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This was when Christopher Columbus reached The Bahamas, Cuba and Hispaniola.
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The first African slaves were brought to Virginia in 1619. Some historians say that about 600, 000 Africans ended up in the USA. Most of the slaves worked on plantations in the South.
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In 1861 the Civil War broke out between the North and the South. The North wanted to keep she states united and abolish slavery. The South wanted to form a seperate country where they could hold on to slavery.
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Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was visiting family in Mississippi when he was kidnapped, brutally beaten, shot, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River for allegedly whistling at a white woman.
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Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat at the front of the "colored section" of a bus to a white passenger.
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Legal segregation of schools was stopped in the U.S. by federal enforcement of a series of Supreme Court decisions after Brown v. Board of Education.
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Malcolm X, black nationalist and founder of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, was shot to death. It is believed the assailants were members of the Black Muslim faith, which Malcolm had recently abandoned in favor of orthodox Islam.
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Asserting that civil rights laws alone are not enough to remedy discrimination, President Johnson issues Executive Order 11246, which enforces affirmative action for the first time. It requires government contractors to "take affirmative action" toward prospective minority employees in all aspects of hiring and employment.
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Martin Luther King, at age 39, was shot as he was standing on the balcony outside his hotel room. Escaped convict and committed racist James Earl Ray was convicted of the crime.
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Edgar J. Killen, the ringleader in the murder of the Mississippi civil rights workers
(Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman) is convicted of manslaughter on the 41st
anniversary of the crime. -
