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No Major League Baseball team had ever signed a Black player to play professional ball with white players. Jackie Robinson, signed by Branch rickey. Played on Kansas City Monarchs, Robinson won the National League Rookie of the Year award in 1947 and became, in 1949, the league’s MVP.
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In 1896 the U.S. Supreme Court had issued its “separate but equal”, meaning that segregation was legal. Schools were segregated, mostly in the south. U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously (9–0) in Brown that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
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Fourteen-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till is kidnapped shot, beaten and killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman Two white men, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, are arrested for the murder but since they had an all white jury they were accited They later boast about committing the murder in a Look magazine interview.
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Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give her bus seat to a white man, a violation of the city’s racial segregation ordinances.
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the supreme court upheld lowers court ruling saying that bus segregation violated the 14th amendment
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Image 2 of Rosa Parks Papers: Events, 1951-2005; Featuring or honoring Parks; 1956-1959 -
students at North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, North Carolina—entered a Woolworth’s store that had a dining area. They purchased things and sat at a white only counter, the police were contacted.The police arrived, only to declare that they could do nothing because the four Black men were paying customers of the store and had not taken any provocative actions. The media response, however, was immediate.
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7 African Americans and 6 white people left Washington on the first freedom ride.They were hoping to provoke the federal government into enforcing the 1960 Supreme Court ruling in Boynton v. Virginia, which forbade “unjust discrimination
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Near 250,000 people rally to end segregation fair wages and economic justice, voting rights, education, and long overdue civil rights protections.
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MLK jr leads peaceful interracial assembly, “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
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Senators vote for civil rights act. -
Public support for civil rights act. -
this civil rights act forbade discrimination on the basis of sex, as well as, race in hiring, promoting, and firing
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Henry "Hank" Aaron hits his 715th home run, breaking Babe Ruth's record and becoming Major League Baseball's all-time home run leader, a record he would hold until he was bested by Barry Bonds in 2007. The Atlanta Brave receives scores of hate mail and death threats, but former President Jimmy Carter tells CNN in 2014 his success helped advance civil rights. "He became the first Black man for whom white fans in the South cheered," Carter says.
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Col. Guion “Guy” Bluford, Jr. becomes the first Black American to visit space as part of the Challenger Space Shuttle crew. A former U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, he served as a flight engineer and mission specialist and returned to space three more times and was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame and U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame.
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September 12 1992 Engineer and physician MAe jemison becomes the first Black woman to fly in space, serving as a science mission specialist on the Space Shuttle Endeavour.
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Toni Morrison is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Black woman to earn the honor.
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Carol Moseley Braun becomes the first Black woman, and only the second Black American, to be elected to the U.S. Senate. The Democrat representing Illinois was the first woman to serve on the Finance Committee, and after losing her bid for a second term, was named the U.S. ambassador to New Zealand by President Bill Clinton and became the second Black woman to run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000.
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Colin Powell is appointed the first Black secretary of state by George W. Bush, receiving unanimous confirmation and eventually serving four years in the position.
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Condoleezza Rice takes office as the first Black woman secretary of state, also serving under George W. Bush for four years.
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November 8 2008 Barack Obama was the first african american to be elected president
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Share of black children in segregated and intensely segregated schools from 1968 to 2010. -
2012 presidential election. -
American opinion on Civil Rights Act -
Colin Kaeperick, quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, takes a knee during the national anthem for the first time before a game with the San Diego Chargers. He pledges to donate $1 million to help stop police brutality and the oppression of Black people and people of color.
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The National Museum of African American History and Culture opens as the newest Smithsonian Institution museum along Washington, D.C.’s National Mall