Founded in 1942 by an interracial group of University of Chicago students, CORE pioneered key tactics of the modern civil rights movement, using sit-ins and other forms of civil disobedience to challenge segregation. Winning victories in northern cities in the 1940s and 1950s, CORE became active in the South with the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960. The following year CORE organized "Freedom Rides," sending black and white students south to disrupt segregated interstate bus service. Drawing much of its membership from college campuses, CORE kept up civil disobedience campaigns in the North as well as the South. The maps and charts below show the geography of CORE activism, locating more than 600 actions linked to the organization (see sources and methods below). Here is a detailed Timeline listing and describing each event. The maps are hosted by Tableau Public and may take a few seconds to respond. If slow, refresh the page.

Move between five maps and charts

In Progress: We continue to seek additional data and are eager to correct errors. Please Help. If you know something about CORE actions or chapters, please share it here.

Sources: CORE-lator 1950-1968 (incomplete); Seattle CORE-lator (incomplete); Chicago Defender, Cracking the Color Line and Calendar of Coersion (CORE pamphlets available courtesy of the Civil Rights Movement Archive). The New York Times articles are from the database developed for Dynamics of Collective Action in the U.S, 1960-1995. Stanford University: Susan Olzak, Doug McAdam, John McCarthy, Sarah Soule. We gratefully acknowledge that contribution and note that we have reformatted, recoded, and are using only selections from that massive dataset.

Methods note: This database is not complete and is not necessarily geographically representative. We have gathered information from the sources listed above, each of which had agendas that shaped how and what it covered. "Titles" are in almost all cases taken directly from the source. "Dates" are mostly event dates but in some cases represent the date of the publication. "Descriptions" were written by our researchers or by the Dynamics of Collective Action team. "Event types" are loose categories we have assigned. It should be understood that the categories often overlap.

Research and data compilation: Arianne Hermida

Maps: James Gregory

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