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Crispus Attucks, a fugitive slave who had escaped his master and worked for twenty years as a merchant seaman was one of the first men to die for the American Revolution.
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Under the Fugitive Slave Law, an accused runaway was to stand trial in front of a special commissioner, not a judge or a jury, and that the commissioner was to be paid $10 if a fugitive was returned to slavery but only $5 if the fugitive was freed.
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Nat Turner led a rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, him and a group of followers killed about sixty white men, women, and children on the night of August 21.
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A 25-year-old slave broke out of his shackles and released the other Africans. The slaves then revolted, killing most of the crew of the Amistad.
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In Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Supreme Court ruled that African Americans, whether free or slave, were not American citizens and could not sue in federal court.
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On October 16, 1859, 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.
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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.
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On January 1 Lincoln presented the Emancipation Proclamation which was suppose to free all slaves but it did not free all slaves in the United States. Rather, it declared free only those slaves living in states not under Union control.
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The Fugitive Slave Acts were a pair of federal laws that allowed for the capture and return of runaway slaves within the territory of the United States.
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The 13th Amendment abolished slavery.
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Robert E. Lee surrendered the last major Confederate army to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865.
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On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor and Confederate sympathizer, shot President Abraham Lincoln at a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.
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The 14th Amendment granted citizenship and legal rights to African Americans and slaves who had been emancipated after the American Civil War.
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The Constitution granted African American men the right to vote by declaring that the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
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The Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, which indicated that the federal government would officially tolerate the "separate but equal" doctrine.
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A riot was caused in Greenwood County because of elections on this day.
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This riot was a white supremacist movement, which overthrew the legitimately elected biracial government of Wilmington, North Carolina and replaced it with officials who instituted the first Jim Crow laws in North Carolina.
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It all started with a rumor from Fanny Taylor that she was raped in her home which caused a massacre in the small town of Rosewood.
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On this day nine young boys got in an altercation with some other boys on a train and later on were accused of raping two females.
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When Plaintiff McLaurin first applied to the graduate school at the University of Oklahoma, an Oklahoma statute prevented the school from admitting him. McLaurin sued to challenge the denial of his admission.
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Heman Sweatt, a black man, applied for admission to the University of Texas Law School. State law restricted access to the university to whites, and Sweatt's application was automatically rejected because of his race.
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Brown v. Board of Education declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional.
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14 year-old Emmett Till went into a store owned by Roy Bryant and flirted with his wife because his friends made a bet with him. Days later Carolyn Bryant told her husband about it and out of spite him and his brother in law took Emmett's life.
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Nine African-American teenagers faced great obstacles and angry mobs in September 1957 to desegregate Little Rock Central High School.
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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.
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James Meredith was one of the pioneers of the civil rights movement. In 1962 he became the first black student to successfully enroll at the University of Mississippi.
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The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963. It was the largest demonstration ever seen in the nation's capital, and one of the first to have extensive television coverage.
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On Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four girls.
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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.
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On 25 March 1965, Martin Luther King led thousands of nonviolent demonstrators to the steps of the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, after a 5-day, 54-mile march from Selma, Alabama.
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The Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, aimed to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote.
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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.
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The Orangeburg Massacre refers to the shooting of protestors by South Carolina Highway Patrol Officers that were demonstrating against racial segregation at a local bowling alley in Orangeburg, South Carolina.
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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.
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Angela Davis, radical black activist and philosopher, was arrested as a suspect in the attempt to free George Jackson from a courtroom in Marin County, California.
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On July 25, 1972 the results of an investigation of the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male were published. The response was broad-based public outrage, which finally brought the Study to an immediate end.
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Lucy was found by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray.
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In 1976, after twelve years of research, Alex published Roots, a novel based loosely on his family's history.
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Rodney King was caught by the Los Angeles police after a high-speed chase on March 3, 1991. The officers pulled him out of the car and beat him brutally.
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Senator Barack Obama of Illinois defeated Senator John McCain of Arizona to become the 44th U.S. president, and the first African American elected to the White House.
