1963

Timothy Leary is fired from Harvard’s faculty for using students in his research on the effects of hallucinogenic drugs; his slogan “Tune in, turn on, drop out” becomes a rallying cry of the counterculture.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Martin Luther King, Jr., organize civil rights protests in Birmingham, Alabama, resulting in King’s arrest; while incarcerated, King writes his famous essay “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

Millions of television viewers watch as high-pressure hoses and attack dogs are turned on peaceful civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama.

Medgar Evers, a field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), is murdered in Jackson, Mississippi.

Four young black girls are killed in a church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama.

Approximately 250,000 people march on Washington to demonstrate for civil rights.

U. S. Congress passes the Equal Pay Act of 1963, which ensures that women are paid at the same rate as their male coworkers, but only in certain limited circumstances.

In Gideon v. Wainwright, the U. S. Supreme Court rules that states must provide legal counsel to defendants.

President John F. Kennedy is assassinated; Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson succeeds President Kennedy.

Betty Friedan publishes The Feminine Mystique, galvanizing women dissatisfied with their traditional roles.

The Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 prohibits the testing of nuclear weapons in the earth’s atmosphere, in outer space, or underwater.

Alabama governor George C. Wallace personally bars three black students from the University of Alabama, vowing never to accept desegregation; the National Guard oversees the students’ registration later the same day.

In Abington Township v. Schempp, the Supreme Court prohibits prayer in public schools.