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1619

Twenty Africans arrived in Jamestown and were sold as indentured servants

1623

William Tucker was the first black child born in the colony of Jamestown

1634

African slaves imported to Maryland and Massachusetts

1688

Germantown Mennonites in Pennsylvania endorsed the first formal antislavery resolution in the British colonies

1770

Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave, was the first American killed by British soldiers in the Boston Massacre

1773

Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the first book of poetry by an African American, was published

1775

Quakers organized the first Manumission Society in Philadelphia

1775–1783

American Revolutionary War, in which enslaved and free black men fought with the Continental Army; about 5,000 slaves granted freedom through military service

1787

Reverend Richard Allen and Absalom Jones founded the Philadelphia Free African Society, the first African American mutual aid society

1789

First slave narrative was published by Olaudah Equiano

1808

U.S. banned importation of African slaves

1816

American Colonization Society founded with the objective of solving the slavery problem by sending freed blacks to the colony of Liberia on the west coast of Africa

1816

African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, the first independent black denomination, established

1829

David Walker, a free black man, published Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World . . . , a widely circulated antislavery pamphlet

1830

First National Negro Convention held in Philadelphia to provide free blacks with an independent arena to develop strategies for their advancement

1830

Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law, leading to the forced resettlement of many Native Americans west of the Mississippi River

1831

William Lloyd Garrison founded the Liberator, the foremost abolitionist newspaper

1831

Nat Turner led a slave revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, where sixty whites were killed within twenty-four hours

1839

Cinqué led a group of Africans in revolt against their captors aboard the Spanish slave ship Amistad, commandeered the vessel, and landed near Long Island, New York; later defended before the U.S. Supreme Court by former President John Quincy Adams

Frederick Douglass seated beside grandson. Photograph, n.d. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

1845

Frederick Douglass embarked on an antislavery lecture tour in Great Britain; published his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

1848

First Women’s Rights Convention held in Seneca Falls, New York

1852

Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which sold 300,000 copies in the first year and reinvigorated the abolitionist movement

1859

Militant abolitionist John Brown led a band of black and white men in a failed raid to capture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and was later captured and hanged

1861–1865

American Civil War

1865

Ku Klux Klan formed

1865–1877

More than 1,500 African Americans held political office during the period of Reconstruction

1866

Race riots erupted in Memphis and New Orleans, nearly fifty blacks killed and hundreds of black homes, churches, and schools were burned to the ground

1866

Fisk University (Nashville, Tennessee), Howard University (Washington, D.C.), Lincoln University (Jefferson City, Missouri), and Shaw University (Raleigh, North Carolina) founded to educate freed blacks

1867–1872

Blacks protested segregated streetcars, which led to streetcar desegregation specifically in Richmond, New Orleans, Charleston, Philadelphia, Louisville, and Savannah

1868

U.S. Congressman John Mercer Langston (R-VA), diplomat, and great-uncle of writer Langston Hughes, founded the law department at Howard University

1870

Hiram R. Revels (R-MS) and Joseph H. Rainey (R-SC) respectively became the first African Americans elected to the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives

1876

Meharry Medical College, the first all-black medical school in the U.S., founded

1881

Booker T. Washington founded Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama

1890

U.S. troops killed 200 Lakota Sioux men, women, and children in the Wounded Knee Massacre, the last battle of the American Indian Wars

1892

Ida B. Wells-Barnett began a national antilynching campaign

1895

Booker T. Washington delivered his “Atlanta Compromise” speech at the Cotton States International Exposition in Atlanta

1896

National Association of Colored Women (NACW) formed in Washington, D.C.

1897

American Negro Academy founded in Washington, D.C., with the purpose of “the promotion of literature, science, and art”