|
A Time Line Of The Civil Rights Movement
|
1954
May 17 |
Landmark Supreme Court ruling Brown
v. Board of Topeka, Kansas. "Separate but equal"
schools ruled unconstitutional.
|
|
1955
December 1 |
Rosa Parks
refuses to move to the back of a Montgomery City bus to allow a
white man to have her seat, resulting in her arrest for violating
the city's segregation ordinance. The Montgomery bus boycott,
organized as a protest of this law, resulted in the legal
challenge of the law and a victory for the boycott that lasted
over a year. The ordinance was declared unconstitutional.
Montgomery's buses were desegregated.
|
1963
May 3-5 |
A "Children's Crusade" for
equality in Birmingham results in the use of fire hoses and police
dogs by city police on the demonstrators, may of whom were mere
children. |
1963
May 10 |
The first urban riot of the 1960s occurs in Birmingham. Blacks
burnt white owned property in response to another bombing.
|
1963
Sept 15 |
The bombing
of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham results
in the death of four black girls. |
1964
August 28 |
200,000 march in Washington and hear the Rev. Martin
Luther King's "I
Have A Dream" speech. |
1965
August 6 |
The Voting
Rights Act of 1965 forbid the use of literacy tests and other
voter tests as prerequisites for voting. It also authorized
federal intervention to aid blacks in registering to vote in the
South. |
|
1965
March 21-25
|
Rev. King leads a 5-day, 54-mile
march
from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, for racial equality in the
South. |
1965-68 |
Urban racial rioting lasts three years in Los Angeles, Newark,
Detroit, and Chicago
|
1968
April 4 |
The assassination
of Rev. King in Memphis sets off a wave of rioting in 125
cities in 29 states.
|
| |
Information for this summary came from the
following:
Glenn T. Eskew. But For Birmingham: The Local and National
Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1997.
Wayne Flynt, and others. Alabama: The History of a Deep South
State. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994. |
