1960's: Civil Rights Timeline

Civil Rights Movement Timeline

January 31^st, 1865

• The Thirteenth Amendment is passed and slavery is officially abolished from the United States.

April 15^th, 1865

• President Abraham Lincoln, the president who abolished slavery, is assassinated.

July 28^th, 1868

• The Fourteenth Amendment is passed giving black citizens in America full citizenship.

March 30^th, 1870

• The right to vote is granted to all American males (other than Native Americans),regardless of race, color or previous condition of servitude (so even men who had previously been slaves could now vote).

March 1^st, 1875

• Civil Rights Act is passed giving all black citizens the right to equal treatment in public and on any public transportation.

November 26^th, 1883

• US Supreme Court declares the Civil Rights Act to be unconstitutional because laws covered by the Civil Rights Act should be left up to individual states, not the federal government. Individual states now again allowed to discriminate in any way they want against black citizens.

June 3^rd, 1946

• US Supreme Court bans segregation of black and white people on public transit.

December 1^st, 1955

• Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, AL. Martin Luther King Jr. leads a boycott of Montgomery buses that lasts over a year.

September 24^th, 1957

• Nine black students integrate with white students at Central High School in Little Rock, AR. President Dwight Eisenhower sends the paratroopers in to ward off any violence.

      February 1st, 1960

• Four black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College begin a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter.

    May 4th, 1961

• Over the spring and summer, student volunteers begin taking bus trips through the South to test out new laws that prohibit segregation in interstate travel facilities, which includes bus and railway stations. Several of the groups of "freedom riders," as they are called, are attacked by angry mobs along the way. 

August 28^th, 1963

• More than 250,000 civil rights demonstrators march on Washington, DC, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his "I Have A Dream" speech.

Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his I Have A Dream speech

1964

• Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

Aug. 10, 1965

Congress passes the Voting Rights Act of 1965, making it easier for Southern blacks to register to vote. Literacy tests, poll taxes, and other such requirements that were used to restrict black voting are made illegal.

April 4^th, 1968

• Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis, TN, where had gone to give a speech to striking garbage workers.

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