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Oct 27, 2009 · The civil rights movement was a struggle for justice and equality for African Americans that took place mainly in the 1950s and 1960s. Among its leaders were Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm...
- July 26, 1948: President Harry Truman issues Executive Order 9981 to end segregation in the Armed Services.
- May 17, 1954: Brown v. Board of Education, a consolidation of five cases into one, is decided by the Supreme Court, effectively ending racial segregation in public schools.
- August 28, 1955: Emmett Till, a 14-year-old from Chicago is brutally murdered in Mississippi for allegedly flirting with a white woman. His murderers are acquitted, and the case bring international attention to the civil rights movement after Jet magazine publishes a photo of Till’s beaten body at his open-casket funeral.
- December 1, 1955: Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. Her defiant stance prompts a year-long Montgomery bus boycott.
- Sarah Pruitt
- Nine Black Students Arrive at Central High School in Little Rock. U.S. Army Escorts Little Rock Nine. Though the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), state and local officials in a number of Southern states continued to block integration of their schools.
- Rosa Parks Refuses to Give Up Her Seat. Rosa Parks being fingerprinted by police after refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white man. (Credit: Gene Herrick/AP/REX/Shutterstock)
- The Greensboro Four Sit at a Woolworth Lunch Counter. Another key moment in the civil rights movement began on February 1, 1960, when four Black students at the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina (now North Carolina A&T State University), sat down at a “whites-only” lunch counter inside a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, N.C. and refused to leave when they were denied service.
- The Freedom Riders Travel South. A National Guardsmen on a bus with two Freedom Riders, May 1961. After the U.S. Supreme Court banned segregation in interstate bus travel in 1946, activists from the Congress of Racial Equality and the Fellowship of Reconciliation tested the verdict with an interracial bus ride through the upper South they called the Journey of Reconciliation.
- Brown v. Board of Education The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Educational Fund, led by Thurgood Marshall, spent decades fighting against racial segregation in education.
- Rosa Parks arrested On December 1, 1955, civil rights activist Rosa Parks was arrested when she refused to surrender her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to a white passenger.
- Little Rock school integration crisis After the Brown v. Board, Supreme Court decision, state and local officials in a number of states resisted school integration.
- Birmingham campaign In the spring of 1963, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., launched a large-scale campaign of sit-ins and marches in Birmingham, Alabama, to protest the city’s brutal segregation policies.
The civil rights movement was a social movement and campaign from 1954 to 1968 in the United States to abolish legalized racial segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement in the country.
- May 17, 1954 – August 1, 1968
- United States
The Civil Rights Movement racked up many notable victories, from the dismantling of Jim Crow segregation in the South, to the passage of federal legislation outlawing racial discrimination, to the widespread awareness of the African American cultural heritage and its unique contributions to the history of the United States.
Civil rights movements. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights movement leaders in front of the statue of Abraham Lincoln during the March on Washington, August 28, 1963. Civil rights movements are a worldwide series of political movements for equality before the law, that peaked in the 1960s. [citation needed]
