A History of the Civil Rights Movement

Chronology

1941:

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Fair Employment Act into law on June 25. It orders companies working for the United States to treat all workers and job-seekers fairly, including African Americans. Bayard Rustin organizes the “Journey of Reconciliation,” a bus trip by black and white activists through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky to challenge segregation. This action inspired the Freedom Rides of 1961. President Harry Truman issues Executive Order 9981 on July 26, desegregating the U.S. armed forces. In May, the Supreme Court rules in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation of public schools is unconstitutional; it orders schools to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” The murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi in August, and the subse quent acquittal of the teenager’s murders, draws national attention to the plight of African Americans in the Deep South; on December 1, Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give a white passenger her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. Five days later African Americans begin a boycott of Montgomery buses that lasts until late 1956, when the U.S. Supreme Court rules that racial segregation on public buses is illegal. In September nine African-American students begin school at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. U.S. troops are sent to protect them from angry mobs of whites opposed to desegregation. Four African-American students ask for service at the “white” section of a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and are refused. This sparks student “sit-ins” across the South. CORE and SNCC send racially integrated groups of “Freedom Riders” on bus trips in the South, beginning May 4, 1961, in Washington, D.C. The riders are met with force in many communities. On August 28, approximately 250,000 people participate in a major civil rights rally in Washington, D.C. As part of the events, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech. On September 15, a bomb explodes at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four young girls and injuring 22.

1947:

1948:

1954:

1955:

1957:

1960:

1961:

1963:

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