The Civil Rights Era
The Ten Most Important Events
#1: The "I Have a Dream" Speech
On August 28, 1963, 200 thousand people joined the Mach on Washington in Washington D.C. Congregating at the Lincoln Memorial, participants listened as Martin Luther King delivers his infamous speech titled "I Have a Dream ".
#2: Montgomery Bus Boycott
#3: Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas
#4: Southern Christian Leadership Conference
#5: Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
#9: The Murder of Emmett Till
August of 1955: Fourteen-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till was visiting family in Mississippi when he was kidnapped, brutally beaten, shot, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Two white men, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, were arrested for the murder and acquitted by an all-white jury. They later boasted about committing the murder in a Look magazine interview. The case became a cause célèbre of the civil rights movement