Timeline of Civil Rights Events

1936 to 1950

1936: Jesse Owens wins 4 gold medals the Berlin Olympics

1937: Joe Louis wins heavyweight-boxing championship (Jack Johnson, first in 1906), then defeats the “Great White Hope,” Max Schleming

1938: Harlem Riots

1939: “Gone with the Wind” premiers in Atlanta, MLK, Jr., age 4, attends

1941: A. Philip Randolph issues “Call to March”, President Franklin Roosevelt issues Executive Order 8802

1942: Internment of Japanese-Americans begins

1942: Zoot suit riots, Los Angeles; Sojourner Truth Housing Project riots, Detroit

1942: Margaret Walker Alexander wins Yale Young Poets award

1944: Supreme Court outlaws Texas white primary Smith v. Allwright

1945: Bess Meyerson, first Jewish Miss America (despite ‘Rule 7’ restricting contestants to “the white race”)

1945: Richard Wright, Black Boy

1946: Irene Morgan wins her against Virginia when the Supreme Court rules segregation on interstate transportation in unconstitutional

1947: Jackie Robinson becomes the first African American to play major league baseball when he signs with the Brooklyn Dodgers

1947: “Gentleman’s Agreement” published

1948: South African Daniel Francois Malan, apartheid advocate, becomes Prime Minister of South Africa

1949: Catholic schools and churches in Washington, D.C. desegregate under orders from Archbishop Patrick A. O’Boyle.

1950: Gwendolyn Brooks wins Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Annie Allen