c.1517 Black plantation slavery begins in the New World when Spaniards begin importing slaves from Africa to replace Indians who died from harsh working conditions and exposure to disease.
1619 Twenty Africans arrive in Jamestown, Virginia, aboard a Dutch ship. They are the first blacks to be forcibly settled as involuntary laborers in the North American British Colonies.
1641 Massachusetts becomes the first colony to legalize slavery by statute.
1663 The first documented attempt at a slave rebellion takes place in Gloucester County, Virginia.
1688 The Quakers of Germantown, Pennsylvania, pass the first formal anti-slavery resolution.
1739 The Cato revolt, led by a slave named Cato, becomes the first severe revolt mounted by slaves.
1770 Escaped slave Crispus Attucks is one of five people killed in the Boston Massacre.
1772 Fur trader Jean Baptiste Point DuSable decides to build a trading post near Lake Michigan, becoming the first permanent resident of a place later known as Chicago.
1773 Phillis Wheatley, the first notable black woman poet in the U.S., is acclaimed in Europe and America following publication in England of her work, “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.”
1775 Free blacks fight with the Minutemen in the initial skirmishes of the Revolutionary War at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts.
1777 Vermont becomes the first state to abolish slavery.
George Washington reverses policy and allows blacks to be recruited as soldiers. Some 5,000 will fight for America before the end of the Revolution.
1787 Richard Allen and Absalom Jones organize the Free African Society, a self-help group in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The U.S. Constitution allows a male slave to count as three-fifths of a man in determining representation in the House of Representatives.
1790 President George Washington names mathematician Benjamin Banneker to the District of Columbia Commission, where Banneker maps the layout of Washington, D.C.
1793 Congress passes the first Fugitive Slave Act, making it a crime to hide an escaped slave or to interfere with his or her arrest.
1800 Bondsman Gabriel Prosser plans the first major slave rebellion in U.S. history, massing more than 1,000 armed slaves in Virginia. The revolt fails and, 35 slaves, including Gabriel, are hanged.
1804 The Ohio Legislature passes “Black Laws” designed to restrict the rights of free blacks.
1808 A federal law prohibiting the importing of African slaves goes into effect. It is largely circumvented.
1817 The American Colonization Society is established to transport freeborn blacks and emancipated slaves to Africa, leading to foundation of a colony that becomes the Republic of Liberia.
1829 David Walker’s militant anti-slavery pamphlet, An Appeal to the Colored People of the World, calls for a widespread slave revolt.
The first National Negro Convention meets in Philadelphia.
1839 Slaves aboard the Spanish ship, Amistad, take over the vessel and sail it to Long Island. After being captured, the rebels win their freedom when former U.S. President John Quincy Adams successfully argues their case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
1847 Frederick Douglass launches an anti-slavery newspaper called The North Star.
1849 Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery. The so-called “Moses of Her People” would eventually return to the South at least 20 times, freeing more than 300 more slaves.
1855 Former slave John Mercer Langston becomes the first black to be elected to public office when he is elected clerk of Brownhelm Township in Ohio.
1857 The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision denies that blacks are U.S. citizens and denies the power of Congress to restrict slavery. The decision heightens tension between the states and pushes the nation toward civil war.
1861 James Stone of Ohio enlists to become the first black soldier to fight for the Union during the Civil War. Light-skinned and married to a white woman, his ethnic identity is revealed after his death in 1862.
1862 Congress officially allows blacks to enlist in the Union Army. More than 186,000 blacks serve, some 38,000 die.
1863 The Emancipation Proclamation frees slaves. The proclamation is not honored until after the Civil War ends.
1865 Congress establishes the U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to aid four million black Americans in transition from slavery to freedom. This so-called “Freedman’s Bureau” launches the 12-year period popularly known as the Reconstruction Era.
Congress outlaws slavery by passing the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
c.1866 Confederate states pass “black codes” laws to replace the social controls removed by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment.
Edward G. Walker and Charles L. Mitchell of Massachusetts become the first blacks to sit in an American legislature.
The U.S. Army forms black cavalry and infantry regiments. Fighting Indians on the frontier, they are nicknamed “buffalo soldiers” by the Indians.
1868 The South Carolina House of Representatives becomes the first and only legislature to have a black majority – 87 blacks to 40 whites. Whites reclaimed the majority in 1874.
The Fourteenth Amendment is passed, making blacks citizens of the United States.
1870 The Fifteenth Amendment, outlawing the denial of the right to vote, is ratified.
Joseph Hayne Rainey is the first black person elected to the House of Representatives. Later that year, Hiram Revels of Mississippi becomes the first black person elected to the Senate.
1875 Congress passes a Civil Rights bill banning discrimination in public places. The Supreme Court overturns it in 1883.
1877 Reconstruction ends as the last federal troops are withdrawn. Southern conservatives regain control of their state governments through fraud, violence, and intimidation.
1895 Booker T. Washington delivers his “Atlanta Compromise” speech, stressing the importance of vocational education for blacks over social equality.
1896 In Plessy vs. Ferguson, the Supreme Court supports the concept of separate-but- equal public facilities.
1903 W.E.B. Du Bois publishes “The Souls of Black Folk,” which declares: “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.” It also reveals the dual identity of black Americans.
1905 Madame C.J. Walker becomes the nation’s first black female millionaire when she develops and markets a method for straightening curly hair.
1908 Jack Johnson becomes the first black heavyweight champion when he defeats Canadian Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia.
1909 The NAACP is born out of a radical group of black intellectuals who made up the Niagara Movement.
1910 The National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes (National Urban League) is formed to help migrating blacks find jobs and housing and adjust to urban life.
1914 George Washington Carver of the Tuskegee Institute reveals his experiments concerning peanuts and sweet potatoes, popularizing alternative crops and aiding the renewal of depleted land in the South.
Marcus Garvey founds the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Jamaica to advance self-determination and establish a black nation in Africa. Within five years, Garvey migrates to th\e U.S. and makes the UNIA a leading force for black liberation.
1917 Paul Robeson paves the way for blacks in collegiate sports by becoming one of football’s first black All-Americans. A leading scholar, lawyer, athlete, activist, singer and actor, Robeson later becomes a primal force in the fight for civil and human rights.
1918 The First Pan-African Congress meets in Paris.

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