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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
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