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1954
May 17 In Oliver Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the U.S. Supreme Court
rules that segregated schools are unconstitutional.
July 11 First White
Citizens Council is formed in Indianola, Mississippi.
1955
August 28 Emmett Till, a Chicago
youth visiting relatives in the South, is lynched in Money, Mississippi, after he flirts with a white shopkeeper.
September 21-23 Till's uncle,
Moses Wright, is the first black to testify against a white in a Mississippi murder trial. The murderers are acquitted.
December 1 Rosa Parks is arrested
in Montgomery, Alabama, for violating segregation laws on a city bus.
December 5 A black
boycott of Montgomery buses begins. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., is elected to lead the Montgomery Improvement Association
(MIA).
1956
February-March Autherine
Lucy is the first black student to attend the University of Alabama. After white students riot, she is expelled.
March 12 The Southern Manifesto
condemning the Brown v. Board decision is signed by 102 southern members of the U.S. Congress.
June 11 The National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is banned in Alabama. In Birmingham the Alabama Christian Movement for Human
Rights (ACMHR) is founded, with Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth as president.
November 13 The Supreme
Court rules that Montgomery buses must be integrated.
December 21 Montgomery
buses are integrated; the boycott ends.
1957
January 10-11 The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) emerges from an Atlanta meeting
of southern civil rights leaders, mostly ministers. King becomes its president.
August 29 The Civil Rights Act
of 1957 is passed. It sets up a civil rights commission and strengthens the U.S. Justice Department's authority in voting
rights violations.
September The Little
Rock Nine seek to enter Little Rock Central High School but are kept out by rioting whites. President Dwight D. Eisenhower
sends in the National Guard to enforce the school's integration.
1960
February 1 Four black college students ask for service at
a whites-only F. W. Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, sparking the sit-in movement, which rapidly spreads
to all the southern states.
February-May
Nashville students stage the biggest, best-organized sit-in demonstrations and eventually win legal integration of
lunch counters throughout the city.
April
15-17 The Temporary Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (later SNCC) is established at an SCLC meeting
in Raleigh, North Carolina.
October
19-27 Jailed for an Atlanta sit-in, King is aided by presidential candidate John F. 1960
February
1 Four black college students ask for service at a whites-only F. W. Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro,
North Carolina, sparking the sit-in movement, which rapidly spreads to all the southern states.
February-May
Nashville students stage the biggest, best-organized sit-in demonstrations and eventually win legal integration of
lunch counters throughout the city.
April
15-17 The Temporary Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (later SNCC) is established at an SCLC meeting
in Raleigh, North Carolina.
October
19-27 Jailed for an Atlanta sit-in, King is aided by presidential candidate John F. Kennedy; King's support
for Kennedy is a factor in his election.
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The Black American Civil Rights Movement Multimedia Digital Library
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Chronology of Events
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The following time line highlights key events leading up to the Black American Civil Rights Movement
(timeline courtesy of www.abbeville.com)
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Martin Luther King, Jr, deliveres his "I Have A Dream" speech
on the steps at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963.
| Martin Luther King, Jr. |
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| photo courtesy of www.darkwing.uoregon.edu |
1961
May 4 The first "Freedom
Riders" leave Washington, D.C., aboard two buses in an attempt to desegregate southern bus terminals.
May 14 Freedom Riders
are beaten by mobs outside Anniston, Alabama, and at the Anniston and Birmingham Trailways terminals.
May 20 Freedom Riders
are beaten by a mob at a Montgomery bus terminal. Federal marshals are sent in.
May 24-26 Freedom
Riders travel from Montgomery to Jackson, Mississippi, escorted by National Guardsmen. In Jackson they are arrested and sent
to jail.
July
In McComb, Mississippi, near the Louisiana border, Robert Moses establishes the first SNCC voter-registration outpost,
a model for future efforts.
August
Albany, Georgia, is chosen by a SNCC national conference to be the site of an intensive antidiscrimination and voting
rights drive.
November
The first demonstrations are held in Albany, Georgia. A coalition of black organizations, the Albany Movement, is formed.
1962
September
When James Meredith attempts to become the first black to study at the University of Mississippi, rioting ensues, eventually
quashed by federal troops. Meredith attends his first class on October 1.
1963
April 3
Project C is launched in Birmingham. A comprehensive attack on the city's discriminatory practices, it is meant to
have national repercussions.
April 12
King is arrested in Birmingham for violating an injunction against demonstrations.
May 2-7 Phase III
of Project C puts thousands of trained protesters on Birmingham's streets. The Commissioner of Public Safety, Bull Connor,
stages brutal attacks with police dogs and water cannons, which become an international scandal.
May 10 After King
and Shuttlesworth announce an accord with white city leaders in Birmingham, King's motel room is bombed; black rioting ensues.
June 11
Governor George Wallace stages his "stand in the schoolhouse door," an unsuccessful gesture to block integration of
the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. President Kennedy makes an impassioned televised civil rights speech.
June 12 Mississippi
NAACP leader Medgar Evers is murdered outside his Jackson home by Byron de la Beckwith, who is not convicted until his third
trial, in 1994.
August 28
The March on Washington brings 200,000- 500,000 demonstrators together for the biggest protest assembly in the United
States to date.
September 15
Four black schoolgirls are murdered in the dynamiting of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.
1964
June
The Mississippi Freedom Summer Project brings hundreds of volunteers into the state to aid voter-registration campaigns
and set up "freedom schools."
June
21 Three Freedom Summer workers are murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi. Attorney General Robert Kennedy
and President Lyndon B. Johnson order an intensive search for their bodies and their assailants.
July 2
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is passed, outlaw- ing discrimination in voting, public accommodations, and employment.
August 4
The bodies of the three murdered civil rights workers are found. Twenty men, some of them police, are eventually charged with
conspiracy to murder James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner; seven are convicted.
August 22-26
The Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City is attended by delegates of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic
Party (MFDP), who attempt to replace the all-white regular delegation. After Fannie Lou Hamer's televised speech, President
Johnson proposes a compromise seating, which is rejected by the MFDP.
December 10
King is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
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1965
January-February
A full-scale voter-registration drive begins in Selma, Alabama. Hundreds of demonstrators are arrested by Sheriff Jim
Clark.
February 18
In Marion, near Selma, protester Jimmie Lee Jackson is shot dead by a state trooper.
February 21 Malcolm
X is assassinated by Black Muslim hitmen at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.
March 7 On "Bloody
Sunday" the first Selma march is beaten back at Edmund Pettus Bridge by state troopers and Sheriff Clark's deputies. The nation
is outraged by photographs and film of the attack. Washington responds by expediting voting rights legislation. King calls
for clergymen from across the nation to join a second march.
March 9
On "Turnaround Tuesday," King leads the second Selma march over the Pettus Bridge and then right back to Selma. That
evening Rev. James Reeb is clubbed to death.
March 21-25
Under the protection of a federalized National Guard, the Selma to Montgomery march proceeds to the state capitol,
where a rally of 50,000 people is held.
August 6
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is signed into law. It bans voter examinations and provides for federal registrars to
be sent to recalcitrant counties. It prompts a huge rise in black registration.
August 11-16 Rioting
breaks out in the Los Angeles ghetto of Watts, the most devastating racial uprising in the United States to date.
1966
January The SCLC
joins a campaign for better housing and schooling in Chicago.
June 6-26
James Meredith is wounded by a sniper on the second day of his solo March Against Fear. Leaders of SNCC, CORE, and
the SCLC continue the 220-mile march from Memphis to Jackson. The notion of "Black Power" comes to prominence.
July 10 King leads
a large march to Chicago's city hall.
July 12-15
As rioting breaks out in Chicago, King negotiates with Mayor Richard Daley.
August Marchers in
outlying Chicago neighborhoods are attacked by "White Power" mobs. A compromise accord is signed by black leaders and white
politicians.
October
The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense is founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California.
1967
April 4
King condemns the U.S. war in Vietnam in a speech at New York's Riverside Church.
July Large-scale
rioting in Newark, Detroit, and other cities. The worst outbreak of urban rebellions in U.S. history leaves scores dead, hundreds
wounded, thousands arrested, and millions of dollars' worth of property destroyed.
August 25 FBI director
J. Edgar Hoover officially targets civil rights groups for his Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) of surveillance and
neutralization.
December 4
King announces his plan to bring thousands of poor people of all races to Washington, D.C., to press for jobs and income.
1968
March 28
King leads a march in support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis. After youths at the rear of the march turn
violent, King vows to return for another, more peaceful march.
April 4
King is assassinated by a white sniper on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. Black rioting erupts in more
than one hundred cities.
April-June
Led by the new head of the SCLC, Ralph Abernathy, the Poor People's Campaign erects Resurrection City near the Lincoln
Memorial in Washington, D.C. About twenty-five hundred protesters mostly African American, Hispanic, and Native American take
up residence in tents and shacks. They demonstrate to little effect; the last of the demonstrators are evicted by the police
and the National Guard on June 24. (time line
courtesy of: http://www.abbeville.com/civilrights/chronology.asp)
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