| 1866 | Johnson vetoes Civil Rights Act, it passes over his veto (April), Congress passes Fourteenth Amendment (June) |
| 1868 | Southern blacks vote and serve in constitutional conventions |
| 1869 | Congress passes Fifteenth Amendment, granting African Americans the right to vote |
| 1870-1871 | Congress passes Ku Klux Klan Acts to protect black voting rights in the South |
| 1877 | "Compromise of 1877" results in end to military intervention in the South and fall of the last Radical governments |
| 1881 | Booker T. Washington opens Tuskegee Institute in Alabama |
| 1903 | W. E. B. Du Bois calls for justice and equality for African Americans in The Souls of Black Folk |
| 1905 | African America leaders inaugurate Niagara movement, advocating integration and equal opportunity for African Americans |
| 1910 | NAACP founded |
| 1948 | Truman orders end to segregation in armed forces (July) |
| 1954 | Supreme Court orders schools desegregated in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (May) |
| 1955 | African Americans begin boycott of Montgomery, Alabama, bus company (December) |
| 1957 | Congress passes first Civil Rights Act since Reconstruction (August) |
| 1960 | African American college students stage sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina (February) |
| 1968 | Martin Luther King, Jr., assassinated in Memphis (April) |