1831: Nat Turner leads slave uprising in Virginia 1834: anti-abolitionist riots in Philadelphia and

New York 1845: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life

of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself

1847: Liberia proclaims independence (first African Republic)

1849: Harriet Tubman (Underground Railroad)

1850: Fugitive Slave Act is strengthened

1852: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

1859: John Brown's revolt at Harpers Ferry

1859: Last U.S. slave ship lands in Alabama

1863-1865: American Civil War 1863: Emancipation Proclamation by President

Lincoln 1865: Slavery outlawed by 13th Amendment -

“black codes” issued in former Confederate states, severely limiting rights of freed women and men

1865: the Ku Klux Klan is created in Tennessee

1865: “40 acres and a mule” are promised for compensation to freed African American slaves after the Civil war— 40 acres of land to farm, and a mule with which to drag a plow so the land could be cultivated.

1868: Congress passes 14 th Amendment, granting blacks equal citizenship and civil rights

1870: 15th Amendment guarantees suffrage to all male U.S. Citizens

1875: Civil Rights Act

1877: Federal Troops withdrew from the South 1883: Supreme Court overturns Civil Rights Act

of 1875 1890: Mississippi limits black suffrage through

“understanding” test 1894: Ida B. Wells, A Red Record

1895: Booker T. Washington, Atlanta Exposition Address

1896: Supreme Court approves segregation (Plessy v. Ferguson)

1900: Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery

1903: W.E.B. DU Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

1906: Madame C. J. Walker opens hair-care business

1908: Jack Johnson becomes first African American heavyweight champion of the world

1917: the 369th Infantry Regiment (Harlem Hellfighters): the first African American Regiment in World War I

1919: 83 lynchings recorded during “Red summer of hate”

The lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, August 7, 1930

Billie Holiday, “Strange Fruit”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs Strange Fruit

Southern trees bear strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,

For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop,

Here is a strange and bitter crop.

20s: beginning of the Harlem Renaissance