Existing comment:
World War II & the Post War Years Timeline
1940: NAACP-supported Wagner-Gavagan antilynching bill defeated in the Senate by a filibuster
1940: Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win an Academy Award
1941: A. Philip Randolph proposed a March on Washington to demand fair employment for African Americans
1941: African American physician and scientist Dr. Charles Drew developed a technique for preserving blood plasma
1942: U.S. and Mexican governments launched the Bracero Program, which permitted temporary Mexican workers (braceros) to fill the domestic labor shortage
1942: NAACP Washington Bureau established
1942: The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) founded
1942: Federal government forced Japanese Americans into relocation camps
1943: A. Philip Randolph created the National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC)
1945: A. Philip Randolph organized the Committee against Jim Crow Military Services and Training, later named "League for Nonviolent Civil Disobedience against Military Service"
1946: U.S. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., (D-NY) began to attach a provision known as the "Powell Amendment" to bills, which became Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
1947: Jackie Robinson became the first African American to play major league baseball in the modern era
1947: W. E. B. Du Bois submitted to the United Nations "An Appeal to the World," a petition linking racism in the U.S. to colonial imperialism
1947: President's Committee on Civil Rights issued its report, To Secure These Rights
1947: Bayard Rustin of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and George Houser of CORE organized the Journey of Reconciliation, the first Freedom Ride into the South
1948: President Harry Truman became the first U.S. president to address the annual convention of the NAACP
1948: Democratic National Convention endorsed a strong civil rights plank, inciting Southern Democrats to walk out and form the States Rights Party (Dixiecrats), which nominated Senator Strom Thurmond (then D-SC) for president
1949: Entertainer Timmie Rogers had the first prime-time, all-black television show on CBS
1949: Jo Ann Robinson became president of the Women's Political Council (WPC), which organized and supported the Montgomery Bus Boycott
1949: Simone DeBouvior published The Second Sex, which helped launch the modern feminist movement |