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Hege Library & Learning Technologies
Hege Library & Learning Technologies
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General African American Timeline |
Local Quaker & African American Timeline |
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1890 |
The National Afro-American League is founded in Chicago on January 25 by Timothy Thomas Fortune to promote racial unity and self-reliance. |
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1890 |
The disenfranchisement of African Americans is intensified with the approval of the Mississippi Plan on November 1. It allows use of unfair literacy test on black citizens before they can vote. Statues like this spread to South Carolina in 1895, Louisiana in 1898, North Carolina in 1900, Alabama in 1901, Virginia in 1901, Georgia in 1908, and Oklahoma in 1910. |
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1890 |
A white supremacist, "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman is elected governor of South Carolina. |
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1892 |
Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, is elected President of the United States on November 8.
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1894 |
The Pullman strikes lead to a national transportation crisis with much disruption, destruction and loss of life. African American strike breakers were hired leading to even more tension. |
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1895 |
Frederick Douglass, African American eloquent statesman and leader, dies on February 20. |
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1895 |
Six African American workers are killed in New Orleans when they are attacked by whites during a race riot on March 11-12. |
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1895 |
Booker T. Washington, president of the Tuskegee Institute, formulates the Atlanta Compromise. It is announce during his speech at the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition in which he says the "Negro problem" can be addressed with a policy of gradualism. African Americans would receive up to vocational or industrial training in exchange for not seeking right to vote and tolerating discrimination and segregation. |
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1895 |
The National Baptist Convention of the U.S.A is formed by combining three African American Baptist Conventions. It has three boards to foster Foreign Missions, Home Missions, and Education. |
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Baptist_Convention,_USA,_Inc. |
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1896 |
Plessy v. Ferguson is decided by the Supreme Court on May 18 legalizing racial segregation. With it, Jim Crow laws are sanctioned in stating that "separate but equal" is sufficient accommodation for the Fourteenth Amendment. |
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1896 |
The National Association of Colored Women forms on July 21 with Mary Church Terrell serving as the first president. Some of the other founders are Harriet Tubman, Margaret Murray Washington, Frances E. W. Harper, and Ida Bell Wells-Barnett. They become a vocal force in the fight for women's suffrage, against lynching, and to stop Jim Crow laws. |
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Association_of_Colored_Women |
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1896 |
William McKinley, a Republican, is elected President of the United States on November 3. |
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1896 |
George Washington Carver becomes director of the department of agricultural research at Tuskegee Institute and does extensive work with peanut, sweet potato, and soybean farming. |
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1897 |
American Negro Academy is established on March 5 to help foster African American scholarship. |
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1898 |
The Spanish-American War begins on April 2. There were sixteen African American regiments made up of volunteer recruits. Five of these soldiers would receive Congressional Medals of Honor when four of the regiments went into combat. |
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1898 |
The National Afro-American Council is founded on September 15. For a decade, it has a prominent role as the first national civil rights organization, fighting an up rise in lynching’s, violence, and discrimination. Bishop Alexander Walters was elected the first president. |
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1898 |
The Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 started on November 10 when white supremacist Democrats seize power in Wilmington, North Carolina, and carried out the only coup d’état in U. S. history. Two days prior, a Fusionist white mayor and biracial city council had been elected. These leaders and many African Americans in the community were attacked, killed, and run out of town by over 1500 white men. And a town that had been predominately black now had a majority of whites. |
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_Insurrection_of_1898 |
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1898 |
The North Carolina Mutual and Provident Insurance Company and the National Benefit Life Insurance Company of Washington, DC are established by African Americans. |
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1899 |
In order to protest lynchings, the Afro-American Council holds a national day of fasting on June 4. At least eighty-five African Americans were lynched in 1899. |
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1899 |
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1900 |
U.S. Census of 1900: |
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1900 |
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Total population................................................. |
75,994,575 |
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White...................................................................... |
66,809,196 |
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Black...................................................................... |
8,833,994 |
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American Indian..................................................... |
237,196 |
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Asian...................................................................... |
114,189 |
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Percent distribution by |
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Total population................................................. |
100.0 |
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White...................................................................... |
87.9 |
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Black...................................................................... |
11.6 |
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American Indian..................................................... |
0.3 |
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Asian...................................................................... |
0.2 |
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1900 |
At least 106 African Americans were lynched in 1900.
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1900 |
The 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle takes place with an award winning "Exposition des Negres d'Amerique" part of the United States world's fair pavilion. It is designed partly by Booker Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois to highlight African American achievements. Daniel A. P. Murray, Assistant librarian, Library of Congress, gathered a collection of African American works for this Expo. |
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1901 |
George Henry White gives up his seat as a Congressman from North Carolina. He is the last African American to serve in Congress during the Jim Crow era and last from the South until 1972. However, an African American, Oscar De Priest, was elected to Congress from Illinois in 1928. |
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1901 |
President McKinley dies on September 14, after being shot by an assassin in the prior week. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt becomes president. |
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1901 |
Booker T. Washington becomes the first African American to dine at the White House when President Theodore Roosevelt informally invites him to remain for dinner after their scheduled meeting on October 16. It causes a great furor in the public and media. |
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1902 |
Palmer Memorial Institute is opened in Sedalia, North Carolina, by Charlotte Hawkins Brown. It is the first college preparatory school for African-American students in the nation. |
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1903 |
W. E. B. Du Bois's book, The Souls of Black Folk, is published on April 27.
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1904 |
Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School is founded in 1904 by Mary McLeod Bethune. It will become Bethune-Cookman College. |
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1905 |
The Niagara Movement is founded with leadership from W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter. The first meeting takes place on the Canadian side of Niagara Fall and symbolizes the "mighty current" of change that they were calling for in their group's fight against discrimination, racial segregation and disenfranchisement. They were opposed to Booker T. Washington's advocacy of accommodation and conciliation by African Americans as a method to deal with the "Negro problem" |
Immanuel Lutheran College moves to E. Market St. in Greensboro from a prior location in Concord, North Carolina. It closed in 1961 and the building was later torn that. |
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1906 |
The Brownsville Affair or the Brownsville Raid occurs as African American Buffalo Soldiers, from the 25th Infantry Regiment of Fort Brown, react soon after they arrive in town. A fight breaks out between a Brownville merchant and a soldier due to the segregation and discrimination exhibited in the Texas town. The soldiers are then band from town. But gunshots later kill a white bartender and wound a policeman. The African American soldiers are blamed even when their commander states they had not left the barracks. |
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1906 |
The Atlanta Race Riot of 1906 occurs from September 22-26 in Atlanta, Georgia. Between 25-40 African Americans and two whites are killed during rioting sparked by competition for jobs and the struggle for civil rights. |
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1908 |
Thurgood Marshall is born on July 2 in Baltimore, Maryland. He will become the NAACP attorney in the case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that ended school segregation due to the unequal state of African American and white schools. Later he serves as the first African American justice on the Supreme Court. |
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1908 |
The Springfield Race Riot of 1908 occurs in the home town of Abraham Lincoln, Springfield, Illinois, on August 14-19. It is sparked by the arrest of two African Americans for assault (one of them proved to be a false accusation). As tensions build, the sheriff moves the prisoners out of town. This further enrages many whites and rioting, looting and burning occurs first sweeping through the black business areas and then to black residential areas. Many African Americans flee the city and some take refuge with the National Guard in the State Arsenal. At least seven people are killed, five of them white. This set a record as being the only riot in U.S. history where more whites were killed. |
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1908 |
William Howard Taft, a Republican, is elected President of the United States on November 3. |
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1909 |
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is formed on February 12, the 100th Anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth. Its early leadership included many Jewish Americans who empathized with the African American experience. The organization was formed to promote civil rights, education, social equality, and eliminate discrimination. The use of legal means through the courts was considered a key tool. |
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1909 |
Matthew Alexander Henson was an African American explorer. On his expedition with Admiral Robert Peary and four Eskimos, he stated that his footsteps were the first impressions at the Geographic North Pole. This makes him the first known individual to reach it. |
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