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The Murder of Emmett Till
14-year-old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago, is brutally murdered for flirting with a white woman four days earlier. The two men then beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head, and then threw his body, tied to the cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, into the river. -
Murder of Medgar Evers
In the driveway outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, African American civil rights leader Medgar Evers is shot to death by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith. In 1952, he joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As a field worker for the NAACP, Evers traveled through his home state encouraging poor African Americans to register to vote and recruiting them into the civil rights movement. -
1963 March On Washington
Blacks had benefited less than other groups from New Deal programs during the Great Depression, and continuing racial discrimination excluded them from defense jobs in the early 1940s. Randolph called for a March on Washington. After trying to persuade Randolph and his fellow leaders that the march would be inadvisable, Roosevelt issued a specific Executive Order 8802 in June 1941, stating that all discrimination will be forbidden. -
Birmingham Church Bombing
On September 15, a bomb exploded before Sunday morning services at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama–a church with a predominantly black congregation that served as a meeting place for civil rights leaders. Four young girls were killed and many other people injured. -
Civils Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which 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. -
The Murder of James Caney, Andrew, Goodman, and michael Schwerner
The remains of three civil rights workers whose disappearance on June 21 gained national attention. They were found buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi. Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, both white New Yorkers, had traveled to heavily segregated Mississippi in 1964 to help organize civil rights efforts on behalf of the Congress of Racial Equality. The third man, James Chaney, was a local African American man who had joined Congress of Racial Equality in 1963.