From chains to marches to a knee on a neck — the longest struggle in American history.
The story of race in America begins in 1619, when the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia. It runs through two and a half centuries of chattel slavery, a Civil War that killed 750,000, a brief promise of Reconstruction betrayed by a century of Jim Crow, a Civil Rights Movement that changed the law, and an ongoing reckoning that reached its latest inflection point when a Minneapolis police officer knelt on George Floyd's neck in 2020. This is not a story with a triumphant ending — it is a story still being written. Each generation inherits both the progress and the unfinished business of the last. This timeline traces the arc — from the slave ships to the streets — because the past is never past.
A curated dispatch of forgotten moments, pivotal turning points, and the stories behind the dates.