1619
A Dutch ship with 20 African slaves aboard arrives at the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia.

1739
The Stono Rebellion, one of the earliest slave insurrections, leads to the deaths of at least 20 whites and more than 40 blacks west of Charleston in the black-majority colony of South Carolina.

1746
Lucy Terry composes the poem "Bars Fight," the earliest extant poem by an African-American. Transmitted orally for more than 100 years, it first appears in print in 1855.

1770
Crispus Attucks, an escaped slave, is killed by British soldiers in the Boston Massacre. He is one of the first men to die in the cause of American independence.

c. 1772
Jean-Baptist-Point Du Sable builds a fur-trading post on the Chicago River at Lake Michigan. Its success leads to the settlement that later becomes the city of Chicago.

1773
Phillis Wheatley, the first notable black woman poet in the United States, is acclaimed in Europe and America following publication in England of her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.

1790
Benjamin Banneker, mathematician and compiler of almanacs, is appointed by President George Washington to the District of Columbia Commission, where he works on the survey of Washington, D.C.

1793
Congress passes the first Fugitive Slave Act, making it a crime to harbour an escaped slave or to interfere with his or her arrest.

1799
Richard Allen becomes the first ordained black minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

1800
Gabriel (Prosser) plans the first major slave rebellion in U.S. history, massing more than 1,000 armed slaves near Richmond, Va. Following the failed revolt, 35 slaves, including Gabriel, are hanged.

1816
The African Methodist Episcopal Church is formally organized and consecrates Richard Allen as its first bishop.

1817
The American Colonization Society is established to transport freeborn blacks and emancipated slaves to Africa, leading to foundation of a colony that becomes the Republic of Liberia in 1847.

1820
The Missouri Compromise provides for Missouri to be admitted to the Union as a slave state, Maine as a free state, and western territories north of Missouri's southern border to be free soil.

1821
The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church is organized, developing from a congregation of blacks who left the John Street Methodist Church in New York City because of discrimination.

1822
Freedman Denmark Vesey plans the most extensive slave revolt in U.S. history. The Charleston rebellion is betrayed before the plan can be effected, leading to the hanging of Vesey and 34 others.

1829
Abolitionist David Walker publishes a pamphlet entitled Appeal . . . to the Colored Citizens of the World . . . , calling for a slave revolt. Radical for the time, it is accepted by a small minority of Abolitionists.

1831
William Lloyd Garrison begins publishing the antislavery newspaper The Liberator, advocating emancipation for black Americans held in bondage.

1831
Nat Turner leads the only effective, sustained slave rebellion in U.S. history, attracting up to 75 fellow slaves and killing 60 whites. After the defeat of the insurrection, Turner is hanged on November 11.

1833
The American Anti-Slavery Society, the main activist arm of the Abolitionist movement, is founded under the leadership of William Lloyd Garrison.

1839
Slaves revolt on the Spanish slave ship Amistad in the Caribbean. After their arrest in Long Island Sound, former U.S. president John Quincy Adams successfully defends the rebels before the Supreme Court.

1840
The Liberty Party holds its first national convention in Albany, N.Y. In opposition to fellow Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, members believe in political action to further antislavery goals.

1843
In a speech at the national convention of free people of colour, Henry Highland Garnet, Abolitionist and clergyman, calls upon slaves to murder their masters.

1847
Joseph Jenkins Roberts, the son of free blacks in Virginia, is elected the first president of Liberia. In 1849 he secures British recognition of Liberia as a sovereign nation.

1847
Frederick Douglass begins publication of the North Star, an antislavery newspaper, contributing to his break with white Abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of The Liberator.

1848
The Free Soil Party, a minor but influential political party opposed to the extension of slavery into the western territories, nominates former U.S. president Martin Van Buren to head its ticket.

1850
Speaking on behalf of the Abolitionist movement, Sojourner Truth travels throughout the Midwest, developing a reputation for personal magnetism and drawing large crowds.

1850
Harriet Tubman returns to Maryland to guide members of her family to freedom via the Underground Railroad. Later helping more than 300 slaves to escape, she comes to be known as the "Moses of her people."

1850
Congress passes a series of compromise measures affecting California, Utah, New Mexico, Texas, and the District of Columbia in an effort to maintain an even balance between free and slave states.

1853
Episcopalian minister Alexander Crummell becomes a missionary and teacher in Liberia, advocating a program of religious conversion and economic and social development.

1853
William Wells Brown--a former slave, Abolitionist, historian, and physician--publishes Clotel, the first novel by a black American.

1854
Author Frances E.W. Harper's most popular verse collection, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects, is published, containing the antislavery poem "Bury Me in a Free Land."

1855
John Mercer Langston, a former slave, is elected clerk of Brownhelm Township in Ohio. He is the first black to win an elective political office in the United States.

1856
Members of the Methodist Episcopal Church found Wilberforce University. After the university is closed during the Civil War, it is bought and reopened by the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

1856
In the ongoing contest between pro- and antislavery forces in Kansas, a mob sacks the town of Lawrence, a "hotbed of abolitionism," leading to retaliation by John Brown at Pottawatomie Creek.

1857
In its Dred Scott decision, the U.S. Supreme Court legalizes slavery in all the territories, exacerbating the sectional controversy and pushing the nation toward civil war.

1859
Harriet E. Wilson writes Our Nig, a largely autobiographical novel about racism in the North before the Civil War.

1859
The U.S. Supreme Court, in Ableman v. Booth, overrules an act by a Wisconsin state court that declared the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 unconstitutional.

c. 1859
Martin R. Delany, physician and advocate of black nationalism, leads a party to West Africa to investigate the Niger Delta as a site for settlement of African-Americans.

1861
The Civil War begins in Charleston, S.C., as the Confederates open fire on Fort Sumter.

c. 1861
Pinckney Pinchback runs the Confederate blockade on the Mississippi to reach New Orleans. There he recruits a company of black volunteers for the Union, the Corps d'Afrique.

1862
Future U.S. congressman Robert Smalls and 12 other slaves seize control of a Confederate armed frigate in Charleston harbour. They turn it over to a Union naval squadron blockading the city.

1862
The second Confiscation Act is passed, stating that slaves of civilian and military Confederate officials "shall be forever free," enforceable only in areas of the South occupied by the Union Army.

1864
Southern outrage at the North's use of black soldiers flares up in Confederate forces capturing Fort Pillow, Tenn., and massacring the black troops within; some are burned or buried alive.

1864
President Lincoln refuses to sign the Wade-Davis bill, which requires greater assurances of loyalty to the Union from white citizens and reconstructed governments.

1865
The Civil War ends on April 26, after the surrender of the Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and J.E. Johnston.

1865
Congress establishes the U.S. Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to aid four million black Americans in transition from slavery to freedom.

c. 1866
The states of the former Confederacy pass "black code" laws to replace the social controls removed by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment.

1866
The U.S. Army forms black cavalry and infantry regiments. Serving in the West from 1867 to 1896 and fighting Indians on the frontier, they are nicknamed "buffalo soldiers" by the Indians.

1866
With the complicity of local civilian authorities and police, rioting whites kill 35 black citizens of New Orleans and wound more than 100, leading to increased support for vigorous Reconstruction policies.

1867
Howard University, a predominantly black university, is founded in Washington, D.C. It is named for General Oliver Otis Howard, head of the post-Civil War Freedmen's Bureau.

1870
The Colored Methodist Episcopal Church is organized, four years after the first efforts among black members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, to develop an independent church.

1870
Joseph Hayne Rainey is the first black elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. This congressman from South Carolina will enjoy the longest tenure of any black during Reconstruction.

1870
Hiram R. Revels of Mississippi takes the former seat of Jefferson Davis in the U.S. Senate, becoming the only black in the U.S. Congress and the first elected to the Senate.

1872
John R. Lynch, speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives, is elected to the U.S. Congress.

1877
Reconstruction ends as the last Federal troops are withdrawn. Southern conservatives regain control of their state governments through fraud, violence, and intimidation.

1879
Author Joel Chandler Harris' "Tar-Baby," an animal tale told by the Uncle Remus character, popularizes the sticky tar doll figure of black American folktales.

1881
Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Alabama is founded on July 4 with Booker T. Washington as the school's first president.

1883
Inventor Jan Ernst Matzeliger patents his shoe-lasting machine that shapes the upper portions of shoes. His invention wins swift acceptance and soon supplants hand methods of production.

1887
Florida A&M University is founded as the State Normal (teacher-training) School for Colored Students.

1887
Journalist T. Thomas Fortune begins editing the New York Age. His well-known editorials defend the civil rights of blacks and condemn racial discrimination.

1892
The offices of the Memphis Free Speech are destroyed following editorials of part-owner Ida B. Wells denouncing the lynching of three of her friends.

c. 1895
Cornetist Buddy Bolden, semi-legendary founding father of jazz, leads a band in New Orleans.

1895
A merger of three major black Baptist conventions leads to the formation of the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc., in Atlanta, Ga.

1895
At the Atlanta Exposition, educator Booker T. Washington delivers his "Atlanta Compromise" speech, stressing the importance of vocational education for blacks over social equality or political office.

1896
Believing African-Americans to be the descendants of the "lost tribes of Israel," Prophet William S. Crowdy founds the Church of God and Saints of Christ.

1896
Mary Church Terrell becomes the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, working for educational and social reform and an end to racial discrimination.

1896
Paul Laurence Dunbar, acclaimed as "the poet laureate of the Negro race," publishes Lyrics of Lowly Life, containing some of the finest verses of his Oak and Ivy and Majors and Minors.

c. 1900
Originally a slaves' parody of white ballroom dances, the cakewalk becomes a wildly popular dance among fashionable whites as well as white minstrels working in blackface.

1901
Booker T. Washington dines with President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. The dinner meeting is bitterly criticized by many whites, who view it as a marked departure from racial etiquette.

1903
W.E.B. Du Bois publishes The Souls of Black Folk, which declares that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line," and discusses the dual identity of black Americans.

1903
In protest to the ideology of Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois suggests the concept of the "Talented Tenth"--a college-trained leadership cadre responsible for elevating blacks economically and culturally.

1904
Joe Gans, perhaps the greatest fighter in the history of the lightweight division, loses to welterweight champion Jersey Joe Walcott in a 20-round draw.

1905
The Niagara Movement is founded as a group of black intellectuals from across the nation meet near Niagara Falls, Ont., adopting resolutions demanding full equality in American life.

1905
Madame C.J. Walker develops and markets a method for straightening curly hair, on her way to becoming the first black female millionaire in the United States.

1906
President Theodore Roosevelt orders 167 black infantrymen be given dishonourable discharges because of their conspiracy of silence regarding the shooting death of a white citizen in Brownsville, Texas.

1906
After educator John Hope becomes its president, Atlanta Baptist College expands its curriculum and is renamed Morehouse College.

1907
Black Primitive Baptist congregations formed by emancipated slaves after the Civil War organize the National Primitive Baptist Convention, Inc.

1908
In Springfield, Ill., the home town of Abraham Lincoln, the black community is assaulted by several thousand white citizens and two elderly blacks are lynched.

1909
A group of whites shocked by the Springfield riot of 1908 merge with W.E.B. Du Bois's Niagara Movement, forming the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

1910
The Crisis, a monthly magazine published by the NAACP, is founded. W.E.B. Du Bois edits the magazine for its first 24 years.

1911
The National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes (National Urban League) is formed in New York City with the mission to help migrating blacks find jobs and housing and adjust to urban life.

1913
Timothy Drew, known as Prophet Noble Drew Ali, founds the Moorish Science Temple of America in Newark, N.J. His central teaching is that blacks are of Muslim origin.

1914
George Washington Carver of the Tuskegee Institute reveals his experiments concerning peanuts and sweet potatoes, popularizing alternative crops and aiding the renewal of depleted land in the South.

1914
The Universal Negro Improvement Association is founded by Marcus Garvey in his homeland of Jamaica to further racial pride and economic self-sufficiency and to establish a black nation in Africa.

1915
Historian Carter G. Woodson founds the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in an attempt to assist the accurate and proper study of African-American history.

1915
Jack Johnson, first black heavyweight champion of the world, loses the title to Jess Willard, the "Great White Hope," in 26 rounds in Havana. Rumors claim he lost to avoid legal difficulties.

1915
A schism in the National Baptist Convention yields the National Baptist Convention of America, the largest black church in the United States.

1917
Racial antagonism toward blacks newly employed in war industries leads to riots that kill 40 blacks and 8 whites in East Saint Louis, Ill.

1918
James Van Der Zee and his wife open the Guarantee Photo Studio in Harlem. The portraits he shoots later become a treasured chronicle of the Harlem Renaissance.

1919
During the "Red Summer" following World War I, 13 days of racial violence on the South Side of Chicago leave 23 blacks and 15 whites dead, 537 people injured, and 1,000 black families homeless.

1919
A'Lelia Walker inherits the family business and estate upon the death of her mother, Madame C.J. Walker. In the 1920s she entertains the leading writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance.

1920
Marcus Garvey, leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, addresses 25,000 blacks at Madison Square Garden and presides over a parade of 50,000 through the streets of Harlem.

1921
Oscar Charleston, perhaps the best all-around baseball player in the history of the Negro leagues, leads his league in doubles, triples, and home runs, batting .434 for the year.

1922
Louis Armstrong leaves New Orleans, arriving in Chicago to play second trumpet in cornetist King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band. Armstrong's work in the 1920s would revolutionize jazz.

1922
Aviator Bessie Coleman, who later refuses to perform before segregated audiences in the South, stages the first public flight by an African-American woman.

1923
Charles Clinton Spaulding becomes president of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. He builds it into the nation's largest black-owned business by the time of his death in 1952.

1923
Pianist and orchestrator Fletcher Henderson becomes a bandleader. His prestigious band advances the careers of such black musicians as Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, and Roy Eldridge.

1923
Poet and novelist Jean Toomer publishes his masterpiece, Cane, an experimental novel often considered one of the greatest achievements of the Harlem Renaissance.

1923
Blues singer Bessie Smith, discovered by pianist-composer Clarence Williams, makes her first recording. She will eventually become known as "Empress of the Blues."

1924
Spelman Seminary, which began awarding college degrees in 1901, becomes Spelman College. The school began in 1881 with two Boston women teaching 11 black women in an Atlanta church basement.

1925
The New Negro, an anthology of fiction, poetry, drama, and essays associated with the Harlem Renaissance, is edited by Alain Locke.

1925
In an era when Ku Klux Klan membership exceeds 4,000,000 nationally, a parade of 50,000 unmasked members takes place in Washington, D.C.

1925
Countee Cullen, one of the finest poets of the Harlem Renaissance, publishes his first collection of poems, Color, to critical acclaim before graduating from New York University.

1925
Singer and dancer Josephine Baker goes to Paris to dance at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in La Revue nègre, becoming one of the most popular entertainers in France.

1925
A. Philip Randolph, trade unionist and civil-rights leader, founds the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which becomes the first successful black trade union.

1925
At a historic literary awards banquet during the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes earns first place in poetry with The Weary Blues, which is read aloud by James Weldon Johnson.

1926
The literary journal Fire!!, edited by young writer Wallace Thurman, publishes its first and only issue. The short-lived publication remains highly influential among the participants of the Harlem Renaissance.

c. 1926
Pianist, composer, and self-proclaimed inventor of jazz Jelly Roll Morton records several of his masterpieces, including "Black Bottom Stomp" and "Dead Man Blues."

1927
James Weldon Johnson, poet and anthologist of black culture, publishes God's Trombones, a group of black dialect sermons in verse accompanied by the illustrations of Aaron Douglas.

1927
Poet and playwright Angelina Weld Grimké publishes Caroling Dusk, an anthology of her poetry edited by Countee Cullen.

1927
Painter Henry Ossawa Tanner, whose works include "The Raising of Lazarus," becomes the first black American to be granted full membership in the National Academy of Design.

1928
Poet and novelist Claude McKay publishes Home to Harlem, the first fictional work by an African-American to reach the best-seller lists.

1929
John Hope, noted advocate of advanced liberal arts instruction for blacks, is chosen as president of Atlanta University, the first graduate school for African-Americans.

1931
Nine black youths accused of raping two white women on a freight train go on trial for their lives in Scottsboro, Ala. The case becomes a cause célèbre among Northern liberal and radical groups.

1931
Walter White begins his tenure as executive secretary of the NAACP, his principal objective being the abolition of lynching. By the time of his death in 1955, lynchings would become a rarity.

1932
In Tuskegee, Ala., the U.S. Public Health Service begins examining the course of untreated syphilis in black men, not telling them of their syphilis or their participation in the 40-year study.

1932
Wallace Thurman, young literary rebel of the Harlem Renaissance, publishes his satiric novel Infants of the Spring.

1934