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The massive effort to desegregate public schools across the United States was a major goal of the Civil Rights Movement. Since the 1930s, lawyers from the NAACP had strategized to bring local lawsuits to court, arguing that separate was not equal and that every child, regardless of race, deserved a first-class education. These lawsuits were combined into the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case that outlawed segregation in schools in 1954. -
While visiting family in Mississippi, 14-year-old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago, is brutally murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman four days earlier. -
The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a civil rights protest during which African Americans refused to ride city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest segregated seating. -
These nine students were integrating into a formerly whites-only institution, the nine students arrived at Central High School, looking forward to a successful academic year. Instead, they were greeted by an angry mob of white students, parents, and citizens determined to stop integration. -
The purpose of the bill was to increase the number of registered black voters in the South since only 20% were registered with lower numbers in communities in the Deep South. -
Four students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworths in downtown Greensboro, where the official policy was to refuse service to anyone but whites. Denied service, the four young men refused to give up their seats. -
A series of political protests against segregation by Blacks and whites who rode buses together through the American South in 1961
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The Albany Campaign aimed to end all forms of racial segregation in the city, focusing initially on desegregating travel facilities, and forming a permanent biracial committee to discuss further desegregation and the release of those jailed in segregation protests.
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Riots erupted on the campus of the University of Mississippi in Oxford where locals, students, and committed segregationists had gathered to protest the enrollment of James Meredith, a black Air Force veteran attempting to integrate the all-white school. -
A series of lunch counter sit-ins, marches on City Hall, and boycotts on downtown merchants to protest segregation laws in the city. The peaceful demonstrations would be met with violent attacks using high-pressure fire hoses and police dogs on men, women, and children -
In the driveway outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, African American civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot to death by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith. -
The event focused on employment discrimination, civil rights abuses against African Americans, Latinos, and other disenfranchised groups, and support for the Civil Rights Act that the Kennedy Administration was attempting to pass through Congress. -
The 1964 Freedom Summer project was designed to draw the nation’s attention to the violent oppression experienced by Mississippi blacks who attempted to exercise their constitutional rights and to develop a grassroots freedom movement that could be sustained after student activists left Mississippi. -
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Provisions of this civil rights act forbade discrimination on the basis of sex, as well as, race in hiring, promoting, and firing. -
Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbade racial discrimination by places of public accommodation if their operations affected commerce. The Heart of Atlanta Motel in Atlanta, Georgia, refused to accept Black Americans. The government sought to enjoin the motel from discriminating on the basis of race under Title II. -
The Supreme Court case involving Civil Rights under the Commerce Clause is Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, decided December 14, 1964. The Supreme Court held that the government could enjoin private businesses from discriminating on the basis of race under the Commerce Clause.
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Malcolm X, a religious and civil rights leader, was assassinated during a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. -
Hundreds of people gathered in Selma, Alabama to march to the capital city of Montgomery. They marched to ensure that African Americans could exercise their constitutional right to vote, even in the face of a segregationist system that wanted to make it impossible. -
The act outlawed the discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states after the Civil War, including poll taxes and literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting. -
The first African American to enroll at the University of Mississippi, began a solitary walk intending to walk from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi to call attention to racism and continued voter discrimination in the South. -
Martin Luther King was shot dead while standing on a balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. News of King’s assassination prompted major outbreaks of racial violence, resulting in more than 40 deaths nationwide and extensive property damage in over 100 American cities. -
Fair Housing Act makes it illegal to discriminate in housing because of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, physical or mental handicaps, or family status -
The Supreme Court of the United States unanimously upheld busing programs that aimed to speed up the racial integration of public schools in the United States. -
She became the first black candidate for a major-party nomination for President of the United States, and the first woman to run for the Democratic Party's nomination. She was from Brooklyn, New York. -
Hank Aaron of the Atlanta Braves hits his 715th career home run, breaking Babe Ruth’s legendary record of 714 homers. A crowd of 53,775 people, the largest in the history of Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. However, as Aaron was an African American who had received death threats and racist hate mail during his pursuit of one of baseball’s most distinguished records, the achievement was bittersweet. -
Texas Congresswoman Barbara Jordan delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. As Americans sensed a fracturing of American life in the 1970s, Jordan called for Americans to commit themselves to a “national community” and the “common good.” Jordan began by noting she was the first black woman to ever deliver a keynote address at a major party convention and that such a thing would have been almost impossible even a decade earlier.