Timeline of the Civil Rights Movement: 1925 to 1962

Timeline of the Civil Rights Movement: 1925 to 1962 [The editors of Americans All Maryland ] (January 1, 1925 - December 31, 1962) American History, Assassination, Boycott, Constitutional Amendments, Desegregation, Discrimination, Education, Equality, Freedom Marches, Jim Crow, Lunch Counter Protests, Plessy, Public Laws, Riots, Segregation, Slavery, Voting Rights, Women's Rights

1925: First Female Governor of a U.S. State (Missouri]
Nellie Tayloe Ross, a Democrat, was the first woman to serve as governor of a state, January 5, 1925 to January 3, 1927. Upon the death of her husband, elected Governor in 1922, she succeeded him. As governor, she stressed the need for tax relief for farmers, and proposed legislation to require counties, school boards, and the state council to prepare budgets a publish them before levying any taxes. She also backed a measure designed to prevent bank failures while making examining officials responsible to the governor. She also served as two five-year terms as Director of the U.S. Mint, beginning May 3, 1933, the first woman to hold that position. [Source: https://www.nga.org/governor/nellie-tayloe-ross]

1927: Gong Lum v. Rice (275 U.S. 78)
The Supreme Court, applying the "separate but equal" formulation of Plessy v. Ferguson to the public schools, held that a Mississippi school district may require a Chinese-American girl to attend a segregated Black school rather than a White school. [Source: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/275/78]

1942: Riots at the Sojourner Truth Housing Project in Detroit, Michigan
Information on this event appears at the end of the Sojourner Truth Heritage Honor Roll legacy story.

1947: The First Black Major League Baseball Player
On April 5, 1947, with the help and support of Brooklyn Dodger president Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson took the field with the Dodgers. Rickey knew that Robinson was not necessarily the best pure ballplayer in the Negro Leagues, that would have been Josh Gibson, but he felt Robinson had greatest ability to perform under what would be difficult conditions. Rickey was proven correct—his career on the field was legendary and it opened the door for other Black athletes to get their chance. He was Rookie of the Year in 1947, National League MVP in 1949, a member of the World Series champions in 1955, and entered its Hall of Fame in 1962—his first year of edibility. [Source: https://americansall.org/legacy-story-individual/jack-robinson-1]

1948: Desegregation of the Armed Forces, Executive Order 9981
On July 26, 1948, President Harry S Truman's Order abolished segregation in the armed forces and ordered full integration of all services. The Order stated that "there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed forces without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin." The order also established an advisory committee to examine the rules, practices, and procedures of the armed services and recommend ways to make desegregation a reality.
There was considerable resistance to the Order from the military, but by the end of the Korean conflict, almost all the military was integrated. Truman bolstered the civil rights division, and appointed William H. Hastie as the first African American judge to the Federal bench, serving on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the Third District, Philadelphia, PA. Truman also named several other African Americans to high-ranking administration positions. [Source: https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=84]

1952: University of Alabama Integrates
Before Brown v. Board of Education, a young Black woman, Autherine Lucy, was accepted to the University of Alabama on September 11, 1952. Once the university realized she was Black, they told her state law did not allow her to attend. Thurgood Marshall and other lawyers worked with Lucy to sue the university. She took her case to the U.S. District Court and won the right to attend. After years of courtroom battles, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1955 that Lucy could go to the University of Alabama.
In February 1956, a mob of people assembled on campus. They wanted to stop desegregation. They insulted Lucy, chanted racist slogans, threw eggs and threatened to kill her. She had to be escorted off campus in a police car. At the end of the day, university officials voted to suspend Lucy because they said that the campus was not safe for her. The angry protestors got their way and forced her out of school.
Thirty-two years later, she was asked to speak to a history class at the University of Alabama. After her talk, the teachers wanted her to be allowed to come back to the school as a student. In April of 1988, the university sent Lucy a letter saying that she was no longer suspended. She began school in 1989 and graduated from the same school at the same time as her daughter Grazia. Her legacy continues, as the University of Alabama named a $25,000 scholarship after her, and her picture was put up at the university in 1992. [Sources:
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/autherine-lucy; ttp://www.americaslibrary.gov/aa/marshallthrgd/aa_marshallthrgd_lucy_3.html]

1954: Brown v. Board of Education (347 US 483)
Brown v. Board of Education was a group of five legal appeals that challenged the "separate but equal" basis for racial segregation in public schools in Kansas, Virginia, Delaware, South Carolina, and the District of Columbia. The appeals reached the Supreme Court about the same time, and because they all dealt with the same issues, the Court heard arguments on them together.
On May 17, 1954, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren delivered the unanimous ruling in the landmark civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. State-sanctioned segregation of public schools was a violation of the 14th amendment and was therefore unconstitutional. This historic decision marked the end of the "separate but equal" precedent set by the Supreme Court nearly 60 years earlier in Plessy v. Ferguson and served as a catalyst for the expanding civil rights movement during the decade of the 1950s. [Source: https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=87]

1955: Murder of Emmett Till
While visiting his relatives in Money, Mississippi, 14-year-old Emmett Till, and African American from Chicago, went to the Bryant store with his cousins, and may have whistled at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who was a cashier at the store. Her husband, Roy Bryant, and brother-in-law, J.W. Milam, were enraged and, four days later, kidnapped and brutally murdered Till, dumping his body in the Tallahatchie River. His murderers are acquitted on September 23 and the state failed to bring separate kidnapping charges against Bryant and Milam. This galvanized a generation of young African Americans to join the Civil Rights Movement out of fear that such an incident could happen to friends, family, or even themselves. [Source: https://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-rights-history-project/articles-and-essays/murder-of-emmett-till]

1955-56: Bus Boycott in Montgomery, Alabama
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. At that time, the Montgomery NAACP had been looking for a test case to challenge the constitutionality of Alabama state bus segregation laws. To coincide with her trial on December 5, 1955, the Women’s Political Council initiated a one-day citywide bus boycott. That evening, E. D. Nixon and other Black leaders called a mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church and voted to extend the bus boycott under the direction of the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA).
Rosa, who had been discharged from the Montgomery Fair department store, began setting up rides and garnering public support for the boycott and the NAACP. For 381 days, African American citizens of Montgomery walked, carpooled, and took taxis rather than city buses. They endured bad weather, harassment, intimidation, and the loss of their jobs. On November 13, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s ruling that bus segregation violated the due process and

equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, leading to the successful end of the bus boycott on December 20. [Source:https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/rosa-parks-in-her-own-words/about-this-exhibition/the-bus-boycott/]

1956: Browder v. Gayle (352 US 903 35)
The NACCPs Legal Defense Fund challenged racial segregation on the bus system in the federal courts. This case arose in federal court as a violation of Reconstruction-era civil rights statutes and as a violation of the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. A three-judge district court held that state enforcement of the segregated but privately owned bus system in Montgomery violated the Equal Protection Clause. The city appealed directly to the Supreme Court.
The court ruled that racially segregated transportation systems enforced by the government violate the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court summarily affirmed the district court decision and in effect overturned the long-standing decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. [Source: "Gayle v. Browder." www.oyez.org/cases/1956/342]

1957: Federal Troops Help Integrate a School in Little Rock, Arkansas
The "Little Rock Nine," as the teens came to be known, were to be the first African American students to enter Little Rock's Central High School. Three years earlier, following the Supreme Court ruling, the Little Rock school board pledged to voluntarily desegregate its schools. This idea was explosive for the community and, like much of the South, it was fraught with anger and bitterness. On September 4, just 24 hours after a federal judge ordered the teens to begin attending classes, a belligerent mob, along with the National Guard, prevented them from entering the school.
Finally, on September 25, following a plea from Little Rock's mayor, Woodrow Mann, President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the National Guard and sent U.S. Army 101^st Airborne troops to the scene. With support from the soldiers, the teens began regular classes Central High. [Sources: https://www.nps.gov/chsc/learn/historyculture/timeline.htm; https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/little-rock-nine]

1957: Civil Rights Act, (18 Stat. 335-337)
This Act, passed September 9, established the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to protect an individual's civil rights. It also empowered federal officials to prosecute individuals that conspired to deny or abridge another citizen's right to vote. However, the Act failed to eliminate literacy tests and prequalification that states had been making since the 15th Amendment. [Source: https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/research/online-documentshttps://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/research/online-documents]

1957: Formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
SCLC is a civil rights organization founded in Atlanta, Georgia, as an offshoot of the MIA, which successfully staged the 381-day boycott of the Montgomery Alabama's segregated bus system. Martin Luther King, Jr., Bayard Rustin, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, and others, founded the SCLC in order to have a regional organization that could better coordinate civil rights protest activities across the South.
SCLC advocated confronting segregation through civil dissent. This "direct action" included boycotts, marches, and other forms of nonviolent protest. Others in the Black community felt that segregation should be challenged in the courts. The SCLC's leadership, most of whom were ministers, also believed that churches should be involved in political activism and held many of their meetings at Black churches, which became important symbols in the battle for civil rights. [Source: https://www.nps.gov/subjects/civilrights/sclc.htm]

1960: Lunch Counter Protest in Greensboro, North Carolina
In 1960, four freshmen from North Carolina A&T (Ezell A. Blair, Jr., Franklin E. McCain, Joseph A. McNeil, and David L. Richmond) walked into the F. W. Woolworth store and quietly sat down at the lunch counter. They were refused service, but they stayed until closing time. The next morning, they came with twenty-five more students; the third day, sixty-three students joined the sit-in. On the following day, the students were joined by three white female students from the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina, and by the fifth day Woolworth had more than three hundred demonstrators at the store.
The next day, the company said they were willing to negotiate, but only token changes were made. The students resumed their sit-ins; the city adopted more stringent segregation policies and forty-five students were arrested and charged with trespassing. The students were so enraged by this that they launched a massive boycott of stores with segregated lunch counters. Sales dropped by a third, forcing the store owners to relent. Six months from the very first sit-in, the four freshmen returned and were served at Woolworth’s lunch counter. [Source: https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/odyssey/educate/lunch.html]

1960: Civil Rights Act of 1960 (Pub. L. 86–449, 74 Stat. 89)
This Act was intended to strengthen voting rights and expand the enforcement powers of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. It included provisions for federal inspection of local voter registration rolls and authorized court-appointed referees to help African Americans register and vote. It also provided criminal penalties for anyone attempting to prevent people from voting. Controversial at the time of passage, the act foreshadowed an increasing emphasis on enforcement of voting rights and paved the way for additional civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965. [Source: https://www.visitthecapitol.gov/exhibitions/legislative-highlights/civil-rights-act-1960-may-6-1960]

1960: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
SDS, founded in Ann Arbor, Michigan, by Tom Hayden, Bill Ayers, Alan Haber and Aryeh Neier, was the largest and most influential U.S. radical student organization of the 1960s. At its inception, there were just a few dozen members, inspired by the civil rights movement and initially concerned with equality, economic justice, peace, and participatory democracy. With the escalation of the Vietnam War, SDS grew rapidly as young people protested the destruction caused by the U.S. government and military. Polite protest turned into stronger and more determined resistance as rage and frustration increased across the country. [Source: https://www.sds-1960s.org]

1962: Integration of the University of Mississippi
After President John F. Kennedy sent troops for his protection, James Meredith enrolls at University of Mississippi. Meredith became one of the heroic figures in the American Civil Rights Movement, succeeding against every legal, political and bureaucratic obstacle that blocked his path to becoming the university’s first African American student. His persistence opened the door for thousands of others who followed and set an example for every student, of every background, about what even one individual can accomplish. Following this event, some schools and universities accepted integration easily, while others put up great resistance. [Source: https://50years.olemiss.edu]

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Photograph credits: Portrait image: AdobeStock,926382516; 1. U.S. Information Agency; 2. Facebook article, tolerance magazine, summer 2016; 3. Public Domain; 4. Public Domain; 5. Public Domain; 6. National Museum of African American History & Culture, Smithsonian Institution; 7. Public Domain; 8. Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-80126, July 1939; 9. Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, Public Domain; 10. Wiki, Public Domain.

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