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Home > My Ancestors
> African American > Timeline:
1950-present
- 1950: Postwar migration increases the black population of Boston
to more than 40,000. Most of the newcomers are from
the South and they settle in the existing black neighborhoods.
Spanish speaking African Americans also begin to arrive
in the 1950s; they initially settle in the South End.
- 1951:
September, Martin
Luther King, Jr. arrives at Boston University
to study for his Ph.D. While in Boston, King would
meet Coretta Scott who, like King, was a southerner
attending a Boston school.
- 1967: Thomas Atkins becomes the first black person elected to
the city council at-large.
- 1968: April, Black community organizers in the South End erect
"Tent City" in protest of the urban renewal program
that left many people without affordable housing in
their own neighborhood.
- 1970: Boston's black population reaches 104,000.
- 1973: Roxbury Community College is founded after Boston's black
community pressures the state.
- 1974: The offices of the NAACP on Massachusetts Ave. in Boston
are firebombed in protest to the busing of children
to integrate schools.
- 1975: Bill Owens becomes first black State Senator.
- 1985:
Black
Bostonians vote on a referendum to secede from Boston
to form their own city, with Roxbury and Dorchester
as its principal parts. The city would be called Mandela.
It is voted down.
- 1988: Roxbury Community College opens at its current location
in its first permanent building. It is the only predominantly
black college in New England.
See 1850-1949
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