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The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except for as a punishment for a crime.
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The amendment addresses citizenship rights and equal protection of the laws and was proposed in response to issues related to former slaves following the American Civil War. The amendment was bitterly contested, particularly by the states of the defeated Confederacy, which were forced to ratify it in order to regain representation in Congress.
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The Jim Crow Laws were part of a system that segregated almost everything between blacks and whites. They are the main reason the civil rights movement occurred.
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The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, was founded in response to lynchings and riots in 1909. It worked against lynching and segregation in the 20th century and is still together today.
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The Omaha race riot occurred in Omaha, Nebraska, September 28–29, 1919. The race riot resulted in the brutal lynching of Will Brown, a black worker; the death of two white men; the attempted hanging of Mayor Edward Parsons Smith; and a public rampage by thousands of whites who set fire to the Douglas County Courthouse in downtown Omaha. It followed more than 20 race riots that occurred in major industrial cities of the United States during the Red Summer of 1919.
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Dick Rowland was accused with the sexual assault on May 31, 1921, as he was in the elevator with a white woman (Sarah Page). On the other hand the Man said he stepped on her foot and threw her off balance. Once he was arrested that night many were angered and riots arose.
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The Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, was founded in 1942. It was a leading civil rights organization. CORE helped the SNCC create the Freedom Rides, which tried to desegregate public facilities. Also similar to the SNCC, it started as a nonviolent organization but slowly shifted away from that.
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Through nonviolent protest, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s broke the pattern of public facilities' being segregated by “race” in the South and achieved the most important breakthrough in equal-rights legislation for African Americans since the Reconstruction period (1865–77).
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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which allowed state-sponsored segregation, insofar as it applied to public education. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the decision stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."
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Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was a 14-year-old African-American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after a white woman said she was offended by him in her family's grocery store. The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Till posthumously became an icon of the Civil Rights Movement.
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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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The Southern Christian Leadership Conference dates back to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Leaders of the civil rights movement met to organize specific movements.
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In a speech, King explains why the boycotts must continue: "There comes a time," he says, "that people get tired. We are here this evening to say to those who have mistreated us for so long, that we are tired, tired of being segregated and humiliated, tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression."
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The U.S. Supreme Court rules that the segregation of Montgomery, Alabama, buses is unconstitutional.
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At a previously all-white school, nine African Americans were banned from entering the school by the Arkansas National Guard. Federal troops were sent later in the month to allow the students to begin school.
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In 1960, four college students sat at the counter at a Woolworth's restaurant and asked for service but were asked to leave. They refused, helping lead to more challenges of racial inequality.
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The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, was formed in 1960 to help students take part in nonviolent acts to stop segregation. The organization helped hold many of these events until a new leader led to its destruction.
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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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Martin Luther King, Jr., writes his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," his famous statement about the civil rights movement.
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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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A bomb exploded before Sunday morning services at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama--a church with a predominantly black congregation that served as a meeting place for civil rights leaders. Four young girls were killed and many other people injured; outrage over the incident and the violent clash between protesters and police that followed helped draw national attention to the struggle for civil rights.
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One year after splitting from the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X is assassinated in New York by gunmen affiliated with the NOI.
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The 24th Amendment abolishes the poll tax, which originally had been instituted in 11 southern states after Reconstruction to make it difficult for poor blacks to vote.
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King organizes a protest march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, for African American voting rights. A shocked nation watches on television as police club and teargas protesters.
