FACTBOX: Significant events in black American history

(Reuters) - Democratic Sen. Barack Obama is in a tight race with Sen. Hillary Clinton for the party's nomination to run against the presumptive Republican nominee John McCain in the November presidential election. Obama would be the first U.S. black president.

Following is a timeline of some of the significant events in black American history.

1619 - The first African slaves arrive in Virginia.

1787 - The U.S. Constitution states that Congress may not ban the slave trade until 1808.

1793 - The invention of the cotton gin increases demand for slave labor in the South. Fugitive Slave Act seeks to require free states to return fugitive slaves, but is rarely enforced in the North.

1808 - Importation of slaves banned.

1831-1861 - Around 75,000 slaves escape to the North and freedom using an "underground railroad".

1831 - Nat Turner leads a slave rebellion in Virginia.

1850 - Fugitive Slave Act revised to require law enforcement to return runaway slaves, forcing Northerners to choose between slavery and abolition.

1857 - U.S. Supreme Court decides the case of slave Dred Scott who sued for his freedom. Court said slaves were private property and no slave or descendant could be a U.S. citizen; Congress had no authority to outlaw slavery in federal territories.

1861 - The Confederacy is founded when the South secedes. The Civil War begins.

1863 - President Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all slaves in Confederate states free.

1865 - The civil war ends. Lincoln is assassinated. The 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlaws slavery.

1868 - The 14th amendment grants full citizenship to all African-Americans.

1870. The right to vote is given to black males.

1896 - The Supreme Court holds that racial segregation is constitutional, paving the way for segregation in the South.

1948 - President Truman issues an executive order desegregating the U.S. armed forces.

1954 - A Supreme Court decision declares racial segregation in schools is unconstitutional.

1955 - Emmett Till, a black teenager, is murdered in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman.

1955 - Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her arrest sparks a successful year-long boycott led by Martin Luther King to desegregate the city's buses.

1957 - The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a civil rights group, is founded.

1961 - Student and other volunteers known as "freedom riders" begin taking bus trips through the south despite violent opposition to test new laws that prohibit segregation.

1963 - King is jailed during civil rights protests in Birmingham, Alabama. Delivers "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington. Four black girls killed when bomb explodes at a Birmingham church.

1964 - President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act. Bodies of three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi are found. King wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

1965 - Civil rights leader Malcolm X is murdered. State troopers attack civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama. Congress passes the Voting Rights Act.

1968 - Martin Luther King is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Source:here#AAH-1960

(Editing by Jim Loney and Jackie Frank)