Slavery is made illegal in the Northwest Territory.
A federal fugitive slave law is enacted, providing for the return slaves who had escaped and crossed state lines.
Congress bans the importation of slaves from Africa.
The Missouri Compromise bans slavery north of the southern boundary of Missouri.
Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery and becomes one of the most effective and celebrated leaders of the Underground Railroad.
The Confederacy is founded when the deep South secedes the Civil War begins.
Howard University's law school becomes the country's first black law school.
The Black Exodus takes place, in which tens of thousands of African Americans migrated from southern states to Kansas.
The Harlem Renaissance flourishes in the 1920s and 1930s. This literary, artistic, and intellectual movement fosters a new black cultural identity.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kans. declares that racial segregation in schools is unconstitutional (May 17).
A young black boy, Emmett Till, is brutally murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. Two white men charged with the crime are acquitted by an all-white jury. They later boast about committing the murder.
Four black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, begin a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter (Feb. 1). Six months later the "Greensboro Four" are served lunch at the same Woolworth's counter. The event triggers many similar nonviolent prote
Martin Luther King Jr. is arrested and jailed in an anti-segregation protest
Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated in Memphis, Tenn. (April 4)
