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Brown v Board of Education
On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. The decision effectively overturned the “separate but equal” ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which had allowed Jim Crow laws that mandated separate public facilities for white and Black Americans to prevail throughout the South during the first half of the 20th century. -
Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott
On December 1, 1955, African American civil rights activist Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a public bus to a white passenger. Her subsequent arrest initiated a sustained bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. The protest began on December 5, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., then a young local pastor, and was so successful that it was extended indefinitely. -
The Little Rock Nine and the Little Rock Central High School Integration
In September 1957 nine African American students attended their first day at Little Rock Central High School, whose entire student population had until that point been white. The Little Rock Nine, as they came to be called, encountered a large white mob and soldiers from the Arkansas National Guard, sent by Arkansas Gov. Orval Eugene Faubus blocking the entrance of the school. For the next 18 days Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Gov. Faubus, and Little Rock’s mayor, Woodrow Mann, discussed situation -
Ruby Bridges and the New Orleans School Integration
On November 14, 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges was escorted to her first day at the previously all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans by four armed federal marshals. They were met with angry mobs shouting their disapproval, and, throughout the day, parents marched in to remove their children from the school as a protest to desegregation. -
The Greensboro Four and the Sit-In Movement
On February 1, 1960, a group of four African American students from the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina (now North Carolina A&T State University), a historically Black college, began a sit-in movement in downtown Greensboro. After making purchases at the F.W. Woolworth department store, they sat at the “whites only” lunch counter. They were refused service and eventually asked to leave. -
Freedom Rides
The Freedom Rides began on May 4, 1961, with a group of seven African Americans and six white people who boarded two buses bound for New Orleans. Testing the Supreme Court’s ruling on the case Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which extended an earlier ruling banning segregated interstate bus travel (1946) to include bus terminals and restrooms, the Freedom Riders used facilities for the opposite race as their buses made stops along the way. -
March on Washington
The demonstrations of 1963 culminated with the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28 to protest civil rights abuses and employment discrimination. A crowd of about 250,000 individuals gathered peacefully on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. -
Birmingham Demonstrations
In the spring of 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the SCLC launched a campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, with local Pastor Fred Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights to undermine the city’s system of racial segregation. The campaign began on April 3, 1963, with sit-ins, economic boycotts, mass protests, and marches on City Hall. -
Civil Rights Act
On July 2, 1964, Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson, signed the Civil Rights Act into law, a stronger version of what his predecessor, President Kennedy, had proposed the previous summer before his assassination in November 1963. -
Assassination of Malcolm X
On February 21, 1965, the prominent Black leader Malcolm X was assassinated while lecturing at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, New York. An eloquent orator, Malcolm X spoke out on the civil rights movement, demanding it move beyond civil rights to human rights, and argued that the solution to racial problems was in orthodox Islam.