Civil rihts

Civil Rights Timeline

  • Brown v Board Of Education

    Brown v Board Of Education
    Brown v. Board of Education, was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that U.S. state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools are unconstitutional
  • White Citizens Council

    The Citizens' Councils were an associated network of white supremacist, extreme right organizations in the United States, concentrated in the South. The first was formed on July 11, 1954.
  • Brown v Board of Education II

    Brown v Board of Education II
    Board of Education II was a Supreme Court case decided in 1955. The year before, the Supreme Court had decided Brown v. Board of Education, which made racial segregation in schools illegal.
  • Lynching of Emmett Till

    Lynching of Emmett Till
    Emmett Louis Till was a 14-year-old African American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store.
  • Rosa Parks Arrested

    Rosa Parks Arrested
    Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. This single act of nonviolent resistance sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, an eleven-month struggle to desegregate the city's buses.
  • Montgomery Bus Boycott

    Montgomery Bus Boycott
    The Montgomery bus boycott was a political and social protest campaign against the policy of racial segregation on the public transit system of Montgomery, Alabama. It was a seminal event in the civil rights movement.
  • MLK House Bombing

    MLK House Bombing
    On September 30, 1956, Martin Luther King Jr.'s house was bombed by segregationists in retaliation for the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
  • Black Panthers Formed

    Black Panthers Formed
    The Black Panther Party, originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was a revolutionary political organization founded by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton in October 1966 in Oakland, California.
  • Bombing of Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth

    Bombing of Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth
    On December 25, 1956, Ku Klux Klan members in Alabama bombed the home of civil rights activist Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. Shuttlesworth was home at the time of the bombing with his family and two members of Bethel Baptist Church, where he served as pastor.
  • SCLC Founded

    SCLC Founded
    The Southern Christian Leadership Conference is an African-American civil rights organization. SCLC, which is closely associated with its first president, Martin Luther King Jr., had a large role in the American civil rights movement.
  • Eisenhower sends in Federal Troops

    President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered troops from the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to restore order and to protect the students. After a single year of integration, Governor Faubus closed the Little Rock public high schools to avoid further integration
  • SNCC Formed

    SNCC Formed
    The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was the principal channel of student commitment in the United States to the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s.
  • Greensboro sit ins

    Greensboro sit ins
    The Greensboro sit-in was a civil rights protest that started in 1960, when young African American students staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave after being denied service.
  • Freedom Rides

    Freedom Rides
    Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated southern United States in 1961 and subsequent years to challenge the non-enforcement of the supreme court.
  • White mob attacks federal marshals in Montgomery

    The violence toward the Freedom Riders was not quelled—rather, the police abandoned the Greyhound bus just before it arrived at the Montgomery, Alabama, terminal, where a white mob attacked the riders with baseball bats and clubs as they disembarked.
  • Albany Georgia “failure”

    Although the Albany Movement is deemed by some as a failure due to its unsuccessful attempt at desegregating public spaces in Southwest Georgia, those most directly involved in the Movement tend to disagree, citing it as a beneficial lesson in strategy and tactics for the leaders of the civil rights movement
  • Bailey v Patterson

    Bailey v Patterson
    the court opined that no State can require or order racial
    segregation on “interstate or intrastate” transportation services
  • MLK goes to a Birmingham jail

    MLK goes to a Birmingham jail
    Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested and sent to jail because he and others were protesting the treatment of blacks in Birmingham, Alabama.
  • Assassination Of Medgar Evers

    Assassination Of Medgar Evers
    In the driveway outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, African American civil rights leader Medgar Evers is shot to death by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith. During World War II, Evers volunteered for the U.S. Army and participated in the Normandy invasion.
  • Equal Pay Act

    Equal Pay Act
    Equal Pay Act. The Equal Pay Act requires that men and women be given equal pay for equal work in the same establishment. The jobs need not be identical, but they must be substantially equal.
  • Kennedy sends in Federal Troops

    On June 10, 1963, President John F. Kennedy federalized National Guard troops and deployed them to the University of Alabama to force its desegregation. The next day, Governor Wallace yielded to the federal pressure, and two African American students—Vivian Malone and James A.
  • Assassination of JFK

    Assassination of JFK
    John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was assassinated on November 22, 1963, while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza. Kennedy was riding with his wife Jacqueline, Texas Governor John Connally, and Connally's wife Nellie when he was fatally shot by former U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald firing in ambush from a nearby building.
  • March On Washington

    March On Washington
    The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the March on Washington, or The Great March on Washington, was held in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, August 28, 1963. The purpose of the march was to advocate for the civil and economic rights of African Americans.
  • Bombing of a church in Birmingham

    Bombing of a church in Birmingham
    The Birmingham church bombing occurred on September 15, 1963, when a bomb exploded before Sunday morning services at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama—a church with a predominantly black congregation that also served as a meeting place for civil rights leaders.
  • Freedom Summer

    Freedom Summer
    Freedom Summer, or the Mississippi Summer Project, was a volunteer campaign in the United States launched in June 1964 to attempt to register as many African-American voters as possible in Mississippi.
  • XXIV (24th) Amendment

    XXIV (24th) Amendment
    The Twenty-fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution prohibits both Congress and the states from conditioning the right to vote in federal elections on payment of a poll tax or other types of tax.
  • Murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner

    Murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner
    They were discovered on August 4, 1964, 44 days after their murder, underneath an earthen dam on Burrage's farm. Schwerner and Goodman had each been shot once in the heart; Chaney, a black man, had been severely beaten, castrated and shot three times.
  • Civil Rights Act of 1964

    Civil Rights Act of 1964
    The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a landmark civil rights and labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
  • Assassination Of Malcom X

    Assassination Of Malcom X
    In New York City, Malcolm X, an African American nationalist, and religious leader, is assassinated by rival Black Muslims while addressing his Organization of Afro-American Unity at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights.
  • Selma to Montgomery March

    Selma to Montgomery March
    Southern state legislatures had passed and maintained a series of discriminatory requirements and practices that had disenfranchised most of the millions of African Americans across the South
  • Voting Rights Act of 1965

    Voting Rights Act of 1965
    The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark piece of federal legislation in the United States that prohibits racial discrimination in voting.
  • Loving v Virginia

    Loving v Virginia
    Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that struck down laws banning interracial marriage as violations of the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
  • Minneapolis Riots

    Minneapolis Riots
    The racial tensions that led to violent demonstrations around the country in the summer of 1967 spread to the city's north side. Young blacks rebelled against an unjust power structure and set fire to storefronts. Hundreds of National Guard troops were deployed to the area.
  • Detroit Riots

    Detroit Riots
    The 1967 Detroit Riot, also known as the 12th Street Riot, was the bloodiest incident in the "Long, hot summer of 1967". Composed mainly of confrontations between black residents and the Detroit Police Department, it began in the early morning hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967, in Detroit, Michigan.
  • Assassination Of MLK

    Assassination Of MLK
    Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. An hour later, he was declared dead. For nearly 50 years, the federal government has maintained that James Earl Ray was the gunman who assassinated King that day.
  • Assassination of RFK

    Assassination of RFK
    Around 12:15 a.m. on June 5, 1968, Sirhan fired a. 22 caliber Iver-Johnson Cadet revolver at United States Senator Robert Kennedy and the crowd surrounding him in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after Kennedy had finished addressing supporters in the hotel's main ballroom.