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Congress passes the Civil Rights Act, which confers citizenship on African Americans and grants them equal rights with whites.
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The white supremacist organization known as the Ku Klux Klan is founded in Tennessee.
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KKK
From All Things Considered
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Five all-black colleges are founded: Howard University, Morgan State College, Talladega College, St. Augustine's College, and Johnson C. Smith College. There will be more than 100 predominantly black colleges by the middle of the next century.
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Sculptor Edmonia Lewis sculpts her famous work "Forever Free," which shows an African American couple as they hear that slavery has ended.
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Armed African Americans surround the county seat in Colfax, Louisiana, fearing whites will illegally overthrow the Republican government. About 300 African Americans are killed in the so-called Colfax Massacre.
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The Freedman's Savings and Trust Co., a bank for American-Africans which many thought was guaranteed by the U.S. government, fails and leaves a legacy of mistrust of white-run institutions.
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Thousands of African Americans migrate from the South to the West to escape exploitation and oppression. Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, a former slave, is a leader of this "Exodus of '79."
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Henry O. Flipper is the first African American to graduate from West Point. In 1889, he will write a book about his experiences, The Colored Cadet at West Point.
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Tennessee passes the first of the "Jim Crow" segregation laws, segregating state railroads. Other Southern states pass similar laws over the next 15 years.
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The Tuskegee Institute, an historic black university, is founded in Alabama to train African Americans as teachers and in agriculture and industry. Booker T. Washington is the first president.
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Black historian George Washington Williams publishes his History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, the first comprehensive and objective history of African Americans.
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Mississippi enacts a poll tax, which most African Americans cannot afford to pay, to try to keep blacks from voting.
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Timothy Thomas Fortune, a freed slave and journalist, founds the National Afro-American League, considered a forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
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African American journalist Ida B. Wells begins a crusade to investigate the lynchings of African Americans after three of her friends are lynched in Tennessee.
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African American physician Daniel Hale Williams performs the world's first successful open-heart surgery.
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African American intellectual spokesman Booker T. Washington gives his controversial "Atlanta Compromise" speech at the Cotton Exposition in Georgia, saying that African Americans should focus on economic advancement rather than political change.
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In Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that segregated, or "separate but equal," public facilities for whites and blackAfrican-AmericanAfrican Americans are legal. The ruling stands until 1954.
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