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Crispus Attucks dies in Boston Massacre
On March 5, 1770, a crowd of colonists confronted a sentry who had chastised a boy for complaining that an officer did not pay a barber bill. Both townspeople and a company of British soldiers of the 29th Regiment of Foot gathered. Five colonists were killed and six were wounded. Attucks took two ricocheyed bullets in the chest and was the first to die. -
Nat Turner's Rebellion
Turner declared that 'indiscriminate slaughter was not their intention after they attained a foothold, and was resorted to in the first instance to strike terror and alarm." The group spared a few homes because Turner believed the poor white inhabitants thought no better of themselves than they did of negroes.The rebels spared almost no one whom they encountered. A small child who hid in a fireplace was among the few survivors. The slaves killed approximately sixty white men. -
Amistad Revolt
Three days into the journey, a 25-year-old slave named Sengbe Pieh (or "Cinque" to his Spanish captors) broke out of his shackles and released the other Africans. The slaves then revolted, killing most of the crew of the Amistad, including the cook and captain. The Africans then forced Montez and Ruiz to return the ship to Africa. -
Fugitive Slave Law
This controversial law allowed slave-hunters to seize alleged fugitive slaves without due process of law and prohibited anyone from aiding escaped fugitives or obstructing their recovery. Because it was often presumed that a black person was a slave, the law threatened the safety of all blacks, slave and free, and forced many Northerners to become more defiant in their support of fugitives. -
Fugitive Slave Act
Required that all escaped slaves were, upon capture, to be returned to their masters and that officials and citizens of free states had to cooperate in this law. Abolitionists nicknamed it the "Bloodhound Law" for the dogs that were used to track down runaway slaves. -
Scott Vs. Sanford (Day of SC Decision)
The Supreme Court decision Dred Scott vs. Sanford was issued on this date. Delivered by Chief Justice Roger Taney, this opinion declared that slaves were not citizens of the US and could not sue in federal courts. -
John Brown's Raid
was an attempt by the white abolitionist John Brown to start an armed slave revolt in 1859 by seizing a United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Brown's raid, accompanied by 20 men in his party, was defeated by a detachment of U.S. Marines led by Col. Robert E. Lee. John Brown had originally asked Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, both of whom he had met in his formative years as an abolitionist in Springfield, Massachusetts, to join him in his raid. -
SC Secedes from Union
On December 20, 1860, a secession convention called by the South Carolina legislature voted unanimously, 169-0, to secede from the United States. -
Emancipation Proclamation
Was issued after the Union victory at Antietam, the Emancipation Proclamation had both moral and strategic implications for the ongoing Civil War. -
13th Amendment
The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. -
End of Civil War
Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith, commander of Confederate forces west of the Mississippi, signs the surrender terms offered by Union negotiators. With Smith's surrender, the last Confederate army ceased to exist, bringing a formal end to the bloodiest four years in U.S. history. -
Assassination of Lincoln
John Wilkes Booth assigned Lewis Powell to kill Secretary of State William H. Seward at his home, George Atzerodt to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson at his residence, the Kirkwood Hotel, and David E. Herold to guide Powell to the Seward house and then out of Washington to rendezvous with Booth in Maryland. Booth planned to shoot Lincoln with his single-shot Deringer and then stab Grant with a knife at Ford's Theatre. They were all to strike simultaneously shortly after ten o'clock that night. -
14th Amendment
National citizenship and forbidding the states to restrict the basic rights of citizens or other persons. -
15th Amendment
The 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits states from denying voting rights to citizens based on race, color or previous condition of servitude (meaning slavery). -
Plessy Vs. Ferguson (Day of SC Decision)
In a 7 to 1 decision the "Separate but equal " provison of public accomodations by state governments was found to be constitutional under the Equal Protection Clause. -
Wilmington, North Carolina Riot
A mob set Alex Manly’s newspaper office on fire, and tensions between African Americans and whites exploded. hites demanded that Manly and his newspaper cease to publish and that Manly be banned from the community. Manly escaped from Wilmington because he was mistakenly thought to be white. African Americans armed themselves and whites began to hunt and gun them down. It was said that twenty-five African Americans had been killed. -
Rosewood Massacre
Racially-motivated mob atrocity in Florida during January 1-7, 1923. In the violence at least six blacks and two whites were killed, and the town of Rosewood was abandoned and destroyed in what contemporary news reports characterized as a race riot. Racial disturbances were common during the early 20th century in the United States, reflecting the nation's rapid social changes. Florida had an especially high number of lynchings in the years before the massacre. -
Scottsboro Boys
The Scottsboro Boys were nine black teenagers accused of rape in Alabama in 1931. The landmark set of legal cases from this incident dealt with racism and the right to a fair trial. The case included a frameup, an all-white jury, rushed trials, an attempted lynching, and an angry mob; it is frequently given as an example of an overall miscarriage of justice. -
McLaurin Vs. Oklahoma (Day of SC Decision)
Was a United States Supreme Court case that reversed a lower court decision upholding the efforts of the state-supported University of Oklahoma to adhere to the state law requiring African-Americans to be provided graduate or professional education on a segregated basis. -
Sweatt Vs. Painter (Day of SC Decision)
A U.S. Supreme Court case that successfully challenged the "separate but equal" doctrine of racial segregation established by the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson. The case was influential in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education four years later.The case involved a black man, Heman Marion Sweatt, who was refused admission to the School of Law of the University of Texas, At the time, no law school in Texas would admit black students. -
Brown Vs Board (Day of SC Decision)
The Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which allowed state-sponsored segregation, insofar as it applied to public education. This ruling paved the way for integration and was a major victory of the civil rights movement. -
Emmett Till Death
Two men named Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam brutally murdered Till. They kidnapped him and took the boy away to a barn, where they beat him and gouged out one of his eyes, before shooting him through the head and disposing of his body in the Tallahatchie River, weighting it with a 70-pound (32 kg) cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. Three days later, Till's body was discovered and retrieved from the river. -
Little Rock Nine
Little Rock Nine were a group of African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas. They then attended after the intervention of President Eisenhower. The NAACP attempted to register black students in previously all-white schools in cities throughout the South. -
Ruby Bridges
American activist now, but 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
Became the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi, and then was shot by a sniper shortly after beginning a lone civil rights march through the South. Known as the "March Against Fear." His admission was revoked when the registrar learned of his race. -
March on Washington
The march commanded national attention by preempting regularly scheduled television programs. As the first ceremony of such magnitude ever initiated and dominated by African Americans, the march also was the first to have its nature wholly misperceived in advance. -
16th St.Church Bombing
The 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed on Sunday, September 15, 1963 as an act of white supremacist terrorism. The explosion at the African-American church, which killed four girls, marked a turning point in the United States 1960s Civil Rights Movement and contributed to support for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. -
Assassination of Malcolm X
On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was preparing to address the Organization of Afro-American Unity in Manhattan's Audubon Ballroom. A man rushed forward and shot him once in the chest with a sawed-off shotgun; two other men charged the stage firing semi-automatic handguns. Malcolm X was pronounced dead at 3:30 pm, shortly after arriving at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. The autopsy identified 21 gunshot wounds to the chest, left shoulder, arms and legs, including ten buckshot wounds. -
March on Selma
Triumphant civil rights demonstrators led by Martin Luther King, Jr. marched into Montgomery, Alabama. It was the culmination of a fifty-mile procession from Selma. As they entered the capital, the marchers were largely African American but joined by a small number of whites. The road from Selma to Montgomery may have been a mere fifty miles yet the journey had spanned nearly two years of violent opposition. -
Voting Rights Act
This act was to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and for other purposes. The Voting Rights Act is a landmark piece of federal legislation in the US that prohibits discrimination in voting. -
Watts Riot
A race riot that took place in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles from August 11-17. This riot resulted in more than fourty million dollars worth of property damage. -
Orangeburg Massacre
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 near South Carolina State University on the evening of February 8, 1968. Of the 150 protestors in the crowd that night, three African American males were killed and twenty-eight other protestors were injured. -
Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
At 6:01 p.m. on Thursday, April 4, 1968, while he was standing on the motel's second floor balcony, King was struck by a single .30-06 bullet fired from a Remington Model 760. The bullet entered through his right cheek, breaking his jaw, and several vertebrae as it traveled down his spinal cord, severing the jugular vein and major arteries in the process before lodging in his shoulder. By the force of the blast, King's necktie was ripped completely off his shirt. Unconscious, He fell violent. -
Arrest of Angela Davis
Angela Davis was arrested in New York by the FBI on Tuesday October 13th 1970. She had been on the run for over two months, crossing the country from Los Angeles to New York. She was hiding out in Miami she watched one of those shows on television where the FBI saves the day at the end in some big shoot out. She imagined it was her getting killed. -
Congressional Hearings End for Tuskegee Study
The advisory panel concluded that the Tuskegee Study was "ethically unjustified", the knowledge gained was sparse when compared with the risks the study posed for its subjects. In October 1972, the panel advised stopping the study at once. A month later, the Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs announced the end of the Tuskegee Study. -
Lucy is discovered
She is the early human ancestor, the 3.2 million year old ape "Lucy" was the first Austrolopithicus afarensis skeleton ever found, though her remains are only about 40 percent complete. She was discovered in 1974 by paleontologist Donald C. Johanson in Hadar, Ethiopia. -
ROOTS was published
Haley published Roots: The Saga of an American Family, a novel based on his family's history, starting with the story of Kunta Kinte, who was kidnapped in the Gambia in 1767 and transported to the Province of Maryland to be sold as a slave. Haley claimed to be a seventh-generation descendant of Kunta Kinte, and Haley's work on the novel involved ten years of research, intercontinental travel and writing -
Beating of Rodney King
King was struck by Koon's Taser the second time is the approximate start of the George Holliday videotape of the incident. In the tape, King is seen on the ground. He rises and rushes toward Powell and what was argued in court as either to attack Powell or to flee but regardless King and Powell both collided in the rush. Taser wire can be seen on King's body. Officer Powell strikes King with his baton, and King is knocked to the ground. Powell strikes King several more times with his baton. -
Barack Obama (First Black President of the US)
He's an Illinois Democrat, and he decisively defeated his Republican rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona, to become the nation's 44th president and the first African-Amemrican to be elected to the White House. -
Phoenix, Arizona riot
At least three people suffered injuries during a riot at a prison. A total of 6 patients with either minor or moderate injuries were being taken by ambulance to area hospitals. It involved less than approximately 100 inmates, but more than 50.
