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In Henderson v. United States the Supreme Court abolishes segregation in railroad dining cars.
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University of Virginia, under a federal court order, admits a black student to its law school.
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Maryland legislature ends segregation on trains and boats; meanwhile Georgia legislature votes to deny funds to schools that integrate.
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The United States Army high command announces it will desegregate the Army.
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Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower wins presidential election, November 4.
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Ruby McCollum, an African-American woman, went on trial at the Suwanee County Courthouse in Live Oak, Florida, in November 1952 for the murder on August 3, 1952, of Dr. C. LeRoy Adams, a white physician and state senator who was the father of her youngest child.
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In Monteagle, Tennessee, the Highlander Folk School in runs various workshops to teach how to organize protests for people like union organizer. The school invites civil rights workers.
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Supreme Court orders reargument in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.
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The Supreme Court decides Brown v. Board of Education arguing that "separate but equal" schools are inherently unequal. The decision declares legal school segregation unconstitutional.
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Department of Defense announces that the armed forces have been fully desegregated.
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While visiting family in Mississippi, fourteen-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till was kidnapped, brutally beaten, shot and dumped in the Tallahatchie River for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Two white men, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, were arrested for the murder and acquitted by an all-white jury. They later boasted about committing the murder in a Look magazine interview. The case became a cause célèbre of the civil rights movement.
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Rosa parks refuses to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, to a white person, triggering a successful year-long African American boycott of the bus system.
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The home of Martin Luther King, Jr., is bombed in Montgomery. King is a leader in the boycott and its designated spokesman.
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The U.S Supreme Court rules that the segregation of Montgomery, Alabama, buses is unconstitutional.
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Martin Luther King helps found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in January. The organization's purpose is to fight for civil rights, and Kind is elected its first president.
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Nine black students are blocked from entering the school on the orders of Governor Orval Faubus. Federal troops and the National Guard are called to intervene on behalf of the students, who become known as the "Little Rock Nine." Despite a year of violent threats, several of the "Little Rock Nine" manage to graduate from Central High.
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Cooper v. Aaron, is ruled on by the Supreme Court where the court states that the threat of mob violence is not a good enough reason to delay desegregation of the school.
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Voter registration officials in Montgomery refuse to cooperate with US Civil Rights Commission investigation.
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Four African-American men who were students at North Carolina Agriculture and Technical College, visit Woolworth in Greensboro, North Carolina, where they sit down at a whites-only lunch counter to order coffee. Although they are denied service, the four men sit politely and silently at the counter until the store closes. This starts the series of Greensboro sit-ins and also triggers similar protests in the South.
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In a 7-2 decision handed down on December 5 by the Supreme Court in the case Boynton v. Virginia case, the court rules that segregation on vehicles that travel between states is unlawful and unconstitutional because it is in violation of the Interstate Commerce Act.
