1619 to 2026
Four hundred years in one scroll.
159 events. Each links into the full record where one exists. A chronological index of The Ledger.
- 1619Aug 20Context
First enslaved Africans arrive at Point Comfort
The English privateer White Lion arrives at Point Comfort, Virginia, carrying roughly twenty Africans taken from a Portuguese slave ship. The colonial governor records them as purchased in exchange for provisions, the first documented sale of Africans in the English North American colonies.
- 1808Jan 1Context
The international slave trade ends in the United States
The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, passed in 1807 and signed by President Thomas Jefferson, takes effect on the earliest date permitted by the Constitution. Chattel slavery within the United States continues for fifty-seven more years.
- 1818FebruaryThe Rise
Frederick Douglass born
Frederick Douglass is born in Tuckahoe, Maryland, to an enslaved mother. He never learns his exact birth date because enslaved people are forbidden to know their birthdays.
- 1822The Rise
Harriet Tubman born
Araminta Ross is born into slavery in Dorchester County, Maryland. She escapes in 1849 and returns to the South roughly thirteen times, guiding an estimated seventy enslaved people to freedom along the Underground Railroad.
- 1862Jul 16The Rise
Ida B. Wells born
Ida Bell Wells is born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, several months before the Emancipation Proclamation reaches the region. She becomes a founding figure of investigative journalism on racial violence.
- 1863Jan 1Context
Emancipation Proclamation takes effect
President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation takes effect, declaring the enslaved people of Confederate-held territory to be free. It does not cover border states loyal to the Union and relies on Union military advance for enforcement.
- 1864Jul 15The Rise
Maggie Lena Walker born
Maggie Lena Walker is born in Richmond, Virginia, to Elizabeth Draper, a formerly enslaved woman. She becomes the first woman of any race to charter and serve as president of a bank in the United States in 1903.
- 1865Mar 3Context
Freedmen's Bureau established
Congress creates the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands in the War Department. Under Commissioner Oliver Otis Howard, the Bureau issues rations, sets up schools, and adjudicates labor contracts for roughly four million formerly enslaved people until Congress defunds most operations in 1872.
- 1865Sep 19The Rise
Atlanta University founded
The American Missionary Association charters Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia. W.E.B. Du Bois later conducts the Atlanta Studies there, the first systematic sociological research on Black life in the United States.
- 1865Dec 6Context
13th Amendment ratified
The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified, abolishing chattel slavery except as punishment for a crime. The exception clause becomes the legal foundation for convict leasing and later mass incarceration.
- 1866Jan 9The Rise
Fisk University founded
Fisk Free Colored School opens in Nashville, Tennessee, chartered by the American Missionary Association. It becomes Fisk University and produces W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, John Hope Franklin, and the touring Fisk Jubilee Singers.
- 1866May 1The Record
Memphis Massacre
Over three days in Memphis, Tennessee, white mobs joined by city police attack Black residents, most of them Union Army veterans and their families. Forty-six Black residents are killed, five women are raped, and ninety-one homes, four churches, and twelve schools are burned.
- 1866Jul 30The Record
New Orleans Massacre
White mobs and New Orleans police attack a Louisiana constitutional convention reconvened to extend the franchise to Black men. Between thirty-four and fifty Black delegates and supporters are killed. The event pushes Congress toward the Reconstruction Acts of 1867.
- 1867Feb 14The Rise
Morehouse College founded
Augusta Institute opens in the basement of Springfield Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia, with William Jefferson White as its first teacher. The school later moves to Atlanta and becomes Morehouse College, the alma mater of Martin Luther King Jr.
- 1867Mar 2The Rise
Howard University chartered
President Andrew Johnson signs the act of Congress chartering Howard University in Washington, D.C. Named for Freedmen's Bureau commissioner Oliver Otis Howard, it produces Thurgood Marshall, Zora Neale Hurston, Kamala Harris, and generations of Black professional leadership.
- 1867Dec 23The Rise
Madam C.J. Walker born
Sarah Breedlove, later Madam C.J. Walker, is born in Delta, Louisiana, on the plantation where her parents had been enslaved. She is the first of her family born into freedom.
- 1868Feb 23The Rise
W.E.B. Du Bois born
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois is born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He becomes the first Black American to earn a PhD from Harvard, a co-founder of the NAACP, and a founder of the sociology of Black America.
- 1868Apr 1The Rise
Hampton Institute founded
General Samuel Chapman Armstrong opens Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia, on the grounds of a former Union contraband camp. Booker T. Washington graduates in 1875 and carries its industrial-education model to Tuskegee.
- 1868Jul 9Context
14th Amendment ratified
The 14th Amendment is ratified, guaranteeing birthright citizenship and requiring states to provide equal protection under the laws. Its Section 1 becomes the constitutional basis for Brown v. Board, Loving v. Virginia, and a century of civil-rights litigation.
- 1870Feb 3Context
15th Amendment ratified
The 15th Amendment is ratified, prohibiting the federal and state governments from denying the right to vote on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
- 1870Feb 25The Rise
Hiram Revels seated in the U.S. Senate
Hiram Rhodes Revels is seated as United States Senator from Mississippi, the first Black person to serve in either chamber of Congress. He fills the seat previously held by Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
- 1873Apr 13The Record
Colfax Massacre
On Easter Sunday, more than 300 armed white paramilitaries attack the Grant Parish courthouse in Colfax, Louisiana, killing between 62 and 153 Black defenders. The deadliest single massacre of Reconstruction.
- 1875Mar 5The Rise
Blanche K. Bruce seated in the U.S. Senate
Blanche Kelso Bruce, born enslaved in Virginia, takes his seat as United States Senator from Mississippi. He serves a full six-year term and is the last Black American to serve a full Senate term until Edward Brooke in 1967.
- 1877Mar 2The Record
Compromise of 1877
Congressional leaders settle the disputed Hayes-Tilden presidential election. Rutherford B. Hayes takes the White House and federal troops withdraw from Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida. Reconstruction ends and the white-supremacist Redeemer governments take hold across the South.
- 1877Mar 4The Rise
Garrett Morgan born
Garrett Augustus Morgan is born in Paris, Kentucky, the seventh of eleven children born to formerly enslaved parents. He later patents the Safety Hood and the three-position traffic signal.
- 1877Mar 17The Rise
Frederick Douglass confirmed as U.S. Marshal
The U.S. Senate confirms Frederick Douglass as United States Marshal for the District of Columbia, the first Black American in the office. He later serves as Recorder of Deeds and, in 1889, as U.S. Minister Resident and Consul General to Haiti.
- 1881Jul 4The Rise
Tuskegee Institute opens
Booker T. Washington opens the Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers in Tuskegee, Alabama, with thirty students in a one-room shanty behind a Black church. George Washington Carver joins the faculty in 1896 and keeps the institute at the frontier of agricultural science.
- 1883Oct 15The Record
The Civil Rights Cases decided
The U.S. Supreme Court rules 8 to 1 in the Civil Rights Cases, striking down the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Justice John Marshall Harlan writes a lone dissent that becomes canon.
- 1890Jan 25The Rise
Afro-American League founded
T. Thomas Fortune convenes 141 delegates from twenty-one states in Chicago to charter the Afro-American League. The organization presses for federal anti-lynching protection, equal school funding, and a fair trial in the South. It becomes a direct ancestor of the Niagara Movement and the NAACP.
- 1891Jan 7The Rise
Zora Neale Hurston born
Zora Neale Hurston is born in Notasulga, Alabama, and raised in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first incorporated Black townships. She trains as an anthropologist under Franz Boas at Barnard and writes Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937.
- 1892Jan 26The Rise
Bessie Coleman born
Bessie Coleman is born in Atlanta, Texas, the tenth of thirteen children in a sharecropping family. She becomes the first Black person of any gender to hold an international pilot's license.
- 1892Jun 7The Rise
Homer Plessy arrested in New Orleans
Homer Adolph Plessy, a New Orleans shoemaker, boards a whites-only car on the East Louisiana Railroad as part of a deliberate test case organized by the Comité des Citoyens. His arrest sets in motion the challenge that becomes Plessy v. Ferguson.
- 1892Jul 4The Rise
A.G. Gaston born
Arthur George Gaston is born in Demopolis, Alabama. He builds a $130 million Black business empire from a Birmingham rooming house and, in 1963, bails Dr. King out of the Birmingham jail.
- 1895Jun 27The Rise
Ida B. Wells marries Ferdinand Barnett
Ida B. Wells marries Ferdinand Lee Barnett, founder of the Chicago Conservator, Illinois's first Black-owned newspaper. She becomes Ida B. Wells-Barnett and takes ownership of the paper, continuing her anti-lynching campaign from Chicago.
- 1895Sep 18The Rise
Booker T. Washington delivers the Atlanta Compromise
Booker T. Washington addresses the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, urging Black southerners to accept social separation in exchange for economic opportunity. W.E.B. Du Bois calls the speech a surrender in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk.
- 1896May 18The Record
Plessy v. Ferguson decided
The U.S. Supreme Court rules 7 to 1 in Plessy v. Ferguson that separate-but-equal public accommodations satisfy the 14th Amendment. Justice John Marshall Harlan writes alone in dissent, declaring that the Constitution is color-blind. The decision stands for fifty-eight years.
- 1898Feb 21The Record
Lake City postmaster lynched
A white mob in Lake City, South Carolina, sets fire to the home of Frazier Baker, the town's Black postmaster, and shoots the family as they flee. Baker and his infant daughter Julia are killed. Ida B. Wells leads a delegation to President McKinley, but no one is ever convicted.
- 1898Nov 10The Record
Wilmington coup
Armed white supremacists led by Alfred Moore Waddell overthrow the elected biracial Fusion government of Wilmington, North Carolina. It remains the only successful coup on American soil.
- 1899Apr 29The Rise
Duke Ellington born
Edward Kennedy Ellington is born in Washington, D.C. He composes roughly 1,000 works, leads his orchestra for nearly fifty years, and carries American jazz into Carnegie Hall, Westminster Abbey, and the Kennedy Center Honors.
- 1903Nov 2The Rise
St. Luke Penny Savings Bank opens
Maggie Lena Walker opens the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond, Virginia, becoming the first woman of any race to charter and serve as president of a bank in the United States.
- 1904Jun 3The Rise
Charles Drew born
Charles Richard Drew is born in Washington, D.C. He becomes the first Black American to earn a Doctor of Medical Science from Columbia and designs the wartime blood-plasma protocol still in use.
- 1905Jul 11The Rise
Niagara Movement founded
W.E.B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter convene twenty-nine Black leaders at Fort Erie, Ontario, after U.S. hotels refuse the group. The Niagara Movement demands full civil and political equality and a rejection of the Atlanta Compromise. Four years later the surviving members help found the NAACP.
- 1906Aug 13The Record
Brownsville affair
A shooting in Brownsville, Texas leaves one white man dead and two wounded. Without trial, President Theodore Roosevelt dishonorably discharges all 167 Black soldiers of the 25th Infantry stationed at Fort Brown. In 1972 the Army reverses the discharges; only one soldier, Dorsie Willis, is still alive to receive it.
- 1906Sep 22The Record
Atlanta race massacre
After Atlanta newspapers run fabricated reports of assaults by Black men, white mobs rampage through Atlanta for four days, killing at least twenty-five Black residents and destroying Black businesses across Decatur Street. W.E.B. Du Bois, teaching at Atlanta University, writes A Litany at Atlanta in response.
- 1908Jul 2The Rise
Thurgood Marshall born
Thurgood Marshall is born in Baltimore, Maryland. He becomes the NAACP's chief counsel, the architect of Brown v. Board of Education, and the first Black United States Supreme Court Justice.
- 1908Aug 14The Record
Springfield, Illinois race riot
A white mob in Springfield, Illinois, lynches two Black residents and burns Black homes and businesses over two nights, driving much of the Black population out of Abraham Lincoln's hometown. The violence provokes Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villard, and William English Walling to plan the organization that becomes the NAACP.
- 1908Dec 26The Rise
Jack Johnson wins the heavyweight title
John Arthur Johnson defeats Canadian champion Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia, becoming the first Black world heavyweight boxing champion. White promoters spend two years searching for a Great White Hope; Johnson keeps the belt until 1915.
- 1909Feb 12Context
NAACP founded
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is founded in New York on the centennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth. Co-founders include W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Mary White Ovington, and Archibald Grimké.
- 1910Oct 16The Rise
National Urban League founded
George Edmund Haynes and Ruth Standish Baldwin merge three New York City organizations into the National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes, later the National Urban League. The league places newly migrated Black workers into jobs across industrial cities during the Great Migration.
- 1910NovemberThe Rise
The Crisis magazine founded
W.E.B. Du Bois founds The Crisis as the official magazine of the NAACP. Under his editorship for the next twenty-four years, it reaches a peak circulation above 100,000.
- 1913Mar 10The Rise
Harriet Tubman dies
Harriet Tubman dies in Auburn, New York, at roughly ninety-one years of age. She is buried with full military honors for her Civil War service as a scout, spy, and nurse for the Union Army.
- 1913Sep 12The Rise
Jesse Owens born
James Cleveland Owens is born in Oakville, Alabama, the seventh of eleven children in a sharecropping family. He becomes the track and field star who wins four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics in front of Adolf Hitler.
- 1915Feb 8The Record
The Birth of a Nation released
D.W. Griffith's three-hour film The Birth of a Nation premieres in Los Angeles, romanticizing the Ku Klux Klan and depicting Black Reconstruction legislators as predators played by white actors in blackface. President Woodrow Wilson screens it at the White House; Klan membership passes four million within a decade.
- 1915Apr 7The Rise
Billie Holiday born
Eleanora Fagan is born in Philadelphia and raised in Baltimore. She records Strange Fruit in 1939, the protest song Columbia Records refuses to release and Commodore Records picks up. Time magazine later names it the song of the century.
- 1916The Rise
Great Migration begins
The Chicago Defender and Northern labor agents recruit Black southern workers to fill wartime industrial jobs in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. Roughly 1.6 million Black southerners leave the rural South between 1916 and 1940, the first wave of the Great Migration.
- 1916Jul 25The Rise
Cleveland Waterworks rescue
Garrett Morgan and his brother Frank enter a 250-foot tunnel beneath Lake Erie wearing Morgan's Safety Hood after a natural-gas explosion traps workers underground. They bring survivors out alive.
- 1917Jul 2The Record
East St. Louis massacre
White mobs in East St. Louis, Illinois, attack Black workers brought in to fill wartime jobs at the Aluminum Ore Company. Official counts of Black dead range from thirty-nine to two hundred; thousands are left homeless. Marcus Garvey calls it a crime against humanity; W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson lead a silent protest march of 10,000 down Fifth Avenue.
- 1917Aug 23The Record
Houston mutiny
After months of harassment by Houston police, Black soldiers of the 24th Infantry Regiment march on the city. Sixteen white civilians and four Black soldiers die. The Army holds the largest court-martial in American history; nineteen soldiers are hanged, mostly without appeal, and forty-one are sentenced to life in prison.
- 1918Apr 8The Rise
Harlem Hellfighters enter combat in France
The 369th Infantry Regiment, the Harlem Hellfighters, are placed under French command because white American troops refuse to serve alongside them. They fight 191 days in the trenches, longer than any other American unit. France awards the regiment the Croix de Guerre; the United States awards 171 individual citations.
- 1918Aug 26The Rise
Katherine Johnson born
Creola Katherine Coleman, later Katherine Johnson, is born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. She becomes the NASA mathematician whose hand calculations John Glenn requires before flying the Friendship 7.
- 1919May 25The Rise
Madam C.J. Walker dies
Madam C.J. Walker dies at Villa Lewaro in Irvington, New York, the first self-made female millionaire in American history. Her estate exceeds one million dollars.
- 1919JulyThe Rise
If We Must Die published
Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay publishes If We Must Die in The Liberator, written in response to the Red Summer. The sonnet becomes an anthem of resistance to mob violence and is later quoted by Winston Churchill at the Commons during the London Blitz.
- 1919Jul 27The Record
Red Summer: Chicago race riot
White swimmers stone seventeen-year-old Eugene Williams to death off a Chicago beach after he drifts past the unmarked color line in Lake Michigan. Thirteen days of mob violence leave thirty-eight dead and 537 injured. It is the deadliest episode of the Red Summer, during which white mobs attack Black residents in more than three dozen American cities.
- 1919Sep 30The Record
Elaine Massacre begins
A white railroad agent and a deputy sheriff fire on a Black sharecroppers union meeting at the Hoop Spur church in Phillips County, Arkansas. Over five days, white mobs and U.S. Army troops kill between 100 and 240 Black residents.
- 1920Jan 12The Rise
Within Our Gates released
Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates premieres at the Vendome Theatre in Chicago, a direct cinematic reply to The Birth of a Nation. Censors cut the lynching sequence in several cities. For decades the film is presumed lost until a single Spanish-subtitled print surfaces in Madrid in 1979.
- 1920Feb 13The Rise
Negro National League founded
Kansas City Monarchs owner Andrew Rube Foster convenes eight Black team owners at the Paseo YMCA in Kansas City to charter the Negro National League. The league produces Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, and the pipeline that supplies the integrated majors after 1947.
- 1920Nov 2The Record
Ocoee Massacre
Election Day. Mose Norman is turned away from the Ocoee, Florida polling place twice. That night a white mob attacks the home of July Perry, lynches him in Orlando, and drives the entire Black population of Ocoee out permanently.
- 1921May 31The Record
Tulsa Race Massacre begins
A white mob attacks Greenwood, the Black Wall Street of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Over the following eighteen hours, thirty-five blocks and more than 190 Black-owned businesses are destroyed; 10,000 residents are displaced.
- 1921JuneThe Rise
The Negro Speaks of Rivers published
Langston Hughes publishes The Negro Speaks of Rivers in The Crisis. He wrote the poem at nineteen, crossing the Mississippi on a train to visit his father in Mexico. It becomes the first major work of the Harlem Renaissance.
- 1921Jun 15The Rise
Bessie Coleman earns her pilot's license
Bessie Coleman receives pilot's license No. 18310 from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale at the Caudron Brothers School in Le Crotoy, France. First Black woman in history licensed to fly.
- 1921Sep 14The Rise
Constance Baker Motley born
Constance Juanita Baker is born in New Haven, Connecticut. She becomes the first Black woman to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court and the first Black woman federal judge.
- 1923Jan 1The Record
Rosewood Massacre begins
A white woman in Sumner, Florida claims assault. Over seven days, white mobs joined by KKK members destroy every structure in the self-sufficient Black town of Rosewood. The survivors hide in the swamps.
- 1923Feb 19The Rise
Moore v. Dempsey decided
The U.S. Supreme Court overturns the death sentences of twelve Black sharecroppers convicted after the Elaine Massacre. The ruling establishes that federal courts can intervene in mob-dominated state trials.
- 1923OctoberThe Rise
Cotton Club opens in Harlem
Gangster Owney Madden reopens the Club Deluxe on 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue as the Cotton Club. The policy is whites-only seating and all-Black talent. Duke Ellington's orchestra begins a residency in 1927 that runs four years and is broadcast nationally on radio.
- 1923Nov 20The Rise
Traffic-signal patent granted
The U.S. Patent Office grants Garrett Morgan U.S. Patent 1,475,024 for a three-position traffic signal. General Electric buys the rights for $40,000.
- 1923Dec 2The Rise
Roland Hayes recital at Carnegie Hall
Tenor Roland Hayes, son of a formerly enslaved Georgia woman, sings a recital of German lieder and spirituals at Carnegie Hall before a sold-out, integrated audience. He is the first Black American man to headline the venue, six years after his 1917 Symphony Hall debut in Boston.
- 1924Aug 2The Rise
James Baldwin born
James Arthur Baldwin is born in Harlem Hospital. He writes Go Tell It on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son, The Fire Next Time, and Giovanni's Room, and becomes one of the most consequential American essayists of the twentieth century.
- 1925Feb 8The Record
Marcus Garvey imprisoned at Atlanta Penitentiary
Jamaica-born Marcus Mosiah Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and publisher of Negro World, enters the federal penitentiary in Atlanta to serve a five-year sentence for mail fraud tied to Black Star Line stock. President Calvin Coolidge commutes the sentence in 1927 and orders Garvey deported.
- 1925SeptemberThe Rise
Zora Neale Hurston enrolls at Barnard
Zora Neale Hurston enters Barnard College on a scholarship arranged by novelist Fannie Hurst, the only Black student in the school. She studies anthropology under Franz Boas and begins the fieldwork that produces Mules and Men and Their Eyes Were Watching God.
- 1926JulyThe Rise
Dorothy West publishes The Typewriter
Eighteen-year-old Dorothy West places second in the Opportunity magazine short-story contest with The Typewriter, tying with Zora Neale Hurston's Muttsy. The youngest member of the Harlem Renaissance, West lives to see the movement reappraised and publishes her second novel, The Wedding, in 1995.
- 1931Mar 25The Record
Scottsboro Boys arrested
Nine Black teenagers aged thirteen to twenty are pulled from a Southern Railroad freight train in Paint Rock, Alabama, and charged with the rape of two white women. Two weeks later an all-white jury sentences eight to death. Their appeals produce Powell v. Alabama in 1932 and Norris v. Alabama in 1935, two foundational rulings on the right to counsel and jury composition.
- 1935Dec 5The Rise
National Council of Negro Women founded
Mary McLeod Bethune convenes fourteen Black women's organizations at 138th Street YWCA in Harlem to charter the National Council of Negro Women. Bethune serves as its first president and uses the council to lobby the Roosevelt White House on federal hiring and anti-lynching legislation.
- 1936Aug 3The Rise
Jesse Owens wins gold in Berlin
Jesse Owens wins the 100 meters at the Berlin Olympics, the first of four gold medals he takes at the Games before the watching Adolf Hitler. His 8.13-meter long jump world record stands for twenty-five years. President Franklin Roosevelt never invites him to the White House.
- 1937Jun 22The Rise
Joe Louis wins the heavyweight title
Joseph Louis Barrow knocks out James J. Braddock in the eighth round at Comiskey Park in Chicago to become world heavyweight champion. He defends the title a record twenty-five consecutive times over the next eleven years, eight months and seven days.
- 1941Mar 22The Rise
Tuskegee Airmen activated
The War Department activates the 99th Pursuit Squadron at Chanute Field, Illinois, the first Black flying unit in the U.S. military. Training moves to Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama. Over the war the Tuskegee Airmen fly 15,000 sorties in North Africa and Europe and escort heavy bombers into Berlin.
- 1941Jun 25Context
Executive Order 8802 signed
President Franklin Roosevelt signs Executive Order 8802 banning discrimination in the defense industry, six days before A. Philip Randolph's threatened March on Washington. The order establishes the Fair Employment Practice Committee, the first federal civil-rights enforcement body since Reconstruction.
- 1942Feb 7The Rise
Double V campaign launched
The Pittsburgh Courier publishes a letter from twenty-six-year-old cafeteria worker James G. Thompson calling for victory over fascism abroad and racial apartheid at home. The paper adopts the Double V logo on its masthead. Circulation passes 200,000 by the end of the war.
- 1942Nov 4The Rise
Patricia Bath born
Patricia Era Bath is born in Harlem, New York. She becomes the first Black woman physician to hold a United States medical patent, for the Laserphaco Probe.
- 1942Dec 7The Rise
Reginald F. Lewis born
Reginald Francis Lewis is born in Baltimore, Maryland. He becomes the first Black American to build a billion-dollar company with the 1987 TLC Beatrice acquisition.
- 1944Apr 3The Rise
Smith v. Allwright decided
The U.S. Supreme Court rules 8 to 1 in Smith v. Allwright that the Texas Democratic Party's whites-only primary violates the 15th Amendment. Thurgood Marshall argues the case. Black primary participation across the South jumps from roughly three percent before the ruling to twelve percent by 1947.
- 1944Jun 22Context
G.I. Bill signed
President Franklin Roosevelt signs the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, promising tuition, low-interest home loans, and unemployment pay to sixteen million veterans. Administered through local draft boards and segregated colleges, the bill subsidizes white suburban wealth while denying most Black veterans equal access; the resulting homeownership gap compounds for four generations.
- 1947Apr 15The Rise
Jackie Robinson breaks the Major League color line
Jack Roosevelt Robinson plays first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers against the Boston Braves at Ebbets Field, the first Black player in the modern Major Leagues. He bats .297, steals twenty-nine bases, and wins Rookie of the Year. Every Major League club retires his number 42 in 1997.
- 1948May 3The Rise
Shelley v. Kraemer decided
The U.S. Supreme Court rules unanimously in Shelley v. Kraemer that courts cannot enforce racially restrictive property covenants. Thurgood Marshall and George Vaughn argue for the plaintiffs. Enforcement continues informally through redlining and steering for decades afterward.
- 1948Jul 26Context
Truman desegregates the armed forces
President Harry Truman signs Executive Order 9981, declaring equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed forces. Full integration takes until the Korean War; the Marine Corps, the last segregated service, integrates its final all-Black units in 1951.
- 1954Jan 29The Rise
Oprah Winfrey born
Oprah Gail Winfrey is born in Kosciusko, Mississippi. She later becomes the first Black woman billionaire and one of the most influential media figures in American history.
- 1954May 17Context
Brown v. Board of Education decided
The U.S. Supreme Court rules unanimously in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. Thurgood Marshall argues the case for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
- 1955Aug 28The Record
Emmett Till murdered in Money, Mississippi
Fourteen-year-old Emmett Louis Till, visiting from Chicago, is taken from his great-uncle's home by Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, beaten, shot, and thrown into the Tallahatchie River. His mother Mamie Till-Mobley opens the casket for the Chicago funeral. Jet magazine publishes the photographs.
- 1955Dec 1Context
Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat
In Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refuses a bus driver's order to give up her seat to a white passenger. Her arrest launches the Montgomery Bus Boycott and propels Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence.
- 1956Dec 20The Rise
Montgomery Bus Boycott ends
After 381 days, Montgomery's Black riders return to integrated buses. The U.S. Supreme Court's November decision in Browder v. Gayle, argued by Fred Gray, has affirmed that Alabama and Montgomery bus segregation violates the 14th Amendment. Martin Luther King Jr., E.D. Nixon, and Glenn Smiley board together.
- 1957The Rise
Citizens Federal Savings Bank opens
A.G. Gaston opens Citizens Federal Savings Bank in Birmingham, the first Black-owned bank in Alabama since Reconstruction.
- 1957Sep 25The Rise
Little Rock Nine escorted into Central High
Under federal orders from President Dwight Eisenhower, 101st Airborne paratroopers escort Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Pattillo, Gloria Ray, Terrance Roberts, Jefferson Thomas, and Carlotta Walls into Little Rock Central High School. Governor Orval Faubus had used the Arkansas National Guard to keep them out for three weeks.
- 1960Feb 1The Rise
Greensboro sit-ins begin
North Carolina A&T freshmen Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond sit at the whites-only lunch counter at Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina, and order coffee. Within two months the sit-in movement spreads to fifty-four cities across nine states.
- 1961Mar 6Context
Executive Order 10925 signed
President John F. Kennedy signs Executive Order 10925, requiring federal contractors to take affirmative action to ensure equal employment regardless of race, creed, color, or national origin. The phrase affirmative action enters federal policy for the first time.
- 1961May 4The Rise
Freedom Riders leave Washington
Thirteen Congress of Racial Equality riders, led by James Farmer, board Greyhound and Trailways buses in Washington, D.C., bound for New Orleans. In Anniston, Alabama, a white mob firebombs the Greyhound bus. In Birmingham, Klansmen beat the Trailways riders with the permission of Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor.
- 1961Aug 4The Rise
Barack Obama born
Barack Hussein Obama II is born in Honolulu, Hawaii. He becomes the 44th President of the United States and the first Black president in American history.
- 1962Feb 20The Rise
John Glenn orbits Earth; Katherine Johnson verifies
Astronaut John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit the Earth aboard Friendship 7. He does not board the capsule until NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson has personally verified the electronic-computer trajectory numbers.
- 1962Sep 30The Rise
Constance Baker Motley walks James Meredith into Ole Miss
Constance Baker Motley accompanies James Meredith through the federally guarded doors of the University of Mississippi, desegregating the institution.
- 1963Apr 12The Rise
Dr. King jailed in Birmingham; Gaston signs the bail
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is arrested in Birmingham on Good Friday. A.G. Gaston quietly draws $160,000 from Citizens Federal Savings to post his bail and the bail of other arrested demonstrators.
- 1963May 2The Rise
Children's Crusade begins in Birmingham
More than a thousand Black schoolchildren march from 16th Street Baptist Church into downtown Birmingham. Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor orders police dogs and fire hoses turned on them. Televised footage of the assault pushes President Kennedy to draft what becomes the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
- 1963Aug 28Context
March on Washington; I Have a Dream
More than 250,000 people gather at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his I Have a Dream speech. Roy Wilkins announces from the podium that W.E.B. Du Bois has died in Accra the day before.
- 1963Sep 15The Record
16th Street Baptist Church bombed
Ku Klux Klansmen plant a bomb under the steps of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The blast kills Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, aged eleven to fourteen. One of the four men identified as responsible is tried in 1977; the last is tried in 2002.
- 1964Jul 2Context
Civil Rights Act of 1964 signed
President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations. The Act's Title II uses the Commerce Clause for constitutional grounding, the lesson Congress learned from the 1883 Civil Rights Cases.
- 1964Oct 20The Rise
Kamala Harris born
Kamala Devi Harris is born in Oakland, California. She becomes the 49th Vice President of the United States and the first Black woman, first South Asian, and first woman to hold the office.
- 1965Mar 7Context
Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge
Alabama state troopers attack civil-rights marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma during a voting-rights march. John Lewis is beaten and suffers a fractured skull. Televised footage galvanizes national support for the Voting Rights Act.
- 1965Aug 6Context
Voting Rights Act signed
President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act. Its preclearance regime (Section 5) blocks thousands of discriminatory election rules over the next forty-eight years.
- 1967Jun 12The Rise
Loving v. Virginia decided
The U.S. Supreme Court rules unanimously in Loving v. Virginia that state laws barring interracial marriage violate the 14th Amendment. Mildred and Richard Loving had been arrested at home in Caroline County, Virginia, in 1958. Sixteen states still had bans on their books the day the opinion came down.
- 1967Jul 23The Record
Detroit uprising
A police raid on a Black-owned after-hours club at Twelfth Street and Clairmount in Detroit ignites five days of unrest. Governor George Romney calls in the National Guard and President Lyndon Johnson sends the 82nd and 101st Airborne. Forty-three die, over a thousand are injured, and 7,200 are arrested. Johnson appoints the Kerner Commission.
- 1967Oct 2The Rise
Thurgood Marshall confirmed to the Supreme Court
Thurgood Marshall is sworn in as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, the first Black American on the Court. He serves twenty-four years.
- 1968Feb 29The Rise
Kerner Commission Report released
The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, chaired by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner, issues its 426-page report. Its central finding: the nation is moving toward two societies, one Black, one white, separate and unequal. President Johnson shelves the report's recommendations; Bantam Books sells two million paperback copies.
- 1968Apr 4Context
Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He is thirty-nine.
- 1968Apr 11Context
Fair Housing Act signed
President Lyndon Johnson signs Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, prohibiting discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing. The bill had stalled for two years; Congress passes it one week after Dr. King's assassination.
- 1968Nov 5The Rise
Shirley Chisholm elected to Congress
Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm wins New York's 12th Congressional District, becoming the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress. She serves seven terms and in 1972 becomes the first Black candidate to seek a major-party presidential nomination.
- 1969Jul 20The Rise
Apollo 11 lands on the moon
Apollo 11 lands on the lunar surface, carrying trajectory calculations prepared by Katherine Johnson and the West Computing team at NASA Langley.
- 1970Sep 14The Rise
Ketanji Brown Jackson born
Ketanji Onyika Brown is born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Miami. She later becomes the 116th Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and the first Black woman to sit on the Court.
- 1972Jun 4The Rise
Angela Davis acquitted
An all-white San Jose jury acquits Angela Yvonne Davis on charges of murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy tied to the 1970 Marin County courthouse shootout. Davis had spent sixteen months in federal custody. She returns to academic work and remains a central voice in the abolitionist movement.
- 1983Nov 3The Rise
Jesse Jackson announces presidential run
Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson announces his Rainbow Coalition campaign for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination. He finishes third with 3.3 million primary votes and returns in 1988 to win thirteen contests, seven million votes, and 1,200 delegates before losing the nomination to Michael Dukakis.
- 1986Sep 8The Rise
The Oprah Winfrey Show launches nationally
The Oprah Winfrey Show begins national syndication, ultimately running twenty-five seasons and reaching 150 countries.
- 1987Nov 30The Rise
Reginald F. Lewis closes the Beatrice deal
TLC Group acquires Beatrice International Foods for $985 million, the largest offshore leveraged buyout in history at the time. The resulting TLC Beatrice International becomes the first Black-owned company to surpass $1 billion in revenue.
- 1988May 17The Rise
Laserphaco Probe patent granted
The U.S. Patent Office grants Patricia Bath U.S. Patent 4,744,360 for the Laserphaco Probe. She is the first Black woman physician to hold a medical patent.
- 1992Apr 29The Record
Rodney King verdict and Los Angeles uprising
A Simi Valley jury acquits four Los Angeles police officers of the videotaped beating of Rodney Glen King. Six days of unrest across Los Angeles County follow. Sixty-three die, 2,383 are injured, and an estimated $1 billion in property is destroyed. Federal prosecutors later convict two of the officers of civil-rights violations.
- 1993Jan 19The Rise
Reginald F. Lewis dies
Reginald F. Lewis dies of brain cancer at age fifty in New York City. Loida Nicolas Lewis succeeds him as chairman and CEO of TLC Beatrice International.
- 1993Oct 7The Rise
Toni Morrison wins the Nobel Prize in Literature
The Swedish Academy awards the Nobel Prize in Literature to Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, citing novels of visionary force and poetic import. Morrison is the first Black American to win the prize. She donates most of the award to a Howard University fund in her name.
- 1994May 4The Rise
Rosewood Compensation Act signed
Florida Governor Lawton Chiles signs the Rosewood Compensation Act, awarding $2.1 million to survivors and descendants of the Rosewood Massacre. The first state reparations for racial violence in United States history.
- 1995Oct 16The Rise
Million Man March
Roughly 837,000 to 1.1 million Black men gather on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., at a march convened by Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam and co-organized by Benjamin Chavis. Maya Angelou, Rosa Parks, Cornel West, and Jesse Jackson speak. The march produces a voter-registration surge across thirty-two states.
- 2001Jan 20The Rise
Colin Powell sworn in as Secretary of State
Colin Luther Powell, retired four-star general and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is sworn in as the 65th Secretary of State under President George W. Bush. He is the first Black American to hold the office. His February 2003 United Nations address on Iraq later becomes a defining regret of his career.
- 2001Jan 22The Rise
Condoleezza Rice becomes National Security Advisor
Birmingham-born political scientist Condoleezza Rice is sworn in as the 19th U.S. National Security Advisor, the first woman in the role. In 2005 she succeeds Colin Powell as the 66th Secretary of State, the first Black woman in that office and the second woman to hold it.
- 2001Feb 28The Rise
Oklahoma Commission Final Report on the Tulsa Race Massacre
The Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 publishes its Final Report, establishing the authoritative death and property-destruction figures for the massacre.
- 2004Jul 27The Rise
Barack Obama delivers the DNC keynote
Illinois state senator Barack Obama, then a candidate for the U.S. Senate, delivers the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. Roughly 9.1 million people watch. Within weeks he wins his Senate race in a thirty-four-point landslide and begins the run that produces the 2008 presidential campaign.
- 2005Aug 29The Record
Hurricane Katrina makes landfall
Hurricane Katrina makes landfall near Buras, Louisiana, as a Category 3 storm. Federal levees fail in fifty-three places and eighty percent of New Orleans floods. Official counts put the death toll at 1,833. Residents of the majority-Black Lower Ninth Ward and eastern New Orleans wait days for rescue; tens of thousands are scattered across the country and never return.
- 2008Nov 4The Rise
Barack Obama elected President
Barack Obama is elected the 44th President of the United States, defeating John McCain. He receives 69.5 million votes, the most of any presidential candidate at that time.
- 2009Jan 20The Rise
Barack Obama inaugurated
Barack Obama is inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States on the west front of the U.S. Capitol.
- 2012Feb 26The Record
Trayvon Martin killed in Sanford, Florida
Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Benjamin Martin, walking home from a convenience store in Sanford, Florida, is shot and killed by neighborhood-watch volunteer George Zimmerman. Zimmerman is charged six weeks later after national protest and acquitted on July 13, 2013. Alicia Garza's Facebook post that night, ending with Black Lives Matter, names what becomes a movement.
- 2013Jun 25The Record
Shelby County v. Holder decided
The U.S. Supreme Court rules 5 to 4 in Shelby County v. Holder that the coverage formula of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional, gutting the preclearance regime that had blocked discriminatory election rules since 1965.
- 2013Jul 13The Rise
Black Lives Matter named
Hours after the Florida jury acquits George Zimmerman, Alicia Garza writes A Love Letter to Black People on Facebook, ending with the line Black Lives Matter. Patrisse Cullors turns it into a hashtag; Opal Tometi builds the online infrastructure. Within a year the three have registered the name and the network.
- 2014Aug 9The Record
Michael Brown killed in Ferguson
Officer Darren Wilson shoots and kills eighteen-year-old Michael Brown Jr. on Canfield Drive in Ferguson, Missouri. Brown's body remains in the street for four and a half hours. Protests draw a militarized police response and become the catalyst for the 2015 U.S. Justice Department report documenting Ferguson's systemic policing and court abuses.
- 2015Jun 17The Record
Charleston church massacre
A white supremacist enters Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, sits through most of a Bible study, then shoots nine congregants dead. Among them is State Senator Clementa C. Pinckney. Within weeks Governor Nikki Haley orders the Confederate battle flag removed from the State House grounds.
- 2016Aug 26The Rise
Colin Kaepernick kneels during the anthem
San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Rand Kaepernick kneels during the national anthem before a preseason game against the San Diego Chargers, in protest of police killings of Black Americans. He goes unsigned after the 2016 season. In 2019 the NFL and Kaepernick settle his collusion grievance for an undisclosed sum.
- 2017Aug 12The Record
Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville
White nationalists, neo-Nazis, and Klansmen converge on Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. Rally attendee James Alex Fields Jr. drives a Dodge Challenger into counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring nineteen others. Fields is later convicted of first-degree murder.
- 2019May 19The Rise
Robert F. Smith pays off the Morehouse 2019 debt
Robert F. Smith announces at Morehouse College's commencement that he will eliminate the student debt of every graduate in the class of 2019 and their parents. The gift totals $34 million.
- 2020May 25The Record
George Floyd killed in Minneapolis
Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneels on the neck of forty-six-year-old George Perry Floyd Jr. for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds outside Cup Foods at 38th and Chicago. Seventeen-year-old Darnella Frazier records the video. By mid-June an estimated fifteen to twenty-six million people have joined protests across the United States.
- 2020Nov 7The Rise
Kamala Harris becomes Vice President-elect
Major news networks call the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Harris is the first woman, first Black American, and first South Asian American Vice President-elect.
- 2021Jan 20The Rise
Kamala Harris inaugurated as Vice President
Justice Sonia Sotomayor administers the oath of office to Kamala Devi Harris on the west front of the U.S. Capitol, making her the 49th Vice President of the United States. Harris holds a family Bible once owned by Thurgood Marshall.
- 2021May 19The Rise
Viola Fletcher testifies before Congress
Viola Fletcher, aged 107, testifies before the United States Congress as the oldest living survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, demanding accountability one hundred years after the attack on Greenwood.
- 2021Jun 17Context
Juneteenth becomes a federal holiday
President Joe Biden signs the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, making June 19 a federal holiday commemorating the 1865 announcement that enslaved people in Texas were free.
- 2022Apr 7The Rise
Ketanji Brown Jackson confirmed to the Supreme Court
The U.S. Senate confirms Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court by a vote of 53 to 47. She is the 116th Justice and the first Black woman on the Court.
- 2022Jun 30The Rise
Ketanji Brown Jackson sworn in
Ketanji Brown Jackson is sworn in as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, 232 years after the Court was established.
- 2023Jan 7The Record
Tyre Nichols beaten by Memphis police
Memphis police officers from the department's SCORPION unit stop twenty-nine-year-old Tyre Deandre Nichols in his Nissan Sentra a few minutes from his mother's home. The beating that follows leaves him unresponsive; he dies three days later. All five officers charged are Black, complicating the narrative without changing the outcome. The city disbands the SCORPION unit within weeks.
- 2023Jun 29The Record
Supreme Court ends race-conscious admissions
The U.S. Supreme Court rules 6 to 3 in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and 6 to 2 in the companion University of North Carolina case that race-conscious college admissions violate the 14th Amendment. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson writes in dissent that the ruling will entrench the advantages of wealth and lineage across generations.
- 2026Jun 19The Rise
newBWS reborn
newBWS, the member-owned professional network for the Black capital ecosystem, opens its Wefunder campaign on Juneteenth 2026. The platform launch follows at Black History Month 2027.