timeline

  • missouri compromise

    the Missouri Compromise, enabled Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state while the northernmost counties of Massachusetts became the free state of Maine. The scheme neutralized fears that the South would gain more influence in the Senate.
  • novek dates

    1840-1954
  • Harpers ferry

    On October 16, 1859, the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, was captured by the abolitionist John Brown (1800–1859) and twenty-one of his followers. Although the rebels were quickly defeated—and their goal of inspiring local slaves to mount a full-scale rebellion came to nothing—the attack would have profound consequences for the national debate on the future of slavery in the United States.
  • Emancipation proclomation

    Few events in American history can match the drama and the social significance of black Emancipation in the midst of the Civil War. Since the early seventeenth century, when African-born slaves were first brought ashore in Virginia, through the long development of the South's plantation economy and its dependence upon slave labor, emancipation had been the dream of African-American people.
  • dred scott decision

    On October 16, 1859, the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, was captured by the abolitionist John Brown (1800–1859) and twenty-one of his followers. Although the rebels were quickly defeated—and their goal of inspiring local slaves to mount a full-scale rebellion came to nothing—the attack would have profound consequences for the national debate on the future of slavery in the United States.
  • american civil war

    The american civil war was a war between the north and the south. The war was mostly about slavery the north beleived that African Americans should be free and the south thought that they should stay as slaves.
  • jim crow

    When Reconstruction ended in 1877, Southerners began passing new laws enforcing racial segregation (separation of black people from whites) known as Jim Crow laws. It was the Jim Crow laws through which the beliefs about the inferior nature of blacks were perpetuated throughout much of the twentieth century.
  • Plessy v. Ferguson decision

    In the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Louisiana law that required railroads to provide “equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races.” The case enshrined the constitutional validity of racial segregation laws under what came to be known as the “separate but equal doctrine,” and it permitted the proliferation of mandatory segregation laws across the American South during the late nineteenth and early twentiet
  • brown vs.board

    On May 19, 1954, the Supreme Court outlawed separate public schools for black and white schoolchildren in the celebrated Brown v. Board of Education decision (Brown I), one of the most important high court rulings in American history.
  • bus boycott

    During this whole period, African Americans fought this segregation with varying results. Civil Rights leaders staged an effective boycott of the Montgomery (Alabama) bus system in 1955, sparked by Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. The bus system, economically damaged by this boycott (and influenced partly by a Supreme Court ruling holding such segregation unconstitutional) desegregated. Around this same time, African Americans were given new opportunities for employm
  • march on washington

    During this whole period, African Americans fought this segregation with varying results. Civil Rights leaders staged an effective boycott of the Montgomery (Alabama) bus system in 1955, sparked by Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. The bus system, economically damaged by this boycott (and influenced partly by a Supreme Court ruling holding such segregation unconstitutional) desegregated. Around this same time, African Americans were given new opportunities for employm