Civil Rights

Civil Rights march 1963

• 1887 Thomas Fortune founded the Afro-American League.
• 1892 Ida Wells founded the anti-lynching campaign.
• 1905 W. E. B. DuBois was a founder and general secretary of the Niagara movement, an African American protest group of scholars and professionals. The National Negro Committee was formed in 1909 and reorganized in 1910 as the NAACP.
• 1914 Marcus Garvey founded the Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association and African Communities League, usually shortened to Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).
• 1930 Black Muslims founded, became led by Elija Mohammed,
• 1939 Thurgood Marshall became director of the LDF that came from the NAACP Garland Fund under Charles Hamilton Houston of Howard University.
• 1941 A. Philip Randolph organized the March of Washington. On June 25, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, which mandated an end to discrimination in hiring and union membership for companies and unions that did business with the government and established the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) to oversee compliance.
• 1942 Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., on March 7 graduated from the Tuskegee Flying School, and with four second lieutenants began the Tuskegee Airmen.
• 1944 Frank Capra on April 13 released the film The Negro Soldier.
• 1947 Jackie Robinson on April 15 became the first major league baseball player.
• 1948 President Truman on July 26 issued Executive Order 9981 that desegregated the military services.
• 1954 Brown v, Board of Education overturned "separate but equal" segregated schools
• much opposition: 1955 Southern Manifesto, "massive reisistance" of Sen. Harry Byrd, Gov. Orville Faubus closed Little Rock high schools, police chief Bull Connor used dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham
• NAACP and church led movement in Montgomery, Rosa Parks kept her bus seat in Dec. 1955, bus boycott for 13 months, Martin Luther King
• Greensboro NC Woolworth lunch counter sit-in began the sit-in movements of 1960, SNCC "commando raiders"
• Freedom Rides by students, CORE in 1961
• desegregation of the entire community in 1961 Albany GA
• Fanny Lou Hamer for voter registration in 1962 Miss
• James Meredith integrated Ole Miss 1962
• SCLC led desegregation of 1963 Birmingham
• A. Philip Randolph organized march on Washington August 1963
• The Mississippi Freedom Summer Project organized June, 1964, by The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). On June 21, three Freedom Summer workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi.
• The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination in voting, public accommodations, and employment.
• "Bloody Sunday" Mar. 7, 1965, when the first Selma march was beaten back at Edmund Pettus Bridge.
• The Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned voter examinations and provided for federal registrars to be sent to recalcitrant counties.

Links:

• The Rights Revolution
• A. Philip Randolph exhibit from George Meany Archives
• Ole Miss' Lessons in Southern Symbolism from LAT, May 22, 1997
• Debating Flag, Mississippi Finds It Doesn't Have One from NYT May 5, 2000
• The Rights Revolution of the Sixties outline
• Mississippi: Is This America? 1962-64, from Eyes on the Prize

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