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A year before the Mayflower, the first 20 African slaves are sold to settlers in Virginia as "indentured servants."
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Constitution adopted; slaves counted as three-fifths of a person for means of representation
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Congress passes the first Fugitive Slave Act, which makes it a crime to harbor an escaped slave.
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The court declares that slaves were not citizens and had no rights to sue, and that slave owners could take their slaves anywhere on the territory and retain title to them.
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Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation
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The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution is ratified stating that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude....shall exist" in the United States
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Ku Klux Klan organized in Pulaski, Tenn
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Fourteenth Amendment, making African Americans full citizens of the United States and prohibiting states from denying them equal protection or due process of law, is ratified
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The Fifteenth Amendment enacted, guaranteeing the right to vote will not be denied or abridged on account of race. At the same time, however, the first "Jim Crow" or segregation law is passed in Tennessee mandating the separation of African Americans from whites on trains, in depots and wharves
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Congress passes the first Civil Rights Act, guaranteeing African Americans equal rights in transportation, restaurant/inns, theaters and on juries.
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The Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, rules that state laws requiring separation of the races are within the bounds of the Constitution as long as equal accommodations are made for African Americans, thus establishing the "separate but equal" doctrine that justifies legal segregation in the South
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The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is founded by W.E.B Du Bois, Jane Addams, John Dewey and others.
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In Brown v. Board of Education, the decision widely regarded as having sparked the modern civil rights era, the Supreme Court rules deliberate public school segregation illegal, effectively overturning "separate but equal" doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson.
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In Alabama, Rosa Parks refuses to up her bus seat to a white man, precipitating the Montgomery bus boycott, led by Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Supreme Court ruling declaring segregation on buses illegal.
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On Sept. 24, federal troops mobilize to protect the nine African American students at Little Rock, Arkansas' Central High School from white mobs trying to block the school's integration
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Over a quarter of a million people participate in the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, and hear Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his "I Have a Dream" speech.
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April 4, Martin Luther King, Jr. is murdered
