On March 2, 1955, Claudette Coluin, a teenager is arrested in Montgomery, Alabama for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person.
On December 1, 1955 Rosa Park is arrested in Montgomery for the same action Claudette Coluin had taken, refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person.
On December 5, 1955 the Montgomery Bus Boycott begins and lasts over a year, until the buses are integrated. The Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) is formed to coordinate the boycott and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is elected president.
November 1956: The United States Supreme Court rules that Montgomery bus segregation laws are unconstitutional. On December 21, the boycott ends in victory and the buses are integrated.
September 1957: Arkansas governor Orval Faubus orders the National Guard to keep 9 black students from integrating Little Rock's Central High School. President Eisenhower orders the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to protect the Little Rock 9.
In April 1963 massive protest demonstrations take place in Birmingham to challenge segregation. Led by police commissioner Eugene Bull Connor, the police attack protesters with dogs and fire hoses. Thousands of the protesters are arrested, many of them children. So many thousands of children are involved that the campaign becomes known as the Children Crusade.
June 1963 Alabama Governor George Wallace tries to prevent integration of the University of Alabama by standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama.
September 15, 1963: The Sixteenth Street Baptists in Birmingham are bombed. Four young black girls are killed in the explosion.
Feb 18, 1965: civil rights worker Jimmie Lee Jackson is beaten and shot by state police in Marion, Alabama. He dies eight days later.
March 7, 1965: Civil rights demonstrators begin a march from Selma to Montgomery to protest the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson and demand voting rights for blacks. They are brutally beaten by police officers while crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. The brutal attack becomes known as "Blood Sunday".
On March 9, 1965 Reverend James Reeb, a Boston minister, who had traveled to Selma to join the demonstration, is viciously beaten by a white gang and dies two days later.
On March 25, 1965 Viola Liuzzo is killed by Klansmen while driving demonstrators between Selma and Montgomery. She had come to Selma from Detroit to join the protest.
On August 20, 1965 Jonathan Daniel, seminary student and civil rights activist, is shot and killed at point blank range in Nayneville, Alabama. His killer is acquitted by an all white jury that was motivated by something other than the truth: We must confront this corrupt system, the corrupt system will never change unless we confront it.
