Significant events of 1890-1939

SERIES - FIRST OF 5 PARTS

1901: Booker T. Washington dines with President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. Whites bitterly criticize the meeting as a departure from racial etiquette.

1903: W.E.B. Du Bois publishes The Souls of Black Folk, calling "the color line" the problem of the Twentieth Century. Du Bois suggests the "Talented Tenth" - college-trained leaders to elevate blacks economically and culturally.

1903: Orville and Wilbur Wright successfully fly a powered airplane (first manned flight).

1904: War between Japan and Russia - first time U.S. gets involved as a world power.

1905: The Niagara Movement, a group of black intellectuals, adopts resolutions demanding full equality in American life. Madame C.J. Walker develops a hair-straightening method, one step to becoming the nation's first black female millionaire.

1906: President Theodore Roosevelt orders 167 black infantrymen discharged dishonorably because of their silence regarding the shooting death of a white citizen in Texas.

1909: A group of whites shocked by the Springfield riot of 1908, during which two elderly black people are lynched and several thousand whites assault the black community, merges with W.E.B. Du Bois's Niagara Movement to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

1911: The National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes (National Urban League) is formed to help migrating blacks find jobs and housing and adjust to urban life.

1913: Timothy Drew (Prophet Noble Drew Ali) teaches that blacks are of Muslim origin.

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

1914: World War I begins.

1914: Marcus Garvey founds the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Jamaica to boost 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 to assist accurate and proper study of African-American history.

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

1918: World War II.

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

1922: Aviator Bessie Coleman, who refuses to perform before segregated audiences, stages the first public flight by a black woman.

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

1925: Josephine Baker becomes 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.

1928: Poet and novelist Claude McKay publishes Home to Harlem, the first fictional work by a black author to reach the best-seller lists.

1929: Stock market crashes.

1930s: Negro lynchings average 50 a year 1931. Walter White becomes NAACP's executive secretary, with the main objective of abolishing lynching.

1930: Benjamin Oliver Davis, Sr., becomes the first black colonel in the U.S. Army. He later oversees race relations and the morale of black soldiers in World War II and becomes the first black general in 1940.

1931: Nine black youths accused of raping two white women on a train go on trial in Scottsboro, Ala. The case becomes a cause among northern liberal and radical groups.

1932: In Tuskegee, Ala., the U.S. Public Health Service begins examining the course of untreated syphilis in black men without telling them of their disease or the 40-year study.

1932: President Roosevelt unveils his New Deal program.

1934: Wallace D. Fard, Nation of Islam movement founder, disappears; Elijah Muhammad begins his rise.

1936: Track-and-field athlete Jesse Owens wins four gold medals at the Olympics in Berlin. His victories derail Adolf Hitler's intended use of the games as a showcase for Aryan supremacy.

1938: U.S. Supreme Court rules University of Missouri Law School must admit blacks.

1939: Count Basie leads his legendary Kansas City band. Singer Marian Anderson performs at the Lincoln Memorial before 75,000 people after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow her to sing at Constitution Hall.

1939: The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund is organized. Charles Hamilton Houston consolidates some of the nation's best legal talents in the fight against legally sanctioned bias.