millions of people from Africa were shipped to the New World as part of the Atlantic slave trade. -
The first Africans
The first Africans were brought against their will to Jamestown in 1619 to work on tobacco plantations. -
Crispus Attucks (1723-1770)
He was one of the colonials involved in the Boston Massacre, and when the shooting started, he was the first to die. He became a martyr. -
Stono Rebellion
The Stono Rebellion was the largest slave revolt ever staged in the 13 colonies. About 20 slaves under the leadership of a man named Jemmy provided whites with a painful lesson on the African desire for liberty. Many members of the group were seasoned soldiers, either from the Yamasee War or from their experience in their homes in Angola, where they were captured and sold, and had been trained in the use of weapons. -
Phillis Wheatly (1754-1784)
An African domestic in the colonies, and a well-known colonial poet. Her poetry was ornate and elaborate. -
Three-Fifths Compromise
The South’s slave trade was guaranteed for at least 20 years after the ratification of the Constitution. Slaves were considered 3/5 of a person when determining the state population. -
Gabriel Prosser (1776- 1800)
He was the leader of an unsuccessful slave revolt in Richmond, Virginia in 1800. He and is cohorts were hung. -
Toussaint L’Overture
1803 - Led a slave rebellion which took control of Haiti, the most important island of France’s Caribbean possessions. The rebellion led Napoleon to feel that New World colonies were more trouble than they were worth, and encouraged him to sell Louisiana to the U.S. -
Harriet Tubman (1821-1913)
A former escaped slave, she was one of the shrewdest conductors of the underground railroad, leading 300 slaves to freedom. -
Denmark Vesey (1767- 1822)
He was a free black and former slave in Charleston, South Carolina who is noted for his plan for "the rising," a major slave revolt in 1822; by some accounts, it would have involved thousands of slaves in the city and others on plantations miles away. A skilled carpenter, Vesey had won a lottery and purchased his freedom at age 32 in 1799. He had a good business and a family, but was not able to buy his wife and children out of slavery. -
David Walker (1785-1830)
"Walker's Appeal"
A Boston free black man who published papers against slavery. -
Nat Turner's Insurrection
Slave uprising. A group of 60 slaves led by Nat Turner, who believed he was a divine instrument sent to free his people, killed almost 60 Whites in South Hampton, Virginia. This let to a sensational manhunt in which 100 Blacks were killed. As a result, slave states strengthened measures against slaves and became more united in their support of fugitive slave laws. -
William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879)
A militant abolitionist, he came editor of the Boston publication, The Liberator, in 1831. Under his leadership, The Liberator gained national fame and notoriety due to his quotable and inflammatory language, attacking everything from slave holders to moderate abolitionists, and advocating northern secession. -
Prigg v. Pennsylvania
A slave had escaped from Maryland to Pennsylvania, where a federal agent captured him and returned him to his owner. Pennsylvania indicted the agent for kidnapping under the fugitive slave laws. The Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutional for bounty hunters or anyone but the owner of an escaped slave to apprehend that slave, thus weakening the fugitive slave laws. -
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
A self-educated slave who escaped in 1838, Douglas became the best-known abolitionist speaker. He edited an anti-slavery weekly, the North Star. He was Former enslaved African American who became a prominent abolitionist and who urged Lincoln to recruit former enslaved African Americans to fight in the Union army -
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the abolitionist book, Uncle Tom's Cabin. It helped to crystalize the rift between the North and South. It has been called the greatest American propaganda novel ever written, and helped to bring about the Civil War. -
Dred Scott Decision
A Missouri slave sued for his freedom, claiming that his four year stay in the northern portion of the Louisiana Territory made free land by the Missouri Compromise had made him a free man. The U.S, Supreme Court decided he couldn't sue in federal court because he was property, not a citizen. -
John Brown's Raid
In 1859, the militant abolitionist John Brown seized the U.S. arsenal at Harper's Ferry. He planned to end slavery by massacring slave owners and freeing their slaves. He was captured and executed. -
Black codes
Restrictions on the freedom of former slaves, passed by Southern governments. -
Thirteenth Amendment
- Freed all slaves, abolished slavery.
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Fourteenth Amendment
It fixed provision of the Civil Rights Bill: full citizenship to all native-born or naturalized Americans, including former slaves and immigrants. -
Fifteenth Amendment
No one could be denied the right to vote on account of race, color or having been a slave. It was to prevent states from amending their constitutions to deny black suffrage. -
Hiram R. Revels (1827- 1901)
North Carolina free black, he became the first African American senator in 1870. -
Blanche K. Bruce
Became a senator in 1874 -- the only black to be elected to a full term until Edward Brooke in 1966. -
Civil Rights Act of 1875
Prohibited discrimination against blacks in public place, such as inns, amusement parks, and on public transportation. Declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. -
Jim Crow laws (1877- 1954)
"Separate but equal"-State laws which created a racial caste system in the South. They included the laws which prevented blacks from voting and those which created segregated facilities. -
Sojourner Truth (1797 – November 26, 1883
Sojourner Truth was named Isabella ("Bell") Baumfree when she was born. She gave herself the name Sojourner Truth in 1843. Her best-known extemporaneous speech on gender inequalities, "Ain't I a Woman?", was delivered in 1851 at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. During the Civil War, Truth helped recruit black troops for the Union Army; after the war, she tried unsuccessfully to secure land grants from the federal government for former slaves. -
Ida B. Wells (1861- 1931)
She led an anti-lynching crusade and called on the federal government to take action. -
Plessy v. Ferguson
Plessy was a black man who had been instructed by the NAACP to refuse to ride in the train car reserved for blacks. The NAACP hoped to force a court decision on segregation. However, the Supreme Court ruled against Plessy and the NAACP, saying that segregated facilities for whites and blacks were legal as long as the facilities were of equal quality. -
W. E. B. DuBois (1868-1963)
A black orator and eassayist. Helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He disagreed with Booker T. Washington's theories, and took a militant position on race relations. -
Booker T. Washington (1857-1915)
An educator who urged blacks to better themselves through education and economic advancement, rather than by trying to attain equal rights. In 1881 he founded the first formal school for blacks, the Tuskegee Institute. -
Langston Hughes (1902- 1967)
He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that "the negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue". -
The Great Migration (1910–1930)
The first Great Migration (1910–1930), numbering about 1.6 million migrants who left mostly rural areas to migrate to northern industrial cities; and, after a lull during the Great Depression, a Second Great Migration (1940–1970), in which 5 million or more people moved from the South, including many to California and other western states. -
The Harlem Renaissance (1918- 1930)
The Movement included the new African-American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by the Great Migration (African American) of which Harlem was the largest. Though it was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of the borough of Manhattan in New York City, in addition, many francophone black writers from African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were also influenced by the Harlem Renaissance. -
James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)
An American poet and part of the Harlem Renaissance, he was influenced by jazz music. -
Marcus Garvey (1887-1940)
Universal Negro Improvement Association-
Black leader who advocated "black nationalism," and financial independence for Blacks, he started the "Back to Africa" movement. He believed Blacks would not get justice in mostly white nations. -
George Washington Carver (1860-1943)
A black chemist and director of agriculture at the Tuskegee Institute, where he invented many new uses for peanuts. He believed that education was the key to improving the social status of blacks. -
Detroit race riots
June 25, 1943 - Outright racial war broke out between Blacks and Whites and the government did not send help. -
The Tuskegee Airmen (1940–1952)
THis was the popular name of a group of African-American military pilots (fighter and bomber) who fought in World War II. Formally, they formed the 332nd Fighter Group and the 477th Bombardment Group of the United States Army Air Forces. The name also applies to the navigators, bombardiers, mechanics, instructors, crew chiefs, nurses, cooks and other support personnel for the pilots. -
Jackie Robinson (1919- 1972)
He was an American baseball player who became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball (MLB) in the modern era. -
Desegregation of the Armed Forces
In July, Truman issued an executive order establishing a policy of racial equality in the Armed Forces "be put into effect as rapidly as possible." He also created a committee to ensure its implementation. -
Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas
1954 - The Supreme Court overruled Plessy v. Ferguson, declared that racially segregated facilities are inherently unequal and ordered all public schools desegregated. -
Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993)
In 1967, appointed the first Black Supreme Court Justice, he had led that NAACP's legal defense fund and had argued the Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas case before the Supreme Court. -
Irene Morgan (1917- 2007)
She a woman who was arrested in Middlesex County, Virginia, in 1944 for refusing to give up her seat on an interstate bus according to a state law on segregation. Later a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and Thurgood Marshall, legal counsel of the NAACP took her case, Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia, 328 U.S.373(1946), was taken to the United States Supreme Court. In 1946 in a landmark decision, the Court ruled that the Virginia law was un
