1960s Timeline

Mar. 28, 1962 - A program to increase Negro voter registration throughout the South was announced in Atlanta today. Major civil rights...

Mar. 20, 1962 - Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy asked Congress today to toughen Federal statutes against police brutality. He proposed...

Mar. 12, 1962 - Mike Mansfield (pictured center), the Senate majority leader, said today that he would call up for debate this week a...

Mar. 11, 1962 - Mrs. Coretta Scott King urged today that Negroes “at the bottom of the economic scale” be given “better than equal...

Mar. 10, 1962 - Because local hotels in Clearwater, Fla., refused to accommodate five Negro ballplayers, the Philadelphia Phillies moved...

Feb. 25, 1962 - Floyd Patterson (pictured right with Eleanor Roosevelt), the heavyweight boxing champion, said today that he felt guilty...

Feb. 14, 1962 - White persons living in Macon, Ga., who had done little bus riding in recent years started using city buses today in an...

Feb. 6, 1962 - Twenty-nine Memphis stores desegregated dining rooms and lunch counters today. The move came quietly after meetings...

Feb. 1, 1962 - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, announced today a “recruiting tour”...

Jan. 28, 1962 - Official segregation has virtually ended at bus and railroad terminals in the South, Justice Department sources reported...

Jan. 24, 1962 - The national director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was convicted of breach of peace in Jackson, Miss., today...

Jan. 23, 1962 - Here is video of a debate between Black Muslim Minister Malcolm X (right) and Bayard Rustin (left) of the Southern...

Jan. 23, 1962 - Lunch counters in Columbus, Ga., were quietly desegregated today. The city of 118,000, situated near Fort Benning, the...

Jan. 20, 1962 - Legal activity for civil rights this year will include an all-out desegregation drive in Mississippi, more numerous...

Jan. 16, 1962 - Three Negro churches in Birmingham, Ala., were bombed tonight. Two were damaged severely. Two of the bombings took place...

Jan. 15, 1962 - The Cosmos Club, by a voice vote, overwhelmingly put itself on record today as opposed to racial, color, or religious...

Jan. 15, 1962 - Representative John V. Lindsay, Manhattan Republican, today wrote a letter to President Kennedy deploring “abandonment of...

Jan. 15, 1962 - President Kennedy said today that he would act to advance Negro rights “in a way which will maintain a consensus” of...

Jan. 14, 1962 - Federal Judge Sidney Mize is scheduled to open a final hearing tomorrow on Mississippi’s first integration lawsuit in the...

Jan. 6, 1962 - In Georgia’s Reidsville Prison, a 15-year-old Negro boy, Preston Cobb Jr., is under sentence of death for killing a...