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At Ebbets Field, Jackie Robinson made his Major League Baseball debut in front of 26,623 fans. Robinson started at first base and went hitless, but in the seventh inning, he reached base on an error and scored the game-winning run in a win over the Boston Braves. -
President Harry S. Truman signed this executive order establishing the President’s Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services, committing the government to integrating the segregated military. -
In the famous civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren gave a unanimous ruling. Segregation of public schools by the state was unlawful since it was a violation of the 14th amendment. -
Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American from Chicago, is brutally murdered on August 28, 1955, while visiting family in Money, Mississippi, for supposedly flirting with a white lady four days earlier. -
The Montgomery bus boycott was a political and social protest campaign against racial segregation on Montgomery, Alabama's public transportation system. It was a watershed moment in the United States' civil rights struggle. -
In 1957, the Little Rock Nine were a group of nine African-American pupils at Little Rock Central High School. Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas originally prohibited the kids from joining the racially segregated school. -
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Provisions of this civil rights act forbade discrimination on the basis of sex, as well as, race in hiring, promoting, and firing. -
Young African American students held a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960, and refused to leave after being denied service. The sit-in movement quickly expanded across the South's college cities. -
Locals, students, and devoted segregationists assembled on the campus of the University of Mississippi in Oxford to protest the enrollment of James Meredith, a black Air Force veteran aiming to integrate the all-white school. -
On May 2–3, 1963, nearly 1,000 school students marched in Birmingham, Alabama as part of the Children's Crusade, or Children's March. The goal of the march, which was organized by Rev. James Bevel, was to walk downtown and talk to the mayor about segregation in their city. -
On June 11, 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace stood in front of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama to prevent African-American students Vivan Malone and James Hood from enrolling. Nicholas Katzenbach. -
On Wednesday, August 28, 1963, the March on Washington took place in Washington, D.C. The march's goal was to advocate for African Americans' civil and economic rights. One of the biggest things to happen during that march was the"I Have a Dream" public speech given by Martin Luther King Jr., an American civil rights leader, on August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. -
The 16th Street Baptist Church was a big and well-known church in Birmingham's downtown area, just a few blocks from the city's commercial district and City Hall. On September 15, 1963, just before 11 a.m., the congregation was knocked to the ground instead of rising to begin prayers. They sought shelter under the pews and sheltered one other from falling debris as a bomb burst beneath the church's steps. -
The Mississippi Summer Project, also known as Freedom Summer, was a voter registration drive in 1964 that attempted to increase the number of registered Black voters in Mississippi. In Mississippi, more than 700 primarily white volunteers joined African Americans to oppose voter intimidation and discrimination at the polls. -
The Selma to Montgomery marches were three protest marches that took place in 1965 along the 54-mile roadway connecting Selma, Alabama, and Montgomery, Alabama's state capital.