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African American Timeline Project
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The first slaves come to North America
To satisfy the labor needs of the rapidly growing North American colonies, white European settlers turned in the early 17th century from indentured servants (mostly poorer Europeans) to a cheaper, more plentiful labor source: African slaves. Beginning around 1619, when a Dutch ship brought 20 Africans ashore at the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia, slavery spread quickly through the American colonies. -
Phillis Wheatley
In 1773, the Wheatleys sent Phillis to London where her first book of poems - the first book ever by an African American woman and the second by any American woman - was published under the title Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. -
Abolition and the Underground Railroad
The early abolition movement in North America was fueled both by slaves’ efforts to liberate themselves and by groups of white settlers, such as the Quakers, who opposed slavery on religious or moral grounds. Known as the Underground Railroad, the organization gained real momentum in the 1830s and eventually helped anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 slaves reach freedom. -
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery in Maryland and becomes one of the most effective and celebrated leaders of the Underground Railroad. On numerous risky trips south, she helped some 300 other slaves escape before serving as a scout and spy for Union forces in South Carolina during the Civil War. -
Emancipationo Proclamation
President Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring "that all persons held as slaves" within the Confederate states "are, and henceforward shall be free." Lincoln justified his decision as a wartime measure, and as such he did not go so far as to free the slaves in the border states loyal to the Union, an omission that angered many abolitionists. By freeing some 3 million black slaves in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its lab -
Cival War Ends
Though the Union victory in the Civil War gave some 4 million slaves their freedom, significant challenges awaited during the Reconstruction period. The 13th Amendment, adopted late in 1865, officially abolished slavery, but the question of freed blacks’ status in the post–war South remained. -
Lincoln Assassinated
On the night of April 14, the actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth slipped into the president’s box at Ford’s Theatre in Washington and shot him point-blank in the back of the head. Lincoln was carried to a boardinghouse across the street from the theater, but he never regained consciousness, and died in the early morning hours of April 15. -
Black Codes
The black codes sought to ensure the availability of a subservient agricultural labor supply controlled by white people. They imposed severe restrictions on freedom. Freedmen had to sign annual labor contracts with white landowners. -
15th Ammendment
The 15th Amendment, adopted in 1870, guaranteed that a citizen’s right to vote would not be denied —on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” During Reconstruction, blacks won election to southern state governments and even to the U.S. Congress. Their growing influence greatly dismayed many white southerners, who felt control slipping ever further away from them. -
Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute
Booker T. Washington founds the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama. The school becomes one of the leading schools of higher learning for African Americans, and stresses the practical application of knowledge. -
Jim Crow Laws
Jim Crow laws, in U.S. history, statutes enacted by Southern states and municipalities, beginning in the 1880s, that legalized segregation between blacks and whites. Supreme Court ruling in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate facilities for whites and blacks were constitutional encouraged the passage of discriminatory laws that wiped out the gains made by blacks during Reconstruction. -
Niagra Movement
W.E.B. DuBois founds the Niagara movement, a forerunner to the NAACP. The movement is formed in part as a protest to Booker T. Washington's policy of accommodation to white society; the Niagara movement embraces a more radical approach, calling for immediate equality in all areas of American life. -
NAACP
W.E.B. DuBois founds the Niagara movement, a forerunner to the NAACP. The movement is formed in part as a protest to Booker T. Washington's policy of accommodation to white society; the Niagara movement embraces a more radical approach, calling for immediate equality in all areas of American life. -
Universal Negro Improvement Association
Marcus Garvey establishes the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), an influential black nationalist organization "to promote the spirit of race pride" and create a sense of worldwide unity among blacks. UNIA became the largest mass movement of black people in American history. -
Harlem Renaissance
In the 1920s, the great migration of blacks from the rural South to the urban North sparked an African American cultural renaissance that took its name from the New York City neighborhood of Harlem but became a widespread movement in cities throughout the North. Also known as the Black Renaissance or the New Negro Movement, the Harlem Renaissance marked the first time that mainstream publishers and critics turned their attention seriously to African–American literature, music, art and politics. -
Jackie Robinson
As a sharecropper’s son from Georgia, Jackie joined the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League in 1945, after a stint in the U.S. Army (he earned an honorable discharge after facing a court–martial for refusing to move to the back of a segregated bus). His play caught the attention of Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Robinson played his first game with the Dodgers on April 15; he led the National League in stolen bases that season, earning Rookie of the Year. -
Brown v. Board of Education
The U.S. Supreme Court delivered its verdict in Brown v. Board of Education, ruling unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the 14th Amendment’s mandate of equal protection of the laws of the U.S. Constitution to any person within its jurisdiction. The landmark verdict reversed the “separate but equal” doctrine the Court had established with Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). -
Rosa Parks
Rosa Parks was riding a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama when the driver told her to give up her seat to a white man. Parks refused, and was arrested for violating the city’s racial segregation ordinances, which mandated that blacks sit in the back of public buses and give up their seats for white riders if the front seats were full. In response to her arrest Montgomery's black community launch a successful year-long bus boycott. Montgomery's buses were desegregated on Dec. 21, 1956. -
March on Washington
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is attended by about 250,000 people, both black and white, the largest demonstration ever seen in the nation's capital. The last leader to appear was the Baptist preacher Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Martin Luther King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. The march built momentum for civil rights legislation -
Selma, Alabama
In early 1965, MLK Jr.’s SCLC made Selma, Alabama, the focus of its efforts to register black voters in the south. State troopers violently attacked peaceful demonstrators in protest led by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., as they try to cross the Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. Fifty marchers are hospitalized on "Bloody Sunday," after police use tear gas, whips, and clubs against them. The march is considered the catalyst for pushing through the voting rights act five months later
