The Civil Rights Movement

An interracial group in Chicago founds the Congress of Racial Equality, pioneering Gandhian nonviolent direct action and the first sit-ins.

The Supreme Court bans the all-white primary, a key tool of disenfranchisement.

The Supreme Court bars segregation on interstate buses.

The Court rules racially restrictive housing covenants unenforceable.

Executive Order 9981 ends segregation in the US military.

The Supreme Court strikes down school segregation, igniting the modern Civil Rights movement.

The Highlander Folk School incubates Citizenship Schools that teach literacy and voting rights to tens of thousands across the South.

The lynching of a 14-year-old in Mississippi, and his mother's open casket, galvanizes the movement.

Sparked by Rosa Parks, a 381-day boycott launches Dr. King and mass nonviolent protest.

The Supreme Court affirms that bus segregation is unconstitutional, vindicating the boycott.

Dr. King and allies form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Nine students integrate Central High under federal troops as a mob and the governor resist.

The first federal civil-rights law since Reconstruction, focused on voting.

Four students' lunch-counter protest sparks a wave of sit-ins across the South.

Student activists form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

A six-year-old desegregates an elementary school under federal escort.

Interracial riders challenge segregated buses and terminals, met with mob violence.

The first campaign to desegregate an entire city; over a thousand are jailed, and the movement learns hard lessons it later applies in Birmingham.

Meredith enrolls amid riots and federal intervention.

Thousands of Black schoolchildren march in Birmingham; images of fire hoses and police dogs turned against children shift the nation.

Children marchers face dogs and fire hoses; the images shock the nation.

The NAACP leader is murdered outside his Mississippi home.

250,000 gather as Dr. King delivers "I Have a Dream," pressing for jobs and freedom.

Volunteers register Black voters in Mississippi; three are murdered by the Klan.

Marchers for voting rights are beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, spurring the Voting Rights Act.

Federal protection of the ballot finally enforces the 15th Amendment.

The Supreme Court strikes down bans on interracial marriage.

1,300 Black sanitation workers strike under the banner "I Am A Man" — the cause that brought Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis.

A federal commission warns the nation is "moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal," and blames white racism.

King's last crusade, carried on after his death, builds Resurrection City on the National Mall to demand economic justice for all poor Americans.