Events
The Events browse is an access feature for collections in CRDL. For a more complete civil rights timeline, visit the Teachers Domain.
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- 1954
- Brown versus Board of Education
The U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education was a watershed event in the history of the United States.
- Brown versus Board of Education
- 1955
- Emmett Till murder
On August 28, 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was kidnapped and murdered in Money, Mississippi, galvanizing support for racial reform in the South.
- Montgomery Bus Boycott
Local authorities in Montgomery, Alabama, arrested Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, when she refused to vacate her seat in the white section of a city bus on December 1, 1955.
- Emmett Till murder
- 1956
- Montgomery Bus Boycott
Local authorities in Montgomery, Alabama, arrested Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, when she refused to vacate her seat in the white section of a city bus on December 1, 1955.
- Montgomery Bus Boycott
- 1957
- Civil Rights Act of 1957
On September 9, 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
- Highlander Folk School 25th Anniversary
Between 1932 and 1962, the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, provided a valuable training ground for two generations of southern labor organizers and Civil Rights activists.
- Little Rock Central High School Integration
The desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, gained national attention on September 3, 1957, when Governor Orval Faubus mobilized the Arkansas National Guard in an effort to prevent nine African American students from integrating the high school.
- Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, Washington, D.C.
The Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington for Freedom took place on May 17, 1957, when a crowd of over thirty thousand nonviolent demonstrators, from more than thirty states, gathered at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. to commemorate the third anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling.
- Civil Rights Act of 1957
- 1958
- Temple Bombing (Atlanta, Ga.)
In the early hours of October 12, 1958, fifty sticks of dynamite exploded in a recessed entranceway at the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation, Atlanta's oldest and most prominent synagogue, more commonly known as "the Temple."
- Temple Bombing (Atlanta, Ga.)
- 1960
- New Orleans school integration
Two years following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Federal District Court Judge, J. Skelly Wright, ordered the Orleans Parish School Board to design an effective plan for the desegregation of New Orleans' public schools.
- Sit-ins: Atlanta, Ga.
In March 1960, students representing Atlanta's six historically black colleges organized a series of sit-ins at area lunch counters to protest the city's legally sanctioned segregation.
- Sit-ins: Greensboro, N.C.
On February 1, 1960 four North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College students entered the F. W. Woolworth Co. department store in Greensboro, North Carolina and staged a sit-in at the store's segregated lunch counter.
- Sit-ins: Nashville, Tenn.
The Nashville sit-in movement is widely regarded as one of the most successful and sustained student-directed sit-in campaigns of the Civil Rights movement.
- New Orleans school integration
- 1961
- Albany Movement
In November 1961, residents of Albany, Georgia, launched an ambitious campaign to eliminate segregation in all facets of local life.
- Freedom Rides
On May 4, 1961, an interracial group of student activists under the auspices of the Congress of Racial Equality departed Washington D.C. by bus to test local compliance throughout the Deep South with two Supreme Court rulings banning segregated accommodations on interstate buses and in bus terminals that served interstate routes.
- Georgia Tech Integration
To avoid the civil unrest that attended the University of Georgia's court-ordered desegregation, officials at Georgia Tech began plotting an integration strategy in January 1961.
- University of Georgia Integration
On January 6, 1961, federal district court Judge W. A. Bootle ordered the immediate admission of Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter to the University of Georgia, ending 160 years of segregation at the school.
- Albany Movement
- 1962
- Albany Movement
In November 1961, residents of Albany, Georgia, launched an ambitious campaign to eliminate segregation in all facets of local life.
- Augusta Movement
In March 1960, students from Augusta's historically black Paine College initiated the direct action phase of the city's Civil Rights movement when they organized sit-ins at area department stores.
- NAACP convention in Atlanta
In July 1962, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People held its annual convention in Atlanta.
- Ole Miss Integration
On September 30, 1962, riots erupted on the campus of the University of Mississippi in Oxford where locals, students, and committed segregationists had gathered to protest the enrollment of James Meredith, a black Air Force veteran attempting to integrate the all-white school.
- Albany Movement
- 1963
- Americus Movement
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) fieldworkers began organizing with black community leaders in Americus soon after their arrival in Sumter County in February 1963.
- Birmingham Bombing (Sixteenth Street Baptist Church)
The bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was one of the deadliest acts of violence to take place during the Civil Rights movement and evoked criticism and outrage from around the world.
- Birmingham Demonstrations
Despite energetic organization on the local level, Birmingham, Alabama remained a largely segregated city in the spring of 1963 when Martin Luther King Jr. and his colleagues at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) launched Project C (for confrontation), an ambitious program that wedded economic pressure and large scale direct action protest to undermine the city's rigid system of segregation.
- John F. Kennedy's assassination
On November 22, 1963 President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while traveling through Dallas, Texas, in a presidential motorcade.
- March on Washington
On August 28, 1963, a quarter of a million Americans from across the United States converged on the nation's capitol in what was to become a defining moment in the Civil Rights movement.
- Sedition Trial, Americus, Ga.
After relocating to Sumter County in February 1963, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee fieldworkers Ralph Allen, Don Harris, and John Perdew launched voter registration and community organizing drives under the aegis of the Southwest Georgia Project.
- University of Alabama Integration
On May 16, 1963, a federal district court in Alabama ordered the University of Alabama to admit African American students Vivien Malone and James Hood during its summer session.
- Americus Movement
- 1964
- Americus Movement
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) fieldworkers began organizing with black community leaders in Americus soon after their arrival in Sumter County in February 1963.
- Civil Rights Act of 1964
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson just a few hours after House approval on July 2, 1964.
- Freedom Summer
During the summer of 1964, hundreds of Northern college students traveled to Mississippi to help register black voters and encourage participation in the Civil Rights movement.
- Heart of Atlanta/Pickrick trial
In 1964, two Atlanta business owners captured national attention when they refused to comply with the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Nobel Prize
In 1964 Martin Luther King, Jr. was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his dynamic leadership of the Civil Rights movement and steadfast commitment to achieving racial justice through nonviolent action.
- New York Race Riots
The New York Race Riots of 1964 were the first in a series of devastating race-related riots that ripped through American cities between 1964 and 1965.
- New York School Boycott
In one of the largest demonstrations of the Civil Rights movement, hundreds of thousands of parents, students and civil rights advocates took part in a citywide boycott of the New York City public school system to demonstrate their support for the full integration of the city's public schools and an end to de facto segregation.
- Americus Movement
- 1965
- Americus Movement
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) fieldworkers began organizing with black community leaders in Americus soon after their arrival in Sumter County in February 1963.
- SCOPE project
On June 14, 1965, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) launched an innovative grassroots organizing campaign, the Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) project. Under the direction of WW II veteran Hosea Williams, SCOPE sought to build upon the momentum of the Medgar Evers led NAACP in Mississippi, 1964 Freedom Summer, as well as the voting rights stuggle that culminated in the Selma-Montgomery March. The project placed nearly five hundred predominantly white college students in nearly one hundred predominantly black rural and urban areas in Southern states, including: Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina to help lead voter registration drives. SCOPE successfully encouraged political activism, reported violations of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act; along with developing political education programs for some of the counties that the campaign served. Its voter registration drives also flourished: SCOPE volunteers, working with local activists and leaders, and SCLC field staff, registered more than 49,000 new African American voters by the project's official end date on August 28, 1965, with about thirty-five SCOPE volutneers taking positions on the SCLC staff with additional activities continuing in 1966.
- Selma-Montgomery March
To protest local resistance to black voter registration in Dallas County, Alabama, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organized a mass march from Selma to Montgomery on March 7, 1965.
- Watts Riots
The Watts Riot, which raged for six days and resulted in more than forty million dollars worth of property damage, was both the largest and costliest urban rebellion of the Civil Rights era.
- Americus Movement
- 1968
- Dr. King's Assassination
On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated by a sniper's bullet while standing on the second-floor balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
- Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike
Longstanding tensions between disgruntled African American sanitation workers and Memphis city officials erupted on February 12, 1968 when nearly one thousand workers refused to report to work demanding higher wages, safer working conditions, and recognition of their union, local 1733 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees.
- Poor People's Campaign
In the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, the fate of his final cause, the Poor People's Campaign, faced an uncertain future.
- Dr. King's Assassination