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Brown v. Board of Education
1.) The court Plessy v. Ferguson allowed separate but equal facilities.
2.) An African American little girl tried enrolling at a public school in Topeka Kansas, but was denied acceptance.
3.) The Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. -
Lamar Smith Murdered
1.) This event occurred in Belzoni, Mississippi.
2.) Smith was a Civil Rights activist and organizer of black voter registration. Smith was at a courthouse in Brookhaven seeking to assist black voters to fill out absentee ballots so they could vote in the run-off election. He was shot to death in the front of this courthouse later that day. -
Emmett Louis Till Murdered
1.) Occurred in Money, Mississippi
2.) Emmett was lynched for supposedly flirting with a white women at the age of 14. He spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, a married women. Several nights later, Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam went to Till's great-uncle's house and abducted the boy. They took him away and beat and mutilated him before shooting him and sinking his body in the Tallahatchie River. Three days later, Till's body was discovered and retrieved from the river. -
Rosa Parks arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat
1.) Rosa stepped onto the bus for her ride home and sat in the fifth row — the first row of the colored section. In Montgomery when a bus became full, the seats nearer the front were given to white passengers. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man.
2.) When Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus she was arrested and sent to jail. -
Supreme Court bans segregated seating on Montgomery buses
1.) Occurred in Montgomery Alabama.
2.) Montgomery's black leaders created a boycott of the cities buses, Martin Luther King was their appointed leader. After almost a year of the boycott, anti-segregation laws on Montgomery's buses was passed. -
Civil Rights Act of 1957
1.) Congress passed this law
2.) This law stated that segregated schools were unconstitutional -
Events at Little Rock, Arkansas
1.) Nine African American students tested federal anti-segregation laws in public schools for the first time.
2.) Eisenhower sent Federal troops to protect the nine African American students and maintain the peace at Little Rock high school. -
Mack Charles Parker
1.) Occurred in Poplarville, Mississippi
2.) Mack Charles parker was accused of raping a pregnant white woman in northern Pearl River County, Mississippi. Three days before his trial, Parker was kidnapped from his jail cell by a mob, beaten and shot. -
Black students stage a "sit-in"
1.) Occurred in Greensboro, North Carolina
2.) On February 1, 1960, four African-American students of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University sat at a white-only lunch counter inside a Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth’s store. Even though sit-ins had been held elsewhere in the United States, the Greensboro sit-in caused a wave of nonviolent protest against segregation in the United States. -
Attack of the Freedom Riders
1.) Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated southern States.
2.) Groups such as CORE, a U.S. civil rights group and the SNCC, student nonviolent coordination committee help the freedom riders.
3.) This group did not only consist of blacks, whites joined in on the nonviolent protests as well. -
James Meredith enrolls at Ole Miss
1.) When James Meredith was accepted at Ole Miss, riots broke out across the campus. These riots resulted in two deaths and left hundreds of people injured.
2.) One of Kennedy's advisers sent troops to Ole Miss to try and resolve the problem and military officials protected student James Meredith. -
Medgar Evers Assasinated
1.) Medgar is a civil rights activist, he organized voter-registration efforts, demonstrations, and economic boycotts of companies that practiced discrimination. He also worked to investigate crimes perpetrated against blacks.
2.) Evers worked on behalf of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, organizing local affiliates. While doing his work he created many white enemies that didn't agree with what he was doing. -
Civil Rights Act of 1964
1.) Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson passed these new laws.
2.) The Civil Rights Act of 1964, ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, is considered one of the crowning legislative achievements of the civil rights movement. -
March to Selma
1.) This march was organized in hope of African Americans gaining their voting rights.
2.) Those who participated in the march were faced with violence and resistance by state and local authorities. Troopers attacked the crowd with clubs and tear gas.
3.) The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed as a result of this march. -
Thurgood Marshall first black Supreme Court Justice
1.) Before becoming apart of the Supreme Court, he worked for the Baltimore branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
2.) This was an imporetant event because he was the first African America to be given a job in the Supreme Court. This was a huge step towards desegregation. -
The Assasionation of Martin Luther King
1.) On April 4th 1968, Martin Luther King was shot dead while standing on the balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. When news of King’s assassination spread major outbreaks of racial violence, resulting in more than 40 deaths nationwide and extensive property damage in over 100 American cities occurred.
2.) MLK's death caused a nationwide mourning. He was such a leader and inspired so many to fight for their dreams that his death affected millions. -
The March on Washington
1.) More than 200,000 Americans gathered in Washington, D.C., for this political rally. It was a march for jobs and freedom.
2.) The famous Martin Luther King jr speech "I Have a Dream" was given at this event.
