(Friday, April 12, 1963, Good Friday; during the African-American Civil Rights Movement (1955–68)) — Civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested and jailed today in Birmingham, Alabama, charged with contempt of court and parading without a permit for his part in the Birmingham campaign, a planned non-violent protest against racial segregation by Birmingham’s city government and downtown retailers.

During his time behind bars, King wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”; he was released on bond on April 20.

Video: 'Rosa Parks - Mini Bio'

(Tuesday, February 4, 1913) — Rosa Parks, a black woman whose 1955 refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus to a white man touched off the modern civil rights movement in America, was born Rosa Louise McCauley today in Tuskegee, Alabama.

(Wednesday, May 22, 2002) — A jury in Birmingham, Alabama, convicted former Ku Klux Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry of murder today in a 1963 church bombing that killed four black girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair.

Video: Lincoln's distress on Jan. 10, 1862, letter (at 12:13)

(Friday, January 10, 1862, during the American Civil War) — U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, in great distress, entered the office of Union Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs today.

Meigs later wrote: “He took a chair in front of the open fire and said, ‘General, what shall I do? The people are impatient: Chase has no money and he tells me he can raise no more; the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub. What shall I do?’”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2XGe9oAaTc

(Saturday, May 20, 1961) — A white mob attacked a busload of Freedom Riders in Montgomery, Alabama, today prompting the federal government to send in U.S. marshals to restore order.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwgqsXTvQns

This video tells the story of the integration of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system during the 1960's and 70's.

(Tuesday, April 20, 1971) — The U.S. Supreme Court, in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, today unanimously upheld the use of busing to achieve racial desegregation in schools.