Sources

Martin Luther King is assassinated by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tennessee.

Robert C. Weaver is appointed Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. He is the first black to hold a Cabinet position in U.S. history.

Slavery was gone but Jim Crow was alive.

President Johnson announces the “Great Society” with “abundance and liberty for all”, and declares a “War on Poverty.”

In Birmingham, a white man is seen placing a box containing a bomb under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church, a black congregation. The explosion kills four black girls attending Sunday school. Twenty-three others people are also injured in the blast.

Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail inspires a growing national civil rights movement. In Birmingham, the goal is to end the system of segregation completely in every aspect of public life (stores, no separate bathrooms and drinking fountains, etc.) and in job discrimination.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference establishes and adopts nonviolent mass action as its cornerstone strategy to gain civil rights and opportunities for blacks. Working initially in the South under the leadership of Martin Luther King, by the mid 1960’s King enlarges the organization’s focus to address racism in the North.

A white woman named Carolyn Bryant Donham accused 14-year-old lynching victim Emmett Till of making “verbal and physical advances”; but years later, she admitted she’d made the whole thing up.

Brown v. Board decision declares segregation in public schools illegal.