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Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was an African American boy who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955 at the age of 14, after being accused of offending a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family's grocery store. -
On April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson made his MLB debut in front of 26,623 fans at Ebbets field. Robinson started at first base and went hitless, but reached base on an error in the seventh and scored the eventual go-ahead run in a victory against the Boston Braves. -
On July 26, 1948, President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981, creating the President's Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services. The order mandated the desegregation of the U.S. military. -
On May 17, 1954, after the Brown v. Board. Nine African American students enrolled at Central High School in Little Rock. They tried entering the school but President Dwight Eisenhower nationalized the National Guard and sent U.S. troops to protect them. -
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the bus when she was asked to. This led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, an important event in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. -
On February 1, 1960, four friends sat down at a lunch counter in Greensboro. That may not sound like a legendary moment, but it was. The four people were African American, and they sat where African Americans weren't allowed to sit. They did this to take a stand against segregation. -
On September 30, 1962, 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. -
The Stand in the Schoolhouse Door took place at Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama on June 11, 1963. -
It was June 12, 1963, in a suburban neighborhood of Jackson, Mississippi. A 37-year-old civil rights activist named Medgar Evers had just come home after a meeting of the NAACP.As he began the short walk up to his single-story rambler, the bullet struck Evers in the back. He staggered up to the steps of the house, then collapsed. -
The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was a terrorist bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963. The bombing was committed by a white supremacist terrorist group. -
Freedom Summer, also known as the Freedom Summer Project or the Mississippi Summer Project, was a volunteer campaign in the United States launched in June 1964 to attempt to register as many African-American voters as possible in Mississippi. -
The Selma to Montgomery marches were three protest marches, held in 1965, along the 54-mile highway from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery. -
Malcolm X, an African American Muslim minister and human rights activist who was a popular figure during the civil rights movement, was shot multiple times and died from his wounds in Manhattan, New York City on February 21, 1965, at age 39. -
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) was founded in October 1966 in Oakland, California by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, who met at Merritt College in Oakland. It was a revolutionary organization with an ideology of Black nationalism, socialism, and armed self-defense, particularly against police brutality. -
Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, was a landmark civil rights decision of the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.