A Few Suggested Movies to Illustrate the Civil Rights Movement:
Key Events of the Civil Rights Movement
1954:
Brown vs. Board of Education occurs which the U.S. Supreme Court bans
segregation in public schools.
1955:
A bus boycott is launched in Montgomery, Alabama, after the African-American
Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person.
1956:
In December, the Montgomery buses desegregate.
1957:
Garfield High School in Seattle has a more than 50% nonwhite student body.
~At a previously all-white high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1000
paratroopers are called on by President Eisenhower to restore order and to
escort nine black students.
1960:
A sit-in protest movement begins in Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro,
North Carolina and spreads across the nation.
1962:
Black students become the majority at Garfield High School with a 51% of the
student population.
~Two people are killed in riots as James Meredith is enrolled as the first
black in the University of Mississippi.
1963:
Police arrest Martin Luther King and other ministers demonstrating in
Birmingham, Alabama.
~Medgar Evers, NAACP leader, is murdered as he enters his home in Jackson,
Mississippi.
~250,000 people attend the March on Washington, D.C. urging support for
pending civil rights legislation. The event was highlighted by King's "I
Have a Dream" speech.
~The Seattle School District creates a voluntary racial transfer program,
mainly aimed at busing black students to mostly white schools.
1964:
On July 2, President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
1965:
Malcom X is murdered on February 21.
~On August 6, President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The act,
which King sought, authorized federal examiners to register qualified voters
and suspended devices such as literacy tests that aimed to prevent African
Americans from voting.
1968:
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, which
created violence in 100 cities.
1977:
Seattle School Board adopts a plan designed to eliminate racial imbalance in
schools by fall 1979.
1978:
U.S. Supreme Court outlaws racial quotas in a suit brought by Allan Bakke, a
white man who had been turned down by the medical school at University of
California, Davis.
1989:
Douglas Wilder of Virginia becomes the nation's first African American to be
elected state governer.
A Few Suggested Movies to Illustrate the Civil Rights Movement: