1933: Lynch mobs kill forty-two blacks as lynchings increase in the southern U.S. states. 1991 and 1992: Los Angeles police officers beat unarmed Rodney King, and the following year the officers charged in connection with the beating are acquitted. The worst riot for violence and looting in U.S. history follows the verdict.

1948: Nationalist Afrikaner bloc wins the election in South Africa on an apartheid platform that favors the separation of the white and black races with the whites in power.

1992: South African whites vote 2 to 1 to give a mandate to the president of the country to end white-minority rule.

1939: The Daughters of the American Revolution refuse to rent Constitution Hall to Marian Anderson because of her race, although Anderson had been proclaimed as the world's greatest contralto by European critics. An audience of 75,000 gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to hear Anderson on Easter Sunday.

1987: Popular...