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Black American History Timeline

By Jessica P · Last reviewed October 17, 2026

Quick answer

Key dates in Black American history include 1619, when enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia; 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation; 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment; 1954, Brown v. Board of Education; 1964 and 1965, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts; and 1976, when Black History Month became national.

Each entry links to its source. Exact dates are given where the source gives them.

Slavery and resistance, 1619–1860

Date	Event	Source
Late August 1619	Captive Africans from the Ndongo kingdom arrive at Point Comfort, Virginia, aboard the White Lion.	NPS
1806	Boston's African Meeting House is built, now the oldest existing Black church building in the U.S.	NPS
1818	Frederick Douglass is born enslaved in Talbot County, Maryland.	LOC
1834	Boston's Abiel Smith School is built for Black children.	NPS
1859	Harriet Tubman moves her family to Auburn, New York.	NPS
1860	The Clotilda illegally brings 110 people from Benin to Mobile, Alabama.	AHC

Civil War and Reconstruction, 1861–1877

Date	Event	Source
July 1862	The Militia Act opens military service to Black Americans.	NPS
January 1, 1863	The Emancipation Proclamation takes effect in Confederate-held areas.	NARA
May 22, 1863	The War Department creates the Bureau of Colored Troops.	NARA
1865–1872	The Freedmen's Bureau operates, reuniting families and recording marriages.	NARA
December 6, 1865	The Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery is ratified.	NARA
July 9, 1868	The Fourteenth Amendment grants citizenship to formerly enslaved people.	NARA
February 3, 1870	The Fifteenth Amendment bars denying the vote because of race.	NARA
February 25, 1870	Hiram Revels becomes the first Black American U.S. senator.	Senate

Building institutions, 1878–1945

Date	Event	Source
1892	Ida B. Wells begins her anti-lynching campaign in Memphis.	NPS
1903	Maggie Lena Walker charters St. Luke Penny Savings Bank. W.E.B. Du Bois publishes The Souls of Black Folk.	NPS; NAACP
1909	The NAACP is founded.	LOC
1910	The Great Migration begins; about six million people leave the South by 1970. Du Bois starts The Crisis.	Census; NAACP
September 9, 1915	Carter G. Woodson and others found the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History.	ASALH
1920	Black-operated farms peak at 925,710.	USDA
May 31–June 1, 1921	A white mob destroys Tulsa's Greenwood District.	DOJ
February 1926	The first Negro History Week is observed.	LOC
1936	Mary McLeod Bethune becomes the first Black woman to head a federal agency.	NPS
July 19, 1941	The first advanced training class of Tuskegee Airmen begins.	NPS

The civil rights era, 1946–1975

Date	Event	Source
May 17, 1954	Brown v. Board of Education rules school segregation unconstitutional.	NARA
March 2, 1955	Claudette Colvin, 15, refuses to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus.	EOA
December 1, 1955	Rosa Parks is arrested in Montgomery, Alabama.	LOC
December 20, 1956	The 381-day Montgomery bus boycott ends.	King Institute
1961	Margaret and Charles Burroughs found the DuSable Museum in Chicago.	DuSable
June 11, 1963	Governor George Wallace blocks Vivian Malone and James Hood at the University of Alabama, then steps aside after President Kennedy federalizes the National Guard.	University of Alabama
August 28, 1963	More than 250,000 people join the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gives his “I Have a Dream” speech.	NARA
September 15, 1963	The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing kills four girls in Birmingham.	NPS
July 2, 1964	President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act.	NARA
March 7, 1965	Bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.	NPS
August 6, 1965	President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act.	NARA
October 1966	Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale found the Black Panther Party in Oakland.	NARA
October 2, 1967	Thurgood Marshall becomes the first Black American Supreme Court justice.	LOC
April 4, 1968	Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis.	NCRM
1968	Coretta Scott King founds the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta.	Encyclopedia of Alabama
1970	Kent State holds the first monthlong Black History Month.	Kent State

Recognition and remembrance, 1976–today

Date	Event	Source
February 10, 1976	President Ford issues the first Black History Month message.	APP
February 11, 1986	Congress designates National Black (Afro-American) History Month.	Congress
1991	New York's African Burial Ground is rediscovered. The National Civil Rights Museum is established in Memphis.	NPS; NCRM
February 21, 2001	Oklahoma's Tulsa Race Riot Commission submits its final report.	OHS
September 24, 2016	The National Museum of African American History and Culture opens.	Smithsonian
April 26, 2018	The Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice open in Montgomery.	EJI
June 17, 2021	Juneteenth becomes a federal holiday.	Congress
December 29, 2022	The African American Burial Grounds Preservation Act becomes law.	ASLA
June 27, 2023	The International African American Museum opens in Charleston.	NPR
July 8, 2023	The Africatown Heritage House opens in Mobile.	Encyclopedia of Alabama
January 2025	The Justice Department releases its review of the Tulsa Race Massacre.	DOJ
February 2026	The centennial of Negro History Week, themed "A Century of Black History Commemorations."	ASALH

Sources

Every fact on this page links to the source beside it. All sources cited: