Dr. Martin Luther King published his first book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. While at a book signing in Harlem, he is stabbed in the chest by Izola Ware Curry.
NAACP Youth Council begin sit-ins at Oklahoma City Lunch counters.
An employee of the Bethel Baptist Church at Birmingham, Ala., finds a dynamite bomb beside the church June 29 and moves it to an open area where it explodes without injuring anyone. The church’s pastor Fred L. Shuttlesworth is a civil rights leader and authorities will arrest a Ku Klux Klan leader in 1977 on charges of trying to blow up the black church.
The U.S. Civil Rights Commission swears in six members January 3 and begins operations.