Lest We Forget

A Brief Chronology
OF THE
AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND EXPERIENCE

1400-1787

1400s

Europeans invade Africa seeking gold, trade routes, and humans for slave labor.

1526

Enslaved Africans were part of a Spanish expedition to establish an outpost on the North American coast in present-day South Carolina. They later rebelled and destroyed the Spanish settlers’ ability to sustain the settlement, which they abandoned a year later.

1619

A group of twenty African slaves arrive from a passing ship in Jamestown, Virginia, documented by John Rolfe.

1662

The practice of slavery becomes a legally recognized institution in British America, and colonial assemblies begin to enact laws known as “slave codes,” which protect the institution of slavery.

1773

The first African American book is published, by Phillis Wheatley, entitled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.

1776

The Declaration of Independence declares that “All men are created equal.” However, slavery remains a legal institution in all thirteen states.

1777

Vermont is the first state to amend its constitution to ban slavery. More Northern states follow.

1780

Estimated beginning of the Underground Railroad, a vast network of people who helped an estimated 100,000 enslaved people escape the South. It would become a widely used term in the 1830s with conductors, stations, and depots assisting in navigation to freedom.

1787

The United States Constitution signed, which includes the Three-Fifths Compromise, counting the enslaved as 3/5 of the number of white inhabitants to determine representation and taxation.

1793-1926

1793

A federal fugitive slave law is enacted.

Invention of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin. Processing cotton becomes faster and more profitable, increasing the demand for land and slave labor.

1808

Congress bans the importation of slaves from Africa.

1820

Missouri Compromise allowed slavery in territory below the 36° 30´ latitude line. Missouri was admitted as a slave state and Main as a free state to maintain a balance between slave and free states.

1831

William Lloyd Garrison founds The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper, which signaled a dramatic shift in the antislavery movement.

Nat Turner, an educated enslaved freedom fighter, instigates a slave revolt in Virginia. He and his followers kill 57 whites, but the revolt is unsuccessful and nearly 200 enslaved people are killed.

1839

Amistad revolt results in one of the most celebrated trials involving the slave trade. Thirty-five captured Africans win their freedom and are returned home to Sierra Leone.

1849

Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery and becomes a leader of the Underground Railroad.

1850

The Fugitive Slave Act requires the United States government to actively assist slave owners in recapturing their fugitive slaves.

1852

The novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, is published, and becomes a bestseller in the North and banned in the South.

1855

A miniature civil war known as Bleeding Kansas breaks out over the issue of slavery in the Kansas Territory.

1859

John Brown and his freedom fighters including five black men free embark on a failed attempt of an armed slave revolt to take over a U.S. arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

1861

The Civil War begins on April 12.

1862

President Abraham Lincoln issues a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, on September 22, which sets a date for the freedom of more than 3 million black slaves in the United States.

1865

The Thirteenth Amendment officially abolishing slavery in the United States is ratified.

Congress establishes the Freedmen’s Bureau, on March 3, to protect the rights of newly emancipated blacks.

The Civil War ends on April 9.

1865–1877

Period of Reconstruction when the federal government sought to rebuild Southern society by protecting the rights of newly freedmen and freedwomen.

1868

The Fourteenth Amendment is ratified, granting citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” which included those formerly enslaved.

1870

Fifteenth Amendment grants African American men the right to vote by declaring that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

1881

Tennessee passes first Jim Crow laws endorsing racial segregation and disenfranchisement.

1896

Plessy v. Ferguson upheld the constitutionality of “separate but equal” for public facilities. Facilities were separate, but rarely if ever equal.

1901

Booker T. Washington’s autobiography Up from Slavery is published.

1903

W.E.B. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folks is published on April 27.

1905

The black weekly newspaper, the Chicago Defender, is founded by Robert Abbott on May 5.

African Americans in Nashville boycott streetcars to protest racial segregation.

1907

Madam C.J. Walker develops and markets her hair-care methods, and establishes one of the most highly successful cosmetics firms in the nation.

1909

The National Association of the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is formed on February 12, in New York City.

1910

The National Urban League is founded in New York City, on September 29, to help African Americans secure employment and adjust to urban life.

1913

The Jubilee year—celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation—is celebrated all year throughout the nation.

1916

Marcus Garvey founds the New York Division of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) with sixteen members.

1919

Race riots erupt in 26 cities as whites attack blacks in the “Red Summer of 1919.”

1920

Andrew Rube Foster leads the effort in Kansas City to establish the Negro National League on February 14, along with its governing body, the National Association of Colored Professional Base Ball Clubs.

Beginning of the Harlem Renaissance and its celebration of black art, theater, literature, and political thought.

1926

Historian Carter G. Woodson establishes Negro History Week to become Black History Month.

1935-1960

1935

National Council of Negro Women founded by Mary McLeod Bethune, who served as its first President.

1936

Track star Jesse Owens wins four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics between August 3–9.

1937

Boxer Joe Louis wins the heavyweight championship on June 22, in Chicago, Illinois, against James J. Braddock.

1947

Jackie (Jack Roosevelt) Robinson becomes the first black player in Major League Baseball, signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

1955

Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till of Chicago is murdered in Moody, Mississippi. The sight of his brutalized body in an open casket enrages thousands and gives added support to Civil Rights Movement.

On December 1, in Montgomery Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to obey bus driver James F. Blake’s order to give up her seat in the “colored section” to a white passenger, when the whites-only section was filled—a quiet protest that initiated the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted from December 5, 1955, to December 20, 1956.

1960

On February 1, four African American college students walked up to a whites-only lunch counter at the local Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and were refused service. Despite threats and intimidation, the students sat quietly and waited to be served. The civil rights sit-in movement was born.

1963-2013

1963

On August 28, civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his famous “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom at the nation’s capital.

1965

On March 21, 25,000 people participate in the 50-mile march from Selma, Alabama, to the state’s capital, Montgomery, in the Selma March for Voting Rights, led by Martin Luther King Jr.

1967

Thurgood Marshall is the first African American appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

1989

General Colin Powell named Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff and later appointed Secretary of State, becoming the first African American to serve in each position.