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Crispus Attucks Dies In The Boston Massacre
Crispus Attucks, one of the first men to die for the American fugitive Revolution, was a slave who had escaped from his master and had worked for twenty years as a merchant seaman. -
Fugitive Slave Act
Established the Mason Dixon Line over Maryland (set first boundary for slavery in US). Allowed masters/hunters to retrieve runaway slaves in the North. -
Fugitive Slave Law
It required every state, including those that forbade slavery, to forcibly return slaves who had escaped from other states to their owners. The House vote was 48-7 with 14 members abstaining. -
Nat Turner's Rebellion
Turner and six of his men met in the woods to eat a dinner and make their plans. At 2:00 that morning, they set out to the Travis household, where they killed the entire family as they lay sleeping. They continued on, from house to house, killing all of the white people they encountered. Turner's force eventually consisted of more than 40 slaves, most on horseback. -
Amistad Revolt
53 African natives were kidnapped from eastern Africa and sold into the Spanish slave trade, three days into the journey, a 25-year-old slave named Sengbe Pieh broke out of his shackles and released the other Africans. The slaves then revolted, killing most of the crew of the Amistad, including her cook and captain. The Africans then forced Montez and Ruiz to return the ship to Africa. -
Scott vs. Sanford
Scott sued Emerson's widow for his freedom in the Missouri supreme court, claiming that his residence in the “free soil” of Illinois made him a free man. After defeat in State courts, Scott brought suit in a local federal court. Eleven years after Scott's initial suit, the case came before the U.S. Supreme Court. -
John Browns Raid
John Brown led a small army of 18 men into the small town of Harper's Ferry, Virginia. His plan was to instigate a major slave rebellion in the South. He would seize the arms and ammunition in the federal arsenal, arm slaves in the area and move south along the Appalachian Mountains, attracting slaves to his cause. -
SC Secedes from the Union
The force of events moved very quickly upon the election of Lincoln. South Carolina acted first, calling for a convention to secede from the Union. State by state, conventions were held, and the Confederacy was formed -
Emancipation Proclamation
Lincoln issued a preliminary decree stating that, unless the rebellious states returned to the Union by January 1, freedom would be granted to slaves within those states. The decree also left room for a plan of compensated emancipation. No Confederate states took the offer. -
End of Civil War
Confederates burned Richmond to prevent Union troops from taking it before Grant cornered and defeated the remains of Lee’s bedraggled army. Lee’s unconditional surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, ended the war. -
Assassination of Lincoln
Shortly after 10 p.m. on April 14, 1865, actor John Wilkes Booth entered the presidential box at Ford's Theatre in Washington D.C., and fatally shot President Abraham Lincoln -
13th Amendment
The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime -
14th Amendment
The Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits states from denying any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. -
Plessy vs Ferguson
Supreme Court decision, segregation is not unconstitutional, created "separate but equal" standard. -
Phoenix, AZ Riot
A riot by white South Carolinians in the name of Redemption in Greenwood, South Carolina. Over a dozen prominent black leaders were murdered and hundreds were injured by the white mob. -
Wilmington, NC Riot
"It will be the meanest, vilest, dirtiest campaign since 1876. The slogan of the Democratic Party from the mountains to the sea will be but one word ... Nigger." -
Rosewood Massacre
A massacre was carried out in the small, predominately black town of Rosewood in Central Florida. The massacre was instigated by the rumor that a white woman, Fanny Taylor, had been sexually assaulted by a black man in her home in a nearby community. -
Mc Laurin vs Oklahoma (day of SC decision)
Supreme Court ruled that separation did not impair learning. -
Sweatt vs Painter (day of SC decision)
Court ruled in his favor, (separate is not equal). -
Scottsboro Boys
During the 1930s, much of the world's attention was riveted on the "Scottsboro Boys," nine black youths falsely charged with raping two white women in Alabama. -
Brown vs Board (day of SC decision)
Brown v. Board of Education, now acknowledged as one of the greatest Supreme Court decisions of the 20th century, unanimously held that the racial segregation of children in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. -
Death of Emmett Till
While visiting family in Money, Mississippi, 14-year-old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago, is brutally murdered for flirting with a white woman four days earlier. -
Little Rock 9
The students, now known as the Little Rock Nine, entered Central High School, an academically renowned school with an enrollment of approximately two thousand white students. Despite suffering constant torment and discrimination from their classmates, eight of the nine students completed the school year at Central High School. -
Ruby Bridges
Ruby Nell Bridges Hall is an American activist known for being the first black child to attend an all-white elementary school in the South. She attended William Frantz Elementary School -
James Meredith
James Meredith was to make his name in civil rights history by being the first African-American to attend the University of Mississippi. -
March on Washington
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. addresses a crowd near the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. -
16th St. Church Bombing
A bomb exploded before Sunday morning services at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. 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 hard-fought, often dangerous struggle for civil rights for African Americans. -
Assassination of Malcolm X
At a speaking engagement in the Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965, three gunmen rushed Malcolm onstage. They shot him 15 times at close range. The 39-year-old was pronounced dead on arrival at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. -
March on Selma
About 600 people started a planned march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, it was called a demonstration. When state troopers met the demonstrators at the edge of the city by the Edmund Pettus Bridge, that day became known as "Bloody Sunday." -
Voting Rights Act
In the century following Reconstruction, African Americans in the South faced overwhelming obstacles to voting. Despite the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which had enfranchised black men and women, southern voter registration boards used poll taxes, literacy tests, and other bureaucratic impediments to deny African Americans their legal rights. -
Watts Riots
The Watts Riot, which raged for six days and resulted in more than forty million dollars worth of property damage, was both the largest and costliest urban rebellion of the Civil Rights era -
Orangeburg Massacre
Nine white highway patrolmen opened gunfire onto a college campus—killing three black students and wounding 27 others. All the students were unarmed and in retreat from the highway patrolmen at the time of the shooting. Yet, without warning, they were shot in their backs. -
Assassination of Mlk Jr
King had been standing on the balcony in front of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, when, without warning, he was shot. The .30-caliber rifle bullet entered King's right cheek, traveled through his neck, and finally stopped at his shoulder blade. King was immediately taken to a nearby hospital but was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. -
15th Amendment
The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude" -
Arrest of Angela Davis
Angela Davis appeared on the FBI's Most Wanted List. She was able to evade the police for 2 months before being arrested. She spent 18 months in the Women's Detention Center in New York awaiting the trial. She was tried and acquitted of all charges. -
Congressional Hearings End for Tuskegee Study
Buxtin had resigned from the PHS and entered law school. Still bothered by the failure of the agency to take his objections seriously, he contacted the Associated Press, which assigned reporter Jean Heller to the story. On July 25, 1972 the results of her journalist investigation of the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male were published. The response to Heller's revelations was broad-based public outrage, which finally brought the Study to an immediate end. -
Lucy is Discovered
Lucy was classified as an australopithecus, and as a female. She was the earliest found form of humans. -
Roots Was Published
Roots: The Saga of an American Family is a novel written by Alex Haley and first published in 1976. It tells the story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent and sold into slavery in the United States, and follows his life and the lives of his alleged descendants in the U.S. down to Haley. -
Beating of Rodney King
re pulled over by the Los Angeles police. After he attempted to escape on foot, he was caught by officers. The 6-foot-3 Mr. King was struck with batons and kicked dozens of times, and hit with Tasers. -
Barack Obama Becomes 1st Black President
Obama became the 44th president, and the first African American to be elected to that office.
