http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-death-of-emmett-till

Emmett Till a 14 year old boy from Chicago was murdered in Money, Mississippi while visiting his family. Being from the North Emmett also know as Bo or Bobo wasn't used to racism. One day Emmett, his cousin and some other guys were outside a story. Emmett was talking about all this white friends back home in Chicagi. One of the boys didn't believe that Emmett had white friends so he said to Emmett " there is a white woman in there bet you won't go talk to her." Emmett did go in that story and talk to her but her husband found out and wasn't pleased. The woman's husband rounded up some other guys to go teach Emmett a lesson. They didn't plan on killing but Emmett just wouldn't stop running his mouth and one of the guys couldn't take it anymore. Emmett's mother Mamie Till decided to have an open casket even though the body was gross because she wanted everyone to see what they did to her boy. When the mean went on trail for the murders Emmett's uncle Mose Wright was brave enough to testify against the killers, but they were still found not guilty.


http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9NPRwFOWQ_0

http://www.history.com/topics/montgomery-bus-boycott

The Montgomery Bus Boycott, in which African Americans refused to ride city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, to protest segregated seating, took place from December 5, 1955, to December 20, 1956, and is regarded as the first large-scale demonstration against segregation in the U.S. On December 1, 1955, four days before the boycott began, Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, refused to yield her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus. She was arrested and fined. The boycott of public buses by blacks in Montgomery began on the day of Parks' court hearing and lasted 381 days. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately ordered Montgomery to integrate its bus system, and one of the leaders of the boycott, a young pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-68), emerged as a prominent national leader of the American civil rights movement in the wake of the action. All this started when Rosa Parks refused to give up her sit to a white man. Everyone says that she wouldn't give it up because she was tired but in reality she didn't give it up because she planned to get arrested for it. Rosa wanted to end segregation and she was willing to.

http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryI...

On May 24, 1955, the Little Rock School Board adopted a plan for gradual integration, known as the Blossom Plan. The Little Rock Nine were a group of African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas. The Nine remained at home for more than two weeks, trying to keep up with their schoolwork as best they could. When the federal court ordered Gov. Faubus to stop interfering with the court’s order, Faubus removed the guardsmen from in front of the school. On September 23, the Nine entered the school for the first time. The crowd outside chanted, “Two, four, six, eight…We ain’t gonna integrate!” and chased and beat black reporters who were covering the events. The Little Rock police, fearful that they could not control the increasingly unruly mob in front of the school, removed the Nine later that morning. They once again returned home and waited for further information on when they would be able to attend school. After the Nine suffered repeated harassment—such as kicking, shoving, and name calling—the military assigned guards to escort them to classes. The guards, however, could not go everywhere with the students, and harassment continued in places such as the restrooms and locker rooms. The students made it through high school and each of them graduated. Ernest Green being the first black to graduate from Little Rock Central.

http://crdl.usg.edu/events/sit_ins_nashville_tn/?Welcome

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville_sit-ins

The Nashville sit-ins, which lasted from February 13 to May 10, 1960, were part of a nonviolent direct action campaign to end racial segregation at lunch counters in downtown Nashville, Tennessee. Over the course of the campaign, sit-ins were staged at numerous stores in Nashville's central business district. Sit-in participants, who consisted mainly of black college students, were often verbally or physically attacked by white onlookers. Despite their refusal to retaliate, over 150 students were eventually arrested for refusing to vacate store lunch counters when ordered to do so by police. At trial, the students were represented by a group of 13 lawyers. On April 19, nearly 4000 people marched to City Hall to confront Mayor Ben West about the escalating violence. When asked if he believed the lunch counters in Nashville should be desegregated, West agreed that they should. After subsequent negotiations between the store owners and protest leaders, an agreement was reached during the first week of May. On May 10, six downtown stores began serving black customers at their lunch counters for the first time.

http://www.history.com/topics/freedom-rides


In 1961, the Freedom Riders set out for the Deep South to defy Jim Crow laws and call for change. They were met by hatred and violence — and local police often refused to intervene. But the Riders' efforts transformed the civil rights movement. On May 14, 1961, the Greyhound bus was the first to arrive in Anniston, Alabama. There, an angry mob of about 200 white people surrounded the bus, causing the driver to continue past the bus station. The mob followed the bus in automobiles, and when the tires on the bus blew out, someone threw a bomb into the bus. The Freedom Riders escaped the bus as it burst into flames, only to be brutally beaten by members of the surrounding mob. The second bus, a Trailways vehicle, traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, that day, and those riders were also beaten by an angry white mob, many of whom brandished metal pipes. Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor stated that, although he knew the Freedom Riders were arriving and violence awaited them, he posted no police protection at the station because it was Mother's Day. The violence toward the Freedom Riders was not quelled; rather, the police abandoned the bus just before it arrived at the Montgomery, Alabama, terminal, where a white mob attacked the riders with baseball bats and clubs as they disembarked. Attorney General Kennedy sent 600 federal marshals to the city to stop the violence. The following night, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-68) led a service at the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, which was attended by more than one thousand supporters of the Freedom Riders. A riot ensued outside the church, and King called Robert Kennedy to ask for protection. Kennedy summoned the federal marshals, who used teargas to disperse the white mob. Patterson declared martial law in the city and dispatched the National Guard to restore order. On May 24, 1961, a group of Freedom Riders departed Montgomery for Jackson, Mississippi. There, several hundred supporters greeted the riders. However, those who attempted to use the whites-only facilities were arrested for trespassing and taken to the maximum-security penitentiary in Parchman, Mississippi. During their hearings, the judge turned and looked at the wall rather than listen to the Freedom Riders' defense, just as had been the case when sit-in participants were arrested for protesting segregated lunch counters in Tennessee. He sentenced the riders to 30 days in jail.

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/birmingham_1963.htm

In 1963 Birmingham became a focus for the civil rights movement. The Birmingham campaign was a model of direct action protest, as it it effectively shut down the city and, through the media drew the worlds attention to racial segregation in the South. The Birmingham campaign was a movement organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to bring attention to the integration efforts of the black Americans in Birmingham, Alabama. Led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and others, the spring 1963 campaign of nonviolent direct actions culminated in widely publicized confrontations between black youth and white civic authorities, and eventually led the municipal government to change the city's discrimination laws. In the spring of 1963, activists in Birmingham, Alabama launched one of the most influential campaigns of the Civil Rights Movement: Project C, better known as The Birmingham Campaign. It would be the beginning of a series of lunch counter sit-ins, marches on City Hall and boycotts on downtown merchants to protest segregation laws in the city.
Over the next couple months, the peaceful demonstrations would be met with violent attacks using high-pressure fire hoses and police dogs on men, women and children alike -- producing some of the most iconic and troubling images of the Civil Rights Movement. President John F. Kennedy would later say, "The events in Birmingham... have so increased the cries for equality that no city or state or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them." It is considered one of the major turning points in the Civil Rights Movement and the "beginning of the end" of a centuries-long struggle for freedom.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-0lD37bq8YI

http://www.history.com/topics/march-on-washington

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mAtOV_cp2b8

On August 28, 1963 more than 200,000 Americans gathered in Washington, D.C., for a political rally known as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The march, which became a key moment in the growing struggle for civil rights in the U.S., help Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 enacted July 2, 1964 is a landmark piece of civil rights legislation in United States it outlawed major forms of discrimination against racial, ethnic national and religious minorities, and woman.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selma_to_Montgomery_marches


In early 1965, Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) made Selma, Alabama, the focus of its efforts to register black voters in the South. That March, protesters attempting to march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery were met with violent resistance by state and local authorities. As the world watched, the protesters (under the protection of federalized National Guard troops) finally achieved their goal, walking around the clock for three days to reach Montgomery. The historic march, and King's participation in it, greatly helped raise awareness of the difficulty faced by black voters in the South, and the need for a Voting Rights Act, passed later that year.
King himself led another attempt on March 9, but turned the marchers around when state troopers again blocked the road. That night, a group of segregationists beat another protester, the young white minister James Reeb, to death. Alabama state officials (led by Walllace) tried to prevent the march from going forward, but a U.S. district court judge ordered them to permit it. President Lyndon Johnson also backed the marchers, going on national television to pledge his support and lobby for passage of new voting rights legislation he was introducing in Congress. Some 2,000 people set out from Selma on March 21, protected by U.S. Army troops and Alabama National Guard forces that Johnson had ordered under federal control. After walking some 12 hours a day and sleeping in fields along the way, they reached Montgomery on March 25. Nearly 50,000 supporters--black and white--met the marchers in Montgomery, where they gathered in front of the state capitol to hear King and other speakers including Ralph Bunche (winner of the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize) address the crowd. "No tide of racism can stop us," King proclaimed from the building's steps, as viewers from around the world watched the historic moment on television.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965

The Voting Rights Act (VRA) bans racial discrimination in voting practices by the federal government as well as by state and local governments. Passed in 1965 after a century of deliberate and violent denial of the vote to African-Americans in the South and Latinos in the Southwest – as well as many years of entrenched electoral systems that shut out citizens with limited fluency in English – the VRA is often held up as the most effective civil rights law ever enacted. It is widely regarded as enabling the enfranchisement of millions of minority voters and diversifying the electorate and legislative bodies at all levels of American government.