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The Missouri Compromise of 1820 provided a simple solution for resolving a crisis of the Union growing out of slavery's expansion towards the western territories.
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Being born a slave and fighting for his freedom, Dred Scott filed a suit against the Missouri state courts in 1846. Longing for freedom, finally on May 26, 1857 Scott's owner freed him. Scott's bid for freedom remained the most momentous judicial event of the century .
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On the night of October 16, 1859, Brown and 18 other men set out. After cutting down all telegraph wires and slipping into town killing many and being caught, John Brown ended up jailed in Charles Town. Later being imposed the death sentence on November 2, to be executed a month later.
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As black men waited for the nation to recongnize the value to the Union cause, they drilled and prepared themselves for service. The dispute between white brothers that erupted into armed conflict in April 1861 was a turning point for American men and women of color.
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The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 freed slaves in states that remained in rebellion during the American Civil War.
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The union victory in the Civil War in 1865 may have given some 4 million slaves their freedom, but the process of rebuilding the South during the Reconstruction period (1865-1877) introduced a new set of significant challenges.
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In the 1896 case of Plessy v.s. Ferguson, the United States Supreme Court upheld one of Louisiana's laws that required railroads to provide "Equal but seperate accommodations for the white and colored races."
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The first type of racial segregation law to spread over the South was the "Jim Crow car" law, requiring blacks and whites to be seated seperately in railroad passenger cars.
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On Monday, 17 May 1954, the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled that segregated schools were in violation of the Constitution.
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The Montgomery Bus Boycott began on December 5,1955, as an effort by black residents to protect the trial that day in the Montgomery Recorder's Court of Rosa McCauley Parks.
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The March on Washington was the largest civil rights demonstration the nation had ever witnessed. One hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, 250,000 Americans of all races gathered to petition the government to pass meaningful civil rights legislation and enforce existing laws establishing racial equality.
