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Emancipation of enslaved people
Lincoln proclamed the emancipation of enslaved people: they are free, and nobody can force them to work. -
The Post-Slavery South
The slavery was abolished thanks to the 13th amendment adopted in 1865. Thanks to the Union victory in the Civil War, some 4 million enslaved people became free. -
'Separate But Equal,'
Southern state legislatures tried to oppose to the first segregation laws. For example, black people were separated from white people in hotels, theaters, restaurants. -
NAACP Founded
A new permanent civil rights organization was created in 1909, it is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). This organization wanted to stop all kind of segregation. -
Marcus Garvey and the UNIA
Born in Jamaica, the Black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey founded his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) -
Harlem Renaissance, 1920
In the 1920s, the great migration of Black Americans from the rural South to the urban North sparked an African American cultural renaissance that took its name from the New York City neighborhood of Harlem but became a widespread movement in cities throughout the North and West. -
African Americans in WWII, 1941
During World War II, many African Americans were ready to fight for what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the “Four Freedoms” freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear—even while they themselves lacked those freedoms at home. More than 3 million Black Americans would register for service during the war, with some 500,000 seeing action overseas -
Jackie Robinson,
By 1900, the unwritten color line barring Black players from white teams in professional baseball was strictly enforced. Jackie Robinson, a sharecropper’s son from Georgia, joined the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League in 1945 after a stint in the U.S. Army (he earned an honorable discharge after facing a court-martial for refusing to move to the back of a segregated bus). -
Emmett Till,
In August 1955, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago named Emmett Till had recently arrived in Money, Mississippi to visit relatives. While in a grocery store, he allegedly whistled and made a flirtatious remark to the white woman behind the counter, violating the strict racial codes of the Jim Crow South. -
Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott
On December 1, 1955, an African American woman named Rosa Parks was riding a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama when the driver told her to give up her seat to a white man. Parks refused and was arrested for violating the city’s racial segregation ordinances, which mandated that Black passengers sit in the back of public buses and give up their seats for white riders if the front seats were full. -
Central High School integrated, September 1957
Although the Supreme Court declared segregation of public schools illegal in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the decision was extremely difficult to enforce, as 11 southern states enacted resolutions interfering with, nullifying or protesting school desegregation. In Arkansas, Governor Orval Faubus made resistance to desegregation a central part of his successful 1956 reelection campaign. -
Sit-in Movement and Founding of SNCC
On February 1, 1960, four Black students from the Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at the lunch counter in a local branch of Woolworth’s and ordered coffee. Refused service due to the counter’s "whites-only" policy, they stayed put until the store closed, then returned the next day with other students. -
CORE and Freedom Rides, May
Founded in 1942 by the civil rights leader James Farmer, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sought to end discrimination and improve race relations through direct action. In its early years, CORE staged a sit-in at a Chicago coffee shop (a precursor to the successful sit-in movement of 1960) a year after the U.S. Supreme Court banned segregation in interstate bus travel. -
Integration of Ole Miss, September
By the end of the 1950s, African Americans had begun to be admitted in small numbers to white colleges and universities in the South without too much incident. In 1962, however, a crisis erupted when the state-funded University of Mississippi (known as “Ole Miss”) admitted a Black man, James Meredith. After nine years in the Air Force, Meredith had studied at the all–Black Jackson State College and applied repeatedly to Ole Miss with no success. -
Birmingham Church Bombed, 1963
Despite Martin Luther King, Jr.’s inspiring words at the Lincoln Memorial during the historic March on Washington in August 1963, . In mid-September, white supremacists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama during Sunday services; The church bombing was the third in 11 days, after the federal government had ordered the integration of Alabama’s school system. -
'I Have a Dream,' 1963
On August 28 some people both black and white participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, After marching from the Washington Monument, the demonstrators gathered near the Lincoln Memorial, where a number of civil rights leaders addressed the crowd, calling for voting rights, equal employment opportunities for Black Americans and an end to racial segregation. -
Civil Rights Act of 1964, July 1964
Thanks to the campaign of nonviolent resistance championed by Martin Luther King Jr. beginning in the late 1950s, the civil rights movement had begun to gain serious momentum in the United States by 1960. That year, John F. Kennedy made passage of new civil rights legislation part of his presidential campaign platform; he won more than 70 percent of the African American vote. Congress was debating Kennedy’s civil rights reform bill when he was killed by an assassin’s bullet in Dallas -
Selma to Montgomery March, March 1965
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) made Selma, Alabama, the focus of its efforts to register Black voters in the South. Only 2 percent of Selma’s eligible Black voters had managed to register. In February, an Alabama state trooper shot a young African American demonstrator in nearby Marion, and the SCLC announced a massive protest march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery. -
Voting Rights Act of 1965, August 1965
Less than a week after the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers were beaten and bloodied by Alabama state troopers in March 1965, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress, calling for federal legislation to ensure protection of the voting rights of African Americans. The result was the Voting Rights Act, which Congress passed in August 1965. -
Fair Housing Act, April 1968
The Fair Housing Act of 1968, meant as a follow-up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, marked the last great legislative achievement of the civil rights era. Originally intended to extend federal protection to civil rights workers, it was later expanded to address racial discrimination in the sale, rental or financing of housing units. -
MLK Assassinated, April 4, 1968
On April 4, 1968, the world was stunned and saddened by the news that the civil rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot and killed on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to support a sanitation workers’ strike. King’s death opened a huge rift between white and Black Americans, -
Jesse Jackson Galvanizes Black Voters, 1984
As a young man, Jesse Jackson left his studies at the Chicago Theological Seminary to join Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in its crusade for Black civil rights in the South; when King was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968 -
Barack Obama Becomes 44th US President, 2008
On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States; he is the first African American to hold that office. The product of an interracial marriage—his father grew up in a small village in Kenya, his mother in Kansas—Obama grew up in Hawaii but discovered his civic calling in Chicago, where he worked for several years as a community organizer on the city’s largely Black South Side. -
George Floyd Protests
The movement swelled to a critical juncture on May 25, 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic when 46-year-old George Floyd died after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by police officer Derek Chauvin.Chauvin was filmed kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes.. All four officers involved in the incident were fired and Chauvin was charged with second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. -
Kamala Harris Becomes the First Woman and First Black US Vice President, 2021
January 2021, Kamala Harris became the first woman and first woman of color to become vice president of the United States. Then-candidate Joe Biden had nominated Harris in August 2020 during the Democratic party’s “remote” national convention. Harris, whose mother immigrated to the United States from India and whose father immigrated from Jamaica, was the first person of African or Asian descent to become a major party’s vice presidential candidate—and the first to win the office.