USA African American Civil Rights

1861 to 1865 - American Civil War.
1865 - Ratification of the 13th Amendment which abolishes slavery in the US. Except as a punishment for a crime.
1865 – Ku Klux Klan started in Pulaski in Tennessee, it was a private club for confederate veterans.
1868 – 14th Amendment. Granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalised in the US and granted all citizens equal protection of the laws.
1870 15th Amendment to the constitution granted black African American men the right to vote. It was only in 1920 that the 19th Amendment granted woman the right to vote.
1896 - Plessy v Ferguson. This case was all about Plessy a black man refusing to sit in the black section of a train.   Important case because the Supreme Courts decision holds that racial segregation is constitutional, paving the way for the repressive Jim Crow laws in the South. ‘Separate but equal’ African Americans facilities like education and transport were inferior and underfunded. This Law was enforced until 1965. What made you black or coloured – The ‘One drop rule’ anyone with even one black ancestor, this was associated with the principle of invisible blackness.
The name Jim Crow was from ‘Jump Jim Crow’ a black minstrel song and dance show. Jim Crow was a caricature of a black performed by a white in ‘Blackface’.
The Jim Crow black codes were strict and detailed where and how former slaves could work and for how much. The legal system was stacked against them, and because former confederate soldiers worked as police many African Americans found themselves incarcerated and back as slaves again. - 13th Amendment allowed this.
1887 - Isaiah Montgomery created African American only town. Mound Bayou Mississippi. Still there today almost 100% black.
1914 – 1918 World War one
1918 – Spanish flu

 

 

1919 – After World War One, lynching of blacks became more prevalent. There is a memorial to 4400 lynching victims.
1919 - Race riots increased, 25 across the US sometime referred to as ‘Red Summer’. Chicago July 27 returning veterans wanted their jobs back that had been fill with blacks from the south. Returning black veterans wanted to be treated equally because they had fought for the country. It all started when some blacks playing in the sea drifted over to the white area, rocks were thrown, one black boy drowned. Irish Americans accused of being behind the riots that followed, killing 35 blacks and 13 whites.

1921 – Tulsa race massacre – Greenwood Tulsa Oklahoma known as Black Wall Street. A white mob attacked residents homes and businesses in one of the worst incidents of racial violence in US history. Hundreds were killed, thousands left homeless. The cause of this riot was because a black teenager entered an elevator, young white elevator operator screamed, the black teen Rowland fled the scene, police were called, Rowland was arrested. Angry white mob wanted policed to hand him over, police refused. African Americans joined in to help protect the teen. According to Red Cross, 1256 houses burnt 215 looted, 36 people killed including 10 whites. Schools, businesses, libraries damaged. In a 2001 investigation is was estimated 100 to 300 people were killed and 8000 homes lost over 18 hours.
Hours after the massacre all charges against Rowland were dropped.
1930s Great Depression
1939 World War 2
1948 - Although African Americans had participated in every major U.S. war, it was not until after World War II that President Harry S. Truman issues an executive order integrating the U.S. armed forces.
1954 – May 17. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. declares that racial segregation in schools is unconstitutional. The end of ‘separate but equal’.

1955 - A 14 year old black boy, Emmett Till, is brutally tortured murdered for allegedly whistling/lewd advances at a white woman in a store in Mississippi. He was from South Chicago, visiting family in Money Mississippi. His body was thrown into the Tallahatchie river, when the corpse was recovered the authorities wanted to bury the body but Tills mother requested it be send back to Chicago. After seeing her son she decided to make it an open casket funeral so the world could see what had been done to him.
The two white men charged with the crime are acquitted by an all-white jury in a segregated court room. The state did not charge them with kidnapping either. The men later boast about committing the murder. The public outrage generated by the case helped spur the civil rights movement.
Later Carolyn Bryant recanted her testimony admitting Till had never threatened her.

1955 – Dec 1. Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat at the front of the "coloured section" of a bus to a white passenger. Not the first to do it but the most famous. In response to her arrest Montgomery's black community launch a successful year-long bus boycott. Approximately 40,000 African-American bus riders boycotted the bus system the next day, December 5. That afternoon, black leaders met to form the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). The group elected Martin Luther King, Jr., the 26-year-old-pastor as its president, and decided to continue the boycott until the city met its demands.
To ensure the boycott could be sustained, black leaders organized carpools, and the city’s African-American taxi drivers charged only 10 cents—the same price as a bus fare—for African-American riders. Others chose to walk to work or other destinations. Black leaders organized regular mass meetings to keep African-American residents mobilized around the boycott.
1956 - June 5, A Montgomery federal court ruled that any law requiring racially segregated seating on buses violated the 14th Amendment of (1868). Montgomery's buses are desegregated on Dec. 21.

 

 

1957 – Sept 4, Little Rock Nine. Three years after B vs Board of Education, 1954 First day of school, white students gather at the front of the school, Arkansas governor deploys National Guard to prevent black students from entering. Federal district court injunction prevented governor from blocking students. With help of police escorts the black students entered school. Fearing violence, they were rushed home afterwards.
Eisenhower ordered troops to protect students for remainder of school year. Next year Governor Faubus closed all public school rather than have desegregation, supreme court ruled that schools resume.

1962 – Oct 1. James Meredith becomes the first black student to enrol at the University of Mississippi. President Kennedy has to send 5,000 federal troops after segregationists rioting breaks out.
1963 – Aug. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is attended by about 250,000 people, the largest demonstration ever seen in the nation's capital. Martin Luther King delivers his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. The march builds momentum for civil rights legislation.
1964 – President Lindon B Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. Legally ending segregation and Jim Crow laws.

1965 – Feb 21. Malcolm X assassinated by rival Black Muslims in New York City. A black nationalist and founder of the Organization of Afro-American Unity.

1965 – March 7. State troopers violently attack peaceful demonstrators led by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., as they try to cross the Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. Fifty marchers are hospitalized on "Bloody Sunday," after police use tear gas, whips, and clubs against them. The march is considered the catalyst for pushing through the voting rights act five months later.
1965 - Congress passes the Voting Rights Act, making it easier for Southern blacks to register to vote. Literacy tests, poll taxes, and other requirements that were used to restrict black voting were made illegal.

1965 -Aug 11-16. In six days of rioting in Watts Los Angeles, a black section of Los Angeles, 35 people are killed and 883 injured. Reason for the riots, Frya a young black man is pulled over, fails a sobriety test, resists arrest, brother joins in, crowds gather etc etc and all hell breaks loose.

1968 – Fair housing act – ended discrimination in renting and selling homes.

 

 

1968 – 1 Feb.’ I am a man’. Memphis sanitation strike. Two Memphis garbage collectors, were crushed to death by a malfunctioning truck. Eleven days later, frustrated by the city’s response to the latest event in a long pattern of neglect and abuse of its black employees, 1,300 black men from the Memphis Department of Public Works went on strike.

1968- April 4th Martin Luther King assassinated, at Lorraine Motel in Memphis. He was in Memphis to advocate for the sanitation workers striking for better conditions.

1972 - The infamous Tuskegee Syphilis experiment ends. Begun in 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service's 40-year experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis has been described as an experiment that "used human beings as laboratory animals in a long and inefficient study of how long it takes syphilis to kill someone."

 

 

1983 – Aug 30 Guion Bluford Jr. was the first African-American in space. He took off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on the space shuttle Challenger.

1992 – April 29. The first race riots in decades erupt in south-central Los Angeles after a jury acquits four white police officers for the videotaped beating of African-American Rodney King.

2001 - Colin Powell becomes the first African American U.S. Secretary of State.
2005 - Condoleezza Rice becomes the first black female U.S. Secretary of State.
2009 - Barack Obama Democrat from Chicago, becomes the first African-American president and the country's 44th president.
2010 – Fair sentencing act. Reduced disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentencing.

2011 new guidelines retroactively applied.
2012 - Feb 12. Trayvon Martin 17, unarmed shot by neighbourhood crime watch, he was visiting his father.
2013 – July 13. #Black lives matter, started after the acquittal for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.
2014 – Aug 9. Ferguson unrest - Michael Brown – fatal shooting of unarmed black teenager walking with friend. It is unclear/ conflicting stories why Wilson a white officer shot him seven times. Grand jury decined to charge officer Wilson with murder. Ferguson protests ended 25 August.
November 24 - Darren Wilson not indicted – more protests.
2014 July 17. Eric Garner. Put in choke hold. Repeated I can’t breath 11 times. Ambulance arrived. Garner pronounced dead. Held on suspicion of selling single cigarettes a loosey/loosie, it is illegal but popular in poor areas because of the high taxes on cigarettes.
2020 May 25 – George Floyd killed – protests riots.
2020 - June 11. Atlanta police officer shoots Rayshard Brooks who had been drinking and fallen asleep in his car in a Wendys drive through. protests  - Wendys burnt.

Of course there have been others like Philando Castile and Sandra Bland.

NOT the End.

African American or Black American?   Barack Obama is an African American because his father was Kenyan, but other blacks do not identify with Africa.

Seattles CHAZ. Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone?
Statues toppled – fair enough with Robert E Lee, he fought against the union, but Thomas Jefferson?

Defund the police?
Democrats 'Take a knee'.  Nancy Pelosi calls for confederate statues to be removed from US capitol.

I know there is a lot of violence and 95% of blacks are killed by other blacks, but my experience of black Americans was that they could not have been more friendly or polite.  I was in an African American area in a food shop in Little Rock Arkansas. I got to the check out slightly in front of a big black man who only had two items. He stopped, I said go ahead I am not in a hurry. He said no, I am no bully and lined up behind me. The black man packing bags then said yes, he is no bully.  I never thought for one minute he was, looked more like a big teddy bear. It did make me feel uncomfortable though to think he had to go to such lengths to make me feel non threatened by him.

 

Most of this info and old photos come from History.com
Podcasts like 1619 project.