Black History Month is a time to commemorate achievement. DiversityInc provides a list of the important dates and relevant demographics you need to know.

“Negro History Week” was established in 1926 by Carter G. Woodson, an NAACP leader, educator and historian, to recognize the central role Blacks played in the development of the United States. The second week of February was chosen to coincide with the birthdays of abolitionist Frederick Douglass and President Abraham Lincoln. In 1976, the federal government expanded the celebration to Black History Month.

Download the Black History Month Timeline and Black History Month Facts & Figures by clicking the images below.

 1600s – 1700s

• 1619 Dutch ship brings 20 Africans to Jamestown, Va., the first enslaved Africans in the U.S.
• 1793 Eli Whitney’s new cotton gin increases demand for slaves
• 1793 Congress passes Fugitive Slave Act, making it a federal crime to assist a slave trying to escape

1800s

• 1808 Congress bans importation of slaves
• 1820 Missouri Compromise bans slavery above the southern border of the state
• 1831 Nat Turner leads largest slave rebellion prior to Civil War
• 1849 Harriet Tubman escapes to Philadelphia and subsequently helps about 300 enslaved people to freedom via the Underground Railroad
• 1857 In Dred Scott v. Sanford, U.S. Supreme Court declares that Blacks are not citizens of the U.S. and that Congress cannot prohibit
• slavery
• 1859 John Brown leads raid of U.S. Armory and Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, W.Va.
• 1861 South secedes from Union and Civil War begins
• 1863 President Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring “all persons held as slaves within any State or designated
• part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free”
• 1865 Civil War ends
• 1865 Thirteenth Amendment is ratified, prohibiting slavery
• 1868 Fourteenth Amendment is ratified, allowing Blacks to become citizens
• 1870 Fifteenth Amendment guarantees that right to vote cannot be denied because of race, color or previous condition of servitude
• 1870 Hiram Revels becomes first Black member of Congress
• 1896 U.S. Supreme Court rules in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregation doesn’t violate the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause as long as conditions provided are “separate but equal”

1900s

• 1900 William H. Carney becomes first Black to be awarded Medal of Honor
• 1909 NAACP is founded
• 1940 Hattie McDaniel becomes first Black to win an Academy Award
• 1947 Jackie Robinson becomes first Black to play Major League Baseball
• 1950 Ralph J. Bunche becomes first Black to win the Nobel Peace Prize
• 1953 Willie Thrower becomes first Black to play quarterback in the National Football League
• 1954 In Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, U.S. Supreme Court rules that racial segregation in public schools violates the 14th Amendment
• 1955 Two white men who confessed to murdering a 14-year-old Black boy, Emmett Till, for allegedly whistling at a white woman are acquitted by an all-white jury
• 1955 Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery, Ala., leading to the Montgomery Bus Boycott
• 1957 Little Rock Nine integrate Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas
• 1960 Four Black students stage famous sit-in at a whites-only Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C.
• 1961 Freedom rides begin from Washington, D.C.
• 1963 Four young Black girls are killed in the bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., church
• 1962 James Meredith becomes first Black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Violence prompts President Kennedy to
• send in 5,000 federal troops
• 1963 More than 200,000 people march on Washington, D.C., in the largest civil-rights demonstration in U.S. history; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gives his “I Have a Dream” speech
• 1964 President Johnson signs Civil Rights Act of 1964, giving the government more power to protect citizens against race, religion, sex
• or national-origin discrimination
• 1965 Malcolm X, former minister in the Nation of Islam and civil-rights activist, is assassinated
• 1965 Thousands participate in three protest marches from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., for Black voting rights
  President Johnson signs Voting Rights Act of 1965
• 1967 Thurgood Marshall becomes first Black U.S. Supreme Court justice
  In Loving v. Virginia ruling, Supreme Court declares law prohibiting interracial marriages to be unconstitutional
• 1968 Dr. King is assassinated
  Johnson signs Civil Rights Act of 1968, which prohibits discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing
• 1972 Shirley Chisholm becomes first major-party Black candidate to run for president
• 1983 Vanessa Williams becomes first Black Miss America
• 1984 Reverend Jesse Jackson becomes first Black to make serious bid for presidency
• 1986 First observation of Dr. King’s birthday as a national holiday
• 1990 Douglas Wilder of Virginia becomes first Black to be elected governor
• 1991 President George H.W. Bush signs Civil Rights Act of 1991, which strengthened laws on employment discrimination
• 1993 Dr. Joycelyn Elders becomes first Black Surgeon General

2000s

• 2001 General Colin Powell becomes first Black Secretary of State
• 2009 Barack Obama becomes first Black president