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On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States of America, led by chief justice Earl Warren, decided that the doctrine of "separate but equal" was inherently unconstitutional. The decision struck down segregation of American schools and set the stage for desegregation of public facilities throughout the United States. This decision is marked as the beginning of the civil rights-era in "master narrative" readings of the movement's history. 

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The day after the Supreme Court decided the unconstitutionality of school segregation in Brown v Board of Education, newspaper across the United States and around the world reported their variable reactions to the prospect of desegregation.

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On May 21st, 1954, Jo Ann Robinson wrote to Mayor W. A. Gayle in her capacity as leader of the Women's Political Council of Montgomery. Robinson politely requested a redress of grievances, but stopped short of asking for the complete desegregation of the bus system (despite the letter coming only days following Brown v Board of Education).

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From Wikipedia: Claudette Colvin (born Claudette Austin; September 5, 1939)[1][2] is an American pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement and retired nurse aide. On March 2, 1955, she was arrested at the age of 15 in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a crowded, segregated bus. It occurred nine months before the similar, more widely known incident in which Rosa Parks, secretary of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), helped spark the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.

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From Wikipedia: Brown v. Board of Education II (often called Brown II) was a Supreme Court case decided in 1955. The year before, the Supreme Court had decided Brown v. Board of Education, which made racial segregation in schools illegal.[1] However, many all-white schools in the United States had not followed this ruling and still had not integrated (allowed black children into) their schools. In Brown II, the Court ordered them to integrate their schools "with all deliberate speed."[

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Responding to the proposed desegregation of American schools, Black writer and cultural critic Zora Neale Hurston offered a defense of Black schools and railed against the prospect of Black children being forced to learn within racist institutions.

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Mamie Till-Mobley asked that her son, Emmett Till, be given an open casket funeral on September 6, 1955, so the world could see what his murderers had done. 

On September 15, 1955, JET magazine featured an image of Emmett Till's open casket on its cover. The image drew revulsion towards the lynching from around the world.

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On September 23 the all-white, all-male jury (both women and blacks had been banned) acquitted both Milam and Bryant after a 67-minute deliberation; one juror said, "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't have taken that long."

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On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks rejected bus driver James F. Blake's order to vacate a row of four seats in the "colored" section in favor of a white passenger, once the "white" section was filled. A police officer arrested her.

Parks later said about being asked to move to the rear of the bus, "I thought of Emmett Till—a 14-year-old African American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store, whose killers were tried and acquitted—and I just couldn't go back."

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The protest that brought Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr to public attention, the Montgomery Bus Boycott's successful demonstration of nonviolent resistance to segregation continues to be celebrated as the pinnacle of civil rights movement activism. 

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At Holt Street Baptist Church, Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr addresses a crowd of people following the first day of the Montgomery Bus Boycott

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Journalist Willie M. Lee interviewed a number of the bus boycotters in Montgomery. In this piece, someone identified only as a "store maid" expressed their adoration of Martin Luther King, Jr. and their willingness to defend themselves, violently, against racist abuse.

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In conjunction with the tactic of Massive Resistance, 'The Declaration of Constitutional Principles' (known informally as the Southern Manifesto) was drafted to support reversing the landmark Supreme Court 1954 ruling Brown v. Board of Education, which determined that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. Written in February and March 1956, during the 84th United States Congress, the manifesto was signed by 19 US Senators and 82 Representatives from the Southern United States. The signatories included the entire congressional delegations from Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia, most of the members from Florida and North Carolina, and several members from Tennessee and Texas.

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Ghana's independence had a powerful resonance across the Black Atlantic and especially in the United States. Many African American leaders traveled to Accra for the occasion, including Adam Clayton Powell and Martin Luther King, Jr.

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From Wikipedia: The Little Rock Nine were a group of nine African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas. They then attended after the intervention of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

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On February 1, 1960, four Black students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University sat at the segregated "whites only" lunch counter of Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina, and demanded service. Refused by servers, they refused to leave, and the Greensboro Lunch Counter Sit-Ins began. After several months of nonviolent protest, the students experiencing escalating violence from White citizens, the lunch counters were segregated. In tandem with the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the sit-in movement demonstrated the power of nonviolent protest. 

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The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced /snɪk/ SNIK) was the principal channel of student commitment in the United States to the civil rights movement during the 1960s.

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President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana declared at a rally in Harlem yesterday afternoon that the 20,000,000 Americans of African ancestry constituted the "strongest link between the people of North America and the people of Africa."

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From Wikipedia: Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated Southern United States in 1961 and subsequent years to challenge the non-enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decisions Morgan v. Virginia (1946) and Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional.[3] The Southern states had ignored the rulings and the federal government did nothing to enforce them. The first Freedom Ride left Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961,[4] and was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans on May 17.[5]

The Freedom Riders challenged this status quo by riding interstate buses in the South in mixed racial groups to challenge local laws or customs that enforced segregation in seating. The Freedom Rides, and the violent reactions they provoked, bolstered the credibility of the American Civil Rights Movement. They called national attention to the disregard for the federal law and the local violence used to enforce segregation in the southern United States. Police arrested riders for trespassing, unlawful assembly, violating state and local Jim Crow laws, and other alleged offenses, but often they first let white mobs attack them without intervention.

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sponsored most of the subsequent Freedom Rides, but some were also organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The Freedom Rides, beginning in 1961, followed dramatic sit-ins against segregated lunch counters conducted by students and youth throughout the South, and boycotts of retail establishments that maintained segregated facilities.

The Supreme Court's decision in Boynton supported the right of interstate travelers to disregard local segregation ordinances. Southern local and state police considered the actions of the Freedom Riders to be criminal and arrested them in some locations. In some localities, such as Birmingham, Alabama, the police cooperated with Ku Klux Klan chapters and other white people opposing the actions, and allowed mobs to attack the riders.

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From Wikipedia: 

Freedom Summer, also known as the Freedom Summer Project or the Mississippi Summer Project, was a volunteer campaign in the United States launched in June 1964 to attempt to register as many African-American voters as possible in Mississippi. Blacks had been restricted from voting since the turn of the century due to barriers to voter registration and other laws. The project also set up dozens of Freedom Schools, Freedom Houses, and community centers such as libraries, in small towns throughout Mississippi to aid the local Black population.

The project was organized by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a coalition of the Mississippi branches of the four major civil rights organizations (SNCC, CORE, NAACP, and SCLC). Most of the impetus, leadership, and financing for the Summer Project came from SNCC. Bob Moses, SNCC field secretary and co-director of COFO, directed the summer project

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Three civil rights workers - James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Micky Schwerner - disappeared without trace on the night of June 21st, 1964.

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Spearheaded by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the aftermath of his predecessor's assassination, the Civil Rights Act came into effect on July 2nd, 1964.

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From Wikipedia: It took authorities weeks to fully investigate the disappearance of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. On August 4th, 1964 - some 6 weeks after their disappearance - their bodies were recovered from an earthen damn in Meridian, Mississippi, after a tip off from an informant. 

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The autopsy for James Chaney recorded extensive injuries, attesting to the brutality of his murder during Mississippi Freedom Summer.

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The 1964 Democratic National Convention coronated President Lyndon Johnson as the party's candidate for the forthcoming presidential election, but was notorious for shunning the request of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party for redress of grievances. Framed by Fannie Lou Hamer's searing testimony of the racism she had experienced at the hands of the Mississippi Democratic Party.

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Under police questioning, participant in the Mississippi Burning murders Horace Dayle Barnette confessed his role, revealing the deliberate planning and brutal execution of three civil rights workers.

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Known mostly for the police attacks on marchers on March 9th, 1965, the 54 mile Selma to Montgomery marches were organized by nonviolent activists to demonstrate the desire of African-American citizens to exercise their constitutional right to vote.

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"...and we shall overcome."

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After the civil rights act, the voting rights campaign of SNCC experienced violence and death in Mississippi. Nonviolent marchers were beaten to death in Selma, Alabama. Catalysed by these efforts, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6th, 1965.

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From Wikipedia: Initially, the TWWA was known as the Black Women's Liberation Committee (BWLC) and was created by black women within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), including Frances Beal, in 1968.[4] The BWLC then became the Black Women's Alliance (BWA) when it became independent from SNCC. The BWA approached the problems that black women were facing with an intersectional lens. They focused on the fact that they experienced different oppression than black men because of their intersectional identity. The BWA found that other women of color, specifically Puerto Rican women, were experiencing this oppression, later coined "triple jeopardy." The BWA was finally transformed in 1970, and the Third World Women's Alliance was officially established. 

The Third World Women's Alliance (TWWA) was a revolutionary socialist organization for women of color active in the United States from 1968 to 1980. It aimed at ending capitalism, racism, imperialism, and sexism and was one of the earliest groups advocating for an intersectional approach to women's oppression.

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From Wikipedia: The desegregation of Boston public schools (1974–1988) was a period in which the Boston Public Schools were under court control to desegregate through a system of busing students. The call for desegregation and the first years of its implementation led to a series of racial protests and riots that brought national attention, particularly from 1974 to 1976. In response to the Massachusetts legislature's enactment of the 1965 Racial Imbalance Act, which ordered the state's public schools to desegregate, W. Arthur Garrity Jr. of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts laid out a plan for compulsory busing of students between predominantly white and black areas of the city. The hard control of the desegregation plan lasted for over a decade. It influenced Boston politics and contributed to demographic shifts of Boston's school-age population, leading to a decline of public-school enrollment and white flight to the suburbs. Full control of the desegregation plan was transferred to the Boston School Committee in 1988; in 2013 the busing system was replaced by one with dramatically reduced busing.

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