January 14, 1963--George C. Wallace becomes governor of Alabama. He famously insists on “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” in his inaugural address.
January 28, 1963--Clemson University in South Carolina is desegregated. South Carolina was the final state to hold out against desegregation.
February 19, 1963--Betty Friedan publishes The Feminine Mystique. The women’s movement gathers steam.
March 18, 1963--The Supreme Court of the United States rules in Gideon v. Wainwright that the poor must have access to counsel.
April 3, 1963--Southern Christian Leadership Council volunteers launch the Birmingham campaign with a sit-in.
April 12, 1963--Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, along with others, are arrested in Birmingham for “parading without a permit.”
April 16, 1963--MLK writes his Letter from Birmingham Jail, arguing that, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
May 2, 1963--Thousands of African Americans, including many children, are arrested for protesting in Birmingham. Commissioner Bull Connor turns fire hoses and police dogs on the demonstrators.
June 11, 1963--Governor Wallace of Alabama performs his Stand in the Schoolhouse Door in an attempt to prevent the desegregation of the University of Alabama by two students. That same day, President John F. Kennedy delivered the Civil Rights Address on radio and television, in which he proposed what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
June 12, 1963--Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers is assassinated in Jackson, Mississippi. His killer is finally convicted in 1994.
June 16, 1963--President Kennedy delivers a speech in West Berlin, in which he pledges support for West Germany. The speech remains a notable moment in the Cold War and the New Frontier.
July 11, 1963--South Africa’s apartheid government arrests members of the African National Congress as they meet in Rivonia, Johannesberg, South Africa.
August 7, 1963--the United Nations issues Security Council Resolution 181, calling for an arms embargo of South Africa.
August 18, 1963--James Meredith becomes the first African American to graduate from Ole Miss.
August 28, 1963--During the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, MLK delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The Lincoln Memorial played a significant role in the American Civil Rights Movement--in 1939 when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow African American contralto Marian Anderson to perform before a desegregated audience at Constitution Hall, it was arranged for her to perform on the Memorial’s steps.
September 1963--Governor Wallace again attempts to prevent the desegregation of schools in Alabama as he tries, and fails, to prevent four black students from enrolling at four elementary schools in Huntsville on September 9.
September 15, 1963--Four little girls are killed when a bomb explodes at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church. Three of the four men who planted the bomb were later convicted, in 1977, 2001, and 2002. The fourth died without having been charged.
October 1, 1963--the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women issues its final reports to President Kennedy.
October 8, 1963--Sam Cooke is arrested for trying to find lodging at a whites only motel in Louisiana. The incident inspires the song “A Change is Gonna Come.”
November 10, 1963--Malcolm X delivers a “Message to the Grass Roots” to listeners in Detroit, Michigan. The speech is famous for its distinction between house and field “Negroes,” but exhorted African Americans to unify, regardless of their religious differences to combat their common enemy--white people.
November 22, 1963--President Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas’s Dealey Plaza. Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson becomes the nation’s thirty-sixth president.
November 24, 1963--LBJ confirms that the nation will continue to support South Vietnam in the Vietnam War.
December 12, 1963--the United Kingdom recognizes the independence of Kenya.
December 19, 1963--the United Kingdom recognizes the independence of Zanzibar.

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