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Rudy Francisco talks about how people should not harm each other. Weapons do not need to be used to create justice but rather  compromise. He references that people dancing is like being in a battle but instead of using instruments, they use weapons; this is a less blissful way to deal with problems. Regardless the main reason he approach this topic is inform the world of the unfortunate ways we we destroy a graceful community. Literally as the title says "The Heart and The Fist, which illustrates that we are using weapons to defend ourselves when really, that's the heart of the problem.

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Rudy Francisco - "The Heart and The Fist"

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To Highlight the Importance of having a Culture

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To Highlight the Importance of having a Culture

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My playlist is about how POC consist of many different cultural backgrounds and in order for us to live peacefully amongst each other, we need to acknowledge our differences and set aside biases that are harmful and offensive. It can also lead to micro-agression, discriminations, stereotypes, and other brutalities. Such accounts are spoken within this playlist. From the distasteful events, there still however so good like singer-songwriters will compose songs about their community and bring joy to those who can relate or admire the art and be amused. Educating ourselves about how POCs/cultures is important so that we can illustrate that this is what brings people together and helps other, despite the difference, share the space to live with.

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In Priya's poetic speech she illustrates how their are many scenerios where people would take assumptions of one's race due to their appearance; like, "you are not that brown, you are not indian," can not be a determining factor that showcases what somebody may or may not identify as. Regardless of how we look, we are still rooted from our parents which provides us with the default in what race we are born to be and nothing can biologically change that. Due to stereotypes, their are depictions of what we should look like, but oftentimes such types are inaccurate ..people need to separate the pre-accusations to reality because that is the only way it is fair for anyone. (To have a clean slate.)

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Where Are You Really From? - Priya Malik | The Storytellers

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Clint Smith states that no matter who you are, everyones' words matter and mean something. He reminds us that if there is something we want to say, we can not take them for granted. The demeanor of one does not determine how meaningful/less the idea and statements are. No words too much nor belittling.

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She said "Hola, Cómo estás?"
She said "Konnichiwa"
She said "Pardon my French"
I said "Bonjour Madame"
Then she said "Sak pase"
And I said "N'ap boule"
No matter where I go, you know I love 'em all
--> the respect for the languages = respect for the culture.

Keep telling me this
And telling me that --> people give reasons as to why their's judgment which gives space to assume but..
You said once you take me with you, I'll never go back = no regrets

Now I got a lesson that I want to teach
she wants to share the importance of cultural with everyone.

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Don't touch my pride
They say the glory's all mine
Don't test my mouth
They say the truth is my sound --> her demeanor is powerful and vocal so that people know she means business.
She made a voice for herself and using her song, urging everyone else to find there own confidence.

They don't understand
What it means to me
Where we chose to go
Where we've been to know
--> people who are not us (POC) because their are struggles that only understand.
--> you can choose to stand up fro yourselves or stay on the sidelines
They don't understand
What it means to me
Where we chose to go
Where we've been to know

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This song is to show appreciation to the simplest of identity-African American. Who else better to highlight this than the queen herself, Beyonce.

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Assuming the American population and society standards is that people would judge and look down upon non-fluent english speaker, the natives do not stand a chance. This still very much a problem in the BIPOC community because with this mindset, it will affect the future and continue to be pass the judgements along.

Amy Tan wanted to note that people of the non-fluent english speakers are just as important as the fluent not because they may have experienced hardship and come from a background filled with their own wisdom, but because everyone should have equal chance to speak their mind and gain respect regardless of what the circumstances are. In this case, the circumstance is that those people are different, they are not born American or had fulfilled their education..so "Don't judge a book by its cover or someone's intelligence by her English."

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Knowledge is power, and Vinson proposes that Black speeches are something of importance when learning who the Black community are referring to. "Black English is perfectly legitimate as language, but its use in schools wouldn’t help black students," however it would help those outside of the community to understand their culture more.

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The Case for Black English _ The New Yorker

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I further analyzed both articles of: Learn to Read by Malcolm X and Learn to Read and Write by Frederick Douglas. I put my own opinions as to how they wanted to reach the same goal which is explain why people should be informed of the inequalities and about the history because it is important to not replay it again. One of author, despite his struggles, managed to learn how to read and furthermore read about his heritage's past; the other, Douglas having gone through his own hardship just shares his experience as being a African American.

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Since the early 17th&18th century, African American racism has driven all the way to the 20th century with discrimination and micro-agression as an ongoing problem. However, in attempt to stop these brutality, the protest of Black Lives Matter presented itself in America in hopes to break the silence and claim Black's equality back. This has been a step forward to making America a safer and fairer country to live although it is unavoidable to completely resolve racism.

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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.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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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 first major wave of Asian immigrants arrived at American shores in the mid-1800s and Asian Americans have since played a key role in U.S. history, while also facing discrimination and exclusion.

A diverse population, the nation's 20 million-plus Asian Americans have roots in more than 20 countries in Asia and India, according to the Pew Research Cente r, with Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese making up 85 percent of today's Asian American population. Here's a look at some of the notable milestones throughout Asian American history.

Gold Rush Lures New Wave of Immigrants

May 7, 1843: A 14-year-old fisherman named Manjiro becomes the first official U.S. Japanese immigrant after being adopted by American Capt. William Whitfield who rescued the boy and his crew after a shipwreck 300 miles from Japan's coast. Years later, Manjiro returned to his home country, where he was named a samurai and worked as a political emissary with the West.

Page Act, Chinese Exclusion Act Restrict Immigration

May 6, 1882: Facing hostile, and often violent treatment from locals, Chinese immigrants are targeted by Congress with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, signed into law by President Chester Arthur. The act bans Chinese workers from entering the country and excludes Chinese immigrants from American citizenship. Every 10 years, Congress extends its provision until 1943, when World War II labor shortage pressure and increased anti-Japanese sentiment leads to its demise and Chinese immigrants are allowed to become naturalized citizens.

March 3, 1885: In the case Tape v. Hurley, California's Supreme Court rules that the state entitles "all children" access to public education. The case centers on Mamie Tape, then 8, an American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants whose family sued the San Francisco Board of Education for denying her admission because of her race.

White Coal Miners Target Chinese Workers

September 2, 1885: Angered that they're taking away "white" jobs, white coal miners attack Chinese laborers in the Wyoming territory during what comes to be known as the Rock Springs Massacre. Twenty-eight Chinese are killed, with 15 more injured by the mob, which also looted and set fire to all of the homes in the area's Chinatown. Federal troops are brought in to return Chinese miners, who had fled, to Rock Springs, and Congress eventually agrees to compensate the workers for their losses.

May 27-28, 1887: Seven white horse thieves ambush a group of Chinese miners who had set up camp along the Snake River in Oregon, murdering all 34 men and mutilating their bodies before dumping them in the river. Three members of the gang stand trial in the Hells Canyon Massacre, with one testifying for the state, and all are found not guilty by an all-white jury.

February 5, 1917: Congress passes the Immigration Act of 1917, which includes an "Asiatic Barred Zone," banning Chinese, Asian Indians, Burmese, Thai, Maylays and others. Japan is not on the list of those excluded, as prohibitions against immigrants from that country are already in place, nor is the Philippines, as it is a U.S. territory.

Japanese Internment

December 7, 1941: The Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. Two months later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, fearing Japanese immigrants or those with Japanese ancestry had taken part in planning the attack, issues an executive order that forces more than 120,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast into internment camps.

According to the National Archives, approximately 70,000 of those targeted are U.S. citizens, and no charges are made against any of them. Most lose their homes, businesses and belongings, and are held until the war ends. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signs a law apologizing for the civil liberty injustice with the order to pay $20,000 to each person who had been incarcerated.

Asian-American Firsts in Congress

January 3, 1957: Dalip Saund of California is sworn in as a U.S. Representative, becoming the first Asian-American, first Indian American and first Sikh to serve in Congress. An immigrant from India, he became an American citizen in 1949, eventually earning a Ph.D. and being elected as a judge before serving three terms in the House. According to the U.S. House of Representatives History, Art & Archives, he was vocal on issues such as communism and civil rights, including desegregation. "The problem of man's injustice to man is a world problem," he said in response to the case in Little Rock, Arkansas. "Let one who is innocent and pure throw the first stone."

August 24, 1959: Born in Honolulu the son of poor Chinese immigrants, Hiram L. Fong is sworn in as Hawaii's first U.S. Senator, becoming the first Asian American elected to the chamber. The only Republican senator ever elected from the state, he defended President Richard Nixon's Vietnam policies, and, according to the U.S. House of Representatives History, Art & Archives, saw himself as an Asian American spokesman. "I feel sometimes they think I am their senator," he once said. "I try to interpret America to them and to interpret them to America."

January 4, 1965: U.S. Representative Patsy T. Mink of Hawaii is sworn in as the first Asian American woman, and first woman of color, to serve in Congress. A supporter of women's and civil rights and an advocate for education, children and labor unions, Mink opposed the Vietnam War, supported Head Start and the Women's Educational Equity Act and was a co-author and sponsor of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, outlawing sex discrimination in any education program or activity receiving federal funding. She also co-founds the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus in 1994.

Advances in Labor Rights

August 19, 1973: Martial arts movie Enter the Dragon premieres, three weeks after its action star, Bruce Lee, dies from an allergic reaction to pain medication in Hong Kong. In his first starring role in a Hollywood film, the box office hit cements Lee, born in 1940 in San Francisco and raised in Hong Kong, as a film icon.

March 28, 1979: President Jimmy Carter proclaims a week in May is to be designated Asian/Pacific American Heritage Week, which would be continued by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. In 1990, Bush broadens the observance to cover the month of May and, in 1992, Congress passes a law permanently designating May as Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month. May is chosen in honor of the first official Japanese immigrant's arrival in the U.S. on May 7, 1843, and because May 10, 1869, marks the completion of the transcontinental railroad.

June 24, 1982: More than 20,000 garment workers, most of whom are female immigrants from China and Hong Kong, rally in New York's Chinatown after labor union negotiations stall. A second rally is held the next month, with a one-day strike taking place July 15, the largest in the history of Chinatown that ends with employers accepting the union's contract demands.

Asian Americans in Architecture, Film

October 2018: Director Jon M. Chu's Crazy Rich Asians breaks box office records, becoming North America's highest-earning romantic comedy in a decade. It's also the first Hollywood studio movie since 1993's Joy Luck Club starring an "all-Westernized Asian American cast," according to the Hollywood Reporter. Based on the novel by Kevin Kwan, the film, made for $30 million, has grossed more than $238 million.

July 21, 2000: President Bill Clinton swears in Norman Mineta as the U.S. secretary of commerce, making him the first Asian American to serve in a presidential cabinet. Mineta, a Japanese American who had been sent to a World War II internment camp in 1942, was the first Asian American mayor of a major city, San Jose, Calif., served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1975 to 1999 and, in 2001, was named transportation secretary under George W. Bush. Bush also appoints Elaine Chao secretary of labor, the first female Asian American to serve in a presidential cabinet. President Donald Trump names her secretary of transportation in 2017.

Sources

Key facts about Asian origin groups in the U.S., Pew Research Center

Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in Congress: First Arrivals, First Reactions, U.S. House of Representatives

Immigration and Relocation in U.S. History, Library of Congress

U.S. Immigration Station, Angel Island, National Park Service

Grapes Of Wrath: The Forgotten Filipinos Who Led A Farmworker Revolution, NPR

Japanese-American Internment During World War II, National Archives

Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month, Library of Congress

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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Asian American Timeline - Immigration, Achievements & Famous Firsts

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Asian immigrants have come to American shores since the mid-1800s, playing a significant role in U.S. history, but one that's rife with inequity and exclusion. See a timeline of key events.

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Long before Christopher Columbus stepped foot on what would come to be known as the Americas, the expansive territory was inhabited by Native Americans. Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, as more explorers sought to colonize their land, Native Americans responded in various stages, from cooperation to indignation to revolt.

After siding with the French in numerous battles during the French and Indian War and eventually being forcibly removed from their homes under Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act, Native American populations were diminished in size and territory by the end of the 19th century.

Below are events that shaped Native Americans' tumultuous history following the arrival of foreign settlers.

April 1513: Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon lands on continental North America in Florida and makes contact with Native Americans.

February 1521: Ponce de Leon departs on another voyage to Florida from San Juan to start a colony. Months after landing, Ponce de Leon is attacked by local Native Americans and fatally wounded.

May 1539: Spanish explorer and conquistador Hernando de Soto lands in Florida to conquer the region. He explores the South under the guidance of Native Americans who had been captured along the way.

October 1540: De Soto and the Spaniards plan to rendezvous with ships in Alabama when they're attacked by Native Americans. Hundreds of Native Americans are killed in the ensuing battle.

C. 1595: Pocahontas is born, daughter of Chief Powhatan.

1607: Pocahontas' brother kidnaps Captain John Smith from the Jamestown colony. Smith later writes that after being threatened by Chief Powhatan, he was saved by Pocahontas. This scenario is debated by historians.

1613: Pocahontas is captured by Captain Samuel Argall in the first Anglo-Powhatan War. While captive, she learns to speak English, converts to Christianity and is given the name "Rebecca."

1622: The Powhatan Confederacy nearly wipes out Jamestown colony.

1680: A revolt of Pueblo Native Americans in New Mexico threatens Spanish rule over New Mexico.

1754: The French and Indian War begins, pitting the two groups against English settlements in the North.

May 15, 1756: The Seven Years' War between the British and the French begins, with Native American alliances aiding the French.

1785: The Treaty of Hopewell is signed in Georgia, protecting Cherokee Native Americans in the United States and sectioning off their land.

1788/89: Sacagawea is born.

1791: The Treaty of Holston is signed, in which the Cherokee give up all their land outside of the borders previously established.

April 7, 1805: Sacagawea, along with her baby and husband Toussaint Charbonneau, join Lewis and Clark on their voyage.

November 1811: U.S. forces attack Native American War Chief Tecumseh and his younger brother Lalawethika. Their community at the juncture of the Tippecanoe and Wabash rivers is destroyed.

June 18, 1812: President James Madison signs a declaration of war against Britain, beginning the war between U.S. forces and the British, French and Native Americans over independence and territory expansion.

March 27, 1814: Andrew Jackson, along with U.S. forces and Native American allies attack Creek Indians who opposed American expansion and encroachment of their territory in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. The Creeks cede more than 20 million acres of land after their loss.

May 28, 1830: President Andrew Jackson signs the Indian Removal Act, which gives plots of land west of the Mississippi River to Native American tribes in exchange for land that is taken from them.

1851: Congress passes the Indian Appropriations Act, creating the Indian reservation system. Native Americans aren't allowed to leave their reservations without permission.

October 1860: A group of Apache Native Americans attack and kidnap a white American, resulting in the U.S. military falsely accusing the Native American leader of the Chiricahua Apache tribe, Cochise. Cochise and the Apache increase raids on white Americans for a decade afterwards.

November 29, 1864: 650 Colorado volunteer forces attack Cheyenne and Arapaho encampments along Sand Creek, killing and mutilating more than 150 American Indians during what would become known as the Sand Creek Massacre.

November 27, 1868: General George Armstrong Custer leads an early morning attack on Cheyenne living with Chief Black Kettle, destroying the village and killing more than 100 people, including many women and children and Black Kettle himself.

1873: Crazy Horse encounters General Custer for the first time.

1874: Gold discovered in South Dakota 's Black Hills drives U.S. troops to ignore a treaty and invade the territory.

June 25, 1876: In the Battle of Little Bighorn, also known as " Custer's Last Stand," Lieutenant Colonel George Custer's troops fight Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, along Little Bighorn River. Custer and his troops are defeated and killed, increasing tensions between Native Americans and white Americans.

October 6, 1879: The first students attend Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, the country's first off-reservation boarding school. The school, created by Civil War veteran Richard Henry Pratt, is designed to assimilate Native American students.

December 15, 1890: Sitting Bull is killed during a confrontation with Indian police in Grand River, South Dakota.

December 29, 1890: U.S. Armed Forces surround Ghost Dancers led by Chief Big Foot near Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, demanding the surrender of their weapons. An estimated 150 Native Americans are killed in the Wounded Knee Massacre, along with 25 men with the U.S. cavalry.

January 29, 1907: Charles Curtis becomes the first Native American U.S. Senator.

June 2, 1924: U.S. Congress passes the Indian Citizenship Act, granting citizenship to all Native Americans born in the territorial limits of the country. Previously, citizenship had been limited, depending on what percentage Native American ancestry a person had, whether they were veterans, or, if they were women, whether they were married to a U.S. citizen.

May 1942: Members of the Navajo Nation develop a code to transmit messages and radio messages for the U.S. armed forces during World War II. Eventually hundreds of code talkers from multiple Native American tribes serve in the U.S. Marines during the war.

July 1968: Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt found the American Indian Movement (AIM) in Minneapolis, along with Bellecourt's brother Vernon and Banks' friend George Mitchell. Originally an urban-focused movement formed in response to police brutality and racial profiling, AIM grows rapidly in the 1970s to become the driving force behind the Indigenous civil rights movement.

November 20, 1969: A group of San Francisco Bay-area Native Americans, calling themselves "Indians of All Tribes," journey to Alcatraz Island, declaring their intention to use the island for an Indian school, cultural center and museum. Referencing Europeans' colonization of North America, they claim Alcatraz is theirs "by right of discovery." On June 11, 1971 armed federal marshals descend on the island and remove the last of its Indian residents.

August 29, 1970: A group of Native Americans, led by the San Francisco-based United Native Americans, ascend 3,000 feet to the top of Mount Rushmore and set up camp to protest the broken Treaty of Fort Laramie.

November 26, 1970: On Thanksgiving Day, AIM members seize a replica of the Mayflower in Boston Harbor, declaring the holiday a National Day of Mourning.

June 6, 1971: A group of Native Americans, led by AIM, occupy Mount Rushmore to demand the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie be honored. Twenty Native Americans-nine men and 11 women-are eventually arrested.

February 27, 1973: The Wounded Knee Occupation begins as some 200 Oglala Lakota (also referred to as Oglala Sioux) and AIM members seize and occupy the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The occupation lasts for 71 days, during which time two Sioux men are shot to death by federal agents and several more are wounded.

January 4, 1975: Congress passes the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, which reverses the termination policy of previous decades when American Indian tribes were disbanded, their land sold and "relocations" forced Indians off reservations and into urban centers. The 1975 act provides recognition and funds to Indian tribes.

July 15, 1978: A transcontinental trek for Native American justice, called the " Longest Walk," sets off from Alcatraz Island, California. By the time marchers reach Washington, D.C. they number 30,000.

August 11, 1978: The American Indian Religious Freedom Act is passed, granting Native Americans the right to use certain lands and controlled substances for religious ceremonies.

October 11, 1980: President Jimmy Carter signs the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act. The act grants Indian tribes, including the Passamaquoddy, Maliseet and Penobscot, $81.5 million for land taken from them more than 150 years ago.

July 13, 2020: The Washington National Football League franchise announces it is dropping its name, the "Redskins," as well as its Indian head logo. The move is in response to decades of criticism that they are offensive to Native Americans. The team is eventually renamed the Commanders.

July 23, 2021: In response to criticisms, Cleveland's Major League Baseball team announces they are changing their name to the Guardians and are dropping their previous name, the Indians.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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As explorers sought to colonize their land, Native Americans responded in various stages, from cooperation to indignation to revolt.

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Contents

1. Early Spanish Explorers Reach America

2. Los Angeles Founded, First Hispanic Congressman Elected

3. Battle of the Alamo, Mexican-American War

4. Mexico Revolution Drives Immigration to US

5. Puerto Ricans Granted US Citizenship

6. First Hispanic Senator Sworn in

7. Contributions During World War II

8. Supreme Court Prohibits Segregation for Mexican-American Students

9. Civil Rights Act of 1964

10. Cesar Chavez Leads Delano Grape Strike

11. Mariel Boatlift

12. Multiple Firsts in White House Cabinets

13. NAFTA, Prop 187

14. Sonia Sotomayor Joints US Supreme Court

15. DAPA, DACA Rulings

American Hispanic/Latino history is rich, diverse and long, with immigrants, refugees and Spanish-speaking or Indigenous people living in the United States since long before the nation was established.

And, bringing with them traditions and culture from Mexico, Spain, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and other Latin American and Iberian nations, America's Hispanic population continues to grow, reaching a record 62.5 million in 2020, or 18.7 percent of the U.S. population.

From early Spanish colonialism to civil and worker rights laws to famous firsts to recent Supreme Court decisions on immigration, here's a timeline of notable events in U.S. Hispanic and Latino history.

Early Spanish Explorers Reach America
READ MORE: How St. Augustine Became the First European Settlement in America
Los Angeles Founded, First Hispanic Congressman Elected

Battle of the Alamo, Mexican-American War
READ MORE: Why Mexican Americans Say 'The Border Crossed Us' READ MORE: How the 14th Amendment Made Corporations Into People
Mexico Revolution Drives Immigration to US
READ MORE: How Border Crossing Became a Crime in the United States
Puerto Ricans Granted US Citizenship

March 2, 1917
President Wilson signs the Jones-Shafroth Act, granting U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans and creating a bicameral legislature in the island territory. With the United States about to enter World War I, it also gives America a stronghold and allows Puerto Ricans to join the U.S. Army. Eventually, 20,000 Puerto Ricans are drafted to serve during the conflict, many charged with guarding the important Panama Canal.
READ MORE: Puerto Rico's Complicated History With the United States
First Hispanic Senator Sworn in

Contributions During World War II

Dec. 7, 1941
Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, drawing the U.S. into World War II. More than 500,000 Mexican Americans serve in the American military during the conflict, with 13 Medals of Honor awarded to Latinos. The 158th Regimental Combat Team, largely composed of Latino and Native American soldiers who fought in the Philippines and New Guinea, is called "the greatest fighting combat team ever deployed in battle" by Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
READ MORE: 6 Facts About the Medal of Honor READ MORE: The Surprising Role Mexico Played in World War II
With racial tensions growing between the Hispanic and Anglo communities following an injust murder trial, sailors drag Latino youth from dineres, cafes, bars and movie theaters, ripping off their baggy suits and beating them with clubs and whips. The youth fight back, leaving both Mexicans and servicemen hospitalized.
READ MORE: The Zoot Suit Riots: Causes, Facts & Photos
Supreme Court Prohibits Segregation for Mexican-American Students

April 14, 1947
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals makes a landmark ruling prohibiting segregation in California public schools in Mendez v. Westminster School District. In the case, the family of Sylvia Mendez, then 9, and others sued four school districts for being denied entrance to Westminster Elementary School because they were Mexican. The ruling sets precedent for the historic Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case seven years later.
READ MORE: The Mendez Family Fought School Segregation 8 Years Before Brown v. Board of Ed
May 3, 1954
In Hernandez v. State of Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that Mexican-Americans have equal protection under the law. The important civil rights case centers around Pete Hernandez, a farm worker indicted for murder by an all-anglo grand jury in Jackson County, Texas. His attornies argue discrimination, including the fact that no person of Mexican ancestory had served as juror in the county in 25 years, citing the 14th Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously agrees, holding that the amendment protects those beyond "white" or "negro," also covering those of Mexican ancestry.
READ MORE: The Largest Mass Deportation in US History
Feb. 13, 1959
A plane carrying musicians Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly and "The Big Bopper" J.P. Richardson crashes near Clear Lake, Iowa, killing everyone on board. Valens, who was just 17 years old when he died, is the first Mexican-American rock and roll star, scoring four hit records ( Donna and La Bamba among them) in his eight-month-long career.
READ MORE: All the Way the Bay of Pigs Invasion Failed
Civil Rights Act of 1964
READ MORE: US Immigration Timeline
Cesar Chavez Leads Delano Grape Strike
March 17, 1966
Cesar Chavez, general director of the National Farm Workers Association, leads 75 Latino and Filipino farm workers on a historic 340-mile march from Delano, California to the state capitol in Sacramento. Drawing attention to the demands of grape growers, the march, held at the onset of a strike that would last five years, lasts 25 days, and upon arrival in Sacramento on Easter Sunday, the group is met by a crowd of 10,000. Later that summer, the NFWA merges with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee to form the United Farm Workers union that affiliates with the AFL-CIO.
READ MORE: When Millions of Americans Stopped Eating Grapes in Support of Farm Workers READ MORE: Maurice Ferré becomes first Puerto Rican to lead a major U.S. mainland city
Mariel Boatlift

Multiple Firsts in White House Cabinets

NAFTA, Prop 187

Sonia Sotomayor Joints US Supreme Court

June 25, 2012
In a 5-3 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down most of SB1070, an Arizona immigration law in Arizona v. United States. The decision finds three of the four provisions of the statute are preempted by federal law: the section making it a crime to reside in the country illegally, the section making it unlawful for undocumented workers to apply for a job and the section allowing warrantless arrest based on probable cause of unlawful presence. However, the court does uphold the law's requirement that law enforcement officers verify immigration status during lawful stops.

DAPA, DACA Rulings

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Early Spanish Explorers Reach America Los Angeles Founded, First Hispanic Congressman Elected Battle of the Alamo, Mexican-American War Mexico Revolution Drives Immigration to US Puerto Ricans Granted US Citizenship First Hispanic Senator Sworn in Contributions During World War II Supreme Court Prohibits Segregation for Mexican-American Students Civil Rights Act of

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The micro-agression and hate toward the Asian American community has effected the health immensely in this community. And it did not help when the news that Asians were the results of a worldwide pandemic--COVID-19. The stereotypes that Asian American have to live up to takes a tole in mental health as well. They want the same amount of chance and opportunities as others.

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There's been a tragic surge in anti-Asian sentiment across the United States since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) in major cities across the nation have increased 169% in the first quarter of 2021 over the same period in 2020, according to a recent analysis by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. And a new report by Stop AAPI Hate, an online reporting tool established to track these cases, revealed that an estimated 6,603 hate incidents - categorized as verbal harassment, physical assault, civil rights violations, and online harassment - have been reported to the center between March 19, 2020, and March 31, 2021. While these incidents have gotten more media attention of late, the AAPI community has long experienced violent macroaggressions as well as microaggressions, which may not even seem malicious but are harmful and get internalized nonetheless.

Derald Wing Sue, M.S., Ph.D., a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, whose books and research have focused on race, defines microaggressions as slights and invalidations that people of color experience in their day-to-day interactions with well-intentioned individuals. Microaggressions aimed at AAPIs (such as asking "Where are you really from?" or commenting "You speak English so well.") are largely manifestations of harmful stereotypes that consistently view Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners, the model minority, and the yellow peril - the belief that Asians (particularly East Asians) pose a danger to Western values, power, and culture.

"Microaggressions are really meant to make people feel like lesser human beings," says Dr. Warren Ng, medical director of outpatient health at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center and director of clinical services for the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital. "There's another term for microaggressions: Death by a thousand cuts. I think that description really does speak to the cumulative effects."

Indeed, studies have shown that microaggressions can increase stress levels, negatively affect self-esteem and psychological well-being, and create and perpetuate systemic inequities in education, the workplace, and health care.

Health Matters spoke to Dr. Ng about the history of microaggressions aimed at Asian Americans, the stereotypes from which they stem, and how experiencing them over time can affect health and well-being.
How has the history of discrimination against Asian Americans led to the microaggressions AAPIs continue to face?

From the Asian American perspective, I think the yellow peril stereotype is at the root of it all. Yellow peril was legitimized through our federal government with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (which restricted all Chinese people from immigrating to the U.S.). There was the idea that Asians were taking away opportunities. So, how do you keep people in their place? By taking away their liberties, their freedoms, their rights, their families.

Then going to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; to the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American engineer who was targeted by white autoworkers blaming him for the Japanese taking manufacturing jobs, in Detroit; to post-9/11 and the scapegoating of Muslim Americans and the Sikh community. History continues to repeat itself, and yellow peril is very much alive and well today. Underneath it all is the specter of white supremacy and the idea that if you look different, you don't belong. You have a lot of Asian Americans who grew up and were born here and only think of themselves as American. However, just based on how they appear to others, they experience microaggressions and discrimination due to this long history of oppression.
A lot of AAPI microaggressions are also born out of the model minority stereotype - the perception that all Asian Americans are successful, smart, and hard workers. Can you explain why these seemingly positive traits can be problematic?

The model minority myth is part of the white supremacy hierarchy in terms of where Asian Americans can fit in. It was initially attributed to Japanese Americans after World War II, who were seen as more resourceful and self-sufficient, so they didn't need as much public benefits or assistance compared to other groups. One of the groups that they were pitted against was Black Americans. It creates this dynamic of animosity in which one group may feel the other has more privilege or opportunity - meanwhile, that group is told that opportunity is only granted when they behave and stay within a lane. What is the cost when we don't work in solidarity to address that? It harms all of us.

The model minority also casts Asian Americans as a monolith. Dr. Sue calls this the ascription of intelligence, where you assign a certain set of competencies based on race that are clearly not correct. As a group, AAPIs have the greatest income gap. Within New York City, a quarter of Asian Americans are living at the level of poverty and are actually less likely to receive benefits or public assistance because of language, culture, immigration, and many of the other barriers that have not been addressed.

Still, it's a challenge for some AAPI people to understand the double-edged sword of the model minority. People believe it helps you get your foot in the door more easily - but yet it doesn't necessarily allow access to all the different levels of that organization, especially at the top, for what has been called " bamboo ceilings."

The model minority myth says that you stay in your place, you do a good job, you work hard, you don't challenge authority, and you don't create problems. It's a trap. It's that gilded cage.
When people do speak up about microaggressions and their concerns are dismissed, that also creates a harmful cycle. Can you explain gaslighting and the long-term consequences of people self-doubting the legitimacy of their feelings?
Gaslighting is a term that really connotes psychological abuse, where a person or a group is made to question their sanity. It encourages them not to trust themselves, and in many ways, it's causing them to be disconnected from their own experience - what they feel, what they know to be true, what they value. It definitely leads to a sense of depersonalization for themselves and also a sense of depression, anxiety, and trauma.

When I think about my work as a mental health provider, what we're really trying to do is to help people integrate their experiences, their thoughts, their behaviors. By gaslighting - trying to tell someone that what they're experiencing is not real or valued - you're telling them to ignore a part of themselves and their experiences.

They continue to feel the pain without ever acknowledging that there's a problem as well as trying to find a solution. It really affects not only mental health, but also self-esteem. It also makes it difficult for that person to seek help for it. All of those things really create a sense of helplessness for that person and dehumanization.

These things are very damaging when it's repeatedly communicated to someone. It's so interesting because in the past year-particularly with all of the racial discord and all the anti-Black racism - I've heard many AAPIs say that they feel they don't have a right to feel mistreated because their Black and brown brothers and sisters were being treated so much worse. They almost felt there wasn't a role or a space to talk about what they were experiencing, even with all the hate rhetoric and the verbal and physical abuse that they were experiencing.

It's that perspective of "You might have a complaint or an experience but it's not as bad as someone else's. Just be grateful." That really reinforces not only that sense that you don't matter, but that you're not important enough and you're invisible. That's often a part of the AAPI experience as well, not drawing attention to yourself.

COVID-19 has brought both microaggressions and violence to light. How do underlying prejudices lead to overt physical harm?
We've felt a universal sense of loss, mourning, and stress during this period of COVID-19. The question is "What do you do with those feelings, and that discomfort, and that difficulty?" You can choose to see it as something that we as a human race are all going through. Or you can try to blame someone for it.

Through scapegoating, you find a target and then dehumanize them, which allows you to remove your emotions and your feelings from your actions, because you almost feel justified.

It's happened repeatedly throughout history. How does something as little as name calling lead to something like murder? That seems like a big jump. But there's a pathway to that action and understanding where microaggressions, racism, dehumanization, objectification, stereotyping, and all of those things lead to us distancing ourselves and our humanity from that other person who is a human being. The more that they are not a human being, the more that we're able to feel that we can do things to them because they're not the same as you and I.

What's the toll that witnessing these hate crimes can take on a person's mental health?
There's a lot of secondary trauma related to experiencing that as an AAPI as they're witnessing and imagining their loved ones, the elderly, and the most vulnerable within their communities being victims of these senseless acts. Many are triggered and reminded of their own experiences of personal trauma or discrimination that they had put away in their minds.

Many folks are experiencing a loss of a sense of safety and security. People are afraid to leave their homes and afraid to do things they would otherwise do, which is not only a restriction of their freedom, but also a limitation on their ability to experience joy and to live the life that they want to live.

There is a road to violence, and it is lined by what doesn't appear violent. People who haven't experienced microaggressions may minimize these words and statements by saying they are innocuous, but over time, underlying prejudices can lead to something much worse. As an ally, you have the power to be transformative, responsible, and mindful and not contribute to reinforcing stereotypes. Wrestling with the hard questions and the harder answers is the only way we're going to get to a better collective humanity.

I am inspired by the wise words of Dr. Martin Luther King: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

Consult An Expert

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'Death by a Thousand Cuts': The Impact of Microaggressions on the AAPI Community

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There's been a tragic surge in anti-Asian sentiment across the United States since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) in major cities across the nation have increased 169% in the first quarter of 2021 over the same period in 2020, according to a recent analysis by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.