1. Early Days & Slavery Timeline By: Tameka Woodard

2. 1942 A black navigator, Pedro Alonso Niño, travels with Christopher Columbus's first expedition to the New World

3. 1739 Lucy Terry, a slave, composes "Bars Fight," the first known poem by an African American. A description of an Indian raid on Terry's hometown in Massachusetts, the poem will be passed down orally and published in 1855.

4. 1770 Attucks, an escaped slave, becomes the first Colonial soldier to die for American independence when he is killed by the British in the Boston Massacre.

5. 1776 A passage condemning the slave trade is removed from the Declaration of Independence due to pressure from the southern colonies

6. 1791 Benjamin Banneker publishes the first almanac by an blackAfrican-AmericanAfrican American and is appointed by President George Washington to help survey Washington, D.C. Benjamin Banneker

7. 1793 Congress passes the first Fugitive Slave Act, which makes it a crime to harbor an escaped slave.Fugitive Slave Act

8. 1827 The first African American newspaper in the U.S., Freedom's Journal, is published in New York by John Brown Russwurm and Samuel CornishFreedom's Journal

9. 1831 Nat Turner leads a slave rebellion in Virginia. Fifty-seven whites are killed, but Turner is eventually captured and executed Nat Turner

10. 1849 Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery. She returns to the South and becomes one of the main "conductors" on the Underground Railroad, helping more than 300 slaves to escape. Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad

11. 1863 President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation legally frees all slaves in the ConfederacyEmancipation Proclamation

12. All these dates are the dates that helped change history for us today. It did not take place right away but eventually it did.