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Eastern Theatre in 1861 and 1862, the confederact stopped union attempts to capture its capital in Richmond, Virginia.
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Document that legally freed slaves
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First Northern black unit, the fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment, was organized.
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Congress passes the Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing slavery, and establishes the Freedmen's Bureau to assist former slaves. This is the beginning of the Reconstruction era.
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All-white legislatures in the former Confederate states pass the so-called "Black Codes," sharply curtailing African Americans' freedom and virtually re-enslaving them.
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Revels was elected by a vote of 81 to 15 in the Mississippi State Senate to finish the term of one of the state's two seats in the US Senate left vacant since the Civil War.
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Armed Blacks surround the county seat in Colfax, Louisiana, fearing whites will illegally overthrow the Republican government. About 150 African Americans are killed in the so-called Colfax Massacre.
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Texas, Alabama, Virginia, Missisippi, all passed poll tax to stop black from voing
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Preceding the foundation of the NAACP, the organization dedicated itself to racial solidarity and self-help created by Thomas Timothy Fortune.
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The First successful open heart surgery was done by african american Dr. Daniel Hale Williams. The patient recovered 51 dats later and lived for another 50 years.
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African American Booker T. Washington gives his "Atlanta Compromise" speech at the Cotton Exposition in Georgia, saying that African Americans should focus on economic advancement rather than political change.
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World-famous African American agricultural researcher George Washington Carver accepts an appointment at the Tuskegee Institute. Carver's research in farming techniques helps to revolutionize farming in America.
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The U.S. Supreme Court rules that segregated, or "separate but equal," public facilities for whites and blackAfrican-AmericanAfrican Americans are legal. The ruling stands until 1954. These are also known as the "Jim Crow" laws.
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Robert "Bob" Cole produces "A Trip to Coontown," the first full-length musical written, directed, performed, and produced by African Americans, on Broadway.
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Louisiana tries to disenfranchise its African Americans by passing a "grandfather clause" limiting the right to vote to anyone whose fathers and grandfathers were qualified on January 1, 1867. (No African Americans had the right to vote at that time.)
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Sarah Breedlove MacWilliams, better known as Madam C. J. Walker, starts an African American hair-care business in Denver and eventually becomes America's first self-made woman millionaire
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Robert S. Abbott begins publishing The Chicago Defender, Chicago's first African American newspaper. Within a decade, it is one of the country's most influential African American weekly papers.
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Its mission is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination
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Black explorer Matthew Henson reaches the North Pole along with Admiral Robert Peary. They are the first men known to have reached the North Pole.
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The National Urban League is founded to help the many African Americans who are migrating to the cities find jobs and housing.
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My Great Granpa was born. (Layman)
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My Great Grandma was born. (Layman)
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Organized by the NAACP, thousands of African Americans march down New York City's Fifth Avenue to protest racial violence and discrimination.
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Race riots across the country leave at least 100 people dead. These are again sparked by white resentment of African Americans working in industry, and their large-scale migration from South to North.
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My Great Granma was born. (Layman)
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My Great Grandpa Frank was born. (Layman)
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Phillip Randolph organizes the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first successful African American trade union.
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Nine African American youths are accused of raping two white women, and tried for their lives and quickly convicted in Scottsboro, Alabama. The "Scottsboro Boys" case attracts national attention and will help fuel the civil rights movement.
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Track-and-field athlete Jesse Owens wins four gold medals in the Berlin Olympics, thwarting Adolf Hitler's plan to use the games to demonstrate "Aryan supremacy."
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Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., becomes the first African American general in the U.S. Army.
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The first training program for African American pilots is established at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. The Tuskegee Airmen serve heroically in World War II.
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The interracial Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) is formed in Chicago. It will become famous for organizing the Freedom Rides of 1961.
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My Grandpa was born. (Layman)
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My Grandma was born. (Layman)
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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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The U.S. Supreme Court rules that the segregation of Montgomery, Ala., buses is unconstitutional.
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Martin Luther King, Jr., helps found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to work for full equality for African Americans.
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For the first time since Reconstruction, the federal government uses the military to uphold African Americans' civil rights, as soldiers escort nine African American students to desegregate a school in Little Rock, Arkansas. Daisy Bates, an NAACP leader, advised and assisted the students and eventually had a state holiday dedicated to her
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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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Four African American girls are killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
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The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), CORE and the NAACP and other civil-rights groups organize a massive African American voter registration drive in Mississippi known as "Freedom Summer." Three CORE civil rights workers are murdered. In the five years following Freedom Summer, black voter registration in Mississippi will rise from a mere 7 percent to 67 percent.
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Martin Luther King, Jr. is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
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In the wake of the Selma-Montgomery March, the Voting Rights Act is passed, outlawing the practices used in the South to disenfranchise African American voters
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Edward W. Brooke becomes the first African American U.S. Senator since Reconstruction. He serves two terms as a Republican from Massachusetts.
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Martin Luther King, Jr., is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. His murder sparks a week of rioting across the country.
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The Equal Employment Opportunity Act is passed, prohibiting job discrimination on the basis of, among other things, race, and laying the groundwork for affirmative action.
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Shirley Chisholm becomes the first African American woman to be elected to Congress.
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The Equal Employment Opportunity Act is passed, prohibiting job discrimination on the basis of, among other things, race, and laying the groundwork for affirmative action.
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In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court rules against universities using fixed racial quotas in making admissions decisions, a challenge to affirmative action.
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Singer Michael Jackson's album Thriller becomes one of the best-selling albums of all time.
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General Colin L. Powell is the first African American to be named chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. military.
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Oprah Winfrey, the first African American woman to host a nationally syndicated (and wildly popular) talk show, founds Harpo Productions to produce her own movies and TV shows. In 2000, Forbes magazine will estimate Winfrey's earnings at $150 million.
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Former football player O.J. Simpson is charged with the murder of his ex-wife Nicole and her friend Ronald Goldman. He will be acquitted in 1995 after a hugely controversial trial.
