📅 13 February 1960
Students trained in nonviolent action began coordinated sit-ins at segregated Nashville lunch counters. Workshops and local organizing prepared them to face hostility and arrest. The campaign...
📅 15 April 1960
Student activists met at Shaw University on 15–17 April at Ella Baker’s invitation and formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. They shared experiences and developed an independent...
📅 10 May 1960
Following months of sit-ins, local pressure and negotiations, several downtown Nashville lunch counters began serving Black customers on a nonsegregated basis. Student organization helped change...
📅 4 May 1961
An interracial group organized by CORE departed Washington by bus to test compliance with federal desegregation rulings. Riders challenged segregated seating and terminal facilities across the...
📅 17 May 1961
Student activists from Nashville resumed the rides after violence threatened to end the campaign. Diane Nash helped coordinate their continuation. The decision demonstrated that organized local...
📅 28 August 1963
A mass demonstration in Washington demanded civil rights protections, employment and economic justice. Movement and labour organizations brought their constituencies together for the March on...
📅 7 March 1965
John Lewis and Hosea Williams led marchers out of Selma toward Montgomery. State troopers and local law-enforcement officers attacked them near the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The violence exposed the...
📅 21 March 1965
Demonstrators departed Selma under federal protection after earlier attempts had faced repression. Local residents and national supporters sustained a five-day march demanding voting rights. Federal...
