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Crispus Attucks, one of the first men to die for American Revolution, was a fugitive slave who had escaped from his master and had worked for twenty years as a merchant seaman.
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The fugitive slave laws were laws passed by the United States Congress in 1793 and 1850 to provide for the return of slaves who escaped from one state into another state or territory.
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Nat Turner was a slave rebellion that took place in Southampton County, Virginia, during August 1831. Led by Nat Turner, rebel slaves killed anywhere from 55 to 65 people, the highest number of fatalities caused by any slave uprising in the American South. The rebellion was put down within a few days.
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In January 1839, 53 African natives were kidnapped from eastern Africa and sold into the Spanish slave trade. They were then placed aboard a Spanish slave ship bound for Havana, Cuba. he slaves then revolted, killing most of the crew of the Amistad, including her cook and captain.
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The Fugitive Slave Acts were a pair of federal laws that allowed for the capture and return of runaway slaves within the territory of the United States.
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Dred Scott v. Sandford was a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court held that African Americans, whether slave or free, could not be American citizens and therefore had no standing to sue in federal court, and that the federal government had no power to regulate slavery in the federal territories acquired after the creation of the United States.
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On October 16, 1859, John Brown led a small army of 18 men into the small town of HARPER'S FERRY, Virginia. His plan was to instigate a major slave rebellion in the South
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South Carolina was a site of major political and military importance for the Confederacy during the American Civil War. The white population of the state strongly supported the institution of slavery long before the war.
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The American Civil War, was a civil war fought from 1861 to 1865, after seven Southern slave states declared their secession and formed the Confederate States of American.The states that remained in the Union were known as the "Union" or the "North".
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The Emancipation Proclamation was a presidential proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863, as a war measure during the American Civil War, directed to all of the areas in rebellion and all segments of the Executive branch of the United States. It proclaimed the freedom of slaves in the ten states that were still in rebellion, thus applying to 3 million of the 4 million slaves in the U.S. at the time.
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President Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Lincoln led the United States through its Civil War its bloodiest war and its greatest moral, constitutional and political crisis.
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The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. It was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, by the House on January 31, 1865, and adopted on December 6, 1865. On December 18, 1865, Secretary of State William H. Seward proclaimed its adoption. It was the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments adopted following the American Civil War.
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The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments. The amendment addresses citizenship rights and equal protection of the laws, and was proposed in response to issues related to former slaves following the American Civil War.
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The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude". It was ratified on February 3, 1870, as the third and last of the Reconstruction Amendments.
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Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) is a landmark United States Supreme Court decision in the jurisprudence of the United States, upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in public facilities under the doctrine of "separate but equal".
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The Phoenix Election Riot in 1898 was a riot by white South Carolinians in the name of Redemption in Greenwood, South Carolina. Over a dozen prominent black leaders were murdered and hundreds were injured by the white mob.
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In 1898, Wilmington, North Carolina, located in eastern Carolina, where the Cape Fear River enters into the Atlantic Ocean, was a prosperous port town. Almost two-thirds of its population was black, with a small but significant middle class.
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The Rosewood massacre was a racially-motivated mob atrocity in Florida during January 1-7, 1923. In the violence at least six blacks and two whites were reportly killed, and the town of Rosewood was abandoned and destroyed in what contemporary news reports characterized as a race riot.
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The Scottsboro Boys were nine black teenagers accused of rape in Alabama in 1931. The landmark set of legal cases from this incident dealt with racism and the right to a fair trial. The case included a frameup, an all-white jury, rushed trials, an attempted lynching, and an angry mob; it is frequently given as an example of an overall miscarriage of justice.
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McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, was a United States Supreme Court case that reversed a lower court decision upholding the efforts of the state-supported University of Oklahoma to adhere to the state law requiring African-Americans to be provided graduate or professional education on a segregated basis. Seperate but not equal.
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Sweatt v. Painter, was a U.S. Supreme Court case that successfully challenged the "separate but equal" doctrine of racial segregation established by the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson. The case was influential in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education four years later.
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Brown v. Board of Education, was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which allowed state-sponsored segregation, insofar as it applied to public education.
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Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was an African-American boy who was murdered in Mississippi at the age of 14 after reportedly flirting with a white woman.
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Little Rock Nine were a group of African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas. They then attended after the intervention of President Eisenhower.
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Ruby Nell Bridges Hall is an American activist known for being the first black child to attend an all-white elementary school in the South. She attended William Frantz Elementary School
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James Howard Meredith (born June 25, 1933) is an American civil rights movement figure, a writer, and a political adviser. In 1962, he was the first African-American student admitted to the segregated University of Mississippi, an event that was a flashpoint in the American civil rights movement.
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March on Washington as styled in a sound recording released after the event was one of the largest political rallies for human rights in United States history and called for civil and economic rights for African Americans. It took place in Washington, D.C..Thousands of Americans headed to Washington on Tuesday August 27, 1963. Martin Luther King, Jr., standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech in which he called for an end to racism.
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The 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed on Sunday, September 15, 1963 as an act of white supremacist terrorism. The explosion at the African-American church, which killed four girls, marked a turning point in the United States 1960s Civil Rights Movement and contributed to support for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
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Malcolm, who entered into an intense program of self-education and took the last name "X" to symbolize his stolen African identity.On February 21, 1965, one week after his home was firebombed, Malcolm X was shot to death by Nation of Islam members while speaking at a rally of his organization in New York City.
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The historic march, and King’s participation in it, greatly helped raise awareness of the difficulty faced by black voters in the South, and the need for a Voting Rights Act, passed later that year.
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An act to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and for other purposes.
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Watts Riot was a race riot that took place in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles from August 11 to 17, 1965. The six-day unrest resulted in 34 deaths, 1,032 injuries, 3,438 arrests, and over $40 million in property damage
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The Orangeburg Massacre refers to the shooting of protestors by South Carolina Highway Patrol Officers that were demonstrating against racial segregation at a local bowling alley in Orangeburg, South Carolina near South Carolina State University on the evening of February 8, 1968. Of the 150 protestors in the crowd that night, three African American males were killed and twenty-eight other protestors were injured.
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Martin Luther King, Jr. was an American pastor, activist, humanitarian, and leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement.
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Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American political activist, scholar, and author. She emerged as a nationally prominent counterculture activist and radical in the 1960s as a leader of the Communist Party USA, and she had close relations with the Black Panther Party through her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, despite never being an official member of the party.
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On November 30, 1974, Johanson and another member of the expedition discovered small bones from one individual -- it was a hominid, but looked different from any they were familiar with. Everyone at the site joined in the search for more of this specimen and collected hundreds of pieces. The pieces did appear to be from the same individual, and made up 40 percent of a skeleton. The pelvis showed it had been a female, and the team named her Lucy after the Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamo
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Roots is a television miniseries in the USA based on Alex Haley's 1976 novel, entitled Roots.
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Rodney Glen King (April 2, 1965 – June 17, 2012) was an African-American construction worker who became nationally known after being beaten by Los Angeles police officers, following a high-speed car chase on March 3, 1991. A local witness, George Holliday, videotaped much of it from his balcony.
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In 1932, the Public Health Service, working with the Tuskegee Institute, began a study to record the natural history of syphilis in hopes of justifying treatment programs for blacks. It was called the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.
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Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States, and the first African American to hold the office.
