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In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the Supreme Court rules unanimously against school segregation, overturning its 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.
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Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to a white person, triggering a successful, year-long African American boycott of the bus system.
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Musician Chuck Berry begins recording; his music will help shape rock-and-roll.
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Althea Gibson becomes the first African American tennis player to win a major title by winning both the women's singles and doubles championships at Wimbledon.
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Lorraine Hansberry's "Raisin in the Sun" is the first play by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway.
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Motown Records is founded in Detroit, Mich. Motown will go on to feature such legendary artists as Michael Jackson, Gladys Knight, Lionel Ritchie and Queen Latifah.
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Four African American college students hold a sit-in to integrate a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., launching a wave of similar protests across the South.
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The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) begins to organize Freedom Rides throughout the South to try to de-segregate interstate public bus travel.
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African American radical Malcolm X becomes national minister of the Nation of Islam. He rejects the nonviolent civil-rights movement and integration, and becomes a champion of African American separatism and black pride. At one point he states that equal rights should be secured "by any means necessary," a position he later revises.
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Four African American girls are killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
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More than 200,000 people march on Washington, D.C., in the largest civil rights demonstration ever; Martin Luther King, Jr., gives his "I Have a Dream" speech.
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Sidney Poitier becomes the first black actor to win an Oscar for Best Actor, for his role in Lilies of the Field.
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Martin Luther King, Jr., writes his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," his famous statement about the civil rights movement.
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President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act, which gives the federal government far-reaching powers to prosecute discrimination in employment, voting, and education.
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Martin Luther King, Jr. is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
