Existing comment:
The Civil Rights Era Timeline
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 |