Timeline: Highlights of African American History
Black History Month is an opportunity to celebrate the key roles that African Americans have played in our country's history. The following timeline highlights just some of the chapters in this story. You can learn more about these and hundreds of other important events in African American history in the Encarta Reference Library, which includes Encarta Africana Third Edition, the encyclopedia of Africa and the African American experience.
Articles marked with a (*) are available to those with access to MSN Encarta Premium. Learn more.
1619: A Dutch frigate brings 20 African indentured servants to Jamestown, Virginia, the first Africans known to set foot in England's North American colonies.
1676: Black slaves join white indentured servants in an armed uprising against Native Americans and the colonial government of Virginia; the incident will become known as Bacon's Rebellion*.
1773: Phillis Wheatley*, a slave in Boston, Massachusetts, publishes Poems on Various Subjects, the first book published by an African American, and the second by an American woman.
1786: Philadelphia Quakers help fugitive slaves from Virginia reach freedom, in what is probably the first "run" on the Underground Railroad.
1807: Britain and the United States abolish the slave trade, effective January 1808, although slavery itself will continue in British colonies until 1833 and in the American South until 1863.
1831: Slave Nat Turner leads a rebellion that lasts three days and kills 57 whites (including his owner) before it is suppressed.
1839: African slaves held captive aboard the slave ship L'Amistad* launch a rebellion.
1847: Abolitionist Frederick Douglass publishes the first issue of his weekly newspaper, The North Star, "wielding my pen, as well as my voice" for "my enslaved and oppressed people."
1849: Harriet Tubman escapes slavery, and soon undertakes daring trips back into the South to liberate other slaves.
1851: Sojourner Truth, noted African American abolitionist, women's rights advocate, and religious visionary, delivers her groundbreaking feminist speech, "Ain't I a Woman?"* at an Akron, Ohio, women's rights forum.
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1881: Booker T. Washington establishes Tuskegee University, the first U.S. institution of higher learning to have a black faculty.
1903: W. E. B. Du Bois publishes The Souls of Black Folk, advocating the artistic and expressive strengths--the soul--of African American culture.
1914: Marcus Garvey founds the Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association and African Communities League, a pan-Africanist organization that will win support from thousands of blacks across the United States and in other countries.
1915: Floods, cotton crop failures, and a reactivated Ku Klux Klan motivate Southern rural African Americans to relocate to the North in search of employment, a process that will become known as the Great Migration.
1931: The Nation of Islam* (initially known as the Temple of Islam) is founded by Wallace D. Fard.
1932: Duke Ellington records the jazz classic "It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing."
1936: Jesse Owens wins four gold medals at the Olympic Games in Berlin.
1942: James L. Farmer and George Houser found the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to challenge racial segregation through organized, nonviolent protest.
1947: Jackie Robinson signs with the Brooklyn Dodgers, becoming the first African American to play major league baseball in modern times.
1951: The National Basketball Association opens its ranks to African Americans, allowing Chuck Cooper to sign with the Boston Celtics.
1954: The Supreme Court rules in Brown v. Board of Education that the "separate but equal" doctrine allowing racial segregation has "no place in the field of public education."
1955: Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to a white person, spurring the Montgomery bus boycott led by Martin Luther King, Jr.
1959: Miles Davis and his band record Kind of Blue, which will become one of the most influential and popular recordings in jazz history.
1963: More than 250,000 people from all over the United States participate in the March on Washington, demanding civil rights and economic equality for African Americans.
1964: President Lyndon Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964*, banning discrimination in voting, education, employment, and public accommodation.
1965: Malcolm X is assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem just as he is about to address 400 followers.
1969: The Nixon administration develops the first affirmative action program, requiring that contractors on federally assisted projects set specific goals for hiring minorities.
1971: Jesse Jackson founds Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) in Chicago to work for the economic advancement of poor people.
1973: Marian Wright Edelman founds the Children's Defense Fund, an organization that lobbies for children's rights and welfare.
1977: Roots, the serialization of Alex Haley's story of generations of his African and African American family, becomes the most popular television program in history.
1982: Michael Jackson releases Thriller, which will become the best-selling pop album of all time.
1983: Harold Washington is sworn in as the first African American mayor of Chicago.
1987: Toni Morrison publishes her novel Beloved, which is immediately hailed as a major literary achievement and will win her a Pulitzer Prize in 1988.
1989: General Colin Powell becomes the first African American to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
1992: Illinois congresswoman Carol Moseley-Braun becomes the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Senate.
1995: Approximately 900,000 African American men come to the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., to draw attention to the social conditions of African Americans and to urge African American men to assume control over their lives.
2001: Condoleezza Rice becomes the first woman and second African American (after Colin Powell) to hold the office of U.S. national security adviser.
Continue exploring Encarta's special coverage of Black History Month.
To learn more about these and other important events in black history, see Encarta's article on African American history. Or better yet, turn to the Encarta Reference Library, which includes Encarta Africana Third Edition, the comprehensive multimedia encyclopedia of Africa and the African American experience.
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