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President Harry S. Truman issues Executive Order 9981 to end segregation in the Armed Forces. This order abolished discrimination "on the basis of race, religion, color, or national origin."
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Brown VS Board of Education was a consolidation of 5 cases into one, decided by a supreme court, effectively ending racial segregation in public schools. However, many schools remained segregated.
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Emmett Till was a 14 year old from Chicago, brutally murdered for flirting with a white women. His murderers were acquitted. His case brought international attention to the civil rights movement after Jet magazine published this photo of Till's beaten body at his open casket funeral.
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Rosa Parks refuses to give her seat up to a white man and was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama. This prompts a year long Montgomery Bus Boycott.
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The little Rock 9 were blocked from integrating into Little Rock Central High School. President Dwight D. Eisenhower sends troops to escort the students although they continued to be harrassed.
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President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1957. It established the Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department, and empowered federal officials to prosecute individuals that conspired to deny or abridge another citizen's right to vote.
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In Greensboro, North Carolina, four young African American students staged a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter, refusing to move after being denied service. This movement soon spread to college towns across the South. Many of the protestors were arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct, or disturbing the peace, but their actions made a lasting impact on restaurant's segregationists policies.
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Although the Supreme Court ruled to end segregation in public schools nearly 6 years earlier, Ruby Bridges became the first African-American student to attend an all-white elementary school in the Southern United States.
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Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated Southern United States to challenge the non-enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decisions, which ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional. Police arrested riders for trespassing, unlawful assembly, and violating state and local Jim Crow laws, but often they first let white mobs attack them without intervention.
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The March on Washington was a massive protest when 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. for Jobs and Freedom. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I have a dream" speech.
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Malcolm X preached black self-reliance and a return of the African diaspora to Africa. He embraced Pan-Africanism, black self-defense and black self-determination, and disavowed racism. He was shot 15 times by three members of the Nation of Islam.
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600 civil rights activists planned to march from Selma to Montgomery. They were blocked and brutally attacked by police. They won in court for the right to march and Martin Luther King Jr. went on to lead two more marches and reached Montgomery on March 25th.
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President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 during the height of the civil rights movement. It was designed to enforce the voting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The act secured the right to vote for racial minorities throughout the country.
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Originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the BPP was a Black Power political organization founded by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton. At it's inception the BPP's core practice was it's open carry armed citizens' patrol to monitor the behavior of officers of the Oakland Police Department and challenge brutality in the city.
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While standing on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in the neck by James Earl Ray. He was pronounced dead just one hour later, causing rioting throughout the country.
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Fred Hampton was a civil rights activist and a leader of the Illinois Black Panther Party. He was murdered by police while asleep in bed next to his pregnant wife.
