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Blacks fought for both the British and the American side during the Revolutionary War, depending on who was offering freedom for doing so.
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African American soldier Prince Whipple, a black man, crossed the Delaware with General Washington on December 25, 1779, on the eve of the Revolutionary War's famous Battle of Trenton.
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In addition to laying out the procedure for future states to be created in western territories, the Northwest Ordinace forbade slavery in the Northwest Territory, where the future state of Michigan would be created.
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More than a century before the first modern-day civil rights march, Charles Deslondes and his make-do army of more than 200 enslaved men battled with hoes, axes and cane knives for that most basic human rights.
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a series of bills passed mainly to address issues related to slavery. The bills provided for slavery to be decided by popular sovereignty in the admission of new states, prohibited the slave trade in the District of Columbia, settled a Texas boundary dispute, and established a stricter fugitive slave act.
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Just days after Fort Sumter, a pro-Confederate mob in Baltimore, Maryland turned ex-slave Nicholas Biddle into the war's first casualty.
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On Aug. 30, 1861, Union Gen. John C. Fremont instituted martial law in Missouri and declared slaves there to be free.
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President Abraham Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emanicipation Proclamation in the midst of the Civil War, announcing on September 22, 1862, that if the rebels did not end the fighting and rejoin the Union by January 1, 1863, all slaves in the rebellious states would be free.
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near the end of the Civil War, this bill created a framework for Reconstruction and the readmittance of the Confederate states to the Union.
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Passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified on December 6, 1865, the 13th amendment abolished slavery in the United States.
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The Civil Rights Act of 1866 granted citizenship and the same rights enjoyed by white citizens to all male persons in the United States "without distinction of race or color, or previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude."
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In 1868, the same year the state rejected the 15th Amendment giving blacks the right to vote, Dawson Pompey became the first African American to hold elective office in Michigan when Covert residents chose him to oversee local road projects.
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Long before Rosa Parks, Mary Ellen Pleasant sued to win the right to ride on cable cars in San Francisco.
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Passed by Congress February 26, 1869, and ratified February 3, 1870, the 15th amendment granted African American men the right to vote.
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Tennessee passes the first of the "Jim Crow" segregation laws, segregating state railroads. Other Southern states pass similar laws over the next 15 years.
