In the beginning . . .
Hadley Park is dedicated in Nashville. Originally part of the John L. Hadley plantation (Hadley was a well-known supporter of freedmen’s activities after the Civil War), this is the first public park in the United States for African Americans. Located near TSU, thepark continues to honor the community's cultural heritage today.
President Harry S Truman signs Executive Order 9981, which establishes the President’s Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services. It is accompanied by Executive Order 9980, creating a Fair Employment Board to eliminate racial discrimination in federal employment. [This will require an additional change in Department of Defense policy, which does not occur for 25 years. See entry for July 26, 1963.]
The Little Rock School Board votes unanimously to adopt Superintendent Virgil Blossom's plan of gradual integration, to start in September 1957 at the high school level and add the lower grades over the next six years. Mr. Blossom is named "Man of the Year" by the Arkansas Democrat for his work on desegregation.
In Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company the Interstate Commerce Commission outlaws segregation on interstate buses.  

March 26-28, 1958   
The Nashville Christian Leadership Conference (NCLC) holds its first workshop on non-violent tactics against segregation under the leadership of the Rev. Kelly Miller Smith.  The workshops will continue into 1960.

May 27, 1958    Ernest Green becomes the first black student to graduate from Little Rock Central High School.  With police and Federal troops on hand, the graduation ceremony takes place in peace.  Orval Faubus will close Little Rock schools for most of the 1958-59 school year.
James Lawson, a divinity student at Vanderbilt University, and Kelly Miller Smith, the young pastor of the First Colored Baptist Church on 8^th Avenue North, continue to hold workshops to train Nashville high school and college students in the techniques of nonviolence and peaceful protest. 

Nov.-Dec. 1959    Lawson, Smith, and student leaders John Lewis, Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, and others buy goods and make unsuccessful attempts to desegregate the lunch counters at Harvey’s and Cain-Sloan’s department stores.
Nashville students begin the first full-scale sit-ins at downtown businesses.  Convening at the Arcade on 5^th Avenue shortly after noon, they move out to the Kress, Woolworth’s, and McClellan’s stores, where they make purchases and then take seats at the lunch counters.  Two hours later the stores close their lunch counters, and the students leave without incident.

May 21, 1961   
Martin Luther King and James Farmer of CORE (who is already recruiting more Freedom Riders) speak to 1200 people in Rev. Ralph Abernathy’s Montgomery church, while a mob outside throws rocks at the windows, overturns cars, and starts fires.  Over the next several days, more Freedom Riders arrive; most are jailed.  By the end of the summer, more than 60 Freedom Rides have come south, and more than 300 individuals have been jailed, including many local supporters of the Riders.

Winter 1961   
The Loyola University (Chicago) basketball team puts four black players on the floor at one time, breaking an unwritten convention of college sports.

1962   
Darryl Hill is recruited by coach Lee Corso at the University of Maryland.  He is the first African American football player in the Southwest Conference (SWC).  The only black player on the team until his senior year, he set two records that still stand: total yards receiving, and most passes caught in a single game.

September 30, 1962   
James Meredith is escorted onto the University of Mississippi (Oxford) campus by a convoy of Federal Marshals.  In the riots that follow, two people are killed and many others injured.

January 1963   
Alabama Governor George Wallace declares, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

April 8, 1963   
Sidney Poitier is the first African American to win the Academy Award for Best Actor.  Starring in three major films, he is also the top box office star of the year.

April 16, 1963   
Jailed for his protest activities, Martin Luther King writes his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” a classic Civil Rights document, asserting that individuals have a moral right to disobey unjust laws.

May/June 1963   
Civil rights activists, including children, march in Birmingham.  By the end of the first day, 700 have been arrested.  When 1000 more youngsters turn out on May 3, Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor turns high-pressure fire hoses on them. Within five days, 2500 are in jail, at least 80% of  them children.  After 38 days of confrontation and public outcry, Birmingham city officials and business leaders agree to desegregate public facilities.  Governor  Wallace’s refusal to accept the plan will bring violent confrontation.

June 11, 1963   
Governor George Wallace stands in the doorway of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama, blocking the enrollment of two black students.  Later, confronted by Federal Marshals and Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, he stands aside.

June 12, 1963   
NAACP activist Medgar Evers is shot to death outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi.  His assailant, KKK member Byron De La Beckwith, will not be found guilty of his murder until 1994.

July 26, 1963   
The true fulfillment of Executive Order 9981 (1948)—equality of treatment and opportunity for all military personnel—requires a change in Defense Department policy, which finally occurs with the publication of Department Directive 5120.36, issued fifteen years to the day after Truman’s original order. This major policy shift, ordered by Secretary of Defense Robert J. McNamara, expands the military’s responsibility to eliminate off-base discrimination detrimental to the military effectiveness of black servicemen.

August 28, 1963   
250,000 civil rights supporters take part in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.  The highlight of the event occurs when Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. 

September 1963   
Voter registration volunteers in Selma, Alabama, face arrests, beatings, and death threats. Thirty-two black schoolteachers who attempt to register to vote are fired by the all-white school board.

September 15, 1963   
Four young girls, ages 11 to 14, are killed when a bomb explodes in the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.  Many other people are injured. 

After the September 15 church bombing,
students begin lunch counter sit-ins – 300 are arrested, including John Lewis of SNCC.

November 22, 1963   
President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas.  Lyndon B. Johnson becomes President.

January 3, 1964   
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is Time Magazine’s Man of the Year.

January 23, 1964   
The 24^th Amendment abolishes the poll tax, used in Southern states since Reconstruction to make it difficult for poor blacks to vote.

June 14, 1964   
Freedom Summer (also called the Mississippi Summer Project) begins with training sessions in Ohio.  This effort to register black voters, primarily in Mississippi (in which only 6.2% of eligible blacks were registered to vote) is spearheaded by SNCC, along with the NAACP, CORE, and the SCLC.  Dr. Staughton Lynd from Yale University directs the Freedom Schools project.

June 21, 1964   
Three young civil rights workers – James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman – are arrested in Neshoba County, Mississippi, and then disappear.  

July 2, 1964   
President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  The law prohibits all discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin; it also provides the federal government with the authority to enforce civil rights legislation. To Johnson’s dismay, the passage of this law will be followed by a year of violence as white supremacists attempt to undo the gains in registering black voters. Johnson turns his attention to passing a Voting Rights act.

August 4, 1964   
The bodies of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman are found, buried in an earthen dam. Schwerner and Goodman have been shot; Chaney was beaten to death. The state of Mississippi refuses to charge anyone with the murders.  Seven people are eventually tried for Federal crimes, but none of them serve more than six years in jail.

August 25, 1964   
By the end of the 10-week Freedom Summer project, four workers have been killed, four others critically wounded, 80 beaten, and 1000 arrested. Thirty black homes or businesses and 37 churches have been bombed or burned. Many of these crimes are never solved.  Since Mississippi still requires a literacy test for voter registration, of the 17,000 Mississippi blacks trying to register, only 1,600 succeed.

October 14, 1964   
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 35, becomes the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. He will deliver his powerful acceptance speech on December 10 in Oslo: “Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time – the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.”

May 19, 1965   
Patricia Harris becomes the first African American since Ebenezer Bassett (1869, Haiti) to serve as an ambassador (Luxembourg).

February 18, 1965   
Jimmie Lee Jackson, 26, is shot during a peaceful protest in Marion, Alabama, as he tries to protect his mother and grandfather from a beating by Alabama State Troopers.  Jackson, shot at very close range, dies a week later.  An Alabama Grand Jury refuses to indict James Bonard Fowler, the trooper who shot him.

February 21, 1965   
Black nationalist leader Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little in 1925) is assassinated during a speech in Manhattan.  Three members of the Black Muslim organization are accused of his murder.

March 7, 1965
SCLC leader James Bevel sets up a 55-mile march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol in Montgomery -- a demonstration on behalf of African American voting rights.  On the outskirts of Selma, just after crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the 600 marchers are brutally assaulted, in full view of TV cameras, by heavily armed state troopers and deputies.  ABC makes the ironic choice to interrupt its broadcast of Judgment in Nuremberg, a Nazi war crimes documentary, to show footage of the violence.  John Lewis, 25, and the Rev. Hosea Williams, 39, leading the march, are clubbed to the ground, as are many others.  A widely published photograph shows 54-year-old Amelia Boynton Robinsonlying unconscious on the bridge.  Fifty marchers are hospitalized.

March 9, 1965
Martin Luther King leads a second march across the Pettus Bridge.  The marchers kneel in prayer, then return, obeying the court order that prohibits them from going on to Montgomery.  One of three white ministers attacked and beaten after the march (James Reeb, from Boston) dies in Birmingham, after Selma's public hospital refuses to treat him.  Demonstrations condemning "Bloody Sunday," as the March 7 incident has come to be called, take place in 80 cities across the nation during the day.

March 15, 1965 
President Lyndon B. Johnson makes what many consider his greatest speech to Congress as he calls for a Voting Rights bill: "It is wrong--deadly wrong--to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country . . . . What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America.  It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.  Their cause must be our cause, too.  Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.  And we shall overcome."

March 16, 1965
A Federal judge rules in Williams v. Wallace: "The law is clear that the right to petition one's government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups . . . . These rights may . . . be exercised by marching, even along public highways."  Granting the protesters their First Amendment rights to march also means the State of Alabama may no longer obstruct them.

March 21, 1965
Close to 8,000 people, of all races, begin the third march from Selma to Montgomery.  The 5-day march covers a 54-mile route along the "Jefferson David Highway" (U.S. 80).  Protected by 4,000 troops (U.S. Army, Alabama National Guard under Federal command, and many FBI agents and Federal Marshals), the marchers average ten miles a day and arrive at the Alabama Capitol building on the 25th.

March 22-23, 1965
The marchers pass through cold, rainy Lowndes County, where, although African Americans make up 81% of the population, not one is registered to vote, while the 2240 whites on the voting rolls constitute 118% of the adult white population!

March 25, 1965
Martin Luther King speaks to the marchers in Montgomery ("How Long, Not Long") and they are entertained by Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, Peter, Paul & Mary, Sammy Davis Jr., and others in a "Stars for Freedom Rally."

April 1965
Fannie Lou Hamer and other SNCC members help found the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union to organize cotton workers.

August 6, 1965
President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  This bill, urgently sought by Johnson, along with Dr. King and other Civil Rights leaders, eliminates such devices as poll taxes and literacy tests, and authorizes federal registrars to register qualified voters.

August 11, 1965
A large-scale race riot begins in the Watts area of Los Angeles, sparked by a traffic arrest.  As community leaders try to restore order, rioters block fire-fighters from the area, and vandalism and looting occur throughout the area.  Nearly 14,000 National Guardsmen are sent in to help restore order.  By the time the violence ends six days later, 34 people have been killed,1,032 are injured, and 3,952 are arrested.  Nearly 1,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed, and the city is left with $40 million in property damage.

September 15, 1965
The first episode of the television series I Spy is broadcast.  This is the first drama series on American television to feature a black man (Bill Cosby) in a starring role.

September 24, 1965
President Johnson issues Executive Order 11246, which requires government contractors to "take affirmative action" toward prospective minority employees in all aspects of hiring and employment.

January 13, 1966
Robert Clifton Weaver, nominated by President Johnson to be Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is the first African American named to the Cabinet.

March 1966
Texas Western College (today's UTEP), with it's all-black starting line-up, defeats the powerful University of Kentucky team in the NCAA Men's Tournament.

June 16, 1966
SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael rallies a crowd in Greenwood, Mississippi, with the cry, "We want black power!"  Martin Luther King's concern that the phrase carries "connotations of violence and separatism" is borne out by splits in the Civil Rights Movement between those favoring the use of nonviolent methods and those leaning more toward conventional revolutionary tactics like armed self-defense and black nationalism.

Fall 1966
In college football, Jerry LeVias, a student at Southern Methodist University, is the first black scholarship athlete in the Southwest Conference.  African American athletes Greg Page and Nate Northington join the University of Kentucky football team.  When Page dies after a blow to the back during practice, Northington transfers to Western Kentucky University, which integrated its classes in 1956 and has fielded black players since 1963.

October 1966
The militant Black Panther organization is founded in Oakland, California, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.

Late Fall 1966
Seven African American students attend Vanderbilt University.  Among them is Perry Wallace, the first African American basketball scholarship student and player in the SEC.  Although Wallace played only three years (1968-1970), he is still (2009) the school's second leading rebounder.

November 8, 1966
Edward W. Brooke, a Massachusetts Republican, becomes the first African American elected by popular vote to the U.S. Senate.

May-October 1967
In the worst summer of racial violence in the nation's history, more than 40 riots and 100 other upheavals occur across the country.  The most destructive take place in Newark (July 12-16) and Detroit (July 23-30).

June 12, 1967
In Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declares Virginia's anti-miscegenation law unconstitutional, thus prohibiting all legal marital restrictions based on race.

Fall 1967
Wilbut Hackett Jr. joins the University of Kentucky football team.  He will be the first African American team captain in the SEC.

November 1967
Carl Stokes, Cleveland, Ohio, becomes the first African American elected mayor of a major U.S. city.

February 12, 1968
Demanding better pay and working conditions, job equality with white workers, and city recognition of their union, 1300 black sanitation workers in Memphis walk off their jobs.  Although 500 white workers march with them, they get little support from the city and ask Martin Luther King to support their cause.

March 1968
Winston-Salem State University becomes the first black college to win an NCAA basketball championship.

April 4, 1968
Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis.  Violence breaks out in cities across America.  James Earl Ray confesses to the murder, but later recants, working until the end of his life to clear his name, supported by members of the King family, who have come to doubt his guilt.  The mayor of Memphis, fearing further violence, agrees to recognize the sanitation workers' union, permits a dues check-off, grants them a pay raise, and introduces a system of merit promotions.

April 11, 1968
President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968, prohibiting discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing.

June 5, 1968
Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, on the night of his victory in the California Democratic Primary, is shot to death in Los Angeles by Sirhan Sirhan, an Arab nationalist.

Fall 1968
Lester McClain becomes the first black athlete on the University of Tennessee football team.  Two years later he will be joined by African American quarterback Condredge Holloway.

September 17, 1968
With the premiere of Julia, Diahann Carroll becomes the first African American woman to star in a TV series in which she does not play a domestic servant.  In 1962 Carroll had been the first black performer to win a Tony Award for Best Actress.

Late summer 1968
Arthur Ashe wins the U.S. Open in tennis.  He will go on to win the Australian Open in 1970 and the Wimbledon championship in 1975.

November 5, 1968
Shirley Chisholm, a Democrat from New York, is the first African American woman elected to Congress.  She will serve until 1983.  Republican Richard Nixon defeats Hubert Humphrey by a narrow margin to become President.

September 12, 1970
USC fullback Sam "Bam" Cunningham's performance against the all-white Alabama team opens the door for Alabama's coach Bear Bryant to recruit black players.  In fact, Wilbur Jackson, watching the game from the stands, has already been offered a scholarship by Alabama, although most fans are as yet unaware of his status.  NCAA rules make him ineligible to play as a freshman.

December 1970
Perry Wallace, Vanderbilt basketball star, is named All-South-Eastern Conference and wins the SEC Sportsmanship Trophy after a vote by league players.

January 12, 1971
All in the Family begins its eight-year run.  The number-one TV sitcom for five years, it generates many other programs that deal with race relations and other controversial subjects in realistic and humorous ways.

April 20, 1971
In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the Supreme Court moves to end de facto segregation in schools where segregation occurs as a result of neighborhood segregation and proximity to schools, even though the schools themselves have no policy requiring segregation.  The solution in most cases is to reassign students and to bus them to the newly integrated schools, which may be many miles from their homes.  Although the plan is met with disfavor and sometimes violence, court-ordered busing will continue in some cities until the late 1990s.

Fall 1971
The University of Alabama, one of the last schools to integrate its athletic teams, recruits John Mitchell, who will become both co-captain of the team and an All-American the following year.

September 1972
For the first time, all grades in the Little Rock Public Schools are integrated.

September 3, 1974
A Federal court finds that Boston school districts were originally drawn to produce racial segregation; other courts rule that racially imbalanced schools are unfair to minority students and require the racial composition of each school in a district to mirror the composition of the district as a while.  Opponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had worried about using forced busing to achieve racial quotas in schools, Senator Hubert Humphrey insisting "it would be a violation [of the Constitution], because it would be handling the matter on the basis of race and we would be transporting children because of race."  When the Boston schools open in 1974, police in riot gear accompany the buses.  Some black children face abusive language and a storm of rocks and bottles as they enter their schools.

January 1977
Indiana becomes the 36th and last of the 38 required states to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which would give equal rights to women.  In the face of strong opposition, led by Phyllis Schlafly and others, no other states ratify, and five (Idaho, Kentucky, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Tennessee) rescind their earlier ratifications.

June 26, 1978
In a controversial 5-4 decision on Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court rules that racial quotas must be eliminated in education.  The decision is tempered by Justice Lewis Powell's statement (he votes with the majority but writes an opinion supporting the minority view as well): "Race can be a factor, but only one of many to achieve a balance."  This, affirmative action policies could continue if more clearly defined.

September 29, 1978
Seattle becomes the largest city in the United States to desegregate its schools without a court order.  The "Seattle Plan" involves busing almost one-fourth of the school district's students.

July 7, 1984
Returning from church in Bangor, Maine, Charlie Howard, 23, is beaten and kicked by three teenagers, who shout homophobic slurs before throwing him off a bridge, even as he screams he can't swim.  His body is found several hours later.

August 10, 1989
General Colin Powell becomes Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

November 7, 1989
Douglas Wilder of Virginia becomes the nation's first African American state governor.

November 22, 1991
President George H.W. Bush, having first threatened a veto, signs the Civil Rights Act of 1991, strengthening existing civil rights laws and providing for damages in cases of intentional job discrimination.

April 29, 1992
When a predominantly white jury acquits four LAPD officers in the beating of a black man named Rodney King, a huge riot breaks out in Los Angeles.  The videotaped beating combines with existing racial unrest in the city to spark five days of violence, ending only after the deployment of Federal troops.  A total of 53 people die: 25 blacks, 16 Latinos, 8 whites, 2 East Asians, and 2 West Asians; 3,600 fires are set, destroying 1,100 buildings; 10,000 people are arrested.

October 7, 1993
Author Toni Morrison wins the Nobel Prize in Literature.

February 5, 1994
In Jackson, Mississippi, thirty-one years after the 1963 shooting of Medgar Evers, the 73-year-old Byron De La Beckwith is found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.  In December 1997 the Mississippi Supreme Court will uphold this verdict following De La Beckwith's appeal.

April 2, 1997
The Tennessee General Assembly ratifies the 15th Amendment, making the state the last in the nation to do so.

October 7, 1998
College student Matthew Shepard, 21, is robbed, beaten, and left for dead, tied to a fence in a remote area of Wyoming by two men who have been heard plotting "to rob a gay man."  He dies on October 12 without regaining consciousness.

March 7, 2000
In honor of the 35th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday," Rep. John Lewis (now a U.S. Congressman from Georgia), and Hosea Williams cross the Pettus Bridge in Selma in the company of President Bill Clinton, Coretta Scott King, and several hundred other supporters.  Lewis later comments, "This time when I looked there were women's faces and there were black faces among the troopers.  And this time when we faced them, they saluted."

December 16, 2000
President George W. Bush nominated General Colin Powell as Secretary of State.  When he is confirmed in January, Powell will become the first African American to hold that office.

June 23, 2003
In Grutter v. Bollinger the Supreme Court rules that race can be one of many factors considered by colleges when selecting their students because it furthers "a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body."

January 20, 2005
Condoleeza Rice succeeds Colin Powell as Secretary of State, the second female and first black woman to serve in that office.

June 21, 2005
On the 41st anniversary of the murders of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman (and as a result of remarkable investigative work by a newspaper reporter and three high school girls preparing a National History Day project), Edgar Ray Killen, 80, a leader of the killings, is found guilty of three counts of man-slaughter.  Following his 2007 appeal, the Mississippi Supreme Court will uphold Killen's sentence of 3-times-20 years in prison.

October 24, 2005
Rosa Parks dies.  She is the first woman to be honored by lying in state in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.

February 2007
Emmitt Till's 1955 murder case, reopened by the Department of Justice in 2004, is officially closed.  Both confessed murderers have died, and there is insufficient evidence to pursue further convictions.

May 10, 2007
James Bonard Fowler is indicted for the 1965 murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson.  In October 2008 the trial is postponed indefinitely, pending the outcome of an unspecified appeal.

September 18, 2008
Fourteen Freedom Riders, expelled from Tennessee State University for their protest activities in 1961, receive honorary Doctorates of Humane Letters (three posthumously) in a touching ceremony at the school.

November 4, 2008
Illinois Senator Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a black African father and a white American mother, is elected President of the United States.

May 11, 2009
In an awards ceremony at Chattanooga's Howard High School, the Chattanooga History Center dedicates a mural honoring the students who took part in the 1960 lunch counter sit-ins, many of whom were members of Howard's 1960 graduating class.  The mural will be on permanent exhibit at the school.

October 28, 2009
President Barack Obama signs into law the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which specifies penalties for any crime in which someone targets a victim because of actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability. 

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

Martin Luther King,  March 25, 1965


Another excellent timeline,which accompanies study guides to the film "The Color of Blood, Notable Accomplishments & Events in Black Military History," can be found at
http://www.bcbst.com/about/diversity/Color_of_Blood-Notable_Accomplishments_Time_Line.pdf
 

Return to History Nashville page.

White students attack the Nashville lunch-counter demonstrators.  Police make the first arrests (of demonstrators, not attackers), but others move in quickly to take their seats.  The students are represented in court by Nashville councilman and attorney, Z. Alexander Looby and his associates Avon Nyanza Williams and Robert E. Lillard.  By mid-May the first lunch counters will be opened to customers of any race; by October Looby will have convinced a judge to dismiss the charges against 91 students for conspiracy to disrupt trade and commerce.
Wilma Rudolph is the first American woman, black or white, to win 3 gold medals in the Olympics, winning the 100-meter dash, the 200-meter dash, and the 400-meter relay, in which she ran the anchor leg.  

By the end of 1960   
70,000 people have participated in sit-ins and 3,600 are arrested.

January 1961   
In Selma, Alabama, more than 80% of the African American population live below the poverty line, and less than 1% of eligible blacks are registered to vote.

February 1961   
Nine young African American men are jailed in Rock Hill, South Carolina after staging a sit-in at a McCrory’s lunch counter.  They are the first to use the “jail, no bail” strategy, which will lighten the financial burden of civil rights groups across the country.

May 4, 1961   
Organized by members of SNCC, the Freedom Rides will test the enforcement of Boynton v. Virginia.  The first bus of 13 Freedom Riders (7 blacks, 6 whites) leaves Washington, D.C.  In Rock Hill, South Carolina, their first stop in the Deep South, two men (one is John Lewis) are beaten by a white mob.

May 14, 1961   
One of the Freedom Riders’ buses is burned in Anniston, Alabama.  As a second bus pulls into the Trailways Station in Birmingham, riders are attacked and badly beaten by a mob of Ku Klux Klan members. Sheriff Bull Connor orders Birmingham police to stay away.  The wounded Freedom Riders eventually escape to New Orleans when Att. Gen. Robert Kennedy orders a plane for them after other pilots refuse to fly them.

May 17, 1961   
Unwilling to allow the KKK to defeat them, local Tennessee activists take a bus from Nashville to Birmingham; Bull Connor arrests them and dumps them by the side of the road, just over the Tennessee border. They make their way back to Birmingham, but they cannot find a bus driver willing to risk his own safety driving them.

May 20, 1961   
Under orders from Robert Kennedy, Alabama provides a Highway Patrol escort, and the bus roars toward Montgomery at 90 mph.  At the city limits the police guards disappear, under Connor’s orders, and the riders are set upon and brutally beaten by a mob of KKK supporters, who have as much as 20 uninterrupted minutes to attack the Riders with bats and iron bars before the police arrive and drive the growing mob away with teargas. Many riders are left bloody and unconscious, including reporters (the mob has quickly destroyed the cameras) and Justice Department official John Siegenthaler, who is found lying in the street.  Local black citizens eventually rescue the wounded and take them to hospitals. 

March 7, 1965

Martin Luther King,  March 25, 1965

http://www.bcbst.com/about/diversity/Color_of_Blood-Notable_Accomplishments_Time_Line.pdf
 

Another excellent timeline,which accompanies study guides to the film "The Color of Blood, Notable Accomplishments & Events in Black Military History," can be found at
http://www.bcbst.com/about/diversity/Color_of_Blood-Notable_Accomplishments_Time_Line.pdf
 

In an awards ceremony at Chattanooga's Howard High School, the Chattanooga History Center dedicates a mural honoring the students who took part in the 1960 lunch counter sit-ins, many of whom were members of Howard's 1960 graduating class.  The mural will be on permanent exhibit at the school.

Martin Luther King,  March 25, 1965

USC fullback Sam "Bam" Cunningham's performance against the all-white Alabama team opens the door for Alabama's coach Bear Bryant to recruit black players.  In fact, Wilbur Jackson, watching the game from the stands, has already been offered a scholarship by Alabama, although most fans are as yet unaware of his status.  NCAA rules make him ineligible to play as a freshman.

December 1970
Perry Wallace, Vanderbilt basketball star, is named All-South-Eastern Conference and wins the SEC Sportsmanship Trophy after a vote by league players.

January 12, 1971
All in the Family begins its eight-year run.  The number-one TV sitcom for five years, it generates many other programs that deal with race relations and other controversial subjects in realistic and humorous ways.

April 20, 1971
In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the Supreme Court moves to end de facto segregation in schools where segregation occurs as a result of neighborhood segregation and proximity to schools, even though the schools themselves have no policy requiring segregation.  The solution in most cases is to reassign students and to bus them to the newly integrated schools, which may be many miles from their homes.  Although the plan is met with disfavor and sometimes violence, court-ordered busing will continue in some cities until the late 1990s.

Fall 1971
The University of Alabama, one of the last schools to integrate its athletic teams, recruits John Mitchell, who will become both co-captain of the team and an All-American the following year.

September 1972
For the first time, all grades in the Little Rock Public Schools are integrated.

September 3, 1974
A Federal court finds that Boston school districts were originally drawn to produce racial segregation; other courts rule that racially imbalanced schools are unfair to minority students and require the racial composition of each school in a district to mirror the composition of the district as a while.  Opponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had worried about using forced busing to achieve racial quotas in schools, Senator Hubert Humphrey insisting "it would be a violation [of the Constitution], because it would be handling the matter on the basis of race and we would be transporting children because of race."  When the Boston schools open in 1974, police in riot gear accompany the buses.  Some black children face abusive language and a storm of rocks and bottles as they enter their schools.

January 1977
Indiana becomes the 36th and last of the 38 required states to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which would give equal rights to women.  In the face of strong opposition, led by Phyllis Schlafly and others, no other states ratify, and five (Idaho, Kentucky, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Tennessee) rescind their earlier ratifications.

June 26, 1978
In a controversial 5-4 decision on Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court rules that racial quotas must be eliminated in education.  The decision is tempered by Justice Lewis Powell's statement (he votes with the majority but writes an opinion supporting the minority view as well): "Race can be a factor, but only one of many to achieve a balance."  This, affirmative action policies could continue if more clearly defined.

September 29, 1978
Seattle becomes the largest city in the United States to desegregate its schools without a court order.  The "Seattle Plan" involves busing almost one-fourth of the school district's students.

July 7, 1984
Returning from church in Bangor, Maine, Charlie Howard, 23, is beaten and kicked by three teenagers, who shout homophobic slurs before throwing him off a bridge, even as he screams he can't swim.  His body is found several hours later.

August 10, 1989
General Colin Powell becomes Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

November 7, 1989
Douglas Wilder of Virginia becomes the nation's first African American state governor.

November 22, 1991
President George H.W. Bush, having first threatened a veto, signs the Civil Rights Act of 1991, strengthening existing civil rights laws and providing for damages in cases of intentional job discrimination.

April 29, 1992
When a predominantly white jury acquits four LAPD officers in the beating of a black man named Rodney King, a huge riot breaks out in Los Angeles.  The videotaped beating combines with existing racial unrest in the city to spark five days of violence, ending only after the deployment of Federal troops.  A total of 53 people die: 25 blacks, 16 Latinos, 8 whites, 2 East Asians, and 2 West Asians; 3,600 fires are set, destroying 1,100 buildings; 10,000 people are arrested.

October 7, 1993
Author Toni Morrison wins the Nobel Prize in Literature.

February 5, 1994
In Jackson, Mississippi, thirty-one years after the 1963 shooting of Medgar Evers, the 73-year-old Byron De La Beckwith is found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.  In December 1997 the Mississippi Supreme Court will uphold this verdict following De La Beckwith's appeal.

April 2, 1997
The Tennessee General Assembly ratifies the 15th Amendment, making the state the last in the nation to do so.

October 7, 1998
College student Matthew Shepard, 21, is robbed, beaten, and left for dead, tied to a fence in a remote area of Wyoming by two men who have been heard plotting "to rob a gay man."  He dies on October 12 without regaining consciousness.

March 7, 2000
In honor of the 35th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday," Rep. John Lewis (now a U.S. Congressman from Georgia), and Hosea Williams cross the Pettus Bridge in Selma in the company of President Bill Clinton, Coretta Scott King, and several hundred other supporters.  Lewis later comments, "This time when I looked there were women's faces and there were black faces among the troopers.  And this time when we faced them, they saluted."

December 16, 2000
President George W. Bush nominated General Colin Powell as Secretary of State.  When he is confirmed in January, Powell will become the first African American to hold that office.

June 23, 2003
In Grutter v. Bollinger the Supreme Court rules that race can be one of many factors considered by colleges when selecting their students because it furthers "a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body."

January 20, 2005
Condoleeza Rice succeeds Colin Powell as Secretary of State, the second female and first black woman to serve in that office.

June 21, 2005
On the 41st anniversary of the murders of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman (and as a result of remarkable investigative work by a newspaper reporter and three high school girls preparing a National History Day project), Edgar Ray Killen, 80, a leader of the killings, is found guilty of three counts of man-slaughter.  Following his 2007 appeal, the Mississippi Supreme Court will uphold Killen's sentence of 3-times-20 years in prison.

October 24, 2005
Rosa Parks dies.  She is the first woman to be honored by lying in state in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.

February 2007
Emmitt Till's 1955 murder case, reopened by the Department of Justice in 2004, is officially closed.  Both confessed murderers have died, and there is insufficient evidence to pursue further convictions.

May 10, 2007
James Bonard Fowler is indicted for the 1965 murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson.  In October 2008 the trial is postponed indefinitely, pending the outcome of an unspecified appeal.

September 18, 2008
Fourteen Freedom Riders, expelled from Tennessee State University for their protest activities in 1961, receive honorary Doctorates of Humane Letters (three posthumously) in a touching ceremony at the school.

November 4, 2008
Illinois Senator Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a black African father and a white American mother, is elected President of the United States.

May 11, 2009
In an awards ceremony at chattanooga's Howard High School, the Chattanooga History Center dedicates a mural honoring the students who took part in the 1960 lunch counter sit-ins, many of whom were members of Howard's 1960 graduating class.  The mural will be on permanent exhibit at the school.

October 28, 2009
President Barack Obama signs into law the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which specifies penalties for any crime in which someone targets a victim because of actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability. 

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

Martin Luther King,  March 25, 1965

Where it all began . . .
Four young girls, ages 11 to 14, are killed when a bomb explodes in the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.  Many other people are injured. 

Late summer 1968
Arthur Ashe wins the U.S. Open in tennis.  He will go on to win the Australian Open in 1970 and the Wimbledon championship in 1975.

November 5, 1968
Shirley Chisholm, a Democrat from New York, is the first African American woman elected to Congress.  She will serve until 1983.  Republican Richard Nixon defeats Hubert Humphrey by a narrow margin to become President.

September 12, 1970

Fannie Lou Hamer and other SNCC members help found the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union to organize cotton workers.

August 6, 1965
President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  This bill, urgently sought by Johnson, along with Dr. King and other Civil Rights leaders, eliminates such devices as poll taxes and literacy tests, and authorizes federal registrars to register qualified voters.

August 11, 1965
A large-scale race riot begins in the Watts area of Los Angeles, sparked by a traffic arrest.  As community leaders try to restore order, rioters block fire-fighters from the area, and vandalism and looting occur throughout the area.  Nearly 14,000 National Guardsmen are sent in to help restore order.  By the time the violence ends six days later, 34 people have been killed,1,032 are injured, and 3,952 are arrested.  Nearly 1,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed, and the city is left with $40 million in property damage.

September 15, 1965
The first episode of the television series I Spy is broadcast.  This is the first drama series on American television to feature a black man (Bill Cosby) in a starring role.

September 24, 1965
President Johnson issues Executive Order 11246, which requires government contractors to "take affirmative action" toward prospective minority employees in all aspects of hiring and employment.

January 13, 1966
Robert Clifton Weaver, nominated by President Johnson to be Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is the first African American named to the Cabinet.

March 1966
Texas Western College (today's UTEP), with it's all-black starting line-up, defeats the powerful University of Kentucky team in the NCAA Men's Tournament.

June 16, 1966
SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael rallies a crowd in Greenwood, Mississippi, with the cry, "We want black power!"  Martin Luther King's concern that the phrase carries "connotations of violence and separatism" is borne out by splits in the Civil Rights Movement between those favoring the use of nonviolent methods and those leaning more toward conventional revolutionary tactics like armed self-defense and black nationalism.

Fall 1966
In college football, Jerry LeVias, a student at Southern Methodist University, is the first black scholarship athlete in the Southwest Conference.  African American athletes Greg Page and Nate Northington join the University of Kentucky football team.  When Page dies after a blow to the back during practice, Northington transfers to Western Kentucky University, which integrated its classes in 1956 and has fielded black players since 1963.

October 1966
The militant Black Panther organization is founded in Oakland, California, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.

Late Fall 1966
Seven African American students attend Vanderbilt University.  Among them is Perry Wallace, the first African American basketball scholarship student and player in the SEC.  Although Wallace played only three years (1968-1970), he is still (2009) the school's second leading rebounder.

November 8, 1966
Edward W. Brooke, a Massachusetts Republican, becomes the first African American elected by popular vote to the U.S. Senate.

May-October 1967
In the worst summer of racial violence in the nation's history, more than 40 riots and 100 other upheavals occur across the country.  The most destructive take place in Newark (July 12-16) and Detroit (July 23-30).

June 12, 1967
In Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declares Virginia's anti-miscegenation law unconstitutional, thus prohibiting all legal marital restrictions based on race.

Fall 1967
Wilbut Hackett Jr. joins the University of Kentucky football team.  He will be the first African American team captain in the SEC.

November 1967
Carl Stokes, Cleveland, Ohio, becomes the first African American elected mayor of a major U.S. city.

February 12, 1968
Demanding better pay and working conditions, job equality with white workers, and city recognition of their union, 1300 black sanitation workers in Memphis walk off their jobs.  Although 500 white workers march with them, they get little support from the city and ask Martin Luther King to support their cause.

March 1968
Winston-Salem State University becomes the first black college to win an NCAA basketball championship.

April 4, 1968
Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis.  Violence breaks out in cities across America.  James Earl Ray confesses to the murder, but later recants, working until the end of his life to clear his name, supported by members of the King family, who have come to doubt his guilt.  The mayor of Memphis, fearing further violence, agrees to recognize the sanitation workers' union, permits a dues check-off, grants them a pay raise, and introduces a system of merit promotions.

April 11, 1968
President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968, prohibiting discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing.

June 5, 1968
Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, on the night of his victory in the California Democratic Primary, is shot to death in Los Angeles by Sirhan Sirhan, an Arab nationalist.

Fall 1968
Lester McClain becomes the first black athlete on the University of Tennessee football team.  Two years later he will be joined by African American quarterback Condredge Holloway.

September 17, 1968
With the premiere of Julia, Diahann Carroll becomes the first African American woman to star in a TV series in which she does not play a domestic servant.  In 1962 Carroll had been the first black performer to win a Tony Award for Best Actress.

 

SCLC leader James Bevel sets up a 55-mile march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol in Montgomery -- a demonstration on behalf of African American voting rights.  On the outskirts of Selma, just after crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the 600 marchers are brutally assaulted, in full view of TV cameras, by heavily armed state troopers and deputies.  ABC makes the ironic choice to interrupt its broadcast of Judgment in Nuremberg, a Nazi war crimes documentary, to show footage of the violence.  John Lewis, 25, and the Rev. Hosea Williams, 39, leading the march, are clubbed to the ground, as are many others.  A widely published photograph shows 54-year-old Amelia Boynton Robinsonlying unconscious on the bridge.  Fifty marchers are hospitalized.

March 9, 1965
Martin Luther King leads a second march across the Pettus Bridge.  The marchers kneel in prayer, then return, obeying the court order that prohibits them from going on to Montgomery.  One of three white ministers attacked and beaten after the march (James Reeb, from Boston) dies in Birmingham, after Selma's public hospital refuses to treat him.  Demonstrations condemning "Bloody Sunday," as the March 7 incident has come to be called, take place in 80 cities across the nation during the day.

March 15, 1965 
President Lyndon B. Johnson makes what many consider his greatest speech to Congress as he calls for a Voting Rights bill: "It is wrong--deadly wrong--to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country . . . . What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America.  It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.  Their cause must be our cause, too.  Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.  And we shall overcome."

March 16, 1965
A Federal judge rules in Williams v. Wallace: "The law is clear that the right to petition one's government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups . . . . These rights may . . . be exercised by marching, even along public highways."  Granting the protesters their First Amendment rights to march also means the State of Alabama may no longer obstruct them.

March 21, 1965
Close to 8,000 people, of all races, begin the third march from Selma to Montgomery.  The 5-day march covers a 54-mile route along the "Jefferson David Highway" (U.S. 80).  Protected by 4,000 troops (U.S. Army, Alabama National Guard under Federal command, and many FBI agents and Federal Marshals), the marchers average ten miles a day and arrive at the Alabama Capitol building on the 25th.

March 22-23, 1965
The marchers pass through cold, rainy Lowndes County, where, although African Americans make up 81% of the population, not one is registered to vote, while the 2240 whites on the voting rolls constitute 118% of the adult white population!

March 25, 1965
Martin Luther King speaks to the marchers in Montgomery ("How Long, Not Long") and they are entertained by Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, Peter, Paul & Mary, Sammy Davis Jr., and others in a "Stars for Freedom Rally."

April 1965
Fannie Lou Hamer and other SNCC members help found the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union to organize cotton workers.

Black nationalist leader Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little in 1925) is assassinated during a speech in Manhattan.  Three members of the Black Muslim organization are accused of his murder.

March 7, 1965
SCLC leader James Bevel sets up a 55-mile march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol in Montgomery -- a demonstration on behalf of African American voting rights.  On the outskirts of Selma, just after crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the 600 marchers are brutally assaulted, in full view of TV cameras, by heavily armed state troopers and deputies.  ABC makes the ironic choice to interrupt its broadcast of Judgment in Nuremberg, a Nazi war crimes documentary, to show footage of the violence.  John Lewis, 25, and the Rev. Hosea Williams, 39, leading the march, are clubbed to the ground, as are many others.  A widely published photograph shows 54-year-old Amelia Boynton Robinsonlying unconscious on the bridge.  Fifty marchers are hospitalized. 

Nine young African American men are jailed in Rock Hill, South Carolina after staging a sit-in at a McCrory’s lunch counter.  They are the first to use the “jail, no bail” strategy, which will lighten the financial burden of civil rights groups across the country.

1624 -- The first slaves are brought to New York.
Hattie McDaniel wins the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind.
Sipes v. McGhee, a Michigan case, leads to Shelley v. Kraemer, in which the Supreme Court rules that, although no statute prohibits racially restrictive covenants in property deeds [written to block Asians, Jews, or African Americans from purchasing property in a neighborhood], no state or federal court can enforce them.
K. C. Jones and Bill Russell lead the University of San Francisco to the NCAA championship.
Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus.  The next day JoAnn Robinson and other community activists make and distribute flyers encouraging the African American community to boycott the city buses.
Nashville students begin the first full-scale sit-ins at downtown businesses.  Convening at the Arcade on 5^th Avenue shortly after noon, they move out to the Kress, Woolworth’s, and McClellan’s stores, where they make purchases and then take seats at the lunch counters.  Two hours later the stores close their lunch counters, and the students leave without incident.
The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is founded at a series of student meetings led by Ella Baker at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina.  Baker insists on a two-part organization – one part for direct action (sit-ins) and one part for voter registration.  Nashville activists will play leading roles in the new organization.  Marion Barry is the first chairman; other early members are Diane Nash, John Lewis, James Lawson, James Bevel, Charles McDew, Julian Bond, and Stokely Carmichael.
The true fulfillment of Executive Order 9981 (1948)—equality of treatment and opportunity for all military personnel—requires a change in Defense Department policy, which finally occurs with the publication of Department Directive 5120.36, issued fifteen years to the day after Truman’s original order. This major policy shift, ordered by Secretary of Defense Robert J. McNamara, expands the military’s responsibility to eliminate off-base discrimination detrimental to the military effectiveness of black servicemen.
March 7, 1965   
SCLC leader James Bevel sets up a 55-mile march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol in Montgomery – a demonstration on behalf of African American voting rights.  On the outskirts of Selma, just after crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the 600 marchers are brutally assaulted, in full view of TV cameras, by heavily armed state troopers & deputies. ABC makes the ironic choice to interrupt its broadcast of Judgment in Nuremberg, a Nazi war crimes documentary, to show footage of the violence.  John Lewis, 25, and the Rev. Hosea Williams, 39, leading the march are clubbed to the ground, as are many others.  A widely published photograph shows 54-year-old Amelia Boynton Robinson lying unconscious on the bridge.  Fifty marchers are hospitalized.
March 9, 1965   
Martin Luther King leads a second march across the Pettus Bridge.  The marchers kneel in prayer, then return, obeying the court order that prohibits them from going on to Montgomery.  One of three white ministers attacked and beaten after the march (James Reeb, from Boston) dies in Birmingham, after Selma’s public hospital refuses to treat him. Demonstrations condemning  “Bloody Sunday,” as the March 7 incident has come to be called, take place in 80 cities across the nation during the day.
March 15, 1965   
President Lyndon B. Johnson makes what many consider his greatest speech to Congress as he calls for a Voting Rights bill: “It is wrong—deadly wrong—to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country . . . . What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.  Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”
A Federal judge rules in Williams v. Wallace: “The law is clear that the right to petition one's government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups . . . . These rights may . . . be exercised by marching, even along public highways.”  Granting the protesters their First Amendment rights to march also means the State of Alabama may no longer obstruct them.
March 21, 1965   
Close to 8,000 people, of all races, begin the third march from Selma to Montgomery.  The 5-day march covers a 54-mile route along the "Jefferson Davis Highway"(U.S. 80). Protected by 4,000 troops (U.S. Army, Alabama National Guard under Federal command, and many FBI agents and Federal Marshals), the marchers average ten miles a day and arrive at the Alabama Capitol building on the 25^th.
March 22-23, 1965   
The marchers pass through cold, rainy Lowndes County, where, although African Americans make up 81% of the population, not one is registered to vote, while the 2240 whites on the voting rolls constitute 118% of the adult white population!
March 25, 1965   
n college football, Jerry LeVias, a student at Southern Methodist University, is the first black scholarship athlete in the Southwest Conference.  African American athletes Greg Page and Nate Northington join the University of Kentucky football team. When Page dies after a blow to the back during practice, Northington transfers to Western Kentucky University, which integrated its classes in 1956 and has fielded black players since 1963.
August 30, 1967   
Lester McClain becomes the first black athlete on the University of Tennessee football team.  Two years later he will be joined by African American quarterback Condredge Holloway.
In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the Supreme Court moves to end de facto segregation in schools where segregation occurs as a result of neighborhood segregation and proximity to schools, even though the schools themselves have no policy requiring segregation.  The solution in most cases is to reassign students and to bus them to the newly integrated schools.  Although the plan is met with disfavor and sometimes violence, court-ordered busing will continue in some cities until the late 1990s.
September 1972   
For the first time, all grades in the Little Rock Public Schools are integrated.
September 3, 1974   
A Federal court finds that Boston school districts were originally drawn to produce racial segregation; other courts rule that racially imbalanced schools are unfair to minority students and require the racial composition of each school in a district to mirror the compo-sition of the district as a whole.  Opponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had worried about using forced busing to achieve racial quotas in schools, Senator Hubert Humphrey insisting  “it would be a violation [of the Constitution], because it would be handling the matter on the basis of race and we would be transporting children because of race." When Boston schools open in 1974, police in riot gear accompany the buses.  Some black children face abusive language and a storm of rocks and bottles as they enter their schools.
College student Matthew Shepard, 21, is robbed, beaten, and left for dead, tied to a fence in a remote area of Wyoming by two men who have been heard plotting “to rob a gay man.”  He dies on October 12 without regaining consciousness.
In honor of the 35^th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday," Rep. John Lewis (now a U.S. Congressman from Georgia), and Hosea Williams cross the Pettus Bridge in Selma in the company of President Bill Clinton, Coretta Scott King, and several hundred other supporters. Lewis later comments, "This time when I looked there were women's faces and there were black faces among the troopers. And this time when we faced them, they saluted."
President Barack Obama signs into law the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which specifies penalties for any crime in which someone targets a victim because of actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.  Attached to the annual military funding bill, it clears the chamber on an 87-7 vote.

Return to History Nashville page.

March 7, 1965   
March 9, 1965   
March 15, 1965   
President Lyndon B. Johnson makes what many consider his greatest speech to Congress as he calls for a Voting Rights bill: “It is wrong—deadly wrong—to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country . . . . What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.  Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”
March 16, 1965   
A Federal judge rules in Williams v. Wallace: “The law is clear that the right to petition one's government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups . . . . These rights may . . . be exercised by marching, even along public highways.”  Granting the protesters their First Amendment rights to march also means the State of Alabama may no longer obstruct them.
March 21, 1965   
Close to 8,000 people, of all races, begin the third march from Selma to Montgomery.  The 5-day march covers a 54-mile route along the "Jefferson Davis Highway"(U.S. 80). Protected by 4,000 troops (U.S. Army, Alabama National Guard under Federal command, and many FBI agents and Federal Marshals), the marchers average ten miles a day and arrive at the Alabama Capitol building on the 25^th.
March 22-23, 1965   
The marchers pass through cold, rainy Lowndes County, where, although African Americans make up 81% of the population, not one is registered to vote, while the 2240 whites on the voting rolls constitute 118% of the adult white population!
March 25, 1965   
Martin Luther King speaks to the marchers in Montgomery (“How Long, Not Long”) and they are entertained by Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, Peter, Paul & Mary, Sammy Davis Jr., and others in a “Stars for Freedom Rally.” 
April 1965   
Fannie Lou Hamer and other SNCC members help found the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union to organize cotton workers.
August 6, 1965   
President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  This bill, urgently sought by Johnson, along with Dr. King and other Civil Rights leaders, eliminates such devices as poll taxes and literacy tests, and authorizes federal registrars to register qualified voters.
August 11, 1965    A large-scale race riot begins in the Watts area of Los Angeles, sparked by a traffic arrest.  As community leaders try to restore order, rioters block fire-fighters from the area, and vandalism and looting occur throughout the area.  Nearly 14,000 National Guardsmen are sent in to help restore order.  By the time the violence ends six days later, 34 people have been killed, 1,032 are injured, and 3,952 are arrested.  Nearly 1,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed, and the city is left with $40 million in property damage.
September 15, 1965   
The first episode of the television series I Spy is broadcast.  This is the first drama series on American television to feature a black man (Bill Cosby) in a starring role. 
September 24, 1965    
January 13, 1966   
March 1966   
June 16, 1966   
Fall 1966    
October 1966   
Late Fall 1966    Seven African American students attend Vanderbilt University.  Among them is Perry Wallace, the first African American basketball scholarship student and player in the SEC.  (Although Wallace played only three years (1968-1970) he is still (2009) the school’s second leading rebounder.) 
November 8, 1966   
Edward W. Brooke, a Massachusetts Republican, becomes the first African American elected by popular vote to the U.S. Senate.
May–October 1967   
June 12, 1967   
August 30, 1967   
Fall 1967   
Wilbur Hackett Jr. joins the University of Kentucky football team.  He will be the first African American team captain in the SEC.
November 1967   
February 12, 1968   
March 1968   
April 4, 1968   
April 11, 1968   
June 5, 1968   
Fall 1968   
September 17, 1968   
Late summer 1968   
November 5, 1968   
September 12, 1970   
USC fullback Sam “Bam” Cunningham’s performance against the all-white Alabama team opens the door for Alabama’s coach Bear Bryant to recruit black players.  In fact, Wilbur Jackson, watching the game from the stands, has already been offered a scholarship by Alabama, although most fans are unaware of his status. NCAA rules make him ineligible to play as a freshman.
December 1970   
Fall 1971   
September 1972   
September 3, 1974   
A Federal court finds that Boston school districts were originally drawn to produce racial segregation; other courts rule that racially imbalanced schools are unfair to minority students and require the racial composition of each school in a district to mirror the compo-sition of the district as a whole.  Opponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had worried about using forced busing to achieve racial quotas in schools, Senator Hubert Humphrey insisting  “it would be a violation [of the Constitution], because it would be handling the matter on the basis of race and we would be transporting children because of race." When Boston schools open in 1974, police in riot gear accompany the buses.  Some black children face abusive language and a storm of rocks and bottles as they enter their schools.
January 1977   
Indiana becomes the 36^th and last of the 38 required states to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which would give equal rights to women.  In the face of strong opposition, led by Phyllis Schlafly and others, no other states ratify, and five (Idaho, Kentucky, South Dakota. Nebraska, and Tennessee) rescind their earlier ratifications. 
June 26, 1978   
September 29, 1978   
Seattle becomes the largest city in the United States to desegregate its schools without a court order.  The “Seattle Plan” involves busing almost one-fourth of the school district's students.
July 7, 1984   
Returning from church in Bangor, Maine, Charlie Howard, 23, is beaten and kicked by three teenagers, who shout homophobic slurs before throwing him off a bridge even as he screams he can’t swim.  His body is found several hours later. 
August 10, 1989   
November 7, 1989   
November 22, 1991   
April 29, 1992   
When a predominantly white jury acquits four LAPD officers in the beating of a black man named Rodney King, a huge riot breaks out in Los Angeles. The videotaped beating combines with existing racial unrest in the city to spark five days of violence, ending only after the deployment of Federal troops.  A total of 53 people die: 25 blacks, 16 Latinos, 8 whites, 2 East Asians and 2 West Asians; 3,600 fires are set, destroying 1,100 buildings; 10,000 people are arrested.
October 7, 1993   
April 2, 1997   
October 7, 1998   
March 7, 2000   
In honor of the 35^th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday," Rep. John Lewis (now a U.S. Congressman from Georgia), and Hosea Williams cross the Pettus Bridge in Selma in the company of President Bill Clinton, Coretta Scott King, and several hundred other supporters. Lewis later comments, "This time when I looked there were women's faces and there were black faces among the troopers. And this time when we faced them, they saluted."
President George W. Bush nominates General Colin Powell as Secretary of State.  When he is confirmed in January, Powell will become the first African American to hold that office.  
June 23, 2003   
January 20, 2005   
October 24, 2005   
February 2007   
May 10, 2007   
September 18, 2008   
November 4, 2008   
May 11, 2009   
October 28, 2009   

The 15^th Amendment is ratified, guaranteeing that “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” will not be used to bar U.S. male citizens from voting.  Tennessee will not ratify this amendment until 1997.
In Plessy v. Ferguson the Supreme Court rules that state laws requiring separate-but-equal accommodations for blacks and whites are reasonable and do not imply the inferiority of either race. The 7-1 decision (Justice John Marshall Harlan dissents) will serve as legal justification for segregation until it is finally overturned by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
The unanimous decision on Brown v. Board of Education overturns many previous rulings, beginning with Plessy v. Ferguson (58 years earlier, almost to the day), by ruling that state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students deny the black children equal educational opportunities – separate is not equal.  The decision bans segregation in public schools.
Rosa Parks receives a scholarship to attend a school-desegregation workshop for community leaders.  She spends several weeks at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, TN, later saying that the workshop was the first time in her life she felt a sense of being in "an atmosphere of equality with members of the other race."
Emmett Till’s mother, schoolteacher Mamie Till Bradley, insists on keeping Emmett’s casket open during his funeral, even though his face is so disfigured by the beating that he is unrecognizable: “Let the people see what I have seen. I think everybody needs to know what happened to Emmett Till.”
On Labor Day, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus calls out the Arkansas National Guard to protect the school against extremists.  The next day, Judge Ronald Davies orders that integration will begin on September 4.  This will be the first important test of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.
Thirty Chattanooga high school students (most from Howard High School) take seats at the lunch counters of three downtown variety stores.  Their hand-written rules, circulated to all the participants, include “no loud talking,” “no profanity,” “please be on best behavior,” and “try to make small purchase.”  They continue the sit-ins throughout the month of February, drawing more student participants each time.
Z. Alexander Looby's home is destroyed by a dynamite blast.  More than 2000 students and community members stage a silent march to City Hall, where Mayor Ben West meets them on the steps. Student leader Diane Nash asks him, "Do you feel it is wrong to discriminate against a person solely on the basis of their race or color?" West says yes, later explaining, "It was a moral question – one that a man had to answer, not a politician."
Six Nashville lunch counters begin serving black customers.
Unwilling to allow the KKK to defeat them, local Tennessee activists take a bus from Nashville to Birmingham; Bull Connor arrests them and dumps them by the side of the road, just over the Tennessee border. They make their way back to Birmingham, but they cannot find a bus driver willing to risk his own safety driving them.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is Time Magazine’s Man of the Year.
July 2, 1964   
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 35, becomes the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. He will deliver his powerful acceptance speech on December 10 in Oslo: “Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time – the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.”

February 12, 1968   
Demanding better pay and working conditions, job equality with white workers, and city recognition of their union, 1300 black sanitation workers in Memphis walk off their jobs.  Although 500 white workers march with them, they get little support from the community and ask Martin Luther King to support their cause.

March 1968   
Winston-Salem State University becomes the first black college to win an NCAA basketball championship.

April 4, 1968   
Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis.  Violence breaks out in cities across America.  James Earl Ray confesses to the murder, but later recants, working until the end of his life to clear his name, supported by members of the King family who doubt his guilt.  The mayor of Memphis, fearing further violence, agrees to recognize the sanitation workers’ union,  permits a dues check-off, grants them a pay raise, and introduces a system of merit promotions.

April 11, 1968   
President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968, prohibiting discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing.

June 5, 1968   
Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, on the night of his victory in the California Democratic Primary, is shot to death in Los Angeles by Sirhan Sirhan, an Arab nationalist.

Fall 1968   
Lester Mc Clain becomes the first black athlete on the University of Tennessee football team.  Two years later he will be joined by African American quarterback Condredge Holloway.

September 17, 1968   
With the premiere of Julia, Diahann Carroll becomes the first African American woman to star in a TV series in which she did not play a domestic servant.  In 1962 Carroll had been the first black performer to win a Tony Award for Best Actress.

Late summer 1968   
Arthur Ashe wins the U.S. Open in tennis.  He will go on to win the Australian Open in 1970 and the Wimbledon championship in 1975.

November 5, 1968   
Shirley Chisholm, a Democrat from New York, is the first African American woman elected to Congress.  She will serve until 1983.  Republican Richard Nixon defeats Hubert Humphrey by a narrow margin to become President.

September 12, 1970   
USC fullback Sam “Bam” Cunningham’s performance against the all-white Alabama team opens the door for Alabama’s coach Bear Bryant to recruit black players.  In fact, Wilbur Jackson, watching the game from the stands, has already been offered a scholarship by Alabama, although most fans are unaware of his status. NCAA rules make him ineligible to play as a freshman.

December 1970   
Perry Wallace, Vanderbilt basketball star, is named all-South-Eastern conference and wins the SEC Sportsmanship Trophy after a vote by league players.
January 12, 1971   
All in the Family begins its eight-year run.  The number-one TV sitcom for five years, it generates many other programs that deal with race relations and other controversial subjects in realistic and humorous ways.
April 20, 1971   
In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the Supreme Court moves to end de facto segregation in schools where segregation occurs as a result of neighborhood segregation and proximity to schools, even though the schools themselves have no policy requiring segregation.  The solution in most cases is to reassign students and to bus them to the newly integrated schools.  Although the plan is met with disfavor and sometimes violence, court-ordered busing will continue in some cities until the late 1990s.

Fall 1971   
The University of Alabama, one of the last schools to integrate its athletic teams, recruits John Mitchell, who will become both co-captain of the team and an All-American the following year.

September 1972   
For the first time, all grades in the Little Rock Public Schools are integrated.

September 3, 1974   
A Federal court finds that Boston school districts were originally drawn to produce racial segregation; other courts rule that racially imbalanced schools are unfair to minority students and require the racial composition of each school in a district to mirror the compo-sition of the district as a whole.  Opponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had worried about using forced busing to achieve racial quotas in schools, Senator Hubert Humphrey insisting  “it would be a violation [of the Constitution], because it would be handling the matter on the basis of race and we would be transporting children because of race." When Boston schools open in 1974, police in riot gear accompany the buses.  Some black children face abusive language and a storm of rocks and bottles as they enter their schools.

January 1977   
Indiana becomes the 36^th and last of the 38 required states to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which would give equal rights to women.  In the face of strong opposition, led by Phyllis Schlafly and others, no other states ratify, and five (Idaho, Kentucky, South Dakota. Nebraska, and Tennessee) rescind their earlier ratifications. 

June 26, 1978   
In a controversial 5-4 decision on Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court rules that racial quotas must be eliminated in education.  The decision is tempered by Justice Lewis Powell’s statement (he votes with the majority but writes an opinion supporting the minority view as well): “Race can be a factor, but only one of many to achieve a balance.”  Thus, affirmative action policies could continue if more clearly defined.

September 29, 1978   
Seattle becomes the largest city in the United States to desegregate its schools without a court order.  The “Seattle Plan” involves busing almost one-fourth of the school district's students.

July 7, 1984   
Returning from church in Bangor, Maine, Charlie Howard, 23, is beaten and kicked by three teenagers, who shout homophobic slurs before throwing him off a bridge even as he screams he can’t swim.  His body is found several hours later. 

August 10, 1989   
General Colin Powell becomes chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

November 7, 1989   
Douglas Wilder of Virginia becomes the nation’s first African American state governor.

November 22, 1991   
President George H.W. Bush, having first threatened a veto, signs the Civil Rights Act of 1991, strengthening existing civil rights laws and providing for damages in cases of intentional job discrimination.

April 29, 1992   
When a predominantly white jury acquits four LAPD officers in the beating of a black man named Rodney King, a huge riot breaks out in Los Angeles. The videotaped beating combines with existing racial unrest in the city to spark five days of violence, ending only after the deployment of Federal troops.  A total of 53 people die: 25 blacks, 16 Latinos, 8 whites, 2 East Asians and 2 West Asians; 3,600 fires are set, destroying 1,100 buildings; 10,000 people are arrested.

October 7, 1993   
Author Toni Morrison wins the Nobel Prize in Literature.
February 5, 1994   
In Jackson, Mississippi, thirty-one years after the 1963 shooting of Medgar Evers, Byron De La Beckwith, now 73, is finally found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.  In December 1997 the Mississippi Supreme Court will uphold this verdict following De La Beckwith’s appeal.

April 2, 1997   
The Tennessee General Assembly ratifies the 15^th Amendment, making the state the last in the nation to do so.

Normal Web2" style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0in 15.1pt 0pt 0in">October 7, 1998   
College student Matthew Shepard, 21, is robbed, beaten, and left for dead, tied to a fence in a remote area of Wyoming by two men who have been heard plotting “to rob a gay man.”  He dies on October 12 without regaining consciousness.

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March 7, 2000   
In honor of the 35^th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday," Rep. John Lewis (now a U.S. Congressman from Georgia), and Hosea Williams

cross the Pettus Bridge in Selma in the company of President Bill Clinton, Coretta Scott King, and several hundred other supporters. Lewis later comments, "This time when I looked there were women's faces and there were black faces among the troopers. And this time when we faced them, they saluted."

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December 16, 2000   
President George W. Bush nominates General Colin Powell as Secretary of State.  When he is confirmed in January, Powell will become the first African American to hold that office. 

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Normal Web2" style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0in 15.1pt 0pt 0in">June 23, 2003   
In Grutter v. Bollinger the Supreme Court rules that race can be one of many factors considered by colleges when selecting their students because it furthers "a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body."

January 20, 2005   
Condoleeza Rice succeeds Colin Powell as Secretary of State, the second female and first black woman to serve in that office.
June 21, 2005   
On the 41st anniversary of the murders of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman (and as a result of remarkable investigative work by a newspaper reporter and three high school girls preparing a National History Day project) Edgar Ray Killen, 80, a leader of the killings, is found guilty of three counts of man-slaughter.  Following his 2007 appeal, the Mississippi Supreme Court upholds Killen’s sentence of 3-times-20-years in prison.

October 24, 2005   
Rosa Parks dies.  She is the first woman to receive the honor of lying in state in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.

February 2007   
Emmitt Till’s 1955 murder case, reopened by the Department of Justice in 2004, is officially closed.  Both confessed murderers have died, and there is insufficient evidence to pursue further convictions.

May 10, 2007   
James Bonard Fowler is indicted for the 1965 murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson.  In October 2008 the trial is postponed indefinitely, pending the outcome of an unspecified appeal.

September 18, 2008   
Fourteen Freedom Riders, expelled from Tennessee State University for their protest activities in 1961, receive honorary Doctorates of Humane Letters (three posthumously) in a touching TSU ceremony.

November 4, 2008   
Illinois Senator Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a black African father and a white American mother, is elected President of the United States.

May 11, 2009   
In an awards ceremony at Chattanooga’s Howard High School, the Chattanooga History Center dedicates a mural honoring the students who took part in the 1960 lunch counter sit-ins, many of whom were members of Howard’s 1960 graduating class.  The mural will be on permanent exhibit at the school.

Ralph J. Bunche receives the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Arab-Israeli truce.  He has also played a critical role in the formation and administration of the United Nations, chartered in 1945.    
1950
The Little Rock School Board votes unanimously to adopt Superintendent Virgil Blossom's plan of gradual integration, to start in September 1957 at the high school level and add the lower grades over the next six years. Mr. Blossom is named "Man of the Year" by the Arkansas Democrat for his work on desegregation.
Dr. King’s home is bombed.  Over the next two months, MIA attorneys file a federal suit challenging the constitutionality of segregated seating on public buses; a Grand Jury indicts 90 MIA members for breaking an anti-boycott law; Dr. King is convicted and fined $1,000.  The MIA’s appeal draws nation-wide media attention.
December 5, 1960   
In Boynton v. Virginia the Supreme Court rules that restaurant facilities in bus terminals that primarily exist to serve interstate bus passengers can not discriminate based on race – it ties the future of the Civil Rights movement to the Federal Government.

By the end of 1960   
70,000 people have participated in sit-ins and 3,600 are arrested.

January 1961   
In Selma, Alabama, more than 80% of the African American population live below the poverty line, and less than 1% of eligible blacks are registered to vote.

February 1961   
Nine young African American men are jailed in Rock Hill, South Carolina after staging a sit-in at a Mc Crory’s lunch counter.  They are the first to use the “jail, no bail” strategy, which will lighten the financial burden of civil rights groups across the country.

May 4, 1961   
Organized by members of SNCC, the Freedom Rides will test the enforcement of Boynton v. Virginia.  The first bus of 13 Freedom Riders (7 blacks, 6 whites) leaves Washington, D.C.  In Rock Hill, South Carolina, their first stop in the Deep South, two men (one is John Lewis) are beaten by a white mob.

May 14, 1961   
One of the Freedom Riders’ buses is burned in Anniston, Alabama.  As a second bus pulls into the Trailways Station in Birmingham, riders are attacked and badly beaten by a mob of Ku Klux Klan members. Sheriff Bull Connor orders Birmingham police to stay away.  The wounded Freedom Riders eventually escape to New Orleans when Att. Gen. Robert Kennedy orders a plane for them after other pilots refuse to fly them.

May 17, 1961   
Unwilling to allow the KKK to defeat them, local Tennessee activists take a bus from Nashville to Birmingham; Bull Connor arrests them and dumps them by the side of the road, just over the Tennessee border. They make their way back to Birmingham, but they cannot find a bus driver willing to risk driving them.

May 20, 1961   
Under orders from Robert Kennedy, Alabama provides a Highway Patrol escort, and the bus roars toward Montgomery at 90 mph.  At the city limits the police guards disappear, under Connor’s orders, and the riders are set upon and brutally beaten by a mob of KKK supporters, who have as much as 20 uninterrupted minutes to attack the Riders with bats and iron bars before the police arrive and drive the growing mob away with teargas. Many riders are left bloody and unconscious, including reporters (the mob has quickly destroyed the cameras) and Justice Department official John Siegenthaler, who is found lying in the street.  Local black citizens eventually rescue the wounded and take them to hospitals. 

May 21, 1961   
Martin Luther King and James Farmer of CORE (who is already recruiting more Freedom Riders) speak to 1200 people in Rev. Ralph Abernathy’s Montgomery church, while a mob outside throws rocks at the windows, overturns cars, and starts fires.  Over the next several days, more Freedom Riders arrive; most are jailed.  By the end of the summer, more than 60 Freedom Rides have come south, and more than 300 individuals have been jailed, including many local supporters of the Riders.

Winter 1961   
The Loyola University (Chicago) basketball team puts four black players on the floor at one time, breaking an unwritten convention of college sports.
1962   
Darryl Hill is recruited by coach Lee Corso at the University of Maryland.  He is the first African American football player in the Southwest Conference (SWC).  The only black player on the team until his senior year, he set two records that still stand: total yards receiving, and most passes caught in a single game.

September 30, 1962   
James Meredith is escorted onto the University of Mississippi (Oxford) campus by a convoy of Federal Marshals.  In the riots that follow, two people are killed and many others injured.

January 1963   
Alabama Governor George Wallace declares, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
April 8, 1963   
Sidney Poitier is the first African American to win the Academy Award for Best Actor.  Starring in three major films, he is also the top box office star of the year.

April 16, 1963   
Jailed for his protest activities, Martin Luther King writes his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” a classic Civil Rights document, asserting that individuals have a moral right to disobey unjust laws.

May/June 1963   
Civil rights activists, including children, march in Birmingham.  By the end of the first day, 700 have been arrested.  When 1000 more youngsters turn out on May 3, Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor turns high-pressure fire hoses on them. Within five days, 2500 are in jail, at least 80% of  them children.  After 38 days of confrontation and public outcry, Birmingham city officials and business leaders agree to desegregate public facilities.  Governor  Wallace’s refusal to accept the plan will bring violent confrontation.

June 11, 1963   
Governor George Wallace stands in the doorway of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama, blocking the enrollment of two black students.  Later, confronted by Federal Marshals and Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, he stands aside.

June 12, 1963   
NAACP activist Medgar Evers is shot to death outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi.  His assailant, KKK member Byron De La Beckwith, will not be found guilty of his murder until 1994.

July 26, 1963   
The true fulfillment of Executive Order 9981 (1948)—equality of treatment and opportunity for all military personnel—requires a change in Defense Department policy, which finally occurs with the publication of Department Directive 5120.36, issued fifteen years to the day after Truman’s original order. This major policy shift, ordered by Secretary of Defense Robert J. Mc Namara, expands the military’s responsibility to eliminate off-base discrimination detrimental to the military effectiveness of black servicemen.

August 28, 1963   
250,000 civil rights supporters take part in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.  The highlight of the event occurs when Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. 

September 1963   
Voter registration volunteers in Selma, Alabama, face arrests, beatings, and death threats. Thirty-two black schoolteachers who attempt to register to vote are fired by the all-white school board.

September 15, 1963   
Four young girls, ages 11 to 14, are killed when a bomb explodes in the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.  Many other people are injured. 
After the September 15 church bombing,
students begin lunch counter sit-ins – 300 are arrested, including John Lewis of SNCC.

November 22, 1963   
President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas.  Lyndon B. Johnson becomes President.

January 3, 1964   
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is Time Magazine’s Man of the Year.

January 23, 1964   
The 24^th Amendment abolishes the poll tax, used in Southern states since Reconstruction to make it difficult for poor blacks to vote.
June 14, 1964   
Freedom Summer (also called the Mississippi Summer Project) begins with training sessions in Ohio.  This effort to register black voters, primarily in Mississippi (in which only 6.2% of eligible blacks were registered to vote) is spearheaded by SNCC, along with the NAACP, CORE, and the SCLC.  Dr. Staughton Lynd from Yale University directs the Freedom Schools project.

June 21, 1964   
Three young civil rights workers – James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman – are arrested in Neshoba County, Mississippi, and then disappear.  

July 2               1964   
President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  The law prohibits all discrimination based on race, color, religion, or national origin; it also provides the federal government with the authority to enforce civil rights legislation. To Johnson’s dismay, the passage of this law will be followed by a year of violence as white supremacists attempt to undo the gains in registering black voters. Johnson turns his attention to passing a Voting Rights act.
August 4, 1964   
The bodies of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman are found, buried in an earthen dam. Schwerner and Goodman have been shot; Chaney was beaten to death. The state of Mississippi refuses to charge anyone with the murders.  Seven people are eventually tried for Federal crimes, but none of them serve more than six years in jail.

August 25, 1964   
By the end of the 10-week Freedom Summer project, four workers have been killed, four others critically wounded, 80 beaten, and 1000 arrested. Thirty black homes or businesses and 37 churches have been bombed or burned. Many of these crimes are never solved.  Since Mississippi still requires a literacy test for voter registration, of the 17,000 Mississippi blacks trying to register, only 1,600 succeed.

October 14, 1964   
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 35, becomes the youngest person ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. He will deliver his powerful acceptance speech on December 10 in Oslo: “Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time – the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression.”

May 19, 1965   
Patricia Harris becomes the first African American since Ebenezer Bassett (1869, Haiti) to serve as an ambassador (Luxembourg).

February 18, 1965   
Jimmie Lee Jackson, 26, is shot during a peaceful protest in Marion, Alabama, as he tries to protect his mother and grandfather from a beating by Alabama State Troopers.  Jackson, shot at very close range, dies a week later.  An Alabama Grand Jury refuses to indict James Bonard Fowler, the trooper who shot him.

February 21, 1965   
Black nationalist leader Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little in 1925) is assassinated during a speech in Manhattan.  Three members of the Black Muslim organization are accused of his murder.

Normal Web2" style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0in 15pt 0pt 0in">March 7, 1965   
SCLC leader James Bevel sets up a 55-mile march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol in Montgomery – a demonstration on behalf of African American voting rights.  On the outskirts of Selma, just after crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the 600 marchers are brutally assaulted, in full view of TV cameras, by heavily armed state troopers & deputies. ABC makes the ironic choice to interrupt its broadcast of Judgment in Nuremberg, a Nazi war crimes documentary, to show footage of the violence.  John Lewis, 25, and the Rev. Hosea Williams, 39, leading the march are clubbed to the ground, as are many others.  A widely published photograph shows 54-year-old Amelia Boynton Robinson lying unconscious on the bridge.  Fifty marchers are hospitalized.

Normal Web2" style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0in 15pt 0pt 0in">March 9, 1965   
Martin Luther King leads a second march across the Pettus Bridge.  The marchers kneel in prayer, then return, obeying the court order that prohibits them from going on to Montgomery.  One of three white ministers attacked and beaten after the march (James Reeb, from Boston) dies in Birmingham, after Selma’s public hospital refuses to treat him. Demonstrations condemning  “Bloody Sunday,” as the March 7 incident has come to be called, take place in 80 cities across the nation during the day.

Normal Web2" style="BACKGROUND: white; MARGIN: 0in 15.1pt 0pt 0in">March 15, 1965   
President Lyndon B. Johnson makes what many consider his greatest speech to Congress as he calls for a Voting Rights bill: “It is wrong—deadly wrong—to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country . . . . What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.  Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

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March 16, 1965   
A Federal judge rules in Williams v. Wallace: “The law is clear that the right to petition one's government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups . . . . These rights may . . . be exercised by marching, even along public highways.”  Granting the protesters their First Amendment rights to march also means the State of Alabama may no longer obstruct them.

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March 21, 1965   
Close to 8,000 people, of all races, begin the third march from Selma to Montgomery.  The 5-day march covers a 54-mile route along the "Jefferson Davis Highway"(U.S. 80). Protected by 4,000 troops (U.S. Army, Alabama National Guard under Federal command, and many FBI agents and Federal Marshals), the marchers average ten miles a day and arrive at the Alabama Capitol building on the 25^th.

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March 22-23, 1965   
The marchers pass through cold, rainy Lowndes County, where, although African Americans make up 81% of the population, not one is registered to vote, while the 2240 whites on the voting rolls constitute 118% of the adult white population!

March 25, 1965   
Martin Luther King speaks to the marchers in Montgomery (“How Long, Not Long”) and they are entertained by Harry Belafonte, Tony Bennett, Peter, Paul & Mary, Sammy Davis Jr., and others in a “Stars for Freedom Rally.” 

April 1965   
Fannie Lou Hamer and other SNCC members help found the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union to organize cotton workers.

August 6, 1965   
President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  This bill, urgently sought by Johnson, along with Dr. King and other Civil Rights leaders, eliminates such devices as poll taxes and literacy tests, and authorizes federal registrars to register qualified voters.

August 11, 1965    A large-scale race riot begins in the Watts area of Los Angeles, sparked by a traffic arrest.  As community leaders try to restore order, rioters block fire-fighters from the area, and vandalism and looting occur throughout the area.  Nearly 14,000 National Guardsmen are sent in to help restore order.  By the time the violence ends six days later, 34 people have been killed, 1,032 are injured, and 3,952 are arrested.  Nearly 1,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed, and the city is left with $40 million in property damage.

September 15, 1965   
The first episode of the television series I Spy is broadcast.  This is the first drama series on American television to feature a black man (Bill Cosby) in a starring role. 

September 24, 1965    
President Johnson issues Executive Order 11246, which requires government contractors to "take affirmative action" toward prospective minority employees in all aspects of hiring and employment.

January 13, 1966   
Robert Clifton Weaver, nominated by President Johnson to be Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is the first African American named to the Cabinet.

March 1966   
Texas Western College (now UTEP), with its all-black starting line-up, defeats the powerful University of Kentucky team in the NCAA Men’s Tournament

June 16, 1966   
SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael rallies a crowd in Greenwood, Mississippi, with the cry, “We want black power!” Martin Luther King’s concerns that the phrase carries “connotations of violence and separatism” are born out by splits in the civil rights movement between those favoring the use of nonviolent methods and those leaning more toward conventional revolutionary tactics like armed self-defense and black nationalism.

Fall 1966    I
n college football, Jerry Le Vias, a student at Southern Methodist University, is the first black scholarship athlete in the Southwest Conference.  African American athletes Greg Page and Nate Northington join the University of Kentucky football team. When Page dies after a blow to the back during practice, Northington transfers to Western Kentucky University, which integrated its classes in 1956 and has fielded black players since 1963.

October 1966   
The militant Black Panther organization is founded in Oakland, California, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.

Late Fall 1966    Seven African American students attend Vanderbilt University.  Among them is Perry Wallace, the first African American basketball scholarship student and player in the SEC.  (Although Wallace played only three years (1968-1970) he is still (2009) the school’s second leading rebounder.) 

November 8, 1966   
Edward W. Brooke, a Massachusetts Republican, becomes the first African American elected by popular vote to the U.S. Senate.

May–October 1967   
In the worst summer of racial violence in the nation’s history, more than 40 riots and 100 other upheavals occur across the country. Among the most destructive take place in Newark (July 12-16) and Detroit (July 23-30).

June 12, 1967   
In Loving v. Virginia the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declares Virginia's anti-miscegenation law unconstitutional, this prohibiting all legal marital restrictions based on race.

August 30, 1967   
Judge Thurgood Marshall, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, is confirmed by the Senate to be the 96^th Supreme Court Justice.  He becomes the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court.

Fall 1967   
Wilbur Hackett Jr. joins the University of Kentucky football team.  He will be the first African American team captain in the SEC.

November 1967   
Carl Stokes, Cleveland, Ohio, becomes the first African American elected mayor of a major U.S. city.

Return to History Nashville page.

Baseball executive Branch Rickey announces that he has assigned Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers’ minor-league affiliate Montreal Royals.
President Truman’s Civil Rights Committee issues its report, “To Secure These Rights,” which positions America’s harsh treatment of its black citizens against our criticism of Communism’s destruction of its citizens’ individual rights.  The report, which at the time is considered quite radical, calls for segregation to be abolished (primarily in government and the military), for lynching to become a federal crime, for poll taxes to be outlawed, for voting rights to be guaranteed for all citizens, and for a United States Commission on Civil Rights to be established. 

May 3, 1948   
Sipes v. Mc Ghee, a Michigan case, leads to Shelley v. Kraemer, in which the Supreme Court rules that, although no statute prohibits racially restrictive covenants in property deeds [written to block Asians, Jews, or African Americans from purchasing property in a neighborhood], no state or federal court can enforce them.

July 26, 1948   
President Harry S Truman signs Executive Order 9981, which establishes the President’s Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services. It is accompanied by Executive Order 9980, creating a Fair Employment Board to eliminate racial discrimination in federal employment. [This will require an additional change in Department of Defense policy, which does not occur for 25 years. See entry for July 26, 1963.]

1949   
William Henry Hastie is the first African American to be appointed a Federal Judge, when President Truman names him judge of the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Hastie, a native of Knoxville,  graduated first in his class from Amherst and took his law degree at Harvard University.  One of his law students at Howard University will be Thurgood Marshall.

1950   
Ralph J. Bunche receives the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Arab-Israeli truce.  He has also played a critical role in the formation and administration of the United Nations, chartered in 1945.   

1950    1950
Gwendolyn Brooks wins the first Pulitzer Prize in poetry.

November 1, 1950   
Chuck Cooper becomes the first African American professional basketball player when he takes the floor for the Boston Celtics against the Fort Wayne Pistons.

Fall 1951   
The University of Tennessee admits African American students.

1952   
The first year since 1881 without a recorded lynching.

1952    The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) passes a resolution introduced by the Yale Law School faculty two years earlier, making racial integration a requirement for membership in the organization.

Fall 1953   
Vanderbilt University admits its first African American student.

May 17, 1954   
The unanimous decision on Brown v. Board of Education overturns many previous rulings, beginning with Plessy v. Ferguson (58 years earlier, almost to the day), by ruling that state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students deny the black children equal educational opportunities – separate is not equal.  The decision bans segregation in public schools.

September 30, 1954   
The last all-black units are disbanded by the U.S. Military.

March 2, 1955   
Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old African American is arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger.  Local black leaders consider using this as the test case for a major protest movement, but reject the idea when Colvin becomes pregnant.

March 1955   
K.C. Jones and Bill Russell lead the University of San Francisco to the NCAA championship.

May 24, 1955   
The Little Rock School Board votes unanimously to adopt Superintendent Virgil Blossom's plan of gradual integration, to              start in September 1957 at the high school level and add the lower grades over the next six years. Mr. Blossom is named "Man of the Year" by the Arkansas Democrat for his work on desegregation.

July 1955   
Rosa Parks receives a scholarship to attend a school-desegregation workshop for community leaders.  She spends several weeks at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, TN, later saying that the workshop was the first time in her life she felt a sense of being in "an atmosphere of equality with members of the other race."

August 28, 1955   
On a dare, 14-year-old Emmett Till, visiting relatives near Money, Mississippi, flirts with a white woman in a general store.  A few days later he is beaten to death by a group of men, including the woman’s husband.  A few weeks after the two men tried for murdering Till are acquitted by a local jury, they sell a story to Look magazine in which they confess to the murder. 

September 3, 1955   
Emmett Till’s mother, schoolteacher Mamie Till Bradley, insists on keeping Emmett’s casket open during his funeral, even though his face is so disfigured by the beating that he is unrecognizable: “Let the people see what I have seen. I think everybody needs to know what happened to Emmett Till.”
In Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company the Interstate Commerce Commission outlaws segregation on interstate buses.  

December 1, 1955   
Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus.  The next day Jo Ann Robinson and other community activists make and distribute flyers encouraging the African American community to boycott the city buses.

December 5, 1955   
On the first day of the bus boycott; the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) is established.  Members elect a young minister, the Reverend Martin Luther King, 26, as president.

January 30, 1956   
Dr. King’s home is bombed.  Over the next two months, MIA attorneys file a federal suit challenging the constitutionality of           segregated seating on public buses; a Grand Jury indicts 90 MIA members for breaking an anti-boycott law; Dr. King is convicted and fined $1,000.  The MIA’s appeal draws nation-wide media attention.

June 5, 1956    A Federal court rules bus segregation unconstitutional. Montgomery city officials quickly appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.  Meanwhile, the boycott continues, and city officials concentrate on finding a legal way to prohibit the MIA’s carpool system, a home-grown network of alternative transportation provided by drivers both black and white.

Late Summer 1956   
African American tennis player Althea Gibson reaches the finals of  the U.S. Open.  She wins both singles and doubles in the French Open, becoming the first African American to win a Grand Slam tennis title.

August 28, 1956   
After 27 African American students fail in their efforts to register in the all-white Little Rock city schools, the NAACP files a lawsuit on their behalf.  On this date, Federal Judge John E. Miller dismisses the suit, stating that the Little Rock School Board has acted in “utmost good faith” in following its announced integration plan.  Although the NAACP appeals, a higher court upholds Miller’s ruling.  Meanwhile, during the same period of late summer, the city’s public buses are quietly desegregated.

Fall 1956  
Although Vanderbilt University Law School has enrolled Native American, Asian, and Hispanic students for decades, Frederick T. Work and Melvin Porter are the first African American students admitted to a private law school in the South. Both graduate in 1959.

November 13, 1956   
In Browder v. Gayle, the Supreme Court upholds the lower court ruling finding Montgomery’s bus segregation unconstitutional. On December 20, U.S. marshals officially serve the Supreme Court order on Montgomery city officials.

December 21, 1956   
The Montgomery bus boycott comes to a successful end.  After 381 days and the combined efforts of 50,000 people, black residents of Montgomery are now free now to choose any seat on city buses.

January 10, 1957   
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) is organized in Atlanta, its stated goal to coordinate and support non-violent direct action as a method of desegregating bus systems across the South.  Martin Luther King Jr., 28, is its first president.

March 1957   
Tennessee State University defeats Southeast Oklahoma at the NAIA Basketball Tournament 92-73 to become the first black college to win a white-dominated national title.

Spring 1957   
Of the 517 black students eligible to attend Little Rock Central High School, 80 express an interest in doing so and go through a series of interviews with school officials. Of the 17 students selected, eight decide to remain at the all-black Horace Mann High School, leaving a group who will become known as the “Little Rock Nine.”

May 17, 1957   
On the third anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, Bobby Cain graduates from Clinton High School in Clinton, Tennessee, becoming the first African American graduate of a state-supported public integrated high school in the South.

Feb.-August 1957   
Tennis player Althea Gibson wins both singles and doubles titles at the U.S. Open, the Australian open, and Wimbledon. 

August 27, 1957   
During the summer opponents of school integration have organized into groups, the most vocal being the Capital Citizens Council and the Mothers League of Central High School.  On this date one of the mothers files a motion in Chancery Court asking for a temporary injunction against school integration.  Pulaski County Chancellor Murray Reed grants the injunction “on the grounds that integration could lead to violence.”  Three days later Federal District Judge Ronald Davies nullifies the injunction.

September 2, 1957   
On Labor Day, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus calls out the Arkansas National Guard to protect the school against extremists.  The next day, Judge Ronald Davies orders that integration will begin on September 4.  This will be the first important test of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

September 4, 1957    The nine black students attempt to enter Little Rock Central High School but are turned away by National Guardsmen.

September 9, 1957   
On March 11, 1956, President Eisenhower, responding to the racial unrest that follows Brown v Board of Education and following the recommendations of President Truman’s 1947 Civil Rights Committee, urges Congress to pass the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. House Speaker Sam Rayburn and Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, both Texans, guide the Civil Rights Bill through Congress, in spite of the objections of many Southern politicians (most notably Strom Thurmond, whose 24-hour, 18-minute filibuster still stands as the Senate record).  Despite the uproar over its passage, the bill is much weaker than Eisenhower has hoped – it does little more than to expand the authority of the U.S. Justice Department to enforce civil rights and voters’ rights, and to add a new assistant attorney general to oversee the division of a new Justice Department division responsible for civil rights issues.

September 20, 1957   
Judge Ronald Davies rules that Faubus has used the National Guard to prevent the students from entering the school, not to protect them.  The Guardsmen are removed, and the Little Rock Police Department takes responsibility for keeping the school peaceful.

September 23, 1957   
Nine African-American teenagers enter Little Rock Central High for the first time, out of sight of an angry crowd of 1000 protesters, but they are later removed for their own safety when the mob grows unruly. The next day the mayor asks Eisenhower for help.

September 25, 1957   
President Eisenhower sends 1000 members of the 101^st Airborne Division to Little Rock and federalizes the Arkansas National Guard.  The nine black students return to school with a military escort.

March 26-28, 1958   
The Nashville Christian Leadership Conference (NCLC) holds its first workshop on non-violent tactics against segregation under the leadership of the Rev. Kelly Miller Smith.  The workshops will continue into 1960.

May 27, 1958    Ernest Green becomes the first black student to graduate from Little Rock Central High School.  With police and Federal troops on hand, the graduation ceremony takes place in peace.  Orval Faubus will close Little Rock schools for most of the 1958-59 school year.

November 1959   
James Lawson, a divinity student at Vanderbilt University, and Kelly Miller Smith, the young pastor of the First Colored Baptist Church on 8^th Avenue North, continue to hold workshops to train Nashville high school and college students in the techniques of nonviolence and peaceful protest. 

Nov.-Dec. 1959    Lawson, Smith, and student leaders John Lewis, Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, and others buy goods and make unsuccessful attempts to desegregate the lunch counters at Harvey’s and Cain-Sloan’s department stores.

February 1, 1960   
Four African American college freshmen bring attention to the unequal treatment of the races when they take seats at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina.  More  students arrive the next day, and news services become interested.

February 13, 1960   
Nashville students begin the first full-scale sit-ins at downtown businesses.  Convening at the Arcade on 5^th Avenue shortly after noon, they move out to the Kress, Woolworth’s, and Mc Clellan’s stores, where they make purchases and then take seats at the lunch counters.  Two hours later the stores close their lunch counters, and the students leave without incident.

February 19, 1960   
Thirty Chattanooga high school students (most from Howard High School) take seats at the lunch counters of three downtown variety stores.  Their hand-written rules, circulated to all the participants, include “no loud talking,” “no profanity,” “please be on best behavior,” and “try to make small purchase.”  They continue the sit-ins throughout the month of February, drawing more student participants each time.

February 27, 1960   
White students attack the Nashville lunch-counter demonstrators.  Police make the first arrests (of the demonstrators, not the attackers), but others move in quickly to take their seats.  The students are represented in court by Nashville councilman and attorney, Z. Alexander Looby and his associates Avon Nyanza Williams and Robert E. Lillard..

March 3, 1960   
James Lawson, whom Martin Luther King has called “the leading nonviolence theorist in the world,” is expelled from Vanderbilt University for his efforts in organizing the Nashville sit-ins. (He will complete his degree program at Boston University.)  The dean and faculty members of the Vanderbilt Divinity School resign in protest. 

April 16-17, 1960   
The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is founded at a series of student meetings led by Ella Baker at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina.  Baker insists on a two-part organization – one part for direct action (sit-ins) and one part for voter registration.  Nashville activists will play leading roles in the new organization.  Marion Barry is the first chairman; other early members are Diane Nash, John Lewis, James Lawson, James Bevel, Charles Mc Dew, Julian Bond, and Stokely Carmichael.

April 19, 1960   
Z. Alexander Looby's home is destroyed by a dynamite blast.  More than 2000 students and community members stage a silent march to City Hall, where Mayor Ben West meets them on the steps. Student leader Diane Nash asks him, "Do you feel it is wrong to discriminate against a person solely on the basis of their race or color?" West says yes, later explaining, "It was a moral question – one that a man had to answer, not a politician."

May 6, 1960   
President Eisenhower introduces a second civil rights bill in 1958, in reaction to violence against Southern schools and churches.  Once again Southern politicians react against what they see as Federal interference in state business – 18 Southern Senators team up to produce the longest filibuster in history: over 43 hours.  Majority leader Lyndon Johnson holds the Senate in 24-hour session until the Civil Rights Bill of 1960 passes.  Eisenhower signs the bill into law on May 6, thus creating a Civil Rights Commission, establishing federal regulation of local voter registration, and pro-viding penalties for interfering with a citizen’s effort to vote or to register to vote.

May 10, 1960   
Six Nashville lunch counters begin serving black customers.

May 16, 1960   
Benjamin O. Davis Jr. becomes the first black general in the U.S. Air Force.  Twenty years earlier his father was the first black soldier ever promoted to general.

July 31, 1960   
Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, calls for the establishment of a separate state for blacks.

September 7, 1960   
Wilma Rudolph is the first American woman, black or white, to win 3 gold medals in the Olympics, winning the 100-meter dash, the 200-meter dash, and the 400-meter relay, in which she ran the anchor leg.

October 12, 1960   
Thurgood Marshall, who will later become a Supreme Court justice himself, pleads the case of Boynton v. Virginia before the Court.  The case involves a black interstate bus passenger who was arrested for refusing to leave a whites-only section of a bus station restaurant.  Marshall claims such arrests violate the Interstate Commerce Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

October 28, 2009   
President Barack Obama signs into law the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which specifies penalties for any crime in which someone targets a victim because of actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.  Attached to the annual military funding bill, it clears the chamber on an 87-7 vote.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. 
Martin Luther King,  March 25, 1965

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