1909
Founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)

1942
Founding of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE)

1943
Rev. A. Ritchie Low of Johnson, VT, visits Adam Clayton Powell’s Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and conceives the Vermont Plan to promote interracial harmony. Each summer through 1948, 75-100 children from Harlem spent two weeks living with a Vermont family.

1945
Membership in the NAACP reaches 500,000, up from 50,000 in 1941

1947
Jackie Robinson integrates Major League Baseball

1948
Following recommendations of a commission, President Truman proposes anti-lynching and anti-poll tax legislation, as well as action on voting rights protection and equal access to education, jobs, and housing. Congress approves none of these proposals.

Executive Order bans segregation in the U.S. military services

1954
Brown v. Board of Education
First White Citizens Council forms, in MS
Malcolm X returns to Harlem as a minister for the Nation of Islam, preaching a message of black self-respect and empowerment

1955
Brown v. Board of Education implementation order
Murder of Emmet Till in Money, MS
Montgomery Bus Boycott begins, December; thrusts Martin Luther King, Jr. to leadership

1956
Autherine Lucy becomes the first black person admitted to the University of Alabama
The Southern Manifesto states the resistance of most Southern congressmen and senators to Brown
Alabama outlaws the NAACP

1957
Founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
Integration crisis at Little Rock (AK) Central High School resolved by deployment of federal troops (in 1959)
Mild Civil Rights bill passes Congress, first since 1875
Burlington hotel refuses a room to the black Kake Walk date of black UVM football captain Leroy Williams, Jr.; following the outcry on campus, the VT legislature passes a bill prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations. Kake Walk, which began in 1893, was the highlight of UVM’s annual winter carnival, featuring a cakewalk performed by students in blackface
African-American William Pickens is elected president of the UVM student body

1959
Television documentary “The Hate that Hate Produced” brings the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X to public attention

1960
Sit-in at Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, NC, ignites a wave of similar student-led protests throughout the South
Foundation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
UVM students and faculty picket Woolworth’s on Church Street in Burlington for the chain’s refusal to integrate its Southern lunch counters

1961
Freedom Rides to test desegregation in interstate travel
Beginning of the Albany Movement, GA

1962
State-Federal struggle over integration of the University of Mississippi

1963
SCLC’s Birmingham campaign
George Wallace (AL) stands for “segregation forever”
Medgar Evers, head NAACP field organizer in MS, assassinated
March on Washington, King’s “I Have a Dream” speech
Bombing of the 16h Street Baptist Church in Birmingham; four girls killed
President Kennedy assassinated
Rev. Roger A. MacDonald of the Rutland Baptist Church is arrested in Williamston, NC, along with 13 other ministers from New England for protesting segregation, at the invitation of the SCLC. This leads to the formation of the Human Rights Council of Vermont

1964
24th Amendment abolishes the poll tax
Malcolm X breaks with the Nation of Islam
The Deacons for Defense and Justice, a self-defense group, organize in LA to confront the Klan
Mississippi Freedom Summer campaign by SNCC
Ted Seaver, a 25-year-old teacher at Montpelier High School, runs a Freedom School in Jackson, MS; he decides to return and establish a community center to nurture local leadership and provide social services: the Vermont in Mississippi project
Murder of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner in MS
Civil Rights Act. VT Senator George Aiken plays a key role in brokering a compromise that breaks an impasse: a public accommodations exemption for live-in owners of small boarding houses, known as the “Mrs. Murphy clause”
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party confronts the regulars at national Democratic Party convention
The Human Rights Council of Vermont, the Burlington chapter of the NAACP, and the Rutland chapter of the National Conference of Christians and Jews ally to form the Vermont Civil Rights Union.

1965
Selma campaign, culminating in the Selma to Montgomery March
The Vermont Civil Rights Union officially adopts and agress to finance the Vermont in Mississippi project
The SNCC Freedom Singers perform in Rutland to raise money for the Vermont in Mississippi project
Ted Seaver’s teaching contract is cancelled
Malcolm X assassinated
UVM Kakewalk changes blackface to green paint
The Seavers set up the Medgar Evers Neighborhood Guild in Jackson
Voting Rights Act
Watts Riots

1966
James Meredith starts a solitary March Against Fear from Memphis, TN to Jackson, MS and is shot by a sniper; march is continued by SCLC and SNCC activists.
Stokely Carmichael invokes “Black Power” in Jackson at the end of the Meredith March.
SCLC begins its campaign against segregation and race discrimination in Chicago
Formation of the Black Panther Party by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, in Oakland, CA

1967
King publicly opposes the Vietnam War
Vermont legislature passes a fair housing law pushed by the VCRU (it had failed the year before), which includes a version of the “Mrs. Murphy clause”
Riots in Detroit, Newark
Richard Hatcher (Gary, IN) and Carl Stokes (Cleveland, OH) elected first black mayors of major cities
Beginning of the Poor People’s Campaign

1968
Orangeburg (SC) Massacre in which police fire on black students protesting segregation at a bowling alley, killing three and wounding dozens
King supports the Memphis sanitation workers strike
King is assassinated; riots break out in 100 U.S. cities
FBI expands COINTELPRO operation to target black nationalist groups
Gov. Phil Hoff reads the Kerner Commission Report and decides to create the New York-Vermont Summer Youth Project; several hundred inner-city youth come to VT for six weeks to work with VT youth on educational and cultural projects; in theory, VT youth will go to NYC at a future date
Nightriders fire into the home of Rev. David Johnson, newly arrived black pastor in Irasburg, VT; “the Irasburg Affair” implicates local and state police for a cover-up, for instead prosecuting Rev. Johnson for adultery, and for racial bias

1969
UVM terminates Kake Walk
New York-Vermont Summer Youth Project again brings hundreds of youths to VT, for the last time

1974
Federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity orders busing as a solution to segregated schooling in Boston

1991
The last blackface minstrel show is performed at the annual Tunbridge Worlds Fair