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Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Lincoln freed slaves in the Confederacy.
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The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery.
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The 14th Amendment granted due process
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The 15th Amendment granted blacks the right to vote, including former slaves.
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Congress passed a third Civil Rights Act in response to many white business owners and merchants who refused to make their facilities and establishments equally available to black people.
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The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson upheld an 1890 Louisiana statute mandating racially segregated but equal railroad cars.
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The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded by a multi-racial group of activists in New York, N.Y.
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The U.S. Supreme Court's ruled in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas that public school segregation.
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African-American woman Rosa Parks's arrest after her refusal to move to the back of a bus (as required under city law in Montgomery.
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Four black university students from N.C. A&T University began a sit-in at a segregated F.W. Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C.
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250,000 people join in the March on Washington. Congregating at the Lincoln Memorial, participants listened as Martin Luther King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.
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President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964
