Civil Rights Movement

1947 – Jackie Robinson breaks the color barrier in Major League Baseball when he signs with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

1948 – President Truman issues an executive order to desegregate the military.

1954 – In the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Supreme Court overturns the “separate but equal” clause and orders the desegregation of public schools “with all deliberate speed.”

1955 – Emmett Till, a 14 year old African American from Chicago visiting relatives in Mississippi is kidnapped and brutally murdered after whistling at a white woman. Despite ample evidence, his murderers were acquitted.

Emmett Till’s mother wanted the world to see what had been done to her son. She wanted her son to have an open casket at his funeral. THIS NEXT SLIDE IS GRAPHIC!!

1955 – Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, AL. This led to …

… the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Many point to this as the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement.

1957 – 9 students attempt to integrate Little Rock, Arkansas’ Central High School. A white mob surrounds the school and prevents the Little Rock Nine from entering the school.

President Eisenhower sends the 101 st Airborne to escort the black students to school.

1960 – African American college students stage sit-ins at lunch counters to protest segregation in public accommodations.

1961 – The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) sponsor the “Freedom Rides” to attempt to force desegregation of interstate travel … … but were greeted by white mobs with violence.

1963 – Martin Luther King, Jr., writes Letters from a Birmingham Jail, an open letter explaining the merits of civil disobedience. Among the more famous lines from the letter: “… one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

1963 – A. Phillip Randolph organizes a March on Washington to put pressure on the Kennedy Administration to support civil rights issues in the South.

The keynote speaker at this large rally was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

1964 – SNCC organized an effort to register African American voters in Mississippi in the summer of ‘64. Some of the organizers of “Freedom Summer” went missing. Their dead bodies were later found in an earthen dam.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a landmark piece of legislation signed by Lyndon Johnson that banned discrimination in “public accommodations.”

1965 – Non-violent marchers are brutally beaten by police in Selma, Alabama. After outrage swelled throughout the country, LBJ addressed the nation, saying that ‘‘Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome’’

1965 – Lyndon Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlaws discriminatory practices (like literacy tests) in registering voters.

1965 – Malcolm X is assassinated in Harlem. He had been a prominent and controversial member of the Nation of Islam before breaking ties with that organization. Malcolm X had preached black supremacy and advocated that blacks should obtain their rights “by any means necessary.”

1966 – Originally an integrationist, SNCC president Stokely Carmichael begins advocating for “Black Power.”

1968 – Martin Luther King, Jr, is assassinated in Memphis, TN by James Earl Ray. This sparked riots throughout the country.