AP PHOTO/BILL HUDSON
A 17-year-old civil rights demonstrator, defying an anti-parade ordinance in Birmingham, Ala., is attacked by a police dog on May 3, 1963. On the afternoon of May 4, 1963, during a meeting at the White House with members of a political group, President John F. Kennedy discussed this photo, which had appeared on the front page of that day’s New York Times.
many organizations born from the movement, including the NAACP, CORE, SCLC, and SNCC, agreed that nonviolent direct action was a moral and powerful instrument for achieving desegregation, fractures were beginning to form in the movement’s united front, as leaders debated the finer points of strategy and tactics. The stakes could not have been higher. A weakened movement, King knew, would allow the nation to slide back to its old
ways; with Southern governments led at the highest levels by unapologetic segregationists, the hard-fought victories of thousands of protestors, won over the last decade, could disappear almost overnight. In early 1963, King and the SCLC, with local activists led by the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, meticulously developed a plan to revitalize the movement: Project C (for Confrontation) would occur in the nation’s most segregated city: Birmingham, where
• June 12: The U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, invalidates any laws prohibiting interracial marriage. • June 13: Thurgood Marshall, former NAACP chief counsel, becomes the first African-American appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. • July 23-27: The Detroit race riots erupt after a police raid on an African-American club. 43 people are killed and 1,189 injured; more than 2,500 stores are looted or burned.
• Feb. 1: Two sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn., are killed on the job. In the days that follow, the city’s black sanitation workers, tired of poor working conditions and low wages, initiate a strike and call for recognition of their union and improved safety standards and pay. Various civil rights organizations and leaders, including King, support the strike. • April 3: At the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tenn., King delivers his last speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.” • April 4: King is assassinated at his hotel in Memphis. • April 11: While protestors riot in several U.S. cities in response to King’s assassination, Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968, commonly known as the Fair Housing Act. • June 6: Civil rights advocate Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated after winning the presidential primary.
1967
1968
The Congressional Black Caucus is formed.
Black History Month is established by the Association for the Study of AfroAmerican Life and History.
In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the U.S. Supreme Court bars racial quota systems in college admissions, but upholds the constitutionality of affirmative action programs.
1971
1976
1978
45 I HAVE A DREAM 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington