Generating page narration, please wait...
Post-Slavery American
Discover Music
Discover Video
Keywords
Listening Guides
References

Timeline of Important Events Related to Black Codes and Jim Crow


Year Event Legacy/Significance
1863 Emancipation Proclamation The document that helped free the slaves.
1865 Reconstruction begins Reconstruction refers to the period after the Civil War when the economy and social structures were rebuilt.
1865 Black Codes Laws passed on state and local levels to restrict the civil rights and civil liberties of Black people.
1866 Ku Klux Klan (KKK) The Klan is a hate group organization whose purpose is to protect the rights and interests of White Americans.
1870-1871 Enforcement Acts These acts were meant to protect the rights of Southern Blacks following the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution as part of Reconstruction.
1875 Civil Rights Act This act guaranteed that everyone, regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, was entitled to the same treatment in public accommodations. Declared unconstitutional in 1883 by the U.S. Supreme Court.
1876 Jim Crow Era The Jim Crow Era is a historical period between 1877 and the mid-1960s characterized by a racial class system where laws were designed to benefit Whites only. It operated primarily, but not exclusively, in Southern and border states.
1877 End of Reconstruction
1883 Civil Rights Act declared unconstitutional
1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Homer Plessy, a Black man, boarded a white train car and refused to get off. This case went to Supreme Court. The decision of the case was "separate but equal."
1898 Wilmington Race Riot White supremacists illegally seize power from a legitimately elected biracial government in Wilmington, North Carolina.
1906 Atlanta Race Riot Mass civil disturbance in Atlanta, Georgia. The cause was the rising tension between White and Black people competing for jobs, the desire for civil rights, Reconstruction, and the gubernatorial election of 1906.
1909 Founding of the NAACP The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded by William English Walling.
1921 Tulsa Race Massacre A massacre during a large-scale civil disorder confined mainly to the racially desegregated Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
1954 Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas Many argued that public schools did not give Black and White children equal education opportunities, and Oliver L. Brown wanted an equal education. As a result of this case, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, saying separate is not equal.
1965 "End" of Jim Crow Era

Sidney Bechet

The blues like spirituals were prayers. One was praying to God; the other was praying to man.

Sterling Brown

You can't play the blues until you have paid your dues