BLACK HISTORY TIMELINE SNAPSHOT

This week, the timeline snapshot focuses on the 1950's through the 1970s including the Civil Rights era. This is a short 2-5 minute read with links to learn more.

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Civil Rights Era

1954

In 1954, in the  Brown v. Board of Education, the supreme court ruled that segregation was unconstitutional and schools would have to integrate.

1955

Rosa Parks starts the Montgomery Bus Boycott when she refuses to give up her seat for a white passenger in Alabama (the boycott lasts a year). This launches the civil rights movement in the United States which aims to end racial segregation and remove the legal barriers to voting and education for African Americans.

1957

President Eisenhower calls in federal troops and the National Guard to make sure that nine black students (“Little Rock Nine”) in Little Rock, Arkansas, can get past bigoted crowds which oppose them attending the formerly all-white high school. In 1954 the US Supreme Court had outlawed segregation in public education in a landmark case (Brown v. Board of Education). Southern Christian Leadership Conference set up by Martin Luther King and others. Becomes a leading force in the civil rights movement.

1959

A TV documentary called The Hate That Hate Produced raises the profile of the Nation of Islam, introducing a broader audience to its brand of black nationalism. Malcolm X is featured in the documentary and later becomes one of the Nation’s most prominent members.

1960

On February 1, 1960, four Black college students from Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at the lunch counter in a local branch of Woolworth’s and ordered coffee. Refused service due to the counter’s "whites-only" policy, they stayed put until the store closed, then returned the next day with other students. Heavily covered by the news media, the Greensboro sit-ins sparked a movement that spread quickly to college towns throughout the South and into the North, as young Black and white people engaged in various forms of peaceful protest against segregation in libraries, on beaches, in hotels and other establishments. Their actions made an immediate impact, forcing Woolworth’s—among other establishments—to change their segregationist policies.

To capitalize on the sit-in movement’s increasing momentum, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 1960. 

April-May 1963

Images of non- violent protestors being attacked by the police in Birmingham, Alabama, are caught on camera and shock the world.

August 1963

Martin Luther King, Jr. delivers his landmark “I Have a Dream” speech to more than 250,000 people — both black and white—who participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. This was the largest demonstration in the history of the nation’s capital and the most significant display of the civil rights movement’s growing strength.

READ MORE: 7 Things You May Not Know About MLK’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech

September 1963

Bomb attack on a black church in Birmingham kills four girls.

July 1964

The Civil Rights Act is enacted, making it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin.

August 1964

James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner (one black man and two white men), who had been working to see that black people could vote in Mississippi, are murdered. Evidence suggests the Ku Klux Klan, an extreme white supremacist organisation, is responsible.

October 1964

Martin Luther King is awarded the Nobel peace prize.

February 1965

Malcolm X is assassinated.

March 1965

Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) made Selma, Alabama, the focus of its efforts to register Black voters in the South. Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, was a notorious opponent of desegregation, and the local county sheriff had led a steadfast opposition to Black voter registration drives: Only 2 percent of Selma’s eligible Black voters had managed to register. In February, an Alabama state trooper shot a young African American demonstrator in nearby Marion, and the SCLC announced a massive protest march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery.

Marchers were attacked by state troopers wielding whips, nightsticks and tear gas. The brutal scene was captured on television, enraging many Americans and drawing civil rights and religious leaders of all faiths to Selma in protest.

August 1965

Passing of the Voting Rights Act makes it easier for black people to vote.

“Slavery was gone but Jim Crow was alive. Almost all southern African Americans were shut out of the ballot box and the political power it could yield,” wrote Edward E Baptist in The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 attempted to correct this, prohibiting racial discrimination in voting and placing restrictions on a number of southern states if they tried to change voting rights laws. Those restrictions were overturned in a 2013 supreme court ruling.

Some of the worst rioting explodes in Watts, leaving 34 people dead, 3,500 arrested, and property damage of about $225m.

June 1966

After the heady rush of the civil rights movement’s first years, anger and frustration was increasing among many African Americans, who saw clearly that true equality—social, economic and political—still eluded them. The leader of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, Stokely Carmichael  (later known as Kwame Ture), begins to advocate “black power” as an organizing principle.

October 1966

The formation of the  Black Panther Party by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in California. Martin Luther King initiates Poor People’s Campaign to unite people of all races.

Summer 1967

There are 40 riots and 100 other disturbances across the United States, most notably in Newark and Detroit. The first African-American Supreme Court judge, Thurgood Marshall, is elected.

Interracial relationships between black and white people are illegal in 16 states until the Supreme Court rules in the Loving v Virginia case that it is unconstitutional to prevent such unions.

4 April 1968

Martin Luther King is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Inner cities across America explode: as many as 125 cities experience riots.

November 1968

Shirley Chisholm is the first African-American woman elected to Congress, taking office in January 1969.

1972

Affirmative action to redress racial discrimination is given a legal basis with the passing of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act.

1973

Tom Bradley is elected the first black mayor of Los Angeles.

1976

Negro History Week, created in 1926, becomes Black History Month.

BLACK HISTORY IN TWO MINUTES

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School Integration

The landmark case Brown v. Board of Education declared that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. However, for most… VIEW

The Civil Rights Movement

The civil rights movement was an organized effort where African-Americans united and rallied to put black progressiveness at the forefront… VIEW

Black Power

In 1965, one of the last traceable remnants of Jim Crow ideology were thought to be taken off the books with the passage of the Voting… VIEW