1965
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is enacted in the United States. Due to the urging of Dr. Martin Luther King, the question "What is America for?" was brought up for national reappraisal. Questions regarding civil rights, human rights, activism, militancy, and "black power" dominated media attention. What followed was a turbulent period of progress, backlash, action, and reaction.
1965 January
Churchill suffers a stroke which his physician, Lord Moran, tells the family will probably be fatal.
1965 January 1
The Fatah Movement is founded in Palestine by Yasser Arafat and other Palestinian activists. Arafat, after graduating as an architectural engineer from King Fuad University, in Egypt (1951), had lived in Kuwait from 1958 until returning to Palestine.
1965 January 2
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. begins announcing his intention to call for demonstrations if Alabama blacks are not permitted to register and vote in appropriate numbers.
1965 January 4
The U.S. House of Representatives votes to seat five white Congressmen elected from Mississippi. Some 600 blacks assemble in protest outside the House chamber.
1965 January 15
A Jackson, Mississippi, federal grand jury hands down indictments for the June 1964 slaying of three civil rights workers-James E. Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. The following day, 18 men (including two law enforcement officers from the state of Mississippi) are arrested.
1965 January 18
Twelve blacks, including Dr. King, book rooms at Selma's Hotel Albert, becoming the first blacks accepted for this formerly all-white hotel. While signing the register, Dr. King is accosted by a white segregationist who is later fined $100 and given a 60-day jail sentence.
1965 January 19
Sheriff James G. Clark arrests 62 blacks in Selma after they refuse to enter the Dallas County courthouse through an alley door. Clark and his deputies arrest 150 other black voter-registration applicants the very next day.
1965 January 23
A U.S. federal district court issues an order that bars law enforcement officials from interfering with voter registration and warns against violence.
1965 January 24
Winston Churchill dies at age 90. After telling his son-in-law, Christopher Soames: "I am so bored with it," he never again made an intelligible remark to anyone. Churchill died at his home at 28 Hyde Park Gate in London shortly after 8:00 a.m. on the seventieth anniversary of the death of his father, Sir Randoph Churchill.
1965 January 30
Great Britain holds an elaborate State Funeral for Sir Winston Churchill.
1965 February 1
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and some 770 blacks are arrested in Selma, Alabama during protest demonstrations against discrimination in black voter registration. Dr. King remains in jail for four days before posting bond. During this time, more than 3,000 persons are arrested.
1965 February 4
A federal district court orders the county board of registrars to refrain from using an unduly difficult literacy test on voter applicants or from rejecting their application on petty technicalities.
1965 February 16
Three blacks and a white woman from Canada (described by
police as pro-Castro left-wingers) are arrested in New York City on charges of
plotting to blow up the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, and the Washington
Monument.
1965 February 18
Some 300 school-boycotting black students sweep through
the streets of downtown Brooklyn, New York, hurling bricks at policemen and
breaking store windows. The following day, an estimated 5,500 students are
absent from 27 schools.
1965 February 21
Malcolm X, 39-year-old black nationalist leader and
former member of the Black Muslim sect, is shot to death in the Audubon
Ballroom, New York City, as he is about to deliver an address before a rally of
several hundred followers (OAAU). After the murder, Black Muslim headquarters in New
York City and San Francisco are burned, and most Muslim leaders are placed under
heavy police guard. Three blacks: Talmadge Hayer, Norman 3X Butler, and Thomas
15X Johnson are later taken into custody, and charged with first-degree murder.
The trio is convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment on March 10,1966.
1965 February 25
U.S. District Court Judge W. Harold Cox dismisses a
federal indictment against 17 of the men accused of conspiracy in the June 1964
murder of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi. (see January
15 )
1965 February 26
Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old black, dies in Selma,
eight days after having been clubbed and shot during a night march in Marion, Alabama.
1965 March 7
An estimated 200 Alabama state troopers and posse men of the
Dallas County Sheriff's office halt the black civil rights marchers by charging into
their ranks, using tear gas, nightsticks, and whips in a reputed effort to
enforce Governor Wallace's order banning the demonstration. Seventeen blacks
were hospitalized and 67 others treated for injuries of varying severity,
including exposure to tear gas.
1965 March 8
Governor Wallace denies that the police had made an intemperate
display of force, and maintained further that police action in dispersing
marchers had undoubtedly saved many black lives. Dr. King then returned to Selma
to lead another March on Montgomery.
1965 March 9
President Lyndon B. Johnson states that he was certain that all
Americans "joined in deploring the brutality with which a number of black
citizens of Alabama were treated when they sought to dramatize their deep and
sincere interest in attaining the precious right to vote."
1965 March 9
1500 blacks and whites, among them hundreds of northern
clergymen and civil rights workers, begin a second march to Montgomery, with
Martin Luther King in the front rank. By that time, however, Federal Judge Frank
M. Johnson, Jr. had already issued a restraining order against the march. The
demonstrators again turned back, although they were allowed to pass a few
minutes in prayer before doing so.
1965 March 9
Three white Unitarian ministers are beaten in Selma, Alabama while assisting in the civil rights drive being directed by Martin Luther King Jr.
1965 March 11
Reverend James J. Reeb, a critically injured, 38-year-old white Boston minister, dies in a Birmingham hospital. A federal judge arranges with law-enforcement officials in Selma to allow more than 2,000 white and black sympathizers to hold memorial services there on March 15.
1965 March 13
Colonel Al Lingo, head of the Alabama Highway Patrol, admits that Jimmie Lee Jackson (see February 26 entry) was shot in Marion by a state trooper.
