North Carolina TIMELINE

1586: English explorer Sir Frances Drake drops off captured African-Caribbean slaves on Roanoke Island

1669: Colonial Carolina Fundamental Constitution defines and legalizes slavery

1669-1715, 1737-1776: Years of limited suffrage for free black males

1765: Wilmington Slave Ordinance is enacted

1775: Merrick's Slave Insurrection—an unsuccessful attempt by a slave named Merrick to instigate a slave revolt frightens North Carolina slaveholders

1789, November 21: North Carolina ratifies the Constitution and joins the Union

1791-1793: North Carolina slave laws are codified

1831: Eruption of the Nat Turner slave insurrection in neighboring Virginia leads to the summary execution of more than a dozen North Carolina African Americans

1851: Adam Crooks and Jesse McBride, antislavery preachers, are run out of the state

1861, May 21: North Carolina secedes from the Union and joins the Confederacy

1865, March: United States Colored Troops march into Wilmington as an army of liberation

April: Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston surrenders to Union General William T. Sherman at Durham Station; Confederate resistance and slavery end in North Carolina

1866: North Carolina's “unreconstructed” assembly enacts the Black Code of 1866

1868, June 25: North Carolina is readmitted to the Union 1868-1870: North Carolina becomes part of Military District #2 commanded by Major General Daniel Sickles

21 African Americans are elected to the state legislature

1870-1871: Ku Klux Klan terror disrupts state elections

1870-1876: White Democrats “redeem” the state, establishing their political control

1877: “Jim Crow” segregation laws are adopted by the state legislature