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Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was a landmark Supreme Court case ruling that state-sponsored racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. -
The murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in August 1955 in Money, Mississippi, was a brutal lynching that became a catalyst for the American civil rights movement. -
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, an African American seamstress and NAACP activist, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. -
The Little Rock Nine were nine African American students who, in 1957, became the first to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas -
The 1960 Greensboro sit-ins began on February 1 at the F.W. Woolworth lunch counter in North Carolina, where four Black NC AT students—Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., and David Richmond—peacefully protested segregation. -
The 1961 Freedom Rides were organized bus trips by people of different races to fight segregation in the South. They aimed to show that segregation laws should be obeyed. The activists faced violence and arrests, which led the federal government to enforce desegregation in travel facilities nationwide. -
Written in 1963 from a Birmingham jail cell, Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter is a seminal defense of nonviolent direct action against segregation. -
Signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 2, 1964, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a landmark piece of legislation that ended legal segregation (Jim Crow laws) and outlawed discrimination based on race, color,. -
The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a massive civil rights protest held on August 28, 1963, where over 250,000 people rallied in Washington, D.C -
On September 15, 1963, Ku Klux Klan members bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four African-American girls—Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Carol Denise McNair—and injuring over 20 others. -
Ratified on January 23, 1964, the 24th Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits both Congress and the states from conditioning the right to vote in federal elections on payment of a poll tax or other types of taxes. -
Bloody Sunday" (March 7, 1965) was a violent confrontation where 600 civil rights marchers, including John Lewis and Hosea Williams, were brutally attacked by police while trying to march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, for voting rights -
The Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on August 6, 1965, is a landmark federal law that prohibits racial discrimination in voting. -
Loving v. Virginia (1967) was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that unanimously declared state-level bans on interracial marriage unconstitutional. -
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, at 6:01 p.m. in Memphis, Tennessee. While standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, he was struck in the right cheek by a single bullet from a Remington Model 760 rifle, causing fatal injuries. He was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. at St. Joseph's
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