civil rights timeline

  • Brown vs.Board of Education

    Brown vs.Board of Education
    racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution
  • Emmett Till Murder

    Emmett Till Murder
    14-year-old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago, is brutally murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman four days earlier.
  • Rosa Parks & the Montgomery Bus Boycott

    Rosa Parks & the Montgomery Bus Boycott
    Rosa Parks was a civil rights activist who refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama
  • The Little Rock Nine and Integration

    The Little Rock Nine and Integration
    The Little Rock Nine as the nine teens came to be known, were to be the first African American students to enter Little Rock's Central High School. Three years earlier, following the Supreme Court ruling, the Little Rock school board pledged to voluntarily desegregate its schools
  • Greensboro Woolworth's Sit-ins

    Greensboro Woolworth's Sit-ins
    The Greensboro Sit-In was a critical turning point in Black history and American history, bringing the fight for civil rights to the national stage
  • Freedom Rides

    Freedom Rides
    The Freedom Rides were first conceived in 1947 when CORE and the Fellowship of Reconciliation organized an interracial bus ride across state lines to test a Supreme Court decision that declared segregation on interstate buses unconstitutional
  • MLK’s Letter From Birmingham Jail

    MLK’s Letter From Birmingham Jail
    The Letter from Birmingham Jail also known as the Letter from Birmingham City Jail and The Negro Is Your Brother is an open letter written on April 16, 1963, by Martin Luther King Jr
  • March on Washington

    March on Washington
    250,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln memorial in Washington D.C.
  • Birmingham Baptist Church Bombing

    Birmingham Baptist Church Bombing
    Four members of a local Ku Klux Klan chapter planted 19 sticks of dynamite attached to a timing device beneath the steps located on the east side of the church. Described by Martin Luther King Jr.
  • 24th Amendment

    24th Amendment
    United States Constitution says that if the President becomes unable to do his job, the Vice President becomes the President
  • Civil Rights Act of 1964

    Civil Rights Act of 1964
    The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin
  • “Bloody Sunday”/Selma to Montgomery March

    “Bloody Sunday”/Selma to Montgomery March
    525 to 600 civil rights marchers headed southeast out of Selma on U.S. Highway 80. The march was led by John Lewis of SNCC and the Reverend Hosea Williams of SCLC, followed by Bob Mants of SNCC and Albert Turner of SCLC
  • Voting Rights Act of 1965

    Voting Rights Act of 1965
    Outlawed the discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states after the civil war
  • Loving v. Virginia

    Loving v. Virginia
    The U.S. supreme court unanimously struck down states antimiscegenation statutes in Virginia as unconstitutional under equal protection and due process clauses of the 14th amendment