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Who Were the Freedom Riders? | The Civil Rights Movement

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Who Were the Freedom Riders? | The Civil Rights Movement

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How far have African Americans come since the 1960s?

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How far have African Americans come since the 1960s?

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George Floyd: How far have African Americans come since the 1960s?

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How much progress have black people in the US made towards equality since the 1960s?

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Black codes were restrictive laws designed to limit the freedom of African Americans and ensure their availability as a cheap labor force after slavery was abolished during the Civil War. Though the Union victory had given some 4 million enslaved people their freedom, the question of freed Black people's status in the postwar South was still very much unresolved. Under black codes, many states required Black people to sign yearly labor contracts; if they refused, they risked being arrested, fined and forced into unpaid labor. Outrage over black codes helped undermine support for President Andrew Johnson and the Republican Party.

Reconstruction Begins

When President Abraham Lincoln announced the impending passage of the Emancipation Proclamation in early 1863, the stakes of the Civil War shifted dramatically. A Union victory would mean no less than revolution in the South, where the "peculiar institution" of slavery had dominated economic, political and social life in the antebellum years.

In April 1865, as the war drew to a close, Lincoln shocked many by proposing limited suffrage for African Americans in the South. He was assassinated days later, however, and his successor Andrew Johnson would be the one to preside over the beginning of Reconstruction.

Did you know? In the years following Reconstruction, the South reestablished many of the provisions of the black codes in the form of the so-called "Jim Crow laws." These remained firmly in place for almost a century, but were finally abolished with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Johnson, a former senator from Tennessee who had remained loyal to the Union during the war, was a firm supporter of states' rights and believed the federal government had no say in issues such as voting requirements at the state level.

Under his Reconstruction policies, which began in May 1865, the former Confederate states were required to uphold the abolition of slavery (made official by the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution), swear loyalty to the Union and pay off their war debt. Beyond those limitations, the states and their ruling class-traditionally dominated by white planters-were given a relatively free hand in rebuilding their own governments.

Passage of the Black Codes

Even as former enslaved people fought to assert their independence and gain economic autonomy during the earliest years of Reconstruction, white landowners acted to control the labor force through a system similar to the one that had existed during slavery.

To that end, in late 1865, Mississippi and South Carolina enacted the first black codes. Mississippi's law required Black people to have written evidence of employment for the coming year each January; if they left before the end of the contract, they would be forced to forfeit earlier wages and were subject to arrest.

In South Carolina, a law prohibited Black people from holding any occupation other than farmer or servant unless they paid an annual tax of $10 to $100. This provision hit free Black people already living in Charleston and former slave artisans especially hard. In both states, Black people were given heavy penalties for vagrancy, including forced plantation labor in some cases.

Limits on Black Freedom

Under Johnson's Reconstruction policies, nearly all the southern states would enact their own black codes in 1865 and 1866. While the codes granted certain freedoms to African Americans-including the right to buy and own property, marry, make contracts and testify in court (only in cases involving people of their own race)-their primary purpose was to restrict Black peoples' labor and activity.

Some states limited the type of property that Black people could own, while virtually all the former Confederate states passed strict vagrancy and labor contract laws, as well as so-called "anti-enticement" measures designed to punish anyone who offered higher wages to a Black laborer already under contract.

Black people who broke labor contracts were subject to arrest, beating and forced labor, and apprenticeship laws forced many minors (either orphans or those whose parents were deemed unable to support them by a judge) into unpaid labor for white planters.

Passed by a political system in which Black people effectively had no voice, the black codes were enforced by all-white police and state militia forces-often made up of Confederate veterans of the Civil War-across the South.

Impact of the Black Codes

The restrictive nature of the codes and widespread Black resistance to their enforcement enraged many in the North, who argued that the codes violated the fundamental principles of free labor ideology.

After passing the Civil Rights Act (over Johnson's veto), Republicans in Congress effectively took control of Reconstruction. The Reconstruction Act of 1867 required southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment-which granted "equal protection" of the Constitution to former enslaved people-and enact universal male suffrage before they could rejoin the Union.

The 15th Amendment, adopted in 1870, guaranteed that a citizen's right to vote would not be denied "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." During this period of Radical Reconstruction (1867-1877), Black men won election to southern state governments and even to the U.S. Congress.

As indicated by the passage of the black codes, however, white southerners showed a steadfast commitment to ensuring their supremacy and the survival of plantation agriculture in the postwar years. Support for Reconstruction policies waned after the early 1870s, undermined by the violence of white supremacist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan.

By 1877, when the last federal soldiers left the South and Reconstruction drew to a close, Black people had seen little improvement in their economic and social status, and the vigorous efforts of white supremacist forces throughout the region had undone the political gains they had made. Discrimination would continue in America with the rise of Jim Crow laws, but would inspire the civil rights movement to come.

HISTORY Vault: Black History

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Black Codes - Definition, Dates & Jim Crow Laws

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Black codes were restrictive laws designed to limit the freedom of African Americans and ensure their availability as a cheap labor force after slavery was abolished during the Civil War.

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What is AAVE? Where did it come from? How is it used today? All this and more are answered in this installment of the United States of Accents.

By Justine Stephens (February 3, 2020)

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In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, African American Vernacular English, often shortened to AAVE, is "a nonstandard variety of English spoken by some African Americans." Nonstandard is pretty vague, though, in the all-encompassing terms of language. What exactly is so "nonstandard" about this particular dialect of English? Where is it spoken, and by whom? When and how did it become popular? Let's take a closer look.

From The South To The Mouth

AAVE's origins stem from how Black Americans first came to this country over 400 years ago - on slave ships coming primarily from West Africa. Its actual roots are somewhat muddled, however. Like a lot of unknown Black history, it's still argued whether AAVE is simply a variant adapted from the Germanic American English overheard on plantations, or if it's an entirely separate Creole language that evolved from contact between English and several West African languages.

The fact that AAVE shares many structural and pronunciation characteristics with other African-based Creoles around the world makes the Creole Theory intriguing for linguists. That said, AAVE also shares much of its grammar and phonology with rural dialects across the American South.

Out of the beauty of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and '30s came Harlem jive - or simply, it evolved into a fast-talking, exciting lingo that spread with New York's influence. On top of this, linguist William Labov jive. It was an amalgamation of AAVE, Harlem slang, lingo from criminals and Broadway gossip, and studied how racial segregation further pushed the development of AAVE. He found that living in segregated communities (unsurprisingly) made for further divergence from Standard American English over time.

So, What Exactly Is AAVE?

African American Vernacular English is also known as Black English or Black Vernacular English (and historically as "Ebonics," although we'll get to that term later). This dialect has unique phonology, grammar and vocabulary, and these characteristics are conventionalized, meaning that they're used and understood by the wider speech community. That said, you'll also find that accents and some vocabulary in AAVE will vary from New York to New Orleans to Chicago, just as they would for any other geographically based dialects.

Verb Conjugation

The addition, subtraction and replacement of key words, vowels and consonants separate AAVE from Deleting the Standard American English. verbal copula in the present tense - leaving out "is" or "are" - is one of the most distinct characteristics of AAVE. "Sasha going to the store" or "Tyrone working Saturday night" are prime examples of this, and still means the same thing if the "is" were present.

AAVE speakers can take this one step further, and adding a habitual "be" to signify something that is often or usually done. "Tyrone be working Saturday nights" means that Tyrone regularly works on Saturday nights. To show that Tyrone has always worked Saturday nights, you'd say "Tyrone been working Saturday nights."

Verbs are also often uninflected (not changed) for number or person, which means there is no - s suffix in the present-tense third-person singular. So if you want to describe where Tyrone works, you'd drop the final s, saying, "He work at the bar."

Sound Changes

There are some regular sound changes often observed in AAVE, in particular, something called metathesis. Metathesis involves switching around sounds within words. For example, "ask" could be pronounced "aks," or "library" pronounced "libary." TH-fronting is also a prominent feature of African American Vernacular English. For example, "those" and "doze" can sound nearly identical. Another common sound change involves dropping the R when it's not followed by a vowel, which makes AAVE one of many non-rhotic dialects spoken in the USA.

Word Order

Word order in questions is also a distinctive characteristic of AAVE grammar. For example, instead of moving the verb to immediately follow the question word ("Why aren't they coming?"), AAVE speakers often maintain the typical word order of a statement ("Why they ain't coming?").

Sometimes, we AAVE speakers like to add more words than would be considered strictly necessary to get our point across. (Why? Because we be extra, of course.) We'll often use double negatives ("Sasha ain't never at the store") and preterite "had" ("Tyrone had went to work") to get our point across. The expletive "it" is one of my favorite aspects of AAVE: it's simply replacing "there" with "it." "It's a bodega just two blocks away" is how I'd direct someone coming off the NYC subway in my former neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Lexicon

One of the most notable and familiar parts of AAVE is our lexicon of colorful, descriptive words. Hopefully it's common knowledge that jazz was invented by Black Americans, but did you know that the modern way we use "cool" and "hip" was coined by us as well? Here are a few recent highlights:
Finna

Meaning: About to. Replaced "fixing to" from Southern English.

Example: I'm finna go to the store, you want anything

Wildin / whilin

Meaning: To say or do something crazy. Synonymous with buggin or trippin.

Example: That professor was whilin assigning us all that reading.

GOAT

Meaning: Acronym that stands for Greatest Of All Time. Typically used to describe an icon.

A Note On "Ebonics" And "Correctness"

African American Vernacular English used to be called "Ebonics" (a portmanteau of "ebony" and "phonics") when the term was coined in 1970s. It was created by the Black psychologist Robert Williams in the hope of changing the conversation around the dialect, which was often referred to as lazy or broken English by the white establishment. The term garnered national attention when the Oakland School Board declared it to be the primary language of its 28,000 primarily Black students. Because of the media storm that followed, Ebonics now has a negative connotation.

It should go without saying that there are a multitude of ways to speak the English language. As the late Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison emphasized, "It's terrible to think that a child with five different present-tenses comes to school to be faced with books that are less than his own language. And then to be told things about his language, which is him, that are sometimes permanently damaging."

AAVE In Today's World

In music, pop artists like Italian-American singer Ariana Grande have shifted from the flowery lyrics and dance beats that defined the 2000s and early 2010s to rap interludes over trap rhythms in the past few years. Grande chirps in her Grammy-nominated song , "My receipts be lookin like phone numbas / If it ain't money then wrong numba / Black card is my business [pronounced as "bidniss"] card." She adds various habitual "be"s and "ain't"s, as well as omits the verbal copula and final consonants. Since the internet has been at our fingertips over the last 30 years - particularly in the past 5-10 years with the rise of social media - the proximity to AAVE for those who aren't Black has risen considerably.

There are, however, other situations where AAVE still isn't accepted - and where this creates tangible consequences. Take, for example, the United States' legal system. When "He don't be in that neighborhood" was heard in a courtroom in Philadelphia , a court reporter erroneously transcribed it to "We going to be in this neighborhood" - exactly the opposite of what was said.

When Warren Demesme was up for trial in 2017 and asked the police "Why don't you just give me a lawyer, dog?" his rights were ignored because someone presumed he'd requested a "lawyer dog," not an actual attorney. "The larger implication is that people are not being afforded a sense of fairness and justice because the system is not responding to their language," said Anthony L. Ricco, a New York-based criminal defense lawyer, when told about this study's findings.

To some, the Black dialect is equated with being uneducated. But then there are non-Black individuals, like Grande, who seem to be fine hopping between the two without the the consequences of what Black speakers can experience. This is why AAVE usage often neatly falls along the lines of cultural appropriation.

Black Americans also experience situations where we might switch from AAVE to Standard American English - also known as code-switching. This can happen in the workplace or in academia, or at any other point when speaking with a person who doesn't understand our dialect. We do it so that they can understand us or feel comfortable, as described in the video above.

To me, AAVE is comprised of friendly, comforting and familial Black colloquialisms. AAVE feels like your mother's bosom pressing up against the back of your head as she's braiding On the basketball court or sharing in community with friends, AAVE is an ever-evolving, intimate and unifying aspect of communication in Black American life.

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The United States Of Accents: African American Vernacular English

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What is AAVE? Where did it come from? How is it used today? All this and more are answered in this installment of the United States of Accents.

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Separate But Equal Doctrine

In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racially segregated public facilities were legal, so long as the facilities for Black people and whites were equal.

The ruling constitutionally sanctioned laws barring African Americans from sharing the same buses, schools and other public facilities as whites-known as "Jim Crow" laws -and established the "separate but equal" doctrine that would stand for the next six decades.

But by the early 1950s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP) was working hard to challenge segregation laws in public schools, and had filed lawsuits on behalf of plaintiffs in states such as South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware.

In the case that would become most famous, a plaintiff named Oliver Brown filed a class-action suit against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in 1951, after his daughter, Linda Brown, was denied entrance to Topeka's all-white elementary schools.

In his lawsuit, Brown claimed that schools for Black children were not equal to the white schools, and that segregation violated the so-called "equal protection clause" of the 14th Amendment, which holds that no state can "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

The case went before the U.S. District Court in Kansas, which agreed that public school segregation had a "detrimental effect upon the colored children" and contributed to "a sense of inferiority," but still upheld the "separate but equal" doctrine.

Brown v. Board of Education Verdict

When Brown's case and four other cases related to school segregation first came before the Supreme Court in 1952, the Court combined them into a single case under the name Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, served as chief attorney for the plaintiffs. (Thirteen years later, President Lyndon B. Johnson would appoint Marshall as the first Black Supreme Court justice.)

At first, the justices were divided on how to rule on school segregation, with Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson holding the opinion that the Plessy verdict should stand. But in September 1953, before Brown v. Board of Education was to be heard, Vinson died, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower replaced him with Earl Warren, then governor of California.

Displaying considerable political skill and determination, the new chief justice succeeded in engineering a unanimous verdict against school segregation the following year.

In the decision, issued on May 17, 1954, Warren wrote that "in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place," as segregated schools are "inherently unequal." As a result, the Court ruled that the plaintiffs were being "deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment."

Little Rock Nine

In its verdict, the Supreme Court did not specify how exactly schools should be integrated, but asked for further arguments about it.

In May 1955, the Court issued a second opinion in the case (known as Brown v. Board of Education II), which remanded future desegregation cases to lower federal courts and directed district courts and school boards to proceed with desegregation "with all deliberate speed."

Though well intentioned, the Court's actions effectively opened the door to local judicial and political evasion of desegregation. While Kansas and some other states acted in accordance with the verdict, many school and local officials in the South defied it.

In one major example, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas called out the state National Guard to prevent Black students from attending high school in Little Rock in 1957. After a tense standoff, President Eisenhower deployed federal troops, and nine students-known as the " Little Rock Nine"- were able to enter Central High School under armed guard.

Impact of Brown v. Board of Education

Though the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board didn't achieve school desegregation on its own, the ruling (and the steadfast resistance to it across the South) fueled the nascent civil rights movement in the United States.

In 1955, a year after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Her arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott and would lead to other boycotts, sit-ins and demonstrations (many of them led by Martin Luther King Jr.), in a movement that would eventually lead to the toppling of Jim Crow laws across the South.

Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, backed by enforcement by the Justice Department, began the process of desegregation in earnest. This landmark piece of civil rights legislation was followed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

In 1976, the Supreme Court issued another landmark decision in Runyon v. McCrary, ruling that even private, nonsectarian schools that denied admission to students on the basis of race violated federal civil rights laws.

By overturning the "separate but equal" doctrine, the Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education had set the legal precedent that would be used to overturn laws enforcing segregation in other public facilities. But despite its undoubted impact, the historic verdict fell short of achieving its primary mission of integrating the nation's public schools.

Today, more than 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, the debate continues over how to combat racial inequalities in the nation's school system, largely based on residential patterns and differences in resources between schools in wealthier and economically disadvantaged districts across the country.

HISTORY Vault: Black History

Sources

History - Brown v. Board of Education Re-enactment, United States Courts.
Brown v. Board of Education, The Civil Rights Movement: Volume I (Salem Press).
Cass Sunstein, "Did Brown Matter?" The New Yorker, May 3, 2004.
Brown v. Board of Education, PBS.org.
Richard Rothstein, Brown v. Board at 60, Economic Policy Institute, April 17, 2014.

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Brown v. Board of Education: Summary, Ruling & Impact | HISTORY

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Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional.

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African Americans - Free at last? Equal at last?Introductory activities

Describe the pictures in detail and comment on them.Try to explain their context and put them into chronological order.

1: 2009; a pier in Santa Monica, California. Might be a field trip or kids that are part of a summer camp. Approximately 10 years old. Kids of different ethnic backgrounds.2: the picture was taken in 2009, in Manhattan, but could be in any city. African American elderly man searching in a garbage can, probably for food.3: 1877-1965, Jim Crow Era/ Jim Crow Laws. A sign that shows the way to a waiting room that is for "colored only". In the southern states of the USA.4: Angela Davis, a representative of the Black Power Movements in the 1960s. She was a civil rights activist.5: Two girls sitting in a café or a bar and having some drinks together. Interracial. The picture was taken in 2009, in Santa Monica.6: The picture shows a fictitious dollar bill showing Barack Obama, who was the 44th president of the USA (2009-2017) and the 1st African American president. The dollar bill also shows the torch of the Statue of Liberty, the White House, and has Joe Biden's signature. It also quotes Barack Obama's inauguration speech. The bill symbolizes freedom, equality, and the want for equal rights.7: The picture shows a white man whipping black people, who are holding on to each other and seem to be very scared. This depicts the beginning of the history of African Americans. People were captured in Africa to become slaves. 1562

Pictures 1, 2, 5 and 6 are all from around 2009.A possible chronological order could be: 7, 3, 4, 1, 2, 5, 6

Describe and explain the slave ship's design.

The image of the Brookes has become one of the most prominent symbols of the history of the slave trade, showing clearly how cruel and inhuman this kind of transport called the Middle Passage (forcible passage of African people to the New World) was.It is estimated that about two million people died on this passage from 1500 to 1900. The journey took from one to six months. There were usually about 30 crew members and several hundred slaves on a ship.

The floor plan shows that slaves were transported on three decks. Obviously, they had to lie down next to each other during the whole journey.The ship was designed to be able to take as many slaves as possible from Africa to America.

Explain what the advertisement is for.

The advertisement shows two adult African-Americans, a man and a woman with one child next to them respectively. The text says that a cargo of 94 slaves has just arrived and will be auctioned off soon. The advertisement states that these slaves are of first-class quality and health.

Crew or slave?

Imagine you took part in the voyage from Africa to North America on board the Brookes. Write a letter as one of the crew or one of the slaves describing the trip.Upload your letter to our padlet.

The Atlantic Slave Trade

Use the information to research facts about the transatlantic slave trade.a) Collect information about the number of Africans transported from Africa to America.b) Find out what was traded for them and who became rich.c) Who tried to stop this trade? When was the trade finally made illegal?Add your answers to our padlet/ check/ correct the others.

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African Americans intro by m.schoeneshoefer on Genially

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African Americans - Free at last? Equal at last?Introductory activities Describe the pictures in detail and comment on them.Try to explain their context and put them into chronological order. 1: 2009; a pier in Santa Monica, California. Might be a field trip or kids that are part of a summer camp.

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The Civil War, Part I: Crash Course US History #20

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The Civil War Part 2: Crash Course US History #21

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The Slave Auction by Francis E.W. Harper

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The Slave Auction by Francis E.W. Harper

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More information about the author

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As a poet, author, and lecturer, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was a household name in the nineteenth century. Not only was she the first African American woman to publish a short story, but she was also an influential abolitionist, suffragist, and reformer that co-founded the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born on September 24, 1825 in Baltimore, Maryland. An only child, Harper was born to free African American parents. Unfortunately, by the time she was three years old, both of her parents died and she became an orphan. Harper's aunt and uncle, Henrietta and William Watkins, raised her after her parent's death. Her uncle was an outspoken abolitionist, practiced self-taught medicine, organized a black literary society and established his own school in 1820 called the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth. Frances Harper learned from her uncle's activism and she attended the Watkins Academy until she was thirteen years old. At that age, children were typically expected to join the workforce. Harper took a job as a nursemaid and seamstress for a white family that owned a bookshop. Her love for books blossomed as she spent any free time she had in the shop. By age twenty-one, Harper wrote her first small volume of poetry called Forest Leaves.

When she was twenty-six years old, Harper left Maryland and became the first woman instructor at Union Seminary, a school for free African Americans in Wilberforce, Ohio. She taught domestic science for a year and then moved to a school in York, Pennsylvania. Shortly after she began working as a teacher, her home state of Maryland passed a law stating that free African Americans living in the North were no longer allowed to enter the state of Maryland. If found, they would be imprisoned and sold into slavery. Harper was now unable to return to her own home. She decided to devote all of her efforts to the antislavery cause. Harper moved in with William and Letitia George Still who were abolitionists and friends of her uncle. William Still became known as the father of the Underground Railroad while he was an office clerk and janitor in the office of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. Supported by the Stills, Harper began writing poetry for antislavery newspapers. Her poem "Eliza Harris," was published in The Liberator, and in Frederick Douglass' Paper. By the time Harper left Philadelphia in 1854, she had compiled her second small volume of poetry called Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects with an introduction by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.

For the next eight years, Harper traveled across the United States and Canada as a lecturer. After her first speech entitled, "The Elevation and Education of our People," she was hired as a traveling lecturer for various organizations including the Maine Anti-Slavery Society and the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. In addition to her antislavery lectures, Harper was committed to the struggle for women's rights and the temperance movement. She included her observations from her travels in her writings and began to publish novels, short stories, and poetry focused on issues of racism, feminism and classism. In 1859, Harper published a short story in the Anglo-African Magazine called "The Two Offers." This short story about women's education became was the first short story published by an African American woman.

On November 22, 1860, Frances married Fenton Harper and the couple had a daughter named Mary. Unfortunately, Fenton Harper died four years later. After her husband's death, Frances Harper began touring again and formed alliances with prominent women's rights activists. In 1866, Harper spoke at the National Woman's Rights Convention in New York. Her famous speech entitled, "We Are All Bound Up Together," urged her fellow attendees to include African American women in their fight for suffrage. She emphasized that Black women were facing the double burden of racism and sexism at the same time, therefore the fight for women's suffrage must include suffrage for African Americans. The next day, the Convention held a meeting to organize the American Equal Rights Association to work for suffrage for both African Americans and women. However, the organization soon split over the decision to support the fifteenth amendment, granting African American men the right to vote. Harper, along with Frederick Douglass and many others supported the amendment and helped to form the American Woman Suffrage Association.

Harper spent the rest of her career working for the pursuit of equal rights, job opportunities, and education for African American women. She was a co-founder and vice president of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs, and the director of the American Association of Colored Youth. She was also the superintendent of the Colored Sections of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Women's Christian Temperance Unions. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper died on February 22, 1911 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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As a poet, author, and lecturer, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was a household name in the nineteenth century. Not only was she the first African American woman to publish a short story, but she was also an influential abolitionist, suffragist, and reformer that co-founded the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs.

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What was the situation like for African Americans at the end of the 19th century? 

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What was the situation like for African Americans at the end of the 19th century? 

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Simon and Larissa

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https://mm.tt/1663671429?t=2VeoWQ8Ziz
Lisa and Ronja
Sources we used:
https://www.britannica.com/summary/Booker-T-Washingtons-Achievements
https://www.biography.com/activist/booker-t-washington
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Booker-T-Washington

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By Madlen and Lara

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX8ihCOJaZM

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W.E.B. DuBois' rivalry with Booker T. Washington

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W.E.B. DuBois' rivalry with Booker T. Washington

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W.E.B. Du Bois' Rivalry with Booker T. Washington | Biography

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https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/loving-gegen-virginia-paar-kaempft-fuer-aufhebung-der-rassentrennung-a-947756.html

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She sat down to stand up for civil rights

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Black history in the United States is a rich and varied chronicle of slavery and liberty, oppression and progress, segregation and achievement. Though captive and free Africans were likely present in the Americas by the 1400s, the kidnapped men, women and children from Africa who were sold first to European colonists in 1619, and later to American citizens, became symbolic of the early years of Black history in the United States.

Slavery Comes to North America, 1619

To satisfy the labor needs of the rapidly growing North American colonies, white European settlers turned in the early 17th century from indentured servants (mostly poorer Europeans) to a cheaper, more plentiful labor source: enslaved Africans. After 1619, when a Dutch ship brought 20 Africans ashore at the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia, slavery spread quickly through the American colonies. Though it is impossible to give accurate figures, some historians have estimated that 6 to 7 million enslaved people were imported to the New World during the 18th century alone, depriving the African continent of its most valuable resource-its healthiest and ablest men and women.

Many northern states had abolished slavery by the end of the 18th century, but the institution was absolutely vital to the South, where Black people constituted a large minority of the population and the economy relied on the production of crops like tobacco and cotton. Congress outlawed the import of new enslaved people in 1808, but the enslaved population in the U.S. nearly tripled over the next 50 years, and by 1860 it had reached nearly 4 million, with more than half living in the cotton-producing states of the South.

Rise of the Cotton Industry, 1793

In the years immediately following the Revolutionary War, the rural South-the region where slavery had taken the strongest hold in North America-faced an economic crisis. The soil used to grow tobacco, then the leading cash crop, was exhausted, while products such as rice and indigo failed to generate much profit. As a result, the price of enslaved people was dropping, and the continued growth of slavery seemed in doubt.

Around the same time, the mechanization of spinning and weaving had revolutionized the textile industry in England, and the demand for American cotton soon became insatiable. Production was limited, however, by the laborious process of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers, which had to be completed by hand.

In 1793, a young Yankee schoolteacher named Eli Whitney came up with a solution to the problem: The cotton gin, a simple mechanized device that efficiently removed the seeds, could be hand-powered or, on a large scale, harnessed to a horse or powered by water. The cotton gin was widely copied, and within a few years the South would transition from a dependence on the cultivation of tobacco to that of cotton.

As the growth of the cotton industry led inexorably to an increased demand for enslaved Africans, the prospect of slave rebellion-such as the one that triumphed in Haiti in 1791-drove slaveholders to make increased efforts to prevent a similar event from happening in the South. Also in 1793, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it a federal crime to assist an enslaved person trying to escape. Though it was difficult to enforce from state to state, especially with the growth of abolitionist feeling in the North, the law helped enshrine and legitimize slavery as an enduring American institution.

Nat Turner's Revolt, August 1831

In August 1831, Nat Turner struck fear into the hearts of white Southerners by leading the only effective slave rebellion in U.S. history. Born on a small plantation in Southampton County, Virginia, Turner inherited a passionate hatred of slavery from his African-born mother and came to see himself as anointed by God to lead his people out of bondage.

In early 1831, Turner took a solar eclipse as a sign that the time for revolution was near, and on the night of August 21, he and a small band of followers killed his owners, the Travis family, and set off toward the town of Jerusalem, where they planned to capture an armory and gather more recruits. The group, which eventually numbered around 75 Black people, killed some 60 white people in two days before armed resistance from local white people and the arrival of state militia forces overwhelmed them just outside Jerusalem. Some 100 enslaved people, including innocent bystanders, lost their lives in the struggle. Turner escaped and spent six weeks on the run before he was captured, tried and hanged.

Oft-exaggerated reports of the insurrection-some said that hundreds of white people had been killed-sparked a wave of anxiety across the South. Several states called special emergency sessions of the legislature, and most strengthened their codes in order to limit the education, movement and assembly of enslaved people. While supporters of slavery pointed to the Turner rebellion as evidence that Black people were inherently inferior barbarians requiring an institution such as slavery to discipline them, the increased repression of southern Black people would strengthen anti-slavery feeling in the North through the 1860s and intensify the regional tensions building toward civil war.

Abolitionism and the Underground Railroad, 1831

The early abolition movement in North America was fueled both by enslaved people's efforts to liberate themselves and by groups of white settlers, such as the Quakers, who opposed slavery on religious or moral grounds. Though the lofty ideals of the Revolutionary era invigorated the movement, by the late 1780s it was in decline, as the growing southern cotton industry made slavery an ever more vital part of the national economy. In the early 19th century, however, a new brand of radical abolitionism emerged in the North, partly in reaction to Congress' passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the tightening of codes in most southern states. One of its most eloquent voices was William Lloyd Garrison, a crusading journalist from Massachusetts, who founded the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator in 1831 and became known as the most radical of America's antislavery activists.

Antislavery northerners-many of them free Black people-had begun helping enslaved people escape from southern plantations to the North via a loose network of safe houses as early as the 1780s called the Underground Railroad.

Dred Scott Case, March 6, 1857

Upon his return to Missouri, Scott sued for his freedom on the basis that his temporary removal to free soil had made him legally free. The case went to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Roger B. Taney and the majority eventually ruled that Scott was an enslaved person and not a citizen, and thus had no legal rights to sue.

According to the Court, Congress had no constitutional power to deprive persons of their property rights when dealing with enslaved people in the territories. The verdict effectively declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, ruling that all territories were open to slavery and could exclude it only when they became states.

While much of the South rejoiced, seeing the verdict as a clear victory, antislavery northerners were furious. One of the most prominent abolitionists, Frederick Douglass, was cautiously optimistic, however, wisely predicting that-"This very attempt to blot out forever the hopes of an enslaved people may be one necessary link in the chain of events preparatory to the complete overthrow of the whole slave system."

John Brown's Raid, October 16, 1859

On the night of October 16, 1859, he led a small band of less than 50 men in a raid against the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. Their aim was to capture enough ammunition to lead a large operation against Virginia's slaveholders. Brown's men, including several Black people, captured and held the arsenal until federal and state governments sent troops and were able to overpower them.

John Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859. His trial riveted the nation, and he emerged as an eloquent voice against the injustice of slavery and a martyr to the abolitionist cause. Just as Brown's courage turned thousands of previously indifferent northerners against slavery, his violent actions convinced slave owners in the South beyond doubt that abolitionists would go to any lengths to destroy the "peculiar institution." Rumors spread of other planned insurrections, and the South reverted to a semi-war status. Only the election of the anti-slavery Republican Abraham Lincoln as president in 1860 remained before the southern states would begin severing ties with the Union, sparking the bloodiest conflict in American history.

Civil War and Emancipation, 1861

In the spring of 1861, the bitter sectional conflicts that had been intensifying between North and South over the course of four decades erupted into civil war, with 11 southern states seceding from the Union and forming the Confederate States of America. Though President Abraham Lincoln 's antislavery views were well established, and his election as the nation's first Republican president had been the catalyst that pushed the first southern states to secede in late 1860, the Civil War at its outset was not a war to abolish slavery. Lincoln sought first and foremost to preserve the Union, and he knew that few people even in the North-let alone the border slave states still loyal to Washington-would have supported a war against slavery in 1861.

By the summer of 1862, however, Lincoln had come to believe he could not avoid the slavery question much longer. Five days after the bloody Union victory at Antietam in September, he issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation; on January 1, 1863, he made it official that enslaved people within any State, or designated part of a State in rebellion, "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." Lincoln justified his decision as a wartime measure, and as such he did not go so far as to free enslaved people in the border states loyal to the Union, an omission that angered many abolitionists.

The Post-Slavery South, 1865

The 15th Amendment, adopted in 1870, guaranteed that a citizen's right to vote would not be denied-on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." During Reconstruction, Black Americans won election to southern state governments and even to the U.S. Congress. Their growing influence greatly dismayed many white southerners, who felt control slipping ever further away from them. The white protective societies that arose during this period-the largest of which was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)-sought to disenfranchise Black voters by using voter suppression and intimidation as well as more extreme violence. By 1877, when the last federal soldiers left the South and Reconstruction drew to a close, Black Americans had seen dishearteningly little improvement in their economic and social status, and what political gains they had made had been wiped away by the vigorous efforts of white supremacist forces throughout the region.

'Separate But Equal,' 1896

As Reconstruction drew to a close and the forces of white supremacy regained control from carpetbaggers (northerners who moved South) and freed Black people, Southern state legislatures began enacting the first segregation laws, known as the "Jim Crow" laws. Taken from a much-copied minstrel routine written by a white actor who performed often in blackface, the name "Jim Crow" came to serve as a general derogatory term for African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South. By 1885, most southern states had laws requiring separate schools for Black and white students, and by 1900, "persons of color" were required to be separated from white people in railroad cars and depots, hotels, theaters, restaurants, barber shops and other establishments. On May 18, 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its verdict in Plessy v. Ferguson, a case that represented the first major test of the meaning of the 14th Amendment's provision of full and equal citizenship to African Americans.

By an 8-1 majority, the Court upheld a Louisiana law that required the segregation of passengers on railroad cars. By asserting that the equal protection clause was not violated as long as reasonably equal conditions were provided to both groups, the Court established the "separate but equal" doctrine that would thereafter be used for assessing the constitutionality of racial segregation laws. Plessy vs. Ferguson stood as the overriding judicial precedent in civil rights cases until 1954, when it was reversed by the Court's verdict in Brown v. Board of Education.

Washington, Carver & Du Bois, 1900

As the 19th century came to an end and segregation took ever stronger hold in the South, many African Americans saw self-improvement, especially through education, as the single greatest opportunity to escape the indignities they suffered. Many Black people looked to Booker T. Washington, the author of the bestselling Up From Slavery (1900), as an inspiration. As president of Alabama's Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Washington urged Black Americans to acquire the kind of industrial or vocational training (such as farming, mechanics and domestic service) that would give them the necessary skills to carve out a niche for themselves in the U.S. economy. George Washington Carver, another formerly enslaved man and the head of Tuskegee's agriculture department, helped liberate the South from its reliance on cotton by convincing farmers to plant peanuts, soybeans and sweet potatoes in order to rejuvenate the exhausted soil.

By 1940, peanuts had become the second cash crop in the South. Like Washington, Carver had little interest in racial politics, and was celebrated by many white Americans as a shining example of a modest, industrious Black man. While Washington and Carver represented a philosophy of accommodation to white supremacy, another prominent Black educator, the Harvard-trained historian and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, became a leading voice in the growing Black protest movement during the first half of the 20th century. In his 1903 book Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois spoke strongly against Washington's advocacy of industrial education, which he saw as too narrow and economically focused, and stressed the importance of higher education for African Americans.

NAACP Founded, 1909

First established in Chicago, the NAACP had expanded to more than 400 locations by 1921. One of its earliest programs was a crusade against lynching and other lawless acts. Those efforts-including a nationwide protest of D.W. Griffiths' silent film Birth of a Nation (1915), which glorified white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan-would continue into the 1920s, playing a crucial role in drastically reducing the number of lynchings carried out in the United States. Du Bois edited the NAACP's official magazine, The Crisis, from 1910 to 1934, publishing many of the leading voices in African American literature and politics and helping fuel the spread of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s.

Marcus Garvey and the UNIA, 1916

Born in Jamaica, the Black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey founded his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) there in 1914; two years later, he brought it to the United States. Garvey appealed to the racial pride of African Americans, exalting blackness as strong and beautiful. As racial prejudice was so ingrained in white civilization, Garvey claimed, it was futile for Black people to appeal to white peoples' sense of justice and democratic principles. Their only hope, according to him, was to flee America and return to Africa to build a country of their own. After an unsuccessful appeal to the League of Nations to settle a colony in Africa and failed negotiations with Liberia, Garvey announced the formation of the Empire of Africa in 1921, with himself as provisional president.

Other African American leaders, notably W.E.B. Du Bois of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), criticized Garvey and his "Back to Africa" movement; he was openly contemptuous of them in return. There was no denying the movement's appeal, however. Garvey's boast of 6 million followers in 1923 was probably exaggerated, but even his critics admitted that the UNIA had some 500,000 members. In 1923, the U.S. government successfully prosecuted and convicted Garvey for mail fraud in connection with selling stock in his Black Star Line shipping company. After serving a two-year jail sentence, Garvey was pardoned by President Calvin Coolidge and immediately deported; he died in London in 1940.

Harlem Renaissance, 1920

In the 1920s, the great migration of Black Americans from the rural South to the urban North sparked an African American cultural renaissance that took its name from the New York City neighborhood of Harlem but became a widespread movement in cities throughout the North and West. Also known as the Black Renaissance or the New Negro Movement, the Harlem Renaissance marked the first time that mainstream publishers and critics turned their attention seriously to African American literature, music, art and politics. Blues singer Bessie Smith, pianist Jelly Roll Morton, bandleader Louis Armstrong, composer Duke Ellington, dancer Josephine Baker and actor Paul Robeson were among the leading entertainment talents of the Harlem Renaissance, while Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston were some of its most eloquent writers.

There was a flip side to this greater exposure, however: Emerging Black writers relied heavily on white-owned publications and publishing houses, while in Harlem's most famous cabaret, the Cotton Club, the preeminent Black entertainers of the day played to exclusively white audiences. In 1926, a controversial bestseller about Harlem life by the white novelist Carl von Vechten exemplified the attitude of many white urban sophisticates, who looked to Black culture as a window into a more "primitive" and "vital" way of life. W.E.B. Du Bois, for one, railed against Van Vechten's novel and criticized works by Black writers, such as McKay's novel Home to Harlem, that he saw as reinforcing negative stereotypes of Black people. With the onset of the Great Depression, as organizations like the NAACP and the National Urban League switched their focus to the economic and political problems facing Black Americans, the Harlem Renaissance drew to a close. Its influence had stretched around the world, opening the doors of mainstream culture to Black artists and writers.

African Americans in WWII, 1941

During World War II, many African Americans were ready to fight for what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the "Four Freedoms"-freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear-even while they themselves lacked those freedoms at home. More than 3 million Black Americans would register for service during the war, with some 500,000 seeing action overseas. According to War Department policy, enlisted Black and white people were organized into separate units. Frustrated Black servicemen were forced to combat racism even as they sought to further U.S. war aims; this became known as the "Double V" strategy, for the two victories they sought to win.

The war's first African American hero emerged from the attack on Pearl Harbor, when Dorie Miller, a young Navy steward on the U.S.S. West Virginia, carried wounded crew members to safety and manned a machine gun post, shooting down several Japanese planes. In the spring of 1943, graduates of the first all-Black military aviation program, created at the Tuskegee Institute in 1941, headed to North Africa as the 99th Pursuit Squadron. Their commander, Captain Benjamin O. Davis Jr., later became one of the first African American generals (his father- General Benjamin O. Davis Sr.-was the first). The Tuskegee Airmen saw combat against German and Italian troops, flew more than 3,000 missions, and served as a great source of pride for many Black Americans.

Aside from celebrated accomplishments like these, overall gains were slow, and maintaining high morale among black forces was difficult due to the continued discrimination they faced. In July 1948, President Harry S. Truman finally integrated the U.S. Armed Forces under an executive order mandating that "there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin."

Jackie Robinson, 1947

By 1900, the unwritten color line barring Black players from white teams in professional baseball was strictly enforced. Jackie Robinson, a sharecropper's son from Georgia, joined the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League in 1945 after a stint in the U.S. Army (he earned an honorable discharge after facing a court-martial for refusing to move to the back of a segregated bus). His play caught the attention of Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who had been considering bringing an end to segregation in baseball. Rickey signed Robinson to a Dodgers farm team that same year and two years later moved him up, making Robinson the first African American player to play on a major league team.

Robinson played his first game with the Dodgers on April 15, 1947; he led the National League in stolen bases that season, earning Rookie of the Year honors. Over the next nine years, Robinson compiled a .311 batting average and led the Dodgers to six league championships and one World Series victory. Despite his success on the field, however, he encountered hostility from both fans and other players. Members of the St. Louis Cardinals even threatened to strike if Robinson played; baseball commissioner Ford Frick settled the question by threatening to suspend any player who went on strike.

After Robinson's historic breakthrough, baseball was steadily integrated, with professional basketball and tennis following suit in 1950. His groundbreaking achievement transcended sports, and as soon as he signed the contract with Rickey, Robinson became one of the most visible African Americans in the country, and a figure that Black people could look to as a source of pride, inspiration and hope. As his success and fame grew, Robinson began speaking out publicly for Black equality. In 1949, he testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee to discuss the appeal of Communism to Black Americans, surprising them with a ferocious condemnation of the racial discrimination embodied by the Jim Crow segregation laws of the South: "The white public should start toward real understanding by appreciating that every single Negro who is worth his salt is going to resent any kind of slurs and discrimination because of his race, and he's going to use every bit of intelligence...to stop it..."

Brown v. Board of Education, May 17, 1954

On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its verdict in Brown v. Board of Education, ruling unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the 14th Amendment's mandate of equal protection of the laws of the U.S. Constitution to any person within its jurisdiction. Oliver Brown, the lead plaintiff in the case, was one of almost 200 people from five different states who had joined related NAACP cases brought before the Supreme Court since 1938.

The landmark verdict reversed the "separate but equal" doctrine the Court had established with Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which it determined that equal protection was not violated as long as reasonably equal conditions were provided to both groups. In the Brown decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren famously declared that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." Though the Court's ruling applied specifically to public schools, it implied that other segregated facilities were also unconstitutional, thus striking a heavy blow to the Jim Crow South. As such, the ruling provoked serious resistance, including a "Southern manifesto" issued by southern congressmen denouncing it. The decision was also difficult to enforce, a fact that became increasingly clear in May 1955 when the Court remanded the case to the courts of origin due to "their proximity to local conditions" and urged "a prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance." Though some southern schools moved towards integration relatively without incident, in other cases-notably in Arkansas and Alabama-enforcing Brown would require federal intervention.

Emmett Till, August 1955

In August 1955, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago named Emmett Till had recently arrived in Money, Mississippi to visit relatives. While in a grocery store, he allegedly whistled and made a flirtatious remark to the white woman behind the counter, violating the strict racial codes of the Jim Crow South. Three days later, two white men-the woman's husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam-dragged Till from his great uncle's house in the middle of the night. After beating the boy, they shot him to death and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River. The two men confessed to kidnapping Till but were acquitted of murder charges by an all-white, all-male jury after barely an hour of deliberations. Never brought to justice, Bryant and Milam later shared vivid details of how they killed Till with a journalist for Look magazine, which published their confessions under the headline "The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi."

Till's mother held an open-casket funeral for her son in Chicago, hoping to bring public attention to the brutal murder. Thousands of mourners attended, and Jet magazine published a photo of the corpse. International outrage over the crime and the verdict helped fuel the civil rights movement: just three months after Emmett Till's body was found, and a month after a Mississippi grand jury refused to indict Milam and Bryant on kidnapping charges, a citywide bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama would begin the movement in earnest.

Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, December 1955

On December 1, 1955, an African American woman named Rosa Parks was riding a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama when the driver told her to give up her seat to a white man. Parks refused and was arrested for violating the city's racial segregation ordinances, which mandated that Black passengers sit in the back of public buses and give up their seats for white riders if the front seats were full. Parks, a 42-year-old seamstress, was also the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. As she later explained: "I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed. I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen."

Four days after Parks' arrest, an activist organization called the Montgomery Improvement Association-led by a young pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. -spearheaded a boycott of the city's municipal bus company. Because African Americans made up some 70 percent of the bus company's riders at the time, and the great majority of Montgomery's Black citizens supported the bus boycott, its impact was immediate.

About 90 participants in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, including King, were indicted under a law forbidding conspiracy to obstruct the operation of a business. Found guilty, King immediately appealed the decision. Meanwhile, the boycott stretched on for more than a year, and the bus company struggled to avoid bankruptcy. On November 13, 1956, in Browder v. Gayle, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court's decision declaring the bus company's segregation seating policy unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. King, called off the boycott on December 20, and Rosa Parks-known as the "mother of the civil rights movement"-would be one of the first to ride the newly desegregated buses.

Central High School Integrated, September 1957

Although the Supreme Court declared segregation of public schools illegal in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the decision was extremely difficult to enforce, as 11 southern states enacted resolutions interfering with, nullifying or protesting school desegregation. In Arkansas, Governor Orval Faubus made resistance to desegregation a central part of his successful 1956 reelection campaign. The following September, after a federal court ordered the desegregation of Central High School, located in the state capital of Little Rock, Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine African American students from entering the school. He was later forced to call off the guard, and in the tense standoff that followed, TV cameras captured footage of white mobs converging on the " Little Rock Nine " outside the high school. For millions of viewers throughout the country, the unforgettable images provided a vivid contrast between the angry forces of white supremacy and the quiet, dignified resistance of African American students.

After an appeal by the local congressman and mayor of Little Rock to stop the violence, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the state's National Guard and sent 1,000 members of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division to enforce the integration of Central High School. The nine Black students entered the school under heavily armed guard, marking the first time since Reconstruction that federal troops had provided protection for Black Americans against racial violence. Not done fighting, Faubus closed all of Little Rock's high schools in the fall of 1958 rather than permit integration. A federal court struck down this act, and four of the nine students returned, under police protection, after the schools were reopened in 1959.

Loving v. Virginia Ruling, 1958

Mildred and Richard Loving were one of the first interracial couples legally married in the United States and their union marked a pivotal moment in marriage rights for mixed-race families. At 2 a.m. on July 11, 1958, Mildred Jeter was lying next to her husband Richard Loving, when police began knocking on their door, demanding to know about the nature of their relationship. At the time, interracial marriage was illegal in Virginia and the newly-wed couple was guilty of breaking the law.

Richard spent the night in prison, and his sister had to pay a $1,000 bond for his release. Mildred, however, spent three nights in a small women's cell and was released to her father. The couple was then given a choice: spend 25 years in prison or leave Virginia. They chose exile and abandoned the state for nine years, making periodic trips back to visit family while trying to avoid being detected.

Amidst the civil rights movement, ACLU lawyers Bernard S. Cohen and Philip J. Hirschkop decided to take on the couple's case. They tried to have the case vacated and the ruling overturned without success. They then tried appealing the decision to the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, but the court ultimately stuck to the original ruling. The case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, where a majority of members decided on June 12, 1967, that laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional.

Sit-In Movement and Founding of SNCC, 1960

On February 1, 1960, four Black students from the Agricultural and Technical College in 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. Though many protesters were arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace, 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. Over the next few years, SNCC broadened its influence, organizing so-called "Freedom Rides" through the South in 1961 and the historic March on Washington in 1963; it also joined the NAACP in pushing for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Later, SNCC would mount an organized resistance to the Vietnam War. As its members faced increased violence, SNCC became more militant, and by the late 1960s it was advocating the "Black Power" philosophy of Stokely Carmichael (SNCC's chairman from 1966-67) and his successor, H. Rap Brown. By the early 1970s, SNCC was effectively disbanded.

CORE and Freedom Rides, May 1961

Founded in 1942 by the civil rights leader James Farmer, the Congress of Racial Equality ( CORE) sought to end discrimination and improve race relations through direct action. In its early years, CORE staged a sit-in at a Chicago coffee shop (a precursor to the successful sit-in movement of 1960) and organized a "Journey of Reconciliation," in which a group of Black and white activists rode together on a bus through the upper South in 1947, a year after the U.S. Supreme Court banned segregation in interstate bus travel.

Kennedy sent federal marshals to escort the riders to Jackson, Mississippi, but images of the bloodshed made the worldwide news, and the freedom rides continued. In September, under pressure from CORE and other civil rights organizations, as well as from the attorney general's office, the Interstate Commerce Commission ruled that all passengers on interstate bus carriers should be seated without regard to race and carriers could not mandate segregated terminals.

Integration of Ole Miss, September 1962

By the end of the 1950s, African Americans had begun to be admitted in small numbers to white colleges and universities in the South without too much incident. In 1962, however, a crisis erupted when the state-funded University of Mississippi (known as "Ole Miss") admitted a Black man, James Meredith. After nine years in the Air Force, Meredith had studied at the all-Black Jackson State College and applied repeatedly to Ole Miss with no success. With the aid of the NAACP, Meredith filed a lawsuit alleging that the university had discriminated against him because of his race. In September 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Meredith's favor, but state officials including Governor Ross Barnett vowed to block his admission.

When Meredith arrived at Ole Miss under the protection of federal forces including U.S. marshals, a mob of more than 2,000 people formed on the Oxford, Mississippi campus. Two people were killed and close to 200 injured in the ensuing chaos, which ended only after President Kennedy's administration sent some 31,000 troops to restore order. Meredith went on to graduate from Ole Miss in 1963, but the struggle to integrate higher education continued. Later that year, Governor George Wallace blocked the enrollment of a Black student at the University of Alabama, pledging to "stand in the schoolhouse door." Though Wallace was eventually forced by the federalized National Guard to integrate the university, he became a prominent symbol of the ongoing resistance to desegregation nearly a decade after Brown v. Board of Education.

Birmingham Church Bombed, 1963

Governor George Wallace was a leading foe of desegregation, and Birmingham had one of the strongest and most violent chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. Birmingham had become a leading focus of the civil rights movement by the spring of 1963 when Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested there while leading supporters of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in a nonviolent campaign of demonstrations against segregation.

While in jail, King wrote a letter to local white ministers justifying his decision not to call off the demonstrations in the face of continued bloodshed at the hands of local law enforcement officials, led by Birmingham's police commissioner, Eugene "Bull" Connor. "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" was published in the national press even as images of police brutality against protesters in Birmingham-including children being attacked by police dogs and knocked off their feet by fire hoses-sent shock waves around the world, helping to build crucial support for the civil rights movement.

'I Have a Dream,' 1963

On August 28, 1963, some 250,000 people-both Black and white-participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the largest demonstration in the history of the nation's capital and the most significant display of the civil rights movement's growing strength. After marching from the Washington Monument, the demonstrators gathered near the Lincoln Memorial, where a number of civil rights leaders addressed the crowd, calling for voting rights, equal employment opportunities for Black Americans and an end to racial segregation.

The last leader to appear was the Baptist preacher Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), who spoke eloquently of the struggle facing Black Americans and the need for continued action and nonviolent resistance. " I have a dream," King intoned, expressing his faith that one day white and Black people would stand together as equals, and there would be harmony between the races: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

King's improvised sermon continued for nine minutes after the end of his prepared remarks, and his stirring words would be remembered as undoubtedly one of the greatest speeches in American history. At its conclusion, King quoted an "old Negro spiritual: 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'" King's speech served as a defining moment for the civil rights movement, and he soon emerged as its most prominent figure.

Civil Rights Act of 1964, July 1964

At its most basic level, the act gave the federal government more power to protect citizens against discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex or national origin. It mandated the desegregation of most public accommodations, including lunch counters, bus depots, parks and swimming pools, and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to ensure equal treatment of minorities in the workplace. The act also guaranteed equal voting rights by removing biased registration requirements and procedures and authorized the U.S. Office of Education to provide aid to assist with school desegregation. In a televised ceremony on July 2, 1964, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law using 75 pens; he presented one of them to King, who counted it among his most prized possessions.

Freedom Summer and the 'Mississippi Burning' Murders, June 1964

In the summer of 1964, civil rights organizations including the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) urged white students from the North to travel to Mississippi, where they helped register Black voters and build schools for Black children. The organizations believed the participation of white students in the so-called "Freedom Summer" would bring increased visibility to their efforts. The summer had barely begun, however, when three volunteers-Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, both white New Yorkers, and James Chaney, a Black Mississippian-disappeared on their way back from investigating the burning of an African American church by the Ku Klux Klan. After a massive FBI investigation (code-named "Mississippi Burning") their bodies were discovered on August 4 buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, in Neshoba County, Mississippi.

Although the culprits in the case-white supremacists who included the county's deputy sheriff-were soon identified, the state made no arrests. The Justice Department eventually indicted 19 men for violating the three volunteers' civil rights (the only charge that would give the federal government jurisdiction over the case) and after a three-year-long legal battle, the men finally went on trial in Jackson, Mississippi. In October 1967, an all-white jury found seven of the defendants guilty and acquitted the other nine. Though the verdict was hailed as a major civil rights victory-it was the first time anyone in Mississippi had been convicted for a crime against a civil rights worker-the judge in the case gave out relatively light sentences, and none of the convicted men served more than six years behind bars.

Selma to Montgomery March, March 1965

In early 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.

On March 7, 600 marchers got as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside Selma when they 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. King himself led another attempt on March 9, but turned the marchers around when state troopers again blocked the road; that night, a group of segregationists fatally beat a protester, the young white minister James Reeb.

On March 21, after a U.S. district court ordered Alabama to permit the Selma-Montgomery march, some 2,000 marchers set out on the three-day journey, this time protected by U.S. Army troops and Alabama National Guard forces under federal control. "No tide of racism can stop us," King proclaimed from the steps of the state capitol building, addressing the nearly 50,000 supporters-Black and white-who met the marchers in Montgomery.

Malcolm X Shot to Death, February 1965

In 1952, the former Malcolm Little was released from prison after serving six years on a robbery charge; while incarcerated, he had joined the Nation of Islam (NOI, commonly known as the Black Muslims), given up drinking and drugs and replaced his surname with an X to signify his rejection of his "slave" name. Charismatic and eloquent, Malcolm X soon became an influential leader of the NOI, which combined Islam with Black nationalism and sought to encourage disadvantaged young Black people searching for confidence in segregated America.

As the outspoken public voice of the Black Muslim faith, Malcolm challenged the mainstream civil rights movement and the nonviolent pursuit of integration championed by Martin Luther King Jr. Instead, he urged followers to defend themselves against white aggression "by any means necessary." Mounting tensions between Malcolm and NOI founder Elijah Muhammad led Malcolm to form his own mosque in 1964. He made a pilgrimage to Mecca that same year and underwent a second conversion, this time to Sunni Islam. Calling himself el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, he renounced NOI's philosophy of separatism and advocated a more inclusive approach to the struggle for Black rights.

On February 21, 1965, during a speaking engagement in Harlem, three members of the NOI rushed the stage and shot Malcolm some 15 times at close range. After Malcolm's death, his bestselling book The Autobiography of Malcolm X popularized his ideas, particularly among Black youth, and laid the foundation for the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and 1970s.

Voting Rights Act of 1965, August 1965

Less than a week after the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers were beaten and bloodied by Alabama state troopers in March 1965, President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress, calling for federal legislation to ensure protection of the voting rights of African Americans. The result was the Voting Rights Act, which Congress passed in August 1965.

The Voting Rights Act sought to overcome the legal barriers that still existed at the state and local levels preventing Black citizens from exercising the right to vote given them by the 15th Amendment. Specifically, it banned literacy tests as a requirement for voting, mandated federal oversight of voter registration in areas where tests had previously been used and gave the U.S. attorney general the duty of challenging the use of poll taxes for state and local elections.

Along with the Civil Rights Act of the previous year, the Voting Rights Act was one of the most expansive pieces of civil rights legislation in American history, and it greatly reduced the disparity between Black and white voters in the U.S. In Mississippi alone, the percentage of eligible Black voters registered to vote increased from 5 percent in 1960 to nearly 60 percent in 1968. In the mid-1960s, 70 African Americans were serving as elected officials in the South, while by the turn of the century there were some 5,000. In the same time period, the number of Black people serving in Congress increased from six to about 40.

Rise of Black Power

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. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this frustration fueled the rise of the Black Power movement. According to then-SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael, who first popularized the term "Black Power" in 1966, the traditional civil rights movement and its emphasis on nonviolence, did not go far enough, and the federal legislation it had achieved failed to address the economic and social disadvantages facing Black Americans.

Black Power was a form of both self-definition and self-defense for African Americans; it called on them to stop looking to the institutions of white America-which were believed to be inherently racist-and act for themselves, by themselves, to seize the gains they desired, including better jobs, housing and education. Also in 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, college students in Oakland, California, founded the Black Panther Party.

While its original mission was to protect Black people from white brutality by sending patrol groups into Black neighborhoods, the Panthers soon developed into a Marxist group that promoted Black Power by urging African Americans to arm themselves and demand full employment, decent housing and control over their own communities. Clashes ensued between the Panthers and police in California, New York and Chicago, and in 1967 Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter after killing a police officer. His trial brought national attention to the organization, which at its peak in the late 1960s boasted some 2,000 members.

Fair Housing Act, April 1968

The Fair Housing Act of 1968, meant as a follow-up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, marked the last great legislative achievement of the civil rights era. Originally intended to extend federal protection to civil rights workers, it was later expanded to address racial discrimination in the sale, rental or financing of housing units. After the bill passed the Senate by an exceedingly narrow margin in early April, it was thought that the increasingly conservative House of Representatives, wary of the growing strength and militancy of the Black Power movement, would weaken it considerably.

On the day of the Senate vote, however, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Pressure to pass the bill increased amid the wave of national remorse that followed, and after a strictly limited debate, the House passed the Fair Housing Act on April 10. President Johnson signed it into law the following day. Over the next years, however, there was little decrease in housing segregation, and violence arose from Black efforts to seek housing in white neighborhoods.

From 1950 to 1980, the total Black population in America's urban centers increased from 6.1 million to 15.3 million; during this same time period, white Americans steadily moved out of the cities into the suburbs, taking with them many of the employment opportunities Black people needed. In this way, the ghetto-an inner city community plagued by high unemployment, crime and other social ills-became an ever more prevalent fact of urban Black life.

MLK Assassinated, April 4, 1968

On April 4, 1968, the world was stunned and saddened by the news that the civil rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot and killed on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to support a sanitation workers' strike. King's death opened a huge rift between white and Black Americans, as many Black people saw the killing as a rejection of their vigorous pursuit of equality through the nonviolent resistance he had championed. In more than 100 cities, several days of riots, burning and looting followed his death.

The accused killer, a white man named James Earl Ray, was captured and tried immediately; he entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to 99 years in prison; no testimony was heard. Ray later recanted his confession, and despite several inquiries into the matter by the U.S. government, many continued to believe that the speedy trial had been a cover-up for a larger conspiracy. King's assassination, along with the killing of Malcolm X three years earlier, radicalized many moderate African American activists, fueling the growth of the Black Power movement and the Black Panther Party.

The success of conservative politicians that year-including Richard Nixon 's election as president and the third-party candidacy of the ardent segregationist George Wallace, who won 13 percent of the vote-further discouraged African Americans, many of whom felt that the tide was turning against the civil rights movement.

Shirley Chisholm Runs for President, 1972

By the early 1970s, the advances of the civil rights movement had combined with the rise of the feminist movement to create an African American women's movement. "There can't be liberation for half a race," declared Margaret Sloan, one of the women behind the National Black Feminist Organization, founded in 1973. A year earlier, Representative Shirley Chisholm of New York became a national symbol of both movements as the first major party African American candidate and the first female candidate for president of the United States.

A former educational consultant and a founder of the National Women's Caucus, Chisholm became the first Black woman in Congress in 1968, when she was elected to the House from her Brooklyn district. Though she failed to win a primary, Chisholm received more than 150 votes at the Democratic National Convention. She claimed she never expected to win the nomination. It went to George McGovern, who lost to Richard Nixon in the general election.

The outspoken Chisholm, who attracted little support among African American men during her presidential campaign, later told the press: "I've always met more discrimination being a woman than being Black. When I ran for the Congress, when I ran for president, I met more discrimination as a woman than for being Black. Men are men."

The Bakke Decision and Affirmative Action, 1978

Beginning in the 1960s, the term "affirmative action" was used to refer to policies and initiatives aimed at compensating for past discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, religion or national origin. President John F. Kennedy first used the phrase in 1961, in an executive order calling on the federal government to hire more African Americans. By the mid 1970s, many universities were seeking to increase the presence of minority and female faculty and students on their campuses. The University of California at Davis, for example, designated 16 percent of its medical school's admissions spots for minority applicants.

After Allan Bakke, a white California man, applied twice without success, he sued U.C. Davis, claiming that his grades and test scores were higher than those of minority students who were admitted and accusing UC Davis of "reverse discrimination." In June 1978, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the use of strict racial quotas was unconstitutional and that Bakke should be admitted; on the other hand, it held that institutions of higher education could rightfully use race as a criterion in admissions decisions in order to ensure diversity.

In the wake of the Bakke verdict, affirmative action continued to be a controversial and divisive issue, with a growing opposition movement claiming that the so-called "racial playing field" was now equal and that African Americans no longer needed special consideration to overcome their disadvantages. In subsequent decisions over the next decades, the Court limited the scope of affirmative action programs, while several U.S. states prohibited racially based affirmative action.

Jesse Jackson Galvanizes Black Voters, 1984

As a young man, Jesse Jackson left his studies at the Chicago Theological Seminary to join Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in its crusade for Black civil rights in the South; when King was assassinated in Memphis in April 1968, Jackson was at his side. In 1971, Jackson founded PUSH, or People United to Save Humanity (later changed to People United to Serve Humanity), an organization that advocated self-reliance for African Americans and sought to establish racial parity in the business and financial community.

He was a leading voice for Black Americans during the early 1980s, urging them to be more politically active and heading up a voter registration drive that led to the election of Harold Washington as the first Black mayor of Chicago in 1983. The following year, Jackson ran for the Democratic nomination for president. On the strength of his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, he placed third in the primaries, propelled by a surge of Black voter participation.

He ran again in 1988 and received 6.6 million votes, or 24 percent of the total primary vote, winning seven states and finishing second behind the eventual Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis. Jackson's continued influence in the Democratic Party in the decades that followed ensured that African American issues had an important role in the party's platform.

Throughout his long career, Jackson has inspired both admiration and criticism for his tireless efforts on behalf of the Black community and his outspoken public persona. His son, Jesse L. Jackson Jr., won election to the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois in 1995.

Oprah Winfrey Launches Syndicated Talk Show, 1986

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the success of the long-running sitcom The Cosby Show-featuring popular comedian Bill Cosby as the doctor patriarch of a close-knit middle-class African American family-helped redefine the image of Black characters on mainstream American television. Suddenly, there was no lack of educated, upwardly mobile, family-oriented Black characters for TV viewers to look to, both in fiction and in life. In 1980, entrepreneur Robert L. Johnson founded Black Entertainment Television (BET), which he later sold to entertainment giant Viacom for some $3 billion. Perhaps the most striking phenomenon, however, was the rise of Oprah Winfrey.

Born in rural Mississippi to a poor unwed teenage mother, Winfrey got her start in television news before taking over a morning talk show in Chicago in 1984. Two years later, she launched her own nationally syndicated talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, which would go on to become the highest rated in TV history. Celebrated for her ability to talk candidly about a wide range of issues, Winfrey spun her talk show success into a one-woman empire-including acting, film and television production and publishing.

She notably promoted the work of Black female writers, forming a film company to produce movies based on novels like The Color Purple, by Alice Walker, and Beloved, by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. (She starred in both.) One of the most influential individuals in entertainment and the first Black female billionaire, Winfrey is also an active philanthropist, giving generously to Black South Africans and to the historically Black Morehouse College, among other causes.

Los Angeles Riots, 1992

In March 1991, officers with the California Highway Patrol attempted to pull an African American man named Rodney King over for speeding on a Los Angeles freeway. King, who was on probation for robbery and had been drinking, led them on a high-speed chase, and by the time the patrolmen caught up to his car, several officers of the Los Angeles Police Department were on the scene. After King allegedly resisted arrest and threatened them, four LAPD officers shot him with a TASER gun and severely beat him.

Caught on videotape by an onlooker and broadcast around the world, the beating inspired widespread outrage in the city's African American community, who had long condemned the racial profiling and abuse its members suffered at the hands of the police force. Many demanded that the unpopular L.A. police chief, Daryl Gates, be fired and that the four officers be brought to justice for their use of excessive force. The King case was eventually tried in the suburb of Simi Valley, and in April 1992 a jury found the officers not guilty.

Rage over the verdict sparked the four days of the L.A. riots, beginning in the mostly Black South Central neighborhood. By the time the riots subsided, some 55 people were dead, more than 2,300 injured, and more than 1,000 buildings had been burned. Authorities later estimated the total damage at around $1 billion. The next year, two of the four LAPD officers involved in the beating were retried and convicted in a federal court for violating King's civil rights; he eventually received $3.8 million from the city in a settlement.

Million Man March, 1995

In October 1995, hundreds of thousands of Black men gathered in Washington, D.C. for the Million Man March, one of the largest demonstrations of its kind in the capital's history. Its organizer, Minister Louis Farrakhan, had called for "a million sober, disciplined, committed, dedicated, inspired Black men to meet in Washington on a day of atonement." Farrakhan, who had asserted control over the Nation of Islam (commonly known as the Black Muslims) in the late 1970s and reasserted its original principles of Black separatism, may have been an incendiary figure, but the idea behind the Million Man March was one most Black-and many white-people could get behind.

The march was intended to bring about a kind of spiritual renewal among Black men and to instill in them a sense of solidarity and of personal responsibility to improve their own condition. It would also, organizers believed, disprove some of the stereotypical negative images of Black men that existed in American society.

By that time, the U.S. government's "war on drugs" had sent a disproportionate number of African Americans to prison, and by 2000, more Black men were incarcerated than in college. Estimates of the number of participants in the Million Man March ranged from 400,000 to more than 1 million, and its success spurred the organization of a Million Woman March, which took place in 1997 in Philadelphia.

Colin Powell Becomes Secretary of State, 2001

In 2001, George W. Bush appointed Powell as secretary of state, making him the first African American to serve as America's top diplomat. Powell sought to build international support for the controversial U.S invasion of Iraq in 2003, delivering a divisive speech to the United Nations regarding that country's possession of weapons material that was later revealed to be based on faulty intelligence. He resigned after Bush's reelection in 2004.

In another history-making appointment, Condoleezza Rice, Bush's longtime foreign policy adviser and the former head of the National Security Council, succeeded Powell, becoming the first African American woman to serve as secretary of state. Though he largely stayed out of the political spotlight after stepping down, Powell remained an admired figure in Washington and beyond.

Though he continued to brush off any speculation of a possible future presidential run, Powell made headlines during the 2008 presidential campaign when he broke from the Republican party to endorse Barack Obama, the eventual winner and the first African American to be elected president of the United States.

Barack Obama Becomes 44th US President, 2008

On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States; he is the first African American to hold that office. The product of an interracial marriage-his father grew up in a small village in Kenya, his mother in Kansas-Obama grew up in Hawaii but discovered his civic calling in Chicago, where he worked for several years as a community organizer on the city's largely Black South Side.

After studying at Harvard Law School and practicing constitutional law in Chicago, he began his political career in 1996 in the Illinois State Senate and in 2004 announced his candidacy for a newly vacant seat in the U.S. Senate. He delivered a rousing keynote speech at that year's Democratic National Convention, attracting national attention with his eloquent call for national unity and cooperation across party lines. In February 2007, just months after he became only the third African American elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction, Obama announced his candidacy for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

After withstanding a tight Democratic primary battle with Hillary Clinton, the New York senator and former first lady, Obama defeated Senator John McCain of Arizona in the general election that November. Obama's appearances in both the primaries and the general election drew impressive crowds, and his message of hope and change-embodied by the slogan "Yes We Can"-inspired thousands of new voters, many young and Black, to cast their vote for the first time in the historic election. He was reelected in 2012.

The Black Lives Matter Movement

The term "Black lives matter" was first used by organizer Alicia Garza in a July 2013 Facebook post in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a Florida man who shot and killed unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012. Martin's death set off nationwide protests like the Million Hoodie March. In 2013, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi formed the Black Lives Matter Network with the mission to "eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes."

The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter first appeared on Twitter on July 13, 2013, and spread widely as high-profile cases involving the deaths of Black civilians provoked renewed outrage.

A series of deaths of Black Americans at the hands of police officers continued to spark outrage and protests, including Eric Garner in New York City, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Tamir Rice in Cleveland Ohio and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland.

The Black Lives Matter movement gained renewed attention on September 25, 2016, when San Francisco 49ers players Eric Reid, Eli Harold, and quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem before the game against the Seattle Seahawks to draw attention to recent acts of police brutality. Dozens of other players in the NFL and beyond followed suit.

George Floyd Protests

The movement swelled to a critical juncture on May 25, 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic when 46-year-old George Floyd died after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by police officer Derek Chauvin.

Chauvin was filmed kneeling on Floyd's neck for more than eight minutes. Floyd had been accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill at a local deli in Minneapolis. All four officers involved in the incident were fired. In April 2021, Chauvin was convicted of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. In February 2022, the three other officers were found guilty of depriving Floyd of his civil rights when they helped with the restraint that led to his death.

Floyd's killing came on the heels of two other high-profile cases in 2020. On February 23, 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery was killed while out on a run after being followed by three white men in a pickup truck. And on March 13, 26-year-old EMT Breonna Taylor was shot eight times and killed after police broke down the door to her apartment while executing a nighttime warrant.

On May 26, 2020, the day after Floyd's death, protestors in Minneapolis took to the streets to protest Floyd's killing. Police cars were set on fire and officers released tear gas to disperse crowds. After months of quarantine and isolation during a global pandemic, protests mounted, spreading across the country in the following days and weeks.

Kamala Harris Becomes the First Woman and First Black US Vice President, 2021

In January 2021, Kamala Harris became the first woman and first woman of color to become vice president of the United States. Then-candidate Joe Biden had nominated Harris in August 2020 during the Democratic party's "remote" national convention. Harris, whose mother immigrated to the United States from India and whose father immigrated from Jamaica, was the first person of African or Asian descent to become a major party's vice presidential candidate-and the first to win the office.

In her victory speech in November 2020, Harris said that she was thinking "about the generations of women, Black women, Asian, white, Latina, Native American women-who throughout our nation's history have paved the way for this moment tonight-women who fought and sacrificed so much for equality and liberty and justice for all."

Sources

Ferguson shooting victim Michael Brown. BBC.
George Floyd Protests: A Timeline. The New York Times.
Tamir Rice. PBS.org.
The Matter of Black Lives. The New Yorker.
The Hashtag Black Lives Matter. Pew Research.
The Path to Eric Garner's death. The New York Times.
Timeline of Murder Trial of Amber Guyger. ABC.

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Black History Milestones: Timeline | HISTORY

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African American history began with slavery, as white European settlers first brought Africans to the continent to serve as enslaved workers. After the Civil War, the racist legacy of slavery persisted, spurring movements of resistance. Learn important dates and facts about the African American experience.

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The Litte Rock Nine

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Elizabeth Eckford

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Little Rock NIne - Elizabeth Eckford

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Elizabeth Eckford by m.schoeneshoefer on Genially

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JFK Civil Rights Address
1963

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delivered 11 June 1963, White House, Washington, D.C.

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[AUTHENTICITY CERTIFIED: Text version below transcribed directly from audio.]

This afternoon, following a series of threats and defiant statements, the presence of Alabama National Guardsmen was required on the University of Alabama to carry out the final and unequivocal order of the United States District Court of the Northern District of Alabama. That order called for the admission of two clearly qualified young Alabama residents who happened to have been born Negro. That they were admitted peacefully on the campus is due in good measure to the conduct of the students of the University of Alabama, who met their responsibilities in a constructive way. I hope that every American, regardless of where he lives, will stop and examine his conscience about this and other related incidents. This Nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds. It was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and that the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened. Today, we are committed to a worldwide struggle to promote and protect the rights of all who wish to be free. And when Americans are sent to Vietnam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only. It ought to be possible, therefore, for American students of any color to attend any public institution they select without having to be backed up by troops. It ought to to be possible for American consumers of any color to receive equal service in places of public accommodation, such as hotels and restaurants and theaters and retail stores, without being forced to resort to demonstrations in the street, and it ought to be possible for American citizens of any color to register and to vote in a free election without interference or fear of reprisal. It ought to to be possible, in short, for every American to enjoy the privileges of being American without regard to his race or his color. In short, every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated. But this is not the case. The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the State in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing a high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed, about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year, a life expectancy which is 7 years shorter, and the prospects of earning only half as much. This is not a sectional issue. Difficulties over segregation and discrimination exist in every city, in every State of the Union, producing in many cities a rising tide of discontent that threatens the public safety. Nor is this a partisan issue. In a time of domestic crisis men of good will and generosity should be able to unite regardless of party or politics. This is not even a legal or legislative issue alone. It is better to settle these matters in the courts than on the streets, and new laws are needed at every level, but law alone cannot make men see right. We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay? One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free. We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is the land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes? Now the time has come for this Nation to fulfill its promise. The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no city or State or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them. The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South, where legal remedies are not at hand. Redress is sought in the streets, in demonstrations, parades, and protests which create tensions and threaten violence and threaten lives. We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and a people. It cannot be met by repressive police action. It cannot be left to increased demonstrations in the streets. It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk. It is a time to act in the Congress, in your State and local legislative body and, above all, in all of our daily lives. It is not enough to pin the blame on others, to say this a problem of one section of the country or another, or deplore the facts that we face. A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all. Those who do nothing are inviting shame, as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right, as well as reality. Next week I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law. The Federal judiciary has upheld that proposition in a series of forthright cases. The Executive Branch has adopted that proposition in the conduct of its affairs, including the employment of Federal personnel, the use of Federal facilities, and the sale of federally financed housing. But there are other necessary measures which only the Congress can provide, and they must be provided at this session. The old code of equity law under which we live commands for every wrong a remedy, but in too many communities, in too many parts of the country, wrongs are inflicted on Negro citizens and there are no remedies at law. Unless the Congress acts, their only remedy is the street. I am, therefore, asking the Congress to enact legislation giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public -- hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments. This seems to me to be an elementary right. Its denial is an arbitrary indignity that no American in 1963 should have to endure, but many do. I have recently met with scores of business leaders urging them to take voluntary action to end this discrimination, and I have been encouraged by their response, and in the last two weeks over 75 cities have seen progress made in desegregating these kinds of facilities. But many are unwilling to act alone, and for this reason, nationwide legislation is needed if we are to move this problem from the streets to the courts. I'm also asking the Congress to authorize the Federal Government to participate more fully in lawsuits designed to end segregation in public education. We have succeeded in persuading many districts to desegregate voluntarily. Dozens have admitted Negroes without violence. Today, a Negro is attending a State-supported institution in every one of our 50 States, but the pace is very slow. Too many Negro children entering segregated grade schools at the time of the Supreme Court's decision nine years ago will enter segregated high schools this fall, having suffered a loss which can never be restored. The lack of an adequate education denies the Negro a chance to get a decent job. The orderly implementation of the Supreme Court decision, therefore, cannot be left solely to those who may not have the economic resources to carry the legal action or who may be subject to harassment. Other features will be also requested, including greater protection for the right to vote. But legislation, I repeat, cannot solve this problem alone. It must be solved in the homes of every American in every community across our country. In this respect I wanna pay tribute to those citizens North and South who've been working in their communities to make life better for all. They are acting not out of sense of legal duty but out of a sense of human decency. Like our soldiers and sailors in all parts of the world they are meeting freedom's challenge on the firing line, and I salute them for their honor and their courage. My fellow Americans, this is a problem which faces us all -- in every city of the North as well as the South. Today, there are Negroes unemployed, two or three times as many compared to whites, inadequate education, moving into the large cities, unable to find work, young people particularly out of work without hope, denied equal rights, denied the opportunity to eat at a restaurant or a lunch counter or go to a movie theater, denied the right to a decent education, denied almost today the right to attend a State university even though qualified. It seems to me that these are matters which concern us all, not merely Presidents or Congressmen or Governors, but every citizen of the United States. This is one country. It has become one country because all of us and all the people who came here had an equal chance to develop their talents. We cannot say to ten percent of the population that you can't have that right; that your children cannot have the chance to develop whatever talents they have; that the only way that they are going to get their rights is to go in the street and demonstrate. I think we owe them and we owe ourselves a better country than that. Therefore, I'm asking for your help in making it easier for us to move ahead and to provide the kind of equality of treatment which we would want ourselves; to give a chance for every child to be educated to the limit of his talents. As I've said before, not every child has an equal talent or an equal ability or equal motivation, but they should have the equal right to develop their talent and their ability and their motivation, to make something of themselves. We have a right to expect that the Negro community will be responsible, will uphold the law, but they have a right to expect that the law will be fair, that the Constitution will be color blind, as Justice Harlan said at the turn of the century. This is what we're talking about and this is a matter which concerns this country and what it stands for, and in meeting it I ask the support of all our citizens. Thank you very much.
Book/CDs by Michael E. Eidenmuller, Published by McGraw-Hill (2008)

Page Updated: 6/7/19

Audio Source: The Mills Center for Public Affairs -- Scripps Library and Multimedia Archive

U.S. Copyright Status: Text and Audio = Property of AmericanRhetoric.com.

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delivered 11 June 1963, White House, Washington, D.C. Your browser does not support the audio element. [AUTHENTICITY CERTIFIED: Text version below transcribed directly from audio.] This afternoon, following a series of threats and defiant statements, the presence of Alabama National Guardsmen was required on the University of Alabama to carry out the final and unequivocal order of the United States District Court of the Northern District of Alabama.

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transcript

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John F. Kennedy - Civil Rights Address (pdf.io)

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Rhetorical devices 1 (A bis I) - Englisch rhetorische Stilmittel - Definition, Beispiel & Wirkung

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rhetorical devices 2 (J bis Z) - Englisch rhetorische Stilmittel - Definition, Beispiel & Wirkung

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Martin Luther King Jr.

"I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi... will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice."

Minister & Activist

Quotes

Biography

Museum

Bio

Video

https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/explore/history/martin-luther-king-jr/Martin Luther King, Jr.Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929, never backed down in his stand against racism. He dedicated his...Kids

https://www.civilrightsmuseum.org/National Civil Rights Museum | At the Lorraine MotelCivilrightsmuseum

https://youtu.be/I47Y6VHc3Ms

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Martin Luther King Jr. by Ryan Swanson on Genially

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Martin Luther King Jr. "I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi... will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice." Minister & Activist Quotes Biography Museum Bio Video https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/explore/history/martin-luther-king-jr/Martin Luther King, Jr.Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929, never backed down in his stand against racism.

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https://thekingcenter.org/about-tkc/martin-luther-king-jr/

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A hero is born

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929. At the time in that part of the country, segregation-or the separation of races in places like schools, buses, and restaurants-was the law. He experienced racial predjudice from the time he was very young, which inspired him to dedicate his life to achieving equality and justice for Americans of all colors. King believed that peaceful refusal to obey unjust law was the best way to bring about social change.

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Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., never backed down in his stand against racism. Learn more about the life of this courageous hero who inspired millions of people to right a historical wrong.

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Malcolm X: Minister & Human Rights Activist | Biography

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'Who Killed Malcolm X' explores mystery of his murder

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Peter Pettus/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-ppmsca-08102)

On May 4, 1961, a group of seven African Americans and six whites left Washington, D.C., on the first Freedom Ride in two buses bound for New Orleans. They were hoping to provoke the federal government into enforcing the 1960 Supreme Court ruling in Boynton v. Virginia, which forbade "unjust discrimination," including in bus terminals, restrooms, and other facilities associated with interstate travel.

As the Freedom Riders traveled into the Deep South, the white riders would use facilities designated for Blacks and vice versa. On May 14, in Alabama, one bus was firebombed and the riders were beaten. The second bus, as it arrived in Birmingham, was also attacked. Although law enforcement was late in responding, another set of Freedom Riders were undeterred and set out from Nashville to Birmingham, where, at the behest of Robert F. Kennedy, then the U.S. attorney general, they were able to secure a new bus and protection from the State Highway Patrol to Montgomery, where the riders were again beaten. National Guard support was provided when 27 Freedom Riders continued on to Jackson, Mississippi, only to be arrested and jailed. On May 29 President John F. Kennedy ordered the Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce even stricter guidelines banning segregation in interstate travel. Still, Freedom Riders continued to travel by public transportation in the South until the dictate took effect in September.

The history of the American civil rights movement is full of stories of such perseverance in the face of violence and stiff odds and successes coming at the end of long struggles. The following are 10 other defining moments in American civil rights.
This list was adapted from a post that originally appeared on the Britannica Blog.

Freeing the Slaves

While some continue to debate whether the Civil War was fought over slavery, slavery was central to the war, and the fate of the millions of enslaved people was in the balance throughout the war. On January 1, 1863, however, the future became clear, as President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the slaves in the Confederate states in rebellion against the Union.

The Emancipation Proclamation did more than lift the war to the level of a crusade for human freedom. It brought some substantial practical results, because it allowed the Union to recruit Black soldiers. To this invitation to join the army, Blacks responded in considerable numbers, nearly 180,000 of them enlisting during the remainder of the war. By August 26, 1863, Lincoln could report, in a letter to James C. Conkling, that "the emancipation policy, and the use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion." Two months before the war ended-in February 1865-Lincoln told portrait painter Francis B. Carpenter that the Emancipation Proclamation was "the central act of my administration, and the greatest event of the nineteenth century."

13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments Ratified

Although full political freedom for African Americans would not come until the 1960s, in the 1860s the Constitution was fundamentally altered to eliminate discrimination that had been enshrined in the founding document. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) officially abolished slavery, the Fourteenth (1868) granted citizenship rights to former slaves, and the Fifteenth (1870) bestowed voting rights. With their newfound rights, several African Americans were elected to political office at the national level. Hiram Revels of Mississippi even took the former seat of Confederate president Jefferson Davis in the U.S. Senate. Soon, however, particularly in Southern states, a Jim Crow system would be implemented that undermined these rights.

Breaking Baseball's Color Barrier

Although Blacks had long excelled at baseball in the Negro leagues, no Major League Baseball team had ever signed a Black player to play professional ball with white players. That changed in the mid-1940s, when Branch Rickey, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, hatched a plan to sign an African American player. In October 1945 Rickey signed Jackie Robinson of the Kansas City Monarchs, and Robinson played a season with the minor league Montreal Royals. Then, in 1947, Robinson was promoted to the major league club, becoming the first Black player in the major leagues in 63 years. Robinson won the National League Rookie of the Year award in 1947 and became, in 1949, the league's MVP. Still, he endured invectives and even had bottles hurled at him, and some of his teammates openly protested having to play with him. In some cities, Robinson couldn't even stay in the same hotel as his teammates or eat in the same restaurant. As he later recalled: "Plenty of times I wanted to haul off when somebody insulted me for the color of my skin, but I had to hold to myself. I knew I was kind of an experiment. The whole thing was bigger than me."

Integrating the Military

Blacks had always served in the American armed forces from the time of the American Revolution, and at that time Blacks and whites fought alongside one another. However, the integration of the 1770s was not repeated until the mid-20th century. In June 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt ended discrimination in the defense industry, but the armed services remained segregated. In October 1947 the President's Committee on Civil Rights proposed to end segregation in the armed services. Facing resistance from Southern senators and a potential filibuster, President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948, abolishing once and for all racial segregation in the U.S. military.

Integrating the Schools ("With All Deliberate Speed")

No story of the civil rights movement can be told without Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. In 1896 the U.S. Supreme Court had issued its "separate but equal" ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which stipulated that segregation was permissible (in practice, separate was emphasized rather than equal). Particularly in the South (but not only), schools were racially segregated, and schools catering to African American students were generally inferior. On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously (9-0) that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Arguing for the plaintiffs (the suits were filed by the NAACP on behalf of African American students) was Thurgood Marshall, who would go on to become the first African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. In a subsequent opinion on the question of relief, commonly referred to as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (II), argued April 11-14, 1955, and decided on May 31 of that year, Chief Justice Earl Warren ordered the district courts and local school authorities to take appropriate steps to integrate public schools in their jurisdictions "with all deliberate speed." Public schools in Southern states, however, remained almost completely segregated until the late 1960s.

Standing Up by Sitting Down (Part I)

Rosa Parks is often called the "mother of the civil rights movement" for her role in sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56. On December 1, 1955, she was arrested for refusing to give her bus seat to a white man, a violation of the city's racial segregation ordinances. Under the aegis of the Montgomery Improvement Association and the leadership of the young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King, Jr., a boycott of the municipal bus company was begun on December 5. The boycott would last until December 21, 1956, with total victory for the protesters, following the Supreme Court's upholding (in November) of a lower court's decision declaring Montgomery's segregated seating unconstitutional. Parks went on to receive numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1996) and the Congressional Gold Medal (1999).

Standing Up by Sitting Down (Part II)

Although victories came in Supreme Court rulings on education and in seating on buses, not all segregation was wiped away easily, so on February 1, 1960, the " Greensboro Four," all students at North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, North Carolina, entered a Woolworth's store that had a dining area. They purchased items and then sat at the lunch counter-which was reserved for "whites only." The Greensboro Four politely requested service at the counter, remaining seated while their orders were refused by the waitstaff. The lunch counter manager contacted the police, but the local media had already been alerted. The police arrived, only to declare that they could do nothing because the four men were paying customers of the store and had not taken any provocative actions. The media response, however, was immediate. A photo of the Greensboro Four appeared in local newspapers, and the protest quickly expanded. The next day they returned to Woolworth's, this time with 20 other students, and the scene played out again over the following days, students sitting-in even on the sidewalk outside. The sit-ins spread throughout the country, and dining facilities throughout the South began to be integrated. Finally, in July 1960 the lunch counter at the Greensboro Woolworth's was serving Black patrons, providing a template for nonviolent resistance.

Marching for Jobs and Freedom

On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., led an interracial peaceful assembly of more than 200,000 in the shadows of the Lincoln Memorial to demand equal justice for all citizens. The culmination of the March on Washington was King's inspiring "I Have a Dream" speech, in which he emphasized his faith that all men, someday, would be brothers. As King historian Clayborne Carson argues in his article on the civil rights movement for Britannica, King used the speech as "an opportunity to link black civil rights aspirations with traditional American political values. He insisted that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution comprised 'a promissory note' guaranteeing all Americans 'the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'"

Civil Rights, Finally

The trajectory since the 1940s had been toward full political equality for African Americans, but along the way there were setbacks as well as successes. Finally, on July 2, 1964, that goal was realized, as President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The law was intended to end discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin and has often been called the most important U.S. law on civil rights since Reconstruction (1865-77). Though near-universally supported today, the Civil Rights Act was a highly controversial issue in the United States as soon as it was proposed by President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Although Kennedy was unable to secure passage of the bill in Congress, a stronger version was eventually passed with the urging of his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed the bill into law on July 2, 1964, following one of the longest debates in Senate history. White groups opposed to integration with Blacks responded to the act with a significant backlash that took the form of protests, increased support for pro-segregation candidates for public office, and some racial violence. The constitutionality of the act was immediately challenged and was upheld by the Supreme Court in the test case Heart of Atlanta Motel v. U.S. (1964). The act gave federal law enforcement agencies the power to prevent racial discrimination in employment, voting, and the use of public facilities. The act was followed the next year by the Voting Rights Act, which aimed to ensure that African Americans could exercise their right to vote under the Fifteenth Amendment.

The Million Man March

Doug Mills/AP

Thirty-two years after King's March on Washington, Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, organized the Million Man March for Washington, D.C., to promote African American unity and values and to bring about a spiritual renewal that would instill a sense of personal responsibility in African American men for improving the condition of African Americans. Estimates of the number of marchers, most of whom were African American men, ranged from 400,000 to nearly 1.1 million, ranking it among the largest gatherings of its kind in American history. The event was directed by Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., the former head of the NAACP, and attracted many prominent African Americans, including Jesse Jackson, Rosa Parks, Cornel West, and Maya Angelou, though a number of African American leaders did not attend, including Mary Frances Berry, chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and Representative John Lewis, the latter of whom saw Farrakhan's message as an effort to "resegregate America." It was reported that in response to the march some 1.7 million African American men registered to vote.

Peter Pettus/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-ppmsca-08102)

On May 4, 1961, a group of seven African Americans and six whites left Washington, D.C., on the first Freedom Ride in two buses bound for New Orleans. They were hoping to provoke the federal government into enforcing the 1960 Supreme Court ruling in Boynton v. Virginia, which forbade "unjust discrimination," including in bus terminals, restrooms, and other facilities associated with interstate travel.

As the Freedom Riders traveled into the Deep South, the white riders would use facilities designated for Blacks and vice versa. On May 14, in Alabama, one bus was firebombed and the riders were beaten. The second bus, as it arrived in Birmingham, was also attacked. Although law enforcement was late in responding, another set of Freedom Riders were undeterred and set out from Nashville to Birmingham, where, at the behest of Robert F. Kennedy, then the U.S. attorney general, they were able to secure a new bus and protection from the State Highway Patrol to Montgomery, where the riders were again beaten. National Guard support was provided when 27 Freedom Riders continued on to Jackson, Mississippi, only to be arrested and jailed. On May 29 President John F. Kennedy ordered the Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce even stricter guidelines banning segregation in interstate travel. Still, Freedom Riders continued to travel by public transportation in the South until the dictate took effect in September.

The history of the American civil rights movement is full of stories of such perseverance in the face of violence and stiff odds and successes coming at the end of long struggles. The following are 10 other defining moments in American civil rights.
This list was adapted from a post that originally appeared on the Britannica Blog.

Freeing the Slaves

While some continue to debate whether the Civil War was fought over slavery, slavery was central to the war, and the fate of the millions of enslaved people was in the balance throughout the war. On January 1, 1863, however, the future became clear, as President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the slaves in the Confederate states in rebellion against the Union.

The Emancipation Proclamation did more than lift the war to the level of a crusade for human freedom. It brought some substantial practical results, because it allowed the Union to recruit Black soldiers. To this invitation to join the army, Blacks responded in considerable numbers, nearly 180,000 of them enlisting during the remainder of the war. By August 26, 1863, Lincoln could report, in a letter to James C. Conkling, that "the emancipation policy, and the use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion." Two months before the war ended-in February 1865-Lincoln told portrait painter Francis B. Carpenter that the Emancipation Proclamation was "the central act of my administration, and the greatest event of the nineteenth century."

13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments Ratified

Although full political freedom for African Americans would not come until the 1960s, in the 1860s the Constitution was fundamentally altered to eliminate discrimination that had been enshrined in the founding document. The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) officially abolished slavery, the Fourteenth (1868) granted citizenship rights to former slaves, and the Fifteenth (1870) bestowed voting rights. With their newfound rights, several African Americans were elected to political office at the national level. Hiram Revels of Mississippi even took the former seat of Confederate president Jefferson Davis in the U.S. Senate. Soon, however, particularly in Southern states, a Jim Crow system would be implemented that undermined these rights.

Breaking Baseball's Color Barrier

Although Blacks had long excelled at baseball in the Negro leagues, no Major League Baseball team had ever signed a Black player to play professional ball with white players. That changed in the mid-1940s, when Branch Rickey, president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, hatched a plan to sign an African American player. In October 1945 Rickey signed Jackie Robinson of the Kansas City Monarchs, and Robinson played a season with the minor league Montreal Royals. Then, in 1947, Robinson was promoted to the major league club, becoming the first Black player in the major leagues in 63 years. Robinson won the National League Rookie of the Year award in 1947 and became, in 1949, the league's MVP. Still, he endured invectives and even had bottles hurled at him, and some of his teammates openly protested having to play with him. In some cities, Robinson couldn't even stay in the same hotel as his teammates or eat in the same restaurant. As he later recalled: "Plenty of times I wanted to haul off when somebody insulted me for the color of my skin, but I had to hold to myself. I knew I was kind of an experiment. The whole thing was bigger than me."

Integrating the Military

Blacks had always served in the American armed forces from the time of the American Revolution, and at that time Blacks and whites fought alongside one another. However, the integration of the 1770s was not repeated until the mid-20th century. In June 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt ended discrimination in the defense industry, but the armed services remained segregated. In October 1947 the President's Committee on Civil Rights proposed to end segregation in the armed services. Facing resistance from Southern senators and a potential filibuster, President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948, abolishing once and for all racial segregation in the U.S. military.

Integrating the Schools ("With All Deliberate Speed")

No story of the civil rights movement can be told without Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. In 1896 the U.S. Supreme Court had issued its "separate but equal" ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which stipulated that segregation was permissible (in practice, separate was emphasized rather than equal). Particularly in the South (but not only), schools were racially segregated, and schools catering to African American students were generally inferior. On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously (9-0) that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Arguing for the plaintiffs (the suits were filed by the NAACP on behalf of African American students) was Thurgood Marshall, who would go on to become the first African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. In a subsequent opinion on the question of relief, commonly referred to as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (II), argued April 11-14, 1955, and decided on May 31 of that year, Chief Justice Earl Warren ordered the district courts and local school authorities to take appropriate steps to integrate public schools in their jurisdictions "with all deliberate speed." Public schools in Southern states, however, remained almost completely segregated until the late 1960s.

Standing Up by Sitting Down (Part I)

Rosa Parks is often called the "mother of the civil rights movement" for her role in sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56. On December 1, 1955, she was arrested for refusing to give her bus seat to a white man, a violation of the city's racial segregation ordinances. Under the aegis of the Montgomery Improvement Association and the leadership of the young pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King, Jr., a boycott of the municipal bus company was begun on December 5. The boycott would last until December 21, 1956, with total victory for the protesters, following the Supreme Court's upholding (in November) of a lower court's decision declaring Montgomery's segregated seating unconstitutional. Parks went on to receive numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1996) and the Congressional Gold Medal (1999).

Standing Up by Sitting Down (Part II)

Although victories came in Supreme Court rulings on education and in seating on buses, not all segregation was wiped away easily, so on February 1, 1960, the " Greensboro Four," all students at North Carolina A&T in Greensboro, North Carolina, entered a Woolworth's store that had a dining area. They purchased items and then sat at the lunch counter-which was reserved for "whites only." The Greensboro Four politely requested service at the counter, remaining seated while their orders were refused by the waitstaff. The lunch counter manager contacted the police, but the local media had already been alerted. The police arrived, only to declare that they could do nothing because the four men were paying customers of the store and had not taken any provocative actions. The media response, however, was immediate. A photo of the Greensboro Four appeared in local newspapers, and the protest quickly expanded. The next day they returned to Woolworth's, this time with 20 other students, and the scene played out again over the following days, students sitting-in even on the sidewalk outside. The sit-ins spread throughout the country, and dining facilities throughout the South began to be integrated. Finally, in July 1960 the lunch counter at the Greensboro Woolworth's was serving Black patrons, providing a template for nonviolent resistance.

Marching for Jobs and Freedom

On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., led an interracial peaceful assembly of more than 200,000 in the shadows of the Lincoln Memorial to demand equal justice for all citizens. The culmination of the March on Washington was King's inspiring "I Have a Dream" speech, in which he emphasized his faith that all men, someday, would be brothers. As King historian Clayborne Carson argues in his article on the civil rights movement for Britannica, King used the speech as "an opportunity to link black civil rights aspirations with traditional American political values. He insisted that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution comprised 'a promissory note' guaranteeing all Americans 'the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'"

Civil Rights, Finally

The trajectory since the 1940s had been toward full political equality for African Americans, but along the way there were setbacks as well as successes. Finally, on July 2, 1964, that goal was realized, as President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The law was intended to end discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin and has often been called the most important U.S. law on civil rights since Reconstruction (1865-77). Though near-universally supported today, the Civil Rights Act was a highly controversial issue in the United States as soon as it was proposed by President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Although Kennedy was unable to secure passage of the bill in Congress, a stronger version was eventually passed with the urging of his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed the bill into law on July 2, 1964, following one of the longest debates in Senate history. White groups opposed to integration with Blacks responded to the act with a significant backlash that took the form of protests, increased support for pro-segregation candidates for public office, and some racial violence. The constitutionality of the act was immediately challenged and was upheld by the Supreme Court in the test case Heart of Atlanta Motel v. U.S. (1964). The act gave federal law enforcement agencies the power to prevent racial discrimination in employment, voting, and the use of public facilities. The act was followed the next year by the Voting Rights Act, which aimed to ensure that African Americans could exercise their right to vote under the Fifteenth Amendment.

The Million Man March

Doug Mills/AP

Thirty-two years after King's March on Washington, Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, organized the Million Man March for Washington, D.C., to promote African American unity and values and to bring about a spiritual renewal that would instill a sense of personal responsibility in African American men for improving the condition of African Americans. Estimates of the number of marchers, most of whom were African American men, ranged from 400,000 to nearly 1.1 million, ranking it among the largest gatherings of its kind in American history. The event was directed by Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., the former head of the NAACP, and attracted many prominent African Americans, including Jesse Jackson, Rosa Parks, Cornel West, and Maya Angelou, though a number of African American leaders did not attend, including Mary Frances Berry, chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and Representative John Lewis, the latter of whom saw Farrakhan's message as an effort to "resegregate America." It was reported that in response to the march some 1.7 million African American men registered to vote.

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Riding Freedom: 10 Milestones in U.S. Civil Rights History

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On May 4, 1961, a group of seven African Americans and six whites left Washington, D.C., on the first Freedom Ride in two buses bound for New Orleans. They were hoping to provoke the federal government into enforcing the 1960 Supreme Court ruling in Boynton v.

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What it means to be black in the American educational system

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Many people still think that racism is no longer a problem in America. After the election of President Obama, academic John McWhorter argued that racism in America is, for all intents and purposes, dead. The prominent conservative scholar and African-American economist Thomas Sowell has argued that " racism isn't dead, but it is on life support." Harvard professors William Julius Wilson and Roland Fryer too have argued about the declining significance of race and discrimination.

However, as we wind down the final months of Obama's presidency, the declining significance of race and discrimination narratives seem to be at odds with the lived realities for African-Americans. President Obama himself has faced racist treatment, such as the birther controversy and a member of Congress saying "you lie." And then, one incident after another has highlighted the painful reality that black men are disproportionately likely to die at the hands of the police in comparison to any other demographic group.

Sadly, racism and discrimination are facts of life for many black Americans. As an African-American scholar who studies the experiences of black college students, I am especially interested in this issue. My research has found that black college students report higher levels of stress related to racial discrimination than other racial or ethnic groups. The unfortunate reality is that black Americans experience subtle and overt discrimination from preschool all the way to college.

Here's what studies show

The results of a recent survey by the Pew Research Center underscore this point. The survey found that black Americans with some college experience are more likely to say that they have experienced discrimination compared to blacks who did not report having any college experience.

Additional survey results revealed several differences between blacks with college experience versus blacks without college experience. For example, in the past 12 months, 55 percent of people with some college experience reported people had acted suspicious of them, compared to 38 percent of those with no college experience.

Similarly, 52 percent of people with some college experience reported people had acted as if they thought the individual wasn't smart, compared to 37 percent of people with no college experience.

So, what are the race-related struggles experienced by African-American students throughout their schooling?

Story of Tyrone

Let's consider the case of Tyrone. Tyrone is a four-year-old black male raised in a two-parent household. Like most four-year-olds, Tyrone is intellectually curious, and has a vivid imagination. He loves books, loves to color and paint, and also loves physical activities such as running, jumping and playing games with his friends.

Behaviorally, Tyrone is also similar to many four-year-olds in that he often likes to talk more than listen, and he can be temperamental. He can engage in hitting, kicking and spitting behaviors when he is angry.

One day Tyrone was playing a game with a friend and he lost. Tyrone got angry and threw the ball at his friend. A teacher witnessed that and immediately confronted Tyrone about his behavior.

Angry about being confronted, Tyrone started to walk away. The teacher grabbed his arm. Tyrone reacted by pushing the teacher away. The teacher sent Tyrone to the principal's office. After consultation with the principal, Tyrone was deemed to be a danger to students and staff.

He was consequently suspended.

Early years of schooling

On the surface this looks like a simple case of meting out the appropriate punishment for perceived serious student misbehavior. There does not appear to be anything explicitly racial about the interaction.

However, consider the fact that there have been many instances of white students engaging in the same behavior, none of which ever result in suspension. This is the racialized reality black students experience every day in American schools.

Black boys are almost three times as likely to be suspended than white boys, and black girls are four times as likely to be suspended than white girls. Black students' (mis)behavior is more often criminalized compared to other students.

While black kids make up 18 percent of preschool enrollment, they represent 48 percent of students receiving one or more suspensions. Getting suspended matters because it is correlated with being referred to law enforcement and arrested. Black students account for 27 percent of students who are referred to law enforcement and 31 percent of students who are arrested, while they only make up 18 percent of enrolled students. As a general rule, black students do not often receive the benefit of the doubt when they engage in bad or questionable behavior.

School experience

When Tyrone entered fourth grade, teachers noticed a change in his demeanor. His enthusiasm for school and learning had diminished considerably. He no longer eagerly raised his hand to answer questions. He no longer appeared to love books and listening to stories. He appeared to have little joy participating in class activities. His teachers characterized Tyrone as "unmotivated," "apathetic," having "learning difficulties" and "a bad attitude."

Educators and researchers have referred to this phenomenon as " the fourth grade failure syndrome" for black boys. Early childhood educator Harry Morgan suggested that this phenomenon occurred during this time because the classroom environment changes between the third and fourth grade from a socially interactive style to a more individualistic, competitive style.

This change in style is counter to the more communal and cooperative cultural learning environment which, according to research, black students tend to prefer. The fourth grade failure syndrome refers to a bias in schools (e.g., cultural insensitivity, disproportionately harsh discipline, lowered teacher expectations, tracking black students into special education or remedial classes) that has the cumulative effect of diminishing black students' (especially boys') enthusiasm and motivation for school.

By high school Tyrone no longer identified with school. His sense of pride and self-esteem increasingly came from his popularity and his athletic abilities rather than his intelligence. Psychologist Claude Steele has referred to this as "academic disidentification," a phenomenon where a student's self-esteem is disconnected from how they perform in school.

Tyrone is not alone. According to one study based on national data from almost 25,000 students black males were the only students that showed significant disidentification throughout the 12th grade. My research too has confirmed this, although I did not find evidence among black females, white males or white females.

What's the college experience?

While the narrative of more black men being in prison than in college has been thoroughly debunked by psychologist Ivory Toldson, it is still the case that black men are underrepresented in college. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, there were 887,000 black women enrolled in college compared to 618,000 black men.

Owing in large part to the emphasis of education by his family, Tyrone is fortunate enough to be accepted to college. Excited and nervous about being away from home, Tyrone looks forward to starting his college experience.

Like many college students, Tyrone likes to go to parties thrown by Greek organizations, and he frequently attends parties thrown by black fraternities. While attending one party, Tyrone and his friends became upset when campus police broke up the party because of complaints of loud music and threaten to arrest the attendees.

Tyrone has partied with white friends and knows firsthand that their parties often involve drugs and reckless behavior, yet, as my students tell me, police almost never break up their parties. As it turns out, white fraternities are frequently the perpetrators of racist incidents, which cause Tyrone and other black students to engage in campus protests.

For example, in 2014, Tau Kappa Epsilon, a fraternity at Arizona State University, was suspended for having a racist Martin Luther King Jr. party at which they drank from watermelon cups, held their crotches, wore bandannas and formed gang signs with their hands.

Resilience

To add insult to injury, Tyrone and other black students read opinion pieces in the student paper complaining how affirmative action discriminates against white students and allows less qualified "minority" students on campus.

Tyrone finds refuge in black studies classes, where he learns about theories such as "critical race theory" and terms such as "institutional racism," "white privilege" and "hegemony." Exposure to these classes provides Tyrone with the vocabulary and critical analytical tools to better understand the challenges facing black people.

So it is not surprising that college-educated blacks like Tyrone are more likely to report experiencing discrimination in college than blacks with no college experience in college environments where racist incidents and racial microagressions are frequently reported. In spite of the desire among many for America to be colorblind, at every level of education black students experience disproportionate amounts of discrimination.

In many ways my research on African-American students reflects my own experiences as a black male negotiating the challenges of being in predominantly white academic environments. The silver lining to this story is that black students are incredibly resilient and there are positive things to report.

In 2016, for example, enrollment at historically black colleges and universities has increased. It is difficult to know if this increase is related to the negative experiences of discrimination black students often experience on predominantly white campuses, but it does suggest that interest among black students in obtaining a college education remains high. According to 2016 data reported in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, black women now have the highest graduation rate of any demographic group at the University of Georgia.

For every positive outcome for students like Tyrone, there are unfortunately also too many negative outcomes for other similar students. The educational experiences of Tyrone and all black students matters should be of concern to everyone.

While education is not a cure all for experiences with racism and discrimination, education can equip us with the tools to better understand, analyze and ultimately find solutions to the tragic incidents we are seeing too frequently involving police killings of black people.

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What it means to be black in the American educational system

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Many people still think that racism is no longer a problem in America. After the election of President Obama, academic John McWhorter argued that racism in America is, for all intents and purposes, dead. The prominent conservative scholar and African-American economist Thomas Sowell has argued that " racism isn't dead, but it is on life support."

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Well over six decades after the Supreme Court declared "separate but equal" schools to be unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, schools remain heavily segregated by race and ethnicity.

What are the consequences of this lack of progress in integrating schools for black children?

It depresses education outcomes for black students; as shown in this report, it lowers their standardized test scores.

It widens performance gaps between white and black students.

It reflects and bolsters segregation by economic status, with black students being more likely than white students to attend high-poverty schools.

It means that the promise of integration and equal opportunities for all black students remains an ideal rather than a reality.

In contrast, when black students have the opportunity to attend schools with lower concentrations of poverty and larger shares of white students they perform better, on average, on standardized tests.

Black children are still relegated to separate and unequal schools

Findings on school segregation and student performance come from the National Center for Education Statistics' National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the most comprehensive study of education performance in the country. We use the most recently released data to describe school segregation and its consequences for math performance of eighth-graders. These data show that only about one in eight white students (12.9%) attends a school where a majority of students are black, Hispanic, Asian, or American Indian. (We refer to this group collectively as students of color hereafter.) In contrast, nearly seven in 10 black children (69.2%) attend such schools (see Figure A).

As shown in Figure B, black students are also in economically segregated schools. Less than one in three white students (31.3%) attend a high-poverty school, compared with more than seven in 10 black students (72.4%).

In America, race and poverty are intertwined, doubly disadvantaging black students

The known connection between race/ethnicity and poverty in the United States appears in data on the composition of schools attended by for black children. Figure C shows that a black child faces a very high probability of ending up in a school where a majority of her peers are both poor and students of color. While less than 1 in 10 white students (8.4%) attend high-poverty schools with a high share of students of color, six in 10 black students (60.0%) do.

In contrast, about a fourth of white students (23.5%) attend schools where most of their peers are white and not poor, while only 3.1 percent of black children attend such schools.

When black children have the opportunity to attend the same schools that white children routinely attend, black children perform markedly better on standardized math tests, which we use here as a measure of education performance.

Figure D shows math scores of black eighth-graders in low-poverty, mostly white schools and in high-poverty schools with a high share of students of color. In high-poverty schools with a high share of students of color, black students scored on average 20 points less on standardized math tests than their counterparts in low-poverty, mostly white schools (255.4 vs. 275.3). In other words, scores are much lower in the type of school that black children are overwhelmingly more likely to attend (high-poverty, mostly students of color) than in the type of school (low-poverty, mostly white) that only 3.1% of black children have a chance of attending.

Though not shown in the figure, the gap between black and white student test scores is larger in high-poverty schools with a high share of students of color than in low-poverty, mostly white schools. By promoting policies that facilitate a shift away from our current pattern of heavily segregated schools, we would thus help close the gap between black and white students overall.

Unaddressed school segregation is a major longstanding policy failure. It consigns most black children to schools that put them behind academically. The persistent performance gaps between white and black children that challenge the education and career prospects of black children from early on demonstrate that school segregation continues to cast a very long shadow-from well before Brown v. Board of Education to today, and into the future.

This brief, published by EPI to highlight education issues for Black History Month, shows data that are part of ongoing EPI research on student performance and education inequalities. Information using earlier data on segregation and the consequences for performance for other groups, and technical details, are available in Martin Carnoy and Emma García, Five Key Trends in U.S. Student Performance: Progress by Blacks and Hispanics, the Takeoff of Asians, the Stall of non-English Speakers, the Persistence of Socioeconomic Gaps, and the Damaging Effect of Highly Segregated Schools, Economic Policy Institute, 2017.

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Schools are still segregated, and black children are paying a price

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Well over six decades after the Supreme Court declared "separate but equal" schools to be unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, schools remain heavily segregated by race and ethnicity. What are the consequences of this lack of progress in integrating schools for black children? It depresses education outcomes for black students; as shown in...

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https://www.br.de/radio/bayern2/sendungen/radiowissen/geschichte/civil-rights-act-buergerrechtsbewegung-gleichstellung-usa-100.html