The U.S. Civil War ended when the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia surrendered to U.S. General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in south-central Virginia.
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An explosion at the Banner Mine in Alabama killed 128 men, almost all of them African American prisoners of the state who were forced to work in the mine under the convict leasing system.
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A successful boycott of the Norfolk Tars by Black sports fans leads the team to desegregate both the players and stadium seating.
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Billie Holiday was a legendary jazz singer and songwriter. Also born today, Harry Hay and Daniel Ellsberg.
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Enacted following Nat Turner’s Rebellion, this Virginia law prohibited the education of enslaved and free Black people, seeking to suppress potential uprisings. Several other states enacted similar bans at this time as well.
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Inspired by the First Maroon War, a group of enslaved Ghanaian rebels in Jamaica sought to overthrow the British colonialists and create an independent Black nation on the island.
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Twenty-four enslaved Africans launched a rebellion in Manhattan, New York.
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Little Bobby Hutton (age 17) of the Black Panther Party was shot dead by the Oakland police.
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The Tuskegee Student Uprising of 1968 was one of many instances when Black students fought to expand educational opportunities and create more equity on college campuses.
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Boston University refused to approve negotiated contract, so the faculty union called a strike, with Howard Zinn as co-chair of strike committee. Other staff and librarians also went on strike that spring.
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Robert Williams and other Black grocers wrote a letter to the Florida Freedmen’s Bureau calling for an end to high taxes levied against them to support former Confederates.
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The successful 1985 student blockade of Hamilton Hall lasted for three weeks, as students demanded that Columbia University divest from corporations profiting from apartheid South Africa.
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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while in Memphis to support the striking sanitation workers.
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Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his speech in opposition to the Vietnam War, calling for a “revolution of values.”
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In April 1917, soldiers entered the sugar town of Jobabo in eastern Cuba and, according to eyewitnesses, executed several British West Indian men.
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In the face of white supremacists’ threats, a Black Detroit judge upheld the law and acted for equal justice for Black churchgoers detained unlawfully after a deadly police shoot-out.
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The Southern Tenant Farmers Union broke away from a larger organization and became a racially integrated workers union.
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Jeannette Rankin took her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as the first woman ever elected to the U.S. Congress.
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The Standing Rock Sioux and allies founded a Spirit Camp along the proposed route of the Bakken oil pipeline, Dakota Access to protest the route's construction, and to raise awareness of its threat.
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The civil rights suit of Blackwell v. Issaquena Board of Education was filed on behalf of 300 African-American students from several schools across Issaquena County in Mississippi who had been suspended for wearing and distributing “freedom” buttons.
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