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Brown vs Board of Education
On May 17, 1954, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous ruling in the landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. State-sanctioned segregation of public schools was a violation of the 14th amendment and was therefore unconstitutional. This case ended all segregation in schools in the U.S. -
Murder of Emmet Till
Emmett Louis Till was a 14-year-old African American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store. -
Montgomery Bus Boycott
The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a civil rights protest during which African Americans such as; Rosa Parks refused to ride city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest segregated seating. The boycott took place from December 5, 1955, to December 20, 1956, and is regarded as the first large-scale U.S. demonstration against segregation. -
Integration of Little Rock High School (Little Rock Nine)
The Little Rock Nine was a group of nine African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas. -
Formation of the SCLC
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference is an African-American civil rights organization. SCLC, which is closely associated with its first president, Martin Luther King Jr., had a large role in the American civil rights movement. -
Founding of SNCC
In 1960 in Raleigh, North Carolina at Shaw University students formed a nonviolent student committee. Called the SNCC.It was put in place to overturn segregation in the South. -
Woolworth's counter sit-ins in Greensboro
On February 1, 1960, the four African-American students from A and T University sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth's in downtown Greensboro, where the official policy was to refuse service to anyone but whites. -
Assassination of Malcolm X
In New York City, on February 21, 1961 Malcom X was shot and killed by rival Black Muslims while addressing his Organization of Afro-American Unity at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights. -
Freedom Riders
Freedom Riders were groups of white and African American civil rights activists who participated in Freedom Rides, bus trips through the American South in 1961 to protest segregated bus terminals. It lasted form May 4,1961 to December 10,1961. -
Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letters from a Birmingham Jail”
Written as a response to local clergy's “call for unity” during the protests of 1963, the letter's defense of nonviolent resistance and its insistence on justice for all have made it a foundational text of both the civil rights movement and history classrooms. -
Assassination of Medgar Evers
Civil rights leader Medgar Evers is assassinated, in the driveway outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, African American civil rights leader Medgar Evers is shot to death by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith. During World War II, Evers volunteered for the U.S. Army and participated in the Normandy invasion. -
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the March on Washington, or The Great March on Washington, was held in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, August 28, 1963. The purpose of the march was to advocate for the civil and economic rights of African Americans. -
Birmingham Church bombing
A bomb blast at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, kills four African-American girls during church services. At least 14 others are injured in the explosion, including Sarah Collins, the 12-year-old sister of victim Addie Mae Collins, who loses an eye. -
March on Selma
On March 17, 1965, even as the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers fought for the right to carry out their protest, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress, calling for federal voting rights legislation to protect African Americans from barriers that prevented them from voting. -
Assassination of MLK
Martin Luther King, Jr., the most prominent leader of the American civil rights movement, on April 4, 1968, as he stood on the second floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, he was shot by Ray with a single shot from a rifle.
