The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom
World War II and the Post War Years Timeline
View objects from this time period
- 1940
- NAACP-supported Wagner-Gavagan antilynching bill defeated in the Senate by a filibuster
- 1940
- Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win an Academy Award
- 1941–1945
- World War II
- 1941–1945
- Women entered the wartime workforce in unprecedented numbers
- 1941
- A. Philip Randolph proposed a March on Washington to demand fair employment for African Americans
- 1941
- African American physician and scientist Dr. Charles Drew developed a technique for preserving blood plasma
- 1942
- U.S. and Mexican governments launched the Bracero Program, which permitted temporary Mexican workers (braceros) to fill the domestic labor shortage
- 1942
- NAACP Washington Bureau established
- 1942
- The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) founded
- 1942
- Federal government forced Japanese Americans into relocation camps
- 1943
- A. Philip Randolph created the National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC)
- 1945
- A. Philip Randolph organized the Committee against Jim Crow Military Services and Training, later named “League for Nonviolent Civil Disobedience against Military Service”
- 1946
- U.S. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., (D-NY) began to attach a provision known as the “Powell Amendment” to bills, which became Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
- 1947
- Jackie Robinson became the first African American to play major league baseball in the modern era
- 1947
- W. E. B. Du Bois submitted to the United Nations “An Appeal to the World,” a petition linking racism in the U.S. to colonial imperialism
- 1947
- President’s Committee on Civil Rights issued its report, To Secure These Rights
- 1947
- Bayard Rustin of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and George Houser of CORE organized the Journey of Reconciliation, the first Freedom Ride into the South
- 1948
- President Harry Truman became the first U.S. president to address the annual convention of the NAACP
- 1948
- Democratic National Convention endorsed a strong civil rights plank, inciting Southern Democrats to walk out and form the States Rights Party (Dixiecrats), which nominated Senator Strom Thurmond (then D-SC) for president
- 1949
- Entertainer Timmie Rogers had the first prime-time, all-black television show on CBS
- 1949
- Jo Ann Robinson became president of the Women’s Political Council (WPC), which organized and supported the Montgomery Bus Boycott
- 1949
- Simone DeBouvior published The Second Sex, which helped launch the modern feminist movement