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President Harry T. issues an Executive Order to end segregation in the Armed Services. -
Brown v. Board of Education. The end of racial segregation in public schools. (Many schools remained segregated)
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Emmett Till a 14-year-old from Chicago is brutally murdered in Mississippi -
She refuses to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Her defiant stance prompts a year-long Montgomery bus boycott. -
Rosa parks
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Voting Rights Act of 1965 to prevent the use of literacy tests as a voting requirement. It also allowed federal examiners to review voter qualifications and federal observers to monitor polling places.
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Voting Rights Act of 1965 to prevent the use of literacy tests as a voting requirement. It also allowed federal examiners to review voter qualifications and federal observers to monitor polling places.
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Sixty black pastors and civil rights leaders from several southern states meet in Atlanta, Georgia to coordinate nonviolent protests against racial discrimination and segregation.
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The Little Rock Nine are blocked from integrating into Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. -
Eisenhower signs the Civil Rights Act of 1957. To help protect voter rights. (federal prosecution of those who suppress another’s right to vote.)
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Four African American college students in Greensboro, North Carolina refuse to leave a Woolworth’s “whites only” lunch counter.
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Ruby Bridges (6) is escorted by four armed federal marshals as she becomes the first student to integrate William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans. -
Black and white activists, known as freedom riders, took bus trips through the American South to protest segregated bus terminals and attempted to use “whites-only” restrooms and lunch counters.(They were victims of massive violence)
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Governor George C. Wallace stands in a doorway at the University of Alabama to block two Black students from registering. President John F. Kennedy sends the National Guard to the campus. -
Approximately 250,000 people take part in The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Martin Luther King gives his “I Have A Dream” speech. In front of the Lincoln Memorial, stating, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’” -
A bomb at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Kills four young girls and injures several other people prior to Sunday services. The bombing fuels angry protests. -
President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. Preventing employment discrimination due to race, color, sex, religion or national origin.
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Black religious leader Malcolm X is assassinated during a rally by members of the Nation of Islam.
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In the Selma to Montgomery, (the state’s capital). Around 600 civil rights marchers in protest of Black voter suppression. Local police block and brutally attack them. After successfully fighting in court for their right to march, civil rights leaders lead, finally reach Montgomery on March 25.
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August 6, 1965: President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to prevent the use of literacy tests as a voting requirement.
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Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated on the balcony of his hotel room in Memphis, Tennessee. James Earl Ray is convicted of the murder in 1969. -
President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968, (the Fair Housing Act), providing equal housing opportunity regardless of race, religion or national origin.