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Emmett Till
14-year old African American boy was kidnapped, beaten, and shot by two white men for reportedly flirting with a white women cashier at a grocery store. The white men were tried for murder, but were acquitted. The open casket funeral and the murder instigated the Civil Right Movement. -
Montgomery Bus Boycott
Rosa Parks, an African American Women, refused to yield her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus that she was arrested with a fine. Black people in Montgomery boycotted the Montgomery bus for 381 days, and then the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the bus system to be integrated. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the leader of the boycott. -
Little Rock 9
Nine black students enrolled at a formerly all-white high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, after the U.S. Supreme Court declared desegregation in public schools "with all deliberate speed" in the case of Brown VS Board of Education. The governor of Arkansas barred the nine students from entering with state National Guards, but President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent federal troops to escort the nine students to the school. -
Youth Movement: SNCC and Sit-Ins
In the early 1960 Greensboro, North Carolina, African-American students at a segregated lunch counter sparked a sit-in (non-violent) movement that soon spread to college towns in the region. Unlike the Sit-ins, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a radical activist group, gave younger blacks more of a voice in the civil rights movement. -
Freedom Riders
13 African American and white civil rights activists, recruited by Congress of Racial Equality(CORE), went on Freedom Rides, a series of bus trips through the south to protest segregation in interstate bus terminals. They faced violence from white protesters for the protest and using white-only facilities, but several hundreds of Freedom Riders joined their cause over the next few months. On September 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission prohibited segregation in bus and trains in America. -
James Meredith and Ole Miss
James Meredith was rejected admission to the University of Mississippi several times, but enrolled to the university after the U.S. Supreme Court favored Meredith with help from NAACP. A riot broke out on the Ole Miss campus when James attempted to enroll at the university with two dead, hundreds wounded and arrested after Kennedy called out national guardsmen. -
Project C and Children's March
Project C, also known as The Birmingham Campaign, was a series of lunch counter sit-ins, marches on City Hall and boycotts on downtown merchants to protest segregation laws in Birmingham, Alabama. In May 1963, hundreds of children,some as young as six years old, faced police dogs, fire hoses and arrest, to march against segregation in the city. -
The Philosophy of Non-Violence: Letters From a Birmingham Jail
Martin Luther King, imprisoned at the Birmingham Jail for protesting nonviolently against segregation at the Birmingham Campaign, wrote a letter to defend nonviolent defense in response to eight Birmingham clergy who criticized the demonstration and King. -
March on Washington
A political rally known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, to change the political and social challenges that the African American faced in the United States. Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech, "I have a dream", called for racial equality and justice in the March. -
Freedom Summer
In summer 1964, civil rights groups including SNCC and CORE organized a voter registration drive, known as the Mississippi Summer Project, or Freedom Summer, to expand black voting in Mississippi. The Freedom Summer faced violence from the white population of Mississippi including the KKK, police, and the state. -
Civil Rights Act
The Civil Rights Act was proposed by JFK. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 signed by Lyndon B. Johnson ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. -
Malcolm X
Malcolm X, an outspoken public activist voice of the Black Muslim faith, challenged the mainstream civil rights movement and the nonviolent pursuit of integration championed by Martin Luther King Jr. He urged to defend against white aggression “by any means necessary.” After his death in 1965, his autobiography popularized his ideas, laying the foundation for black power movement -
Selma to Montgomery March
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) marched from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery, capital of Alabama, to register black voters in the South. The movement and participation of Martin Luther King raised awareness of the challenges of black voters and helped pass the Voting Rights Act later that year. -
Voting Rights Act
The Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson overcame legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote under the 15th Amendment (1870) to the Constitution of the United States
