-
More than 1,000 Black school children march through Birmingham, Alabama in a demonstration against segregation.
-
President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981 to end segregation in the Armed Services.
-
Ended racial segregation in public schools.
-
Emmet Till, a 14-year-old from Chicago is brutally murdered in Mississippi for allegedly flirting with a white woman.
-
Rosa Parks 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.
-
Georgia's General Assembly ratified the addition of the Confederate Battle Flag to the state flag in 1956 as a backlash.
-
Sixty Black pastors and civil rights leaders from several southern states—including Martin Luther King Jr.—meet in Atlanta, Georgia to coordinate nonviolent protests against racial discrimination and segregation.
-
Federal troops escort nine black students from integrating a public school.
-
Protects voters rights. The law allows federal prosecution of those who suppress another’s right to vote.
-
Gov. Orval Faubus closed all Little Rock, Arkansas public high schools for one year rather than allow integration to continue.
-
A ruling in December 1960 that interstate buses and bus terminals were required to integrate.
-
Four black college students sit on a “whites only” counter without being served, where they are then harassed.
-
Six-year-old Ruby Bridges is escorted by four armed federal marshals as she becomes the first student to integrate William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans.
-
Black activists took rides through the south to protest segregated bus terminals and used “white only” stops.
-
White Mob Attacks Freedom Riders in Anniston, Alabama.
-
The Supreme Court Orders Ole Miss to Integrate
-
Sit-ins, economic boycotts, mass protests, and marches on City Hall. The demonstrations faced challenges and harassments.
-
George Wallace during his 1963 inaugural address said, “Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. And segregation forever.”
-
Governor George C. Wallace stands in a doorway at the University of Alabama to block two Black students from registering.
-
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.
-
A bomb at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama kills four young girls and injures several other people prior to Sunday services.
-
Prevents employment discrimination due to race, color, sex, religion or national origin.
-
Black religious leader Malcolm X is assassinatedduring a rally by members of the Nation of Islam.
-
In the Selma to Montgomery March, around 600 civil rights marchers walk to Selma, Alabama to Montgomery—the state’s capital—in protest of Black voter suppression. Local police block and brutally attack them.
-
Prevents 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.
-
A series of violent confrontation between the city police and residents of predominantly black neighborhood. 34 deaths, 1,000 injuries, and $40 million in property damage.
-
The u.s senate confirmed thurgood Marshall to become first African American to sit in on u.s supreme court
-
Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated on the balcony of his hotel room in Memphis, Tennessee.
-
Provides equal housing opportunity regardless of race, religion or national origin.
-
Supreme Court reaffirmed Powell's core holding that race could be considered in the admissions policy of the University of Michigan law school.