From Emmett Till to Barack Obama

Watts, 1965
The latent anger seething beneath the surface of America's inner cities boiled over repeatedly in the mid-1960s. In Los Angeles, after a California Highway Patrolmen refused to allow the brother of a man arrested for drunken driving to take the vehicle home, a crowd gathered and quickly morphed into a violent mob. By the time the rioting was over six days later, 34 people had been killed, 1,032 injured, and 3,952 arrested. Strikingly similar events took place in Detroit and Newark in 1967.

• TIME's 2008 Person of the Year
• The Assasination of Martin Luther King, Jr.