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1950

National Emergency Civil Rights Mobilization launched a mass lobby that led to the founding of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights

1950

Gwendolyn Brooks awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry; the first African American to receive the award

1950–1953

Korean War

1950

Ralph Bunche became the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize

1951

NAACP Florida Secretary Harry T. Moore and wife Harriett killed on Christmas night by a bomb placed under their home by the Ku Klux Klan

1951

Mattachine Society founded by gay men in Los Angeles “to change the self-image of gay people to produce a new pride”

1952

Ralph Ellison published Invisible Man and won the National Book Award; the first African American to receive the award

1953

First black bus boycott in Baton Rouge, Louisiana

1954

White Citizens’ Councils formed in the South to harass blacks engaged in civil rights activities through economic intimidation

1955

Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till murdered in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman

1955

Thirteen-month Montgomery bus boycott to desegregate the city’s buses began

1955

Daughters of Bilitis founded in San Francisco as the nation’s first lesbian rights organization

1956

Autherine Lucy enrolled as the first black student at the University of Alabama and was expelled four days later

1956

“Southern Manifesto” signed by 101 Southern U.S. senators and representatives to encourage resistance to the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision

1956

The Nat King Cole Show premiered on television; the second African American to host a national television series

1956–1975

Vietnam War

1957

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) formed

1957

Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington held at the Lincoln Memorial

1957

President Dwight Eisenhower sent U.S. troops and nationalized the Arkansas Guard to protect nine black students trying to attend Little Rock, Arkansas’s, Central High School

1958–1959

Youth Marches for Integrated Schools held in Washington, D.C.

1959

Berry Gordy founded Motown Records in Detroit, Michigan

1959

Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun was the first play by an African American woman on Broadway

1959

A. Philip Randolph organized the Negro American Labor Council to combat discrimination in the AFL-CIO

1960

Four black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, launched the lunch counter sit-in movement

1960

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) founded

1960

Martin Luther King, Jr., arrested during a sit-in at Rich’s Department Store in Atlanta; Robert Kennedy arranged his release

1960

King endorsed John F. Kennedy for president and helped to secure the black vote for Kennedy

1961

President Kennedy appointed the President’s Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW)

1961

CORE organized the first Freedom Ride to test the Supreme Court’s Boynton v. Virginia decision banning the segregation of bus terminal facilities

1961

The Albany Movement began in Albany, Georgia

1961

50,000 women mobilized in Women Strike for Peace to protest nuclear bombs and tainted milk

1962

Voter Education Project began

1962

Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) cofounded by SNNC’s Robert Moses and CORE’s David Dennis

1962

President Kennedy sent federal troops to Mississippi to stop rioting as James Meredith enrolled in the University of Mississippi

1962

Daniel K. Inouye (D-HI) elected the first Japanese American to the U.S. Senate

1963

SCLC led demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, to protest segregation

1963

Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in response to religious leaders who criticized his tactics

1963

SNCC launched a major voter registration drive in Greenwood, Mississippi; police arrested James Forman, Charles McDew, Robert Moses, and other SNCC workers

1963

Governor George Wallace failed to block the admission of Vivian Malone and James Hood to the University of Alabama

1963

President Kennedy delivered a televised speech on civil rights, his first on the subject

Warren K. Leffler. Civil rights March on Washington, August 28, 1963. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

1963

NAACP Mississippi Field Secretary Medgar Evers assassinated in front of his house

1963

President Kennedy asked Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1963

1963

Thurgood Marshall traveled to East Africa to advise newly independent nations on civil rights and economic development

1963

March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

1963

Four black girls attending Sunday School died in a bombing at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama

1963

James Baldwin published The Fire Next Time

1963

Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique and became a leader in the feminist movement

1963

President Kennedy assassinated

1963

President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress to ask for the “earliest possible passage” of Kennedy’s civil rights bill