Timeline

Fetch Clay, Make Man takes place in May of 1965, just before the second Ali-Liston heavyweight title fight.  The years immediately preceding this fight were turbulent and dramatic, both for the United States and for the young fighter.  Ali grew from a teenage Olympian to a heavyweight champion and devout follower of the Nation of Islam.  The Civil Rights Movement found itself at a crossroads, as younger and more radical factions emerged.   It was a time of great hope and great violence—and an explosive moment for the nation.

April—May 1963: The Birmingham, Alabama campaign led by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), takes place in order to challenge segregation. The homes of various Birmingham African Americans involved in the campaign are bombed. Dr. King is arrested on April 12, 1963, and writes his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to white clergymen who urged him to call off the campaign.

June 11, 1963: President John F. Kennedy submits civil rights legislation that later becomes the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

June 12, 1963: Medgar Evers, the field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP, is killed in his driveway after leading a protest against segregation in Jackson.

August 28, 1963: The March on Washington takes place to pressure the government to act more quickly on civil rights legislation.

September 15, 1963: Four African-American girls are killed in a KKK bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama. Twenty others are injured.

November 22, 1963: President John F. Kennedy is assassinated.

January 23, 1964: The 24th Amendment of the Constitution is adopted and prohibits the “denial or abridgment” of the right to vote through the use of the poll tax and other taxes, which had been used to prevent black people from voting.

February 25, 1964: Cassius Clay beats Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title.

March 6, 1964: Cassius Clay announces that he has changed his name to Muhammad Ali.

April 1964: The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) is established to unseat the white Democratic party of Mississippi at the Democratic National Convention.

April 13, 1964: Sidney Poitier is awarded an Oscar for his performance in Lilies of the Field.

Summer 1964: Mississippi Freedom Summer, a campaign in the Deep South to register African-American voters, adds over 1,200 African-Americans to the voting rolls and increases the level of education for over 2,500 African-American high-school students.

March 1964: Malcolm X ends his affiliation with the Nation of Islam.

July 2, 1964: Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act, which creates the Equal Opportunity Commission, guarantees equal voting rights, prohibits segregation in public schools and places of accommodation involved in interstate commerce, and ends discrimination in all federally assisted programs, as well as in trade unions, schools and jobs involved in interstate commerce.

August 4, 1964: The bodies of three Civil Rights workers, James Cheney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, are found in Mississippi.

August 24-27, 1964: MDFP is not able to gain support at the Democratic National Convention.

December 11, 1964: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

February 21, 1965: Malcolm X is assassinated by gunmen at Harlem’s Audobon Ballroom.

March 7-March 21, 1965: Demonstrators led by SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) leaders march 54 miles from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest the murder of an activists and the laws and violence that keep African Americans from voting. On the first day, known as “Bloody Sunday,” state police assault 525 peaceful marchers. Dr. King flies in March 9 to participate but the demonstrators are turned back again. The courts allow the march to continue on March 17, and the demonstrators arrive in Selma on the 21st.

May 25, 1965: Second Ali-Liston fight.