| | Highlights |
| 1527–1539 | Estevanico explores the Southwestern United States with the Spaniards. |
| 1619 Aug 20 | Twenty Africans arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, aboard a Dutch ship, the first blacks to be forcibly settled as slaves in the Colonies. |
| 1770 March | Crispus Attucks, an escaped slave, was among the five victims in the Boston Massacre. He is said to have been the first
to fall. |
| 1775 April 19 | Free African Americans fight with the Minutemen in the initial skirmishes of the Revolutionary War at Lexington and Concord. |
| 1777 Dec 31 | Recruitment of blacks as soldiers. Some 5,000 would participate on the American side before the end of the Revolution. |
| 1863 Jan 1 | The Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves in states in rebellion against the United States. |
| 1865 Dec 18 | The Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing slavery. |
| 1915 Sept 9 | Carter G. Woodson, Father of Black History, founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. |
| 1954 May 17 | In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the Supreme Court
completed overturning legal school segregation at all levels. |
| 1955 Dec 1 | Rosa Parks refused to change seats in a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. |
| 1964 Jan 23 | The Twenty-fourth Amendment forbade
the use of the poll tax to prevent voting. |
| 1986 Jan 20 | The first national Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday was celebrated. |
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| For more information and dates, click the number on the timeline at right to show the events for that century. |
