timeline of the civil rights movement of 1954-1968
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May 17, 1954:
Brown v. Board of Education Topeka case where the Supreme Court bans segregation in all public schools in the United States.
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1955 Aug.
Fourteen-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till is visiting family in Mississippi when he is kidnapped, brutally beaten, shot, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River for allegedly whistling at a white woman
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Dec 1,1955
Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat at the front of the "colored section" of a bus to a white passenger,
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1957 Jan.–Feb
Martin Luther King, Charles K. Steele, and Fred L. Shuttlesworth establish the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
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Sept. 1957
The Little Rock Nine pictured with Daisy Bates, the president of the Arkansas NAACP.
(Little Rock, Ark.) Formerly all-white Central High School learns that integration is easier said than done. Nine black students are blocked from entering the school on the orders of Governor Orval Faubus. President Eisenhower sends federal troops and the National Guard to intervene on behalf of the students, who become known as the "Little Rock Nine."
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1960 Feb. 1
(Greensboro, N.C.) Four black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College begin a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter
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April 1960
(Raleigh, N.C.) The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is founded at Shaw University, providing young blacks with a place in the civil rights movement. The SNCC later grows into a more radical organization, especially under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael (1966–1967).
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1961 May 4
Over the spring and summer, student volunteers begin taking bus trips through the South to test out new laws that prohibit segregation in interstate travel facilities
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1962 Oct. 1
James Meredith
James Meredith becomes the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Violence and riots surrounding the incident cause President Kennedy to send 5,000 federal troops.
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1963 April 16
Martin Luther King is arrested and jailed during anti-segregation protests in Birmingham, Ala.; he writes his seminal "Letter from Birmingham Jail," arguing that individuals have the moral duty to disobey unjust laws.
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May ,1963
During civil rights protests in Birmingham, Ala.
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1963 June 12
(Jackson, Miss.) Mississippi's NAACP field secretary, 37-year-old Medgar Evers, is murdered outside his home.
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1963 Aug. 28
Martin Luther King, Jr. (Washington, D.C.) About 200,000 people join the March on Washington. Congregating at the Lincoln Memorial, participants listen as Martin Luther King delivers his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.
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Sept. 15, 1963
(Birmingham, Ala.) Four young girls (Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins) attending Sunday school are killed when a bomb explodes at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church
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1964 Jan. 23
The 24th Amendment abolishes the poll tax, which originally had been instituted in 11 southern states after Reconstruction to make it difficult for poor blacks to vote.
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Summer ,1964
The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a network of civil rights groups that includes CORE and SNCC, launches a massive effort to register black voters
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July 2, 1964
President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
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Aug. 4, 1964
Country, Miss.) The bodies of three civil-rights workers—two white, one black—are found in an earthen dam
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1965 Feb. 21
Malcolm X
(Harlem, N.Y.) Malcolm X, black nationalist and founder of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, is shot to death
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March 7,1965
(Selma, Ala.) Blacks begin a march to Montgomery in support of voting rights but are stopped at the Pettus Bridge by a police blockade.
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Aug. 10, 1965
Congress passes the Voting Rights Act of 1965
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Aug. 11–17, 1965
(Watts, Calif.) Race riots erupt in a black section of Los Angeles.
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Sept. 24, 1965
Asserting that civil rights laws alone are not enough to remedy discrimination
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1966 Oct.
(Oakland, Calif.) The militant Black Panthers are founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.
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1967 April 19
Stokely Carmichael, a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), coins the phrase "black power" in a speech in Seattle
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civil right movement
