The first major conflict on American soil in which Blacks served as soldiers was King William's War from 1689–1697. The last major conflict, prior to 1948, in which Blacks and whites fought in integrated units was the American Revolution from 1775–1783. The first major conflict since the the American Revolution in which Blacks and whites fought in integrated units was the Korean War from 1950–1953.²⁹

The jury deliberation in the Emmett Till murder trial in September 1955 lasted only 65 minutes. In a post-trial interview, one juror told a reporter that they would have delivered the verdict earlier had they not taken a break to drink soda-pop.³⁰

The ratio of Black riders to white riders on Montgomery, Alabama's public buses in 1955, prior to the boycott, was 5 to 1.³¹ The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted 381 days.³²

The first year, since earliest known records, in which no lynchings were reported in the United States was 1952. The number of lynchings reported in 1953 and 1954 was 0, but the number of lynchings in 1955 hit 8 (all victims were Black).³³

Before 1950, several southern states provided scholarships for Black students to enroll in colleges outside their borders, usually in northern states, rather than allow them to attend all-white schools in their region.³⁴

The first filed lawsuit that challenged school segregation in the United States was in 1848. In Roberts v. Boston, Benjamin Roberts filed suit against the Boston public school system for refusing to allow his five-year-old daughter to enroll in a local all-white elementary school. Stating that "prejudice is not created by law, and probably cannot be changed by law," the Massachusetts Supreme Court dismissed the case, thereby upholding school segregation. The U.S. Supreme Court would later cite this decision in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which established the doctrine of "separate but equal."³⁵

The Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education covered five individual cases. These five class action lawsuits called for a variety of challenges to school segregation originating in Delaware, Kansas, South Carolina, Washingon, D.C., and Virginia. Oliver Brown was one of nearly 200 plaintiffs from these five states. ³⁶

In a Gallup Pool taken in late 1958, Americans selected as one of their top "ten most admired men," Orval Faubus, the Arkansas governor who in 1957, deployed National Guardsmen to block court-ordered school integration.³⁷

In the early 1960s, the New Orleans chapter of the White Citizens' Council distributed a handbill imploring white parents to boycott "Negro records." "The screaming, idiotic words, and savage music of these records," the handbill read, "are undermining the morals of our white youth in America."³⁸

The White Citizens' Council, an organization created in 1954 to oppose desegregation, still exists today as the national Council of Conservative Citizens.³⁹