-
He was the first African American to play major league baseball when he debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.He is in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. -
Desegregation of the Armed Forces. On July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed this executive order establishing the President's Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services, committing the government to integrating the segregated military. -
Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American from Chicago, is brutally murdered on August 28, 1955, while visiting family in Money, Mississippi, for supposedly flirting with a white lady four days earlier. -
The Montgomery bus boycott was a political and social protest campaign against racial segregation on Montgomery, Alabama's public transportation system. It was a watershed moment in the United States' civil rights struggle. -
The Little Rock Nine were 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. -
Since the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was the first federal civil rights legislation passed by the United States Congress. On September 9, 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the bill into law after it was passed by the 85th United States Congress. -
The Greensboro sit-in was a civil rights protest that started in 1960, when young African American students staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave after being denied service. The sit-in movement soon spread to college towns throughout the South. -
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. -
"I Have a Dream" is a public speech that was delivered by American civil rights activist and Baptist minister, Martin Luther King Jr., during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. In the speech, King called for civil and economic rights and an end to racism in the United States. -
The Children's Crusade, or Children's March, was a march by over 1,000 school students in Birmingham, Alabama on May 2–3, 1963. Initiated and organized by Rev. James Bevel, the purpose of the march was to walk downtown to talk to the mayor about segregation in their city. -
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. -
The Black Panther Party, originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was a Marxist-Leninist Black Power political organization founded by college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in October 1966 in Oakland, California. -
Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, was a landmark civil rights decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. -
MLK was shot dead on a balcony by James Earl Ray.