-
Emmett Till Murdered
Augusts 28, 1955, Emmett Louis Till was an African-American teenager who was lynched in Mississippi at the age of 14 after reportedly flirting with a white woman. -
Period: to
Rosa Parks/Montgomery Bus Boycott
1 December 1955- December 20, 1956, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. This single act of nonviolent resistance sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, an eleven-month struggle to desegregate the city's buses. -
Period: to
Integration of Central High School, Little Rock, Arkansas
Nine black students enrolled at formerly all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957, testing a landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional. -
Sit-In – Greensboro, North Carolina
On Feb. 1, 1960, four black college students, sat down at a “whites-only” lunch counter at a Woolworth's in Greensboro, N.C., and refused to leave after being denied service.
-
Period: to
Creation of Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded in April 1960, by young people who had emerged as leaders of the sit-in protest movement initiated on February 1 of that year by four black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina. -
Freedom Riders
On May 4, 1961, a group of 13 African-American and white civil rights activists launched the Freedom Rides, a series of bus trips through the American South to protest segregation in interstate bus terminals. -
Voting Rights Act
This act was signed into law on August 6, 1965, by President Lyndon Johnson. It outlawed the discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states after the Civil War, including literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting.