Civil Rights Movement Timeline

Civil Rights Movement: 1890-1900 1890: The state of Mississippi adopts poll taxes and literacy tests to discourage black voters. 1895: Booker T. Washington delivers his Atlanta Exposition speech, which accepts segregation of the races. 1896: The Supreme Court rules in Plessy v. Ferguson the separate but equal treatment of the races is constitutional. 1900-1910 1900-1915: Over one thousand blacks are lynched in the states of the former Confederacy. 1905: The Niagara Movement is founded by W.E.B. du …

…Ray in Memphis, Tennessee, precipitating riots in more than one hundred cities. 1968: Congress passes civil rights legislation prohibiting racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. 1968: Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King Jr.’s successor as head of the SCLC, leads Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C. 1969: The Supreme Court replaces its 1954 decision calling for “all deliberate speed” in school desegregation by unanimously ordering that all segregation in schools mush end “at once.”