(Text in bold refers to Nashville-specific events)
US Supreme Court rules in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, declaring public school segregation unconstitutional.
Two Nashville Catholic schools desegregate: Cathedral High School and Father Ryan High School.
Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till is murdered while visiting relatives in Mississippi.
Robert Kelly attempts to enroll in Nashville’s East High School. He is turned away because he is Black. His father hires Z. Alexander Looby and Avon Williams to sue the school board.
Emmett Till’s open-casket funeral is held in Chicago and covered extensively by the national Black press.
Oak Ridge High School in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, desegregates.
Rosa Parks is arrested for not giving up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus.
Martin Luther King Jr. leads the Montgomery bus boycott.
Dr. King’s home in Montgomery is bombed.
Clinton, Tennessee’s eponymous high school is desegregated by twelve students. John Kasper instigates a riot in retaliation, and the National Guard is called in.
Black pastors and civil rights leaders meet in Atlanta and begin planning nonviolent protests against racial discrimination. They form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
Nine Black students desegregate Little Rock Central High School, sparking a dramatic confrontation between Arkansas governor Orval Faubus and President Eisenhower.
Hattie Cotton School in Nashville is bombed.
The Nashville Jewish Community Center is bombed.
The Nashville Christian Leadership Conference (NCLC), led by Rev. Kelly Miller Smith, holds its first workshop.
James Lawson enrolls at Vanderbilt Divinity School and begins leading workshops in nonviolent protest at Clark Memorial Methodist Church.
Clinton High School is bombed.
The sit-in movement begins in Greensboro, North Carolina.
The Nashville Sit-Ins begin.
Chattanooga high-school students from Howard High begin their lunch counter protests.
James Lawson is expelled from Vanderbilt Divinity School because of his civil rights work.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is founded.
Z. Alexander Looby’s Nashville home is bombed. Protesters lead a silent march downtown to confront Mayor Ben West. Diane Nash gets the mayor to admit that segregation is wrong.
Nashville lunch counters begin to desegregate.
Ruby Bridges desegregates New Orleans public schools.
The Freedom Rides begin.
Activists launch a series of massive demonstrations in Birmingham.
Martin Luther King Jr. is arrested in Birmingham.
The Children’s Crusade begins in Birmingham.
Birmingham commissioner of public safety Bull Connor turns fire hoses and dogs on the child activists.
Governor George Wallace blocks Black students from attending the University of Alabama.
The March on Washington for economic and civil rights for African Americans, Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I have a dream” speech.
Racial terrorists blow up the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Denise McNair (11), Carole Robertson (14), and Cynthia Wesley (14). More than twenty others injured.