Existing comment:
Prologue Timeline
1619: Twenty Africans arrived in Jamestown and were sold as indentured servants
1623: William Tucker was the first black child born in the colony of Jamestown
1634: African slaves imported to Maryland and Massachusetts
1688: Germantown Mennonites in Pennsylvania endorsed the first formal antislavery resolution in the British colonies
1770: Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave, was the first American killed by British soldiers in the Boston Massacre
1773: Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the first book of poetry by an African American, was published
1775: Quakers organized the first Manumission Society in Philadelphia
1775–1783: American Revolutionary War, in which enslaved and free black men fought with the Continental Army; about 5,000 slaves granted freedom through military service
1787: Reverend Richard Allen and Absalom Jones founded the Philadelphia Free African Society, the first African American mutual aid society
1789: First slave narrative was published by Olaudah Equiano
1808: U.S. banned importation of African slaves
1816: American Colonization Society founded with the objective of solving the slavery problem by sending freed blacks to the colony of Liberia on the west coast of Africa
1816: African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, the first independent black denomination, established
1829: David Walker, a free black man, published Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World . . . , a widely circulated antislavery pamphlet
1830: First National Negro Convention held in Philadelphia to provide free blacks with an independent arena to develop strategies for their advancement
1830: Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law, leading to the forced resettlement of many Native Americans west of the Mississippi River
1831: William Lloyd Garrison founded the Liberator, the foremost abolitionist newspaper
1831: Nat Turner led a slave revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, where sixty whites were killed within twenty-four hours
1839: Cinqué led a group of Africans in revolt against their captors aboard the Spanish slave ship Amistad, commandeered the vessel, and landed near Long Island, New York; later defended before the U.S. Supreme Court by former President John Quincy Adams
1845: Frederick Douglass embarked on an antislavery lecture tour in Great Britain; published his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
1848: First Women's Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls, New York
1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin, which sold 300,000 copies in the first year and reinvigorated the abolitionist movement
1859: Militant abolitionist John Brown led a band of black and white men in a failed raid to capture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and was later captured and hanged
1861–1865: American Civil War
1865: Ku Klux Klan formed
1865–1877: More than 1,500 African Americans held political office during the period of Reconstruction
1866: Race riots erupted in Memphis and New Orleans, nearly fifty blacks killed and hundreds of black homes, churches, and schools were burned to the ground
1866: Fisk University (Nashville, Tennessee), Howard University (Washington, D.C.), Lincoln University (Jefferson City, Missouri), and Shaw University (Raleigh, North Carolina) founded to educate freed blacks
1867–1872: Blacks protested segregated streetcars, which led to streetcar desegregation specifically in Richmond, New Orleans, Charleston, Philadelphia, Louisville, and Savannah
1868: U.S. Congressman John Mercer Langston (R-VA), diplomat, and great-uncle of writer Langston Hughes, founded the law department at Howard University
1870: Hiram R. Revels (R-MS) and Joseph H. Rainey (R-SC) respectively became the first African Americans elected to the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives
1876: Meharry Medical College, the first all-black medical school in the U.S., founded
1881: Booker T. Washington founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama
1890: U.S. troops killed 200 Lakota Sioux men, women, and children in the Wounded Knee Massacre, the last battle of the American Indian Wars
1892: Ida B. Wells-Barnett began a national antilynching campaign
1895: Booker T. Washington delivered his "Atlanta Compromise" speech at the Cotton States International Exposition in Atlanta
1896: National Association of Colored Women (NACW) formed in Washington, D.C.
1897: American Negro Academy founded in Washington, D.C., with the purpose of "the promotion of literature, science, and art" |