February 2023

Black History Month

February is recognized as Black History Month. The month honors those who have endured centuries of struggle, and those who continue to fight for civil rights.

Carter G Woodson started the tradition with the creation of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. In 1926, Negro History Week was established. Since 1976, the nation's bicentennial, the month has been federally designated to remember the contributions of people of the African diaspora.

The ASNLH

The story of Black History Month begins in 1915, half a century after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the United States.

That September, the Harvard-trained historian Carter G. Woodson and the prominent minister Jesse E. Moorland founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), an organization dedicated to researching and promoting achievements by Black Americans and other peoples of African descent.

"If you can control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one."

- Carter Godwin Woodson

The Mis-Education of the Negro, 1933

Two Important Birthdays

ASNLH, known today as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), sponsored a national Negro History week in 1926, choosing the second week of February because it coincided with the birthday of Abraham Lincoln on February 12 and that of Frederick Douglass on February 14, both of which dates Black communities had celebrated together since the late 19th century.

The event inspired schools and communities nationwide to organize local celebrations, establish history clubs and host performances and lectures.

From a Week to a Month

In the decades that followed, mayors of cities across the country began issuing yearly proclamations recognizing "Negro History Week." By the late 1960s, thanks in part to the civil rights movement and a growing awareness of Black identity, "Negro History Week" had evolved into Black History Month on many college campuses.

President Gerald Ford officially recognized Black History Month in 1976, calling upon the public to "seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history." Today, Black History Month is a time to honor the contributions and legacy of African Americans across U.S. history and society

46.9 million

The Black or African American alone or in combination population in the United States in 2020

11.7% growth

of the Black or African American alone or in combination population in the United States from 2010 to 2020 census

30.7%

The percentage of the employed Black population ages 16 and older working in management, business, science and arts occupations in 2019.

data source: Census.gov

Inclusive Language Focus

Social markers and identity are socially constructed and evolve temporally. They work at both the structural and institutional level and are also contested and deeply personal. As a general rule, it is recommended that communicators respect the preferences of the person they are writing about, ask the person their preferred ethno-racial identification term and recognize that individual preferences vary.

Read more from NU Global Marketing and Communication

African American (no hyphen)

A U.S. born person, of African and especially of Black African descent. This lineage, while collective, contains a diverse array of histories, cultures and experiences. This includes, but is not limited to, Black, African American, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Latino and African immigrants living in the United States.

Black and African American do not necessarily mean the same thing and individuals may prefer one term over the other. It's best to ask.

Black

People of African descent throughout the world. There are various historical, social and political reasons why one might prefer to identify as Black. Black(s), white(s) (n.) Do not use either term as plurals. The current best practice is to use "people first" language, as in Black people, white people, Black teachers, and white students, which is preferable when clearly relevant.

The terms African American, Native American and Asian American don't have this same problem since American is already a noun like student or neighbor.

What is BIPOC?

BIPOC is an acceptable term for Black, Indigenous and people of color (including Latinx, Asians and others) when speaking generally about this group, but not when not referring specifically to one group—for example, Black people or Native Americans. This term covers the global majority, whose oppression was foundational to the establishment of the Americas that we know now. Use BIPOC as a noun, not an adjective, as people is part of the acronym. BIWOC is an acceptable term for Black women, Indigenous women and women of color.

Black History Milestones

View Selected Work

In August of 1619, a journal entry recorded that "20 and odd" Angolans, kidnapped by the Portuguese, arrived in the British colony of Virginia and were then were bought by English colonists.

The date and the story of the enslaved Africans have become symbolic of slavery's roots, despite captive and free Africans likely being present in the Americas in the 1400s and as early as 1526 in the region that would become the United States.

The Middle Passage

1518-1800s

To satisfy the labor needs of the rapidly growing North American colonies, white European settlers turned in the early 17th century from indentured servants (mostly poorer Europeans) to a cheaper, more plentiful labor source: enslaved Africans.

From about 1518 to the mid-19th century, millions of African men, women, and children made the 21-to-90-day voyage aboard grossly overcrowded sailing ships manned by crews mostly from Great Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, and France.

So that the largest possible cargo might be carried, the captives were wedged below decks, chained to low-lying platforms stacked in tiers, with an average individual space allotment that was 6 feet long, 16 inches wide, and perhaps 3 feet high (183 by 41 by 91 cm). Unable to stand erect or turn over, many slaves died in this position.

Domestic Slavery

1679-1865

After 1619, when a Dutch ship brought 20 Africans ashore at the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia, slavery spread quickly through the American colonies.

Throughout the 17th century, European settlers in North America turned to enslaved Africans as a cheaper, more plentiful labor source than indentured servants, who were mostly poor Europeans.

Though it is impossible to give accurate figures, some historians have estimated that 6 to 7 million enslaved people were imported to the New World during the 18th century alone, depriving the African continent of some of its healthiest and ablest men and women.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Africans worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern coast, from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia.

American Revolution

1775-1783

The Revolutionary War (1775-83), also known as the American Revolution, arose from growing tensions between residents of Great Britain's 13 North American colonies and the colonial government, which represented the British crown.

After the Continental Congress voted to adopt the Declaration of Independence in 1776, slaves fought on both sides during the War until the war ended in 1783 with the victory of the American colonists.

After the War, although leaders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson took cautious steps towards limiting slavery, the new U.S. Constitution tacitly acknowledged its institution, counting each enslaved individual as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of taxation and representation in Congress and guaranteeing the right to repossess any "person held to service or labor".

Many northern states had abolished slavery by the end of the 18th century, but the institution was absolutely vital to the South, where Black people constituted a large minority of the population and the economy relied on the production of crops like tobacco and cotton. Congress outlawed the import of new enslaved people in 1808, but the enslaved population in the U.S. nearly tripled over the next 50 years, and by 1860 it had reached nearly 4 million, with more than half living in the cotton–producing states of the South.

The Cotton Gin

In the late 18th century, with the land used to grow tobacco nearly exhausted, the South faced an economic crisis, and the continued growth of slavery in America seemed in doubt.

Around the same time, the mechanization of the textile industry in England led to a huge demand for American cotton, a southern crop whose production was limited by the difficulty of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers by hand.

But in 1793, a young Yankee schoolteacher named Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, a simple mechanized device that efficiently removed the seeds.

His device was widely copied, and within a few years, the South would transition from the large-scale production of tobacco to that of cotton, a switch that reinforced the region's dependence on enslaved labor. On the other hand, the North saw the growth of abolitionist movements, which brought and end to slavery in many states.

Fugitive Slave Act

1793

Despite the inclusion of the Fugitive Slave Clause in the Constitution, which stated that, "no person held to service or labor" would be released from bondage in the event they escaped to a free state", anti-slavery sentiment remained high in the North throughout the late 1780s and early 1790s, and many petitioned Congress to abolish the practice outright.

In 1793, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it a federal crime to assist an enslaved person trying to escape. Though it was difficult to enforce from state to state, especially with the growth of abolitionist feeling in the North, the law helped enshrine and legitimize slavery as an enduring American institution.

Civil War

1861-1865

In the spring of 1861, the bitter sectional conflicts that had been intensifying between North and South over the course of four decades erupted into civil war, with 11 southern states seceding from the Union and forming the Confederate States of America. Though President Abraham Lincoln's antislavery views were well established, the Civil War at its outset was not a war to abolish slavery. Lincoln sought first and foremost to preserve the Union, but by the summer of 1862, he had come to believe he could not avoid the slavery question much longer, and issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation.

Emancipation

1862

In January 1, 1863, Lincoln made it official that enslaved people within any State, "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free."

He justified his decision as a wartime measure, and as such he did not go so far as to free enslaved people in the border states loyal to the Union, an omission that angered many abolitionists.

By freeing some 3 million enslaved people in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side. Some 186,000 Black soldiers would join the Union Army by the time the war ended in 1865, and 38,000 lost their lives.

Reconstruction

1865-1877

Though the Union victory in the Civil War gave some 4 million enslaved people their freedom, significant challenges awaited during the Reconstruction period. The 13th Amendment, adopted late in 1865, officially abolished slavery, but the question of freed Black peoples' status in the post–war South remained. As white southerners gradually reestablished civil authority in the former Confederate states in 1865 and 1866, they enacted a series of laws known as the Black Codes, which were designed to restrict freed Black peoples' activity and ensure their availability as a labor force.

14th Amendment

In 1968, the 14th Amendment broadened the definition of citizenship, granting "equal protection" of the Constitution to people who had been enslaved.

15th Amendment

The 15th Amendment, adopted in 1870, guaranteed that a citizen's right to vote would not be denied—on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

The Ku Klux Klan Clan

During Reconstruction, Black Americans won election to southern state governments and even to the U.S. Congress. Their growing influence greatly dismayed many white southerners, who felt control slipping ever further away from them. The white protective societies that arose during this period—the largest of which was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)—sought to disenfranchise Black voters by using voter suppression and intimidation as well as more extreme violence.

Jim Crow

1896 - 1964

As Reconstruction drew to a close and the forces of white supremacy regained control and freed Black people, Southern state legislatures began enacting the first segregation laws, known as the "Jim Crow" laws. Taken from a much-copied minstrel routine written by a white actor who performed often in blackface, the name "Jim Crow" came to serve as a general derogatory term for African Americans in the post-Reconstruction South. By 1885, most southern states had laws requiring separate schools for Black and white students, and by 1900, "persons of color" were required to be separated from white people in railroad cars and depots, hotels, theaters, restaurants, barber shops and other establishments.

"Separate but equal"

On May 18, 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its verdict in Plessy v. Ferguson, a case that represented the first major test of the meaning of the 14th Amendment's provision of full and equal citizenship to African Americans.

By an 8–1 majority, the Court upheld a Louisiana law that required the segregation of passengers on railroad cars. By asserting that the equal protection clause was not violated as long as reasonably equal conditions were provided to both groups, the Court established the "separate but equal" doctrine that would thereafter be used for assessing the constitutionality of racial segregation laws.

Plessy vs. Ferguson stood as the overriding judicial precedent in civil rights cases until 1954, when it was reversed by the Court's verdict in Brown v. Board of Education.

World War II

1941-1945

During World War II, many African Americans were ready to fight for what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the "Four Freedoms"—freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear—even while they themselves lacked those freedoms at home. More than 3 million Black Americans would register for service during the war, with some 500,000 seeing action overseas. According to War Department policy, enlisted Black and white people were organized into separate units.

Dorie Miller

The war's first African American hero emerged from the attack on Pearl Harbor, when Dorie Miller, a young Navy steward on the U.S.S. West Virginia, carried wounded crew members to safety and manned a machine gun post, shooting down several Japanese planes.

The Tuskegee Airmen

In the spring of 1943, graduates of the first all-Black military aviation program, created at the Tuskegee Institute in 1941, headed to North Africa as the 99th Pursuit Squadron. The Tuskegee Airmen saw combat against German and Italian troops, flew more than 3,000 missions, and served as a great source of pride for many Black Americans.

Benjamin O. Davis Jr.

The Tuskegee Airmen commander, Captain Benjamin O. Davis Jr., later became one of the first African American generals (his father—General Benjamin O. Davis Sr.—was the first).

Aside from celebrated accomplishments like these, overall gains were slow, and maintaining high morale among black forces was difficult due to the continued discrimination they faced. In July 1948, President Harry S. Truman finally integrated the U.S. Armed Forces under an executive order mandating that "there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin."

Brown v. Board of Education

On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its verdict in Brown v. Board of Education, ruling unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the 14th Amendment's mandate of equal protection of the laws of the U.S. Constitution to any person within its jurisdiction.

In the Brown decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren famously declared that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

Though the Court's ruling applied specifically to public schools, it implied that other segregated facilities were also unconstitutional, thus striking a heavy blow to the Jim Crow South.

As such, the ruling provoked serious resistance, including a "Southern manifesto" issued by southern congressmen denouncing it. The decision was also difficult to enforce and often required federal intervention.

Little Rock Nine

Although the Supreme Court declared segregation of public schools illegal in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the decision was extremely difficult to enforce, as 11 southern states enacted resolutions interfering with, nullifying or protesting school desegregation.

In Arkansas, Governor Orval Faubus made resistance to desegregation a central part of his successful 1956 reelection campaign. The following September, after a federal court ordered the desegregation of Central High School, located in the state capital of Little Rock, Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine African American students from entering the school. He was later forced to call off the guard, and in the tense standoff that followed, TV cameras captured footage of white mobs converging on the "Little Rock Nine" outside the high school. For millions of viewers throughout the country, the unforgettable images provided a vivid contrast between the angry forces of white supremacy and the quiet, dignified resistance of African American students.

After an appeal by the local congressman and mayor of Little Rock to stop the violence, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the state's National Guard and sent 1,000 members of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division to enforce the integration of Central High School. The nine Black students entered the school under heavily armed guard, marking the first time since Reconstruction that federal troops had provided protection for Black Americans against racial violence.

Civil Rights Movements

1955-1968

Several events in this period and the related media coverage revealed systemic inequities within American races and engendered anger and protests across the nation.

Emmett Till

In August 1955, a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago named Emmett Till, while in a grocery store, allegedly whistled and made a flirtatious remark to the white woman behind the counter, violating the strict racial codes of the Jim Crow South. Three days later the woman's husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, dragged Till from his great uncle's house in the middle of the night. After beating the boy, they shot him to death and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River. The two men confessed to kidnapping Till but were acquitted of murder charges by an all-white, all-male jury after barely an hour of deliberations.

Till's mother held an open-casket funeral for her son in Chicago, hoping to bring public attention to the brutal murder. Thousands of mourners attended and international outrage over the crime and the verdict helped fuel the civil rights movement.

Rosa Parks

On December 1, 1955, an African American woman named Rosa Parks was riding a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama when the driver told her to give up her seat to a white man. Parks refused and was arrested for violating the city's racial segregation ordinances, which mandated that Black passengers sit in the back of public buses and give up their seats for white riders if the front seats were full.

Four days after Parks' arrest, an activist organization called the Montgomery Improvement Association, led Martin Luther King Jr., spearheaded a boycott of the city's municipal bus company. Because African Americans made up 70 percent of the bus company's riders at the time, and the great majority of Montgomery's Black citizens supported the bus boycott, its impact was immediate. About 90 participants in the Boycott, including King, were indicted under a law forbidding conspiracy to obstruct the operation of a business. Found guilty, King immediately appealed the decision. Meanwhile, the boycott stretched on for more than a year, and the bus company struggled to avoid bankruptcy.

On November 13, 1956, in Browder v. Gayle, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court's decision declaring the bus company's segregation seating policy unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. King, called off the boycott on December 20, and Rosa Parks—known as the "mother of the civil rights movement"—would be one of the first to ride the newly desegregated buses.

Loving v. Virginia Ruling, 1958

Mildred and Richard Loving were one of the first interracial couples legally married in the United States and their union marked a pivotal moment in marriage rights for mixed-race families. At 2 a.m. on July 11, 1958, Mildred Jeter was lying next to her husband Richard Loving, when police began knocking on their door, demanding to know about the nature of their relationship. At the time, interracial marriage was illegal in Virginia and the newly-wed couple was guilty of breaking the law.

The couple was then given a choice: spend 25 years in prison or leave Virginia. They chose exile and abandoned the state for nine years.

Amidst the civil rights movement, ACLU lawyers Bernard S. Cohen and Philip J. Hirschkop, who took on the couple's case, tried to have the case vacated and the ruling overturned without success. They then tried appealing the decision to the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, also without success. The case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, where a majority of members decided on June 12, 1967, that laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional.

Founding of SNCC

On February 1, 1960, four Black students from the Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at the lunch counter in a local branch of Woolworth's and ordered coffee. Refused service due to the counter's "whites-only" policy, they stayed put until the store closed, then returned the next day with other students. Heavily covered by the news media, the Greensboro sit-ins sparked a movement that spread quickly to college towns throughout the South and into the North, as young Black and white people engaged in various forms of peaceful protest against segregation in libraries, on beaches, in hotels and other establishments.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was then founded in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 1960, broadened its influence, and joined the NAACP in pushing for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Later, SNCC would mount an organized resistance to the Vietnam War. As its members faced increased violence, SNCC became more militant, and by the late 1960s it was advocating the "Black Power" philosophy of Stokely Carmichael (SNCC's chairman from 1966–67) and his successor, H. Rap Brown. By the early 1970s, SNCC was effectively disbanded.

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)

May 1961

Founded in 1942 by the civil rights leader James Farmer, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sought to end discrimination and improve race relations through direct action. In its early years, CORE staged a sit-in at a Chicago coffee shop (a precursor to the successful sit-in movement of 1960) and organized a "Journey of Reconciliation," in which a group of Black and white activists rode together on a bus through the upper South in 1947, a year after the U.S. Supreme Court banned segregation in interstate bus travel.

In Boynton v. Virginia (1960), the Court extended the earlier ruling to include bus terminals, restrooms and other related facilities, and CORE took action to test the enforcement of that ruling.

Freedom Rides

In May 1961, CORE sent seven African Americans and six white Americans on a "freedom ride" on two buses from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans, which were attacked by angry segregationists outside of Anniston, Alabama, and one bus was even firebombed.

Local law enforcement responded, but slowly, and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy eventually ordered State Highway Patrol protection for the freedom riders to continue to Montgomery, Alabama, where they again encountered violent resistance.

Kennedy sent federal marshals to escort the riders to Jackson, Mississippi, but images of the bloodshed made the worldwide news, and the freedom rides continued. In September, under pressure from CORE and other civil rights organizations, as well as from the attorney general's office, the Interstate Commerce Commission ruled that all passengers on interstate bus carriers should be seated without regard to race and carriers could not mandate segregated terminals.

Integration of Ole Miss

In 1962, a crisis erupted when the state-funded University of Mississippi (known as "Ole Miss") admitted a Black man, James Meredith, who had applied repeatedly with no success. With the aid of the NAACP, Meredith filed a lawsuit alleging that the university had discriminated against him because of his race. In September 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Meredith's favor, but state officials including Governor Ross Barnett vowed to block his admission.

When Meredith arrived at Ole Miss under the protection of federal forces including U.S. marshals, a mob of more than 2,000 people formed on the Oxford, Mississippi campus. Two people were killed and close to 200 injured in the ensuing chaos, which ended only after President Kennedy's administration sent some 31,000 troops to restore order.

Meredith went on to graduate from Ole Miss in 1963, but the struggle to integrate higher education continued.

'I Have a Dream,' 1963

On August 28, 1963, some 250,000 people—both Black and white—participated in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the largest demonstration in the history of the nation's capital and the most significant display of the civil rights movement's growing strength. After marching from the Washington Monument, the demonstrators gathered near the Lincoln Memorial, where a number of civil rights leaders addressed the crowd, calling for voting rights, equal employment opportunities for Black Americans and an end to racial segregation.

The last leader to appear was the Baptist preacher Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), who spoke eloquently of the struggle facing Black Americans and the need for continued action and nonviolent resistance. King's stirring words would be remembered as undoubtedly one of the greatest speeches in American history.

Birmingham Church Bombing

Despite Martin Luther King Jr.'s inspiring words at the Lincoln Memorial during the historic March on Washington in August 1963, violence against Black people in the segregated South continued to indicate the strength of white resistance to the ideals of justice and racial harmony King espoused. In mid-September, white supremacists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama during Sunday services; four young African American girls were killed in the explosion.

Birmingham had become a leading focus of the civil rights movement by the spring of 1963 when Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested there while leading supporters of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in a nonviolent campaign of demonstrations against segregation.

Letter from a Birmingham Jail

While in jail, King wrote a letter to local white ministers justifying his decision not to call off the demonstrations in the face of continued bloodshed at the hands of local law enforcement officials, led by Birmingham's police commissioner, Eugene "Bull" Connor.

"Letter from a Birmingham Jail" was published in the national press even as images of police brutality against protesters in Birmingham–including children being attacked by police dogs and knocked off their feet by fire hoses–sent shock waves around the world, helping to build crucial support for the civil rights movement.

Civil Rights Act

Congress was debating John F. Kennedy's civil rights reform bill when he was killed in November 1963. It was left to Lyndon Johnson (not previously known for his support of civil rights) to push the Civil Rights Act—the most far-reaching act of legislation supporting racial equality in American history—through Congress in June 1964.

The act gave the federal government more power to protect citizens against discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex or national origin. It mandated the desegregation of most public accommodations, including lunch counters, bus depots, parks and swimming pools, and established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to ensure equal treatment of minorities in the workplace. The act also guaranteed equal voting rights by removing biased registration requirements and procedures and authorized the U.S. Office of Education to provide aid to assist with school desegregation.

Freedom Summer

In the summer of 1964, civil rights organizations including the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) urged white students from the North to travel to Mississippi, where they helped register Black voters and build schools for Black children.

The so-called "Freedom Summer" had barely begun, however, when three volunteers—Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, both white New Yorkers, and James Chaney, a Black Mississippian—disappeared on their way back from investigating the burning of an African American church by the Ku Klux Klan. After a massive FBI investigation (code–named "Mississippi Burning") their bodies were discovered on August 4 buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, in Neshoba County, Mississippi.

After a three-year-long legal battle, the culprits, 19 white supremacists who were identified but never arrested, finally went on trial in Jackson, Mississippi, after being indicted by the Justice department. In October 1967, an all-white jury found seven of the defendants guilty and acquitted the other nine.

Selma to Montgomery March

March 1965

Alabama's governor, George Wallace, was a notorious opponent of desegregation: only 2 percent of Selma's eligible Black voters had managed to register. In March of that year, protesters marching the 54-mile route from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery were confronted with deadly violence from local authorities and white vigilante groups. 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, Alabama. The historic march, and Martin Luther King Jr.'s participation in it, raised awareness of the difficulties faced by Black voters, and the need for a national Voting Rights Act.

Malcolm X Death

February 1965

Malcolm X was an African American leader in the civil rights movement, minister and supporter of Black nationalism. He urged his fellow Black Americans to protect themselves against white aggression "by any means necessary," a stance that often put him at odds with the nonviolent teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Charismatic and eloquent, Malcolm X soon became an influential leader of the NOI (Nation of Islam, commonly known as the Black Muslims), which combined Islam with Black nationalism and sought to encourage disadvantaged young Black people searching for confidence in segregated America.

On February 21, 1965, during a speaking engagement in Harlem, three members of the NOI rushed the stage and shot Malcolm some 15 times at close range. After Malcolm's death, his bestselling book The Autobiography of Malcolm X popularized his ideas, particularly among Black youth, and laid the foundation for the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and 1970s.

Voting Rights Act

August 1965

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, aimed to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote as guaranteed under the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Voting Rights Act is considered one of the most far-reaching pieces of civil rights legislation in U.S. history.

In Mississippi alone, the percentage of eligible Black voters registered to vote increased from 5 percent in 1960 to nearly 60 percent in 1968. In the mid-1960s, 70 African Americans were serving as elected officials in the South, while by the turn of the century there were some 5,000. In the same time period, the number of Black people serving in Congress increased from six to about 40.

Rise of Black Power

After the heady rush of the civil rights movement's first years, anger and frustration was increasing among many African Americans, who saw clearly that true equality—social, economic and political—still eluded them. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this frustration fueled the rise of the Black Power movement. According to then–SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael, who first popularized the term "Black Power" in 1966, the traditional civil rights movement and its emphasis on nonviolence, did not go far enough, and the federal legislation it had achieved failed to address the economic and social disadvantages facing Black Americans.

A response to system Inadequacy

Black Power was a form of both self-definition and self-defense for African Americans; it called on them to stop looking to the institutions of white America, believed to be inherently racist, and act for themselves, by themselves, to seize the gains they desired, including better jobs, housing and education.

Black Panther

Also in 1966, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, college students in Oakland, California, founded the Black Panther Party. While its original mission was to protect Black people from white brutality by sending patrol groups into Black neighborhoods, the Panthers soon developed into a Marxist group that promoted Black Power by urging African Americans to arm themselves and demand full employment, decent housing and control over their own communities.

Assassination of MLK

On April 4, 1968, the world was stunned and saddened by the news that the civil rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot and killed on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to support a sanitation workers' strike. King's death opened a huge rift between white and Black Americans, as many Black people saw the killing as a rejection of their vigorous pursuit of equality through the nonviolent resistance he had championed. In more than 100 cities, several days of riots, burning and looting followed his death.

The accused killer, a white man named James Earl Ray, was captured and tried immediately; he entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to 99 years in prison; no testimony was heard. Ray later recanted his confession, and despite several inquiries into the matter by the U.S. government, many continued to believe that the speedy trial had been a cover-up for a larger conspiracy. King's assassination, along with the killing of Malcolm X three years earlier, radicalized many moderate African American activists, fueling the growth of the Black Power movement and the Black Panther Party.

Affirmative Action

1978

President John F. Kennedy first used the phrase "Affirmative Action" in 1961, in an executive order calling on the federal government to hire more African Americans. By the mid 1970s, many universities were seeking to increase the presence of minority and female faculty and students on their campuses. The University of California at Davis, for example, designated 16 percent of its medical school's admissions spots for minority applicants.

Allan Bakke

After Allan Bakke, a white California man, applied twice without success, he sued U.C. Davis, claiming that his grades and test scores were higher than those of minority students who were admitted and accusing UC Davis of "reverse discrimination." In June 1978, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the use of strict racial quotas was unconstitutional and that Bakke should be admitted; on the other hand, it held that institutions of higher education could rightfully use race as a criterion in admissions decisions in order to ensure diversity.

In the wake of the Bakke verdict, affirmative action continued to be a controversial and divisive issue, with a growing opposition movement claiming that the so-called "racial playing field" was now equal and that African Americans no longer needed special consideration to overcome their disadvantages. In subsequent decisions over the next decades, the Court limited the scope of affirmative action programs, while several U.S. states prohibited racially based affirmative action.

Jesse Jackson

American civil rights leader

Jesse Jackson, who had joined Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in its crusade for Black civil rights in the South, in 1971 founded "People United to Save Humanity or PUSH (later changed to People United to Serve Humanity), an organization that advocated self-reliance for African Americans and sought to establish racial parity in the business and financial community.

He was a leading voice for Black Americans during the early 1980s, urging them to be more politically active and heading up a voter registration drive that led to the election of Harold Washington as the first Black mayor of Chicago in 1983. The following year, Jackson ran for the Democratic nomination for president. On the strength of his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, he placed third in the primaries, propelled by a surge of Black voter participation.

He ran again in 1988 and received 6.6 million votes, or 24 percent of the total primary vote, winning seven states and finishing second behind the eventual Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis. Jackson's continued influence in the Democratic Party in the decades that followed ensured that African American issues had an important role in the party's platform.

Throughout his long career, Jackson has inspired both admiration and criticism for his tireless efforts on behalf of the Black community and his outspoken public persona. His son, Jesse L. Jackson Jr., won election to the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois in 1995.

Los Angeles Riots

1992

In March 1991, officers with the California Highway Patrol attempted to pull an African American man named Rodney King over for speeding on a Los Angeles freeway. After King allegedly resisted arrest and threatened them, four LAPD officers shot him with a TASER gun and severely beat him.

Caught on videotape by an onlooker and broadcast around the world, the beating inspired widespread outrage in the city's African American community, who had long condemned the racial profiling and abuse its members suffered at the hands of the police force.

The King case was eventually tried and in April 1992 a jury found the officers not guilty. Rage over the verdict sparked the four days of the L.A. riots, summing up to 55 people dead, more than 2,300 injured, and more than 1,000 buildings burned.

The next year, two of the four LAPD officers involved in the beating were retried and convicted in a federal court for violating King's civil rights; he eventually received $3.8 million from the city in a settlement.

Million Men March

In October 1995, hundreds of thousands of Black men gathered in Washington, D.C. for the Million Man March, one of the largest demonstrations of its kind in the capital's history.

Its organizer, Minister Louis Farrakhan, had called for "a million sober, disciplined, committed, dedicated, inspired Black men to meet in Washington on a day of atonement."

The march was intended to bring about a kind of spiritual renewal among Black men and to instill in them a sense of solidarity and of personal responsibility to improve their own condition. It would also, organizers believed, disprove some of the stereotypical negative images of Black men that existed in American society.

Estimates of the number of participants in the Million Man March ranged from 400,000 to more than 1 million, and its success spurred the organization of a Million Woman March, which took place in 1997 in Philadelphia.

Colin Powell

As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993—the first African American to hold that position—the Vietnam veteran and four–star U.S. Army general Colin Powell played an integral role in planning and executing the first Persian Gulf War under President George H.W. Bush. After his retirement from the military in 1993, many people began floating his name as a possible presidential candidate. He decided against running, but soon became a prominent fixture in the Republican Party.

Powell made headlines during the 2008 presidential campaign when he broke from the Republican party to endorse Barack Obama, the eventual winner and the first African American to be elected president of the United States.

Barack Obama

On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States; he is the first African American to hold that office. The product of an interracial marriage—his father grew up in a small village in Kenya, his mother in Kansas—Obama grew up in Hawaii but discovered his civic calling in Chicago, where he worked for several years as a community organizer on the city's largely Black South Side.

After studying at Harvard Law School and practicing constitutional law in Chicago, he began his political career in 1996 in the Illinois State Senate and in 2004 announced his candidacy for a newly vacant seat in the U.S. Senate. He delivered a rousing keynote speech at that year's Democratic National Convention, attracting national attention with his eloquent call for national unity and cooperation across party lines.

Obama's appearances in both the primaries and the general election drew impressive crowds, and his message of hope and change—embodied by the slogan "Yes We Can"—inspired thousands of new voters, many young and Black, to cast their vote for the first time in the historic election. He was reelected in 2012.

Kamala Harris

First Black US Vice President, 2021

In January 2021, Kamala Harris became the first woman and first woman of color to become vice president of the United States. Then-candidate Joe Biden had nominated Harris in August 2020 during the Democratic party's "remote" national convention. Harris, whose mother immigrated to the United States from India and whose father immigrated from Jamaica, was the first person of African or Asian descent to become a major party's vice presidential candidate—and the first to win the office.

In her victory speech in November 2020, Harris said that she was thinking "about the generations of women, Black women, Asian, white, Latina, Native American women—who throughout our nation's history have paved the way for this moment tonight—women who fought and sacrificed so much for equality and liberty and justice for all."

The Black Lives Matter Movement

The term "Black lives matter" was first used by organizer Alicia Garza in a July 2013 Facebook post in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a Florida man who shot and killed unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012.

Martin's death set off nationwide protests like the Million Hoodie March. In 2013, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi formed the Black Lives Matter Network with the mission to "eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes."

The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter first appeared on Twitter on July 13, 2013, and spread widely as high-profile cases involving the deaths of Black civilians provoked renewed outrage.

A series of deaths of Black Americans at the hands of police officers continued to spark outrage and protests, including Eric Garner in New York City, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Tamir Rice in Cleveland Ohio and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland.

The Black Lives Matter movement gained renewed attention on September 25, 2016, when San Francisco 49ers players Eric Reid, Eli Harold, and quarterback Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem before the game against the Seattle Seahawks to draw attention to recent acts of police brutality. Dozens of other players in the NFL and beyond followed suit.

George Floyd

The movement swelled to a critical juncture on May 25, 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic when 46-year-old George Floyd died after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by police officer Derek Chauvin.

Chauvin was filmed kneeling on Floyd's neck for more than eight minutes. Floyd had been accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill at a local deli in Minneapolis. All four officers involved in the incident were fired. In April 2021, Chauvin was convicted of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. The three other officers were charged with aiding and abetting murder.

Floyd's killing came on the heels of two other high-profile cases in 2020. On February 23, 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery was killed while out on a run after being followed by three white men in a pickup truck. And on March 13, 26-year-old EMT Breonna Taylor was shot eight times and killed after police broke down the door to her apartment while executing a nighttime warrant.

On May 26, 2020, the day after Floyd's death, protestors in Minneapolis took to the streets to protest Floyd's killing. Police cars were set on fire and officers released tear gas to disperse crowds. After months of quarantine and isolation during a global pandemic, protests mounted, spreading across the country in the following days and weeks.

Black Resistance

The Black History Month 2023 theme, "Black Resistance," explores how "African Americans have resisted historic and ongoing oppression, in all forms, especially the racial terrorism of lynching, racial pogroms and police killings," since the nation's earliest days.

By resisting Black people have achieved triumphs, successes, and progress as seen in the chattel slavery, end of dismantling of Jim and Jane Crow segregation in the South, increased political representation at all levels of government, desegregation of History in of educational institutions, the passage Civil Rights Act of 1964, the opening of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American DC and media. Black increased and diverse representation of Black experiences in resistance strategies have served as a model for every other social movement in the country, thus, the legacy and importance of these actions cannot be understated.

Resources

Be a visionary and activate during Black History Month!

Note: Some content has been created ad-hoc, some has been made available through organizations sustaining the movement

Explore more content

Black Leaders

Content created by Federica Sidoti, sources: History.com, Britannica.com, Wikipedia.org.

Testimonials

Learn how culture has shaped Kellogg EW students' lives through their stories

Want to be featured?

Please send us an email!

Other Important Dates

in February 2023

1