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Jackie Robinson enters Major League Baseball
Jackie Robinson was the first African American to enter the MLB. -
Executive Order 9981 signed by President Truman
Truman signed this order establishing the President's Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services, committing the government to integrate the segregated military. -
Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court Ruling
On May 17, 1954, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous ruling in the landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. State-sanctioned segregation of public schools was a violation of the 14th amendment and was therefore unconstitutional -
Emmett Till is murdered
Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago, is brutally murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman four days earlier. -
Montgomery Bus Boycott
The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a protest against segregation in the bus system. People refused to ride buses, leaving them with no business, until segregation was taken care of. -
Little Rock Nine Intervention
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 -
Civil Rights Act of 1957 is passed
The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1957 and prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. -
Greensboro Sit-In Protest
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. -
Integration of Ole Miss Riots
The Ole Miss riot of 1962, or Battle of Oxford, was an incident of mob violence by proponents of racial segregation beginning the night of September 30, 1962. -
The Birmingham Children’s March
The Birmingham Children's March was a march by over 1,000 school students in Birmingham, Alabama on May 2–3, 1963. The purpose of the march was to walk downtown to talk to the mayor about segregation in their city. -
George Wallace’s “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door”
The legacy of Wallace's stand in the schoolhouse door is two-fold. It is an enduring stain on Alabama's education record and a sad testament to the treatment of its own people. It also served as a turning point for the state and its first steps toward racial equality. -
March on Washington / I Have a Dream Speech
The Martin Luther King Speech was a call for equality and freedom, it became one of the defining moments of the civil rights movement and one of the most iconic speeches in American history. -
16th Street Baptist Church Bombing
The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was a white supremacist terrorist bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on Sunday, September 15, 1963. -
Freedom Summer
Freedom Summer was an attempt to register as many African-American voters as possible in Mississippi. -
Civil Rights Act of 1964 is passed
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was intended to end discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin in the United States -
The Selma Marches
The Selma Marche was to ensure that African Americans could exercise their constitutional right to vote -
Voting Rights Act of 1965 is passed
This act was signed into law on August 6, 1965, by President Lyndon Johnson. It outlawed the discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states after the Civil War, including literacy tests as a prerequisite to voting. -
Black Panther Party is formed
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 Supreme Court ruling
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. -
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated
Martin Luther King Jr., an African-American clergyman, and civil rights leader, was fatally shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, by James Earl Ray