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Sections: Prologue | The Segregation Era (1900–1939) | World War II and Post War (1940–1949) | Civil Rights Era (1950–1963) | The Civil Rights Act of 1964 | Immediate Impact of the Civil Rights Act | Epilogue
View objects from this time period
- 1950
- National Emergency Civil Rights Mobilization launched a mass lobby that led to the founding of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights
- 1950
- Gwendolyn Brooks awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry; the first African American to receive the award
- 1950–1953
- Korean War
- 1950
- Ralph Bunche became the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize
- 1951
- NAACP Florida Secretary Harry T. Moore and wife Harriett killed on Christmas night by a bomb placed under their home by the Ku Klux Klan
- 1951
- Mattachine Society founded by gay men in Los Angeles “to change the self-image of gay people to produce a new pride”
- 1952
- Ralph Ellison published Invisible Man and won the National Book Award; the first African American to receive the award
- 1953
- First black bus boycott in Baton Rouge, Louisiana
- 1954
- White Citizens’ Councils formed in the South to harass blacks engaged in civil rights activities through economic intimidation
- 1955
- Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till murdered in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman
- 1955
- Thirteen-month Montgomery bus boycott to desegregate the city’s buses began
- 1955
- Daughters of Bilitis founded in San Francisco as the nation’s first lesbian rights organization
- 1956
- Autherine Lucy enrolled as the first black student at the University of Alabama and was expelled four days later
- 1956
- “Southern Manifesto” signed by 101 Southern U.S. senators and representatives to encourage resistance to the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision
- 1956
- The Nat King Cole Show premiered on television; the second African American to host a national television series
- 1956–1975
- Vietnam War
- 1957
- Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) formed
- 1957
- Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington held at the Lincoln Memorial
- 1957
- President Dwight Eisenhower sent U.S. troops and nationalized the Arkansas Guard to protect nine black students trying to attend Little Rock, Arkansas’s, Central High School
- 1958–1959
- Youth Marches for Integrated Schools held in Washington, D.C.
- 1959
- Berry Gordy founded Motown Records in Detroit, Michigan
- 1959
- Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun was the first play by an African American woman on Broadway
- 1959
- A. Philip Randolph organized the Negro American Labor Council to combat discrimination in the AFL-CIO
- 1960
- Four black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, launched the lunch counter sit-in movement
- 1960
- Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) founded
- 1960
- Martin Luther King, Jr., arrested during a sit-in at Rich’s Department Store in Atlanta; Robert Kennedy arranged his release
- 1960
- King endorsed John F. Kennedy for president and helped to secure the black vote for Kennedy
- 1961
- President Kennedy appointed the President’s Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW)
- 1961
- CORE organized the first Freedom Ride to test the Supreme Court’s Boynton v. Virginia decision banning the segregation of bus terminal facilities
- 1961
- The Albany Movement began in Albany, Georgia
- 1961
- 50,000 women mobilized in Women Strike for Peace to protest nuclear bombs and tainted milk
- 1962
- Voter Education Project began
- 1962
- Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) cofounded by SNNC’s Robert Moses and CORE’s David Dennis
- 1962
- President Kennedy sent federal troops to Mississippi to stop rioting as James Meredith enrolled in the University of Mississippi
- 1962
- Daniel K. Inouye (D-HI) elected the first Japanese American to the U.S. Senate
- 1963
- SCLC led demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, to protest segregation
- 1963
- Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in response to religious leaders who criticized his tactics
- 1963
- SNCC launched a major voter registration drive in Greenwood, Mississippi; police arrested James Forman, Charles McDew, Robert Moses, and other SNCC workers
- 1963
- Governor George Wallace failed to block the admission of Vivian Malone and James Hood to the University of Alabama
- 1963
- President Kennedy delivered a televised speech on civil rights, his first on the subject
- 1963
- NAACP Mississippi Field Secretary Medgar Evers assassinated in front of his house
- 1963
- President Kennedy asked Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1963
- 1963
- Thurgood Marshall traveled to East Africa to advise newly independent nations on civil rights and economic development
- 1963
- March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
- 1963
- Four black girls attending Sunday School died in a bombing at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama
- 1963
- James Baldwin published The Fire Next Time
- 1963
- Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique and became a leader in the feminist movement
- 1963
- President Kennedy assassinated
- 1963
- President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress to ask for the “earliest possible passage” of Kennedy’s civil rights bill
Warren K. Leffler. Civil rights March on Washington, August 28, 1963. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress