Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery and becomes one of the most effective and celebrated leaders of the Underground Railroad​.
Booker T. Washington founds the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama. The school becomes one of the leading schools of higher learning for African Americans, and stresses the practical application of knowledge. In 1896,George Washington Carver begins teaching there as director of the department of agricultural research, gaining an international reputation for his agricultural advances.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is founded in New York by prominent black and white intellectuals and led by W.E.B. Du Bois. For the next half century, it would serve as the country's most influential African-American civil rights organization, dedicated to political equality and social justice In 1910, its journal, The Crisis, was launched. Among its well known leaders were James Weldon Johnson, Ella Baker, Moorfield Storey, Walter White,Roy Wilkins, Benjamin Hooks, Myrlie Evers-Williams,Julian Bond, and Kwesi Mfume.
Malcolm X becomes a minister of the Nation of Islam. Over the next several years his influence increases until he is one of the two most powerful members of theBlack Muslims (the other was its leader, Elijah Muhammad). A black nationalist and separatist movement, the Nation of Islam contends that only blacks can resolve the problems of blacks.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kans.declares that racial segregation in schools is unconstitutional (May 17).
A chronology of black history from the early slave trade through Affirmative Action.