A timeline tracing the history of Black travelers through the centuries
The movement toward recognizing the importance of preserving cultural richness led to the passage of a joint resolution of the General Assembly in 1993 that established the South Carolina African American Heritage Council, and to its establishment as a commission in 2001 by executive order of Governor Jim Hodges. Since.. Read More…
In 1964, Congress passed Public Law 88-352 (78 Stat. 241). The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Provisions of this civil rights act forbade discrimination on the basis of sex, as well as race, in hiring, promoting, and.. Read More…
Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated Southern United States in 1961 and subsequent years to challenge the non-enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decisions, Morgan v. Virginia (1946) and Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which ruled that segregated public buses, waiting rooms, and.. Read More…
Boynton v. Virginia was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court. The case overturned a judgment convicting an African American law student for trespassing by being in a restaurant in a bus terminal that was “Whites only.” The Boynton v. Virginia held that racial segregation in public transportation.. Read More…
The Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case was initially heard by a three-judge panel from the U.S. District Court in Kansas, which agreed that public school segregation had a “detrimental effect upon the colored children” and contributed to “a sense of inferiority,” but still upheld the “separate but.. Read More…
The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was founded by U.S. President Roosevelt as part of the Emergency Conservation Act. The CCC was a voluntary public work relief program that operated from 1933 to 1942 in the United States for unemployed, unmarried men ages 18–25 and eventually expanded to ages 17–28. The.. Read More…
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws for public facilities as long as the segregated facilities were equal in quality; a doctrine that came to be known as “separate but equal.” The decision.. Read More…
The Lei Áurea was preceded by the Rio Branco Law of September 28, 1871 (“the Law of Free Birth”), which freed all children born to enslaved parents, and by the Saraiva-Cotegipe Law (also known as “the Law of Sexagenarians”), of September 28, 1885, that freed enslaved people when they reached.. Read More…
On June 19, 1865, Union soldiers reach Texas and share the news of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. This becomes known as Juneteenth with annual celebrations initially just in Texas but now in many other cities and states across the United States. It is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of.. Read More…
United States President, Abraham Lincoln, issued the Emancipation Proclamation or Proclamation 95 which (legally) freed the enslaved. The proclamation declared “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.” From the first days of the Civil War, enslaved Africans had acted to secure.. Read More…