Timeline of Desegregation and Civil Rights

Brown v. Board of Education

Timeline of Desegregation and
Civil Rights

c. 1500	Spain imports enslaved Africans to the New World to replace enslaved American indians who escaped or died from European diseases.
1619	Twenty Africans are sold into servitude in Jamestown, VA . With institutionalized slavery comes branding of the enslaved.
1793	Congress passes the Fugitive Slave Act, making it a crime to harbor African Americans who have escaped enslavement.
1831	Nat Turner and 60 followers kill 55 whites in Virginia--the most serious uprising by enslaved African Americans in U.S. history. Turner and 16 followrers are hanged.
1843	Sojourner Truth (born Isabella Bomefree; freed from slavery in New York, 1827) becomes an itinerant antislavery orator and singer.
1847	Fredericak Douglass ' publication of the North Star, an antislavery newspaper, signals his break with the more radical white abolitionist William Lloyd Arrison.
1849	Supreme Court's Roberts v. The City of Boston decision upholding segregated schools provides precedent for Plessy v. Ferguson
1857	Supreme Court's Dred Scott v. Sandford decision upholds slavery in the territories. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney writes that an enslaved person is property and that only whites are U.S. citizens.
1863	President Abraham Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation . Mobs in the New York City Draft Riots kill dozens of African Americans.
1865 - 1869	Congress passes 13th, 14th, 15th amendments to the Constitution , outlawing slavery, ensuring equal protection of the laws, and banning state restrictions on voting based on race.
1875	Civil Rights Act promises to citizens of every race...regardless of any previous condition of servitude equal access to public accomodations. It is nullified by the Supreme Court in 1883.
1881	Booker T. Washington founds Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama.
1896	Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson decision establishes the separate but equal doctrine
1903	In The Souls of Black Folk , W.E.B. DuBois breaks with Booker T. Washington over the latter's emphasis on graduation and vocational education. DuBois wants the college educated Talented Tenth to lead the masses of the Negro people to political and social equality.
1909	DuBois' Niagara Movement joins with whites outraged by the Springfield Riot of 1908 to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Its strategy relies on legal action, protest, and education.
1934	Charles H. Houston is named Chief Counsel to NAACP. He develops a legal strategy for achieving equality in education.
1942	Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sponsors nonviolent sit-ins at northern segregated public facilities.
1948	President Harry Truman ends segregation in the U.S. Military (Executive Order 9981) [image of Executive Order 9981]
1954	On May 17 the U.S. Supreme Court rules in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation is unconstitutional.
1955	Rosa Parks , seamstress and secretary of the Montgomery, AL chapter of the NAACP, refuses to giver her bus seat to a white passenger. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., helps organize a successful year-long bus boycott in Alabama. See also: * Rosa Parks: A 50th Anniversary
1960	Four African American students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College launch the southern sit-in movement at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, NC.
1961	CORE organizes Freedom Rides , in which student volunteers take bus trips to test new laws desegregating bus terminals. They are met with brutal resistance in Alabama. See also: * FreedomRides: Recollections by David Fankhauser * Civil Rights Movement, 1955-65: Freedom Rides
1963	Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth and Rev. Martin Luther Knig, Jr. and Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference lead anti-segregation marches in Birmingham, AL. Police Commissioner "Bull" Connor [ photos of Bull Connor ] uses fire hoses and dogs against student marchers, hundreds of whom are jailed. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail , Martin Luther King, Jr., defends direct action to clergymen counseling patience. "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed". Demonstrators estimated at 250,000 people March on Washington , demanding passage of the Civil Rights Act .
1964	President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawing racial discrimination in employment, voting, and the use of public facilities.
1965	The nation is appalled by images of police and state troopers beating and kicking participants in the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march [ Photos of march ]. Soon after, Congress passes the Voting Rights Act , which nullifies state and local laws hindering voting by African Americans.
Timeline source: Brown v. Board of Education. Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 2003. (pamphlet) call number: I 29.6/6: B 81

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