1963	AUG. 28 (Washington, D.C.) More than 250,000 people join in the March on Washington. Congregating at the Lincoln Memorial, participants listen as Martin Luther King delivers his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. SEPT.15 (Birmingham, Ala.) Four young girls (Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins) attending Sunday school are killed when a bomb explodes at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a popular location for civil rights meetings. Riots erupt in Birmingham, leading to the deaths of two more black youth.
1964	JAN. 23 The 24th Amendment abolishes the poll tax, which originally had been instituted in 11 southern states after the defeat of Reconstruction to make it difficult for blacks to vote. MAY 4 - FREEDOM SUMMER The Mississippi Freedom Summer Project was organized in 1964 by the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a coalition of four civil rights organizations -- the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) -- to carry out a unified voter registration program in the state of Mississippi. Both COFO and the Summer Project were the result of the "Sit-In" and "Freedom Ride" movements of 1960 and 1961, and of SNCC's early efforts to organize voter registration drives throughout Mississippi. The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) launches a massive effort to register black voters during what becomes known as the Freedom Summer. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) begins sending student volunteers on bus trips to test the implementation of new laws prohibiting segregation in interstate travel facilities. One of the first two groups of “Freedom Riders,” as they are called, encounters its first problem two weeks later, when a mob in Alabama sets the riders' bus on fire. The program continues, and by the end of the summer 1,000 volunteers, black and white, have participated. CORE also sent delegates to the Democratic National Convention as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to protest—and attempt to unseat—the official all-white Mississippi contingent. JULY 2 President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination of all kinds based on race, color, religion, or national origin. The law also provides the federal government with the powers to enforce desegregation. The Act transformed American society. It prohibited discrimination in public facilities, in government, and in employment. The “Jim Crow” laws" in the South were abolished, and it became illegal to compel segregation of the races in schools, housing, or hiring. Enforcement powers were initially weak, but they grew over the years, and later programs, such as affirmative action were made possible by the Act.Title VII of the Act establishes the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). AUG.4 (Neshoba County, Miss.) The bodies of three civil-rights workers—two white, one black—are found in an earthen dam, six weeks into a federal investigation backed by President Johnson. James E. Chaney, 21; Andrew Goodman, 21; and Michael Schwerner, 24, had been working to register black voters in Mississippi, and, on June 21, had gone to investigate the burning of a black church. They were arrested by the police on speeding charges, incarcerated for several hours, and then released after dark into the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, who murdered them.