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Seven Southern slave states individually declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America. The Confederacy, often simply called the South, grew to include eleven states.
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The Emancipation Proclamation was a presidential proclamation and executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln on January 1, 1863. In a single stroke, it changed the federal legal status of more than 3 million enslaved persons in the designated areas of the South from "slave" to "free".
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Passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified on December 6, 1865, the 13th amendment abolished slavery in the United States and provides that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
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General Lee of the South surrenders to General Grant of the North
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President Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth; Andrew Johnson becomes president
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President Johnson officially declared a virtual end to the insurrection.
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Cherokee leader Stand Watie became the last Confederate General to surrender his forces.
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Jim Crow Laws begin to take control over the rights of African Americans. Jim Crow laws mandated the segregation of public schools, public places, and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants, and drinking fountains for whites and blacks.
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Plessy v. Ferguson was a landmark United States Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in public facilities under the doctrine of "separate but equal"
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World War 1 begins with the assassination of the heir to Austria’s throne, Archduke Frans Ferdinand.
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Germany signs the Treaty of Versailles and ends World War 1.
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Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, born.
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In the United States, people thought their country wouldn't become a victim of the Great Depression that had overtaken Europe. However, on the 29th of October, the stock market crashed sending the United States into their own Great Depression.
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The Scottsboro Boys were nine black teenage boys 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, an angry mob, and is an example of an overall miscarriage of justice.
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Along with the Great Depression was the Dust Bowl in the middle of the country. The Dust Bowl took place in the Great Plains, which included Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, and Colorado. The Dust Bowl was caused by the lack of crop rotation; it basically killed the soil, which caused it to dry up, resulting in dust storms.
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At the peak of the Great Depression, the unemployment rate had reached 8.7 percent, up from about 5 percent when the Great Depression had started. Unemployment was becoming a major issue as many people were living paycheck-to-paycheck, with only their last job to keep them going.
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The setting of To Kill a Mockingbird’s story starts in the early summer.
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Many workers in search of jobs often traveled by themselves, so they only had themselves to look after. They could also move easily from job-to-job. Many migrant workers were desperate for money, so the were willing to take lower paying jobs if it meant being paid at all.
-The number of unemployed workers continued to rise. People just couldn't find jobs to support their families. Factories had no work to offer due to their shortages, as well. -
The Black Blizzards were what convinced the government to take action and try to stop the Dust Bowl. One of the storms on the Great Plains was so bad that it carried dust all the way up the East Coast. When the senate looked out the window of the Capitol Building, they saw the storm coming
-The effects of the Dust Bowl were enormous. Many families and their homes were completely destroyed by the storms. People were left to fend for themselves because their farms were their only source of income -
The story ends in October.
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Japan bombs Pearl Harbor. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the US entered WWII. With the increased needs of the war came increased jobs, which provided more job opportunities for the unemployed.
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Japan surrendered, with the surrender documents finally signed aboard the deck of the American battleship USS Missouri ending the war.
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Supreme Court rules on the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, unanimously, (completely), agreeing that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. The ruling paves the way for large-scale desegregation. The decision overturned (reversed) the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that ruled that blacks and whites are "separate but equal."
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Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to a white person, triggering a successful, year-long African American boycott of the bus system.
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For the first time since Reconstruction, the federal government uses the military to uphold African Americans' civil rights, as soldiers escort nine African American students to desegregate a school in Little Rock, Arkansas.
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Four African American college students hold a sit-in to integrate a Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, launching a wave of similar protests across the South. By February 7th, there were 54 sit-ins throughout the South in 15 cities in 9 states.
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More than 200,000 people march on Washington, D.C., in the largest civil rights demonstration ever; Martin Luther King, Jr., gives his "I Have a Dream" speech.
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President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act, which gives the federal government far-reaching powers to prosecute discrimination in employment, voting, and education.
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Martin Luther King Jr. organizes a protest march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, for African American voting rights. A shocked nation watches on television as police club and teargas protesters.
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In the wake of the Selma-Montgomery March, the Voting Rights Act is passed, outlawing the practices used in the South to disenfranchise African American voters.
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Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated sparking a week of rioting across the country.
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President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968, prohibiting
discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing. -
Go Set a Watchman, was written in the mid-1950s and controversially published in July 2015 as a "sequel", though it was later confirmed to be To Kill a Mockingbird's first draft.
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Age 89
