Renewed Legacy

The Macon Republican newspaper in Tuskegee, Alabama, published a notice from Sheriff G.W. Nuckolls advertising the planned sale of a 23-year-old enslaved Black man named Bob. According to the ad, the Macon County Circuit Court had ordered the sale as part of a ruling settling a debt dispute against a white man named Joseph B. Wynn—Bob’s enslaver.

The bodies of Black men, women, and children enslaved in the U.S. were assigned monetary values throughout their lives. An enslaved person’s purchase price was a painful reminder of the way his or her life was commodified. Banks and creditors accepted enslaved human “property” as collateral when underwriting loans, and they were authorized to “repossess” enslaved people if a debtor failed to repay the loan. Enslaved people were also appraised as human “assets” to allow enslavers to report on their “property” holdings for the purposes of insurance, wills, and taxes. Values for enslaved people could reach more than $5,000—equal to more than $150,000 today.

Through the Domestic Slave Trade, which facilitated the sale of enslaved people from the Upper South to the Lower South in the first half of the 19th century, newly settled Southern territories like Alabama and Mississippi became home to sprawling, profitable cotton plantations worked by enslaved Black labor. It is estimated that more than half of all enslaved people were separated from a parent or child through sale. Meanwhile, between 1819 and 1860, the enslaved population of Alabama grew from 40,000 to 435,000, amassing wealth and economic power for the state, fueling the growth of Northern industry, and inflicting horrific inhumanity upon the Black people held in bondage.

Slavery is a prominent though largely ignored foundation of this nation’s wealth and prosperity. The sale and labor of countless enslaved people—including a man named Bob who was advertised for auction on this day in 1853—laid the path for the Industrial Revolution, helped to build Wall Street, and funded many of the U.S.’s most prestigious schools.

Following an anti-slavery speech by Vermont representative William Slade, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly renewed and expanded a rule that prohibited any future discussion about the abolition of slavery in the House. The so-called “Gag Rule”—initially passed in 1836—remained in effect until 1844, preventing the topic of abolition from even being discussed for almost a decade.

The debate over slavery had divided the House, but the Constitutional provision that counted enslaved people as “three-fifths” of a person for the purposes of determining Congressional representation gave Southern representatives the majority they needed to completely shut down any debate on the subject. In December of 1835, South Carolina representative James Hammond proposed the initial Gag Rule that required, under the pretext of maintaining order in the House, that petitions or discussions about slavery should be immediately tabled without consideration or discussion.

The rule, which effectively silenced any representatives who opposed slavery, was instituted in May of the following year under James K. Polk, who was speaker of the House at the time and would later become U.S. President.

This laid the foundation for Virginia representative John Mercer Patton, who responded to William Slade’s anti-slavery speech in 1837 by renewing the Gag Rule. His resolution declared that “all petitions, memorials, and papers, touching the abolition of slavery, or the buying, selling, or transferring of slaves, in any State, District, or Territory, of the United States, be laid on the table, without being debated, printed, read, or referred, and that no further action whatever shall be had thereon.”

The 1837 Gag Rule was a more extreme version of the 1836 version, applying not just to current U.S. states but also to U.S. territories, which were administered by the federal government. It allowed the House to ignore without discussion the tens of thousands of petitions sent by citizens calling on the chamber to forbid the expansion of slavery into these territories.

The extraordinary act of barring all discussion of a central moral and political issue that was shaping the nation created untold challenges and is part of a legacy of avoidance and silence about racial injustice in America.

23-year-old Michael Griffith and his friends Cedric Sandiford and Timothy Grimes were traveling from Brooklyn to Queens in New York. When their car broke down in Howard Beach, a predominantly white, middle-class Queens neighborhood, the three young Black men walked to a local restaurant and asked to use the phone. When they were refused, the young men sat down at a table where they were soon confronted by a group of white teenagers. After a brief verbal altercation, the white teens left to attend a party, where one announced: “There’s some niggers in the pizza parlor—let’s go kill them.”

When Mr. Griffith, Mr. Sandiford, and Mr. Grimes exited the restaurant soon after, the white teens had returned with baseball bats and tree limbs. Mr. Grimes ran fast enough to escape the attack, but Mr. Griffith and Mr. Sandiford were brutally beaten. Fleeing the blows, Mr. Griffith ran into traffic on the busy Belt Parkway and was struck and killed by a car. The attack against Mr. Sandiford continued even as Mr. Griffith lay dying.

News of the attack spread quickly, sparking outrage and protests from the Black community and inspiring an anti-racism march through Howard Beach that crowds of white residents gathered to harass. In the press, many reports of the attack used dehumanizing language to describe Michael Griffith only by his race, while in some cases describing the young men accused of killing him as “teenagers” and “baby-faced.”

When Queens District Attorney John Santucci charged Scott Kern, Jason Ladone, and Jon Lester with reckless endangerment for their suspected roles in Mr. Griffith’s death, Santucci was accused of being inappropriately lenient and removed from the case, replaced by special prosecutor Charles Hynes. After the three defendants were prosecuted and convicted for Michael Griffith’s murder, Judge Thomas Demakos sentenced Scott Kern to 6-18 years imprisonment; Jason Ladone to 5-15 years; and Jon Lester, the accused instigator, to 10-30 years. While passing down his rulings, Judge Demakos asked, “What kind of individual do I have before me who, after witnessing a young Black man get crushed by a car, continues his reckless conduct by savagely beating another Black male with a bat?”

South Carolina passed a law that forced recently emancipated Black citizens into subservient social relationships with white landowners, stating that “all persons of color who make contracts for service or labor, shall be known as servants, and those with whom they contract, shall be known as masters.”

Following the Civil War and emancipation, many freed Black people in the South remained subjugated by their former white enslavers. In South Carolina and other former slaveholding states, many freed people continued to reside in the same communities, sometimes on the same land, working for white people who had previously claimed they “owned” them as property. Freedmen had limited opportunities to earn money to support themselves and their families and often continued to work as manual laborers in slavery-like conditions. Black Codes enacted following emancipation sought to maintain white control over freedmen and perpetuated the exploitation Black people had experienced during slavery.

South Carolina’s Black Codes, like others, contained many laws that applied only to Black people. The new law passed on this day required Black “servants” to work from dawn to dusk and to maintain a “polite” demeanor. South Carolina reached even further into Black laborers’ personal lives, prohibiting apprentices to marry without their “masters’” permission, forbidding farmers living on their “masters’” land to have visitors, and imposing a curfew. Another Black Code sought to restrict the upward mobility of the Black community by forbidding freedmen in South Carolina from pursuing any occupation other than laborer unless able to pay a $100 fee.

Georgia Gov. Herman E. Talmadge liked to portray himself as a champion of education who’d built hundreds of new schools, many of them for Black children. When it came to integration, however, Mr. Talmadge said he would sooner end public education in Georgia than allow Black children to attend school with white children.

“There is only one solution in the event segregation is banned by the Supreme Court,” Mr. Talmadge declared on December 18, 1952, anticipating how the justices would rule in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. “And that is abolition of the public school system.”

Mr. Talmadge was not an outlier. “The mixing of races in the schools will mark the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it,” South Carolina Gov. James F. Brynes, a New Deal Democrat and former U.S. secretary of state, told a group of white teachers in 1954. Defending that civilization fell to Southerners, he said.

The cornerstone of that “civilization” was the South’s rigid racial caste system, enabled and enforced by the state-mandated segregation that had relegated generations of Black children to vastly underfunded, ill-equipped schools—and in some places even denied those children access to high school.

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court invalidated racial segregation in public schools, ruling unanimously in Brown that separate education for white and Black children was “inherently unequal” and unconstitutional. Widely viewed as the beginning of the dismantling of the Jim Crow system, Brown galvanized civil rights leaders and enraged segregationist Southerners.

A year later, in a decision known as Brown II, the Supreme Court opted for a gradualist approach, ruling that school integration should “proceed with all deliberate speed.”

The vagueness of the order, however, emboldened segregationists across the South. NAACP attorneys were forced to file hundreds of lawsuits over the next two decades in response to widespread efforts to evade the Supreme Court’s decision.

Even before Brown II was announced, voters in Georgia, South Carolina, and Mississippi had approved constitutional amendments authorizing their legislatures to abolish public education if they were ordered to integrate.

From the Deep South stretching north to Virginia, opposition to school integration began coalescing into a mass movement of resistance. While its best-remembered images are of white mobs shouting racial slurs at Black schoolchildren in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Birmingham, Alabama, the resistance was powered by a broad swath of segregationists whose tactics included legal maneuvering, school closures, intimidation, and economic reprisals as well as violence. The resistors were bankers and business leaders, Kiwanis and Rotary Club members and clergy, and middle-class members of white Citizens’ Councils who took pains to distance themselves from the Ku Klux Klan—as well as officeholders from local school boards to state capitols to the halls of Congress.

“If we can organize the Southern States for massive resistance to this order,” Virginia’s influential, long-serving senator, Harry Byrd, said in February 1956, “I think that in time the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South.”

Massive resistance was endorsed in most Southern editorial pages. In Virginia, one especially influential editor, James J. Kilpatrick of the Richmond News Leader, worked behind the scenes against desegregation with Mr. Byrd and state officials. Mr. Kilpatrick churned out editorials denouncing the Court’s ruling as “an act of usurpation” by “a judicial junta” and arguing that the 19th century doctrine of interposition allowed states to ‘interpose’ themselves between the federal government and their citizenry. Virginia and a number of other states adopted this legal strategy to resist Brown and preserve segregation.

Mr. Kilpatrick would reveal his racial views several years later in an unpublished 1963 article titled “The Hell He Is Equal,” writing that Black people were “an inferior race.”

The Southern Manifesto

The call for resistance was enshrined in “The Declaration of Constitutional Rights,” also known as the “Southern Manifesto.” This document was crafted by Mr. Byrd and other U.S. Senators including South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, Mississippi’s James Eastland, and Arkansas’s J. William Fulbright. Designed to win over moderates and Northerners, the manifesto was cloaked in a reading of the U.S. Constitution that invoked Civil War-era theories of states’ rights. Ignoring decades of racial violence, disenfranchisement, and lynching, it said the Court’s ruling was “destroying the amicable relations which have existed between the white and Negro races.”

Expanding on the interposition argument, the Manifesto urged states to resist Brown. It was signed by 19 senators and 82 representatives, all from former Confederate states.

The support of prominent national figures further emboldened those who fought desegregation on the local level. Amis Guthridge, an attorney and prominent Little Rock segregationist, made note of the Manifesto at a rally in Jacksonville, Arkansas, telling the crowd, “We are not going to have trouble with public office holders.” Mr. Guthridge took that message across the South in speeches that claimed school integration was a Soviet scheme “to mongrelize the white race in America.”

Herman Talmadge had used similar language in his 1955 book You and Segregation, warning that nations “composed of a mongrel race” were easy prey—precisely “what the Communists want to happen to the United States.” The message resonated amid the climate of the Cold War. One year later, voters sent the former governor to the Senate.

Southern legislatures passed more than 450 measures designed to limit, delay, or evade Brown. The laws denied funding to schools that integrated, enabled firing of school employees who supported desegregation, suspended compulsory attendance in desegregating schools, authorized use of public funds to open hundreds of private white academies, and provided tuition grants to white families that encouraged them to pull their children out of public schools.

In 1955, North Carolina pioneered another tactic: the pupil placement law. Making no mention of race, the law empowered districts to maintain nearly all-white schools by assigning students to schools based on “race-neutral” criteria such as intelligence and psychological readiness. By 1958, every Southern state had a version of the statute.

Lest political pressure, public agitation, novel legislation, and revamped policies fail to stop desegregation, white violence emerged as yet another tactic deployed to nullify the force of Brown. Two Tennessee public schools were bombed in 1956. Four years later a bomb destroyed an Atlanta school, prompting The Atlanta Journal-Constitution editor Ralph McGill to write: “Men and women in high places who organize groups to resist court orders, those who urge pledges of never surrendering, and who encourage those of the Klan mentality, did not toss the explosive at the school. But in a very real sense, their hands were there just the same.”

Even President Dwight D. Eisenhower took no public stance on the merits of Brown but in private he sympathized with white Southerners. At a White House dinner while the case was pending in the Supreme Court, Mr. Eisenhower sat Chief Justice Earl Warren near John W. Davis, the Southern lawyer who had argued for segregation in Brown. The president called Mr. Davis “a great man,” and told the chief justice that Southerners weren’t “bad people…All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big, overgrown Negroes.”

“Our Way of Life”

Amid this atmosphere in the South, there was no room for moderates. The white Citizens’ Councils, whose numbers reached 250,000 by 1958, saw to it that Brown’s supporters lost jobs, mortgages, credit, and social standing. NAACP activists were labeled “Communist outside agitators.” In Elloree, South Carolina, 17 Black parents who signed an NAACP integration petition were fired or evicted. Fourteen withdrew their names.

In Walthall County, Mississippi, after the NAACP submitted a school desegregation petition, officials closed the county’s Black schools for two weeks and fired school employees believed to have aided the desegregation drive. When 53 Black residents of Yazoo County, Mississippi, signed a desegregation petition, the Citizens’ Council published their names in a newspaper ad. Retaliation was swift. Petitioners lost their jobs. A local bank’s president telephoned his customers on the list and told them to “get their money out, that the bank did not want to do business with them any longer.”

Meanwhile, Georgia’s Board of Education barred textbooks from describing discrimination against Black people. “There is no place in Georgia schools at any time for anything that disagrees with our way of life,” the chairman explained.

Showdown at Little Rock

Similar assumptions guided events even in places where desegregation appeared to be working. On September 4, 1957, shy, studious Elizabeth Eckford, 15, was the first of nine Black students to arrive at all-white Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas, on the first day of school. Elizabeth’s family had no telephone. She had not been informed that a group of ministers planned to escort the nine to school.

Little Rock officials had agreed on a plan to gradually integrate schools, starting with Central High. Seeing helmeted guardsmen with rifles in front of the school that morning, Elizabeth assumed they were there to protect her. But Gov. Orval Faubus had sent them—not to prevent violence, as he claimed, but to block the nine students from attending school with Central’s 2,000 white students. As Elizabeth approached the entrance, guardsmen crossed their rifles in front of her. They directed her back into the street, toward a white mob shouting racial slurs. “Lynch her!” people yelled. Elizabeth looked imploringly at one gray-haired woman whose expression seemed kindly. The woman spat in her face.

At a time when one in four white Southerners told pollsters they “favored violence, if necessary, to prevent school desegregation,” Gov. Faubus was overwhelmingly reelected the following year.

As resistance to desegregation continued, Black children still attended underfunded schools or—when officials closed schools for weeks, months, even years—stayed home. In 1956, Virginia’s governor closed three cities’ schools rather than integrate. The Supreme Court ordered them reopened. In 1959, Prince Edward County, Virginia, closed its public schools for five years, diverting tax monies to build a K-12 private academy for 1,400 white students and allotting their families tuition grants. Some 1,700 Black students were denied public education in the county where their parents worked and paid taxes.

By the time the Supreme Court reopened those schools in 1964, the county’s 3% illiteracy rate for Black residents ages 5 to 22 had risen to 22%.

Black families who tried to integrate Alabama schools in 1963 faced death threats, white mobs, and school doors blocked by armed police despite federal judges’ integration orders. “We are not fighting against the Negro people,” Gov. George C. Wallace said in a Labor Day speech. “We are fighting for local government and states’ rights.”

A few days later, Sonnie Hereford III, a Black physician and civil rights activist in Huntsville, walked his son to Fifth Avenue Elementary to start first grade. “There was a mob out there, I guess 150, 175 parents and kids,” Dr. Hereford remembered a half-century later. “They called my son and me everything you can think of.” State troopers turned father and son away, saying Gov. Wallace had closed the school. Similar scenes played out across the state—until President John F. Kennedy federalized Alabama’s National Guard and reopened schools.

Thus did six-year-old Sonnie Hereford IV become the first Black child to integrate an Alabama public school—nine years after Brown.

In fact, a decade after Brown, 99% of Black children in America still attended segregated schools. When federal judges approved token integration plans, and white parents availed themselves of pupil placement laws, “freedom of choice,” and private academies, or moved to the suburbs, little in the racial landscape of education changed.

In 1966, 450 Black students enrolled in Grenada, Mississippi, public schools under a court-ordered integration plan. After parents were threatened with firings and evictions, 200 pupils withdrew.

Civil rights activist Bruce Hartford described what the schoolchildren endured the first morning of classes: “A huge white mob surrounds Grenada’s elementary and high school… Radio-equipped scouts in pickup trucks [search] for Negro students coming to school and direct the mob to attack them.” Police did not intervene.

The New York Times reported how that day ended: “A throng of angry whites wielding axe handles, pipes and chains” attacked Black students leaving school. One pupil, age 12, “ran a gantlet of cursing whites for a full block, his face bleeding, his clothes torn…He finally escaped, limping.”

The Children of Brown

Integration gained momentum after the 1964 Civil Rights Act—which empowered federal officials to enforce desegregation—and other steps by the courts and Congress. By the early 1970s, schools in the South were the nation’s most integrated. The achievement gap between white and Black students narrowed. The children of Brown went to college and, over time, made substantial gains in income, employment, and health.&

Starting in the 1990s, however, the Supreme Court ended hundreds of school desegregation orders and plans across the country. Today, 67 years after Brown, racial and economic segregation are rising sharply among schoolchildren in the South and across the country. The number of “apartheid schools,” where white enrollment is one percent or less, has increased. Growing disparities in funding and other resources are recreating separate and unequal schools for children of color and, according to a 2019 report, “placing the promise of Brown at grave risk.”

Union General Ulysses S. Grant issued Order No.11, expelling all Jewish people from the Tennessee District, which encompassed portions of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi. In the midst of the Civil War between Union forces and Confederate forces attempting to secede from the U.S., the Tennessee District consisted of areas within these Southern states held under Union control.

General Grant, who would later be elected president, issued his order based on anti-Semitic stereotypes and rumors. General Grant was in charge of black market cotton trading and blamed the Jewish community for corruption and speculation. These views were heavily influenced by the pervasive prejudice that Jewish people engaged in war profiteering. Under Order No. 11, Jewish residents of the Tennessee District were prohibited from obtaining trade licenses and risked imprisonment if they did not leave the district boundaries within one day. “The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders,” the order read, “are hereby expelled from the department twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.” As a result, Jewish families were forced to move with only the belongings they could carry.

When President Abraham Lincoln learned of the order in January 1863, he quickly expressed his disapproval, and Grant rescinded the order soon after.

The Fontana, California, home of the Short family erupted in flames, killing Helen Short and her two children, Barry, 9, and Carol Ann, 7. Husband and father O’Day H. Short survived the explosion but stayed in critical condition at a nearby hospital for several weeks until he also succumbed to his injuries. Until their deaths, the Shorts were the first and only Black family living in their neighborhood.

Initially organized as a collection of chicken farms and citrus groves in the early 20th century, by the early 1940s, the small San Bernardino County town of Fontana had been transformed by the opening of a wartime steel mill into an industrial center. As the community grew and became more diverse, strict segregation lines emerged: Black families moving out of the overcrowded Los Angeles area were relegated to living in the rocky plains of “North Fontana” and working in the dirtiest departments of the mill. Ku Klux Klan activity also surged throughout Southern California during this time period, with white supremacists poised to terrorize Black and Chicano veterans of WWII returning with ideas of racial equality.

This was the reality in the fall of 1945, when O’day H. Short—a Mississippi native and Los Angeles civil rights activist—purchased a tract of Fontana land in the white section of town and made arrangements to move there with his family. As the Shorts built their modest home and prepared to live in it full time, local forces of all kinds tried to stop them. In early December 1945, “vigilantes” visited Mr. Short and ordered him to move or risk harm to his family; he refused and reported the threats to the FBI and local sheriff. Sheriff’s deputies did not offer protection and instead reiterated the warning that Short should leave before his family was harmed. Soon after, members of the Fontana Chamber of Commerce visited the home, encouraging Mr. Short to move to the North Fontana area and offering to buy his home. He refused.

Just days later, an explosion “of unusual intensity” destroyed the home, killing Mr. Short’s wife and children. He survived for two weeks, shielded from the knowledge of the other deaths, but died in January 1946 after the local D.A. bluntly informed him of his family’s fate during an investigative interview.

Local officials initially concluded that the fire was an accident, caused by Mr. Short’s own lighting of an outdoor lamp. After surviving family members, the Black press, and the Los Angeles NAACP protested, a formal inquest was held, at which an independent arson investigator obtained by the NAACP testified that the fire had clearly been intentionally set. Despite this testimony and evidence of the harassment the Short family had endured in the weeks leading up to the fire, local officials again concluded the explosion was an accident and closed the case. No criminal investigation was ever opened, no arrests or prosecutions were made, and residential segregation persisted in Fontana for over 25 more years.

A white mob of 400 men lynched an African American man named Tom Waller in Lawrence County, Mississippi. Mr. Waller was accused of helping to murder a white family, despite a lack of evidence against him and his strenuous claims of innocence. Without a legal trial or investigation, an angry white mob hanged him from a tree the same night he was arrested.

A week earlier, after a white family was found murdered, a surviving 5-year-old child claimed a Black man did it. Officials brought several Black male “suspects” before her and she identified one—a man named Charles Lewis—as the perpetrator. A mob of hundreds immediately formed and lynched Mr. Lewis on December 10. During this era, the deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society burdened Black people with a presumption of guilt that often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered, whether evidence supported that suspicion or not.

Although early accounts alleged only one perpetrator, the white community was unsatisfied to lynch only one man and continued to “investigate” the white family’s murders. Several days later, a group of 30 white men approached a group of Black men, including an acquaintance of Mr. Lewis, and coerced him into saying that a man named Tom Waller had also been involved in the crime. Though another man in the group insisted this was not true, the unsubstantiated allegation was enough to seal Mr. Waller’s fate.

During this era of racial terror, mobs often used violence to force confessions or false identifications from African Americans fearful of the mob. News reports reported these facts later as justifications for the lynching of Mr. Waller but without a fair investigation or trial, the accusation against Mr. Waller was more reliable evidence of the acquaintance’s fear than of Mr. Waller’s guilt. Though he professed his innocence and there was no actual evidence against him, Mr. Waller was arrested on December 15—and was dead before dawn the next day.

Soon after he was taken into custody, a growing mob of 400 people seized Mr. Waller from law enforcement and conducted a “sham trial”; newspapers reported that several men “held court under a tree,” where Mr. Waller was interrogated as a rope was placed around his neck. Some men reportedly suggested that the “trial” be delayed a week because the “evidence” was so scant, but the rest of the mob rejected that idea and instead insisted that Mr. Waller be lynched that night. Newspapers later explained that the mob preferred to lynch Mr. Waller immediately because waiting “meant standing guard all night in the cold, and most of those present did not relish this at all.” To the mob, the low temperature and their own discomfort mattered more than the guilt or innocence of the Black man they planned to kill.

As the hundreds of white men in the mob grew “hungry,” press accounts described, “a wagon load of provisions” including fish and lobster was brought forward and everyone “indulged in a hearty supper” before continuing their deadly plan. Racial terror lynchings were often conducted as public spectacles; large white crowds came to cheer on the violence and participate in the brutal acts in a carnival-like atmosphere with food and “souvenirs.”

The mob ultimately hanged Tom Waller on the night of December 15, on the same hill where Mr. Lewis had been lynched five days earlier, and left his body hanging until 10 am the next morning. Mr. Waller is one of the more than 4,400 documented African American victims of racial terror lynching killed in the U.S. between 1877 and 1950, and there is no indication anyone was ever punished for his death.

Local police found two 12-year-old white girls alone in the area of University Park, Maryland. The girls told police officers that they had been “attacked” by a Black man “with a big knife” who had tried to tear their clothes off. This barebones accusation sent 60 Maryland state and D.C. police to the University Park area, where officers wrongly arrested and detained 17 Black men for questioning.

Hours later, the girls confessed that they fabricated the entire story. After getting lost on the way to view holiday decorations in downtown Washington, D.C., the girls admitted to police, they tore their own clothes and acted “hysterical” in the hopes of “getting a ride.” Rather than investigate the girls’ story from the start, which could have quickly exposed inconsistencies and established it as a lie, police had instead launched an immediate, massive manhunt, rounding up Black men for arrest on sight and subjecting them to interrogation to prove their innocence.

For decades, Black Americans have been subjected to repeated harassment, mistreatment, and police attacks, along with widespread racial discrimination. Black people are burdened with a presumption of guilt and dangerousness that is deeply rooted in our history of racial injustice and fueled by the myth of racial difference. Young Black men in particular are seen as threatening figures who should be feared, monitored, and even hunted.

This ongoing presumption of guilt and dangerousness is inextricably tied to a history of racial terror lynching. Between 1877 and 1950, thousands of Black men were lynched in the U.S., and nearly one in four were targeted based on the allegation of raping a white woman. These men were subjected to mob murder without investigation or trial, at a time when the definition of Black-on-white “rape” in the South was incredibly broad and required no allegation of force because white institutions, laws, and most white people rejected the idea that a white woman could or would willingly consent to sex with a Black man. This meant that any action by a Black man that could be interpreted as seeking or desiring contact with a white woman might prove deadly. Throughout the lynching era, Black men were lynched for knocking on the door of a white woman’s home, for delivering a letter to a white woman, or for entering a room where white women were sitting. A white woman’s claim of victimization at the hands of a Black man, whether true or not, could and often did lead to brutal and deadly violence.

Soon after the hoax was revealed, police announced that no charges would be filed against the two white girls, despite their serious false report resulting in the wrongful arrest of 17 innocent Black men—and creating the potential for much worse. The police also issued no apology for the way their overreach and unlawful detainment had targeted these Black men without any evidence.

Judge Householder of Knoxville, Tennessee, sent an entire family to jail on felony miscegenation charges. Setting bond at $500, he jailed a Black man named Jim McFarland, his mother, Ms. McFarland, a Black woman, Henry Whitehead, a Black man, Harriet Smith, who newspapers and local authorities reported was a white woman, and her children from prior relationships with white men, Lydia Smith and John Smith. At the time of arrest, the multigenerational family lived in the same household. The court’s order left a young child at home without a caregiver. The family spent over a month in jail before facing trial in January.

Newspapers at the time noted that Ms. Smith had reported to them “with shameless candor,” that she was actually a Black woman—while her mother was white, her father was a light-skinned Black man—and that she had never pretended to be white. Local news speculated further that since Ms. Smith’s children had white fathers, those children living with Black men and women might violate the miscegenation codes as written “even should the taint of negro blood be traced to the remote degree claimed.”

Local media praised Squire Householder’s actions, reporting that he “came to the rescue of the community” by “starting a war on the crime of miscegenation.” The white community in Knoxville universally commended the judge’s decision to incarcerate the family. White citizens viewed the case as an opportunity to expand the reach of a state law criminalizing relationships between Black and white people. While Tennessee law classified interracial marriage as a felony, at the time of the family’s arrest, no state supreme court decision addressed whether interracial cohabitation was a felony or a misdemeanor. The press and the courts hoped to eliminate interracial relationships entirely by terrorizing interracial couples with the threat of extreme punishment. As the Knoxville Sentinel wrote:

“There is no crime so common in Knoxville as white people living together with [Black people], and to make the matter more revolting, it generally happens that it is a white woman living with a [Black man]…. These [Black men] and their white mistresses will soon abandon their loathsome relations when they find that they must go to the penitentiary if they continue to live together.”

Ultimately, a month after her arrest, Ms. Smith was tried before a jury that determined she was “of colored stock” and acquitted her and Henry Whitehead of miscegenation. However, the jury still convicted them both of lewdness for living together, and they were each sentenced to 11 months in the workhouse. The cases against her children were dropped by the prosecutor after this verdict.

On December 2, 1922, a white schoolteacher was found killed in Perry, Florida. Though items found near the woman’s body belonged to a local white man, police insisted the perpetrator had to be a Black man and quickly focused on a Black man named Charles Wright as a suspect. The deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society during this time period often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered, whether evidence supported that suspicion or not. This was especially true in cases of violent crime against white victims.

After several days of violent manhunts that terrorized the Black community and left at least one Black man dead, police arrested Charles Wright with a friend named Arthur Young. Before the men could be investigated or tried, a white mob seized Mr. Wright as they were being transported to jail and burned him alive.

Four days later, on December 12, the lynch mob attacked again. As officers were moving Arthur Young to another jail, the white mob seized him, riddled his body with bullets, and left his body hanging from a tree on the side of a highway in Perry, Florida.

The public lynching of Arthur Young, like that of Charles Wright, was not only intended to inflict harm on these individual men; it was also meant to terrorize the entire Black community. Following these murders, members of the mob turned on the Black community of Perry, burning several Black-owned homes, a church, the Masonic hall, and a school. Dozens of Black families fled the area, moving to the North as refugees from racial violence. No one was ever held accountable for the lynchings of Arthur Young and Charles Wright. They are among 15 documented African American victims of racial terror lynching killed in Taylor County, Florida, between 1877 and 1950.

The U.S. Army executed 13 Black soldiers who had been previously court-martialed and denied any right to appeal. In July 1917, the all-Black 3rd Battalion of the 24th United States Infantry Regiment was stationed at Camp Logan, near Houston, Texas, to guard white soldiers preparing for deployment to Europe. From the beginning of their assignment at Camp Logan, the Black soldiers were harassed and abused by the Houston police force.

Early on August 23, 1917, several soldiers, including a well-respected corporal, were brutally beaten and jailed by police. Police officers regularly beat African American troops and arrested them on baseless charges; the August 23 assault was the latest in a string of police abuses that had pushed the Black soldiers to their breaking point.

Seemingly under attack by local white authorities, over 150 Black soldiers armed themselves and left for Houston to confront the police about the persistent violence. They planned to stage a peaceful march to the police station as a demonstration against their mistreatment by police. However, just outside the city, the soldiers encountered a mob of armed white men. In the ensuing violence, four soldiers, four policemen, and 12 civilians were killed.

In the aftermath, the military investigated and court-martialed 157 Black soldiers, trying them in three separate proceedings. In the first military trial, held in November 1917, 63 soldiers were tried and 54 were convicted on all charges. At sentencing, 13 were sentenced to death and 43 received life imprisonment. The 13 condemned soldiers were denied any right to appeal and were hanged on December 11, 1917.

The second and third trials resulted in death sentences for an additional 16 soldiers; however, those men were given the opportunity to appeal, largely due to negative public reactions to the first 13 unlawful executions. President Woodrow Wilson ultimately commuted the death sentences for 10 of the remaining soldiers facing death, but the remaining six were hanged. In total, the Houston unrest resulted in the executions of 19 Black soldiers. NAACP advocacy and legal assistance later helped secure the early release of most of the 50 soldiers serving life sentences. No white civilians were ever brought to trial for involvement in the violence.

Black college football players from California’s Humboldt State College were banned from “mixing” with white people during their stay in Florida for the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) National Championship Football Game. After an undefeated season, the racially integrated team earned the right to compete in the Holiday Bowl on December 10 in St. Petersburg, Florida, for the national title. However, segregated facilities forbade Humboldt State’s Black players from sleeping under the same roof as their white teammates.

The 1960 Holiday Bowl in St. Petersburg brought together the Humboldt State Lumberjacks team and the all-white Lenoir-Rhyne University Bears from North Carolina. The five Black players who traveled to Florida as part of the Lumberjacks team—fullbacks Dave Littleton, Earl Love, and Ed White; tackle Vester Flanagan; and guard Walt Mosely—were denied entrance to the hotel where their white teammates were permitted to stay.

As in most cities across the South, St. Petersburg’s Jim Crow laws stringently defined and dominated all aspects of life from the major to the mundane. Segregation laws barred any “race mixing” in public hospitals, schools, transportation, and other public accommodations. Due to these policies, Black men, women and children experienced the daily humiliation of a system designed to maintain racial hierarchy and uphold white supremacy.

Even in 1960, college football remained segregated throughout the South, largely because colleges and universities in the region remained segregated. Though the U.S. Supreme Court struck down school segregation in its 1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education, Southern lawmakers’ defiant resistance to that decision greatly delayed implementation; by 1960, flagship state schools in Alabama and Mississippi had not yet allowed a Black student to enroll, and Southern white schools achieved all-white athletic competition by segregating themselves into all-white athletic conferences. This meant that Black athletes living in the South were restricted to attending and playing for Historically Black Colleges and Universities in segregated conferences within the region, or relocating to play at integrated schools in the North and West.

Integrated and segregated schools still met in competition when paired in bowl and national title games; when they did, racial prejudice was pervasive. The all-white University of Alabama football team refused to play any integrated teams for years, until it accepted a bid in the 1959 Liberty Bowl against Penn State and lineman Charley Janerette became the first Black player to face the Crimson Tide (Penn State won, 7-0). Just one year later, the NAIA arranged a national title game to take place in Florida, and Humboldt State’s Black players received virtually no support from the athletic conference or their school administrators.

Despite calls from some students and organizers that humiliating Black players to submit to racist segregation requirements was unacceptable, players were nonetheless compelled to play. Humboldt State’s head coach, Phil Sarboe, praised the treatment the team had received in St. Petersburg, denied that players were unhappy about the segregated facilities, and expressed that Humboldt State would “like to come back next year.”

The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a report revealing the CIA’s use of torture against Muslim detainees during the “War on Terror.” The report detailed dozens of horrific accounts of Muslim people being dehumanized to such an extent that they were likened to “dogs who had been kenneled.”

The story of Gul Rahman is illustrative of what the Senate Select Committee uncovered about the CIA’s practices between 2001 and 2006. In November 2002, Mr. Rahman was subjected to “48 hours of sleep deprivation, auditory overload, total darkness, isolation, a cold shower, and rough treatment.” Immediately following this experience, he was labeled as “uncooperative,” stripped of his clothing, shackled to the wall of his cell, and “forced to sit on the bare concrete floor without pants.” His autopsy revealed that he most likely died from hypothermia. Three months after Mr. Rahman froze to death, the CIA approved a plan to strip detainees nude in rooms set to near freezing temperatures. No officials were charged for Mr. Rahman’s death, and one of his interrogators was recommended to receive a $2,500 bonus for his “consistently superior work.”

In addition to exposing stories similar to Mr. Rahman’s (including accounts of people being subjected to force-feeding, mock executions, and sexual violence), the report concluded that the CIA had misled Congress about its practices, under-reported the number of people it had detained and tortured, and falsely incarcerated more than 20% of its detainees. One of the people unlawfully detained was a man with an intellectual disability who was used as “leverage” to obtain information from a family member. Despite these troubling findings, there have been few attempts to hold anyone accountable for the harm that U.S. officials perpetrated against Muslim detainees.

A white mob in New Hope near Columbus, Mississippi, raped and lynched a Black woman named Cordelia Stevenson and left her body hanging for days near a railroad track to terrorize Black residents.

Several months earlier, the barn of a white man named Gabe Frank burned down, and the town quickly focused suspicion on Black community members, including Mrs. Stevenson’s son. The deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society during this time period often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered or alleged, whether evidence supported that suspicion or not. Though Mrs. Stevenson insisted that her son had moved out of town months before the barn burned, and though no evidence tied him to the fire, local authorities seized Mrs. Stevenson and her husband, Arch, for questioning.

The local police ultimately concluded the Stevensons’ son had not been involved in the barn fire and released them both. Soon after, on December 8, a white mob gathered outside the Stevenson home, forced their way into the house while the couple slept, and kidnapped Mrs. Stevenson. The mob raped and lynched her, then left Mrs. Stevenson’s naked, brutalized body hanging by the railroad track for two days, where she was visible to thousands of people traveling by train.

No one was ever held responsible for her death.

White mobs attacked and killed dozens of Black citizens of Vicksburg, Mississippi, who had organized a political meeting in support of a duly elected Black sheriff, who had been improperly removed from office.

During the Reconstruction era that followed Emancipation and the Civil War, Black Mississippians made progress toward political equality. Despite the passage of Black Codes designed to oppress and disenfranchise Black people in the South, under the protection of federal troops in place to enforce the newly established civil rights of Black people, many Black men voted and served in political office on federal, state, and local levels.

In the 1870s, Peter Crosby, a formerly enslaved Black man, was elected sheriff in Vicksburg, Mississippi—but shortly after taking office, Sheriff Crosby was indicted on false criminal charges and a violent white mob removed him from his position.

On December 7, 1874, Black citizens in Vicksburg organized an effort to try to help Mr. Crosby regain his office. In response, white mobs attacked and killed dozens of Black citizens in an act of racial terrorism, which would later become known as the “Vicksburg Massacre.”

Following this brutal attack, federal troops were sent to Vicksburg and Mr. Crosby was appointed as sheriff again. However, in early 1875, a white man named J.P. Gilmer was hired to serve as Sheriff Crosby’s deputy. After Sheriff Crosby tried to have Mr. Gilmer removed from office, Mr. Gilmer shot Sheriff Crosby in the head on June 7, 1875. Mr. Gilmer was arrested for the attempted assassination but never brought to trial. Mr. Crosby survived the shooting but never made a full recovery and had to serve the remainder of his term through a representative white citizen.

The violence and intimidation tactics utilized by white Mississippians intent on restoring white supremacy soon enabled forces antagonistic to the aims of Reconstruction and racial equality to regain power in Mississippi.

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision upholding the Expatriation Act of 1907, which stripped American women of their citizenship when they married a non-citizen. Under that act, women who lost their U.S. citizenship could apply to be naturalized if their husbands later became American citizens—but since virtually all Asian immigrants were legally barred from becoming U.S. citizens at the time, an American woman who married an Asian man would lose her citizenship permanently. Similarly, women of Asian descent who were American citizens by birth had no means of regaining their U.S. citizenship if they lost it through marriage to a foreign person—even if the foreign person was white—because Asian men and women were ineligible for naturalization in all circumstances.

Meanwhile, American men who married foreign women were permitted to keep their citizenship.

Mackenzie v. Hare was an attempt to challenge the Expatriation Act and reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court upheld the law, ruling that an involuntary revocation of citizenship would be unconstitutional, but stripping a woman of citizenship upon marriage to a foreign husband was permissible because such women voluntarily enter into such marriages, “with knowledge of the consequences.”

The Expatriation Act remained in full effect until 1922, when Congress amended the law to permit most women to retain their American citizenship after marriage to a non-U.S. citizen—but still stripped citizenship from American women married to Asian immigrants ineligible for citizenship until discriminatory immigration laws were reformed in the 1960s. In 2014, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution expressing regret for the past revocation of American women’s citizenship under this law.

Chief Justice Seth Shepard of the District Court of Appeals in Washington D.C., ruled that Isabel Wall, an eight-year-old girl, was prohibited from attending the local white public school because she was 1/16th Black. The court held that any child with an “admixture of colored blood” would be classified as such; thus, Isabel would be made to attend a separate school for Black children.

The decision in Oyster v. Wall came just over a decade after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which held that the U.S. Constitution permitted the racial segregation of public facilities. Isabel’s parents filed a lawsuit against the D.C. School Board objecting to the law providing for segregated schooling, but also arguing that, even if segregation was appropriate, their child was not Black.

Growing up, Isabel had been “treated and recognized by her neighbors and friends” as white, according to court filings. The School Board, however, refused to admit her into Brookland White School on account of her “blood,” which they believed made her ineligible to attend school with white students.

Justice Shepard sided with the School Board and ruled that, if “the child is of negro blood of one eighth to one sixteenth; that her racial status is that of the negro.” His decision asserted that “no matter what the complexion,” any person who has “an appreciable admixture of negro blood” would be considered “colored.” Justice Shepard ruled that physical characteristics of an individual were irrelevant as “the sense of sight is but one avenue for the conveyance of information upon the subject of racial identity to the mind of the investigator.” Justice Shepard’s decision thus relied on bigoted views of racial groups and suggested that even where Black ancestry was not easily detectable in someone’s physical appearance, Blackness manifested itself in racial “traits.”

Justice Shepard acknowledged the disparities in the quality of education and funding between schools attended by white students and schools attended by Black students, as well as the fallacy of “separate but equal.” He knew that Isabel Wall, like all other Black students, would be greatly disadvantaged in the quality of education she could receive at the underfunded segregated school. Justice Shepard even recognized that as a “cruel hardship,” but justified the decision by insisting it would be a “greater evil” to allow a child with even one Black great-great-grandparent to attend a white school.

Around 4:30 am, plainclothes officers from the Chicago Police Department armed with shotguns and machine guns kicked down the door of the Chicago apartment where several Black Panther Party members were staying and opened fire on them. Though the Party members were asleep at the time and posed no threat, the officers fired over 90 bullets into the apartment, killing Fred Hampton, 21, and Mark Clark, 22—two leaders of the Black Panther Party—and critically wounding four other Party members. Mr. Hampton had been asleep next to his fiancée, who was eight months pregnant when he was killed.

Following Mr. Hampton and Mr. Clark’s assassinations on December 4, seven Panthers at the apartment that night, who had allegedly wounded two officers, were charged with attempted murder. In a statement released after the shooting, Edward Hanrahan, the Cook County state’s attorney who had ordered the violent raid, said: “The immediate, violent, criminal reaction of the occupants in shooting at announced police officers emphasizes the extreme viciousness of the Black Panther Party.”

Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in Oakland, California, in 1966. Spurning civil rights tactics of marches, sit-ins, and boycotts, the Black Panther Party was inspired by the self-determination philosophy of Malcolm X and the “Black Power” speeches of Kwame Ture (born Stokely Carmichael). The Party founded youth centers and free breakfast programs, organized legally armed patrols to guard against police brutality in Black neighborhoods, and became popular among Black urban youth as chapters spread throughout the country. In the 1968-69 school year, the Black Panther Party fed as many as 20,000 children.

Despite their goals of community empowerment and self-help, the Party was condemned by President Lyndon B. Johnson and other national leaders. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the group “the most dangerous threat to the internal security of the country” in the late 1960s. The FBI also launched an aggressive counter-intelligence program aimed at dismantling the Black Panther Party through misinformation, infiltration, and by facilitating violent attacks against the group.

Just four days after the Chicago shooting, on December 8, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) violently raided the Black Panther Party’s headquarters in Los Angeles, California. In 1968, as protests were spreading across the country in response to police brutality, the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party formed to help combat the growing threat. The Party established monitoring patrols in Black neighborhoods and worked to ensure police accountability.

On December 8, the LAPD set out to serve a warrant to search Party headquarters at 41st Street and Central Avenue for stolen weapons. Though the warrant was obtained using false information provided by the FBI, police used it as the basis to ambush about twelve Party members inside the building. More than 200 police officers, including the newly militarized Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team descended on the headquarters, armed with 5,000 rounds of ammunition, gas masks, a helicopter, a tank, and a military-grade grenade. During the coordinated attack, three officers and six members of the Black Panther Party were wounded.

In 1976, five years after the FBI’s counterintelligence program was shut down, a Senate committee concluded that the bureau’s tactics “were indisputably degrading to a free society” and “gave rise to the risk of death and often disregarded the personal rights and dignity of the victims.”

Cesar Chavez was jailed for his refusal to end a boycott on farmers that engaged in coercive, violent, and unjust labor practices against Latino migrant farmworkers. During the summer of 1970, farm owners in California’s Salinas Valley, with the assistance of the Teamsters Union, used coercive tactics to prevent Latino migrant farm workers from joining Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers union. In response, the United Farm Workers union organized a massive strike in the Salinas Valley.

As retaliation for participating in the strike, farm owners fired hundreds of Latino migrant farmworkers and targeted the workers with violence. Striking farmworkers and leaders of the United Farm Workers were attacked and beaten throughout the strike, and in November 1970, the offices of the United Farm Workers in the Salinas Valley were bombed.

As the strike continued, movement leader Cesar Chavez organized a boycott of lettuce produced by farms that had used coercive tactics against the United Farm Workers. The farm owners sought an anti-boycott injunction, which was granted by a Monterey County judge. When Mr. Chavez refused to end the boycott, he was charged with contempt of court for violating the injunction. On December 3, 1970, Judge Gordon Campbell sentenced Mr. Chavez to an indefinite jail term and warned him that “improper and evil methods cannot be used to achieve even noble objectives.”

Cesar Chavez spent 21 days in jail before being released on December 24, 1970. He was held in an isolation cell but received visits from Coretta Scott King, widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Ethel Kennedy, widow of Robert F. Kennedy. In early 1971, the California Supreme Court held that the injunction against the strike was unconstitutional, and Cesar Chavez’s contempt conviction was overturned.

A white police officer named Donald Foster shot and killed Bernard Whitehurst Jr., a 32-year-old Black man, after mistaking him for a crime suspect. Rather than acknowledge the mistake, Foster and other officers planted a gun near Mr. Whitehurst’s body as part of an elaborate cover-up of tragic police violence. There was no autopsy report, and Mr. Whitehurst’s family was not even notified that he had been killed; they found out about his death shortly after when one family member heard about it on the radio.

Six months after Mr. Whitehurst’s killing, an investigation urged by the Whitehurst family revealed that the gun officers claimed had been found near his body had actually been picked up during a drug raid a year earlier. Mr. Whitehurst’s body was exhumed soon after, and an autopsy confirmed that he had been shot in the back—and not in the chest as the officers who had been chasing him initially claimed.

In 1976, three police officers who had helped plant the gun near Mr. Whitehurst after he was shot were indicted on charges of perjury but only one case went to trial. It resulted in a hung jury. Soon after, the state attorney general, William Baxley, made a deal with police and government officials that if the officers involved in the alleged cover-up could all pass polygraph tests confirming their innocence, charges against them would be dropped. Rather than take the tests, the city’s mayor, the public safety director, and eight police officers resigned or were fired. Mr. Whitehurst’s mother filed a civil suit against the police department but a federal judge ruled that any conspiracy to violate Mr. Whitehurst’s civil rights had ended with his death, and the jury ultimately returned a verdict in favor of the former police chief, his top aide, and Officer Foster. To this day, no one has been held accountable for Mr. Whitehurst’s death.

Montgomery, Alabama, police arrested seamstress and activist Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated city bus. Her stand helped spark the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which remains one of the most well-known campaigns of the civil rights movement. However, Mrs. Parks’s work for racial justice long preceded this courageous act. She was very active in the local chapter of the NAACP since joining as the chapter’s only woman member in 1943 and had served as both the youth leader and secretary. Mrs. Parks frequently traveled throughout Alabama to interview Black people who had suffered racial terror, violence, or other injustices. In 1944, she investigated the Abbeville, Alabama, gang-rape of a young Black woman named Recy Taylor and joined with other civil rights activists to organize a national campaign demanding prosecution of the white men responsible.

On the evening of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks began her bus ride home from work sitting in the “colored section.” Montgomery’s segregated bus service designated separate seating areas for Black and white passengers; during peak operating hours, if the white seating area became full, the bus driver could expand its boundaries and request that African Americans stand to relinquish their seats to white people. While Black riders were not legally obligated to comply, city bus drivers were notorious for their hostile treatment of Black riders, and their requests were rarely refused.

As more white passengers boarded, the bus driver asked Mrs. Parks and three other Black passengers who were seated to give up their seats to white riders. When Mrs. Parks was the only one to refuse, the driver summoned police and she was arrested. Mrs. Parks later recalled that she had refused to stand, not because she was physically tired, but because she was tired of giving in. That same night, Jo Ann Robinson and other local activists began organizing what would become the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

A statue of Mrs. Parks was dedicated in Montgomery on December 1, 2019, near the location where she boarded the bus on the day of her arrest. On February 14, 2024, the Equal Justice Initiative unveiled a sculpture honoring Mrs. Parks at Legacy Plaza, across from the Legacy Museum in downtown Montgomery.

A mob of white men in Ballinger, Texas, seized Robert Murtore, a 15-year-old Black boy, from the custody of law enforcement and, in broad daylight, shot him to death.

After a 9-year-old white girl alleged that she had been assaulted by an unknown Black boy, suspicion immediately fell on Robert, who worked in the same hotel as the white girl’s mother. He was arrested and held in the Ballinger jail, but word soon spread. On the morning of November 30, a white mob formed outside of the jail in an attempt to lynch Robert. Local law enforcement removed Robert from his cell for transport away from Ballinger; it is unclear whether this was to facilitate or block the lynching.

As the sheriff and Robert drove away from town, an armed mob of white men blocked the road and demanded that the sheriff turn Robert over to them. Though he was armed and charged with protecting Robert while he was in his custody, the sheriff willingly turned the Black teenager over to the mob without a fight.

During this era of racial terror lynchings, it was not uncommon for lynch mobs to seize their victims out of police hands. In some cases, police officials were even found to be complicit or active participants in lynchings. In this case, instead of pursuing the mob to try to stop the lynching or identify the mob members, the sheriff left the mob to its murderous task and rode back to the station at Ballinger to report Robert’s fate.

Unchallenged, the lawless mob seized Robert, drove him to a nearby grove, tied him to a post, and riddled his body with 50 bullets. A Texas newspaper described the mob as “orderly,” leaving “peacefully” after violently taking the young boy’s life.

American troops murdered more than 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho people who were living peacefully along Sand Creek in eastern Colorado. Days before the massacre, white officials had assured chiefs of the village that their community would not be harmed.

At dawn on November 29, hundreds of U.S. soldiers led by Colonel John Chivington surrounded the village. Residents responded by waving white flags and pleading for mercy; one of the chiefs even raised the American flag in an attempt to demonstrate that he, too, was American. Ignoring these symbols of surrender and peace, the white troops opened fire with carbines and cannons, slaughtering more than 200 Native American people. Most of the victims of the massacre were women, children, and the elderly and infirm. After the massacre, the troops burned the village, mutilated the bodies of the deceased, and removed body parts to keep as trophies. Some scalps of the dead became props in plays that the troops later performed to celebrate, as one soldier boasted, “almost an annihilation of the entire tribe.”

Violence against Indigenous people in the U.S. had been overlooked and ignored for decades. Many white settlers in America cultivated a view that Native people were less human and worthy of dignity and respect than white people. This was evident in the horrific violence and slaughter on display at Sand Creek. Officers tried to justify the massacre by asserting a false narrative that described Indigenous people as less than human and dangerous and claimed that the soldiers who committed the massacre had acted in self-defense. This fabricated account was disputed by other American soldiers who witnessed the massacre and felt compelled to tell the truth. “Hundreds of women and children were coming towards us, and getting on their knees begging for mercy,” described U.S. Captain Silas Soule in an 1865 letter to Congress, “[only to be shot] and have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized.”

A mob of 7,000 white men, women, and children seized an 18-year-old Black man named Lloyd Warner from the jail in St. Joseph, Missouri, hanged him, and burned his body in a brutal public spectacle lynching.

Just hours before, news spread that a Black man had allegedly assaulted a white girl. Mr. Warner was quickly accused of being the perpetrator, arrested, and placed in jail. As was typical of the era, the mere accusation of sexual impropriety between a Black man and a white woman aroused a violent white mob that gathered outside the jail armed with ice picks, firearms, and knives. Mr. Warner professed his innocence to a court-appointed lawyer who remained at the jail with him, but the threat of lynching grew.

Outside, the crowd swelled to 1,000 people, and the state governor deployed National Guardsmen, allegedly to quell the mob. For at least three hours, in a standoff with local law enforcement and national troops, mob members demanded the sheriff turn over Mr. Warner. Neither the National Guardsmen nor local law enforcement took actions to defend the jail or dispel the mob, even as mob members smashed jail windows and attempted to knock down the jail door.

Instead, around 11 pm that evening, the sheriff announced that officials would turn Mr. Warner over if the mob would cease the attack on the jail and leave other incarcerated people unharmed. To prevent “further property damage” to the jail, the sheriff abandoned his duty to protect Mr. Warner from lynching.

Once the mob was permitted to enter the jail, several white men descended upon Mr. Warner, beating, choking and stabbing him. One member of the mob halted the assault on Mr. Warner, stating that he wished to “make this Black boy suffer” before he died. At this request, the mob dragged Mr. Warner down the street, attracting larger crowds that included women and children.

The mob hanged Mr. Warner near the courthouse, then drenched his body with gasoline and set him on fire. Newspapers reported that three children had climbed the tree to fasten the rope that hanged Mr. Warner and, in jumping from the tree, hoisted Mr. Warner’s body in the air. Before Mr. Warner’s body was burned, members of the crowd cut pieces of his leather belt and pants as “souvenirs.” For two hours, the mob that had by then grown to 7,000 people watched Mr. Warner burn; some witnesses even said that he may have been alive when he was set on fire.

In the wake of Lloyd Warner’s lynching, the white girl he had allegedly attacked reportedly told several newspapers, “they might have gotten the wrong one.”

No one was ever held accountable for the lynching of Mr. Warner. He is one of over 6,500 Black women, men, and children killed in racial terror lynchings in the U.S. between 1865 and1950.

The Weekly Standard published an article by Princeton University political science professor John Dilulio. Entitled “The Coming of the Super-Predators,” the article predicted the U.S. would be home to 270,000 violent youth by 2010. According to Professor Dilulio, growing rates of “moral poverty” were causing aggressive behavior among poor and minority youth and were building toward a crisis.

Professor Dilulio’s “super-predator” language came to be commonly used in conjunction with dire predictions that a vast increase in violent juvenile crime was looming. Theorists suggested that the nation would soon see “elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches” and who “have absolutely no respect for human life.” Much of the frightening imagery was racially coded. For example, in “My Black Crime Problem, and Ours,” Professor Dilulio warned of “270,000 more young predators on the streets than in 1990, coming at us in waves over the next two decades … as many as half of these juvenile super-predators could be young Black males.”

Panic over the impending crime wave expected from these “radically impulsive, brutally remorseless” children led nearly every state to enact legislation mandating automatic adult prosecution for children, permitting sentences of life without parole or death for children, and/or allowing children to be housed with adult prisoners. But the predictions proved wildly inaccurate. Lower rates of juvenile crime from 1994 to 2000 despite simultaneous increases in the juvenile population led academics who had originally supported the “super-predator” theory to back away from their predictions, including Professor Dilulio himself. In 2001, the U.S. surgeon general labeled the “super-predator” theory a myth.

Efforts to reverse the policies that grew from the “super-predator” myth have seen some success in the Supreme Court, which in 2005 decided in Roper v. Simmons that the death penalty is unconstitutional for juveniles. In 2010, the Court in Graham v. Florida prohibited life imprisonment without parole sentences for children convicted of non-homicide crimes. And in 2012, the Court’s decision in Miller v. Alabama invalidated mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles convicted of homicide. Meaningful implementation of these decisions, as well as further reform, remains an ongoing effort and challenge. But tens of thousands of children prosecuted as adults as a result of this misguided, racially biased rhetoric still remain in American jails and prisons today.

During a special legislative session called to pass segregation laws, the Texas legislature voted overwhelmingly (115-26) to pass a bill giving Governor Price Daniel the power to immediately close any school where federal troops might be sent to enforce integration.

The Texas legislature passed the bill just a few months after President Dwight Eisenhower deployed federal troops to Arkansas and commanded the Arkansas National Guard to escort nine Black students, known as the Little Rock Nine, to their first day of school at Central High School amid violent threats from white community members. In passing this bill, the state legislators made clear that they would rather everyone at a school be denied education than allow Black students to attend previously all-white schools.

During the same session another bill was passed that provided school districts with legal aid should integration suits be brought against them.

Bills like these, and the broader massive resistance to integration by white officials and community members, were largely successful in preventing integration of schools in the South. In the five Deep South states, every single one of 1.4 million Black schoolchildren attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960. By the start of the 1964-65 school year, less than 3% of the South’s Black children attended school with white students, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina that number remained substantially below 1%. In 1967, 13 years after Brown v. Bd. of Education, a report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights observed that white violence and intimidation against Black people “continues to be a deterrent to school desegregation.”

For decades, the University of North Carolina had a program whereby the university “leased” hundreds of enslaved Black people to students for a fee. On November 25, 1829, after a Black man escaped the university grounds and sought his freedom, rewards were issued to effectuate his recapture and re-enslavement on UNC grounds.

Through this program, UNC engaged in the active trafficking of enslaved Black people, by collecting fees from students to “lease” enslaved Black people back to them. Students paid a yearly fee in their tuition directly to the university for the labor of enslaved Black people. The university maintained contract agreements with plantations and local enslavers in Orange and Chatham County, as well as the university’s employees, trustees, and presidents, who “leased” Black people they enslaved to the university. Consequently, through this trafficking program, UNC not only increased its revenue, but also enriched local enslavers.

Until 1845, students from families who enslaved Black people were permitted to bring enslaved people with them to campus. After 1845, the university prohibited students from bringing enslaved people to campus, but still authorized students to pay the university to “lease” enslaved Black people on campus.

On November 25, 1829, as part of this trafficking scheme, a graduate of UNC issued rewards for the capture of a Black man named James who had been trafficked to work at the university for the prior four years. James had sought his freedom from enslavement and ran away from campus. The ad was placed in several local newspapers and encouraged people with information about James’s whereabouts to direct their correspondence to UNC to effectuate his recapture.

In addition to the leasing program which trafficked enslaved Black people onto the grounds of the university, UNC participated in and profited from the sale of Black people. In its founding charter in 1789, the university was given the right to sell enslaved Black people who had been enslaved by local white people who died without heirs. Under this agreement, white enslavers’ “property,” including enslaved Black people, was escheated to the university’s Board of Trustees. In the 1840s, 10 years after the reward for James was announced, following the death of a local enslaver, the university sold the Black people that person had enslaved, earning $2,800, which amounts to approximately $83,000 dollars today.

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decided Shuttlesworth vs. Birmingham Board of Education, rejecting a challenge to Alabama’s School Placement Law. The law, designed to defy the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and maintain school segregation, allowed Alabama school boards to assign individual students to particular schools at their own discretion with little transparency or oversight.

Alabama’s School Placement Law, which claimed to allow school boards to designate placement of students based on ability, availability of transportation, and academic background, was modeled after the Pupil Placement Act in North Carolina—enacted on March 30, 1955, in response to the Brown decision. Virginia passed the second placement law on September 29, 1956. In 1957, after the North Carolina law was upheld by a higher court, legislatures in other Southern states passed similar pupil placement laws; by 1960, such laws were on the books in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and the city of Atlanta, Georgia.

After the Alabama law’s passage, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth sued on behalf of four African American students in Birmingham who had been denied admission to white schools that were closer to their homes. In its unanimous decision, the Supreme Court wrote, “The School Placement Law furnishes the legal machinery for an orderly administration of the public schools in a constitutional manner by the admission of qualified pupils upon a basis of individual merit without regard to their race or color. We must presume that it will be so administered.”

Between the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 and 1958, a total of 376,000 African American children were enrolled in integrated schools in the South. This growth slowed significantly as states passed obstructive legislation like these pupil placement laws; the figure rose by just 500 students between 1958 and 1959, and by October 1960, only 6% of African American children in the South were attending integrated schools. Crucially, in the five Deep South states, including Alabama, every single one of 1.4 million Black schoolchildren attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960.

Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black boy, died from injuries inflicted when he was shot by a white police officer the day before. Tamir was playing in a park near his Cleveland, Ohio, home when a police car approached him; within seconds, before Tamir could be questioned or warned, Officer Timothy Loehmann shot Tamir in the stomach.

The officers were responding to a 911 dispatch in which a caller had reported that someone in the park was playing with a gun. The caller also explained to the dispatcher that the person was “probably a juvenile” and the gun was “probably fake.” Tamir was, in fact, playing with a toy gun in the park—as countless children have—and was immediately shot to death by police despite posing no threat to anyone.

Immediately after the shooting, police tackled Tamir’s 14-year-old sister as she rushed to his side, handcuffed her, and held her in the back of their squad car unable to comfort her injured brother. Tamir’s mother was also prevented from going to her son and threatened with arrest if she did not “calm down.” Neither Officer Loehmann nor his partner, Frank Garmback, attempted to administer critical lifesaving procedures to Tamir as he lay bleeding immediately after the shooting.

After the December autopsy was released, Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner Thomas Gilson reaffirmed his initial ruling that the shooting was a homicide, and in June 2015, the Cleveland Municipal Court found probable cause for prosecutors to proceed with charges of murder and other offenses against Officer Loehmann. County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty instead declared that he would wait to follow a grand jury’s recommendation. A grand jury ultimately refused to indict Officer Loehmann on any charges.

The Mississippi legislature passed “An Act to regulate the relation of master and apprentice, as relates to freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes.” Under the law, sheriffs, justices of the peace, and other county civil officers were authorized and required to identify all minor Black children in their jurisdictions who were orphans or whose parents could not properly care for them. Once identified, the local probate court was required to “apprentice” Black children to white “masters or mistresses” until age 18 for girls and age 21 for boys.

After the physical and economic devastation of the Civil War, Southern states faced the daunting task of rebuilding their infrastructures and economies. At the same time, the young white male population had been drastically reduced by war-time casualties and emancipation had freed the formerly enslaved Black labor that had largely built the entire region. In response, some Southern state legislatures passed race-specific laws to establish new forms of labor relations between Black workers and white “employers” that complied with the letter of the law, but actually sought to recreate the enslaver-enslaved conditions of involuntary servitude that existed prior to emancipation.

Though the law did not require white “employers” to pay the children they “hired” a wage, the law did require them to pay the county a fee for the apprentice arrangement. The law claimed to require white “masters” to provide their apprentices with education, medical care, food, and clothing, but it also re-instituted many of the more notorious features of slavery. The children’s former enslavers were given first opportunity to hire those formerly enslaved by them, for example. In addition, the law authorized white “masters” to “re-capture” any apprentice who left their employment without consent and threatened children with criminal punishment for refusing to return to work.

In Gong Lum v. Rice, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Chinese American Lum family and upheld Mississippi’s power to force nine-year-old Martha Lum to attend a “colored school” outside the district in which she lived. Applying the “separate but equal” doctrine established in 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the Court held that the maintenance of separate schools based on race was “within the constitutional power of the state legislature to settle, without intervention of the federal courts.”

First adopted in 1890 following the end of Reconstruction, the Mississippi Constitution divided children into racial categories of Caucasian or “brown, yellow, and Black,” and mandated racially segregated public education. In 1924, the state law was applied to bar Martha Lum from attending Rosedale Consolidated High School in Bolivar County, Mississippi—a school for white students. Martha’s father, Gong Lum, sued the state in a lawsuit that did not challenge the constitutionality of segregated education but instead challenged his daughter’s classification as “colored.”

When the Mississippi Supreme Court held that Martha Lum could not insist on being educated with white students because she was of the “Mongolian or yellow race,” her father appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In its decision siding with the state of Mississippi, the Court reasoned that Mississippi’s decision to bar Martha from attending the local white high school did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment because she was entitled to attend a “colored” school. This decision extended the reach of segregation laws and policies in Mississippi and throughout the nation by classifying all non-white individuals as “colored.”

A white church board in Durant, Mississippi, voted unanimously to fire a Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Marsh Callaway, after he defended racial integration and spoke out against the White Citizens’ Council in Holmes County.

In September, a group of white people in nearby Tchula, Mississippi, demanded that Dr. David Minter and Eugene Cox, two white men who operated a cooperative farm, leave the community for supporting racial integration. Dr. Minter served as a physician and, alongside Mr. Cox, had assisted the Black community in Holmes County with medical care and aid over the prior 17 years. When news spread that the two men supported racial integration and allegedly permitted Black and white teenagers to swim in a pond together near the farm, an officer of the White Citizens’ Council called a meeting to vote to remove these two men from the community.

Like White Citizens’ Councils across the country, the White Citizens’ Council in Holmes County was committed to preserving racial segregation and white supremacy in all aspects of life. In 1955, 250 White Citizens’ Councils had formed throughout the South, composed of a total of 60,000 members, and by 1957, membership reached 250,000.

During the meeting attended by at least 400 white people from Holmes County, as individuals gathered to vote on the removal of Dr. Minter and Mr. Cox from the community, the Rev. Callaway, a minister at the Durant Presbyterian Church, stood up in opposition, calling the meeting “undemocratic and un-Christian.” He praised Mr. Cox as “a fine Christian man,” to which the crowd booed and hissed him into silence. Shortly after the meeting, the Rev. Callaway was asked by his white congregation to resign as minister because his support for integration caused “many of the church members to lose faith in the minister.”

In the week prior to the Rev. Callaway’s public condemnation of the White Citizens’ Council, Durant Presbyterian had one of the “largest crowds in several months” attend church services. The following week, church members of the Durant Presbyterian Church boycotted services because the Rev. Callaway had spoken out at the meeting. On November 20, members of the church voted unanimously for the Rev. Callaway’s immediate removal, citing “personal conflict.” He was fired after approval by the Central Mississippi Presbytery.

Dozens of Black veterans who were wrongfully discharged from the 25th Infantry Regiment, a segregated unit stationed at Fort Brown, Texas, went to San Antonio seeking work. In a coordinated effort, white employers throughout the city uniformly refused to hire these men in an attempt to drive them out of town.

Over the summer of 1906, Black soldiers of the segregated 25th Infantry Regiment were stationed by the U.S. government in Fort Brown, Texas, even though the War Department recognized that Black soldiers would “not be welcomed” there and would be at risk for racial violence. While stationed at Fort Brown, Black soldiers were subjected to segregated facilities and barred from most establishments and parks in nearby Brownsville.

On the evening of August 13, 1906, shots were fired into civilian homes in Brownsville by an unknown group of individuals. When police arrived at the scene, an altercation ensued, leaving a white man, who was hit by stray bullets, dead and a police officer wounded. Without any evidence identifying those responsible, suspicion quickly turned to a group of Black soldiers of the 25th Regiment.

When questioned by authorities, Fort Brown’s all-white military commanders corroborated the alibis of these Black soldiers, affirming that the soldiers remained in their barracks at the time of the shooting. Despite this strong evidence of their innocence, Brownsville authorities charged 12 Black soldiers with murder. The soldiers repeatedly and consistently stated they had no knowledge of the attack or those who were involved.

Attempting to force confessions from this group of innocent Black soldiers, the federal government gave the entire regiment a deadline to come forward with information about the August 13 incident or face the consequences. When no soldiers came forward, in an action unprecedented in U.S. history, President Theodore Roosevelt issued an executive order dishonorably discharging not only the 12 accused men, but the entire unit—167 Black soldiers of the B, C, and D companies of the 25th Infantry—from the U.S. Army on November 6 for their “conspiracy of silence.” The order further barred the men from ever re-enlisting in the U.S. military or applying for a civil service position with the federal government.

In the wake of being discharged, these innocent Black veterans, who had bravely chosen to serve the U.S., were forced to navigate the presumption of guilt and dangerousness, despite never having a trial or being convicted of any crime, and were subjected to mistreatment and abuse, as exemplified by the white employers in San Antonio who colluded to deny them employment. Some of these veterans had served in the military for over 20 years, but because of this action, were denied their pensions.

A Black man named James Cody was beaten with a flashlight, subjected to electric shock on his testicles and buttocks, and threatened with castration by officers acting under Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge. Over the course of almost 30 years, Commander Burge oversaw and participated in the torture of over 100 Black men, resulting in scores of forced confessions. When Commander Burge first took command of the jurisdiction known as Area 2 as a detective in 1972, he and his men—known as the “Midnight Crew”—began forcing confessions using brutal torture practices such as beating, suffocation, electric shock, burning, Russian roulette, and mock execution.

In 1982, Cook County State’s Attorney Richard Daley was notified of Commander Burge’s tactics through a letter detailing Commander Burge’s abuse of a man named Andrew Wilson, who was beaten, shocked, suffocated, burned with a radiator, and threatened with a gun in his mouth. Mr. Wilson sued the city in one of numerous complaints and lawsuits alleging torture by Commander Burge and his men. Despite these complaints, the State’s Attorney’s office continued to use confessions obtained by Commander Burge’s team to convict and incarcerate dozens of Black men over the next 10 years.

An investigation into the torture allegations was not launched until 1991, following pressure from advocacy groups, international human rights organizations, and torture survivors. Two years later, Commander Burge was fired, and 15 years after that, he was convicted of perjury for lying under oath in one of the civil suits; he served less than four years in prison. In 2015, the city of Chicago approved a $5.5 million reparations package for survivors of the Burge-led torture campaign. The settlement included a formal apology as well as curricular reforms that would highlight the survivors’ stories in schools. Despite the review and reversal of many convictions that were obtained under Commander Burge’s command, in 2015 more than a dozen survivors remained in prison and had not yet had their cases reviewed.

Over 1,000 white students and faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill gathered to attend a speech openly advocating for white supremacy by the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Dr. Hiram Evans. The UNC Political Science Department and the Carolina Political Union hosted the event, entitled “America and the Klan.” Amidst the rise of Nazism in Europe, Dr. Evans told students, “What America needs most now to restore the good old days when nations loved each other is a universal dose of the Ku Klux Klan.”

Dr. Evans said that “the Klan will continue to insist on white supremacy, for experience has shown that nations that have mixed breeds with the Black race have found themselves headed for destruction.” Dr. Evans also urged that “America had admitted too many foreigners” who were “responsible for most of our country’s social and economic ills” and that “America must be dominated by Americans, not by Negroes or aliens.” He warned students of the rise of Black leadership in the South, urging white students and faculty to join the Klan to combat Black political power.

As Dr. Evans spewed racism and intolerance, the more than 1,000 white students and faculty showed support and enjoyment of racial insults and threats throughout the event.

Locals viewed Dr. Evans’ visit as an attempt to launch a new public KKK chapter. In covering Dr. Evans’ 1937 speech, the Daily Tar Heel, Carolina’s student newspaper, noted that since the chapter first launched privately in 1921, “The KKK has grown to the strongest secret organization in existence.”

Carolina’s ties to the Klan persisted well into the 21st century. In the 1920s, UNC named Saunders Hall, a campus building, after William Saunders, the leader of the North Carolina Ku Klux Klan.

Despite decades of student activism seeking to change this name, Saunders Hall remained the name on the building until 2015.

A 15-year-old Black teenager named Preston “John” Porter Jr. was burned alive while chained to a railroad stake in Limon, Colorado. A mob of more than 300 white people from throughout Lincoln County gathered to participate in the brutal public spectacle lynching.

Earlier in the year, Preston, his father, Preston Porter Sr., and his brother, Arthur Porter, moved to the Limon, Colorado, area from Lawrence, Kansas, to seek work on the railroad. When a white girl named Louise Frost was found dead in Limon on November 8, a search began for possible suspects. Newspapers reported that the Porter family had left Limon for Denver a few days after the girl was found dead, and white authorities focused suspicions on them. On November 12, all three were arrested and taken to the city jail in Denver.

During this era, the deep racial hostility that permeated American society burdened Black people and communities with presumptions of guilt and dangerousness when crimes were discovered. Allegations against Black people were rarely subject to serious scrutiny, and mere accusations of inappropriate behavior or violence by a Black person towards a white person often incited mob violence and the threat of lynching.

After the Porters had been in jail for four days, newspapers reported that Preston had confessed to the crime “in order to save his father and brother from sharing the fate that he believes awaits him.” Black suspects were often subjected to beatings, torture, and threats of lynching during police interrogations. While news reports often reported these confessions as justifications for the brutal terror lynchings that followed, the confession of a lynching victim was always more reliable evidence of fear than guilt.

Despite the governor’s order to not transfer Preston back to Lincoln County for at least eight days following Preston’s confession, the sheriff of Lincoln County prematurely transported Preston by train from the Denver jail to return to Lincoln County. When the train stopped just outside of Limon, a mob of 300 or more people—including Louise Frost’s father—were waiting. Newspapers described the lynching as follows:

[Preston] was said to have been reading a Bible and was allowed to pray before his lynching. When the flames reached his body, reports documented his screams for help as he writhed in pain, crying, “Oh my God, let me go men!…Please let me go. Oh, my God, my God!” When the ropes binding [Preston] to the stake had burned through, such that his body had fallen partially out of the fire, members of the mob threw additional kerosene oil over him and added wood to the fire. It was reported that [Preston’s] last words were “Oh, God, have mercy on these men, on the little girl and her father!”

Despite ample press coverage identifying multiple members of the mob, no investigation into the lynching was conducted and the coroner concluded Preston died “at the hands of parties unknown.” Following the lynching, Preston’s father and brother left Colorado to return to Kansas and soon afterward the Colorado legislature voted to reinstate the state’s death penalty to avoid future “lawlessness” like the lynching in Limon.

Preston “John” Porter Jr. is one of more than 6,500 documented African American victims of racial terror lynching killed in the U.S. between 1865 and 1950, and one of six killed in Colorado.

North Carolina passed two laws designed to limit the influence of an anti-slavery pamphlet and discourage its dissemination, mandating the punishment of death for those who twice violated the law. About a year earlier, in September 1829, David Walker, a free Black abolitionist and activist living in Boston, Massachusetts, published An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. The anti-slavery pamphlet advocated for racial equality and called for free and enslaved Black people to actively challenge injustice, racial oppression, and the institution of slavery.

The Appeal was the first published document to demand the immediate and uncompensated emancipation of enslaved people in America. Mr. Walker also indirectly targeted his pamphlet to white readers, urging them to cease their inhumane treatment of enslaved people.

The pamphlet was quickly and clandestinely circulated among Black people, especially in the South, inciting anger among many white people and sometimes swift and harsh punishment. Jacob Cowan, a literate enslaved man in North Carolina, was sold “downriver” to Alabama after he was caught with 200 copies of the pamphlet for distribution to other enslaved people in the community. Copies of the pamphlet found by Southern officials were destroyed, the State of Georgia offered a bounty for Mr. Walker’s capture, and several Southern states—like North Carolina—eventually passed laws to further oppress both enslaved and free Black people.

Titled “An Act to Prevent the Circulation of Seditious Publications,” North Carolina’s first law banned bringing into the state any publication with the tendency to inspire revolution or resistance among enslaved or free Black people; a first violation of the law was punishable by whipping and one-year imprisonment, while those convicted of a second offense would “suffer death without benefit of clergy.”

The second law forbade all persons in the state from teaching the enslaved to read and write. A white person convicted of violating the law would be subject to a $100-200 fine or imprisonment; a free Black person would face a fine, imprisonment, or between 20 and 39 lashes; and an enslaved Black person convicted of teaching other enslaved people to read or write would receive 39 lashes.

Four federal marshals escorted six-year-old Ruby Bridges to her first day of first grade as the first Black student to attend previously all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana. A riotous white mob organized by the local White Citizens’ Council gathered to protest her arrival, screaming hateful slurs, threats, and insults.

In August 1955, African American parents in New Orleans, Louisiana, sued the Orleans Parish School Board for failing to desegregate local schools in compliance with the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The following February, a federal court ordered the school board to desegregate the city’s schools. For the next four years, the school board and state lawmakers defied the federal court’s order and resisted school desegregation.

On May 16, 1960, Judge J. Skelly Wright issued a federal order demanding the gradual desegregation of New Orleans public schools, beginning with the first grade—but the Orleans Parish School Board convinced Judge Wright to accept an even more limited desegregation plan, requiring African American students to apply for transfer into all-white schools. Only five of the 137 African American first graders who applied for a transfer were accepted; four agreed to attend, including six-year-old Ruby Bridges, who was the sole Black student assigned to William Frantz Elementary.

After getting past the angry white crowd to enter the school, Ruby arrived in her assigned classroom to find that she and the teacher were the only two people present; it would remain that way for the rest of the school year. Within a week, nearly all of the white students assigned to the newly integrated elementary schools in New Orleans had withdrawn.

Despite threats and retaliation against her family, including her grandparents’ eviction from the Mississippi farm where they worked as sharecroppers, Ruby remained at Frantz Elementary. The next year, Ruby advanced to the second grade, and the school’s incoming first grade class had eight Black students.

Longview, Texas, Police Chief Roy Stone threatened four top-ranking NAACP officers—the Reverend S.Y. Nixon, I.S. White, E.C. Hawkins, and Rance James—phoning each of the men at home and stating he would jail them if they did not produce NAACP membership records immediately. Chief Stone acted under the authority of a new Longview city ordinance that gave the city manager the power to demand membership lists from any organization operating within the city’s limits and to impose criminal fines for non-compliance. Within 24 hours, Chief Stone made good on his threat, arresting Mr. Nixon, Mr. White, Mr. Hawkins, and Mr. James and detaining them in the city jail. Longview City Judge Henry Atkinson set bail at $200.

On October 9, the Texas NAACP announced plans to host the organization’s annual state conference in Longview. During planning meetings, local white officials refused to allow the Texas NAACP to convene in Longview unless they produced membership lists. During one meeting on October 23, white Longview journalist Carl Estes physically assaulted Field Secretary Edwin Washington and forced Black organizers out of his office after the NAACP declined to disclose confidential information about its members.

The following day, the Longview City Commission passed the mandatory disclosure ordinance targeting the Texas NAACP. Every city commissioner endorsed enforcement of the ordinance, knowing that requiring the NAACP to disclose its membership lists could have disastrous and deadly consequences for its members. On October 27, NAACP Field Secretary Washington announced plans to move the Texas annual conference to Dallas, considering “the pressures, threats, ugliness, and distress” that Black civil rights leaders faced in Longview.

Membership in the NAACP or participation in civil rights work often meant that Black people would be fired from their jobs, harassed by the police, and become targets of vigilante violence and hate crimes. African Americans joined despite the threats because of their commitment to end racial inequality, but the risks were real.

The passage of this ordinance in Longview led to the passage of a new state law, enacted in December 1957, modeled on the Longview ordinance, which authorized county judges to demand confidential records from civil rights organizations. In 1958, in NAACP v. Alabama ex rel Patterson, the U.S. Supreme Court declared these mandatory disclosure laws unconstitutional, as violative of the First Amendment right to freedom of association.

A mob of at least 700 white men, women, and children killed two teenage Black boys—15-year-old Ernest Collins and 16-year-old Benny Mitchell—in Colorado County, Texas, in a public spectacle lynching. Afterward, officials called the lynching “justice,” and no one in the mob was punished.

In October 1935, a young white woman’s body was found in a creek near her family’s farm in Columbus, Texas. When local officials concluded she had been murdered, suspicion soon focused on Ernest Collins and Benny Mitchell: two Black teens who had been seen picking pecans near the same creek. During this era, the deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society burdened Black people with a presumption of guilt that often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered, whether evidence supported that suspicion or not.

Law enforcement officers arrested Ernest and Benny and, soon after, reported that the young men had confessed to the crime. Black suspects in the South during this time were regularly subjected to beatings, torture, and threats of lynching during police interrogations. News reports eagerly reported Ernest’s and Benny’s alleged confessions as truthful justifications for the brutal lynchings that followed, but without fair investigation or trial, their supposed confessions serve as more reliable evidence of fear than guilt.

The boys were held in Houston after arrest until they had to return to Columbus for a trial on November 12. While the sheriff was transporting Benny and Ernest to the Colorado County courthouse, several cars filled with armed white men stopped them on a bridge crossing and demanded to lynch the two boys. The sheriff handed them over.

Immediately, the white mob brought Ernest and Benny to a live oak tree about a mile from the young white girl’s home and prepared to kill them. A crowd of at least 700 people gathered to watch and repeatedly “burst into jeering screams” as Ernest and Benny, who had been chained together by their necks, were led to the tree. Several members of the mob placed ropes around the boys’ necks and hanged them until dead.

The next day, the white community proudly boasted and praised the lynchings. The county attorney publicly said the lynching was “an expression of the will of the people,” and a local judge called the lynchings “justice.” Several newspapers reporting on the lynchings printed an image of two local sheriff officials posing with one of the lynching ropes, and both ropes were exhibited in a local drug store. Local press was silent about the lynching’s impact on the local Black community. Though the mob members and spectators were widely known, no one was immediately arrested or charged for their actions.

Since the end of Reconstruction in 1877, racial terror lynchings targeting Black communities had killed thousands of men, women, and children throughout the U.S., but repeated calls for a federal anti-lynching law had failed due to obstruction by Southern white lawmakers. In 1935, the same year that Benny Mitchell and Ernest Collins were lynched, the Costigan-Wagner anti-lynching bill was introduced in the U.S. Senate. Texas’s own Sen. Tom Connally opposed the bill and claimed that states were capable of stopping lynching without “federal interference.” Within weeks of the lynchings of Benny and Ernest, the NAACP protested the lack of any state or local investigation and insisted it clearly showed that many states could not—or would not—act to stop the lynching of Black people. The bill ultimately failed, and the U.S. Congress never passed anti-lynching legislation during the 20th century.

After a rushed trial and conviction, an enslaved Black man named Nat Turner was hanged in Jerusalem, Virginia, after being convicted of leading a revolt against his enslavers.

On August 21, 1831, Mr. Turner led a group of Black people in a revolt against slavery. Other enslaved Black people joined the uprising, and Mr. Turner’s troops grew to 60 to 70 people who fought white enslavers before being defeated by a militia. Many of Mr. Turner’s followers were killed or captured immediately, but Mr. Turner escaped and evaded searchers for weeks before being captured on October 30, 1831.

Enslavers and defenders of slavery throughout Virginia wanted Nat Turner and all who participated in the revolt harshly punished as an example to others who might be inspired by his efforts. At least 18 Black participants in the uprising were executed along with Nat Turner.

However, in the months after the rebellion, angry white mobs began to torture and murder hundreds of Black people who had not participated in the revolt, terrorizing enslaved and free Black people. Conditions of enslavement worsened for thousands of enslaved Black people as more cruel, barbaric, and traumatizing forms of control were implemented.

In response to Mr. Turner’s revolt, at least nine states—Virginia, Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee—passed laws targeting enslaved and free Black people and limiting their mobility. These laws prohibited Black people from assembling freely, conducting independent religious services, or preaching to a crowd of more than five people. Some states passed laws criminalizing the education of Black people, prohibiting Black people from learning to read or write. Some states also passed laws barring free Black people from living in the state.

Rather than retreat from the horrors of slavery as was happening in Central and South America, southern states in America committed to a new era of harsher conditions, dehumanizing control, and brutal punishment of enslaved people.

In the late 1890s, Wilmington, North Carolina, a port city between the Atlantic’s barrier islands and the banks of the Cape Fear River, became an island of hope for a new America.

Residents of the city’s thriving Black community made themselves a political force, exercising the rights of citizenship guaranteed to them after the Civil War by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Across the South, such activity had triggered deadly white violence against Black voters, organizers, and officeholders in the decades since the war. But in Wilmington, a city of 20,000, the votes of 8,000 Black men helped a rare biracial “Fusion” alliance elect candidates of both races.

Three of the 10 aldermen were Black. The city had Black health inspectors, postmasters, magistrates, and policemen, albeit under orders not to arrest anyone white. The county coroner, jailer, and treasurer were Black, as was the register of deeds. Black business people pooled their money in three Black-owned banks. Families a generation removed from enslavement owned their homes and read a local Black newspaper.

As modern-day Wilmingtonian Tim Pinnick, a genealogist, put it, “Things functioned the way they were meant to function as a result of Emancipation.”

But if Wilmington looked to some Americans like a model for the South, powerful white leaders, including the president of Wilmington Cotton Mills Company, the editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, and the chairman of the state Democratic party, could not abide it. They set out to topple what the newspaper editor labeled “Negro rule.”

The plotters had set the stage by creating what they called the “White Supremacy Campaign.” They printed falsehoods about Black men preying on white women and stockpiling guns. They targeted the Fusion officeholders and the Black newspaper, summoned militias and white vigilantes known as Red Shirts, and terrorized Black voters at the polls.

“If you see the negro out voting tomorrow, tell him stop,” one of the leaders, former Confederate Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell, told a gun-waving white audience on the eve of Wilmington’s 1898 election. “If he doesn’t, shoot him down. Shoot him down in his tracks.” Mr. Waddell vowed to “choke the current of the Cape Fear River” with Black bodies if he had to.

On November 10, Red Shirts, militiamen, and white mobs surged through Wilmington’s streets and massacred 60 or more Black people. “They gave their lives to vote,” said Hesketh “Nate” Brown, a retired New York City transit manager whose great-great-grandfather, Joshua Halsey, tried to flee the militiamen.

The Red Shirts torched the Black newspaper’s office, posed for pictures in front of its smoking ruins, installed Mr. Waddell as mayor, and sent hundreds of Black residents fleeing into the woods. Some ran west toward the river; others, east to the Black cemetery. Athalia Howe was 12 when her family and others took refuge in Pine Forest, a cemetery that dated back to the period before Emancipation. It was said that families sheltered next to graves of their loved ones.

For years no one in Ms. Howe’s family said much about those events, as her great-granddaughter, Cynthia Brown, told The Washington Post. But one day, when she was about eight years old, a distant look filled her great-grandmother’s eyes and she grabbed Ms. Brown’s wrist.

So did Mr. Pinnick, the Black schoolteacher from Illinois who learned of the coup in recent years when he retired to Wilmington. And Nate Brown, the retired transit manager who found his great-great-grandfather’s name in an 1898 newspaper clipping about the “Race War.” (The article blamed Black “aggressors.”) And Sonya Patrick-AmenRa, who counts among her ancestors four soldiers of the United States Colored Troops who helped win the Civil War.

Now, Mr. Brown, Ms. Brown (they are not related), Mr. Pinnick, Ms. AmenRa, and other Wilmingtonians, along with ministers, activists, authors, educators, and a documentary filmmaker whose ancestor aided the plotters, are helping change the historical narrative.

Over the last two decades a school and park named after leaders who directed the murder of dozens of Black people have been renamed. Community activists have set out to learn the names of everyone who was killed and every Black Wilmingtonian who survived the 1898 massacre. They are marking the coup’s 125th anniversary, November 10, with a week of events that include “racial-equity and trauma training,” documentary film showings, and descendants’ stories.

“There is a need to focus on that horrible day to understand it,” Mr. Pinnick said. “And yet, it’s a testimony to surviving that the story should be told.”

For nearly a century the story was told falsely—in textbooks, clippings, and memoirs that cast the horrific violence as a spontaneous “riot” and the plotters as heroes who restored racial order to Wilmington.

In 2006, a state-commissioned report debunked the longstanding false narratives about Wilmington’s history.

Even so, Deborah Dicks Maxwell, president of the county’s NAACP chapter, said many local residents still don’t know about it. “This is Wilmington,” she told USAToday last year. “There’s a distance to progress.”

That was evident in the unguarded words of three white Wilmington police officers in 2020, weeks after George Floyd’s killing. A routine audit of patrol car videotapes revealed the longtime officers discussing killing “f—ing n—s.”

A civil war was coming, Officer Michael Piner said. “We are just gonna go out and start slaughtering them f—ing n—s.” The officers told investigators they had been “venting” and blamed the “stress of today’s climate in law enforcement.”

Wilmington’s first Black police chief fired them in his first week on the job.

Their words were “painful, hurtful,” Chief Donny Williams, a Wilmington officer for nearly three decades, told NPR. “Being from this community, and then working alongside these people for so long, so just hurt—and not just me.”

Estimates of the number of Black people killed range from dozens to hundreds. The state’s 2006 study described the coup in detail and blamed all levels of government for not intervening; it said Black merchants and workers “suffered losses after 1898 in terms of job status, income, and access to capital.” Black businesses moved or closed. Some 2,100 Black residents fled. Black literacy rates plunged.

By the turn of the century, Southern states were using poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses to deny Black men the right to vote, which the Fifteenth Amendment had guaranteed them since 1870. Between 1896 and 1902, the number of Black voters registered in North Carolina fell from 126,000 to 6,100. Wilmington did not elect another Black candidate until 1972.

The violence in Wilmington was not unique. Historians and EJI researchers have documented at least 34 instances of mass violence during Reconstruction where scores of Black people were murdered by white mobs intent on reestablishing white supremacy and resisting Black political participation. It is a history that is not well known but is critically relevant for understanding the continuing struggle for racial justice and the many obstacles that still remain.

Hesketh Brown has tracked down the deed for the home that his great-great-grandfather, Joshua Halsey, who was born before Emancipation, owned at 812 North Sixth Street in Wilmington. David Zucchino’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2020 book, “Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy”, described what happened there on November 10, 1898: A rumor of gunfire from a Black dance hall caused white militiamen to hunt for Mr. Halsey, searching house to house until someone gave them his address.

One of Joshua and Sallie Halsey’s four daughters—Mary, Susan, Satira, and Bessie—saw the militiamen marching toward the house and begged her father, who was said to be deaf, to flee.

He “ran out the back door in frantic terror to be shot like a dog by armed soldiers ostensibly sent to preserve the peace,” a white neighbor wrote in her diary.

Jars of sandy soil from the spot where Mr. Halsey died were collected in 2021 as part of EJI’s Community Remembrance Project. One jar has a place of honor 500 miles away, in the library of Mr. Brown’s home in Queens.

Another jar was part of a ceremonial burial for Mr. Halsey in 2021. After attending the event on that bitterly cold November day, Mr. Brown visited the Cape Fear River. “I just pictured myself being one of those people many years ago—stuck between that river and armed racists and needing to choose,” he said. “It was the first time I felt anger.”

He and Tim Pinnick want to tell the story of 1898. “I want my legacy here to be that I reconnected people, or connected them to their legacy—their great-grandfather lived next door to Joshua Halsey, or around the corner, or a newspaper account connects them, or a marriage document,” Mr. Pinnick said.

He knows how long the truth of what happened went unwritten. Not anymore.

“Someone’s going to write your history,” Mr. Pinnick said. “You can let someone else write it, or you can write it.”

A Texas law entitled “An Act to provide for the employment of Convicts for petty offenses” was approved, authorizing county authorities to employ jailed men and women in public works and/or lease them out to private employers. These jailed workers were to receive a “wage” of $1 per day, applied toward unpaid fines or costs owed to the county. Just days later, the legislature passed another law, authorizing the leasing of people incarcerated in state prisons.

The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, was then and is still today celebrated as the legislative act that ended American slavery. However, the amendment’s text includes an exception: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

In Southern states that had long relied on enslaved Black people to perform the agricultural work so critical to the region’s economy, emancipation upended the social, economic, and political systems. The abolition amendment’s exception permitting the continued enslavement of people with criminal convictions, however, enabled the South to continue exploiting the labor of Black people, and many states seized that opportunity.

In addition to passing Black Codes that criminalized acts like unemployment and public assembly when committed by freedmen, many Southern states also passed laws authorizing the leasing of the larger, predominately Black convict populations these statutes created. Rather than create a financial burden for the state, increased prison populations could create profit. In Texas and throughout the South, these arrangements would prove profitable for the state and deadly for the workers, nearly all Black, who were forced to work in dangerous, inhumane conditions.

A white mob took 18-year-old Orion “Owen” Anderson from the jail in Leesburg, Virginia, and lynched him. Mr. Anderson, a young Black man, allegedly wore a sack on his head and frightened the daughter of a prominent white man in Loudoun County on her walk to school. Though there were no witnesses and the girl could not identify who had scared her, Mr. Anderson was arrested after a sack was found near him. He was jailed, and later reports claimed he confessed to attempting to frighten her.

During the era of racial terror, Black suspects were often subjected to beatings, torture, and threats of lynching during police interrogations. While news reports often reported these confessions as justifications for the brutal terror lynchings that followed, the confession of a lynching victim was always more reliable evidence of fear than guilt.

In the early morning on November 8, a group of 40 white men rode into Leesburg on horseback. Three of the men gained entry to the jail by pretending that they had a prisoner who needed to be admitted. Once inside, they took Mr. Anderson from his cell, carried him to the freight depot of the Richmond & Danville Railroad, hanged him, and shot his body full of bullets. The members of the mob were seen riding through town on horseback afterward, but no one tried to apprehend them or claimed to recognize them. Owen Anderson was buried in the town’s pauper’s cemetery.

Leesburg’s newspaper, the Mirror, reported the lynching on November 14, calling it “a terrible warning” and stating, “The fate of the self-confessed author of the outrage should serve as a terrible admonition to the violators of the law for the protection of female virtue.” Owen Anderson is one of over 6,500 Black women, men, and children who were victims of racial terror lynching in the U.S. between 1865-1950.

Dean Juliette Derricotte of Fisk University in Nashville was driving three students to her parents’ home in Atlanta when an older white man driving a Model T car suddenly swerved and struck Dean Derricotte’s car, overturning it into a ditch. The white driver stopped to yell at Dean Derricotte and her passengers for damaging his own vehicle, then left the scene without rendering any aid. Others tried to get care for the injured Black passengers, but the nearby Hamilton Memorial Hospital in Dalton, Georgia—a segregated facility—refused to admit African American patients. Instead, Dean Derricotte and the three students were treated by a white doctor at his office in Dalton. Though Dean Derricotte and one of the students, Nina Johnson, were critically injured, following their treatment they were left to recuperate in the home of a local African American woman.

Six hours after the accident, one of the other students who sustained less serious injuries was able to reach a Chattanooga hospital by phone, and arrangements were made to transport Dean Derricotte and Ms. Johnson to that facility, which was 35 miles away. However, the delay proved fatal: Dean Derricotte died on her way to the hospital, at age 34, and Ms. Johnson died the next day.

The Committee on Interracial Cooperation opened an investigation into the incident, and Walter White, secretary of the New York-based NAACP, traveled south in December 1931 to learn more. He later concluded, “The barbarity of race segregation in the South is shown in all its brutal ugliness by the willingness to let cultured, respected, and leading colored women die for lack of hospital facilities which are available to any white person no matter how low in social scale.”

Six white police officers shot an unarmed 25-year-old Black military veteran named Roland T. Price outside of a bar in Rochester, New York. The shooting was deemed “justified” even though evidence showed that Mr. Price did not resist the officers’ demands.

Mr. Price was the recipient of the Purple Heart medal, awarded in the name of the president to those wounded or killed while serving, which he was wearing when he entered the bar in his military uniform that evening. After buying a drink, Mr. Price and the white bartender got into an argument over whether Mr. Price had been given the correct amount of change. In response, the bartender then drew a gun on Mr. Price and one of the waitresses called the police.

Patrolman William Hamill entered the restaurant with his gun drawn and ordered Mr. Price at gunpoint to step outside. Mr. Price complied with this order, exiting the bar to find five police officers waiting for him.

Despite seeing no weapon on Mr. Price, police confronted the veteran, who was in uniform, and ultimately opened fire on Mr. Price, shooting him multiple times, including twice in the chest and once in the head. After his death, a search of his body confirmed that he was unarmed. None of the police officers involved were indicted for Mr. Price’s death, and the shooting was deemed “justified.”

The repeated shootings of unarmed Black men by police and widespread racial discrimination against Black people have traumatized communities of color for decades. The legacy of this violence and a lack of response continues to haunt the U.S.

A five-man territorial commission representing the U.S. government sentenced 303 Dakota men to death for their participation in the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.

In the early 1800s, white settlers increasingly encroached upon the land of the Dakota people in Minnesota. To maintain peace, the Dakota agreed to a series of treaties, the first of which was signed in 1805, exchanging their land for the promise of financial payments and goods.

After the American Civil War began in 1861, the U.S. government failed to pay the money promised to the Dakota. This monetary deficit, coupled with further settler encroachment onto Dakota hunting and farming lands, pushed the Dakota to the brink of starvation, prompting Dakota men to begin making incursions into white settlements for food in the summer of 1862.

In response, the U.S. organized a military force composed of federal troops and local militia, and the conflict escalated. Outnumbered, the Dakota forces surrendered in September of 1862. Over 2,000 Dakota were taken into custody.

On November 5, 1862, a territorial commission composed of five military officers sentenced the captured Dakota men accused of participating in the war. Of the nearly 500 Dakota tried, 303 were sentenced to be executed. These men had no access to lawyers, and some of the trials lasted fewer than five minutes. After ordering a review of the trial records, President Abraham Lincoln commuted all but 39 of the death sentences; the execution of the condemned Dakota men on December 26, 1862, remains the largest single mass execution in American history.

Benjamin Ryan Tillman was elected governor of South Carolina. An outspoken white supremacist, Mr. Tillman created his identity as a politician based on white supremacy, a deep commitment to blocking any educational opportunity for Black people, and advocating for violence against Black voters. Concerning the education of Black people, Mr. Tillman argued, “when you educate a Negro, you educate a candidate for the penitentiary or spoil a good field hand.”

Mr. Tillman’s political career began after his involvement in the 1876 Hamburg Massacre, where white men rioted and killed nine people in a predominantly Black town in South Carolina. In his gubernatorial campaign, Mr. Tillman promised to keep the state’s Black population in a position of permanent inferiority. In his inaugural address and throughout his administration, he emphasized white supremacy and the necessity to revoke Black Americans’ rights.

Mr. Tillman served two terms as governor and played a critical role in the 1895 South Carolina Constitutional Convention. In order to vote under the revised constitution, a man had to own property, pay a poll tax, pass a literacy test, and meet certain educational standards. The 1895 constitution disenfranchised Black voters in intent and effect and served as a model for other Southern states.

After serving as governor, Mr. Tillman was elected U.S. senator from South Carolina in 1895 and served in this capacity for 24 years. Throughout his tenure, he staunchly opposed Black equality and women’s suffrage. Mr. Tillman’s philosophy helped shape the era of oppression and abuse of Black Americans throughout the South. A statue honoring Mr. Tillman still stands on the grounds of South Carolina’s State Capitol.

On Election Day, local white residents in Eufaula, Alabama, determined to regain political dominance in the county that they had lost during Reconstruction, used terror and intimidation to suppress Black votes, ultimately waging a violent, deadly massacre.

As the 1874 election neared, white employers openly fired any Black workers who intended to vote for Elias Keils, a white candidate who supported the aims of Reconstruction, for the position of city court judge. False rumors spread that Black residents planned to violently drive white voters from the polls, and white residents began stockpiling guns near Eufaula polling sites.

Judge Keils tried to notify state and federal officials of the danger, but Alabama’s attorney general rebuffed the warning, and federal troops stationed in Eufaula refused to intervene.

Despite the risk, hundreds of Black men marched to the downtown Eufaula polling site on November 3. Some Black voters were immediately arrested and jailed on fraud accusations. Around noon, several white men forced a Black man into an alley and threatened to arrest him if he did not vote against civil rights. As witnesses protested, a single gunshot was fired by an unknown individual, harming no one.

Soon afterward, a large mob of white men retrieved the stockpiled guns stored nearby and fired “indiscriminately” into the crowd of mostly unarmed Black voters. Within minutes, 400 shots had been fired, killing at least six Black people, and possibly many more based on some estimates; as many as 80 additional Black people were left injured. Many survivors fled, including an estimated 500 Black people who had not yet voted.

Later that day, a white mob attacked another county polling station in Spring Hill, Alabama, where Judge Keils was the election supervisor. The mob destroyed the ballot box, burned the ballots inside, and killed Judge Keils’s teenage son Willie.

Although the identities of many white perpetrators of the massacre were known, no white person was ever convicted. Instead, a Black man named Hilliard Miles was convicted and imprisoned for perjury after identifying members of the white mob. Decades later, Braxton Bragg Comer, whom Mr. Miles had named as a perpetrator of the massacre, was elected governor of Alabama.

The Eufaula Massacre and its aftermath showed Black residents that exercising their new legal rights—particularly by voting—made them targets for deadly attacks and that they could not depend on authorities for protection.

The result was mass voter suppression. While 1,200 Black Eufaula residents voted in the 1874 election, only 10 cast ballots in 1876.

On Election Day, white mobs in Ocoee, Florida, began a campaign of terror and violence designed to stop Black citizens in Ocoee from voting that resulted in the deaths of dozens of Black people and the destruction of the Black community.

With the election approaching, Black residents in Ocoee who owned land and businesses were eager to vote. Despite a terrorizing and threatening march by white citizens through the streets of Orlando three days earlier aimed at deterring Black people from participating in the election, Mose Norman and other Black Americans went to the polls to vote on November 2. Mr. Norman, however, was turned away, allegedly on the grounds that he had not paid his poll tax.

After seeking advice from an Orlando judge, John Cheney, Mr. Norman again attempted to vote. This time, armed white men stationed at the polls immediately assaulted him. He fled to the nearby home of his friend and business associate, Julius “July” Perry.

As word spread of Mr. Norman’s attempts to vote, a mob of white residents seeking to capture him and Mr. Perry surrounded and burned Mr. Perry’s home. Mr. Norman escaped, but the mob severely wounded Mr. Perry. He was arrested, taken to Orlando, and locked in the Orange County Jail.

The next morning, a lynch mob took Mr. Perry from police custody, brutally beat him, and hanged him within sight of Judge Cheney’s home. His lifeless body was shot repeatedly.

Over a two-day span, a mob of white Floridians killed dozens of Black people and burned 25 Black homes, two Black churches, and a masonic lodge in Ocoee. Estimates of the total number of Black Americans killed during the violence range from six to over 30. There is no adequate accounting of this violence because neither the government nor the newspapers at the time thought it was important to establish how many Black people were killed during the attack.

The Ocoee Election Day Massacre represents one of the bloodiest days in American political history. Black survivors fled the community, never to return. The entire Black community of Ocoee was driven out within a year, forced to abandon or sell land and homes they owned. No Black Americans resided in the City of Ocoee for the following 60 years.

The lynching of July Perry and countless others, and the destruction of the Black community with impunity, showed Black residents that exercising their legal right to vote made them targets for deadly attacks and that they could not depend on authorities for protection.

As part of the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Project, in June 2019, EJI staff joined hundreds of community members, including Mr. Perry’s descendants, in downtown Orlando to unveil a historical marker honoring July Perry and the victims of the Ocoee Election Day Massacre.

Over several decades in the 19th and 20th centuries, thousands of Native children were forced away from their families and sent to off-reservation boarding schools in misguided efforts to “civilize” them. After the U.S. Congress created the Civilization Fund and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, boarding schools for Native children were established and children were forcibly compelled to attend these schools, which were designed to eradicate Native youth’s tribal ties and assimilate them into white culture so that they would grow into adults supportive of the American economy. The consequences of this horrific abuse are still felt today.

The first such school to open was Carlisle Indian School, opened in Carlisle, Pennsylvania on November 1, 1879. The founder, Captain Richard Pratt, described his philosophy for educating Native children as: “All the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” The federal government used Carlisle as a model for other boarding schools designed to forcefully assimilate Native children into white culture. Young children were taken from their families to attend these schools, and parents who resisted were forced to flee, hide, or face imprisonment. Many parents sent their children because Native children were not permitted to attend local public schools with white students, making assimilation boarding schools the only available opportunity for formal education.

The federal government’s views on educating Native children were rooted in racism and prejudice. While the government believed a white youth’s “moral character and habits are already formed and well-defined” when they leave for school, a Native youth was thought to be “born a savage and raised in an atmosphere of superstition and ignorance” without the “advantages which are inherited by his white brother.” In the eyes of the government, “if [a Native American child] is to rise from his low estate the germs of a nobler existence must be implanted in him and cultivated. He must be taught to lay aside his savage customs like a garment and take upon himself the habits of civilized life.”

Reflecting these genocidal biases, Native children attending boarding schools were given English names, forced to cut their hair, and forbidden from speaking their Native languages. Students received vocational training but very little academic instruction, with the expectation that they would make their living as farmers or manual laborers. Conditions in many schools were poor, and students were often the victims of physical and sexual abuse.

These schools continued to exist for decades with funding and support from the federal government.

In the early morning, a white mob of more than 50 men tightened a noose around the neck of an 18-year-old Black man named Silas Esters, dragged him from the LaRue County Jail in Hodgenville, Kentucky, and lynched him.

According to newspaper reports at the time, Mr. Esters had been accused of “coercing” a 15-year-old white boy to commit a crime. However, newspapers reported that Mr. Esters’s alleged offense was “unpunishable by any statute.” Despite having committed no crime, Mr. Esters was arrested by local white police and placed in jail.

During this era of racial terror, law enforcement officers, tasked with protecting the people in their custody, often witnessed or directly participated in deadly mob violence. In this instance, when the white mob arrived at the LaRue County Jail intent on lynching Mr. Esters, the white police officers gave the mob the keys to the jail and made no effort to protect Mr. Esters as he was violently removed and lynched.

After being seized by the mob, newspapers reported that Mr. Esters slipped free and began to run away—but made it only 100 yards before the white mob riddled his body with bullets. The mob then placed a noose around his neck, dragged his lifeless body to the courthouse, and swung it from the top steps.

At the time, newspapers reported that Granville Ward and his father, Thomas Ward, were the leaders of this mob. Though the identities of at least two individuals who participated in Mr. Esters’s murder were known, no one was ever held accountable for his lynching. Mr. Esters was one of over 6,500 Black women, men, and children who were documented victims of racial terror lynching in the U.S. between 1865 and 1950.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy were arrested and forced to begin serving sentences in Birmingham jail because they led peaceful protests against unconstitutional bans on “race mixing” in Birmingham in 1963. In April 1963, a series of civil rights protests occurred in Birmingham, Alabama, to challenge segregation in Birmingham’s public accommodations. Pro-segregation white residents and local police, led by the city’s notorious public safety commissioner, Bull Connor, responded to the protests with violence and legal suppression.

On April 10, 1963, a state judge granted city officials an injunction banning all anti-segregation protest activity in the city of Birmingham. Dr. King and the Rev. Abernathy chose to lead a march in defiance of the injunction and were arrested on April 12, 1963. Dr. King spent eight days in jail before being released on bail, and during that time wrote his famed “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

Dr. King and the Rev. Abernathy were still prosecuted after posting bail, and on April 26, 1963, they were convicted of contempt of court. Dr. King and the Rev. Abernathy unsuccessfully appealed and, on October 30, 1967, returned to Birmingham to each serve five-day jail sentences. Dozens of supporters protested outside of Birmingham’s jail for the duration of their incarceration.

A white mob attacked and brutally whipped a 52-year-old Black man named Abram Colby because of his political advocacy. Abram Colby was born into slavery in Greene County, Georgia, in approximately 1817. The son of an enslaved Black woman and a white landowner, Mr. Colby was emancipated 15 years before the end of American slavery and worked tirelessly to organize newly free Black people following the Civil War. A Radical Republican who stood for racial equality, Mr. Colby was elected to serve in the Georgia House of Representatives during Reconstruction. His impassioned advocacy for Black civil rights earned him the attention of the local Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist organization founded in 1865 to resist Reconstruction and restore white supremacy through targeted violence against Black people and their white political allies.

Three years after being attacked by a mob of white Klansmen, when called to Washington, D.C., to testify about the assault before a Congressional committee investigating reports of racial violence in the South, Mr. Colby bravely identified his attackers as some of the “first class men in our town. One is a lawyer, one a doctor, and some are farmers.” Shortly before the attack, Mr. Colby explained, the men had tried to bribe him to change parties or give up his office. Mr. Colby refused to do either and days later they returned:

On October 29,1869, [the white mob] broke my door open, took me out of bed, took me to the woods and whipped me three hours or more and left me for dead. They said to me, “Do you think you will ever vote another damned Radical ticket?” I said, “If there was an election tomorrow, I would vote the Radical ticket.” They set in and whipped me a thousand licks more, with sticks and straps that had buckles on the ends of them.

Mr. Colby told the committee that the attack had “broken something inside of [him]” and that the Klan’s continued harassment and violent assaults had forced him to abandon his re-election campaign. Mr. Colby testified most emotionally about the attack’s impact on his daughter, who was home when the white mob seized him to be whipped: “My little daughter begged them not to carry me away. They drew up a gun and actually frightened her to death. She never got over it until she died. That was the part that grieves me the most.”

A bright, warm afternoon in late October 1958, in rural Monroe, North Carolina: two Black children, nine-year-old James Hanover Thompson and his eight-year-old friend David “Fuzzy” Simpson, were playing with a group of white boys and girls in the yard next to one of the white children’s homes. Jim Crow laws were rigidly enforced at the time, but it was not unusual for Black and white children to play together when their separate, segregated schools let out for the day. They knew each other. The mothers of the Black children cooked and cleaned for the mothers of the white children.

As afternoon gave way to evening that day, October 28, and some of the children left, a kissing game began. One of the white girls, seven-year-old Sissy Sutton, kissed first David on the cheek, and then James, before heading home. Retrieving their wagons, which held a stash of empty bottles they hoped to sell, the two friends walked toward the center of town. They had no way of knowing they’d done anything wrong, and that white Monroe was about to severely punish them, and their families—for a kiss.

Sissy Sutton mentioned the kiss to her parents when she got home. James’s mother had worked for Sissy’s mother; his grandmother had worked for Sissy’s grandmother. Reportedly in hysterics and threatening to kill James, Sissy’s mother notified police. Rumors raced through the white community. Sissy’s father grabbed his shotgun and, joined by a mob threatening a lynching, he crossed the railroad tracks that divided Monroe’s white and Black neighborhoods. The Thompsons’ house was dark. James’s mother, Evelyn Thompson, would tell a reporter months later that “some white people in Monroe” had warned her “that my family would be killed if I didn’t get out of town.”

James and David were pulling their wagons when police accosted them, with guns drawn. Shouting racial epithets and calling them “little rapists,” police handcuffed the boys and shoved them into a patrol car. “When we got down to the police station, we understood that they said we had raped a little white girl,” James Thompson would recall more than half a century later. “They took us down in the bottom of the police station to a cell … They started beating us, they were beating us to our body, you know? They didn’t beat us to the face where nobody could see it. They just punched us all in the stomach and back and legs. We was hollering and screaming. We thought they were going to kill us.”

For the next six days they were kept locked up and barred from seeing their parents. Police entered their cell on Halloween, pretending to be Klansmen. “These men came with sheets over their heads,” Mr. Thompson would recall later. “They said they were going to hang us, lynch us. I was crying. I was scared to death.”

So began the infamous “kissing case,” as it came to be called, a case that shined an international spotlight on the bigotry and racial injustice in the South. The lives of James Thompson and David Simpson and their families were shattered and the entire Black community was traumatized, but as the spotlight shifted, with the exception of a television interview with Oprah Winfrey in 1993 and a 2011 interview for StoryCorps and NPR, the kissing case all but disappeared from public view.

“It’s been swept under the rug,” James Thompson’s younger brother, Dwight “Dee“ Thompson, 62, said in a recent interview with EJI, revisiting the “kissing case” as the 65th anniversary approached. “It’s history—American history. It’s shameful history.”

The boys were charged with assault and molestation. A juvenile court judge, J. Hampton Price, prepared to hear the case—but first he contacted the Morrison Training School in Hoffman, North Carolina, to secure places for the boys. The reformatory was founded as the State Training School for Negro Boys and renamed for Cameron Morrison, a North Carolina governor who had been a leader of the white supremacist Red Shirts.

Judge Price held his first hearing with just Sissy Sutton and her parents, thus denying the boys their right to confront their accuser. Then he held what he called a “separate but equal” hearing, and without attorneys there to defend them, he ruled the boys were guilty. He would later cite the boys’ silence when confronted with the charges as an admission of their guilt. On November 3, the judge sentenced the boys to spend the rest of their childhoods at the Morrison school. They would be eligible for release when they turned 21.

Within days, Evelyn Thompson’s white landlord sent her an eviction notice. Mrs. Thompson and David Simpson’s widowed mother, Jennie Simpson, were fired from their $15 a week jobs as domestic workers.

At night, shots were fired at the Thompson home. “My mom and them, they would go out in the morning and sweep bullets off the porch,” James’s older sister, Brenda Lee Graham, recalled in the StoryCorps interview.

Evelyn Thompson didn’t sleep. “She would be up walking the floors and praying,” Ms. Graham said. She also remembered “that at night you could see them burning crosses … right down the front yard.”

“They ran our family out of town,” Dwight Thompson told EJI. The NAACP moved both families into public housing in Charlotte for their own safety. That’s where Dwight was born, in 1961. “After everything that happened,” he said, “my mother had the audacity to have another child.”

Kelly Alexander, of the Wadesboro, North Carolina, NAACP, comforts James and David following an unsuccessful habeas corpus hearing. (Jet Magazine)

None of Monroe’s three newspapers or any of the state’s white newspapers covered the hearing or, initially, any of the events surrounding the kissing case. James and David might have spent years at the Morrison school but for the involvement of Robert Williams, the president of Monroe’s NAACP, who took up their cause, and Ted Poston, a rarity in 1958, a Black reporter for a major white newspaper, the New York Post, who agreed to write about the case.

On November 10, Mr. Poston’s story—which included the detail that the two boys had been threatened with lynching—ran on the Post’s front page. A Black civil rights attorney from New York, Conrad Lynn, got in touch with Robert Williams, offering to represent the boys.

Mr. Williams had already drawn the ire of white residents in Monroe. Weeks before the kissing episode he had petitioned, unsuccessfully, for his children to attend the segregated public elementary school. The previous year, he’d tried, and failed, to get Monroe to integrate its public swimming pool for even one day a week. Black children had drowned in local swimming holes and creeks, but officials said desegregation would be too costly because they would have to drain and clean the pool after Black swimmers used it.

Thanks in part to Mr. Williams’s efforts, newspapers elsewhere began picking up the story of the kissing case. Joyce Egginton, a reporter for the London News-Chronicle, traveled to Monroe. Accompanied by the boys’ mothers, along with Robert Williams and Conrad Lynn, the London reporter, posing as a social worker and with a camera concealed under a fruit basket, visited James and David at the reformatory.

On December 18, her story and a photo of the boys with their mothers ran on the News-Chronicle’s front page. Papers across Europe picked up the story, sparking an international campaign aimed at winning the boys’ freedom. Thousands of schoolchildren in the Netherlands sent letters to North Carolina Governor Luther H. Hodges. Clergy on both sides of the Atlantic protested. So did union members and college students in the North.

The NAACP appealed the case in North Carolina courts. On January 12, 1959, state superior court judge Walter Johnston presided over a two-hour hearing at which both boys and their mothers were present, along with their lawyer, Conrad Lynn, who argued for their innocence. In his testimony, Judge Price twice referred to the boys with the “n-word,” according to the Winston-Salem Journal. David fell asleep, with his head on his friend James’s shoulder, waking up to hear Judge Johnston say he was sending both boys back to the reformatory. The judge said he had heard no evidence that the boys should not have been convicted. Newspapers reported that David and James both cried.

Embarrassed by worldwide attention to the case, Gov. Hodges, Judge Price, and other white officials went on the offensive. They enlisted the state’s white media to publicly blame the boys and their mothers, and in violation of the requirement to protect juveniles’ privacy, they freely offered details they said had been provided by social service workers, teachers, and police. The said they were acting to correct “misinformation” and “inaccuracies” in the national and international media.

Officials branded James and David as “incorrigible” and “wayward” delinquents with irresponsible mothers. They said the boys had been sent to the reformatory for their own good, claimed Mrs. Thompson “has a bad reputation” in her community, and charged that Mrs. Simpson’s children were often in trouble with police. Local and state news outlets repeated those officials’ words in articles that showed little concern about accuracy.

“This is my family’s history,” Dwight Thompson told EJI. The local and state mainstream media coverage, which he reviewed as part of his own research, did not portray the mother who had raised him. “My mother is my hero. I can’t imagine what she endured.”

Led by Black journalists, national media attention continued to spread and on February 13, 1959, bowing to public pressure, Gov. Hodges—who went on to become U.S. Secretary of Commerce—pardoned the boys. Released from the reformatory, they joined their families, who had been relocated by the NAACP to public housing in Charlotte.

James Hanover Thompson (left) and his brother Dwight Thompson in 2011. (StoryCorps)

A couple days later, an AP reporter interviewed both mothers in Charlotte. All the boys had been doing on that October afternoon, Mrs. Thompson said, were innocent things—“raking leaves for a white lady,” a game of “cowboys and Indians” with their friends, and “playful-like” kisses on the cheek. But that night a policeman came to the house and told her James had been arrested. “We haven’t had much peace since it happened,” she said.

The media spotlight quickly moved on, but the stigma remained for both boys.

David Simpson said a police sergeant from Monroe told Charlotte police to look for him whenever crimes occurred. “I was never able to get out of the system,” he told Oprah Winfrey in 1993.

James Thompson remembered the words of the state psychologist he was required to visit weekly in Charlotte after being released from the state reformatory. “He said, ‘What are you, some kind of maniac? We should sterilize you.’ ”

This was not a hollow threat. North Carolina sterilized more than 7,000 people between the 1920s and the 1970s. A recent study by scholars identified the Morrison Training School as one of the “feeder” institutions that sent children to be sterilized. Black people were sterilized in the 1960s at a much higher rate than white people, the study found.

After James returned home from Morrison, his sister, Brenda Lee Graham, recalled during the StoryCorps interview, “It was like seeing somebody different that you didn’t even know. He never talked about what he went through there. But ever since then, his mind just hadn’t been the same.”

Both boys were repeatedly arrested and incarcerated as they got older.

James said to his brother Dwight, who interviewed him for StoryCorps, “I always sit around and wonder if this hadn’t happened to me, you know, what could I have turned out to be? Could I have been a doctor? Could I have gone off to some college or some great school? It just destroyed our life.”

“I still feel the hurt and the pain from it,” James told his younger brother. “And nobody ever said, ‘Hey, look, I’m sorry what happened to y’all. It was wrong.’”

Still today, no one—no local or state officials or the media—has ever apologized to Mr. Thompson or Mr. Simpson or their families, or compensated them for violating their rights.

Sissy Sutton never spoke about the kiss publicly. In 1993, Oprah Winfrey asked Mr. Thompson and Mr. Simpson, “Do you blame her?”

Both men responded immediately that the little girl should not be held responsible. “I don’t blame her,” Mr. Thompson said. “We were kids, kids do innocent things.”

“It wasn’t her fault,” Mr. Simpson said. “Children [are] only taught what their parents feed them.”

President Ronald Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. The law created a significant disparity in the sentences imposed in federal courts for crimes involving powder cocaine versus those imposed for crimes involving crack cocaine, with mandatory minimum sentences set at a 100:1 ratio.

For instance, a drug crime involving five grams of crack cocaine resulted in a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in federal prison, while crimes involving up to 500 grams of powder cocaine received a lower sentencing recommendation.

This sentencing disparity was not based on credible scientific evidence about a differing biological impact between cocaine in powder form versus crack form, but it had clear racial results. In the years following the enactment of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, the number of Black people sent to federal prison ballooned from approximately 50 in 100,000 adults to nearly 250 in 100,000 adults. During the same period, there was almost no change in the number of white people incarcerated in federal prison. Disparities in sentence lengths also increased: in 1986, Black people received drug sentences 11% longer than sentences received by white defendants, on average, but that disparity increased to 49% in the years following the law’s enactment.

This law, along with the “War on Drugs” overall, significantly contributed to huge increases in the American prison and jail population, which grew from approximately 500,000 in 1980 to nearly 2.3 million in 2013.

Prior to the Civil War, many Southern states, including Texas, barred enslaved or free Black people from testifying against white people in court proceedings. Following the Confederacy’s defeat, those states were forced to comply with certain requirements in order to be readmitted to the Union, including altering their laws and state constitutions to respect Black Americans’ new status as citizens with civil rights.

On October 26, 1866, the Texas legislature passed a law redefining the circumstances in which Black people could testify in court. Rather than simply declare that Black people had full and equal rights to testify, the new law provided that “persons of color shall not testify” except in cases where “the prosecution is against a person who is a person of color; or where the offense is charged to have been committed against the person or property of a person of color.”

In civil cases between white parties, and in criminal prosecutions of white people not charged with offenses against a Black person, Black people remained second-class citizens with no right to testify in a court of law. In addition, even in the cases in which Black witnesses were permitted to speak, their testimony was often given little to no weight by white decisionmakers.

Boston police officers scoured predominantly Black communities searching for anyone who fit the vague description provided by Charles Stuart, a white businessman, who lied to police, claiming a Black man shot him and his pregnant wife, Carol, two nights before.

Late on October 23, Mr. Stuart called 911 and reported he and his wife Carol had been robbed and injured in Roxbury: “My wife’s been shot. I’ve been shot,” he told the police. Charles Stuart later told police that a Black gunman had forced his way into the couple’s car and told him to drive to the Mission Hill neighborhood, where the man robbed and shot them both. Carol Stuart, seven months pregnant, died of her injuries; their son, Christopher, was delivered at the hospital but died days later.

The case quickly sparked public outrage and nationwide media coverage as local law enforcement faced heavy pressure to solve the case. Black men and boys were publicly strip-searched, repeatedly interrogated, and terrorized, while city officials, lawmakers, and police used the case as a symbol of growing “urban crime” and vowed to crack down on “gun-wielding criminals.” Some even used the alleged crime as a reason that Massachusetts should reinstate its death penalty.

Within a week of the shooting, police had narrowed the list of suspects to “a chosen few.” William Bennett, an African American man who had spent 13 years in prison, soon became a prime suspect; during a lineup, Mr. Stuart claimed that Mr. Bennett looked “most like” the shooter, and several witnesses testified against Mr. Bennett before a specially convened grand jury. The judicial system was poised to prosecute Mr. Bennett to the full extent of the law until, in January 1990, Charles Stuart’s brother, Matthew, came forward with evidence implicating Mr. Stuart himself in the shootings. Matthew Stuart told police he and a friend met Mr. Stuart in the Mission Hill neighborhood on the night of the shootings and agreed to dispose of a gun, Carol’s purse, and several other items. Matthew Stuart agreed, thinking it was just an insurance scam, and did not learn of the murder plot until press coverage later.

The day after his brother’s admission to police, Charles Stuart committed suicide by jumping from the Tobin Bridge. The public soon learned the truth about Mr. Stuart’s crime and lies, motivated by greed and a desire for life insurance money. Many expressed disgust for the ease with which he was able to concoct false allegations and exploit racist prejudices about Black criminality to convince police to target the Black community for harassment and civil rights violations.

Although some city officials and lawmakers made apologies, the Stuart case illustrated the insidiousness of racial bias and the continuing burden of presumed guilt and dangerousness borne by African Americans, generations after the peak of racial terror lynching, and even decades after the civil rights movement. In 2014, William Bennett’s niece recalled the trauma of watching police search her grandmother’s house as an eight-year-old child and the fear and chaos that gripped the neighborhood during the intense police crackdown targeting Black men and boys.

In response to a federal court decision that Birmingham’s racially segregated parks, golf courses, and playgrounds were unconstitutional, Birmingham officials publicly announced that they would close all public parks and facilities rather than racially integrate them.

Under the Birmingham city code, interracial games of pool, cards, dice, dominoes, checkers, and billiards were illegal. Interracial play was not permitted in public parks including ball parks, tennis courts, golf courses, and football fields, as well as theaters, auditoriums, swimming pools, and playgrounds. After 15 Black leaders, including civil rights legend the Reverend F. L. Shuttlesworth, sued Birmingham’s Parks and Recreation board, a federal district judge ruled that Birmingham’s segregated facilities and parks were unconstitutional.

In response to the October 24 court ruling, Birmingham’s mayor, Art Hanes, and the city’s police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, immediately announced the plan to close all city parks. By December, the city had eliminated funding to almost all of its parks and closed 67 of them, along with 38 playgrounds, four golf courses, and eight swimming pools.

Bull Connor defended the necessity of the city’s decision, insisting that integrating the parks “would only be the first step in total integration of our schools, churches, hotels, restaurants and everything else.” Mr. Connor received a flood of support from white Birmingham residents who wrote letters applauding the decision. One local newspaper, The Jeffersonian, applauded the closures and stated the move helped the white community “retain our white race and culture.”

What happened in Birmingham was not unique. As courts ruled on the unconstitutionality of segregated facilities, white people across the South remained so committed to preventing racial integration that they voluntarily shut down public parks, swimming pools, and other recreational facilities—choosing to deny all citizens these benefits rather than to extend them to Black people. In some areas, this commitment to preserving and upholding segregation lasted a long time. Birmingham parks remained closed for two years, while some communities reopened parks but permanently shut down facilities like public pools.

On this day in 1909, a white mob from Maryland boldly attempted to lynch a Black man just blocks from the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., in a dramatic display of the lawless reign of terror against Black people that defined this era. The mob dispersed only after D.C. police promised to turn over the intended lynching victim the next morning.

On October 22, a Black man was accused of attacking a white girl during a robbery near Landover, Maryland. When news of the incident spread and Walter Ford, a 26-year-old Black man, was targeted as the suspect, Mr. Ford was seized by local police in Washington, D.C., where he lived. During this era, allegations against Black people were rarely subject to scrutiny and often sparked violent reprisal even when there was no evidence tying the accused to any offense. Mr. Ford was detained by the Washington, D.C., police department.

That evening and into the next day, a white lynch mob of more than 100 people from nearby Prince George’s County, Maryland, arrived at the jail, committed to lynching Mr. Ford. Just blocks from the Capitol grounds and in the face of D.C. law enforcement, the mob wielded shotguns, pitchforks, and revolvers. For hours, they attempted to seize Mr. Ford from the jail. In the early hours of the morning on October 23, the would-be lynchers dispersed only after law enforcement promised to turn over Mr. Ford to the mob the next morning. While police ultimately did not turn Mr. Ford over, the mob believed this promise would be kept given widespread law enforcement complicity in lynchings.

The lawlessness that prevailed during this era was possible because state and federal governments retreated from the rule of law, allowing more than 6,500 Black women, men, and children to become victims of racial terror lynching in the U.S. between 1865-1950. These lynch mobs acted with impunity, and in many cases acted in tandem with members of law enforcement who were charged with protecting those in their custody. The federal government’s failure to protect citizens was a serious obstacle to protecting Black people from racial violence and terrorism. No one from the Prince County lynch mob was ever arrested or held responsible for attempting to lynch Mr. Ford just blocks away from the U.S. Capitol.

Five white men who beat to death Leon McAtee, a Black man, were freed by the court in Holmes County, Mississippi, even though one of the five had confessed to his own involvement in the murder and implicated the other four men. Before the trial ended, Judge S.F. Davis acquitted Spencer Ellis and James Roberts, finding the evidence insufficient to prove their guilt. The all-white jury then deliberated for 10 minutes before acquitting Jeff Dodd Sr., Jeff Dodd Jr., and Dixie Roberts.

As a tenant on Jeff Dodd Sr.’s farm, Leon McAtee worked a small plot of land for very little pay. When Mr. Dodd’s saddle went missing, he suspected Mr. McAtee of stealing it and had the Black man arrested. On July 22, 1946, Mr. Dodd withdrew the charges and police released Mr. McAtee into Mr. Dodd’s custody. Mr. Dodd then called Dixie Roberts and together they took Mr. McAtee back to Mr. Dodd’s home, where Jeff Dodd Jr., James Roberts, and Spencer Ellis awaited them.

Inside the home, all five men beat Mr. McAtee and whipped him with a three-quarter-inch rope. The men then drove the badly beaten man to his home and presented him to his wife, who later reported that her husband was dazed and muttering about a saddle. The men then drove away with Mr. McAtee in their truck, and Mrs. McAtee fled with her children. Her husband was found dead in a bayou two days later.

William Lloyd Garrison was a prominent white abolitionist and newspaper editor in the 19th century. Born in 1805 to English immigrants in Newburyport, Massachusetts, Mr. Garrison co-founded his first newspaper at age 22 and began to focus on the issue of slavery. In 1829, Mr. Garrison became the co-editor of the Baltimore-based Genius of Universal Emancipation, through which he and his colleagues criticized proponents of slavery.

Unlike most American abolitionists at the time, Mr. Garrison demanded immediate emancipation of enslaved Black people rather than gradual emancipation. In 1830, he founded The Liberator, which continued to publish criticisms of slavery. By that time, Mr. Garrison had become a vocal opponent of the American Colonization Society, which sought to reduce the number of free Black people in America by relocating them to Africa. In 1832, Mr. Garrison helped to organize the American Anti-Slavery Society and sought to keep the organization unaffiliated with any political party. He also advocated for women’s equal participation in the organization, a radical stance nearly 90 years before white women in America obtained the right to vote.

On October 21, 1835, Mr. Garrison attended a meeting held by the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society to hear remarks from George Thompson, a British abolitionist and personal friend. When Mr. Thompson was warned that a pro-slavery mob planned to tar and feather him, he canceled his appearance. Instead, the mob seized Mr. Garrison, dragged him through the streets by a rope around his waist, and threatened to kill him. Mr. Garrison was rescued by police and spent the night in a city jail before leaving Boston the next morning. He nevertheless remained a staunch opponent of slavery and lived to see the institution’s abolition 30 years later.

The Virginia Colonial Assembly enacted a law that removed criminal penalties for enslavers who killed enslaved people resisting authority. The assembly justified the law on the grounds that “the obstinacy of many [enslaved people] cannot be suppressed by other than violent means.” The law provided that an enslaver’s killing of an enslaved person could not constitute murder because the “premeditated malice” element of murder could not be formed against one’s own property.

In subsequent years, Virginia continued to reduce legal protections for enslaved people. In 1723, the assembly removed all penalties for the killing of enslaved people during “correction,” meaning that an enslaved person could be killed for an “offense” as minor as picking bad tobacco. The willful or malicious killing of an enslaved person could constitute murder, in theory, but the law excused the killing of an enslaved person if the killing was in any way provoked. In effect, enslavers could kill enslaved people with impunity in colonial-era Virginia, and the situation was similar in most other colonial territories.

Following the American Revolution, many states created penalties for killing enslaved people—but the loophole permitting the killing of an enslaved person during “correction” or to prevent “resistance” remained. As a result, throughout the course of slavery in this country’s history, enslavers were rarely punished for killing enslaved people.

52 individuals, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., were arrested in downtown Atlanta, Georgia, after refusing to leave their seats at segregated department store lunch counters. Under the heavily enforced Jim Crow segregation laws and customs in Atlanta at the time, Black and white people were required to use separate water fountains, bathrooms, ticket booths, and other public spaces. In addition, Black people were banned from being served at department store lunch counters.

Similar laws in other Southern states had recently become the focus of a “sit-in” movement, in which Black college students calmly and peacefully sat at segregated lunch counters and refused to leave until they were served. In February 1960, four North Carolina A&T students held the first sit-in at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina. Soon, many more students joined their protest and word of the tactic spread to students in other states. By August 1961, sit-ins had attracted more than 70,000 participants, generated over 3,000 arrests, and, in cities like Nashville, Tennessee, successfully led to desegregation.

Dr. King was invited to join the student-organized Atlanta sit-in and ended up arrested alongside students and local activists under a 1960 law that made refusing to leave private property a misdemeanor offense. Charges against 16 of the 52 protesters were dismissed at their first court appearance, but Dr. King (the most high-profile of the group) was held on charges that his arrest violated a term of state probation imposed earlier that year. After Dr. King was sentenced to six months of hard labor, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy reached out to the King family, helped secure Dr. King’s release, and earned pivotal Black votes that would help him win the presidency weeks later.

A mob of at least 2,000 white residents of Princess Anne, Maryland, beat, hanged, dragged, and burned George Armwood to death. Mr. Armwood, who was reportedly intellectually disabled, had been accused of assaulting an 80-year-old woman who was also the mother of a local white policeman. Shortly after being arrested, Mr. Armwood was dragged out of the jail and an 18-year-old boy immediately cut off his ear with a butcher knife. The growing mob then beat George Armwood nearly to death and dragged him to a tree, where he was hanged. Afterward, the mob cut down his corpse, dragged it through the streets, hanged it again, and then staged a public burning. The New Journal and Guide reported that “[m]en, women and children, participated in the savage orgy.” The Afro American reported that the mob danced around Mr. Armwood’s charred remains. The report quoted one white man, who said, “It would have cost the state $1000 to hang the man. It cost us 75 cents.”

Mr. Armwood’s lynching sparked a national outcry and calls for prosecution of the mob members, yet investigations at the county, state, and federal levels faced obstacles and delays. Inquiries following the lynching were marked by residents’ refusal to identify participants as well as mockery and intimidation of Black witnesses. The American Civil Liberties Union, frustrated with the silence, began offering a $1,000 reward to people willing to name leaders of the mob.

Even when finally presented with identifying evidence, the county prosecutor refused to act. When the Maryland Attorney General ordered troops to arrest eight named participants, white residents who supported the accused mob members waged riots of protest. Four white men were ultimately tried for the lynching of George Armwood and acquitted by all-white juries.

Founded in December 1865 by former Confederate Army officers, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) operated as a secret vigilante group targeting Black people and their allies with violent terrorism to resist Reconstruction and re-establish a system of white supremacy in the South.

KKK violence was so intense in South Carolina after the Civil War that U.S. Attorney General Amos Akerman and Army Major Lewis Merrill traveled there to investigate. In York County alone they found evidence of 11 murders and more than 600 whippings and other assaults. When local grand juries failed to take action, Mr. Akerman urged President Ulysses S. Grant to intervene, describing the counties as “under the domination of systematic and organized depravity.” Mr. Merrill said the situation was a “carnival of crime not paralleled in the history of any civilized community.”

In April 1871, President Grant signed the Ku Klux Klan Act, which made it a federal crime to deprive American citizens of their civil rights through racial terrorism. On October 12, 1871, President Grant warned nine South Carolina counties with prevalent KKK activity that martial law would be declared if the Klan did not disperse. The warning was ignored. On October 17, 1871, President Grant declared martial law and suspended the writ of habeas corpus in the same nine counties. Once he did so, federal forces were allowed to arrest and imprison KKK members and instigators of racial terrorism without bringing them before a judge or into court.

Many affluent Klan members fled the jurisdiction to avoid arrest, but by December 1871 approximately 600 Klansmen were in jail. More than 200 arrestees were indicted, 53 pleaded guilty, and five were convicted at trial. Klan terrorism in South Carolina decreased significantly after the arrests and trials, but racial violence targeting Black people continued throughout the South for decades.

Black Olympic sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who engaged in a silent protest on the medal stand to bring light to the racial discrimination and violence against Black people in the U.S., were met with hostility by white supporters and the media and were eventually suspended for their protest.

The 1968 Olympics followed a summer of racial unrest and protest following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in April and the murder of Robert Kennedy in June. Police violence and poverty burdened Black communities in ways that attracted international attention.

Mr. Smith and Mr. Carlos placed first and third in the 200-meter dash at the Olympic Games in Mexico City. As the U.S. national anthem played during the medal ceremony, the two men bowed their heads and raised black gloved fists in a protest against racial discrimination in the U.S. Both men wore black socks with no shoes, and Mr. Smith also wore a black scarf around his neck. Mr. Smith raised his right fist to represent Black power, while Mr. Carlos raised his left fist to represent Black unity. Mr. Smith said his black scarf represented Black pride and their black socks without shoes signified Black poverty in America.

The following day, the U.S. Olympic Committee threatened other athletes with stern disciplinary action if they engaged in demonstrations. Acting USOC Director Everett Barnes issued a formal statement to the Olympic International Committee, condemning Mr. Smith and Mr. Carlos and claiming that the sprinters “made our country look like the devil.”

The USOC suspended Mr. Smith and Mr. Carlos from the U.S. Olympic team following a midnight meeting. In the early hours of the morning on October 18, the Committee ordered both men to vacate the Olympic village in Mexico within 48 hours.

Despite their medal-winning performances, the two athletes faced intense criticism in the media and received death threats upon returning home. At the time, their protest was wrongly perceived as a show of disrespect directed toward the American flag and national anthem.

In 1875, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which forbade racial discrimination in access to public accommodations and facilities. A number of African Americans subsequently sued businesses that refused to serve Black customers. The Supreme Court heard five of those cases in 1883, and on October 15, 1883, it struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 in an 8-1 decision known as the Civil Rights Cases.

The Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment, which was cited as the constitutional authorization for the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and mandates “equal protection of the laws,” did not apply to private citizens or entities. The Court decided that the Equal Protection Clause applied only to actions taken or laws passed by state governments. Writing for the majority less than 20 years after the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, Justice Joseph Bradley questioned the necessity and appropriateness of laws aimed at protecting Black people from discrimination:

“When a man has emerged from slavery, and, by the aid of beneficent legislation, has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen or a man are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected.”

The Supreme Court’s decision in the Civil Rights Cases eliminated the only federal law that prohibited racial discrimination by individuals or private businesses and left African Americans who were victims of private discrimination to seek legal recourse in unsympathetic state courts. Racial discrimination in housing, restaurants, hotels, theaters, and employment became increasingly entrenched and persisted for generations. It would be more than 80 years before Congress tried again to outlaw discrimination by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Authorities charged four white people with unlawful assembly for convening a literacy class for Black residents in Wheeling, a city in present-day West Virginia that was then a part of Virginia.

That day, a group of free Black people met at a Wheeling schoolhouse to attend a literacy class taught by Ellen Richie, John Templeton, John Moore, and Stanley Cuthbert. When authorities learned about the gathering, they declared that the literacy class was “against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth” and charged the four instructors under an anti-literacy law passed three years earlier by Virginia’s all-white legislature.

That 1831 law, which led to at least a dozen prosecutions in Wheeling alone, declared that “all meetings of free negroes or mulattos, at any school-house, church, meeting house or other place for teaching them reading or writing, either in the day or night, under whatsoever pretext, shall be deemed and considered as an unlawful assembly.” The law authorized officers to enter the meeting space, break up the meeting, and subject any Black person found in attendance to up to 20 lashes. White people convicted under the law faced a fine of up to $50—the equivalent of roughly $1,800 today—and could be imprisoned for up to two months.

The law was part of a wave of anti-literacy laws passed throughout the South targeting both free and enslaved Black people as well as those assisting them. Similar legislation was passed in Georgia (1829), Louisiana (1830), North Carolina (1830), and South Carolina (1834).

Yet, despite the criminalization of Black education—and the harsh legal and extrajudicial punishments inflicted on those accused of violating literacy laws—many Black people courageously found ways to circumvent these laws. Historians estimate that hundreds of thousands of Black people acquired literacy during the era of enslavement.

Members of the Black community in Roxboro, North Carolina, were terrorized by an ongoing campaign from a white lynch mob, threatening them to leave their homes or face racial violence.

In July 1920, a mob of local white residents in Roxboro seized an innocent Black farmworker, Ed Roach, from the Person County Jail where he was being held for the alleged assault of a white girl. In broad daylight, the mob took Mr. Roach to the churchyard, hanged him from a tree, and riddled his body with bullets. In the days after the lynching, Mr. Roach’s employer signed a written statement affirming Mr. Roach’s innocence, stating that he had been working with him when the crime occurred. No one was held accountable for his death.

After lynching an innocent man, the white mob sought to further terrorize members of the Black community. The self-identified “Person County Mob” claimed credit for the lynching and began distributing letters and threatening death, bombing, and other violence in an attempt to drive the Black community out of Person County.

In the early weeks of October, a Black community member received a letter signed from the “Person County Mob” that instructed him to leave town “or face a fate similar to that suffered by Ed Roach.” For weeks, each day, more letters were sent by the “Person County Mob” that called for the removal of the Black community from Roxboro or threatened violence.

An older Black woman who lived in a predominantly white area of the county received a letter telling her to move from her home within one week or face violence. She refused to move, and sticks of dynamite were detonated at her home while she was in it, tearing out the windows and doors of her house. She survived but was forced to move from her home.

In addition, white landowners were told to assist in getting Black tenants to leave and everyone was required to support the eviction of Black residents. No one was ever held accountable for this violence and terrorism in Person County.

Jonny Gammage, cousin and business partner of Pittsburgh Steelers football player Ray Seals, was detained during a traffic stop while driving Mr. Seals’s Jaguar in the working-class suburb of Brentwood. According to witness testimony, Lt. Milton Mulholland pulled Mr. Gammage over for tapping his brakes and called Officer John Votjas for backup. The officers later claimed that Mr. Gammage pointed an object at the officers—which turned out to be a cell phone—and struggled. Mr. Mulholland and Mr. Votjas, along with Officer Michael Albert, Sergeant Keith Henderson, and Officer Sean Patterson, ultimately pinned Mr. Gammage face-down on the pavement. After several minutes, the officers’ use of force suffocated Mr. Gammage and he died.

On November 27, 1995, Mr. Mulholland and Mr. Votjas were charged with third-degree murder, and Mr. Albert was charged with involuntary manslaughter. The charges against Mr. Mulholland and Mr. Votjas were later reduced to involuntary manslaughter. Mr. Henderson and Mr. Patterson were not charged in the incident.

Officer Votjas was acquitted by an all-white jury and, a year later, promoted to sergeant; Judge Joseph McCloskey dismissed charges against Mr. Mulholland and Mr. Albert after two trials resulted in mistrials. In January 1996, Brentwood police chief Wayne Babish, who had called for a complete investigation into Mr. Gammage’s death, was fired by the Brentwood City Council for failing to support the charged officers.

Multiple public protests were held in Pittsburgh and elsewhere, calling for “Justice for Jonny” and federal intervention. However, in 1999 the Department of Justice declined to file civil rights charges, stating that there was not enough evidence that unreasonable force had been used. Learn more about how a presumption of guilt and dangerousness makes people of color vulnerable to racial violence, wrongful convictions, and unfair treatment.

Tarrant County Sheriff Carl Smith and Deputy Tom Snow shot David Bunn, a handcuffed Black man, as he fled to escape a white lynch mob.

Four days before these officers shot Mr. Bunn, white mobs made three separate attempts to lynch him. On October 7, a mob of over 500 white men, women, and children surrounded the Tarrant County Jail, where Sheriff Carl Smith stood guard. The mob selected a committee of 15 white men to carry out the lynching, and Sheriff Smith permitted them to enter the jail. Finding no evidence of Mr. Bunn in that jail, the crowd selected a new lynching committee, whose members broke into the Fort Worth City Jail. After inspecting that jail and failing to locate Mr. Bunn, 21 white men got in their cars and drove across the county line to Dallas, intent on seizing Mr. Bunn from the Dallas County Jail and lynching him, but they failed in their attempt.

Threats of a future lynching continued to circulate in Dallas and Tarrant counties over the next several days. Sheriff Smith and Deputy Snow knew that white mobs intended to kidnap and lynch Mr. Bunn as they transported him from the Dallas County Jail to the Tarrant County Courthouse, so they planned to move him in the early morning hours, allegedly to avoid detection.

At 2:30 am on the morning of October 11, the officers handcuffed Mr. Bunn and loaded him into a police car. Mr. Bunn sat in terror as they drove, even saying to the officers that he feared being lynched. As they crossed the county line near Arlington, Sheriff Smith observed four automobiles approaching and identified these vehicles as members of the lynch mob, saying to Mr. Bunn “I think that’s them…”

Fearing for his life, Mr. Bunn jumped, in handcuffs, from the police car. Rather than capture Mr. Bunn and return him to their car, Sheriff Smith and Deputy Snow shot and killed him as the mob approached. Four bullets were lodged in his body before Mr. Bunn fell into a roadside ditch and died. No one faced charges or accountability for Mr. Bunn’s murder.

Three Mexican nationals were killed in central California during cotton growers’ attempts to break a strike waged by roughly 15,000-18,000 cotton pickers and cotton gin workers. Roughly 95% of the strikers were Mexican migrant workers, whose pay had fallen more than 75% since 1930—even as the price of cotton rose 150% in 1932. The strikers were demanding pay of $1 per 100 pounds of cotton picked; the owners offered 60 cents.

Dolores Hernandez, a picker, and Delfino Davila, a Mexican consular representative, were shot and killed in Pixley, California, when at least 30 armed white ranchers confronted dozens of unarmed Mexican laborers who had gathered to hear one of the strike leaders speak. Eight other strikers were shot and wounded by the ranchers. Pedro Subia, the third person killed that day, was shot in a separate incident when other armed growers and police confronted strikers at a nearby farm; three other strikers were shot and wounded alongside Mr. Subia.

Days earlier, growers had tried to break the strike by evicting the Mexican workers and their families from housing on the growers’ property. When the workers and families maintained the strike and camped in nearby fields, growers conspired with local authorities and businesses to refuse them access to food. Even the federal government promised food aid only if the migrant farmworkers acceded to the growers’ demands; over the course of two weeks, seven children of strikers reportedly died from malnutrition.

The strike ended on October 26, 1933, when the growers agreed to pay strikers 75 cents per 100 pounds of cotton. In February 1934, eight ranchers standing trial for the murder of Dolores Hernandez and Delfino Davila were found not guilty by an all-white local jury. No one was ever tried for killing Pedro Subia.

A Black man named Bob Hudson was shot to death by a white lynch mob in Weakley County, Tennessee, near the town of Dresden. According to reports, Mr. Hudson’s wife filed charges of assault and battery against a white man, who was subsequently arrested and fined. In retaliation, 10 masked white men dragged Mrs. Hudson from her home and whipped her severely. When Mr. Hudson ran to his wife’s defense, the mob shot and killed him.

During this era of racial terrorism, white men committed sexual violence against Black women with impunity, while the most baseless fears of sexual contact between a Black man and white woman regularly resulted in deadly violence. Nearly one in four Black men lynched between 1877 to 1945 were accused of improper contact with a white woman. Meanwhile, white men were rarely arrested, let alone convicted or punished for assaulting Black women—or committing lynchings—and, as in this case, if Black people even dared to seek help from authorities, they could be subjected to lethal violence.

Including Bob Hudson, at least six African American victims of racial terror lynching were killed in Weakley County, Tennessee, between 1877 and 1950. Learn more about how over 6,500 Black women, men, and children were victims of racial terror lynching in the U.S. between 1865-1950.

In Birmingham, Alabama, Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor announced that a planned All-Star baseball game organized by Jackie Robinson—almost a decade after he integrated Major League Baseball—would not be permitted to play in the city. Mr. Robinson, who previously toured the country with an all-Black team, signed notable white players Al Rosen, Ralph Branca, and Gil Hodges to join the interracial All-Stars. Ten days before the game was to take place, Commissioner Connor notified the public that the event would be banned if white players were going to play because “there is a city ordinance that forbids mixed athletic events.”

Bull Connor was a notorious segregationist with close ties to the Ku Klux Klan, and this was one of many actions he would take during his tenure to resist integration. In addition, Mr. Connor facilitated—and in some cases ordered—acts of violence against peaceful protestors. In 1961, he allowed a white mob armed with pipes to attack the Freedom Riders, Black and white college students who rode buses through the South to challenge illegal segregation in interstate transportation. In 1963, the entire world witnessed Mr. Connor’s brutality when Martin Luther King Jr. came to Birmingham to lead a children’s protest against racial segregation. Mr. Connor ordered the fire department to blast nonviolent protestors—most of them children—with high-pressure firehoses and commanded police to attack them with batons and police dogs. Mr. Connor never repudiated his defense of white supremacy or denounced his use of police violence.

Jackie Robinson devoted his life not only to baseball, but also to the fight for civil rights and equality for all. After being the first Black player to integrate major league baseball and leading the Brooklyn Dodgers to the World Series, he devoted himself to civil rights causes in his retirement.

After careful consideration and discussions with members of the Birmingham community, Mr. Robinson decided to move forward with the game and bench the white players rather than cancel. This decision was partly made in response to fears that successfully shutting down the game entirely might help Mr. Connor win a bid for Birmingham mayor. The game did happen, with only Black players participating, and marked the intense resistance to racial integration that defined Alabama for generations.

Hundreds of Black Selma residents attempting to register to vote were met by state and local officials who used stalling and intimidation tactics to deny them that right and violence against supporters attempting to give them food and water as they waited in line.

In 1963, representatives of civil rights organizations such as the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Dallas County Voter’s League (DCVL) organized Black residents of Selma, Alabama, to challenge discriminatory voter registration practices. At the time, Dallas County was 58% Black, but less than 1% of eligible Black residents were registered to vote. During 1963, Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark met their voter registration efforts with harassment and violent resistance, joined by other local law enforcement officers and segregationist supporters who participated in violence against Black residents with impunity. Hundreds of Black residents were arrested, beaten, or threatened in Selma during the first half of 1963.

On the morning of October 7th, on what SNCC and DCVL called “Freedom Day,” 350 Black residents of Selma bravely lined up at the county courthouse—risking their livelihoods—and attempted to register to vote. The registrars intentionally slowed down the proceedings, limiting registration to only a few people every hour and ensuring that only a small handful of those waiting in line would be able to register. Sheriff Clark, his deputies, and supporters forbade Freedom Day participants from leaving the line to eat, drink, or use the restroom.

At 12:30 pm, a group of 40 state troopers arrived and assisted local law enforcement in intimidating the Freedom Day participants. Because those waiting to register to vote could not leave the line to eat or drink, at one point, a group of organizers attempted to bring food and water to the Black residents waiting in line. These organizers were beaten and shocked with cattle prods by the state and local officials. A reporter was also beaten by state troopers. Representatives of the FBI and the Department of Justice witnessed these unlawful attacks but did nothing to intervene.

Beth Humphrey, a white woman from Hammond, Louisiana, called Keith Bardwell, a white justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, to ask him to sign a license for her to marry Terence McKay, a Black man. Mr. Bardwell’s wife informed Ms. Humphrey that he would not sign a marriage license for an interracial couple.

Mr. Bardwell, a justice of the peace for over 30 years, later estimated he had denied marriage licenses to several interracial couples during the previous two and a half years. After his refusal was publicized and generated controversy, Mr. Bardwell defended his actions, insisting that he “does not believe in mixing races in that way.”

Ms. Humphrey expressed shock at Mr. Bardwell’s views: “That was one thing that made this so unbelievable. It’s not something you expect in this day and age.”

Throughout most of the 20th century, there were legal bans on interracial marriage. In 1967, in Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down such bans, holding that they violated the Equal Protection Clause. But resistance to enforcing this constitutional mandate was slow. The State of Alabama did not change the prohibition on interracial marriage in its constitution until 2000.

A white mob lynched four innocent Black men named Fulton Smith, Ray Field, Ben Givens, and Sam Duncan in Macclenny, Florida. According to news reports at the time, a prominent young white farmer named John Harvey was shot and killed at a turpentine camp near Macclenny on October 4. The suspected shooter, a young Black man named Jim Givens, fled immediately afterward, and mobs of armed white men formed to pursue him. Mr. Givens’s brother, Ben Givens, and two other Black men connected to him—Mr. Smith and Mr. Field—were questioned and jailed during the search. Though there was no evidence or accusation that they had been involved in Mr. Harvey’s killing, they were held simply for having a connection to the man the mob wanted.

At around 1 am on October 5, a mob of about 50 white men overtook the jail, seized the three men from their cells, and took them to the outskirts of town, where they tied them to trees and shot them to death. A fourth Black man, Sam Duncan, was found shot to death nearby later in the day. He also had no ties to the killing of John Harvey and was thought to have been killed by the mob simply for being a Black man who they encountered.

Three days later, the Chicago Defender, a Northern Black newspaper, reported that white mobs continued to search for Jim Givens while most of the Black community of Macclenny had fled the area in fear of further violent attacks.

Members of the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) voted to exclude Black players from competitions.

The ACBL was founded in 1937 and became the largest organization devoted to the card game in the U.S. White bridge organizations in this era strictly enforced racial segregation, forcing Black bridge players to create their own bridge association called the American Bridge Association (ABA). Racial exclusion was reinforced by laws in several states that officially banned card games between Black and white players.

In 1949, several Black bridge players applied for membership in the ACBL, challenging the organization’s “white only” policy. In response, the ACBL board of directors held a vote among its 28,000 members. Nearly 60% voted to reject allowing Black bridge players to be admitted.

The ACBL’s president said after the vote that his organization “is not a political organization but is primarily social in character. Social customs are based on public opinion and we do not seek either to perpetuate or to destroy them.”

It would be over a decade until the ACBL began allowing Black players to compete, at first only in select events. In 1962, a Black bridge player named Joseph L. Henry, a top player in the ABA who had coordinated the effort to integrate the ACBL, led a team to the ACBL national title. The ACBL did not formally open its membership to Black players in all of its events until 1967.

Long after laws banning interracial games and sporting events were declared unconstitutional, many social clubs and associations, especially those most popular among upper-income white people, maintained segregated membership. For example, some of the U.S.’s most prominent golf clubs—including Augusta National, the home of the Masters Tournament—did not begin allowing Black members until the 1990s.

Frank Wigfall, a Black man who had been threatened with mob violence at a Wyoming jail, was moved to the state penitentiary for “safe keeping” where he was soon lynched by 100 white prisoners.

Mr. Wigfall had been accused of assaulting a white woman and was taken to the Carbon County Jail. During the era of racial terror lynchings, charges of sexual assault against Black men, even when made with unsubstantiated evidence, regularly aroused violent white mobs. Shortly after his detention at the jail, a white mob attempted to seize Mr. Wigfall to lynch him. In response, the local sheriff transferred him from the county jail to the state penitentiary for “safe keeping.” The next morning, 100 white prisoners attacked Mr. Wigfall while he was getting his breakfast, one of them producing a rope, and they proceeded to hang him from the balcony inside the state penitentiary.

The white inmates had been shouting their intentions to lynch Mr. Wigfall from their cells all morning. Notwithstanding their repeated threats, the prison provided no security, which allowed 100 white prisoners to abduct Mr. Wigfall before hanging him by a rope. No one was held accountable for Mr. Wigfall’s death although it was widely known which prison officials and prisoners were culpable.

Mr. Wigfall was one of at least four documented racial terror lynchings in Wyoming. Learn more about how over 6,500 Black women, men, and children were victims of racial terror lynching in the U.S. between 1865-1950.

White neighbors violently attacked a house in Greeley, Colorado, where six Black students who were enrolled at a teachers college lived with their house mother. The assailants threw bricks, fired gunshots at the building, and used iron bars to smash the windows and screens on the house, terrorizing the Black women inside. The attack took place at 2 am, and the women had been living in the house for less than a week.

Before the assault, an “indignation meeting” had been organized by white residents in the area who objected to these Black women living in the neighborhood. White residents said that these were the first Black residents to rent a house in the area and they objected to the college housing students in the neighborhood despite the college’s presence in the same area. After the attack, all seven Black women fled and relocated to another area. No one was ever charged for the racially motivated attack on these women inside their home.

This attack on seven Black women in Greeley is one of thousands of instances throughout American history where white Americans have terrorized Black people in their homes to maintain racial segregation. Throughout the Jim Crow era, white people used intimidation, physical force, and the threat of lethal violence to prevent integration in American neighborhoods and to stifle the political, social, and economic conditions of Black Americans. Learn more about how millions of white Americans joined a mass movement of abusive, unwavering, and often violent opposition to racial equality, integration, and civil rights.

Sampson County, North Carolina, Sheriff C.C. Tart arrested a young Black woman for helping Andrew Troublefield, a 21-year-old Black man, avoid being lynched. The previous day two white women accused Mr. Troublefield of sexual impropriety. Without verifying the women’s stories, Sheriff Tart led a mob of 500 white people in pursuit of Mr. Troublefield with the intention, as newspapers reported, to lynch him without trial if he was caught. A young Black woman who saw the mob on its way shouted after Mr. Troublefield as he fled, attempting to warn him. Sheriff Tart arrested and detained this woman for her efforts. He also arrested Mr. Troublefield’s younger brother, who encouraged him to flee from the mob.

Black people were often prosecuted or even lynched for complaining about white mob violence or assisting other Black people in avoiding lynch mobs. Mary Turner was lynched in Georgia in 1918 for complaining about the lynching of her husband. Jim Cross condemned a lynching in Letohatchee, Alabama, in 1900, and a white mob came to his house and lynched him, his wife, and both of his children. Criminal prosecution, threat, and violence were tactics used to insulate perpetrators of racial terror lynchings from accountability.

The Sampson County lynch mob grew to over 1,000 white people. They spent over a week in the woods searching for Mr. Troublefield, until police from neighboring Wayne County arrested him on October 8. Wayne County’s chief of police transferred Mr. Troublefield directly to North Carolina’s death row, despite him being convicted of no crime at the time. Mr. Troublefield remained on death row until his trial in February.

On February 15, 1940, Judge R. Parker sentenced Mr. Troublefield to 30 years in prison for attempted rape. The conviction rested entirely on the testimony of the two alleged victims. During the trial, white mobs stood on the courthouse lawn, demanding a more severe sentence and grumbling about “what ought to have been done” to Mr. Troublefield. Threats of violence continued as the highway patrol transported Mr. Troublefield back to Central Prison in Raleigh. Neither the Sheriff nor any of the mob leaders were ever held accountable for this attempted lynching.

Racial terror lynchings and near lynchings inflicted massive trauma on entire Black communities. White mobs acted with impunity, lynching entire families, conducting lynchings in public, and terrorizing Black people who tried to help their neighbors. Perpetrators of these lynchings hoped to keep Black people in a state of perpetual fear and subordination. EJI has documented more than 6,500 racial terror lynchings between 1865 and 1950, including two in Sampson County, North Carolina.

Approximately 100 Black farmers attended a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America at a church in Phillips County, Arkansas. Many of the farmers were sharecroppers on white-owned plantations in the area, and the meeting was held to discuss ways they could organize to demand fairer payments for their crops.

Black labor unions such as the Progressive Farmers were deeply resented among white landowners throughout the country because unions threatened to weaken white aristocratic power. The union also made efforts to subvert racial divisions in labor relations and had hired a white attorney to negotiate with land owners for better cotton prices.

Knowing that Black union organizing often attracted opposition, Black men stood as armed guards around the church while the Phillips County meeting took place. When a group of white people from the Missouri-Pacific Railroad attempted to intrude and spy on the meeting, the guards held them back and a shootout erupted. At least two white men were killed, and enraged white mobs quickly formed.

The mobs descended on the nearby Black town of Elaine, Arkansas, destroying homes and businesses and attacking any Black people in their path over the coming days. Terrified Black residents, including women, children, and the elderly, fled their homes and hid for their lives in nearby woods and fields. A responding federal troop regiment claimed only two Black people were killed, but many reports challenged the white soldiers’ credibility and accused them of participating in the massacre. Today, historians estimate hundreds of Black people were killed in the massacre.

When the violence was quelled, 67 Black people were arrested and charged with inciting violence, while dozens more faced other charges. No white attackers were prosecuted, but 12 Black union members convicted of riot-related charges were sentenced to death. The NAACP, along with local African American lawyer Scipio Africanus Jones, represented the men on appeal and successfully obtained reversals of all of their death sentences.

The Alabama legislature passed a law forbidding “white female nurses” from working “in wards or rooms in hospitals, either public or private in which negro men are placed for treatment, or to be nursed.”

The Jim Crow racial segregation laws enacted and enforced in the American South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries enforced the strict boundaries of a legalized racial caste system and worked to restore and maintain white supremacy in the region. Even after the Civil War and Reconstruction amendments had ended slavery and declared Black people to be citizens with civil rights and the power to vote, many Southern state and local lawmakers passed laws forbidding Black and white people from playing checkers or pool together, entering a circus through the same entrance, or being buried in the same cemetery.

In some instances, these laws interfered with the provision of very important services, including education and health care. The statute mandated segregated nursing and threatened violators with a fine of $10-$200 and up to six months incarceration or hard labor. Learn more about these laws here.

Today, historians acknowledge that Black patients of the Jim Crow era were often relegated to overcrowded, under-resourced basement wards in segregated hospitals—and sometimes denied care altogether. In the neighboring state of Georgia in 1931, two Black women injured in a car accident died from their injuries after the local hospital refused them care due to their race. At a time when many institutional barriers limited the number of Black people able to become doctors and nurses in Alabama and restricted them from practicing in most state hospitals and other medical facilities, laws like this one inflicted further harm on Black people in need of care.

Racialized political violence erupted in Opelousas, Louisiana, when white residents resentful of African Americans’ new voting rights attacked and killed hundreds of people.

When Louisiana voters took to the polls in April 1868, most voted to accept the new Reconstruction constitution and supported Union-loyalist Republic politicians in local elections. St. Landry Parish was an anomaly; voters there rejected the constitution and supported white supremacist, former Confederate Democratic candidates—but the narrow margins showed the community’s white voters that they shared the ballot box with a large, politically powerful Black electorate.

After half-hearted efforts to sway Black voters to the white-controlled Democratic party failed, many white voters in St. Landry resorted to violent intimidation tactics. In response, Republicans like Emerson Bentley, a white journalist who published the radical St. Landry Progress newspaper, organized and encouraged Black people to become politically active. Racial and political tensions continued to escalate as the 1868 presidential election neared.

On September 28, a group of local white men threatened and then physically attacked Mr. Bentley in Opelousas, the parish seat, while he was teaching at a local school he had helped to establish for Black children. The students fled, shouting, and in the confusion, many Black people in the streets wrongly believed Mr. Bentley had been killed. Fearing they were next, Black men in the community armed themselves for protection, and 27 were soon arrested by white mobs.

The next night, the white mob marched these 27 Black men from jail and shot them dead, with the sheriff’s full cooperation. For the next two weeks, murderous violence swept the parish as white mobs terrorized the Black community. The fear was so great that Black people stayed off the streets and tied red strings around their arms to signify to white patrols that they had surrendered and sought white protection. When the attacks subsided, at least six white people had been killed, three Republican and three Democrat, while an estimated 200 Black people were dead.

As a means of political and racial intimidation, the Opelousas Massacre was very effective, terrorizing Black voters into silence. St. Landry was one of the few Louisiana parishes not politically controlled by Republicans by late 1868. Mr. Bentley and other white Radical Republicans fled the area, leaving a solidly Democratic white electorate, while Black voters had learned the consequences of opposing white political will. In the November 1868 presidential election, held just weeks after the massacre and just a few months after St. Landry’s Black voters had solidly supported Republican candidates in state and local races, Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant did not receive a single vote.

Following violent resistance and a legal campaign by the white community against attempts to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, city residents voted to close local public schools rather than comply with federal desegregation orders.

After the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, school boards across the country were ordered to draft desegregation plans. The school board in Little Rock, Arkansas, drafted a plan for small numbers of Black students to begin attending previously all-white schools during the 1957-1958 school year. But when nine Black students, known as the Little Rock Nine, made their way to Central High School for the first day of classes in September 1957, they were met by angry crowds and the Arkansas National Guard blocked their entry. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus encouraged the protestors and did everything in his power to hinder integration. Eventually, President Dwight Eisenhower deployed federal troops to Arkansas and commanded the Arkansas National Guard to escort the students to school.

Still committed to resisting integration, Governor Faubus devised another plan. After the academic year ended in spring 1958, the Little Rock School Board petitioned the federal court for a delay in the implementation of its desegregation plan and was granted a waiver until 1961. The NAACP promptly appealed, and the case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In September 1958, the Court overturned the granted delay and ordered Little Rock to integrate immediately.

In anticipation of such a development, the Arkansas Legislature had recently passed a law allowing Governor Faubus to close public schools as an emergency measure and later hold a special election to determine public support. Immediately after the Supreme Court released its decision, the governor put the new law to use, ordering four public high schools closed. Shortly after, in a vote on September 27, an overwhelming majority of voters (19,470 to 7,561) supported continuing the school closure rather than integrating. The schools would remain closed for the entire 1958-1959 academic term, known as “the lost year.” Following the schools’ closures, voters continued to support Governor Faubus; he was re-elected four times and served as governor until 1967.

The massive resistance by the white community was largely successful in preventing integration of schools in the South. In the five Deep South states, every single one of 1.4 million Black schoolchildren attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960. By the start of the 1964-65 school year, less than 3% of the South’s African American children attended school with white students, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina that number remained substantially below 1%. In 1967, 13 years after Brown, a report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights observed that white violence and intimidation against Black people “continues to be a deterrent to school desegregation.”

The Alabama Supreme Court upheld the contempt conviction of Mary Hamilton, a Black woman who was demeaned in court by a white prosecutor. The prosecutor refused to use the word “Miss” when addressing Ms. Hamilton and insisted on calling her by her first name, a practice that was widely used in the American South to demean and disrespect Black people.

In June 1963, Mary Hamilton was a field secretary for the Congress of Racial Equality in Alabama and one of hundreds of activists arrested during civil rights protests in the city of Gadsden. At a court hearing to determine the legitimacy of those arrests, Ms. Hamilton took the witness stand for questioning. When Etowah County Solicitor William Rayburn addressed her by her first name only, after addressing earlier white witnesses as “Miss,” Ms. Hamilton refused to answer and Judge A.B. Cunningham held her in contempt.

‘Q What is your name, please?
‘A Miss Mary Hamilton.
‘Q Mary, I believe—you were arrested—who were you arrested by?
‘A My name is Miss Hamilton. Please address me correctly.
‘Q Who were you arrested by, Mary?
‘A I will not answer a question——
‘BY ATTORNEY AMAKER: The witness’s name is Miss Hamilton.
‘A —your question until I am addressed correctly.
‘THE COURT: Answer the question.
‘THE WITNESS: I will not answer them unless I am addressed correctly.
‘THE COURT: You are in contempt of court——
‘ATTORNEY CONLEY: Your Honor—your Honor——
‘THE COURT: You are in contempt of this court, and you are sentenced to five days in jail and a fifty dollar fine.’

Ms. Hamilton served the jail time but refused to pay the fine and was allowed out on bond to appeal the conviction. The Alabama Supreme Court—a panel of all-white justices—upheld the conviction unanimously.

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court and urged the nation’s highest court to take action. “Petitioner’s reaction to being called ‘Mary’ in a court room where, if white, she would be called ‘Miss Hamilton,’ was not thin-skinned sensitivity,” LDF lawyers argued in their written filings. “She was responding to one of the most distinct indicia of the racial caste system. This is the refusal of whites to address Negroes with titles of respect.”

In March 1964, with three of nine justices dissenting, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Ms. Hamilton’s contempt citation.

The Baltimore City Council passed an ordinance requiring Black and white residents to live on separate blocks. Titled “an ordinance to prevent conflict and ill-feeling between the white and colored races in Baltimore City,” the law was one of a number of segregation ordinances passed that decade—and was part of the first city-wide effort in the country to create legally segregated neighborhoods.

According to newspaper reports, only one Black family lived on the Mosher Street Block in Baltimore at the time. On September 25, the same day the segregation ordinance was passed, a group of white men and boys “bombarded” the Black family’s home with stones and bricks for several hours.

The passage of the 1913 law formalized decades of de facto segregation enforced by violent attacks by white mobs on Black families in “white” neighborhoods, and helped Baltimore earn the reputation of the “national leader in residential segregation.” The racially discriminatory restrictions were later also applied to Jewish residents, many of whom lived in the Roland Park neighborhood in Baltimore.

In 1917, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Buchanan v. Warley that a Kentucky ordinance prohibiting Black and white people from buying homes in neighborhoods where they were racial minorities violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections for freedom of contract. Baltimore Mayor James H. Preston soon instructed city officials to charge anyone who rented or sold to Black people in predominantly white neighborhoods with code violations.

A decade after Brown v. Board of Education ruled that schools must be racially integrated, a crowd of at least 7,500 demonstrators, almost all of whom were white, marched outside New York City Hall to protest a policy aimed at increasing racial integration in the city’s public school system. The protest was organized by two groups formed by white parents: the Parents and Taxpayers Coordinating Council and the Joint Council for Better Education.

The protestors arrived at City Hall with placards to picket against the Board of Education’s decision to institute a compulsory busing program, transferring students to and from only eight elementary schools in the New York City area; four of these schools had mostly white students and four were predominantly Black.

The week prior, the same two groups of white parents sponsored a two-day school boycott at the start of the school year to protest the busing policy. During the boycott, pupil absences were more than double the usual number. The boycott resulted in the loss of $1.6 million in school aid to the New York City public school system because the aid, “intended to compensate communities with rising school populations,” was calculated on the basis of the number of students in attendance at the start of September.

Outside City Hall on September 24, the crowd carried signs that read “we’d rather fight than bus.” The executive secretary of the Parents and Taxpayers Coordinating Council, a white woman named Rosemary Gunning, argued that they were “asking only that the [City] Council take a position in favor of the traditional neighborhood school concept.” Protestors attempted to storm the City Hall after the council members inside voted to uphold the busing initiative, but they were stopped by the police.

An all-white jury in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, acquitted Roy Bryant and John Milam, the two white men who murdered Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy. Despite the fact that Black citizens comprised over 63% of Tallahatchie County’s population, not a single Black person served on the jury. Under state law, only registered voters qualified as jurors, and not one Black citizen in Tallahatchie County was able to register to vote at the time.

During the summer of 1955, Emmett Till traveled from Chicago to Mississippi to visit his family. One day, Emmett and a group of friends and cousins went to a local store to buy candy. Emmett was later accused of acting “familiar” with the young white female storekeeper, Carolyn Bryant. In response, Roy Bryant, Carolyn’s husband, and John Milam, Mr. Bryant’s half-brother, abducted Emmett from his great-uncle’s home. The men drove Emmett to a storage shed on Milam’s property in Drew, Mississippi, where they took turns torturing and beating him with a pistol, before forcing him to load a 74-pound fan into the back of their pick-up truck. The men then drove Emmett to the edge of the Tallahatchie River, ordered him to remove his clothes, and shot him in the head. Once the child was dead, Bryant and Milam chained the fan to his corpse and rolled it into the river.

At trial, several Black witnesses bravely testified for the State against Mr. Bryant and Mr. Milam, despite threats on their life if they dared to testify, including Mose Wright, who testified that Mr. Bryant and Mr. Milam were the men that took Emmett Till from his home. Emmett’s mother, Mamie Bradley, also courageously traveled from Chicago to attend the trial and identify her son’s body.

Mrs. Bryant testified as well, describing the alleged harassment, including a man trying to hold her hand and whistle at her, and identifying the person responsible as a Black man, but refusing to identify Emmett by name. In asking the jury to acquit, defense lawyers called the State’s theory of motive “illogical,” despite the fact that white mobs in the South had murdered hundreds of Black men accused of similar conduct, with little to no evidence of guilt.

Lawyers for the defense and the prosecution appealed to white jurors’ commitment to racial hierarchy. Defense lawyer John Whitten accused civil rights groups of planting Emmett’s body in the river as a challenge to the “Southern way of life.” District Attorney Gerald Chatham told the jury that Emmett deserved punishment for “insulting white womanhood,” but argued that Mr. Bryant should have limited his vengeance to “beating [him] with a razor strap.”

The jury only deliberated 67 minutes before returning a verdict of not guilty. One juror later said: “We wouldn’t have taken so long if we hadn’t stopped to drink pop.”

Just a few months later, Look Magazine reportedly paid $4,000 to Mr. Milam and Mr. Bryant for their confessions. In a story published by the magazine on January 24, 1956, Mr. Milam and Mr. Bryant graphically described their abduction of Emmett Till from his uncle’s home, admitting that they pistol-whipped him, forced him to disrobe, tied a heavy cotton gin fan around his neck with barbed wire, shot him, and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River.

After local newspapers reported sensational allegations that several white women had been assaulted by Black men, mobs of angry white men gathered in the streets of Atlanta, Georgia, to attack and kill Black men on sight. The mobs seized Black men on streetcars, trapping them inside and shooting or beating them to death. When the streetcars suspended service due to the violence, the rioting mobs ransacked Black businesses and chased, beat, and shot Black men wherever they could find them. The police and fire departments called upon to quell the unrest failed to restore order, and the militia was unable to stop the violence.

In a public statement during the rioting, Atlanta Mayor James Woodward placed blame on the Black men being killed rather than the white men doing the killing. “The only remedy is to remove the cause,” Woodward said. “As long as the Black brutes assault our white women, just so long will they be unceremoniously dealt with.”

Mayor Woodward’s statement empowered the mobs, and the massacre continued. For a total of four days, Black people were violently terrorized throughout Atlanta and its surroundings with little protection from authorities. In contrast, when Black citizens of the nearby Brownsville suburb attempted to arm themselves in defense, Georgia troops raided their homes, taking weapons and arresting those in possession of weapons. After four days of riots, at least 25 people were dead and countless more were injured.

The State of Georgia executed Troy Davis despite evidence of his innocence. Mr. Davis, a Black man, was sentenced to death in the 1989 fatal shooting of white off-duty police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah, Georgia. Supporters of Mr. Davis, including the NAACP, Amnesty International, former President Jimmy Carter, and Pope Benedict XVI, had been encouraged by a 2009 U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing Mr. Davis to present evidence of his innocence in court. But when the federal trial judge denied relief, the Supreme Court refused to review the case and an execution date was set.

In Georgia, the state Board of Pardons and Paroles—not the governor—has exclusive authority to grant clemency. Two days before Mr. Davis’s scheduled execution, the board held a full clemency hearing and heard statements from Mr. Davis’s attorneys and supporters, prosecutors, and the victim’s family. By that time, seven of the prosecution’s nine key witnesses against Mr. Davis had either recanted or backed off their trial testimony, while new witnesses had come forward to give sworn statements that a different person had confessed to the shooting.

The new evidence of Mr. Davis’s innocence was so compelling that three of the original jurors who sentenced him to death in 1991 urged the board to stop the execution. In addition, more than 600,000 people worldwide signed petitions supporting clemency and expressed concerns that executing a man amid so much uncertainty about his guilt would deeply undermine the public’s confidence in the justice system.

Despite these developments and broad-based support, Georgia’s Board of Pardons and Parole denied clemency on September 20, 2011, clearing the way for Troy Davis to be executed the next day. In his final words, Mr. Davis professed his innocence, expressed condolences to Officer MacPhail’s family, and expressed appreciation to his family and supporters. Mr. Davis was executed by lethal injection on September 21 and pronounced dead at 11:08 pm. He was 42 years old.

Maryland’s all-white, all-male legislature passed the first colonial law intended to prevent interracial marriage.

Calling marriages between free white women and enslaved Black men a “disgrace [to] our Nation,” the law aimed at “deterring such freeborne women from such shamefull Matches“ by declaring that the children of these marriages would be born enslaved. This legislation deviated from the precedent that the children of free women followed the status of their mothers and thus were born free. The law also stipulated that white women who married enslaved Black men would become indentured to their husbands’ enslaver for the duration of their spouses’ lives. Altogether, it bolstered a rigid racial caste system by denying dignity and humanity to interracial couples and condemned countless children to the horrific condition of enslavement.

This 1664 law was the first of a series of “anti-miscegenation” laws Maryland passed in opposition to intimate relationships between Black and white partners interacting as equals, even as white enslavers were often permitted to inflict sexual violence against Black women, men, and children with impunity. Following Maryland’s lead, laws targeting interracial marriages were passed in other colonies, including Virginia (1691), Massachusetts (1705), North Carolina (1715), Pennsylvania (1725), and Georgia (1750).

It would take over 300 years, until the 1967 Supreme Court ruling Loving v. Virginia, for anti-miscegenation laws to be banned across the U.S.

As Black politicians and supporters held a peaceful political rally, mobs of white people in Camilla, Georgia, led by the sheriff, opened fire, killing at least seven Black people, including a Black mother and her infant child, in a mass lynching and assaulting and wounding at least 30 others. The political rally, which started in Albany, Georgia, and culminated in Camilla, Georgia, was held to protest the expulsion of Black elected officials from the Georgia Assembly. In an effort to terrorize Black communities further, over the weeks following the massacre, white men from Camilla and the surrounding areas intimidated and assaulted Black people throughout the Georgia countryside, threatening to kill any Black person who dared to vote in the next election.

In the period after the Civil War, Black men gained new opportunities for political power by exercising their right to vote, running for office, and holding political positions. In an effort to uphold racial hierarchy, white state legislators devised a strategy to purge the Georgia Assembly of the 33 Black and mixed-race men who had been democratically elected. On September 3, ignoring the results of the democratic process, the white majority successfully voted to expel all Black and mixed-race lawmakers from the Assembly.

On the morning of September 19, one of the expelled Black lawmakers named Philip Joiner organized a 25-mile peaceful march from Albany, Georgia, to the town of Camilla, Georgia. The group, composed of a few hundred people, marched with a plan to deliver political speeches in Camilla. An armed white man and the sheriff met them outside town and warned them that white residents were prepared to respond with violence if they honored their speaking engagement. When the men refused to be intimidated, the sheriff informed them that “the people would not allow Radical[s] to speak at Camilla.”

By the time the group reached the courthouse square in Camilla, they were met by the sheriff who, instead of protecting their constitutional right to assembly, had mobilized white men in Camilla to ambush the group. Stationed outside of storefronts and surrounding the courthouse square, armed white men shot at the lawmakers and their supporters and then pursued them with bloodhounds, horses, and shotguns for 10 miles outside of Camilla. Eyewitness accounts later recounted that shots were fired at Black people as they ran for cover in the woods outside town, and even those already wounded or dead on the ground were shot repeatedly.

By the end of this mass lynching, at least seven Black people lay dead. At least 30 more people were wounded. One 20-year-old Black man reported that after being pursued by a group of armed white men into a ditch, he was struck on the head with a gun and forced to go back to Camilla to pick up the bodies before he escaped.

The Camilla Massacre not only took the lives of Black people on September 19, but traumatized Black communities and served as a deterrent to those who dared to exercise their political rights

The NAACP and the governor of Pennsylvania publicly denounced remarks by Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Mayor Joseph Cauffiel, who had threatened Black and Mexican migrants, telling them to leave town or risk violence.

This was a period of migration within the U.S., as many African Americans began to move out of the South to the West and North, seeking work in industrial factories and refuge from the racial violence and discrimination so prevalent in the South. The Black population of Johnstown had more than tripled over the course of a decade, growing from fewer than 500 people in 1910 to more than 1,600 in 1920—and the growth was continuing. The Mexican immigrant community in Johnstown was smaller, but also growing, and many white residents resented both.

When a Black man killed several law enforcement officers in a Johnstown shootout in August 1923, growing white intolerance toward the Black newcomers came to a head. In late August, Mayor Joseph Cauffiel publicly announced that all Black and Mexican residents who had lived in Johnstown for fewer than seven years had to leave town “for their own safety”—implying that they would be targeted with violence if they chose to stay.

Later criticized for his remarks, Mayor Cauffiel defended his actions as justified. “We have been sitting on a bomb in this city… I feared an outbreak against the negroes unless I acted quickly,” he said. “Many of the newcomers were bad people, including ex-convicts.” The NAACP protested and urged Governor Gifford Pinchot to take action, while the Mexican Embassy also pressured state officials to respond. On September 18, the governor sent the NAACP a telegram vowing that “the whole power of this Commonwealth will be used, if necessary, to maintain constitutional rights” in Johnstown.

Mayor Cauffiel then backtracked on his statements, claiming that he had meant to make a mere “suggestion.” But by that time, over 2,000 families had fled in fear. No attempt was made to facilitate their return or compensate them for their losses. Such backlash against African Americans and other non-white communities in the North became more prominent in the years following the Great Migration, during which demographic shifts brought latent tensions to the forefront.

The Virginia Assembly sentenced Hugh Davis, a white man, to be whipped for having a relationship with a Black person. According to records, the Assembly asserted that Mr. Davis “abus[ed] himself to the dishonor of God and shame of Christians, by defiling his body in lying with a negro.” Mr. Davis was sentenced to public whipping in front of an audience of Black people, which some historians argue was intended to serve as an example to the Black population. Some evidence suggests that Mr. Davis’s partner may have been a Black man, which could have provided additional motivation for the harsh punishment imposed.

Hugh Davis’s case is the first known time Virginia authorities punished an individual for interracial sexual relations, but not the last. Throughout the rest of the 17th century, documentation shows that a number of other people—Black and white, enslaved and free—were punished for the same behavior in Virginia. Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and other territories also enforced prohibitions on interracial relationships during this era.

In the first decades after enslaved Africans arrived in the English Colonies, authorities worked to establish white supremacy as law, racial difference as legal fact, and enslavement as a permanent, hereditary status centrally tied to race. All of those goals required the maintenance of a strict racial hierarchy that, while often allowing the sexual exploitation and abuse of Black men and women by white enslavers, did not condone sexual relationships between Black and white partners interacting as equals.

In 1691, the Virginia Assembly officially moved beyond regulating sexual relations and explicitly outlawed marriage between free white and free Black people. This prohibition remained in effect for nearly 300 years and was enforced well into the 20th century. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court held that laws prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia, bringing to an end more than three centuries of anti-miscegenation laws.

A Category 4 hurricane with winds of 140 miles per hour made landfall in Palm Beach County, Florida. The hurricane destroyed a levee that protected a number of small, low-lying farming communities from the waters of Lake Okeechobee. Water from Lake Okeechobee rushed in when the levee was destroyed, killing thousands. Most residents in these areas were Black migrant farm workers.

After the hurricane, Black survivors were forced to recover the bodies of those killed. The officials in charge of the recovery effort ordered that food would be provided only to those who worked, and some people who refused to work were shot.

The bodies of white storm victims were buried in coffins in local cemeteries, but local officials refused to provide coffins or proper burials for Black victims. Instead, their corpses were stacked in piles by the side of the roads, doused in fuel oil, and burned. Authorities bulldozed the bodies of 674 Black victims into a mass grave in West Palm Beach. The mass grave was not marked, and the site was later sold for private industrial use—first used as a garbage dump, then a slaughterhouse, and then a sewage treatment plant.

The city of West Palm Beach purchased the land containing the mass grave in 2000. Eight years later, on the 80th anniversary of the storm, officials erected a plaque and historical marker at the site.

On the morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, a white man was seen placing a box under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Shortly afterward, the explosives inside detonated, devastating the church building and the 400 congregants inside. Parents rushed to the Sunday school classroom to check on their children and soon discovered that four young girls had been killed in the blast: Denise McNair (11), Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Robertson (14), and Cynthia Wesley (14). More than 20 others were injured.

In 1963, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was the largest Black church in Birmingham, Alabama, and served as a meeting place for civil rights activities. As demonstrations to desegregate public spaces and secure Black voting rights became more frequent and visible, meeting places like the church became targets for white segregationists looking to terrorize Black activists and their supporters.

Immediately after the bombing, violence surged throughout the city as police clashed with enraged members of the Black community. Before the day ended, at least two other African American children had been slain: 16-year-old Johnny Robinson was shot by police as he fled down an alley, and 13-year-old Virgil Ware was shot and killed by white youths while riding his bicycle.

More than a decade later, in 1977, Ku Klux Klan leader Robert Chambliss was convicted of murder for participating in the church bombing and later died in prison. Several decades later, in the early 2000s, Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton were also convicted of murder for their roles in the bombing; both men were sentenced to life imprisonment.

1,500 members of the White League—a militia of Confederate veterans opposed to the civil rights goals of Reconstruction—attacked New Orleans and overthrew the Louisiana government. Two years before, a pro-Reconstruction politician named William Pitt Kellogg was elected governor of Louisiana, largely on the strength of his support among African American voters. That same year, Caesar Carpenter Antoine, an African American man, was elected lieutenant governor.

The electoral success of the integrated Kellogg-Antoine ticket angered many white men committed to white supremacy. Attempts to overthrow the elected government began nearly as soon as Governor Kellogg and Lt. Governor Antoine took office in 1873 and continued into the next year. During the summer of 1874, Frederick Nash Ogden, a former colonel in the Confederate army, began to organize an armed resistance force that became known as the White League. On September 14, they staged a coup.

After cutting the city’s telegraph lines and killing at least 13 members of the integrated New Orleans police force, the White League overran the state house and attempted to establish a new government. After three days, President Ulysses S. Grant ordered the U.S. Army to put down the rebellion, and the elected government was restored. Though unsuccessful, the attempted coup was emblematic of the political violence that occurred during Reconstruction—and white Southerners’ attempts to overthrow elected, integrated governments and restore white supremacy under law foreshadowed a nearing future.

After Reconstruction ended prematurely in 1877 as part of a political compromise, former Confederates regained control of state government and implemented laws and policies to suppress Black political power. In 1891, the new power structure installed a monument celebrating the 1874 coup attempt as the “overthrow of carpetbag government ousting the usurpers.”

In 1974, a marker was placed near the monument to express how it did not reflect the city’s position on race relations. In July 2015, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu proposed removing the monument, and by December of that same year, the New Orleans City Council voted in agreement. The monument was finally removed on April 24, 2017.

The Michigan Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church voted against ordaining Black bishops. The vote denied Black clergy leadership positions even within predominantly Black congregations. Delegates expressed concern that Black bishops may eventually lead white congregations and claimed that the moral inferiority of Black people required Black preachers to submit to white spiritual leadership.

Early Methodists actually supported the abolition of slavery and preached a theology of egalitarianism that resonated with free and enslaved Black people. By the late 1700s, Black Methodists comprised 24% of the church.

But white Methodist support for abolition did not last long. As Methodism spread across the South, enslavers resented Methodist teachings on human dignity and feared the opportunities that the church created for Black self-determination. They sought assurances from the church against disruption of the existing racial caste system.

The Methodist church complied, adopting policies against the ordination of Black clergy. The church further embraced an interpretation of the Bible that defended white supremacy and justified enslavement as God-ordained. In 1845, Southern Methodists separated and formed a new denomination, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, to preserve their ability to enslave fellow human beings. However, even after the split, Northern congregations continued to enforce policies that subordinated Black people and worked to entrench segregation both inside and outside the church into the 20th Century.

250 Black students attempted to integrate Grenada, Mississippi, schools on the first day of class. Though it was 12 years after the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling held racially segregated public schooling unconstitutional, the city of Grenada, Mississippi, had not stopped operating a segregated school system. In August 1966, a federal judge ordered Grenada officials to enroll African American students in the formerly white-only schools, and approximately 450 students had enrolled by the start of the 1966 school year.

On September 2, the school district postponed the start of school by 10 days. During that time, white leaders tried to coerce African American parents into withdrawing their children from the white schools by threatening them with firing or eviction. As a result, 200 students withdrew.

When the remaining 250 Black students arrived for classes on September 12, a large white mob surrounded the city’s elementary school and high school and turned them away. As the students retreated, members of the mob pursued them through the streets, beating them with chains, pipes, and clubs. At lunchtime, the mob returned to the school to attack the few Black students who had made it inside that morning. As the students left for lunch, members of the mob attacked them, leaving some hospitalized with broken bones. Some reporters covering the story were also beaten.

The mob violence continued for several days with no intervention from law enforcement. On September 16, a federal judge ordered protection for the students, and on September 17, 13 members of the mob were arrested by the FBI.

South Carolina officials met to rewrite the state constitution with the express purpose of disenfranchising the state’s African American voters and restoring white supremacy in all matters political. The convention’s most prominent figure was Benjamin Tillman, a senator and former governor nicknamed “Pitchfork Ben.” A well-known orator, Tillman spoke at great length during the convention.

“[A]ll that is necessary to bring about chaos,” he warned the convention delegates, “is for a sufficient number of white men, actuated by hate, or ambition, or from any unpatriotic motive, to climb up and cut it loose, mobilize and register the negroes, lead them and give them a free vote and fair count under manhood suffrage.” He continued:

The poor, ignorant cotton field hand, who never reaped any advantage, nor saw anything except a pistol, blindly followed like sheep wherever their Black and white leaders told them to go, voted unanimously every time for the Republican ticket during that dark period, and these results were achieved solely and wholly by reason of the ballot being in the hands of such cattle. Is the danger gone? No. How did we recover our liberty? By fraud and violence…How did we bring it about? Every white man sunk his personal feelings and ambitions. The white people of the State, illustrating our glorious motto, “Ready with their lives and fortunes.” came together as one. By fraud and violence, if you please, we threw it off. In 1878 we had to resort to more fraud and violence, and so again in 1880. Then the Registration Law and eight-box system was evolved from the superior intelligence of the white man to check and control this surging, muddy stream of ignorance…

The delegates followed Tillman’s guidance and enacted a constitution that effectively disenfranchised Black residents, with little federal interference, for nearly 70 years. Today, a statue of Tillman stands in front of the South Carolina State House and his name adorns a number of buildings throughout the state—including the main building on the campus of Clemson University.

White students began to withdraw from the newly integrated Tuskegee High School in Alabama to avoid attending school with Black students. Within one week, all 275 white students had stopped attending the school.

In January 1963, African American parents of students in Macon County, Alabama, sued the Macon County Board of Education to desegregate the county’s public schools. Though the U.S. Supreme Court had declared school segregation unconstitutional nearly nine years earlier in Brown v. Board of Education, Macon County had taken no steps to integrate local schools. In August 1963, a federal court ordered the school board to begin integration immediately.

The school board selected 13 African American students to integrate Tuskegee High School that fall. On September 2, scheduled to be the first day of integrated classes, Alabama Governor George Wallace ordered the school closed due to “safety concerns.” The school reopened a week later, and withdrawals began soon after.

Most of Tuskegee High School’s former white students enrolled at Macon Academy, a newly formed, all-white private school. In support of the community’s efforts to sidestep federal law and maintain school segregation, Governor Wallace and the school board approved the use of state funds to provide scholarships for white students abandoning the public school system to use at Macon Academy. Meanwhile, the Macon County School Board ordered Tuskegee High School closed due to low enrollment and split its remaining African American students among all-white high schools in the towns of Notasulga and Shorter. White students in those high schools boycotted for several days in protest, and many eventually transferred to Macon Academy.

Now known as Macon East Academy and located near the city of Montgomery, the former Macon Academy is one of several private schools in the Alabama Black Belt with origins rooted in resistance to integration. As of the 2015-2016 school year, Macon-East Academy’s student body of 277 was 97% white and less than 3% African American.

As 19 Black six-year-olds integrated all-white elementary schools in Nashville, Tennessee, white church members—including one local minister—organized a persistent and violent campaign to oppose the integration of Nashville public schools. Outside Fehr Elementary School, one person held a sign that read “God is the author of segregation” and pursued two Black children walking to the school. Outside three different elementary schools that same morning, Fred Stroud, a white minister, sought to dissuade white parents from allowing their children to be educated alongside Black children by preaching damnation for those who did not uphold segregation.

The next day, 100 sticks of dynamite were thrown into Hattie Cotton Elementary School and exploded. Patricia Watson, the one Black elementary student who had been in class the previous morning, did not return. No Black children returned to Hattie Cotton Elementary School the following year, and no one faced criminal charges for the bombing.

Though Brown v. Board of Education determined in 1954 that school segregation was unconstitutional, for three years white residents in Nashville relied on intimidation and organized political resistance to maintain segregation in the public schools. In 1957, Nashville finally developed a “stair step program” which permitted a few Black elementary school students to enroll in eight elementary schools.

Throughout the summer of 1957, white segregationists in Nashville held intimidation rallies to terrorize Black families. In the days leading up to the first day of school, as Black parents pre-registered their children for school, mobs of white church members gathered outside buildings with signs calling segregation the “will of God.” One leader declared that “integration can be reversed” and that “blood will run the streets” before Nashville’s schools were integrated.

By the morning of September 9, out of the 126 Black children eligible to attend all-white elementary schools, only 19 Black children matriculated. Reverend Stroud gathered crowds at Glenn Elementary to preach about the evils of integration, and white people in cars outside of Jones Elementary held signs emblazoned with KKK iconography and Biblical quotes. As opposition grew throughout the morning, white mobs crowded the sidewalks and threw rocks and bottles at Black children and their parents who attempted to pass through the crowd. By the end of the day, half of the white students at Glenn Elementary School—nearly 250 children—had not arrived, as white parents chose to deny their children education rather than permit them to learn alongside Black children.

That evening, 300 white people gathered downtown and continued to threaten Black families who sent their children to school. They strung an effigy in blackface from a stoplight with a note pinned to its chest that read “this could be you.” As the mob around Fehr Elementary grew to at least 400, white people burned two outbuildings located on the property of a Black family that had sent their daughter to the school. The mob also continued to burn crosses on lawns of Black families who had dared to enroll their students that morning.

The Texas House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a resolution encouraging U.S. senators and congressmen to work toward repealing the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship to Black people born in the U.S.

The resolution was introduced by Representative Robert Yantis, who initially also advocated for the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted African American men the right to vote in the U.S.

During the House session on September 8, Representative Yantis argued that “the perpetuity of Caucasian supremacy depended on the disenfranchisement of the negro.” He added that “in the heart of every negro [is] a desire for social equality and Texas ought to take the initiative in securing the repeal of the amendment.” The resolution passed with a vote of 51-34.

Opposition to the Fourteenth Amendment began before it even became an enforceable part of the Constitution. After the amendment was passed by the Senate in 1866, 28 of the 37 states had to ratify it. Southern legislatures refused; 10 of the 11 former Confederate states rejected the amendment with overwhelming majorities, and Louisiana did so unanimously.

The Fourteenth Amendment was finally adopted in July 1868, after Congress imposed military rule on the South and required states seeking readmission to the Union to ratify the amendment.

Local merchants in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, began enforcing an ordinance that denied service to all members of the U.S. military, regardless of their race, to protest integration. In a choice between patriotic support for the U.S. military and a commitment to racial segregation, the parish chose bigotry.

The day before, a new local ordinance in Plaquemines Parish banning civilian restaurants from serving all military members and prohibiting parish residents from visiting the integrated Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base New Orleans took effect.

While Black veterans were often the target of physical violence and social humiliation, this restaurant ordinance barred all sailors from service, regardless of race, rather than comply with integration. At the time, segregationist Leander Perez knew that the ordinance would “hurt our good white boys who are in the military service” and would bring a significant loss in revenue, but he nevertheless argued that banning service for all troops was necessary because maintaining segregation was more important. Local merchants—including a shopkeeper named Mrs. Charles T. Boone who owned the Hummingbird Restaurant in Belle Chase, Louisiana—complied. On September 7, she pointed to a sign that read “Parish law forbids me to serve military personnel in uniform” and refused to serve coffee to two members of the U.S. Navy.

Mr. Perez championed the ordinance as an aggressive response to a report from President John F. Kennedy’s Committee on Equal Opportunity in the Armed Services (“The Geller Report”). The Geller Report issued a series of recommendations aimed at combatting racial discrimination in the armed services. In particular, the report urged military officers to declare segregated civilian establishments “off-limits” to those under their command.

Leander Perez, who defended the military service ban, served as district attorney, judge, and political boss in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, during the civil rights era. A devout Catholic, he took a segregationist position so extreme that the Archbishop of the Diocese of New Orleans excommunicated him from the church. An active member of his local white citizens’ council, Mr. Perez gave public speeches pledging to outlaw the NAACP, describing integration as the “mongrelization of the races,” and encouraging politicians to commit criminal contempt in defiance of desegregation orders.

12 Black men held at a prison farm in Richmond, Texas, were placed in an underground cell as punishment for not picking cotton fast enough. Eight of those men died of asphyxiation. The cell was nine feet long, seven feet wide, and seven feet high, and temperatures outside neared 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The only ventilation in the cell came from four small holes connected to pipes in the ceiling that were “just large enough to admit a quarter.” The next day, inspectors found that one of the holes had been plugged.

Accused of “laziness in picking cotton” while being forced to work on a prison farm, all 12 men were left in this cramped cell overnight. Three of the surviving men explained that they were each able to position themselves by one of the three working holes in the ceiling. The fourth survived by pressing his face against the crack at the bottom of the door. They cried out repeatedly to guards throughout the night; “Men are dying in here,” they yelled. The guards ignored them, claiming that “it is always the case for prisoners confined as the men were to make such cries.” Early the next morning, when the guard on duty heard the men shouting that one of them was dead, he opened the cell and had two of the prisoners remove one of the dead bodies. The guard “did not stop to ascertain” if any of the other men inside were dead. Instead, he waited for his manager to arrive before they reopened the cell to find eight of the men inside had suffocated to death.

No one was ever held accountable for the deaths of these men. The attorney general of Texas ultimately concluded that prison officials were not culpable because placing these men in this suffocating chamber, and failing to listen to their pleas for help, did not violate the law.

Four of the men were buried on the property at Jester State Prison Farm, which still houses inmates today. Learn more about how millions of Americans today continue to be incarcerated in overcrowded, violent, and inhumane jails and prisons that do not provide treatment, education, or rehabilitation, and how cultures of indifference within prisons and jails continue to result in death.

A white mob lynched a Black man named Robert Johnson in Princeton, West Virginia. After Mr. Johnson was accused of assaulting a white girl, sheriff’s officials anticipated a lynch mob would form and moved him from Bluefield to Princeton. When the move was discovered, an armed mob of white men came to Princeton and seized Mr. Johnson. The local judge urged the mob to let the court conduct a “speedy trial,” and the state governor warned that a lynching should not be allowed—but the mob was determined.

After kidnapping Mr. Johnson from police custody, the enraged mob beat Mr. Johnson with clubs and rocks, strung him to a telegraph pole “in the presence of the judge, sheriff, and armed guards,” and shot him hundreds of times. Despite their purported efforts to dissuade the mob, police did not attempt to use force to save Mr. Johnson’s life, and the judge did not order any members of the lynch mob arrested.

After the lynching, the growing mob patrolled the town terrorizing other African Americans, threatening to lynch other Black people they encountered—including those who attempted to cut down Mr. Johnson’s hanging corpse. Instead, the mob cut the dead body down, stripped off most of the clothing to keep as “souvenirs,” and then again hanged the corpse from the same pole.

According to press reports, authorities later acknowledged a growing possibility that Mr. Johnson had been wrongly identified and was innocent of the alleged assault. Nevertheless, a grand jury convened to investigate the murder declined to return a single indictment, and no one was ever arrested or prosecuted for his lynching.

Mr. Johnson is one of more than 4,000 documented African American victims of racial terror lynching killed in the U.S. between 1877 and 1950.

Republicans in Hinds County, Mississippi, held a barbecue and meeting in the town of Clinton that was attended by 3,000 people. Hoping to curb the risk of violent political conflict, Clinton authorities appointed special police and prohibited serving liquor. When the Republican speakers began making their political speeches in the afternoon, Democratic party representatives unexpectedly joined the meeting and requested speaking time.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln was the dominant political wing of the federal government working to restore national unity and enforce the new civil rights of Black people, while the Democratic Party largely represented the white South of the former Confederacy intent on regaining control of their state governments. The “Radical Republicans” were an arm of the Republican Party that advocated imposing severe penalties on the South for waging the Civil War and also ensuring full political and social equality for the millions of Black people in the South who were now American citizens.

Political realignment during the civil rights movement of the 1960s led to major shifts in party identification, as Southern elected officials and constituents largely left the Democratic Party in protest of civil rights advancements enacted by President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson, while the Republican Party stayed silent on civil rights issues to attract the defecting South and later embraced the coded language of “law and order” and “state’s rights” to dominate regional politics. But in 1875, Republican politicians in the South—a small minority—were considered agents of federal oppression, friends of African Americans, and enemies of the white supremacy many former Confederates wanted to reestablish.

At the Clinton, Mississippi, barbecue on that September evening, the risk of violent conflict between the political parties was great. In the interest of keeping the peace, Republican officials agreed to accommodate Democrats’ request to speak and arranged for a public discussion between Judge Amos R. Johnston, a Democratic candidate for state senate, and Captain H.T. Fisher, Republican editor of the the Jackson Times.

Both speakers were to be given an equal amount of speaking time, and Judge Johnston spoke first. When Mr. Fisher’s turn came, he expressed optimism that meetings between the parties could take place peacefully in the future—but eight minutes into his address, an altercation erupted in the crowd. A gunfight between Black and white people in the audience rang out, as bystanders panicked and rushed to escape the danger. Within 15 minutes, three white people and four Black people were dead, and six white people and 20 Black people were wounded.

Though newspapers reported that the Black people who had fired weapons were acting in self-defense, many white observers were enraged by the Black show of force. That night, armed white men from Clinton and Vicksburg formed roving bands targeting Black men. By the next day, an estimated 50 Black people had been killed. Many more had been forced into the woods and swampland to avoid an attack, where they remained until the attack subsided.

Alabama adopted a new state constitution that prohibited interracial marriage and mandated separate schools for Black and white children. The state constitutional convention’s primary purpose was to legally disenfranchise Black voters, and the new constitution also included several electoral policies designed to suppress Black political power.

Framers of this constitution knew that, because the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited race-based disenfranchisement, discriminatory constitutional provisions intended to maintain white supremacy had to appear race-neutral. To that end, the new constitution called for the appointment of three registrars from each county who had wide discretion when accepting registration applications and were chosen and trained to minimize registration by African Americans.

The constitution’s new registration rules also required voters to be able to read and write any section of the U.S. Constitution and have been lawfully employed for the previous 12 months. Anyone who did not meet the employment specification could still register if he or his wife had real estate and possessions taxed at $300. Though these requirements had severely limited the voting rights of African Americans and poor white people in Alabama, the constitutional drafters provided exceptions that allowed voters to register anyway if they were voters, descendants of voters, or could demonstrate an understanding of the U.S. Constitution. This provision offered a loophole much more likely to apply to white men (who had been eligible for military service in the South). The effect was intentional.

Alabama was home to approximately 75,000 registered African American voters before the new constitution was enacted, but drafters estimated the new rules would reduce that number to less than 30,000. Alabama delegates approved the constitution 132-12. The state amended the 1901 constitution since its adoption, but several of the discriminatory provisions of the 1901 constitution—including the mandate to maintain racially segregated public schools—remained until 2022.

In 1885, the Union Pacific Railroad employed 500 coal miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, two-thirds of whom were Chinese. White miners, angry that the railroad was hiring Chinese miners, decided to drive Chinese people out of Rock Springs.

On September 2, 1885, a dispute broke out between white and Chinese miners when both groups wanted to work in the same part of the mine. Later that day, 100 white miners gathered with guns, hatchets, and knives and marched toward “Chinatown” where the Chinese miners lived, to stage a brutal attack. When the Chinese residents attempted to flee, the white miners fired at them while they ran.

Twenty-eight Chinese people were killed in the massacre and another 15 were badly wounded. The white miners also looted and burned all 79 houses belonging to Chinese residents, leaving “Chinatown” demolished. In the days following this attack, federal troops brought in to establish order set up camp between the white area of town and “Chinatown,” to prevent more violence; troops remained there for the next 13 years. Although 14 white miners were arrested in connection with the massacre, none were ever convicted of any crime.

Today, there is little evidence of the massacre in Rock Springs. No marked gravesites exist for the victims because, at that time, “Orientals” were banned from white cemeteries. Instead, the victims were cremated and their ashes returned to China. Congress eventually authorized an indemnity to China in the amount of $147,748, but the U.S. government never assumed legal responsibility for the massacre.

During the week of September 1, 1884, Joseph and Mary Tape, immigrants from China who had lived in the U.S. for over a decade, attempted to enroll their eight-year-old, American-born daughter, Mamie Tape, in San Francisco’s Spring Valley School. The school principal denied the Tapes’ request because of Mamie’s race, and the state superintendent—noting that even the California Constitution described Chinese Americans as “dangerous to the well-being of the state”—supported that decision.

This incident took place in the midst of extensive discriminatory treatment of Chinese American children in California’s public schools. Until 1880, Asian American students were forbidden from attending public schools altogether, and the educational options available to them in the early 1880s were sparse, with vastly lower resources than the established schools for white children.

Facing these obstacles to securing meaningful education for their daughter, Mr. and Mrs. Tape sued the school and won. In January 1885, a California Superior Court judge ruled that the school’s refusal to admit Mamie Tape was a violation of California state law and the U.S. Constitution. The California Supreme Court confirmed that decision when the state appealed and held that Chinese students had a right to public education. The Court’s decision did not, however, prohibit the creation of segregated schools.

Recognizing that loophole, the California legislature soon passed a bill requiring public school districts to create separate schools for Chinese American students and prohibiting Chinese American students from attending schools attended by white children.

When Mamie Tape arrived for school immediately after the California Supreme Court’s decision, she was denied entry because her vaccinations were not up to date. By the time the Tape family was able to comply with the vaccination requirements, a new school had been opened for Chinese American students in compliance with the new state law, and Mamie was forced to enroll there. The California law banning Chinese American students from attending public schools with white students was enforced until the late 1920s.

In an ongoing battle with federal agencies and the U.S. Supreme Court, the Alabama Senate passed a law that made it illegal for public schools in the state to enter into desegregation plans with federal officials.

A decade after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, many school districts throughout the South still maintained segregated public schools. In 1964, the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which contained a provision that required local school districts to comply with integration orders to receive federal funding.

In 1966, 12 years after Brown, the U.S. Office of Education issued regulations providing guidance and standards regarding school desegregation. These regulations required segregated school districts to submit integration plans to the federal government. Noncompliant districts risked losing federal funds.

In response, Governor George Wallace, whose 1963 inauguration speech had vowed to maintain “segregation forever,” proposed a new state law to forbid Alabama school districts from entering into desegregation agreements with the federal Office of Education. In legislative hearings, representatives of Alabama’s teachers’ unions spoke against the bill and warned that it would risk $24 million of federal funding. Nevertheless, the Alabama Senate approved the bill on August 31, almost unanimously: only seven members voted against the measure.

The Alabama House of Representatives passed the bill soon after, and Governor Wallace signed it into law on September 9.

The massive resistance by the white community was largely successful in preventing the integration of schools in the South. In the five Deep South states, every single one of 1.4 million Black schoolchildren attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960. By the start of the 1964-65 school year, less than 3% of the South’s African American children attended school with white students, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina that number remained substantially below 1%. In 1967, 13 years after Brown, a report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights observed that white violence and intimidation against Black people “continues to be a deterrent to school desegregation.”

The first day of school, mobs of white pro-segregationists guarded Mansfield High School and patrolled the streets threatening to use guns and other weapons to prevent Black children from registering. Outside the school, the mob hung an African American effigy at the top of the school’s flag pole and set it on fire. Attached to one pant leg of the effigy was a sign that read, “This Negro tried to enter a white school. This would be a terrible way to die.” On the other leg, a sign read, “Stay Away, Niggers.” A second effigy was hung on the front of the school building.

In 1956, Mansfield, Texas, was a small farming town of 1,500 people. Its schools were strictly segregated and facilities for Black students were run-down and under-funded. Before the start of the 1956-1957 school year, in compliance with a federal desegregation order and the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision barring racial segregation in schools, the Mansfield school board approved a plan to admit 12 Black students to the all-white Mansfield High School. However, many local white residents opposed integration, and some took to the streets in protest.

In response to the unrest on the first day of school, Texas Governor Allan Shivers sent six Texas Rangers to Mansfield with instructions to “maintain law and order” and transfer any students “white or colored, whose attendance or attempts to attend Mansfield High School would be reasonably calculated to incite violence.” Soon afterward, the Mansfield School Board voted to “exhaust all legal remedies to delay integration.”

Though the U.S. Supreme Court in December 1956 rejected the Mansfield school district’s request to delay integration due to local opposition, resistance and non-compliance continued for years. Mansfield, Texas, public schools did not officially desegregate until 1965.

A white man named Billy Jack Caston, who was the first cousin of the Amite County sheriff, attacked Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader Bob Moses as he accompanied two Black residents—Curtis Dawson and the Reverend Alfred Knox—to register to vote. Two other white men stood by and witnessed the brutal beating.

In the early 1960s, approximately 70% of white adults in Mississippi were registered to vote, but only 6.7% of eligible Black Mississippians were registered. These rates lagged behind even other states in the Deep South, such as Alabama (23%) and Louisiana (32%), and were an intentional consequence of Mississippi’s efforts to disenfranchise Black people in the state over the prior decades.

During Reconstruction, Black Mississippians participated in state politics in large numbers and comprised a majority of the state’s electorate by 1870. However, white Mississippians quickly resorted to violence and discriminatory legislation to deprive Black citizens of their voting rights. As early as 1875, armed groups intercepted Black people as they attempted to register to vote. From 1876 through the 1960s, Mississippi enacted a series of targeted voter suppression measures that disenfranchised Black people. These measures included publishing the names of Black registrants in the local paper to incite violent reprisal, all-white primary elections, a poll tax, stringent residency requirements, and a voter registration test administered at the complete discretion of local white registrars. The test required that Black people prove literacy, knowledge of state law and government, and “good moral character.” These laws maintained the voting rights of white people by exempting those already registered (and their children) from burdensome registration requirements. Further, in 1960, Mississippi adopted legislation providing for the destruction of voter registration records to insulate its discriminatory practices from federal review.

In the 1960s, civil rights activists in Mississippi were working to get Black voters registered. At the time he was attacked, Mr. Moses was working as a vote tutor, training Black applicants to pass Mississippi’s discriminatory registration test.

As Mr. Moses, Mr. Dawson, and the Reverend Knox approached the Amite County Courthouse, Mr. Caston, the sheriff’s first cousin, demanded that Mr. Moses disclose the group’s intentions. Without waiting for a response, he slammed Mr. Moses onto the ground and kneeled over his body for several minutes, beating him with a blunt instrument. Several white men stood nearby watching but did nothing to intervene. Mr. Moses sustained lacerations to his head and required several stitches.

The day he was beaten, Mr. Moses attempted to seek redress from the local authorities for the violence committed against him. The county sheriff refused to help Mr. Moses and directed him to the local justice of the peace, who was “out of the office” that day.

Mr. Moses finally succeeded in filing a formal complaint. However, an all-white jury acquitted the white man who attacked him. Mr. Moses’s complaint marked the first time that a Black person prosecuted a white person for violence in Amite County, Mississippi.

Two white men named Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam abducted a 14-year-old Black boy named Emmett Till from his great-uncle’s home in Money, Mississippi. The men drove Emmett to a storage shed on Milam’s property in Drew, Mississippi, where they took turns torturing and beating him with a pistol, before forcing him to load a 74-pound fan into the back of their pick-up truck. The men then drove Emmett to the edge of the Tallahatchie River, ordered him to remove his clothes, and shot him in the head. Once the child was dead, Bryant and Milam chained the fan to his corpse and rolled it into the river.

Just over one week before, on August 20, Emmett had traveled by train from Chicago to Mississippi to spend two weeks visiting family. A few days into his visit, he and a group of friends and cousins went into a nearby store to buy candy; Emmett was later accused of acting “familiar” with the young white female storekeeper, Carolyn Bryant.

This was a dangerous allegation in the racial caste system of the Mississippi Delta, which was very different from Chicago and unfamiliar to young Emmett. Within a few days, word of the interaction reached Carolyn Bryant’s husband, Roy, and he enlisted his half-brother J.W. in the deadly violence that followed. Two young boys found Emmett Till’s mutilated and bloated body on August 31.

Devastated by the brutal murder and badly disfigured corpse, Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley, defiantly held an open-casket funeral in Chicago, where thousands gazed in horror at what was left of her son. To show the world the brutality Emmett had suffered, his mother also distributed a photograph of his corpse for publication in newspapers and magazines and later explained her motivation: “The whole nation had to bear witness to this.”

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16-year-old NAACP Youth Council President Rodney Hurst and dozens of his peers staged a peaceful sit-in protest at a “whites only” Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Jacksonville, Florida. Throughout that month, Youth Council members had successfully organized peaceful sit-ins at Morrison’s Cafeteria and other prominent lunch counters in the city. On this Saturday, however, the young Black demonstrators were violently attacked by a mob of more than 200 white people armed with baseball bats and ax handles.

The attack began when white onlookers angered by the demonstration began spitting on the sit-in protesters and yelling racial slurs at them. When the Black demonstrators refused to respond and continued sitting peacefully, the violence escalated. The white people beat the demonstrators with wooden ax handles and baseball bats and soon spread into the streets of downtown Jacksonville, attacking Black people indiscriminately. According to reports, members of the Ku Klux Klan organized the “Ax Handle Saturday” attack, which left more than 50 people injured.

As bloodied and battered Black children fled to a nearby church to seek refuge, many white police officers joined the mob violence, arrested the fleeing civil rights demonstrators, or did nothing. “The intent was to scare, intimidate, and bring physical harm,” Rodney Hurst later recalled. “Many times you could not draw a line between the Klan and law enforcement, because law enforcement were at least accomplices to a lot of the things the Klan did.”

A mob of white men seized 16 Black men from the Gibson County Jail in Trenton, Tennessee, and lynched them. The group had been transferred from Picketsville, a neighboring town where they had been arrested and accused of shooting at two white men.

Around 2 am that morning, a contingent of 400-500 masked white men who were mounted on horses and armed with shotguns demanded entrance to the Gibson County Jail. The men confronted the jailer and threatened to kill him if he did not relinquish the keys to the cell holding the African American men. After the jailer gave the leader of the mob the key, the members of the mob bound the Black men by their hands and led them out of the jail cell. The jailer would later testify that he soon heard a series of gun shots in the distance.

Soon afterward, the jailer found six of the men lying along nearby Huntingdon Road—four were dead, their bodies “riddled with bullets.” Two of the men who were found wounded but alive later died before receiving medical attention. The bodies of the 10 remaining men were later found at the bottom of a river about one mile from town.

Local white officials held an inquest that concluded the men were killed by “shots inflicted by guns in the hands of unknown parties.” Though all the victims of the violence had been Black, the town mayor expressed concern that local white people were in danger because Black people throughout the county might be planning to violently retaliate.

Just one day after the mass murder of 16 Black men by hundreds of white men who remained unidentified and free, the mayor ordered police to take all guns belonging to Trenton’s Black residents and threatened to shoot those who resisted.

On the night of August 25, 1956, several sticks of dynamite were thrown into the yard of Pastor Robert Graetz’s home in Montgomery, Alabama. The dynamite exploded, breaking the home’s front windows and damaging the front door.

Pastor Graetz, a young white minister serving the city’s primarily African American Trinity Lutheran Church, was also a member of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). The MIA was the community group that had planned and guided the city’s bus boycott, waged to protest racially discriminatory treatment toward Black bus riders. Pastor Graetz had been an outspoken supporter of the ongoing bus boycott since it began on December 5, 1955, and was known to regularly provide transportation to boycott participants traveling to and from work.

At the time of the explosion, Pastor Graetz was attending an integration workshop in Tennessee. Fortunately, his wife and children were not at home and no one was injured in the blast. Earlier that year, in January, the Montgomery homes of local minister Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and E.D. Nixon, former president of the local NAACP, had also been bombed. Both men were active boycott leaders.

After the bombing of Pastor Graetz’s home, Montgomery Mayor W. A. Gayle made baseless allegations that it was “an inside job” and “just a publicity stunt to build up interest of the Negroes in their campaign.” No one was ever arrested, charged, or convicted for the attack.

Virginia Governor Thomas Stanley pledged to close Virginia’s public schools rather than permit any racial integration. “If we accept admission of one Negro child into a white school, it’s all over…we will have given up,” he said.

Governor Stanley’s remarks flagrantly defied the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation in public education was unconstitutional. The governor’s remarks also signaled his rejection of a rival plan by some Virginia politicians— who sought to preserve segregation while appearing to abide by the Court’s decision—that would give all students in the state the choice between attending a segregated school or an integrated one.

The same day, the governor received a petition signed by 30,000 Virginians asking him to “do everything” to maintain segregation in the state’s schools and Governor Stanley claimed his plan was “supported by at least 95 percent of all white people in Virginia.”

The next month, the Virginia General Assembly approved Governor Stanley’s so-called “Stanley Plan,” under which the governor could close and withdraw funding from any school that tried to integrate. Nine schools were soon closed in Warren County, Charlottesville, and Norfolk.

Additionally, the state school system was placed in the hands of the governor, who created a board to oversee individually all transfers of students between schools. The governor’s office made 450,000 pupil assignments without ever permitting a Black child to attend a school with white children.

Lawmakers also enacted a tuition grant program that gave over $1 million to white students to attend segregated private schools.

While aspects of the Stanley Plan were eventually ruled unconstitutional by state and federal courts, white Virginians were largely successful in preventing the integration of public schools in the state. Five years after the Brown ruling, fewer than 1% of Black students in Virginia attended an integrated public school. Ten years after Brown, that number had only increased to 5%.

16-year-old Yusef Hawkins and three friends went to the predominately white Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, New York, to inquire about a used car for sale. While walking through the neighborhood, the four Black boys encountered a group of 30 white youths gathered in the street. Armed with baseball bats and at least one handgun, the white boys set upon the Black boys. Yusef was shot twice in the chest and was later pronounced dead at the nearby Maimonides Medical Center.

Later investigation revealed that a neighborhood girl, Gina Feliciano, had recently spurned the advances of a young white man in the neighborhood and was rumored to be dating an African American. Angry, the rejected white boy gathered friends to lay in wait for the Black boyfriend they believed would be visiting Ms. Feliciano. Yusef Hawkins, who had no connection to the white girl, walked into this scene of racial tension and lost his life.

Yusef Hawkins was the third Black male to be murdered by a white mob in increasingly racially polarized 1980s New York. Shortly after the slaying, the Rev. Al Sharpton led a protest march through Bensonhurst. Neighborhood residents met the protesters with such intense resistance that one marcher said she had “not been through an experience like this since the 60s.” A year after Yusef Hawkins’s murder, 18-year-old Joseph Fama was convicted of second-degree murder and a string of lesser charges and was sentenced to 32 years in prison. Five other participants were charged in connection with Yusef Hawkins’s murder and received lesser sentences.

An African American man named Charles Julius Miller and an unnamed African American woman entered the Café Neapolitan in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The couple was immediately refused service and ordered to leave. When Mr. Miller refused to exit, a “free-for-all” ensued in which white patrons and staff attacked Mr. Miller, who pulled out a gun for protection after being attacked. The violence left many people injured and resulted in approximately 50 arrests. Mr. Miller was among those hospitalized for his injuries.

Racial segregation and violence plagued the U.S. throughout the early 20th century and was not an exclusively Southern problem. Riots and disturbances like these took place throughout the country, and racial segregation and bias remained pervasive problems nationwide.

As was common at the time, mainstream, white-run newspapers reported the Pittsburgh restaurant incident as having been caused by the African American who dared enter an establishment where he did not belong and made no critique of the injustice of racial segregation.

Jim Johnson, an Arkansas supreme court justice, told a state-wide segregationist rally at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, to “do what needs to be done” to fight the proposed integration of schools in the Dollarway School District. “When Dollarway falls,” Johnson exhorted the crowd, “Arkansas falls!” The crowd of over a thousand white Arkansas residents cheered.

On August 4, a federal judge ordered that three Black children be admitted to the Dollarway School District when schools reopened in September. The Dollarway School Board appealed the decision. Meanwhile, white residents in the Dollarway District put together a petition with over 1,200 signatures asking Governor Orval Faubus to preserve segregation in the district “with all the force at your command.”

Though Brown v. Board of Education determined in 1954 that school segregation was unconstitutional, for years white residents across Arkansas relied on intimidation and organized political resistance to maintain segregation in the public schools. White residents fought court rulings and held intimidation rallies to terrorize Black families and their children while politicians closed schools to avoid integration. By 1960, only 98 of Arkansas’s 104,000 Black students attended integrated schools.

Justice Jim Johnson was an outspoken segregationist who served as an Arkansas state senator and associate justice on the Arkansas Supreme Court in the 1950s and 1960s. After the Brown decision, Justice Johnson launched a campaign to ensure that defense of segregation remained a central political platform in Arkansas. Justice Johnson formed the White Citizens’ Council of Arkansas, which protested plans to integrate schools in the town of Hoxie, and proposed an amendment to the Arkansas Constitution that would authorize state officials to ignore federal law, which Arkansas voters passed. In 1956, Justice Johnson challenged incumbent Orval Faubus and ran for governor on a segregationist platform with the endorsement of the KKK. Although Justice Johnson lost the election, he leveraged his supporters to pressure Governor Faubus to embrace the segregationist cause. He was instrumental in persuading Governor Faubus to defy federal orders to desegregate Little Rock Central High School in 1957.

The massive resistance to integration by the white community was largely successful in preventing integration of schools, especially in the South. In the five Deep South states, every single one of 1.4 million Black school children attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960. By the start of the 1964-65 school year, less than 3% of the South’s Black children attended school with white students, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina that number remained substantially below 1%. In 1967, 13 years after Brown v. Board of Education, a report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights observed that white violence and intimidation against Black people “continues to be a deterrent to school desegregation.”

The stage was set for slavery in the U.S. as early as the 14th century, when Spain and Portugal began to capture Africans for enslavement in Europe. Slavery eventually expanded to colonial America, where the first enslaved Africans were brought in the Virginia colony at Point Comfort on the James River on August 20, 1619. It was reported that “20 and odd Negroes” from the White Lion, an English ship, were sold in exchange for food; the remaining Africans were transported to Jamestown and sold into slavery.

Historians have long believed that these first Africans enslaved in the colonies came from the Caribbean, but Spanish records suggest they were captured in Angola, then a Portuguese colony in West Central Africa. While aboard the ship São João Bautista bound for Mexico, they were stolen by two English ships, the White Lion and the Treasurer. Once in Virginia, the enslaved Africans were dispersed throughout the colony.

Although Virginia was the first British colony to legally define slavery in mid-17th century North America, slavery did not immediately become the predominant form of labor there. For decades after slavery was formalized, Virginia plantation owners held nearly 10 times as many indentured servants as enslaved Africans, and many of them were white. By the 1680s, however, African slave labor became the dominant system on Virginia farms and the population of enslaved people continued to grow exponentially. As enslavement became a status centrally tied to race, colonial American laws and culture developed to create a narrative of racial difference that defined African people as intellectually inferior, morally deficient, and benefitting from the “civilizing” influence of slavery.

This belief system and institution spread widely over the next two centuries, even as the U.S. gained independence and embraced a national identity as the “land of the free.” At the start of the Civil War in 1861, Virginia had the largest population of enslaved Black people of any state in the Confederacy.

A mob of white people in Alachua County, Florida, lynched five Black individuals—Andrew McHenry, Bert Dennis, John Haskins, Mary Dennis, and Stella Young—while a Black man named James Dennis was also killed nearby by a “sheriff’s posse.” On the same day, almost 1,000 miles away in Navarro County, Texas, a mob of 200 white people lynched Edward Lang, a 21-year-old Black man. These incidents of racial terror violence occurred just months before the U.S. entered World War I to fight on behalf of the principles of democracy and freedom.

On August 18, in Jonesville, Florida, a Black man by the name of Boisey Long was accused of murdering the local constable. When Mr. Long went missing, word spread that four Black men—Andrew McHenry, Bert Dennis, James Dennis, and John Haskins—and two Black women—Mary Dennis and Stella Young—had allegedly aided Mr. Long in an escape. On Saturday, August 19, a mob of white people captured Andrew McHenry, Bert Dennis, John Haskins, Mary Dennis, and Stella Young, and lynched them. According to reports, on the same day James Dennis was captured and killed by a “sheriff’s posse.”

As was the case here, and typical of the era, white people sought to maintain white supremacy and dominance by instilling fear in the entire Black community through brutal violence that was often unpredictable and arbitrary. With no reported evidence connecting these men and women to the alleged crime, the white mob’s focus clearly expanded beyond a specific person accused of an offense and instead targeted members of the wider Black community, instilling community-wide fear.

Nearly 1,000 miles away, on the same day, a 21-year-old Black man named Edward Lang was accused of assaulting a young white woman near the town of Rice in Navarro County, Texas. A mob of white people captured Mr. Lang four miles from where the alleged attack took place and handed him over to the sheriff. However, before Mr. Lang could be tried, on that same day, an unmasked and armed mob of 200 white farmers seized Mr. Lang from the jail and hanged him from a telephone pole.

During this era, almost 25% of lynchings involved allegations of inappropriate behavior between a Black man and a white woman that was often characterized as “assault.”

Lynchings and racial terror during this era reinforced racial hierarchy and fostered lawlessness and disregard for constitutional guarantees of equal protection. Despite the tragedy of this violence, hundreds of thousands of Black people fought to defend the U.S. when it was threatened during World War I.

A mob of white people in Chatham County, Georgia, lynched Walter Asbury after he was accused of assaulting a white girl in the community. In an effort to terrorize the Black community, the mob left his body hanging all day with a sign that read: “This is the way we protect our homes.”

On August 17, a young girl reported that she had been assaulted in her home in Pooler, Georgia. When news spread that the alleged attacker was a Black man, white mobs in Pooler began searching the surrounding area for the alleged assailant. Mr. Asbury, who was attending a local dance about a mile from the scene, was located just after midnight and seized by the mob.

The deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society during this time period often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered or alleged, whether evidence supported that suspicion or not. Almost 25% of all lynchings involved allegations of inappropriate behavior between a Black man and a white woman that was characterized as “assault” or “sexual assault.” The mere accusation of sexual impropriety regularly aroused violent mobs and ended in lynching. Allegations against Black people were rarely subject to scrutiny.

Though no evidence linked Mr. Asbury to the crime, a mob of 300 white men from Pooler captured him and took him to an open field. Just after midnight, the mob hanged him next to a railroad track 10 miles west of Savannah and riddled his body with bullets. Newspapers reported that Mr. Asbury asked for time to pray in the moments leading up to his lynching and, right before he was killed, begged that word be sent to his wife.

Mr. Asbury’s body was left hanging by the railroad tracks all day with a sign that read: “This is the way we protect our homes” in an effort to intimidate the entire Black community. The practice of terrorizing members of the Black community following racial violence was common during this period. Southern lynching was not only intended to impose “popular justice” or retaliation for a specific crime. Rather, these lynchings were meant to send a broader message of domination and to instill fear within the entire Black community. Mobs often forced a victim’s body to hang for hours and even prevented families from claiming their loved ones. In this case, more than 24 hours passed before the coroner was permitted to cut down Mr. Asbury’s body.

No one was ever held accountable for the lynching of Walter Asbury. Mr. Asbury was one of at least two victims of racial terror lynchings in Chatham County and one of at least 593 victims in Georgia between 1877 and 1950.

An estimated 1,000 white men and women participated in a Ku Klux Klan initiation ceremony just outside of Warwick, New York.

Newspapers reported that motorists traveling from the city of Warwick to the city of Florida in New York on the evening of August 16 were stopped by guards connected to the Ku Klux Klan rally and asked for a “password” to enter the public area. Beginning at 9 pm, hundreds of white people who had arrived for the initiation gathered in an open field near the highway and burned a cross more than 20 feet tall. The meeting lasted until the early hours of the morning on August 17.

Hundreds of people in the open field dressed in “full regalia” with robes bearing the insignia of the white supremacist organization. The “white hoods and the red crosses embroidered on the breasts of the loose garments could be plainly seen even from a distance of several hundred yards” by eyewitnesses. The leader of the Klansmen reportedly spoke about the organization’s commitment to opposing interracial marriage, as well as their dislike of foreigners.

During this era, white supremacist organizations sought to maintain racial hierarchy and dominance through terror. Organized groups committed to the myth of the inferiority of Black people such as White Citizens’ Councils and the Ku Klux Klan drew in crowds of hundreds, and often thousands. Claiming prominent politicians and other high-ranking members of white society, the Ku Klux Klan mounted campaigns of racial terror violence and used political power to uphold segregation and racial hierarchy.

Although racial terror and codified racial segregation have come to be thought of as uniquely Southern phenomena, the legacy of white supremacy and racial bigotry was a powerful force in the North as well. Inspired by Southern segregationists and white supremacists, there is a clear and undeniable record of pervasive discrimination based on race that spread across America, including the North. The legacy of this history haunts us still.

A mob of unmasked white men in Marengo County, Alabama, lynched Rufus Lesseur, a 24-year-old Black man, and left his body riddled with bullets.

Less than two days earlier, a white woman in Thomaston, Alabama, claimed that a Black man had entered her home and frightened her. After someone claimed that a hat found near the woman’s home belonged to Mr. Lesseur, a mob of white men formed and kidnapped him. The white men transported a terrified Mr. Lesseur into the nearby woods and locked him in a tiny calaboose, or makeshift jail, for more than a day.

Black people carried a heavy presumption of guilt during this era, and many hundreds of Black people across the South were lynched based on false allegations, accusations of non-serious crimes, and even for non-criminal violations of social customs and racial expectations. Such “offenses” could be something as simple as arguing with or insulting a white person or, as in this case, frightening a white woman.

At 3 am on August 16, without an investigation, trial, conviction of any offense, or a sentencing proceeding, a mob of white men broke into the locked shack, seized Mr. Lesseur, dragged him outside, and lynched him, riddling his body with bullets.

Although he was lynched by a mob of unmasked white men in a town with only 300 residents, state officials claimed that no one could be identified, arrested, or prosecuted for his murder. Mr. Lesseur is one of at least four Black victims of racial terror violence in Marengo County, Alabama, between 1877 and 1950.

Today, the makeshift jail where Mr. Lesseur was unlawfully held still stands in Thomaston.

Just after midnight, three firebombs were hurled through the windows of Holy Cross Church of God in Christ, a Black church in Providence, Rhode Island. The church had opened five weeks prior in an all-white part of the Federal Hill neighborhood.

The bombs shattered the church’s glass windows and lit several pews in the Sunday school classroom on fire. The perpetrators of the attack also vandalized a pillar by the church’s main entrance with a racial slur.

The bombing took place amidst a summer of virulent white backlash to the Black community’s efforts to integrate city housing and public schools.

At that time, Providence was one of the most racially segregated cities in the country, with nearly 80% of its Black population residing in South Providence. A 1965 University of Rhode Island study concluded that Providence was “as segregated as many cities of the Deep South.”

In Providence, as in much of the country at the time, many of the leaders of the campaign against segregation were prominent figures in the Black church. This made Black churches a target for white fear, anger, and violence.

Over 100 Black churches were burned, bombed, or vandalized during the civil rights era. While the majority of these racially motivated attacks took place in Southern cities such as Birmingham, where explosives placed by a white man killed four young Black girls at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963, Black churches outside the South were also targeted, in cities including Providence, Philadelphia, and Seattle.

A mob of white citizens gathered at the local jail in Springfield, Illinois, intent on lynching two Black men named George Richardson and Joe James. When the would-be lynch mob learned that the men had been taken from the jail to another city, a violent riot broke out.

Some members of the mob destroyed the business of Henry Loper, a man rumored to have helped transport Mr. Richardson and Mr. James from the jail. Others, convinced the men were still in the jail, attacked police and militia stationed at the facility. The two mob groups then rejoined and descended on homes and businesses in Springfield’s Black neighborhoods, stealing close to $150,000 worth of property and setting fire to whole blocks.

The violence climaxed early the next morning with the lynching of two Black men. After Scott Burton tried to defend himself against the attackers, he was shot four times, dragged through the streets, then hanged and mutilated until the militia interceded. William Donegan, an 84-year-old Black man married to a white woman, was taken from his home and hanged from a tree across the street, where his assailants cut his throat and stabbed him. Mr. Donegan was still alive when the militia arrived at the scene but died the next morning.

Amidst the terror of the riot, which left an estimated seven people dead, hundreds of Black citizens sought National Guard protection at nearby Camp Lincoln. Others fled the city. Police arrested 150 people suspected of participating in the violence, and 117 were indicted. Of the three individuals indicted for murder, one committed suicide and two were acquitted.

On the morning of August 13, 1955, white men shot and killed Lamar Smith, a 63-year-old Black farmer and veteran of World War I, in front of the Lincoln County Courthouse in Brookhaven, Mississippi, while he was encouraging African Americans to vote in a local run-off election.

Mr. Smith, a voting rights advocate affiliated with the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, had been threatened and warned to stop trying to register and organize African American voters in the community. His murder took place on the courthouse lawn in front of dozens of witnesses, including Sheriff Robert E. Case, who permitted one of the alleged assailants to leave the crime scene covered in blood. Days later, that man and two others were arrested in connection with the shooting. All three suspects were white.

In September 1955, a grand jury composed of 20 white men declined to indict the three suspects for murder after witnesses failed to come forward to testify. Following the grand jury’s report, District Attorney E.C. Barlow criticized the lack of witness cooperation and complained about the sheriff’s handling of the case. Despite the district attorney’s public promises to proceed with the investigation, the criminal case against the three suspects was dismissed and no one was held accountable for Lamar Smith’s murder.

The shooting of Lamar Smith was one of several racially motivated attacks in Mississippi in 1955. Others included the May murder of civil rights leader George Lee in Belzoni, the August abduction and murder of Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta, and the near-fatal shooting of Gus Courts in Belzoni in December 1955. Throughout the next decade and beyond, Mississippi would be known as one of the most violent and deadly environments in the fight for equal rights.

In 2019, EJI unveiled a new monument at the Peace and Justice Memorial Center that commemorates 24 men and women who were lynched or killed in racially motivated attacks during the 1950s, including Lamar Smith. Mr. Smith’s grandchildren, pictured below, traveled from Mississippi to attend the monument dedication ceremony.

After a white mob attempted to lynch a Black man and failed in their efforts, armed white residents engaged in widespread racial terrorism that forced Black residents to flee Whitesboro, Texas.

Lynching was a tool of racial terror used to maintain white supremacy and dominance by instilling fear in the entire Black community. It was common during this era of racial terrorism for a white mob’s focus to expand beyond a specific person accused of an offense. Lynch mobs frequently targeted members of a suspect’s family, neighbors, or any and all Black people unfortunate enough to be in the mob’s path, and it was not uncommon for Black people in the vicinity of white mobs to be beaten or killed as collateral violence.

Earlier in the day, a Black man, known as “Brown,” had been arrested after a local white woman reported that she had been criminally assaulted by a Black man. He was taken from jail by a mob of at least 100 white men and boys and hanged from a tree as the mob attempted to violently coerce a confession from him. As he was on the verge of becoming unconscious, a sheriff’s posse cut Mr. Brown down, determined he was still alive, and took him back into custody.

As news spread that they had failed in their attempt to lynch this Black man, the white mob unleashed a reign of terror on the entire Black community in Whitesboro. The mob went from house to house in the town’s Black neighborhood, destroying the homes, beating the Black people inside, and ordering all of them to leave Whitesboro. Black people fled by train that night, with contemporary news sources reporting that “outgoing trains on all roads were filled” with Black people. Hundreds of shots were reportedly fired by the armed mob, but the death toll of the terror remains unknown. Local authorities made no attempt to protect the town’s Black residents.

A few days later, armed white men rounded up the few remaining Black people in town, reported as just 17 people. The mob tied these 17 individuals to trees and whipped them mercilessly, ordering them again to leave town. Contemporary reports noted that after the conclusion of this violence, not a single Black person remained in Whitesboro.

More than 200 members of white supremacist, alt-right, neo-Nazi, and pro-Confederate groups from throughout the country converged on the University of Virginia in Charlottesville for a torch-lit march through central campus shouting slogans like “Blood and soil!” “You will not replace us!” “Jews will not replace us!” and “White lives matter!” The procession was the precursor to a planned “Unite the Right” rally scheduled to take place the next day to protest the Charlottesville City Council’s recent vote to remove a Confederate monument dedicated to Robert E. Lee. As the marchers paraded through the University’s campus, counter-protests quickly emerged and tensions escalated.

The next day, the rally began to form in recently renamed Emancipation Park, where the Lee statue stood. White nationalist rally-goers, many heavily armed, filed into the park amid the outcry of a diverse gathering of counter-protesters. Those opposing the white nationalists included members of anti-fascist groups, Black Lives Matter supporters, local residents, church congregations, and civil rights leaders. In the absence of police intervention, clashes between rally-goers and counter-protesters became more volatile and eventually led law enforcement to declare the rally an unlawful assembly.

As rally-goers and counter-protesters dispersed, sporadic clashes continued. Approximately two hours after the City of Charlottesville declared a local state of emergency, a neo-Nazi named James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car directly into a crowd of counter-protesters, wounding at least 18 people and killing a 32-year-old white woman named Heather Heyer.

The events in Charlottesville, Virginia, sparked national press coverage and debate regarding race, white supremacy, and Confederate iconography.

A white mob seized four Black people from a jail in Clarendon, Arkansas, and lynched them before they could stand trial.

A few weeks prior, a white woman named Erneze Orr allegedly hired Will Sanders, Rilla Weaver, Dennis Ricord, and Manse Castle to kill her husband, John T. Orr. After Mr. Sanders, Ms. Weaver, Mr. Ricord, and Mr. Castle were arrested for this alleged offense, a mob of white community members quickly formed—and on three separate occasions, the mob convened at the jail intent on lynching them. Despite these repeated threats, officers refused to move the group to a safer location as they awaited trial.

On August 10, the white mob stormed the jail a final time. Rather than protecting the people in his custody, the sheriff turned the jail keys over to the mob. Newspapers reported that he had been persuaded to open the jail doors and let the mob enter “by their earnestness.”

Mrs. Orr, the white woman who allegedly orchestrated her husband’s murder, was also being held at the jail. She reportedly poisoned herself shortly before the mob’s arrival. Though contemporary reports note that she was still alive when the mob stormed the jail, the mob left her and took only the four Black people from the jail.

The mob hung Mr. Sanders, Ms. Weaver, Mr. Ricord, and Mr. Castle from the tramway of a nearby sawmill with signs affixed to them that read “This is the penalty for murder and rape.” Their bodies were then left on display for hours to terrorize the entire Black community.

During this era of racial terror, mere suggestions of Black-on-white violence could provoke mob violence and lynching before the judicial system could or would act. The deep racial hostility permeating Southern society often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered, whether or not there was evidence to support the suspicion, and, even in situations like this case, where a white person was believed to be the orchestrator of the violence, accusations lodged against Black people were rarely subject to serious scrutiny. White lynch mobs regularly displayed complete disregard for the legal system, abducting Black people from courts, jails, and out of police custody. Law enforcement officials, charged with protecting those in their custody, often failed to intervene, as was the case here.

Mr. Sanders, Ms. Weaver, Mr. Ricord, and Mr. Castle were four of at least 493 documented lynching victims between 1877 and 1950 in the state of Arkansas.

A white police officer named Darren Wilson shot an unarmed Black teenager named Michael Brown to death in Ferguson, Missouri. According to reports, Officer Wilson stopped Michael on the street in the afternoon to ask him about a robbery at a nearby convenience store. Although the precise details of what happened next remain unclear, many eyewitness accounts suggest that Michael ran from the officer with his hands raised in the air. Officer Wilson then shot Michael six times and claimed that he had feared for his life. Michael’s body was found approximately 150 feet from the officer’s police vehicle. He had graduated from high school just eight days before and was scheduled to begin a vocational training program two days later.

There is a presumption of guilt and dangerousness that has unfairly made people of color, particularly young Black men, targets of police aggression and violence. The shooting and its aftermath sparked weeks of protests in Ferguson and beyond. Demonstrators chanting “hands up, don’t shoot” as a rallying cry against police brutality gathered in the streets, facing officers armed with military-grade equipment. Law enforcement’s heavy-handed response to the protests prompted national discussions about the militarization of inner-city police forces and the ways in which police officers used violence to repress dissent and maintain racially biased social conditions.

Despite nationwide pleas for accountability, no one was punished for Michael Brown’s death. A grand jury ultimately declined to bring criminal charges against Officer Wilson, and the Department of Justice also refused to file federal civil rights charges.

Ahmed Mohamed and his family filed a lawsuit against the city of Irving, Texas, and its school district for an ordeal that had begun nearly a year before. In September 2015, 14-year-old Ahmed, a Sudanese American boy, was arrested at school for showing his teacher a clock he had made at home.

Instead of receiving praise and encouragement, Ahmed was severely punished for his engineering project. The teacher, along with other school officials, later claimed they thought the clock was a bomb, but no one ordered an evacuation of the school or contacted a bomb squad. Instead, standard police officers were called to the school; they arrested Ahmed, took him to the police station for fingerprinting and a mug shot, and subjected him to two hours of interrogation without his parents’ permission. In the end, police arrested him on charges of bringing a hoax bomb to school. Even after those charges were subsequently dropped, school officials suspended Ahmed for three days.

When the incident was reported in the local and national press, Ahmed received an outpouring of support and the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed soon went viral on social media. President Barack Obama, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and thousands of others sent expressions of encouragement, and he was even invited to the White House.

In the meantime, local officials refused to admit that they had handled the situation improperly or that Ahmed’s identity as a brown, Muslim boy caused him to be profiled and criminalized. In November 2015, Ahmed and his family requested damages and a public apology from the City of Irving and its school district for civil rights violations and physical and mental anguish. The city refused to meet those demands. In late 2015—due to ongoing threats and harassment from conspiracy theorists who claimed Ahmed truly was a dangerous terrorist—the Mohamed family moved to Qatar for Ahmed to accept a government-offered educational scholarship.

A federal district court later dismissed the Mohamed family’s lawsuit against the Irving, Texas, School District on the basis of qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that limits remedies for victims of police violence and misconduct.

A white mob used crowbars and hammers to break into the Grant County jail in Marion, Indiana, to lynch three young Black men who had been arrested earlier that afternoon after being accused of murdering a white man and assaulting a white woman. Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, both 19, were severely beaten and lynched, and 16-year-old James Cameron was badly beaten but survived.

That afternoon, word of the charges against these young Black men spread, and a growing mob of angry white residents gathered outside the Grant County jail. Around 9:30 pm, the mob attempted to rush the jail and was repelled by tear gas. An hour later, members of the mob successfully barreled past the sheriff and three deputies, grabbed Mr. Shipp and Mr. Smith from their cells as they prayed, and dragged them into the street. By then, the crowd totaled between 5,000 and 10,000 people. While spectators watched and cheered, the mob beat, tortured, and hanged both men from trees in the courthouse yard, brutally murdering them without the benefit of trial or legal proof of guilt.

As the bodies of Mr. Shipp and Mr. Smith remained suspended above the crowd, members of the mob re-entered the jail and grabbed 16-year-old James Cameron, another Black youth accused of being involved in the crime. The mob beat the teenager severely and was preparing to hang him alongside the others, but when a member of the crowd intervened and said he was innocent, James was released.

The brutalized bodies of Mr. Shipp and Mr. Smith were hanged from trees in the courthouse yard and kept there for hours as a crowd of white men, women, and children grew by the thousands. Public spectacle lynchings, in which large crowds of white people, often numbering in the thousands, gathered to witness and participate in pre-planned heinous killings that featured prolonged torture, mutilation, dismemberment and/or burning of the victim, were common during this time. When the sheriff eventually cut the ropes off the corpses, the crowd rushed forward to take parts of the men’s bodies as “souvenirs” before finally dispersing.

Enraged by the lynching, the NAACP traveled to Marion to investigate and later provided the U.S. attorney general with the names of 27 people believed to have participated. Though the lynching was photographed and spectators were clearly visible, local residents claimed not to recognize anyone pictured. Charges were finally brought against the leaders of the mob, but all-white juries acquitted them despite this overwhelming evidence. In contrast, James Cameron, the Black teenager who survived, was tried for murder, convicted of being an accessory, and served four years in prison. The alleged assault victim, Mary Ball, later testified that she had not been raped.

After his release, James Cameron founded four NAACP chapters in Indiana, authored hundreds of essays on civil rights and a 1982 memoir, and on Juneteenth 1988 opened America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to document the African American Struggle. “I can forgive but I can never forget,” he was quoted as saying. “That’s why I started this museum.” Mr. Cameron was pardoned by the state of Indiana in 1993 and died in 2006.

A photograph of Mr. Shipp’s and Mr. Smith’s battered corpses hanging lifeless from a tree, with white spectators proudly standing below, remains one of the most iconic and infamous photographs of an American lynching. In 1937, an encounter with the photo inspired New York schoolteacher Abel Meeropol to write “Strange Fruit,” a haunting poem about lynching that later became a famous song recorded by Billie Holiday.

Southern Railway, an interstate railroad company based in Washington, D.C., adopted a policy effectively denying dining service to Black passengers on its rail cars.

For years, the Southern Railway policy mandated that trains serve white passengers and Black passengers meals at different times, which often resulted in the denial of meals to Black passengers. In 1942, Southern Railway further entrenched its commitment to segregation and to denying its Black customers service by adopting a policy which reserved 10 of the train’s 11 dining tables exclusively for white passengers at all times. The one remaining table in the dining car that was theoretically open to Black passengers was also available for use by white passengers and was to be given to white passengers upon request. If Black passengers requested service while white passengers were dining, “they should be advised that they will be served just as soon as those compartments are vacated.”

In 1942, Elmer W. Henderson, a Black attorney, civil rights leader, member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practices Commission, and one of the first Black graduates of Georgetown University Law Center, boarded a Southern Railway train, traveling first-class from Washington, D.C., to Atlanta, Georgia. The train’s dining car remained occupied with white passengers for the duration of his journey, and railroad employees denied Mr. Henderson a dining table based on his race. At 9 pm, the train reached Greensboro, North Carolina, and the dining car ceased serving passengers. Neither Mr. Henderson nor any other Black passengers ever had a chance to eat dinner.

Mr. Henderson subsequently filed a complaint with the federal Interstate Commerce Commission, alleging that the railroad’s policy violated the Interstate Commerce Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The ICC denied relief, finding that Mr. Henderson “had sustained no compensable damage as a result of the disadvantage caused him” by Southern Railway. It would take five years for the Supreme Court to reexamine Mr. Henderson’s case. While ruling in Henderson v. United States that Southern Railway’s policies violated the Interstate Commerce Act, the Court avoided declaring racial segregation unconstitutional, paving the way for that practice to continue for years.

A white man named Wade Michael Page opened fire on worshippers at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing six people and seriously injuring several others before taking his own life. Between 30 and 35 people, including several children, were inside the temple that morning as community members prepared for their usual Sunday services.

Though police investigating the attack initially declined to categorize the shooting as a hate crime, Mr. Page had openly expressed white supremacist beliefs in the years leading up to the attack. The investigation later revealed images of Mr. Page wearing a “white power” shirt and posing in front of Nazi flags, which he had posted to public social media pages.

The six people killed in the attack were Sita Singh, Ranjit Singh, Satwant Singh Kaleka, Prakash Singh, Suveg Singh Khattra, and Paramjit Kaur Saini. Baba Punjab Singh, a priest at the temple, initially survived a gunshot wound to the head that left him paralyzed; he died from his injuries in 2020.

After 9/11, crimes against South Asian, Muslim, and Arab Americans became more common. Sikh men in particular, who often wear turbans, increasingly became victims of racial profiling and racialized attacks. In the year leading up to the Oak Creek shooting, two Sikh men in a Sacramento suburb were killed in a hate attack; a Sikh temple in Michigan was vandalized; and a New York hate crime left one Sikh man severely beaten.

A month after the August 5 shooting, Harpreet Singh Saini, whose mother Paramjit Kaur Saini was killed in the attack, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee to urge the Department of Justice to begin federally tracking hate crimes against Sikh, Arab, and Hindu people.

“I came here today to ask the government to give my mother the dignity of being a statistic,” Mr. Saini said. “The FBI does not track hate crimes against Sikhs. My mother and those shot that day will not even count on a federal form. We cannot solve a problem we refuse to recognize.”

The FBI began formally tracking hate crimes against Sikh, Arab, and Hindu Americans in 2015.

Following several weeks of national news coverage and an intensive search by federal authorities, the bodies of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman were found in Longdale, Mississippi. The three men, who went missing after being released from a local Mississippi jail, had been shot to death and buried in a shallow grave.

Earlier that year, Michael Schwerner had traveled to Mississippi to organize Black citizens to vote. A white New Yorker working with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Mr. Schwerner worked extensively with a Black CORE member from Meridian, Mississippi, named James Chaney. The activist pair led an effort to register Black voters and helped Mt. Zion Methodist Church, a Black church in Longdale, create an organizing center. These developments angered local members of the Ku Klux Klan; on June 16, while Mr. Schwerner and Mr. Chaney were away, Klansmen torched the church and assaulted its members.

On June 21, Mr. Schwerner, Mr. Chaney, and a new white CORE member named Andrew Goodman investigated the church burning and then headed for Meridian, Mississippi. Knowing that they were in constant danger of attack, Schwerner told colleagues in Meridian to search for them if they did not arrive by 4 pm. While passing through the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, the three men were stopped by Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price.

A member of the Ku Klux Klan, Mr. Price had been monitoring the activities of the civil rights workers. He arrested the men on traffic charges and held them in jail for about seven hours before releasing them on bail. Mr. Price escorted Mr. Schwerner, Mr. Chaney, and Mr. Goodman out of town but soon re-arrested the men and held them until other Klansmen could join. They were not seen alive again.

When the three activists did not arrive in Meridian, they were reported missing and soon became the subjects of a highly publicized FBI search and investigation. As the days turned into weeks, some Mississippi officials and white segregationists accused civil rights leaders of fabricating the workers’ disappearance to gain support for their cause. Once the three men’s bodies were discovered on August 4, however, no one could deny their fates.

While their disappearance resulted in national news stories, Michael Schwerner’s wife and fellow CORE worker, Rita Schwerner, admonished reporters in 1964: “The slaying of a Negro in Mississippi is not news. It is only because my husband and Andrew Goodman were white that the national alarm has been sounded.” Indeed, investigators searching Mississippi’s woods, swamps, and rivers that summer found the remains of at least two more Black men: Henry Dee and Charles Moore, college students who were kidnapped, beaten and murdered in May 1964.

Several days of racial violence targeting Black communities in Chicago, Illinois, came to an end after intervention by the National Guard. After five days of gunfire, beatings, and burnings, 23 African Americans and 15 white people had been killed, 537 people injured, and 1,000 African American families left homeless.

During the Great Migration, Chicago was a popular destination for many Black people leaving the South in search of economic opportunity and a refuge from racial terror lynching. From 1910 to 1920, the city’s Black population swelled from 44,000 to 109,000 people. The new arrivals joined thousands of white immigrants also relocating to Chicago in search of work. Many Black newcomers settled on Chicago’s South Side, in neighborhoods adjacent to communities of European immigrants, close to plentiful industrial jobs.

Although African American people had fled the Southern brand of racial violence, once in Chicago they still faced racial animosity and discrimination that created challenging living conditions like overcrowded housing, inequality at work, police brutality, and segregation by custom rather than law.

In the second decade of the 20th century, segregation in Chicago was not as legally regulated as in Southern cities, but unwritten rules restricted Black people from many neighborhoods, workplaces, and “public” areas—including beaches. On July 27, 1919, a Black youth named Eugene Williams drowned at a Chicago beach after a white man struck him with a rock for drifting to the “white” side of Lake Michigan. When police refused to arrest the man who had thrown the rock, Black witnesses protested; white mobs responded with widespread violence that lasted five days.

Over that terrifying period, white mobs attacked Black people on sight, set fire to more than 30 properties on Chicago’s South Side, and even attempted to attack Provident Hospital—which served mostly Black patients. Six thousand National Guard troops were called in to quell the unrest, and many Black people left Chicago after the terrifying experience.

Though state officials announced a plan to investigate and punish all parties responsible for violence and destruction of property during the unrest, many more Black people were arrested than white. The subsequent grand jury proceedings resulted in the indictment of primarily Black defendants. Later testifying before a commission investigating the roots of the Chicago violence, the Cook County district attorney admitted this was due to bias in his department of white officers.

“There is no doubt that a great many police officers were grossly unfair in making arrests,” he said in 1922. “They shut their eyes to offenses committed by white men while they were very vigorous in getting all the colored men they could get.”

North Carolina approved a constitutional amendment that required residents to pass a literacy test in order to register to vote. Under the provision, illiterate registrants with a relative who had voted in an election prior to the year 1863 were exempt from the requirement.

These provisions effectively disenfranchised most of the state’s African American voting population. At the same time, the rules preserved the voting rights of most of the state’s poor and uneducated white residents—who were much more likely to have a relative eligible to vote in 1863, before the abolition of slavery and passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. To the drafters and supporters of the amendment, this outcome was by design.

In the days and months leading up to the special election to vote on the literacy test proposal, campaign events throughout the state encouraged white citizens to cast their votes in favor of the policy that would achieve Black disenfranchisement. On the eve of the election, judicial candidate and former Confederate officer William A. Guthrie proclaimed to a crowd of over 12,000:

“The people of the east and west are coming together. The amendment will pass and the negro curbed in every part of the state. Good government will be restored everywhere. Then our ladies can walk the streets of our towns in safety, day or night. White women will not be afraid to go about alone in the country. We will teach the colored race that our people must be respected. We have restrained and conquered other races. They obeyed our demands or were exterminated with the sword. We are at a crisis. Let us rise to the occasion. Come together!”

The campaign was also marked by widespread attempts to suppress African Americans’ participation in the election. “No negro must vote. All white men must vote,” insisted one prominent politician. “We’ll try to bring this about by law. If that don’t go—well, we can try another tack. The white man must and will rule in North Carolina, no matter what methods are necessary to give him authority.”

The effect of racially discriminatory voting laws in North Carolina and throughout the South would persist for generations, effectively disenfranchising Black people throughout the region with little federal intervention until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

White employees of the Philadelphia Transit Company (PTC) launched a strike to protest the company’s decision to promote eight Black workers to the position of trolley driver—a job previously reserved for white men. The Black men were promoted after President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Orders 8802 and 9436, which prohibited companies with government contracts from discriminating on the basis of race or religion and required companies to include a nondiscrimination clause in their contracts.

As the U.S. prepared to enter World War II in the 1940s, Philadelphia quickly became one of the country’s largest war production sources. As many as 600,000 workers relied on the PTC to get to their workplaces, including many factories. The strike threatened the entire city’s ability to function and severely hampered critical wartime production.

White PTC employees James McMenamin, James Dixon, Frank Thompson, and Frank Carney led the strike and threatened to maintain the protest until the Black workers were demoted. The strike grew to include over 6,000 workers, prevented nearly two million people from traveling, and cost businesses almost $1 million per day.

On the strike’s third day, President Roosevelt authorized the War Department to take control of the PTC. Two days later, 5,000 U.S. Army troops moved into Philadelphia to prevent uprisings and protect PTC employees who crossed the picket line. Despite the military presence, the confrontation resulted in at least 13 acts of racial violence, including several non-fatal shootings.

After more than a week, the strike ended when PTC employees facing threats of termination, loss of draft deferments, and ineligibility for unemployment benefits chose to return to work without achieving their goal of blocking Black workers’ opportunity for advancement. By September 1944, the PTC’s first Black trolley drivers were on duty.

Almost a decade after Brown v. Board of Education prohibited racial segregation in public schools, the University of North Alabama, known at the time as Florence State College, denied admission to Wendell Gunn, a Black applicant, based solely on his race. The school’s rejection letter stated explicitly, “Neither the Alabama Legislature nor the State Board of Education ha[s] authorized the college to accept Negroes.”

UNA officials later admitted that it was evident from Mr. Gunn’s application that he had a “very good academic record.” At the time, Mr. Gunn was a chemistry major at Tennessee Agricultural & State Normal School, a historically Black college that later became Tennessee State University. Despite the fact that Mr. Gunn lived just 10 miles from UNA, he had been forced to attend college out-of-state because Alabama insisted on keeping its schools all-white.

Three weeks after being denied admission, Mr. Gunn filed suit in federal court. A U.S. District Judge ordered UNA to admit Mr. Gunn for the fall term, which began in September.

In response to the court order, white citizens in Alabama criticized UNA for discriminating in such a blatant, written form, rather than discriminating in the covert methods typically used. White citizens complained that the school’s actions “eliminated any chance of stalling tactics by school officials” and undermined “pieces of legislation carefully written to slow school integration.” Others predicted that Governor George Wallace would block Mr. Gunn’s admission by physical force, in defiance of the court order, as he attempted to do in June, when Black students Vivian Malone and James Hood integrated the University of Alabama. Due to the level of hostility in the white community and the potential for violence, UNA held a separate, after-hours enrollment session for Mr. Gunn, after white students left campus for the day on September 11.

Historically segregated public colleges in Alabama, like the University of North Alabama, which had been an all-white state-funded institution since 1830, declined to admit a single Black student in the nine years following Brown. Violent white resistance to integration necessitated federal intervention to protect Black students on multiple occasions in Alabama, but Alabama continued to defy federal integration orders, to deny admission to Black applicants, and to enforce discriminatory state laws that conflicted with the U.S. Constitution.

Like most other cities in the South, New Orleans, Louisiana, experienced social turmoil following the Civil War as Black citizens gained greater political and economic standing in a state that had not been willing to grant it voluntarily. The Louisiana Constitutional Convention of 1864 had granted Black people some citizenship rights but denied them the right to vote. In 1865, Louisiana joined other Southern states in enacting Black Codes to disenfranchise Black people, greatly angering Radical Republicans who had supported the Union during the Civil War and promoted full citizenship rights for Black people.

On July 30, 1866, Radical Republicans in the state reconvened the Louisiana Constitutional Convention in an attempt to seize control of the state government. The new convention had many Black supporters, including 200 Union Army veterans who had attended speeches by abolitionists and Radical Republicans a few days earlier. The speakers encouraged Black people to march upon the grounds of the Mechanics Institute in New Orleans to show solidarity with the convention.

After recessing at mid-day on July 30, convention members leaving the meeting were greeted by Black marchers. Across the street from the Mechanics Institute, a group of armed white men gathered to confront both marchers and convention delegates. The white mob, which included many Confederate war veterans, was convinced that the Radical Republicans sought to disenfranchise white voters while enfranchising Black voters. The mob attacked marchers and their political allies, chasing them into the Mechanics Institute. In the ensuing violence, often referred to as the New Orleans Massacre, 35 Black marchers and three white Radical Republicans were killed and about 100 Black marchers were injured.

Beginning on July 29, 1910, a white mob of hundreds massacred Black residents in and around Slocum, a majority-Black community near Palestine, Texas. According to some estimates, the mob killed as many as 200 Black people in the span of just two days. Hundreds more fled the area in the aftermath of the massacre, forced to leave their homes, farms, and businesses behind.

Local white citizens formed the mob after a series of minor events they perceived to have violated racial hierarchy, including a Black worker being appointed to a position of authority on a nearby road construction project.

Armed members of the mob rode through Slocum and the surrounding area on horseback, firing at any and all Black citizens they encountered. They chased those fleeing into forests and marshes, shooting many in the back as they ran.

Most newspapers downplayed the extent of the violence and claimed that the white mobs only shot at Black citizens after being threatened. However, contemporaneous and subsequent investigations found that the massacre was wholly unprovoked. A local sheriff commented to the New York Times that white men “were going about killing Negroes as fast as they could find them.” He continued, “These Negroes have done no wrong that I can discover … They hunted the Negroes down like sheep.”

While at least 11 members of the mob were arrested and seven were indicted, no one was ever prosecuted or convicted for their role in the massacre.

Two weeks after the massacre, a group of Black ministers called on President William Howard Taft to intervene in Texas to “suppress lynching, murder and other forms of lawlessness” and “make human life more valuable and law more universally respected.” President Taft declined to take action, characterizing the widespread racial violence as a state matter rather than a federal one.

The Slocum Massacre was not officially acknowledged in Texas by state or local officials until 2011—100 years after it took place. In 2016, descendants of victims of the massacre unveiled a historical marker recognizing the Slocum Massacre and commemorating those who were killed.

The chief of police in Louisville, Kentucky, announced the arrest of at least three people for interracial relations, or miscegenation. He also announced plans to open an investigation into the practice, which would “spare no effort” to prevent people from forming or maintaining interracial romantic relationships in Louisville.

Earlier that day, Louisville police made at least three arrests involving allegations of interracial romance. Authorities first arrested Harry Jenkins, a 34-year-old Black man, and Alice Shumaker, a 30-year-old woman who self-identified as Black but whom police believed to be white. Louisville law enforcement jailed both Mr. Jenkins and Ms. Shumaker on disorderly conduct charges, though they stood accused of little more than being found under the same roof together at the same time. Unwilling to accept Ms. Shumaker’s own racial self-identification, the local jailor forced her to submit to a blood test “to determine whether or not” she was Black.

The same white Louisville officers who arrested Mr. Jenkins and Ms. Shumaker also detained George Eaton, a 16-year-old Black boy. After subjecting George to a search, the officers found photographs of three teenaged white girls in his pocket. George claimed that the white girls had given him these photographs and refused to identify them. The officers arrested George, while the chief of police directed other high-ranking officials in his department to “make a round of photo galleries” in the city of Louisville to uncover the white girls’ identities.

Kentucky criminalized interracial marriages from the year it was admitted into the Union in 1792. At the time that Mr. Jenkins, Ms. Shumaker, and George were arrested, state law made it illegal for a Black person—defined by the Kentucky Supreme Court as a person with “one–fourth part or more of Negro blood”—to marry or live with a white person. Those found in violation of the law faced a fine of up to $5,000 and up to a year in jail. Black people charged with miscegenation faced dehumanizing treatment by law enforcement, and investigations and court proceedings were often humiliating and intrusive. Despite the fact that the Supreme Court invalidated all laws criminalizing interracial marriage in 1967, Kentucky did not repeal its anti-miscegenation statute until 1974.

During the Jim Crow era, one of the racial boundaries white people protected most fiercely was the prohibition on romantic contact between Black men and white women. Fear of intimate contact between Black men and white women was fueled by the pervasive myth that Black men were violent, sexually aggressive, and always in pursuit of white womanhood. In Kentucky and other states, these fears led to the aggressive enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws, the degradation of interracial couples, and the destruction of multiracial families.

A multi-day uprising of violent clashes between police and Black residents in Detroit ended. The conflict, which began on July 23, was the largest of the year and foreshadowed the violent unrest in cities across the nation the following year. At the conclusion of this conflict, dozens of people had been killed by law enforcement.

Beginning during World War I and continuing through the end of the 1960s, racial terror lynchings in the South fueled a massive exodus of African Americans from Southern states into urban ghettos in the North and West. In a brutal environment of racial subordination and terror, close to six million Black Americans fled the South’s racial caste system between 1910 and 1970. In 1910, Detroit’s population was 1.2% Black; by 1970, that number had risen to 43.7%.

After several years of postwar migration had increased Black populations in Northern cities, pervasive discrimination and segregation in employment, education, and housing resulted in the continuing exclusion of Black people from the benefits of economic progress. Police brutality was rampant in Black communities, and law enforcement was rarely, if ever, held accountable. In the summer of 1967, these issues culminated in a series of uprisings across several major Northern cities.

The Detroit rebellion began after police raided an after-hours club. Looting and fires broke out, and multiple law enforcement agencies were deployed. On July 26, police and National Guardsmen raided the Algiers motel looking for an alleged sniper. They found not a single gun on the premises, but instead tortured the Black men and white women they found there together and killed three Black teenagers, shooting two of them with shotguns at point-blank range. Despite two officers’ confessions, no one was ever convicted for their deaths. By the rebellion’s end, 33 African American and 10 white people had been killed, most at the hands of law enforcement.

Urban rebellions were widely dismissed as senseless “riots,” but many people today recount them as uprisings against oppressive and discriminatory practices that subjected Black residents to violence and inequality. “You see, you can only hold a person down for so long. After a while, they’re going to get tired. And that’s what happened,” explained Frank Thomas, who was 23 years old during the Detroit rebellion. “Basically, we wanted to be a part of the city of Detroit instead of being second-class citizens.”

On July 26, 1949, a mob of hundreds of white men tracked down and shot Ernest Thomas, a 26-year-old Black man, over 400 times while he was asleep under a tree in Madison County, Florida. Two days after being killed by a mob, a coroner’s jury ruled that Mr. Thomas’s death was “justifiable homicide.”

Ernest Thomas was one of the so-called Groveland Four, three young Black men and one 16-year-old Black boy, who in 1949 were falsely accused of raping 17-year-old Norma Padgett and assaulting her husband in Groveland, Florida. The deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society during this time period often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered or alleged, whether evidence supported that suspicion or not. Almost 25% of all lynchings involved allegations of inappropriate behavior between a Black man and a white woman that was characterized as “assault” or “sexual assault.” The mere accusation of sexual impropriety regularly aroused violent mobs and ended in lynching. Allegations against Black people were rarely subject to scrutiny.

On July 16, 1949, two young Black men, Samuel Shepherd, and Walter Irvin, and one 16-year-old Black boy, Charles Greenlee, were captured in a manhunt on charges of assaulting Ms. Padgett. Within hours of the accusations, mobs of white residents burned the homes and property of Black families in Groveland. They were taken to Lake County Jail, where they were tortured by the police. The next day, a mob of at least a hundred white men formed outside of the jail and demanded that the three men be released to them. Unable to access their intended targets, the heavily armed white mob went on a rampage of racial terror in Groveland’s Black neighborhoods, where they shot at residents and set fire to their homes. By the hundreds, the Black community fled Groveland, fearing for their lives. Mr. Thomas had evaded capture by the mob and fled too. The mob pursued him for 10 days before they caught him and shot him to death while he was sleeping.

Despite being beaten into giving false confessions, and the State failing to present crucial evidence, such as a medical examination of Norma Padgett, the three survivors of this violence remained incarcerated and were wrongly convicted by an all-white jury. Charles Greenlee was sentenced to life in prison, while Mr. Irvin and Mr. Shepherd, both 22, were sentenced to death.

In 1951, after the work of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Mr. Irvin’s and Mr. Shepherd’s convictions, stating they were entitled to a new trial. Before their trials could take place, Sheriff McCall shot Mr. Shepherd and Mr. Irvin while they were handcuffed together in his custody and being transferred from prison. Mr. Shepherd died, but Mr. Irvin, who was shot and was denied an ambulance because he was Black, survived. Mr. Irvin was then convicted again by an all-white jury in his retrial, and was sentenced to death. Nearing his execution date, Mr. Irvin received a stay, before finally having his sentence commuted and being released from prison in 1968. He died a year later. Charles Greenlee remained on a life sentence and was released on parole in 1962. He died on April 18, 2012.

No charges were ever filed against any of the white law enforcement officers or members of the mob who were active participants in this racial terror. Sheriff McCall, who was infamous for using violence to enforce segregation and terrorize the Black community, claimed that he acted in self-defense in shooting Mr. Irvin and Mr. Shepherd even though they were handcuffed. Not only was he cleared of all charges, but he was re-elected as sheriff on five subsequent occasions.

All four of these men were posthumously pardoned by the Governor of Florida in 2019. Mr. Thomas was one of at least 14 documented racial terror lynchings in Madison County, Florida. Learn more about how over 6,500 Black women, men, and children were victims of racial terror lynching in the U.S. between 1865-1950.

A white mob lynched two Black couples near Moore’s Ford Bridge in Walton County, Georgia, in what has been called “the last mass lynching in America.” The couples killed were George W. and Mae Murray Dorsey and Dorothy and Roger Malcolm. Mrs. Malcolm was seven months pregnant. Mr. Dorsey, a World War II veteran who had served in the Pacific for five years, had been home for only nine months.

On July 11, Roger Malcom was arrested after allegedly stabbing a white farmer named Barnette Hester during a fight. Two weeks later, J. Loy Harrison, the white landowner for whom the Malcoms and the Dorseys sharecropped, drove Mrs. Malcom and the Dorseys to the jail to post a $600 bond. On their way back to the farm, the car was stopped by a mob of 30 armed, unmasked white men who seized Mr. Malcom and Mr. Dorsey and tied them to a large oak tree. Mrs. Malcom recognized members of the mob, and when she called on them by name to spare her husband, the mob seized her and Mrs. Dorsey. Mr. Harrison watched as the white men shot all four people 60 times at close range. He later claimed he could not identify any members of the mob.

The Moore’s Ford Bridge lynchings drew national attention, leading President Harry Truman to order a federal investigation and offer $12,500 for information leading to a conviction. A grand jury returned no indictments, and the perpetrators were never held accountable. The FBI recently reopened its investigation into the lynching, only to encounter continued silence and obstruction at the highest levels. In response to charges that he was withholding information, Walton County Superior Court Judge Marvin Sorrells, whose father worked for Walton County law enforcement in 1946, vowed that “until the last person of my daddy’s generation dies, no one will talk.”

In recent years, the tragic lynching at the Moore’s Ford Bridge has inspired varied activism including an annual memorial march and legal efforts to gain access to sealed grand jury transcripts—all important ways of confronting the truth of this deadly hate and terror. In 2020, a federal court ruled that the grand jury records must remain sealed.

The Washington Star newspaper in Washington, D.C., published an article exposing details of an ongoing syphilis experiment that withheld diagnosis information and treatment from Black men in Alabama in order to study the effects of the disease. The article incited public outrage over the unethical treatment of participants, leading to the experiment’s termination later that year.

Forty years earlier, in 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) partnered with the Tuskegee Institute on a study to examine the effects of untreated syphilis in African American men in Macon County, Alabama. PHS workers persuaded 600 African American men—399 with syphilis, and 201 without the disease—to participate in the experiment. They were not given full details about the scope of the study and were just told they would be receiving treatment for “bad blood”—a vague term with many meanings in the rural, Southern community.

Nearly all of the men studied were poorly educated, impoverished sharecroppers. The study took advantage of their poverty, promising that their participation would be compensated with burial stipends, hot meals, and free medical exams. Those with syphilis were not told they were infected and did not receive treatment, even after Penicillin was discovered to be an effective cure for the disease in the 1940s. Their access to treatment outside of the study was also thwarted, as local health workers not affiliated with the project were prevented from caring for syphilis-infected individuals participating in the experiment.

Over the study’s 40-year span, 128 participants died of syphilis or syphilis-related complications. One year after the Washington Star broke the story, the NAACP represented survivors in a class action lawsuit. In 1974, the federal government settled for $10 million and agreed to provide survivors and their infected family members with free medical services. It would take another 23 years, however, for the government to issue a formal apology for its actions.

Governor Frank M. Dixon of Alabama refused to sign a contract that would help produce 1.7 million yards of cloth to assist the U.S. in World War II efforts, fearing that the nondiscrimination clause in the contract could require integration and choosing instead to uphold segregated workforces as a “basic necessity.”

The U.S.’s 1941 involvement in World War II spurred a reliance on government agencies to help finance and increase production of defense supplies. The Defense Supplies Corporation was established to help finance critical wartime supplies. When a non-discrimination clause was introduced into a contract with the Defense Supplies Corporation mandating that “the seller, in performing the work required by this contract, shall not discriminate against any worker because of race, creed, color or national origin,” white politicians throughout the South launched a massive campaign to resist the erosion of segregated working conditions—even if it meant hindering U.S. defense efforts.

Relying primarily on the labor of incarcerated people at Alabama cotton mills, the Defense Supplies Corporation’s contract with Alabama was meant to produce 1.7 million yards of cloth. However, on July 23, 1942, in a letter to the New York agent of the corporation, Governor Dixon explained his refusal to sign this contract, arguing that “demand[s] that Negroes be put in positions of responsibility” at cotton mills in Alabama were unacceptable.

Instead, Governor Dixon praised Jim Crow practices throughout the state of Alabama “under which the white and Negro races have lived in peace together in the South since Reconstruction.” In aligning himself with other Southern white politicians, Governor Dixon attested that the “the present emergency [World War II] should not be used as a pretext to bring about the abolition of the color lines in the South.” So fearful of the “intermingling” of Black and white workers, Governor Dixon explicitly praised “white supremacy,” and stated that “he will not permit the employees of the state to be placed in a position where they must abandon the principle of segregation.”

Governor Dixon was not alone in his decision to maintain segregation over assisting the U.S. in defense production. Earlier that week, an attorney named Horace Wilkerson in Birmingham made a public speech calling upon white people in Alabama to join in resisting integration under any circumstance. In stating that “a herculean effort is being made to break down and destroy segregation,” Wilkerson advocated for the establishment of a “league to maintain white supremacy.” Throughout the summer and fall of 1942, thousands of white businessmen and workers supported the governor’s decision to uphold segregation instead of signing the contract that would assist World War II efforts. Forty-two newspaper editorials were published in support of Governor Dixon’s decision. Though pressure for a skilled labor force eventually compelled Governor Dixon to rescind his refusal and permit the training and employment of Black people in defense industries in Alabama by the fall of 1942, he did so only with the understanding and agreement that Black workers must be segregated from white workers.

Two years later, when an executive order ended segregation at Maxwell Field in Montgomery, Alabama, former Governor Dixon wrote to the current governor, Chauncey Sparks: “It is heartbreaking thing for those of us in the South who realize what the destruction of segregation would mean … to have all our plans wrecked by the type of very dangerous thinking which produced this order.” Urging Governor Sparks to continue to stand against integration for “our people,” Dixon remained committed to maintaining white supremacy even after his term as governor.

On the morning of July 22, 1899, a white mob abducted Frank Embree from officers transporting him to stand trial and lynched him in front of a crowd of over 1,000 onlookers in Fayette, Missouri.

About one month earlier, Frank Embree had been arrested and accused of assaulting a white girl. Though his trial was scheduled for July 22, the town’s residents grew impatient and, rather than allow Mr. Embree to stand trial, took matters into their own hands by lynching Mr. Embree.

According to newspaper accounts, the mob attacked officers transporting Mr. Embree, seized him, loaded him into a wagon, and drove him to the site of the alleged assault. Once there, Mr. Embree’s captors immediately tried to extract a confession by stripping him naked and whipping him in front of the assembled crowd, but he steadfastly maintained his innocence despite this abuse. After withstanding more than 100 lashes to his body, Mr. Embree began screaming and told the men that he would confess. Rather than plead for his life, Mr. Embree begged his attackers to stop the torture and kill him swiftly. Covered in blood from the whipping, with no courtroom or legal system in sight, Mr. Embree offered a confession to the waiting lynch mob and was immediately hanged from a tree.

Black people accused of crimes during this era were regularly subjected to beatings, torture, and threats of lynching in efforts to obtain a confession, and the results of those coercive attacks were later used to “justify” the lynchings that followed. In fact, without fair investigation or trial, the confession of a lynching victim was more reliable evidence of fear than guilt.

Though published photographs of Mr. Embree’s lynching clearly depict the faces of many of his assailants, no one was ever arrested or tried for his death.

35 Black men at Oakley Farm, a segregated prison camp in Mississippi, burned to death when the neglected dormitory they were locked into at night caught fire.

Each night, the men who were forced to labor as convicts at Oakley Farm were locked into the second floor of an all-wooden building, where they slept on the floor together. The second floor had metal bars on each window and the building had only one exit—through a single door on the first floor, where the prison stored hay, molasses, and other flammable materials. The dormitory was referred to as an “antiquated convict cage,” and as one report later noted, “everything was in the fire’s favor.”

Shortly before midnight, two watchmen patrolling the prison noticed flames coming out of the windows of the first floor of one of the prison dormitories. Because the prison did not have any fire extinguishing gear, the watchmen simply stood by as the fire grew, failing to take any measures to try to save the individuals locked inside. As flames quickly engulfed the dormitory, the men imprisoned upstairs began shouting for help. With bars on all the windows and the singular exit blocked by the fire, they were left with no way out, and all 35 of the men in the dormitory burned to death.

After the Civil War, the abolition of slavery dealt a severe economic blow to Southern states whose agricultural economies had been built on the backs of unpaid Black people who had been held in bondage for generations. Mississippi, among other states, took advantage of the loophole included in the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime,” to create the system of convict leasing.

Through convict leasing, Southern states profited off of the labor of incarcerated people, who were subjected to brutal physical work each day and horrific living conditions—like those at Oakley Farm—that proved deadly for many. Black Codes, discriminatory laws passed by Southern states to criminalize Black people for “offenses” like loitering, vagrancy, or not carrying proof of employment, ensured that the majority of those imprisoned, leased, and forced to work at prison camps were Black people.

Today, the Oakley Youth Development Center, a juvenile correctional facility, operates on the grounds where the segregated Oakley Farm used to be.

In July 2015, the North Carolina legislature passed a law requiring legislative approval to change or remove monuments erected to honor “an event, person, or military service that is part of North Carolina’s history.”

Floor debate before the legislative vote clearly established that the bill was written as a response to efforts to remove Confederate flags and memorials in other states after a white supremacist shot and killed nine Black men and women in a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2015. The removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol grounds weeks after the shooting was welcomed by many but also sparked criticism and backlash from those who insisted it was a representation of heritage and history rather than racism and pro-slavery ideology.

“The whole purpose of the bill, as I see it, is to keep the flames of passion from overriding common sense,” said North Carolina Representative Michael Speciale. On July 20, 2015, the State House passed the bill. Days later, on July 23, Governor Pat McCrory signed it into law, citing his “commitment to ensuring that our past, present and future state monuments tell the complete story of North Carolina.”

According to a study by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the state has more monuments to the Confederacy than to any other subject, and more than half of the state’s counties have at least one Confederate memorial.

Rumors began circulating among white residents of Washington, D.C., that a Black man had been accused of attempting to sexually assault a white woman. When news spread that police had released a Black suspect from custody, white men across the city began planning a violent rampage against the Black community.

This incident, the latest in several weeks of sensationalized, rumor-mill allegations of sexual offenses by Black men against white women, lit a powder keg. During this era, any action by a Black man that could be interpreted as seeking or desiring contact with a white woman could spark deadly violence. Accusations of “assault” were often based on merely looking at or accidentally bumping into a white woman, smiling, winking, getting too close, or even being disagreeable. The mere accusation of sexual impropriety, even without evidence or facts, often aroused a mob and resulted in lynching before the judicial system could or would act.

In the summer of 1919, which later became known as “Red Summer,” major cities across the U.S. were sites of racialized attacks on Black communities. These conflicts were often set off by white lynch mobs clashing with Black World War I veterans standing up to defend their communities.

On the night of July 19, a mob of white men moved through a residential neighborhood near Pennsylvania Avenue NW, gathering weapons and more members as they traveled. The mob encountered a Black man named Charles Ralls near Ninth and D streets in Southwest D.C. and beat him severely. The mob beat its second victim, 55-year-old George Montgomery, badly enough to fracture his skull. Growing groups of white men, including civilians and military service members, spread out and continued their violent campaign deeper into the Black community for several days.

At the time, Washington, D.C.’s Black community was relatively prosperous and included many members of the military. As Black citizens realized the police were not going to protect them from the attacking mob, many took up arms in their own defense. By the third day of the conflict, armed Black groups were confronting white mobs in shootouts and street fights. On the fourth day, federal troops were deployed to quell the violence. The conflict left nine people dead, 30 severely wounded, and 150 beaten.

In an attempt to undermine the local bus boycott by the Black community against seating segregation and unequal employment, the City Commission in Tallahassee, Florida, ordered a police crackdown on drivers who had volunteered to carpool with Black residents boycotting local buses.

Despite the fact that the riders were not charged regular fares, the city announced it would start arresting Black carpool drivers because they would now be violating the law by acting as public carriers without a license. The new ruling, passed by City Attorney James Messer, was designed to force Black residents to end their boycott and undermine civil rights activism.

The boycott began after two Black students, Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson, were arrested and charged with “inciting a riot” after they sat in the only two available seats on the bus, which happened to be in the “whites-only” section. They were told they would either have to stand or leave without reimbursement for their tickets. The women refused to leave the bus, and the police were called and arrested them. During the subsequent boycott, the Black community in Tallahassee used carpools to allow people to get to work and run errands without having to use public transportation. The bus boycott, which began May 28, was so successful that by July 1 the city had suspended its bus services because 70% of the usual bus riders were Black.

Despite the threat of police intimidation, arrests, and constant harassment from white residents in Tallahassee, the Black community’s activism and the boycott continued for months. Twenty-one people, including the Reverend C. K. Steele, a Black man and the head of the Inter-Civic Council, were arrested for their activism, resulting in about $11,000 in legal fees (the equivalent of roughly $105,000 today). Local white-owned newspapers, like the Tallahassee Democrat, argued that the arrests were justified.

In December 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that similar segregation on city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, was unconstitutional. Despite the Court’s ruling that such practices were unconstitutional, the Tallahassee City Commission instituted a rule making all seats on the bus “by driver assignment only,” meaning that segregation on the city’s buses continued for many more months.

27-year-old Irene Morgan was traveling by bus from Virginia to Baltimore, Maryland, when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger.

Ms. Morgan, a Black woman, purchased a Greyhound ticket that day in Gloucester, Virginia, boarded the bus, and took a seat in the assigned “Black section.” About 30 minutes after the bus departed, however, Ms. Morgan and the passenger sitting beside her were asked to give up their seats for a white couple who had boarded and found no available seats in the “white section.” When Ms. Morgan refused and advised the passenger beside her to do the same, the bus driver drove to the local jail in Middlesex County, where a deputy sheriff boarded the bus and presented Ms. Morgan with a warrant for her arrest.

Under Virginia law at that time, racial segregation was mandatory on state-sponsored transportation. Ms. Morgan insisted that her presence on an interstate bus meant that Virginia law did not apply, and she refused to be removed from her seat. Police physically dragged the young Black woman from the bus, held her in the Saluda City Jail, and convicted her of violating the state segregation law.

Ms. Morgan appealed her conviction and, in March 1946, civil rights lawyers Thurgood Marshall and William H. Hastle argued her case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Less than three months later, in Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia, the Court reversed Ms. Morgan’s conviction, and held that state segregation laws were unconstitutional as applied to interstate bus travel.

At the direction of U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell and under the supervision of Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Commissioner Joseph Swing, the U.S. Border Patrol began the second phase of an immigration law enforcement initiative in the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. The program, officially known as “Operation Wetback,” employed the pejorative term “wetback” often used to refer to Mexican citizens who entered the U.S. by swimming across the Rio Grande River.

The operation had begun one month earlier, targeting Mexican immigrants in California and Arizona. Attorney General Brownell promoted the crackdown based on his assertion that “the Mexican wetback problem was becoming increasingly serious” because Mexican immigrants were “displacing domestic workers, affecting work conditions, spreading disease, and contributing to crime rates.” INS deployed hundreds of agents to the Rio Grande Valley to locate and deport to Mexico anyone they suspected of being in the U.S. without legal status. The following September, INS initiated a similar operation in the Midwest.

Border agents’ tactics included descending on Mexican American neighborhoods, demanding identification from “Mexican-looking” citizens on the street, invading private homes in the middle of the night, and raiding Mexican businesses. Without a hearing or oversight, agents often seized and deported people who were lawfully in the country. By the end of these crusades in California, Arizona, and Texas, as many as 200,000 Mexican immigrants had returned to Mexico—including many who were not undocumented and some who were U.S. citizens. Some immigrants left on their own in the face of the large-scale harassment, but most were taken under Border Patrol escort.

By the end of 1954, according to some reports, INS had deported one million Mexican immigrants nationwide. These mandatory deportations were done at the deportee’s expense and cost some people all the money they had earned while working in the U.S. At the program’s close, Attorney General Brownell praised the effort, which violently displaced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, as a success.

A New York committee organizing a fashion show for the American National Exhibition in Moscow, Russia, announced it would be removing three scenes that featured Black and white models together after dozens of fashion editors protested the representation of racial integration.

The fashion show, which was sponsored by the U.S. State Department and meant to illustrate daily American life, was to be exhibited in Moscow 10 days later. Before the exhibition opening, the organizing committee for the show hosted previews in New York, which dozens of American fashion editors were invited to attend.

Immediately after the previews, over 40 of the fashion editors in attendance signed and circulated a petition demanding that the committee remove three staged wedding scenes that showed racially integrated groups interacting with one another, claiming the scenes were not “representative of the American way of life.”

Within a day, on July 14, the fashion show’s organizing committee announced that it would be removing each of the racially integrated scenes, effectively eliminating the Black models from the show. A spokesman for the show added that the organizers had not yet decided what, if any, future role would exist for the Black models—who were only 3 of 47 total models involved in the show.

During this era, many white Americans throughout the U.S., including in Northern states like New York, openly supported and fought for racial segregation. As this event helps to illustrate, many white people considered even socializing between races to be fundamentally incompatible with American life.

A white mob drove more than 200 Black residents out of North Platte, Nebraska. The mob targeted the entire Black community with violence after a Black man was accused of killing a local white police officer.

The day before, two white police officers responded to a call at the North Platte home of a Black man named Louis “Slim” Seeman. When Mr. Seeman allegedly shot and killed one of the officers, a mob of white men and police descended on his home and trapped him inside of a chicken coop on the property. The mob then doused the coop with gasoline and set it ablaze with Mr. Seeman inside; when his body was pulled from the wreckage, it was clear he had died from a gunshot wound—either by his own hand or fired by a member of the mob.

Even after Mr. Seeman had been killed, the large gathering of white men remained enraged at the bold violation of racial hierarchy represented by a Black man taking the life of a white man. Determined to punish the entire Black community, 500 angry white citizens wielding sticks and ropes demanded that all local Black people leave the city. Facing the threat of deadly violence, and terrified after seeing Mr. Seeman’s fate, North Platte’s 200 Black residents departed that night by foot, train, and automobile, leaving behind most of their possessions.

A county sheriff later commented, “It was the understanding when they left that they were to stay away. The idea is to keep them out.”

An unmasked white mob abducted and lynched a Black man named John Henry James in a public spectacle lynching in Albemarle County, Virginia, near Charlottesville. Although 150 unmasked white men were involved in the lynching—and the police chief and county sheriff were present when Mr. James was lynched—no one was ever held accountable for Mr. James’s killing. Mr. James’s lynching was later celebrated by several hundred more white people who gathered to see his body as it was left hanging for hours.

Mr. James was arrested and falsely accused of assaulting a white woman on July 11. When mobs of white people gathered outside of the jail and open threats of lynching were made, Mr. James was quickly transported to a neighboring city. During the era of racial terror lynchings, charges of sexual assault against Black men, even when made with unsubstantiated evidence, regularly aroused violent white mobs.

The next morning, on July 12, Mr. James was aboard a train returning to Charlottesville when a mob of armed white men intercepted the train at Wood’s Crossing in Albemarle County and seized him. The mob—at least 150 strong—broke into the train car and put a rope around Mr. James’s neck. When news of the attack spread, a group of Black men attempted to stop the lynching, but they were outnumbered by the mob. The mob then dragged Mr. James from the train to a locust tree 40 yards away and hanged him before firing dozens of bullets into his body. Before he was hanged, Mr. James protested his innocence to the crowd. The crowd dispersed, leaving Mr. James’s body hanging for hours.

Those who lynched Mr. James made no effort to conceal their faces. As in the case of Mr. James’s lynching, celebratory atmospheres during or following a lynching were not atypical, and it was not uncommon for lynchers to leave the bodies of their victims hanging in plain sight. Newspapers reported that hundreds of white people visited the scene to view Mr. James’s body and cut off pieces of his clothing, his body, and the locust tree as “souvenirs.” These acts of violence not only victimized the individual, but traumatized and terrorized the wider Black community near and around Charlottesville; Mr. James’s proximity to the railroad tracks meant that hundreds more viewed his body from the passing train cars.

As part of EJI’s Community Remembrance Project, on July 12, 2019, Charlottesville community members and officials gathered in memory of Mr. James and unveiled a historical marker which recognized the lynching of Mr. James.

White residents of Indianola, Mississippi, formed the first White Citizens’ Council to organize and carry out massive resistance to racial integration of public schools.

After the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, mandating an end to racial segregation in public schools, a Mississippi Circuit judge named Tom Pickens Brady gave a speech criticizing the decision and urging white citizens of the state to oppose the ruling. Later a justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court, Judge Brady declared integration a threat to the “Southern Way of life,” and his speech was published as a pamphlet titled “Black Monday” (referencing the day of the week the Brown decision was released).

Robert B. “Tut” Patterson, who owned a 1,500-acre plantation near Indianola, Mississippi, was inspired by Brady’s words and soon called for a meeting of concerned white people to try to oppose integration. On July 11, a large group of local white men and women gathered at the Indianola town hall and formed the first White Citizens’ Council. One year later, 250 White Citizens’ Councils had been launched throughout the South, boasting a total of 60,000 members; by 1956, active Councils were operating in 30 states, and by 1957, membership reached 250,000.

“Integration represents darkness, regimentation, totalitarianism, communism and destruction,” Robert Patterson wrote in 1956. “Segregation represents the freedom to choose one’s associates, Americanism, State sovereignty and the survival of the white race. These two ideologies are now engaged in mortal conflict and only one can survive.”

The Councils’ membership of business, religious, and civic leaders defended white supremacy and used social pressure and economic retaliation to intimidate and coerce Black and white people who supported integration. In South Carolina, where 55 Council chapters were active by July 1956, 17 Black parents were fired or evicted from their farms within two weeks of signing a pro-integration petition in the small town of Elloree. In Yazoo County, Mississippi, when 53 Black residents signed an NAACP petition for integration, the local Council published their names in a newspaper ad, leading to harassment, firing, and credit cancellation. In the end, all signers removed their names from the petition and the Yazoo County NAACP disbanded.

The White Citizens’ Councils claimed to not endorse or engage in explicit violence and in that way tried to differentiate themselves from groups like the Ku Klux Klan. The Councils, dubbed the “Uptown KKK,” did largely avoid the Klan’s stigma but shared many goals—and in some cases, members.

The massive resistance by the white community was largely successful in preventing the integration of schools in the South. In the five Deep South states, every single one of 1.4 million Black schoolchildren attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960. By the start of the 1964-65 school year, less than 3% of the South’s Black children attended school with white students, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina that number remained substantially below 1%. In 1967, 13 years after Brown, a report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights observed that white violence and intimidation against Black people “continues to be a deterrent to school desegregation.”

Georgia Governor Lester Maddox rebuffed demands by the Justice Department to immediately integrate the state’s public schools. In a televised address, Gov. Maddox asserted that he would prefer to close all public schools in the state for several years rather than provide equal educational opportunities to Black students. “It would be better to do that and have free children than have slave children,” he added.

The previous day, the Justice Department had ordered the Georgia State Board of Education to present an integration plan for the state’s public school system within 15 days or face “remedies from the United States District Court.”

“So far as I’m concerned, they can take their ultimatum and ram it in their satchels,” Gov. Maddox answered in his televised response, adding that he would be willing to give up the $75 million annual federal aid for education if it meant that Georgia schools would be allowed to continue operating on a segregated basis.

Gov. Maddox spent the rest of the year calling on other elected officials to join his campaign for “freedom of choice” schools and demand that the president return federal control of education to states.

Governor Maddox remained violently opposed to integration throughout the duration of his term in office and advocated for racial segregation until his death. “I want my race preserved,” he said in a 2001 interview, “and I hope most everybody else wants theirs preserved.”

Elected and supported by the majority of white Americans, segregationists like Gov. Maddox operated as private citizens and at the highest levels of government, wielding violence and criminalization to oppose the civil rights movement and target the courageous activists who fueled it.

Weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools are unconstitutional, the Alabama State Board of Education voted unanimously to continue enforcing segregation within the Alabama public school system.

Alabama Governor Seth Gordon Persons introduced the segregation resolution, which extended racial segregation in Alabama public schools throughout the next school term and “until the state educational system is directly involved in a racial suit.” Days after the Alabama board’s decision, the Montgomery Advertiser aptly noted that Gov. Persons and the rest of the board had proceeded after the Brown decision “as though nothing had happened.”

As was the case in many Southern states after Brown, elected leaders in Alabama were determined to preserve racial segregation at all costs, choosing to defy the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling rather than admit Black children into public schools with white children.

Opposition to racial equality was not limited to elected officials; most white Americans, especially in the South, supported segregation. Following Brown, white Americans implemented a strategy of “massive resistance” to desegregation, using intimidation and even lethal attacks to maintain white supremacy. This campaign of resistance in Alabama, which began with Gov. Persons and the school board, and in the South more broadly, was largely successful. In the five Deep South states, every single one of 1.4 million Black school children attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960. By the start of the 1964-65 school year, less than 3% of the South’s Black children attended school with white students, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina that number remained substantially below 1%.

Many of those who fought violently to uphold segregation were not held accountable—including dozens of elected leaders who to this day are valorized through monuments, memorials, streets, and buildings bearing their names. Despite Gov. Persons’s efforts to prevent Black citizens from attending integrated public schools, since 1989 the Alabama State Department of Education has operated out of the Gordon Persons Building, a 60,000-square-foot office building in Montgomery named after the governor by the Alabama Legislature in 1988.

More than 50 years after Congress banned the trafficking of enslaved Africans into the U.S., the slave ship Clotilde arrived in Mobile, Alabama, carrying more than 100 enslaved people from West Africa. Captain William Foster commanded the boat and was later said to be working for Timothy Meaher, a white Mobile shipyard owner who built the Clotilde.

Captain Foster evaded capture by federal authorities by transferring the enslaved Africans to a riverboat and burning and then sinking the Clotilde. The smuggled Africans were subsequently distributed as enslaved property amongst the group of white men who had financed the voyage. Mr. Meaher kept more than 30 of the Africans on Magazine Point, his property north of Mobile. One of those Africans was a man who came to be known as Cudjo Lewis.

In 1861, Mr. Meaher and his partners were prosecuted for illegally trafficking the Africans into the country, but a federal court dismissed the case as the Civil War began. No investigation or remedy ever involved the actual African men and women central to the case; while the federal case was pending, the Africans Mr. Meaher had claimed remained on his property left to fend for themselves and were offered no means of returning to Ghana.

In 1865, after the Civil War ended and slavery was widely abolished, the Clotilde survivors once held by Mr. Meaher were free—but still trapped in a foreign land far from their home. They settled along the outskirts of Mr. Meaher’s property, at a site that came to be known as “Africatown,” and developed a community modeled after the traditions and government they had been forced to leave behind. Unlike the vast majority of newly freed Black people in the country, who had either been born in the U.S. or seized from Africa many decades before, the people of Africatown had a direct, recent connection to their African roots and vivid memories of their culture, language, and customs. Well into the 1950s, descendants of the Clotilde passengers living in Africatown maintained a distinct language and unique community of survival.

Cudjo Lewis lived to be the last surviving Clotilde passenger in Africatown. In 1927, Black anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Alabama to interview Mr. Lewis about his life and produced a manuscript documenting his story. The book was not published in her lifetime, but in 2018, the story was released as Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo. Today, many descendants of the Africans trafficked on the Clotilde continue to live in northern Mobile, and in December 2012, the National Park Service added the Africatown Historic District to the National Register of Historic Places.

A crowd of over 5,000 white people lynched a Black man named Seay J. Miller in Bardwell, Kentucky, for allegedly killing two young white girls, despite ample evidence of his innocence.

Many Black people were lynched across the South under accusation of murder. During this era of racial terror, mere suggestions of Black-on-white violence could provoke mob violence and lynching before the judicial system could or would act. The deep racial hostility permeating Southern society often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered, whether or not there was evidence to support the suspicion, and accusations lodged against Black people were rarely subject to serious scrutiny. Here, suspicion immediately fell on Mr. Miller and led to his death despite available evidence pointing to a different culprit.

Statements from Mr. Miller’s wife and from law enforcement witnesses indicated that Mr. Miller was not even in Kentucky on the date the girls were killed, and multiple eyewitnesses identified the girls’ killer as a white man. Even the girls’ father was unconvinced of Mr. Miller’s guilt. Only one person implicated Mr. Miller, but he originally told police that the person he saw was a white man—as did other witnesses. The witness who implicated Mr. Miller changed his statement only after the county sheriff threatened to charge him as an accomplice if he did not do so. This same sheriff handed Mr. Miller over to a crowd of thousands of white citizens to be lynched. Though charged with protecting the people in their custody, law enforcement almost never used their authority to resist white crowds intent on killing Black people and were instead often complicit in lynchings. In a system where law enforcement did little to protect Black communities, white crowds acted as judge, jury, and executioner.

The mob was determined to ensure Mr. Miller’s death was brutal. Reasoning that immediate lynching by rope would be “too humane,” the white mob fastened a chain weighing over 100 pounds around Mr. Miller’s neck and forced him to walk through town until he fainted from exhaustion.

“I am standing here an innocent man among excited men who do not propose to let the law take its course. I have committed no crime to be deprived of my liberty or life. I am not guilty,” Mr. Miller reportedly said as he was led to his death. “Burning and torture here last but a little while, but if I die with a lie on my soul, I shall be tortured forever. I am innocent.” These were his last recorded words.

Around 3 pm, the heavily armed mob hanged Mr. Miller from a telephone pole, shot hundreds of bullets into his body, then left his corpse hanging from the pole for hours. Afterward, white people cut off his fingers, toes, and ears as “souvenirs” and then burned Mr. Miller’s body in a public fire.

White people used racial terror lynching as a tool to instill fear in the broader Black community. Lynchings were not merely retaliation for a specific crime. Rather, lynchings were meant to send a broader message to the entire Black community of how quickly and easily they could be killed with no protection from the authorities. Following Mr. Miller’s brutal lynching, armed white residents began organizing to force Black residents to leave the area; law enforcement arrested no one for participating in Mr. Miller’s lynching and made no effort to investigate a white suspect in the girls’ killings, but continued to indiscriminately arrest local Black people on unfounded charges.

Within days, famed journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells traveled to Kentucky to investigate Mr. Miller’s lynching. Her account later published in the Chicago Inter Ocean newspaper detailed the cruel brutality of the lynching, the heartbreak of Mr. Miller’s widow, and the racism that allowed lynching in America to continue.

Thus perished another of the many victims of lynch law, but it is the honest, sober belief of many who witnessed the scene, that an innocent man has been barbarously and shockingly put to death in the glare of the nineteenth century civilization, by those who profess to believe in Christianity, law, and order. These and similar deeds of violence are committed under the protection of the American flag and mostly upon the descendants of the negro race. Had Miller been ever so guilty under the laws, he was entitled to a fair trial. But there is absolutely no proof of his guilt. His widow says he left his home in Springfield July 1 to hunt work. She had a letter from him July 5, mailed at Cairo; when next she heard from him he had been murdered. The poor woman seems to have lost her mind since her trouble, and during her first frenzy destroyed this letter, the only clue by which her husband could be traced. She seems incapable of answering questions intelligently and lives in a state of nervous excitement.

How long shall it be said of free America that a man shall not be given time nor opportunity to prove his innocence of crimes charged against him?

On July 6, 2016, 32-year-old Philando Castile was shot and killed by Jeronimo Yanez, a St. Anthony police officer, during a traffic stop for a broken taillight in St. Paul, Minnesota. Mr. Castile, who had a legally registered gun and a lawful permit to carry the weapon, was shot multiple times from close range while inside the car with his fiancée, Diamond Reynolds, and her four-year-old daughter. Officer Yanez’s reckless and deadly actions soon became yet another rallying cry among ongoing outrage and protests regarding police brutality against the African American community.

Later investigation revealed that Officer Yanez initiated the traffic stop that day as a pretext to check Mr. Castile’s and Ms. Reynolds’s identifications. In police dispatch audio recordings, he can be heard saying, “The two occupants just look like people that were involved in a robbery. The driver looks more like one of our suspects, just because of the wide-set nose. I couldn’t get a good look at the passenger.”

At the start of the stop, Officer Yanez asked Mr. Castile if he had a weapon. Mr. Castile responded that he did have a gun and a valid permit, located in his wallet. When Mr. Castile moved to retrieve the items, Officer Yanez ordered him to keep his hands on the wheel; as Mr. Castile complied and moved his hands back up to place them on the steering wheel, Officer Yanez fired at least four shots into the open car window, striking Mr. Castile in the chest and endangering Ms. Reynolds and her young child.

Ms. Reynolds used her cell phone to broadcast a live stream of the aftermath on social media. In the tragic footage, Mr. Castile sits wounded and slumped over in the driver’s seat as Officer Yanez barks orders at him and a little girl tries to console her shocked mother from the back seat.

Police who arrived at the scene following the shooting rendered no medical aid to Mr. Castile as he bled to death, instead comforting the crying police officer who had killed him. Mr. Castile died at the hospital 20 minutes after the shooting and Officer Yanez was placed on medical leave pending an investigation.

Philando Castile was shot and killed less than 24 hours after the videotaped fatal police shooting of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His death added to national protests and also generated local demonstrations, in which community members joined to mourn his death and praise his contributions as a kind and inspirational elementary school employee.

In the years before his death at the hands of police, Mr. Castile had been stopped for minor traffic violations at least 52 times—approximately every four months. These stops resulted in 86 issued violations, most of which were dismissed, and cost Mr. Castile over $6,500 in fees and fines.

In June 2017, Officer Yanez was tried and acquitted of all charges related to Philando Castile’s death. “He didn’t deserve to die the way he did,” Philando Castile’s tearful sister told reporters after the verdict. “I will never have faith in the system.” Weeks later, Officer Yanez was fired from the St. Anthony, Minnesota, police force.

Two white police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, responded to reports that an armed man with a red shirt was selling CDs outside of a local convenience store. The officers arrived and confronted Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old Black man; they proceeded to tase him and pin him to the ground. While Mr. Sterling was down and restrained, someone exclaimed, “He’s going for a gun!” and an officer shot him multiple times in the chest and back.

Abdullah Muflahi, the convenience store owner and eyewitness, later stated that Alton Sterling never threatened the officers or wielded the gun. Mr. Muflahi also stated that Mr. Sterling had started carrying a gun only days prior to the event, because other vendors had recently been robbed.

Though officials later stated that both officers’ body cameras had become dislodged during the incident, multiple bystanders recorded video of the shooting using their cell phone cameras. That footage, and surveillance video from the convenience store, was quickly distributed to news media outlets and uploaded on social media, allowing millions of people to watch Mr. Sterling’s death at the hands of police. The videos consistently show that his arms and hands were fully restrained when he was shot, and he made no movement suggesting a move to grab a weapon.

Alton Sterling’s death, and the discrepancies between police accounts and the video footage, sparked protests all across the country demanding an end to police brutality and the arrest of officers responsible. Within days, the U.S. Justice Department announced that it would launch a civil rights investigation into Mr. Sterling’s death—and in May 2017 reported that the officers would face no federal charges. In March 2018, Louisiana officials announced that no state charges would be filed either. To date, no one has ever been prosecuted for the death of Alton Sterling.

A white mob in Clinton, South Carolina, seized a 35-year-old Black man named Norris Dendy from a local jail cell, beat him, and hanged him. The mob then dumped Mr. Dendy’s brutalized body in a churchyard seven miles from Laurens County. Even though several Black people witnessed the mob seizing Mr. Dendy from the local jail, no one was ever held accountable.

On the afternoon of July 4, Mr. Dendy was picnicking at a lakeside resort with family and friends for a Fourth of July celebration. During the day, an altercation broke out between Mr. Dendy and a white man, and Mr. Dendy allegedly struck the white man. A crowd of white men began pursuing Mr. Dendy, and he fled the resort, terrified. The white men at Lake Murray alerted officers in the nearby town of Goldville to pursue and arrest Mr. Dendy. Soon after, officers arrested Mr. Dendy for “drunkenness” and “reckless driving.”

By the evening of July 4, Mr. Dendy remained in the custody of Clinton officials at the local jail, but despite the pursuit of the white mob earlier in the day, his cell remained unguarded and unprotected. During this era of racial terror lynchings, white lynch mobs regularly displayed complete disregard for the legal system, and it was not uncommon for lynch mobs to abduct Black people from courts, jails, and out of police custody. In some cases, police officials were even found to be complicit or active participants in lynchings. Law enforcement officials, charged with protecting those in their custody, often failed to intervene, or as was the case here, completely abdicated their responsibility.

Late in the evening, at least four white men arrived at the unguarded jail, where only a single Black janitor remained, and seized Mr. Dendy from his jail cell. Around the same time, Mr. Dendy’s wife, his five children, and his mother arrived at the jail—likely in an attempt to visit Mr. Dendy—and witnessed the mob break into his jail cell. When they tried to intervene, the lynch mob struck Mr. Dendy’s mother and fired a pistol at Mr. Dendy’s family. The mob then tied Mr. Dendy’s wrists and ankles with rope and kidnapped him, driving him away from the jail.

The mob beat Mr. Dendy’s head so many times that he suffered a fatal fracture at the base of his skull. Unsatisfied, the mob then hanged Mr. Dendy before dumping his body next to the Sardis Church, a churchyard seven miles from Laurens County on what is now Highway 72 east.

Despite accounts from multiple eyewitnesses who witnessed the mob’s action, a year later, a grand jury refused to indict the members of the mob. No one was ever held accountable for the lynching of Mr. Dendy.

Continuing violence raged in East St. Louis, Illinois, as white mobs attacked Black residents and destroyed their homes and other property. The primary outbreak of violence began on July 2, 1917, when white residents of East St. Louis and other nearby communities ambushed African American workers as they left factories during a shift change. The National Guard was called in to suppress the violence but they were ordered not to shoot at white rioters; some troops reportedly joined the mobs targeting the Black community.

In 1916 and 1917, thousands of African Americans moved from the rural South to East St. Louis in search of industrial work. White residents, along with the city’s political leaders, attempted to discourage Black migration and prohibited railroads from transporting Black people to the region. When these attempts failed, white residents used violence to intimidate, expel, and destroy the African American population.

From July 2 through July 5, 1917, at least 39—and some estimate as many as 200—African Americans were shot, hanged, beaten to death, or burned alive after being driven into burning buildings. The riots caused more than $400,000 in property damage and prompted 6,000 African Americans—more than half of East St. Louis’s African American population—to flee the city. While 105 people were indicted on charges related to the riot, only 20 members of the white mob received prison sentences for their roles in perpetrating the extreme violence and killings.

Denmark Vesey, a free Black carpenter, was executed in Charleston, South Carolina, for planning to emancipate enslaved people. Weeks before his execution, Mr. Vesey was accused of designing a rebellion to emancipate thousands of enslaved Black people from Charleston and the surrounding plantations. Even though no rebellion ever occurred and no white people were harmed in any way, Mr. Vesey and 34 other people allegedly involved were executed.

In 1781, a Carolina-based slave trader named Joseph Vesey “purchased” Mr. Vesey, who was in his mid-teens at the time. Mr. Vesey was enslaved in Charleston for many years until he won a street lottery in 1799 that allowed him to “buy” his freedom. However, the man who enslaved his wife refused to allow him to “purchase” her freedom, so she remained in bondage. He became a carpenter and was a well-respected community member in Charleston.

In 1818, Mr. Vesey co-founded an independent African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Charleston that quickly attracted a congregation of over 1,800 members, making it one of the largest Black churches in the country.

After Mr. Vesey was executed, white Charleston officials claimed the Black church had played a crucial role in the planning. They ordered the AME members to disperse and burned the church to the ground. Black churches were soon outlawed in Charleston; the AME church was the last Black church to exist there until after the Civil War. In 1865, under the leadership of Mr. Vesey’s son, Robert Vesey, the church was finally rebuilt. Nearly 200 years after Mr. Vesey’s execution, in 2015, a white 21-year-old attended bible study at the church—renamed the Emanuel AME Church—and opened fire on the other worshippers in attendance, all of whom were Black.

A white sheriff in Camden, Alabama, forced people to leave and then padlocked the doors of the Antioch Baptist Church—a Black church where leaders were discussing civil rights—even though he did not have the authority to do so.

Community members from the Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) group had been meeting at the church for several months, working to promote Black voter registration in Alabama and the rest of the South. According to the 1960 census, Black residents made up over 75% of the population of Wilcox County. However, because of established practices and laws passed with the intent of suppressing the Black vote—which were enforced in discriminatory ways—no Black people in Wilcox County were registered to vote during the 1964 election.

When people at the Antioch Baptist Church began registering Black voters, they were quickly targeted by the white community. Two days before Sheriff P.C. Jenkins evicted people from the church, a group of white men had broken into the building and beaten two Black teenagers, inflicting injuries so severe that they were both hospitalized. Rather than providing protection from this violence, on July 1, Sheriff Jenkins announced that the church had been the cause of “too much disturbance,” and gave people only a few hours to clear out their belongings before putting a padlock on the door.

Though Sheriff Jenkins claimed that at least one church leader had expressed opposition to having the church involved in civil rights activism, the following day the Chairman of the Board of Deacons denied that claim, and two weeks later the congregation and board of the church unanimously voted to support the church’s involvement in registering Black voters.

On June 30, 1829, officials in Cincinnati, Ohio, issued a notice requiring Black residents to adhere to laws passed in 1804 and 1807 aimed at preventing “fugitive slaves” and freed Black people from settling in Ohio, forcing hundreds of Black people to flee.

The 1804 law required every Black person in Ohio to obtain proof of freedom and to register with the clerk’s office in his or her county of residence. It also prohibited employers from hiring a Black person without proof of freedom, imposed a fine on those who hid “fugitive slaves,” and provided to any person asserting “a legal claim” to a Black person a procedure for “retaking and possessing his or her Black or mulatto servant.” The 1807 amendments to the law required Black people seeking residence in Cincinnati to post $500 bond guaranteed by two white men. In addition to increasing fines for employing a Black person without proof of freedom and assisting “fugitive slaves,” the 1807 amendments prohibited Black people from testifying in court against white people.

The 1804 law and 1807 amendment failed to stem the growth of Ohio’s Black population, and by 1829, Black residents represented at least 10% of Cincinnati’s population. In another attempt to discourage Black residence in Cincinnati, officials posted a notice informing the public that the 1807 law would be “rigidly enforced” and warning against helping any Black person in violation of the law. The notice effectively sanctioned mob violence against the Black community, stating, “The full cooperation of the public is expected in carrying these laws into full effect.”

Recognizing the notice as a threat, hundreds of Black people organized, requested, and were granted asylum in Canada.

Early in the morning on Sunday, June 29, 1958, a bomb exploded outside Bethel Street Baptist Church on the north side of Birmingham, Alabama, in one of the segregated city’s African American neighborhoods. The church’s pastor, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, was a civil rights activist working to eliminate segregation in Birmingham.

Bethel Street Baptist had been bombed before—on Christmas Day 1956—and since then several volunteers had kept watch over the neighborhood every night. Around 1:30 am, Will Hall, who was on watch that night, was alerted to smoke coming from the church. He discovered a paint can containing dynamite near the church wall, which he quickly carried into the street before taking cover.

The paint can had between 15 and 20 sticks of dynamite inside, and as it exploded it blew a two-foot hole in the street and broke the windows of several houses. The church’s stained glass windows, which were still being repaired from an earlier bombing, were also damaged.

Police told church leaders there were few clues as to the culprit’s identity or motive, but a passerby reported seeing a car full of white men in the area shortly before the bomb was discovered. The Rev. Shuttlesworth praised Mr. Hall for his brave actions and quick intervention, which surely saved the church from ruin, while also condemning the attack. “This shows that America has a long way to go before it can try to be called democratic,” the Rev. Shuttlesworth said.

On this day in 1962, a hotel in Atlanta refused to provide a room to Dr. Ralph Bunche because he was Black. Dr. Bunche was an under-secretary-general of the United Nations at the time and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for mediating an armistice in the Middle East.

While the City of Atlanta no longer officially mandated segregated public accommodations, its policy was to let each business decide individually whether to integrate. Nearly all of the city’s hotels refused, including the Dinkler Plaza Hotel, where Dr. Bunche attempted to stay during the NAACP’s annual convention before his request was denied.

Atlanta hotels also refused accommodation to many of the other convention attendees in the leadup to the event. Dr. Bunche and others were forced instead to find lodging in private homes or the dormitories of local historically Black colleges.

In a speech at the convention, Dr. Bunche denounced the “arbitrarily imposed stigma of color” and stated that “No individual Negro can be free from the degradation of racial discrimination until every Negro is free from it.” He also urged the press to cover all instances of racial exclusion—not just ones in which Black people of prominence were involved.

In response to the Atlanta hotels’ refusal to host Black patrons, convention members launched a picketing campaign in front of segregated hotels and restaurants in the city. Additionally, the NAACP sued the Atlanta Cabana Hotel, arguing that the hotel’s segregation policy violated the Fourteenth Amendment. A federal judge ruled that the hotel’s refusal of Black customers was constitutional because it had been adopted voluntarily by a private business and not a state actor.

Voluntary racial segregation by private businesses was formally outlawed with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a law many white Georgians fiercely and violently opposed. The Act was upheld later that year after the Heart of Atlanta Motel sued the federal government to try to continue its policy of barring Black guests.

A Walton County mob of several hundred unmasked white men lynched two Black men named Tom Allen and Joe Watts after a local white judge—Charles H. Brand—refused to allow state guardsmen to be present to prevent mob action.

Judge Brand had been aware of the threat of mob violence for weeks. Mr. Allen, who had been accused of assaulting a white woman, had been held in Atlanta for safekeeping because of the threat. In early June, Mr. Allen was brought to Monroe for trial with the protection of state troops from the governor, but Judge Brand “resented” the presence of troops, postponed the trial because of the protection being offered, and sent Mr. Allen back to Atlanta. When Mr. Allen was ordered back to Monroe for trial on June 27, Judge Brand refused an offer of protection from the state troops. Consequently, Mr. Allen was protected only by two officers on the train.

Aware that Mr. Allen no longer had the protection of state troops, the white mob intercepted the train bound for Monroe and seized Mr. Allen from the two officers charged with protecting him. The mob tied Mr. Allen to a telegraph pole and shot him while the passengers of the train and hundreds in the mob looked on.

The mob then proceeded to march six miles to the town jail where another Black man named Joe Watts was being held. Some newspapers reported that Mr. Watts was an alleged accomplice of Mr. Allen, while others noted Mr. Watts had been arrested for having “acted suspiciously” outside of a white man’s home but had not been charged with a crime. The white mob stormed the jail without resistance from the jailers, removed Mr. Watts, and lynched him as well, hanging him from a tree and shooting him repeatedly. Both men had maintained that they were innocent, and contemporary newspapers reported that there was no evidence against them.

In most cases of racial terror lynching throughout this era, the criminal legal system failed to intervene or use force to repel lynch mobs, even when the threat of lynching was evident and underway. Despite their legal responsibility to equally protect anyone in their custody, law enforcement and judicial officials were often found to be complicit in the seizure or lynchings of Black men, women, and children by abdicating their responsibility to prevent mob abductions. In this case, Judge Brand refused to allow for the protection of the state troops that had successfully transported and protected Mr. Allen from being lynched just three weeks before, making it easier for the white mob to lynch these men. Three months earlier, in Judge Brand’s hometown of Lawrenceville in Gwinnett County, he had also refused the assistance of state troops to protect a Black man named Charles Hale, who, left without the protection of those troops, was taken by a white mob and lynched.

Despite his failure to protect these men, he continued to serve as a judge until 1917. In 1917, Judge Brand was elected to Congress to represent Georgia’s 8th Congressional District, where he served seven consecutive terms.

The legislative committee of the territory then known as “Oregon Country” passed the first of a series of “Black exclusion” laws. The law dictated that free African Americans were prohibited from moving into Oregon Country and those who violated the ban could be whipped “not less than twenty nor more than thirty-nine stripes.”

That December, the law was amended to substitute forced labor for whipping. It specified that African Americans who stayed within Oregon would be hired at public auction and that the “hirer” would be responsible for removing the “hiree” out of the territory after the prescribed period of forced service was rendered. This law was enforced even though slavery and involuntary servitude were illegal in Oregon Country.

The preamble to a later exclusion law, passed in 1849, explained legislators’ beliefs that “it would be highly dangerous to allow free Negroes and mulattoes to reside in the Territory, or to intermix with Indians, instilling … feelings of hostility toward the white race.”

The Oregon Constitution of 1857 included racial exclusion provisions against African Americans and Asian Americans. The document declared that African Americans outside of Oregon were not permitted to “come, reside, or be within” the state; prohibited African Americans from owning property or performing contracts; and prescribed punishment for those who employed, “harbor[ed],” or otherwise helped African Americans.

Between 1840 and 1860, in the midst of this exclusion and discrimination, African Americans never constituted more than 1% of the population in the American Pacific Northwest. Oregon, which joined the Union as a “free state” on February 14, 1859, stands as a clear illustration that racial discrimination and oppression against Black people was also widespread in jurisdictions where slavery was illegal. The 2020 U.S. Census reported that only 3.2% of Oregon residents were Black.

In a 5-4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and effectively gutted one of the nation’s most important and successful civil rights laws.

Despite adoption in 1870 of the Fifteenth Amendment barring racial discrimination in voting, Southern states and others used poll taxes, literacy tests, and violence to deny Black Americans the right to vote for another century. Unchecked and systematic voter suppression targeted African American communities in the South for generations.

After decades of organized civil rights activism, the Voting Rights Act (VRA) finally became law on August 6, 1965. It outlawed discriminatory barriers to voting like poll taxes and literacy tests and also imposed strict oversight upon states and districts with histories of voter discrimination. The new law quickly proved extremely effective; Black registration rates soon rose throughout the South, and Black officials were elected at the highest rates since Reconstruction. In this way, the Act directly confronted and addressed a century of racist voting policies. Section 4 of the Act required jurisdictions with the worst records of discrimination to obtain “preclearance” from the federal government before changing voting laws.

However, in Shelby County v. Holder, Alabama officials argued that preclearance was no longer constitutional or necessary, and the Supreme Court agreed. Chief Justice Roberts reasoned for the majority that “things have changed dramatically” since 1965—voting tests are illegal, racial disparities in voter turnout and registration have diminished, and people of color hold elected office “in record numbers.”

Yet voting discrimination—and the need for the Voting Rights Act—continues in the present day, the dissenters pointed out. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in dissent that covered jurisdictions continue to propose voting law changes that are rejected under the VRA, “auguring that barriers to minority voting would quickly resurface were the preclearance remedy eliminated.”

The decision drastically reduced the VRA’s power to combat “second-generation barriers” to voting, like racial gerrymandering, which minimize the impact of minority votes. “The sad irony of today’s decision lies in its utter failure to grasp why the VRA has proven effective,” wrote Justice Ginsburg. “The Court appears to believe that the VRA’s success in eliminating the specific devices extant in 1965 means that preclearance is no longer needed. With that belief, and the argument derived from it, history repeats itself.”

The decision unleashed a surge in voter suppression measures—including strict voter ID laws, cutting voting times, restricting registration, and purging voter rolls—that are undermining voter participation by people of color today.

A white mob in Manchester, Tennessee, lynched a 35-year-old Black man named Richard Wilkerson after he allegedly slapped a white man who assaulted a Black woman at an African American dance.

Mr. Wilkerson had been at a Black church festival with his wife when several white men who had been drinking entered the event. When the white men began accosting some of the Black women in attendance—including Mr. Wilkerson’s wife—Mr. Wilkerson intervened and allegedly slapped one of the men.

Soon after, the group of white men went to Mr. Wilkerson’s home and began destroying all of his belongings. The mob “tore up everything he had, tore it literally all to pieces,” the sheriff later told newspapers.

Unsatisfied, the white men then returned to the church dance where they found and grabbed Mr. Wilkerson, along with an unidentified young Black man. The mob drove the two men roughly 15 miles from town, where they shot Mr. Wilkerson several times before mutilating his body. The young Black man who was with Mr. Wilkerson was also shot but managed to escape.

Among the eight men who lynched Mr. Wilkerson was a 14-year-old teenager who later shared the names of the other members of the mob with officers. Several months later, the eight men were convicted of manslaughter. One newspaper noted it was the first case on record in Tennessee where white men had been convicted for lynching a Black person.

A white mob of more than 4,000 people in Wilmington, Delaware, burned a Black man named George White to death before he could stand trial. Mr. White was arrested and accused of killing a young white woman. He adamantly denied any involvement in the crime but was denied the opportunity to defend himself in court.

During the era of racial terror, many Black people were lynched after being accused of murder. The mere suggestion of Black-on-white violence could provoke mob violence and lynching. Here, despite Mr. White’s insistence that he was innocent, Wilmington residents were determined to lynch him without delay.

Within one week of Mr. White’s arrest, two lynch mobs attempted to abduct him from the workhouse where he was being held. White Wilmington residents talked openly about these lynching plans. In a sermon on June 21, local white pastor Robert Elwood urged white residents to exact swift public vengeance by lynching Mr. White. A lynch mob began forming the next day, and its members spent the next two days meticulously planning the public spectacle lynching that took place on June 23. Despite this public planning, in which mob members even shared their plans in advance with police officers, authorities charged with protecting Mr. White did not relocate him to a different jail or take any other measures to prevent the lynching.

In the early morning hours of June 23, the lynch mob had grown to thousands and included people who had traveled from out of town to participate. The mob stormed the workhouse where Mr. White was being held and threatened to destroy every cell to get him unless authorities turned him over. Officers ultimately chose to protect the property of the jail rather than the life of a man they had a legal duty to protect; after leading the mob to his cell, the officers turned Mr. White over and “stood by to await the inevitable.”

The mob removed Mr. White from the jail and led him, chained, through a crowd of thousands to the pyre built outside the jail, where he was bound with rope and forced into the open flames. As Mr. White burned to death, the crowd of white men, women, and children there to participate in the lynching threw rocks at him and cheered.

After Mr. White was dead, members of the mob continued to shoot at his charred body, and lynching participants took pieces of his remains as “souvenirs”; a local white physician reportedly took Mr. White’s skull and right foot to display in the window of a local saloon.

Though thousands of known residents were complicit in the lynching of George White, no one was ever held responsible. Mr. White is one of over 4,400 victims of racial terror lynching killed in the U.S., and more than 300 victims killed outside the states of the former Confederacy, between 1877 and 1950.

In 2019, the Delaware Social Justice Remembrance Coalition gathered with hundreds of community members to unveil a historical marker memorializing Mr. White.

A white mob lynched nine Black men in Sabine County, Texas, within a 24-hour period. The reign of racial terror began when a white farmer was shot to death in his home by an unknown assailant on the evening of June 21.

The deep racial hostility permeating Southern society often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered, whether or not there was evidence to support the suspicion, and accusations lodged against Black people were rarely subject to serious scrutiny.

In this instance, six Black men—Jerry Evans, William Johnson, William Manuel, Moses Spellman, Cleveland Williams, and Frank Williams—were already in jail, accused of being involved in a completely unrelated shooting of another local white man. Early on the morning of June 22, a mob of about 200 white men broke into the jail and seized them from police custody. Five of the men were hanged from a tree outside of the jail, and Mr. Williams, the sixth, was shot in the back as he tried to escape.

Later that night, marauding white men shot and killed a Black man named Bill McCoy near the white farmer’s home and shot and killed two unidentified Black men and threw their bodies into a creek. A Black church and school house in the town were also burned to the ground.

Many Black people were lynched across the South under accusation of murder. During this era of racial terror, mere suggestions of Black-on-white violence could provoke mob violence and lynching before the judicial system could or would act. White lynch mobs regularly displayed complete disregard for the legal system, abducting Black people from courts, jails, and out of police custody. Law enforcement officials, charged with protecting those in their custody, often failed to intervene, as was the case here, and sometimes even participated in mob violence.

Racial terror sought to maintain white supremacy and dominance by instilling fear in the entire Black community through brutal violence that was often unpredictable and arbitrary. It was common during this era for a lynch mob’s focus to expand beyond a specific person accused of an offense and to target any and all Black people. In a system where lynchings regularly went unpunished and law enforcement did little to protect Black communities, white mobs acted as judge, jury, and executioner, killing Black women, men, and children with no expectation of punishment.

The Black people killed on June 22, 1908, were nine of at least 336 documented lynching victims between 1865 and 1950 in the state of Texas.

A 26-year-old Black man named Jesse Thornton referred to a passing police officer by his name: Doris Rhodes. When the officer, a white man, overheard Mr. Thornton and ordered him to clarify his statement, Mr. Thornton attempted to correct himself by referring to the officer as “Mr. Doris Rhodes.” Unsatisfied, the officer hurled a racial slur at Mr. Thornton while knocking him to the ground, then arrested him and took him into the city jail as a mob of white men formed just outside.

Mr. Thornton tried to escape and managed to flee a short distance while the mob quickly pursued, firing gunshots and pelting him with bricks, bats, and stones. When Mr. Thornton was wounded in the gunfire and eventually collapsed, the mob dumped him into a truck and drove to an isolated street where they dragged him into a nearby swamp and shot him again. A local fisherman found Mr. Thornton’s decomposing, vulture-ravaged body a week later in the Patsaliga River, near Tuskegee Institute.

Dr. Charles A.J. McPherson, a local leader in the Birmingham branch of the NAACP, wrote a detailed report on Mr. Thornton’s lynching. NAACP lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall provided the Department of Justice with the report and requested a federal investigation. The Department in turn instructed the FBI to determine whether law enforcement or other officials were complicit in the lynching, but there is no record that anyone was ever prosecuted for Mr. Thornton’s murder.

NAACP leader Elbert Williams was abducted from his home in Brownsville, Tennessee, by a group of white men led by the local sheriff and the night marshal. Three days later, Mr. Williams’s lifeless and brutalized body was found in the nearby Hatchie River. He was 31 years old.

Discrimination and violence had prevented African Americans from voting in Brownsville since 1884. By 1940, Black people made up 75% of the 19,000 people living in town, and they wanted their voices to be heard. In May 1940, members of the Brownsville chapter of the NAACP organized a voting rights drive. Elbert Williams was one of its leaders.

A few days before Mr. Williams’s lynching, fellow NAACP leader Elisha Davis was abducted from his home by the same group of white men. Mr. Davis survived the attack but was ordered to leave Brownsville or face death upon return. Soon after, when Mr. Williams refused to leave town or cease his voting rights work, he was killed.

In the months following the lynching of Elbert Williams, up to 40 more Black families were permanently driven from the community under threats of violence from the white mob. African Americans who remained in Brownsville were prohibited from meeting in groups, even for church services, and two African American men were beaten to death after being arrested by the same night marshal who had helped to abduct Mr. Williams and Mr. Davis.

Despite investigations launched by local authorities, the Department of Justice, and the FBI, charges were never lodged against the well-known men responsible. According to one contemporary observer, the perpetrators of the abuses and murders “can be seen in Brownsville each day going about their work as though they had killed only a rabbit.” As a result of the harassment, violence, and murder of its leaders, the Brownsville NAACP dissolved in 1940, and a new chapter was not formed until 1961.

After white Southerners had extended the enslavement of countless Black people by concealing the Civil War’s end for more than two months, Union troops arrived in Texas. For the first time, local Black residents learned that the Confederacy had lost the war and that they were free under the Emancipation Proclamation.

Although President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had theoretically freed enslaved Black people in Confederate territories when it was issued in 1863, that declaration was largely unenforceable in locations that remained under Confederate control. The Proclamation had almost no effect in Texas and other Confederate states that rejected the freedom of enslaved people—especially on plantations that had little contact with Union forces.

Despite the limits of the Proclamation’s reach during war time, the Confederate Army’s surrender on April 9, 1865, should have immediately freed enslaved Black people in all states and territories where the Proclamation applied. The Proclamation had exempted the so-called “border states” of Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri, so even Union victory did not affect slavery in those areas.

Where Confederate defeat did mean emancipation, white Southerners committed to white supremacy and the continued exploitation of enslaved Black people used violence, misinformation, and threats to keep Black people in bondage. Union troops’ arrival in Texas on June 19, 1865, brought news of freedom to Black men, women, and children who had waited far too long. That date came to be known as “Juneteenth” in the African American community and has for generations remained a day of remembrance, joyous celebration, and hope: remembrance of the hardships and pain of enslavement; joyous celebration of survival; and hope for the opportunity and peace that freedom ought to bring.

Juneteenth does not denote a struggle completed or a finish line reached. Black Americans faced many threats to their liberty and their lives in the years after the Civil War and face continued injustice still.

Slavery did not become illegal throughout the entire U.S. until ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment on December 6, 1865—though it’s important to note that the amendment’s language, still in force today, created an exception authorizing involuntary servitude “as punishment for crime.” Even after the Thirteenth Amendment became national law, many Southern states including Kentucky and Delaware resisted ratifying the provision for decades. Mississippi, the last state to do so, refused to pass ratification legislation until 1995 and didn’t formally file the passage until 2013.

Black Americans quickly learned that freedom’s potential, celebrated with such hope on Juneteenth, would take more than one law or one day to fulfill. Though the end of the Civil War brought the liberation of formerly enslaved people and drastically altered the political and social landscape of the nation, what followed emancipation would determine whether the U.S. would seize or waste this opportunity to lay a new foundational commitment to true liberty and equality while remedying the harmful and unjust legacies enslavement left behind. The Reconstruction period emerged to answer that question.

Though Reconstruction began with promise and marked achievements, the era proved to be short lived, dangerous, and deadly. As documented in EJI’s report, Reconstruction in America, at least 2,000 African Americans were victims of racial terror lynching during the 12-year period from 1865-1876. As Reconstruction-era policies enforced Black Americans’ new rights of citizenship and protections from enslavement, white Americans formed counter-movements that sought to restore white supremacy using racial violence and political discrimination. Intent on terrorizing Black communities into submission and fear, white mobs were determined to ensure that emancipation would not bring Black people political participation, social equality, or economic independence. Faced with defeat in the Civil War and upheaval of the oppressive racial hierarchy, white Southerners waged a campaign of violence targeting African Americans across the South that reached epidemic proportions in the summer of 1865 and continued largely unchecked throughout the first half of the 20th century.

In 1877, just 12 years after the abolition of American chattel slavery and as part of a political compromise, the U.S. government abandoned its promise to protect newly emancipated Black people and withdrew from defending all statehouses in the South. This decision marked the end of Reconstruction and the brief period of multiracial democracy it had represented. Instead, Black men, women, and children were left vulnerable to racial terror and disenfranchisement that would last for generations. From 1877 to 1950, at least 4,400 African Americans were victims of racial terror lynchings while the nation’s legal system ignored the violence, allowing white lynch mobs to kill with impunity.

Today, more than 150 years after the enactment of the 13th Amendment, very little has been done to address the legacy of slavery and its continued legacies visible in contemporary inequality and injustice. Though the enslavement of Black people created wealth, opportunity, and prosperity for millions of white Americans and gave birth to the American economy, its impact is largely obscured and ignored. Slavery in America traumatized and devastated millions of people and created false narratives of racial difference that still persist today. These narratives, including the ideology of white supremacy, lasted well beyond slavery and fueled decades of racial terror, segregation, mass incarceration, and inequality.

As an opportunity for national reflection, Juneteenth invites us all to confront the promises of liberty and justice that remain largely unfulfilled in this nation. Through this reflection, we can recognize and commit to addressing the legacies of racial injustice present in our lives today. Strengthening our understanding of racial history empowers us to create a healthier discourse about race in America and foster an era of truth and justice.

Sheriff’s deputies in Gadsden, Alabama, used electric cattle prods on and arrested over 450 Black protesters who were holding a sit-in to oppose segregation.

Beginning in the fall of 1962, small groups of young Black people in Gadsden began staging sit-ins and picketing to protest segregated public accommodations and Black voter suppression. These peaceful demonstrations continued growing and extended into the following year. In response, authorities in Gadsden issued an injunction against sit-in demonstrations.

On June 18, 1963, law enforcement arrested 200 protesters during a sit-in at a downtown store, and another 250 were arrested for lying down in front of the nearby county courthouse. The protesters offered no resistance as they were taken to the county jail in patrol wagons.

Nevertheless, as sheriff’s deputies took the activists to jail, they tortured many of them—including several children—with the electric tips of cattle prods.

Authorities in Gadsden administered shocks to protesters’ bare feet, necks, stomachs, and genitals, sometimes laughing while doing so. “In Alabama, there was a sadistic kind of joy in inflicting pain,” Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activist Prathia Hall later wrote about the incident.

This assault on protesters in Gadsden was the first time Southern police had used cattle prods on a large group of civil rights demonstrators. The weapon later became a symbol of white resistance to the civil rights movement in the South.

In the months following, Gadsden police repeatedly used cattle prods on activists who continued to oppose segregation in the city despite the threat of violence.

A 21-year-old white man named Dylann Roof entered the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and sat in on a Bible study session for about an hour before opening fire on the other participants, killing nine people. All of the worshippers were Black.

Roof kept a personal website where he posted images of himself alongside Confederate flags and icons and expressed racist views. Before the Charleston church massacre, he uploaded a manifesto to the site in which he praised George Zimmerman for shooting Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black 17-year-old. Prior to the attack, he allegedly told friends that he hoped to incite a “race war.”

The nine victims killed in the shooting were Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson, and Clementa C. Pinckney, the senior church pastor and a South Carolina state senator. Five people survived the shooting.

The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, known as “Mother Emanuel” to many, is one of the largest and most storied Black congregations in the South. Just six years after its founding in 1816, the church was burned down after it was discovered that Denmark Vesey, one of the church’s founders and ministers, was planning a large-scale rebellion. Black churches were outlawed in Charleston in 1834, but after the Civil War ended in 1865, the Emanuel Church reopened.

President Barack Obama delivered the eulogy at the funeral service for the Rev. Pinckney, and the church has continued to be a strong presence within the Black community in Charleston. The Rev. Anthony Thompson, whose wife Myra was killed in the shooting, said the racial attack “forced a reckoning with Charleston’s history, and demeanor.” He has devoted himself to communal truth-telling initiatives ever since, inviting community members to engage in a more honest conversation about Charleston’s history and legacy of racial violence.

George Stinney Jr., a 90-pound Black 14-year-old boy, was executed in the electric chair in Columbia, South Carolina. Three months earlier, on March 24, George and his sister were playing in their yard when two young white girls briefly approached and asked where they could find flowers. Hours later, the girls failed to return home, and a search party was organized to find them. George joined the search party and casually mentioned to a bystander that he had seen the girls earlier. The following morning, their dead bodies were found in a shallow ditch.

George was immediately arrested for the murders and subjected to hours of interrogation without his parents or an attorney. The sheriff later claimed that George confessed to the murders, though no written or signed statement was presented. George’s father was fired from his job, and his family was forced to flee amidst threats on their lives. On March 26, a mob attempted to lynch George, but he had already been moved to an out-of-town jail.

On April 24, George Stinney faced a sham trial virtually alone. No African Americans were allowed inside the courthouse, and his court-appointed attorney, a tax lawyer with political aspirations, failed to call a single witness. The prosecution presented the sheriff’s testimony regarding George’s alleged confession as the only evidence of his guilt. An all-white jury deliberated for 10 minutes before convicting George Stinney of murder, and the judge promptly sentenced the 14-year-old to death. Despite appeals from Black advocacy groups, Governor Olin Johnston refused to intervene. George Stinney remains the youngest person executed in the U.S. in the 20th century.

Seventy years later, a South Carolina judge held a two-day hearing, which included testimony from three of George’s surviving siblings, members of the search party, and several experts. The state argued at the hearing that—despite all the unfairness in this case—George’s conviction should stand. The trial court disagreed and vacated the conviction, finding that George Stinney was fundamentally deprived of due process throughout the proceedings against him, that the alleged confession “simply cannot be said to be known and voluntary,” that the court-appointed attorney “did little to nothing” to defend George, and that his representation was “the essence of being ineffective.” The judge concluded: “I can think of no greater injustice.”

On June 14, 1920, Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie, three Black men in their early 20s, were lynched by a mob of white residents in Duluth, Minnesota. The three men were in town working with a traveling circus when two white teenagers falsely claimed that they and three other Black circus workers had attacked them and raped a local white woman. Newspapers reported the alleged assault, and false rumors soon spread that the woman had died from her injuries. The six men were arrested and jailed, even though there was no evidence that an assault had occurred.

In 1920, the Black population of Duluth, Minnesota, numbered 495 out of 98,000 residents. Many had been recruited from the South to work at United States Steel’s local plant, while others worked as janitors, servers, porters, and assemblers. Despite their small numbers, Black Duluth residents endured significant discrimination; they received lower pay for their labor and were forced to live in substandard housing in segregated neighborhoods. As in other Northern cities during the era of Black migration, many white workers in Duluth resented the presence of Black workers, and racial tension was high.

In this environment, sensational reports of Black men raping a white woman set off a mob mentality among white people in Duluth. On the evening of June 15, a mob of 5,000 to 10,000 white people gathered at the jail and seized three of the arrested Black men: Isaac McGhie, Elmer Jackson, and Elias Clayton. The mob beat and lynched them all, hanging the men from a light pole in downtown Duluth. The Minnesota National Guard arrived the next morning to secure the area and guard the surviving prisoners, but no one was ever arrested or convicted for the lynchings.

Louisiana’s House of Representatives broadened its ban on interracial marriage by passing legislation, by a vote of 93 to 10, prohibiting Black people and white people from living together under any circumstances. Under the new legislation, cohabitation was a felony punishable by imprisonment for up to five years. The bill was signed into law by Governor Jared Sanders on July 16, 1910.

The legislation broadened the state’s existing ban on interracial marriage and criminalized the cohabitation of white people and individuals with at least one Black great-grandparent, punishing those found living together irrespective of marital status. The law authorized the state to break up couples who had lived together for years. Acknowledging that the act would likely destroy thousands of families, white legislators declared the impending trauma to be “suffering incidental to a good cause-the cause of preserving the purity of the [white] race.”

Laws criminalizing relationships between Black and white people predated Loiusiana’s statehood. In 1724, the French colonial government criminalized interracial relationships, imposing severe penalties on interracial couples. When Louisiana joined the U.S. in 1812, it banned marriage between enslaved Black people, free people of color, and white people. In 1825, Louisiana severely restricted the ability of biracial children to inherit property through white fathers. In 1868, during Reconstruction, newly elected Black legislators successfully pushed for the repeal of Louisiana’s interracial marriage ban. An all-white legislature reenacted the ban in 1894.

During the 20th century, Louisiana legislators repeatedly broadened the state’s ban on interracial marriage. A set of laws passed in 1900 and 1914 forbade interracial couples who claimed residence in Louisiana from getting married outside the state. A 1914 enactment made it a crime to officiate an interracial wedding and exposed individuals who violated this law to the threat of imprisonment. Louisiana courts were likewise complicit in rigorously enforcing racial hierarchy. Local press boasted that “a large number of persons had been convicted” during the 1908-1910 period. These laws remained in effect until the Supreme Court declared anti-miscegenation statutes unconstitutional in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia. Louisiana did not formally repeal its ban on interracial marriage until five years later, in 1972.

A white judge ordered a Black mother to brutally beat her 15-year-old son in front of hundreds of white people in the Lexington, Kentucky, town square. Judge John J. Riley imposed this sentence upon the boy, Simon Searce, as punishment for getting into a physical altercation with a white boy.

Compelled by the judge’s order, Simon’s mother took her son straight from the courtroom, through the crowded streets, and to the town square filled with white residents. There, her son was stripped of his clothing and tied to a post, and she administered 20 lashes from a buggy whip. If Simon’s mother had refused to whip her son as ordered, she risked facing her own charges of contempt and also risked angering the judge who had power to impose an even harsher punishment upon her son.

This brutal punishment of a Black child was rooted in the prior era of enslavement. During that time, Black children, women, and men were whipped with impunity by enslavers and traffickers, leaving physical and emotional scars. Narratives of the experience of enslavement written by Black people who escaped bondage often described how white enslavers would cruelly force enslaved people to participate in the punishment of others. Forced to whip fellow enslaved Black people for running away, working too slowly, or other alleged offenses, these men and women were threatened with violence or death if they refused. For generations after Emancipation, white urban and rural communities alike witnessed and participated in the public spectacle of violent punishments inflicted upon Black people through racial terror lynching and deadly massacres targeting entire Black communities.

A narrative of racial difference—the belief that Black people were inferior to white people—was constructed to justify this treatment. That myth of white supremacy survived the formal abolition of enslavement and evolved to include the belief that Black people are dangerous criminals. Black people, even children like Simon, were frequently met with harsh and often violent retribution from courts after being accused of minor social transgressions or for defending themselves against attacks from white people. Even white press accounts of Simon Searce’s punishment recognized the whipping scene’s roots in enslavement; one headline reporting the events declared, “REMINDER OF OLD DAYS: Negro Boy Whipped at Post in Kentucky for Striking White Boy.”

This presumption of guilt and dangerousness persists today and continues to make people of color vulnerable to racial violence, wrongful convictions, and unfair treatment. Our nation’s history of racial injustice has polluted the environment in which the criminal justice system is administered. Understanding how today’s criminal justice crisis is rooted in our country’s history of racial injustice requires truthfully facing that history and its legacy.

Niecey Brown, a 74-year-old Black woman, died from injuries after an off-duty white police officer named George Booker forcibly entered her house and beat her to death with a bottle in Selma, Alabama.

During the early morning on June 10, Officer Booker arrived at Mrs. Brown’s home unannounced. According to reports, when Mrs. Brown answered the door, Officer Booker demanded entry so he could speak with one of her family members. When Mrs. Brown refused him entry and asked him to leave, Officer Booker kicked in the door and began beating her with a bottle, fracturing her skull.

Lige Brown, Mrs. Brown’s husband, came to his wife’s aid and shot the officer in the shoulder in self defense. The Browns’ two grandchildren were also home and witnessed the brutal attack on their grandmother. Two days later, Mrs. Brown, whose skull was crushed, died from her injuries, having never regained consciousness.

Officer Booker was arrested and charged with murder. During his trial in September 1945, his lawyer cautioned the all-white jury, “[I]f we convict this brave man who is upholding the banner of white supremacy by his actions, then we may as well give all our guns to the niggers and let them run the Black Belt.” The jury heeded this advice, ignoring eyewitness testimony and deliberating for only a few minutes before acquitting Officer Booker of all charges.

After the Civil War, the system of policing evolved as a way to maintain racial hierarchy. Though officers were meant to protect and serve their communities, in most cases police departments were restricted to white officers, many of whom used their power to subject Black people to indiscriminate violence. Officers who terrorized and brutalized Black people were rarely held accountable and were often instead exalted as defenders and upholders of racial hierarchy.

Officer James Calvert shot and killed Martin Chambers, an unarmed, 19-year-old Black man, and set off three days of unrest in Tampa, Florida.

Police claimed that they pursued Martin Chambers that day because he and two other young men were suspected of robbing a local photo supply store. While chasing the Black teen, Officer Calvert shot him in the back. According to newspaper accounts, Calvert, a white officer, shot Mr. Chambers when he would not stop running and aimed for his shoulder but missed. Martin Chambers died later that day, shortly after arriving at the hospital.

News of the shooting spread quickly throughout Tampa’s African American neighborhoods. That night, citizens began a public protest that escalated into three days of unrest in the Central Avenue area. As the investigation developed, state officials took testimony from Officer Calvert as well as three young Black men who witnessed the shooting.

The young men reported that Calvert shot Mr. Chambers after he had stopped running and had his hands up against a chain link fence. Calvert insisted that Martin Chambers was still running when shot and said he feared the unarmed 19-year-old would escape if he did not fire his weapon.

After just two days of investigation, officials ruled the shooting necessary. Announcing the decision, the state Attorney General Paul Antinori claimed Officer Calvert’s use of deadly force against an unarmed, fleeing young man was necessary because Martin Chambers was a felon evading arrest. Without acknowledging that Martin Chambers had not been convicted of a crime, and now could never be, Antinori asserted that people who broke the law accepted the risk that law enforcement might have to use force to do their jobs.

City officials and African American community leaders feared that the disappointing announcement would enrage the public and incite more unrest in the Central Avenue area, but the protests ended in despair.

Governors and representatives from 12 Southern states met in Richmond, Virginia, and resolved to defiantly resist the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Released less than a month earlier, the Brown decision struck down racial segregation laws—prevalent in the South—that required separate public schools for Black and white children.

Virginia Governor Thomas Stanley called the Richmond meeting to discuss the Southern states’ options for responding to Brown. The governors of Georgia, South Carolina, and Mississippi had already publicly stated their intent to maintain the separation of white and Black students, even if it required dissolving the public education systems in their respective states. The governors of Louisiana, North Carolina, and Virginia had been less radical in their public comments but still expressed interest in exploring legal methods of avoiding integration.

After a six-hour meeting, representatives from all but three of the 12 states present agreed that they would work to resist the desegregation ruling. Maryland, West Virginia, and Kentucky were the states that declined to make that commitment; notably, all three of those states also had comparatively small African American populations.

Bold and unapologetic vows of resistance, expressed by the highest figures in Southern state governments, inspired and encouraged white communities to wage their own campaigns of massive resistance, characterized by threats, economic intimidation, and violence that spanned decades and spread beyond the South. Those outcomes were the foreseeable result of public rhetoric that denounced desegregation as a threat to civilization and stoked fears of Black children—but political officials who sparked the flame largely denied culpability. “No one had any thought of doing anything wrong,” said Virginia’s Governor Stanley after the resistance meeting. “Everyone is just trying to find a solution to what they consider a major problem.”

The Brown decision signaled the start of a cultural shift in racial dynamics in the U.S. and also launched an organized mass movement of opposition. Most white Americans, especially in the South, supported segregation and resisted all efforts at integration. This campaign of massive resistance to integration in the South discussed at this meeting in 1954 was largely successful. By 1960, only 98 of Arkansas’s 104,000 Black students attended desegregated schools; as did 34 of 302,000 in North Carolina; 169 of 146,000 in Tennessee; and 103 of 203,000 in Virginia. In the five Deep South states, every single one of 1.4 million Black schoolchildren attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960. By the start of the 1964-65 school year, less than 3% of the South’s Black children attended school with white students, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina that number remained substantially below 1%. L

Fannie Lou Hamer and other civil rights activists were arrested in Winona, Mississippi, while returning from a voter education workshop in South Carolina. Mrs. Hamer and the other activists had been traveling in the “white” section of a Greyhound bus despite threats from the driver that he planned to notify local police at the next stop. When the bus arrived at the Winona bus depot, some of the activists attempted to eat at Staley’s Cafe but were refused service.

Mrs. Hamer, who had stayed on the bus, soon saw police officers arresting some of the activists. She got off the bus and was seized by a white police officer who began kicking her and arrested her. In August 1964, while testifying at the Democratic National Convention to urge party bosses to seat a group of Black Mississippi voters as delegates, Mrs. Hamer recalled the abuse she endured that night at the county jail.

“It wasn’t too long before three white men came to my cell,” she said. “One of these men was a state highway patrolman and he asked me where I was from. I told him Ruleville and he said, ‘We are going to check this.’ They left my cell and it wasn’t too long before they came back. He said, ‘You are from Ruleville all right,’ and he used a curse word. And he said, ‘We are going to make you wish you was dead.'”

The white officers then forced two African American prisoners to brutally beat Mrs. Hamer with loaded blackjacks; she was nearly killed. As Mrs. Hamer regained consciousness, she overheard one of the white officers propose, “We could put them SOBs in [the] Big Black [River] and nobody would ever find them.”

Mrs. Hamer suffered from life-long injuries following the attack, including permanent kidney damage. Mrs. Hamer died in 1977 at age 59. Lawyers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) filed suit against the Winona police who brutalized the activists, but an all-white jury acquitted them. Despite the trauma she experienced, Mrs. Hamer returned to Mississippi to continue organizing and remained active in civil rights causes until her death.

A city manager in St. Petersburg, Florida, ordered the closure of a public indoor swimming pool after a Black 19-year-old named David Isom used the facility.

In April 1957, St. Petersburg opened its segregated public swimming facilities to Black residents after the city ruled in favor of six Black community members who had filed a suit against the city government over its discriminatory practices.

Despite the ruling, St. Petersburg’s facilities remained segregated by practice for well over a year. Denied access to the public Spa Pool and Spa Beach downtown, Black residents were forced to travel to Tampa Bay where a much smaller, less well-maintained facility nicknamed the “South Mole” was open to them.

On June 8, Mr. Isom arrived at the all-white Spa Pool and purchased an entry ticket. There were roughly 50 white bathers in the pool when he arrived. He swam for less than a half hour and then continued with his day. “I just feel that it’s not a privilege to use the pool, but a right,” Mr. Isom stated.

After Mr. Isom’s departure, the pool manager promptly announced that the Spa Pool and the adjoining Spa Beach would both be closed immediately because of Mr. Isom’s swim, following orders from the city manager, Ross Windom. Both facilities remained closed until the following week, when the city council reopened them.

Throughout the 1950s, despite court rulings on the unconstitutionality of segregated facilities, white people across the South remained committed to preventing racial integration. As was the case in St. Petersburg, white officials in numerous cities voluntarily shut down public parks, swimming pools, and other recreational facilities—choosing to deny all citizens these benefits rather than to extend them to Black people.

A white Ku Klux Klan leader named William Simmons hired publicists to grow membership for the white supremacist organization.

Confederate veterans founded the Ku Klux Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1865. From beneath white hoods, they terrorized formerly enslaved Black people and their political allies with threats, beatings, and murder. The KKK strived to undermine Reconstruction and restore racial subordination in the South. Faced with federal opposition, the Klan dissolved by the 1870s but reemerged early in the next century.

In 1915, William Simmons revived the Klan atop Georgia’s Stone Mountain. That same year, the film The Birth of a Nation debuted, presenting Klansmen as saviors of white man’s civilization and white women’s chastity. President Woodrow Wilson screened the film at the White House.

Beginning in June 1920, the Klan launched a new public relations campaign that exploited white anxieties following the First World War. The “100 Percent Americanism” campaign promoted the Klan as defenders of the white American nation from defilement by Black people, Catholics, Jewish people, foreigners, and “moral offenders.” This “neat package of hatred” caught attention quickly, and within 16 months, nearly 100,000 new members had joined.

In 1921, public pressure prompted Congress to put on the appearance of investigating Klan violence and undue influence in local and state governments—but Congress quickly ended its inquiry when Klan officials denied the allegations. Immediately thereafter, new Klan membership applications jumped to 5,000 per day. By 1924, there were three million active members nationwide, including 35,000 in Detroit, 55,000 in Chicago, 200,000 in Ohio, 240,000 in Indiana, and 260,000 in Pennsylvania.

On June 5, 1966, equipped with only a helmet and walking stick, James Meredith began a 220-mile “March Against Fear” from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. Mr. Meredith, an activist who had integrated the University of Mississippi four years earlier, organized the one-man march to encourage African Americans in Mississippi to register to vote and to challenge the culture of fear perpetuated by white supremacists in the state.

Mr. Meredith crossed the Mississippi border on the morning of June 6, 1966, accompanied by a handful of friends and supporters. State police and FBI agents monitored the march while reporters and photographers trailed behind. A few miles south of Hernando, Mississippi, Aubrey Norvell, a white salesman, ambushed Mr. Meredith from the woods and shot him in the neck, head, and back. Before he started shooting, Mr. Norvell warned bystanders to disperse and twice shouted out Mr. Meredith’s name from the woods, but law enforcement did nothing to protect Mr. Meredith. He survived his injuries but was unable to immediately continue the march.

Enraged by the attack, civil rights leaders organized to continue the march to Jackson in Mr. Meredith’s place. On June 26, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, and Floyd McKissick were among the thousands of marchers who completed the trip after weathering harassment and physical abuse from angry mobs and law enforcement alike. Mr. Meredith rejoined the march shortly before it reached Jackson and led a rally at the state capitol. In November 1966, Aubrey Norvell pleaded guilty to assault and battery and was sentenced to two years in prison.

A white mob lynched Douglas Lemon and Rankin Moore, two Black men, as they were walking home from a community festival in Orange County, Texas. In the days leading up to the lynchings, white mobs targeted and terrorized the Black community in Orange County, furious that a jury had recently failed to convict a Black man named Jack White of killing a white man. In addition to lynching Mr. Lemon and Mr. Moore, the white mob shot into the Black district of town and fired at other Black men, who managed to survive. No one was ever held accountable.

Mr. Moore was walking home from a festival with two other Black men, whose names were not recorded in newspapers, when a mob of white men approached them on Orange Avenue, in a section of town where many Black residents lived. Without saying anything, the white mob opened fire on these three Black men, hitting Mr. Moore repeatedly with bullets and killing him instantly. Several white men fired at his two companions, both of whom managed to momentarily escape the mob. Another Black man, Mr. Lemon, later was found shot to death on a side street nearby, almost certainly another target of this white mob. The mob left Mr. Lemon’s body in the street until the next morning.

In the weeks prior, white mobs had targeted and terrorized the Black community in Orange County. Newspapers reported that this violence began because a jury failed to convict a different Black man, Jack White, of killing a white man. Terroristic violence targeting the Black community was common during this period, when white mobs used widespread, unchecked racial violence to instill fear in the entire Black community and discourage organized opposition to pervasive Jim Crow laws and other forms of racial oppression. This brutal violence was often unpredictable and arbitrary. Countless Black people—like Mr. Moore and Mr. Lemon—were victims of racial terror lynchings not because they were accused of any crime, but simply because they were Black and present when the lynch mob chose to act and could not locate its intended victim.

No one was ever held accountable for the lynchings of Douglas Lemon and Rankin Moore, who were two of at least five documented victims of racial terror lynching in Orange County, Texas between 1877-1950.

After objections from white residents, the Lucas Theater, Weis Theater, and Savannah Theater in Savannah, Georgia, announced that they would be restoring segregation policies that barred Black people from attending film screenings on an equal basis with white customers.

Two of the three theaters completely banned Black people from attending movie showings, while the third restricted Black customers to balcony seats. In spring 1963, all three theaters announced plans to implement a policy of racial integration. On June 3, the theaters for the first time opened their doors to all patrons equally regardless of race. White community members committed to segregation protested the change by picketing at Savannah City Hall.

Less than 24 hours later, the three theaters quickly reversed themselves and announced plans to restore their segregation practices the next day. One of the theater owners explained that he was withdrawing from the integration agreement “until other businesses also feel that it’s time to integrate.”

Savannah Mayor Malcolm MacLean condoned the continued racist policies and issued a statement maintaining that the theaters were “free to do whatever they wanted on the segregation issue.” Throughout the segregation era, it was common for local elected officials and white residents to resist integration even if segregation violated the law. Intense commitment to racial hierarchy defined many communities throughout the American South.

A mob of 1,500 white people lynched a Black man named Sam Bush on the courthouse lawn in Decatur, Illinois. Following the lynching, members of the mob distributed pieces of the rope used to hang Mr. Bush to the crowd as “souvenirs”—among those in the crowd were doctors, lawyers, and at least one minister.

The prior day, after news spread that a Black man had allegedly sexually assaulted a white woman, Mr. Bush was targeted, arrested, and held in the Macon County jail. During the era of racial terror lynchings, charges of sexual assault against Black men, even when made with unsubstantiated evidence, regularly aroused violent white mobs. Almost 25% of all lynchings involved allegations of inappropriate behavior between a Black man and a white woman that was characterized as “assault” or “sexual assault.” Allegations against Black people were rarely subject to scrutiny.

That evening, about 500 white people descended upon the jail, and 25 unmasked white men broke into the jail. Although multiple jailers were on duty and charged with protecting the men and women in their custody, they neglected to use any type of force to ward off the mob, who, for 20 minutes, sought to break down Mr. Bush’s jail cell door with hammers and chisels. During this era, it was not uncommon for lynch mobs to seize their victims out of police hands. In some cases, police officials were even found to be complicit or active participants in lynchings. Here, newspaper accounts reported that, despite the presence of dozens of law enforcement agents, “no one seemed to care much … [and] there was no talk of resistance” to disrupt the impending plans of the mob.

As the mob attempted to seize him from the jail, Mr. Bush proclaimed, “Gentlemen, you are killing an innocent man.” Undeterred, the mob dragged Mr. Bush from his jail cell.

By the time Mr. Bush was brought outside, 1,500 white people had gathered in front of a telegraph post directly in front of the courthouse lawn to lynch Mr. Bush. In the final moments of Mr. Bush’s life, he knelt to pray and, according to newspapers, called “on Jesus to come and take his soul and forgive the men who were murdering him.” The mob then stripped Mr. Bush of his clothes, forced him atop a car, and hanged him.

Though courts are supposed to be committed to equal justice under law, judges throughout the country have oftentimes been more committed to racial hierarchy than to the Constitution. On June 2, 1961, a Virginia judge upheld racial segregation in courtrooms, dismissing a lawsuit filed by three Black men who challenged the practice, describing as “totally without merit” their allegation that segregating courtrooms was degrading.

After being forced to sit separately from white community members in the municipal court in Petersburg, Virginia, George Wells, the Rev. R. G. Williams, and the Rev. Dr. Milton H. Reid sought an injunction to prevent Judge Herbert H. Gilliam, the chief judge of Petersburg’s municipal court, from continuing to subject Black community members to segregated seating. The lawsuit asserted that there was “no moral or legal justification for courtroom segregation,” calling the practice “degrading and shameful.”

Federal Judge Oren R. Lewis dismissed the lawsuit on June 2, 1961, describing the allegations of mistreatment as meritless since an equal number of seats were provided to each of the segregated sections for Black and white community members. He added that segregated seating in courtrooms was a “long established practice,” and that Judge Gilliam had kept Black and white people separate to “preserve order and decorum in his courtroom.”

The U.S. Supreme Court played a powerful role in protecting discriminatory Jim Crow laws for decades and shielding the South from challenges to its racial caste system. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court’s most well-known decision upholding segregation, the Court rejected Mr. Plessy’s argument that forced racial separation branded Black people as inferior and countered, “If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”

The Black community of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was left in ruins following several days of violent attacks by white mobs outraged that Black residents had organized to protect a Black man from lynching.

Tulsa’s Greenwood District, known as “Negro Wall Street,” was considered one of the wealthiest Black communities in the nation in 1921. Many residents worked and did business in central Tulsa, coming into contact with white men and women—some of whom resented their prosperity.

On May 30, while working in a building in downtown Tulsa, 19-year-old Dick Rowland boarded an elevator operated by Sarah Page, a 17-year-old white girl. When a store clerk heard a scream, he ran to the elevator to find Ms. Page. The clerk assumed that the young Black man in the elevator had tried to attack Ms. Page and quickly called police to arrest Dick Rowland.

Ms. Page told police that Mr. Rowland had startled her by touching her arm but insisted she did not want to press charges. Rumors soon spread, however, and turned into a sensationalized allegation that Dick Rowland had attempted rape. Police arrested Mr. Rowland at his Greenwood home and jailed him at the courthouse. The next night, a mob of white men gathered at the jail seeking to lynch him, but 30 armed Black men from Greenwood were there to ensure that the sheriff and deputies were able to protect Dick Rowland from that fate.

Enraged, members of the mob returned with firearms, and several white people were killed or wounded in the ensuing gunfight. When the Black men returned to Greenwood, white rioters followed and attacked the community, burning 40 city blocks, killing hundreds of Black residents, and displacing many more.

“In all of my experience I have never witnessed such scenes as prevailed in this city when I arrived at the height of the rioting,” a military official recalled days later in a New York Times news article. “Twenty-five thousand whites, armed to the teeth, were raging the city in utter and ruthless defiance of every concept of law and righteousness. Motor cars, bristling with guns swept through your city, their occupants firing at will.” Some researchers estimate that as many as 300 Black people were killed in the violence.

None of the white rioters were convicted of any crime for their violent attack, and survivors of the violence received no compensation for lost property. In 2001, 80 years after the massacre, Oklahoma approved funds to redevelop the area and build a memorial.

Today, the Greenwood Cultural Center stands in the same community where the massacre took place, committed to preserving and sharing the proud and tragic history of “Black Wall Street.”

A mob of over 1,000 white men and boys as young as 12 stormed the Grady County jail in Chickasha, Oklahoma, and lynched a 19-year-old Black man named Henry Argo. The mob shot him in the head and stabbed him, despite the presence of the National Guard who were ordered to protect him.

Mr. Argo had been accused of assaulting a white woman. During this era, race—rather than guilt—made African Americans vulnerable to indiscriminate suspicion and false accusation after a reported crime, even when there was no evidence tying them to the alleged offense. Almost 25% of all lynchings involved allegations of inappropriate behavior between a Black man and a white woman that was characterized as “assault” or “sexual assault.” Any action by a Black man that could be interpreted as seeking or desiring contact with a white woman might prove deadly, and the mere accusation of sexual impropriety by a Black man with a white woman regularly aroused violent mobs and ended in lynching. Throughout the lynching era, Black men were lynched for delivering a letter to a white woman and for entering a room where white women were sitting. Allegations against Black people were rarely subject to scrutiny.

Here, the mob was led by a white man named George Skinner who had accused Mr. Argo of assaulting his wife. The white mob assembled late the night before, on May 30, after Mr. Argo had been arrested and taken into custody. They attempted to use sledgehammers and battering rams to break into the jail and kill Mr. Argo. The National Guard was then deployed to protect Mr. Argo, but they failed.

The mob shot at the Guardsmen and also attempted to set fire to the jail dozens of times. The National Guard deployed tear gas to diffuse the crowds, but the fumes were so strong that they also allegedly drove away members of the Guard who had sworn to protect Mr. Argo, granting the mob, which was apparently unfazed by the tear gas, access to the jail. Members of the mob broke into the jailhouse, and one of them then shot Mr. Argo in the head.

Mr. Argo survived this initial round of violence but was kept in the jail even after suffering a gunshot wound to the head. After order was restored from this initial attack, and despite the fact that the jail had succumbed to an attack in the first place, the jail soon began allowing in visitors again. Mr. Skinner, the leader of the mob, was among those allowed to visit Mr. Argo. Once at the jail, Mr. Skinner stabbed Mr. Argo, who was rushed to the hospital and died shortly thereafter. Mr. Skinner and three other men were arrested but were immediately released without bond.

At the peak of racial terror lynchings in this country, it was not uncommon for lynch mobs to seize their victims from jails, prisons, courtrooms, or out of the hands of guards like in this case. Though they were armed and charged with protecting the men and women in their custody, police and other officials almost never used force to resist white lynch mobs intent on killing Black people. In some cases, police officials were even found to be complicit or active participants in lynchings.

In Los Angeles, California, white soldiers targeted Latino youth in a series of violent attacks that became known as the Zoot Suit Riots.

World War II fueled a 1943 population influx into Los Angeles, California, that coincided with an increase in petty crime. White residents blamed Latino youth, who often wore distinctive, colorful garments known as “zoot suits.” Many members of the military stationed in Los Angeles were also hostile to wearers of zoot suits, which they viewed as an affront to wartime rationing policies.

On May 30, a group of white soldiers got into a scuffle with some Latino youth—that small conflict sparked a violent and widespread riot. White sailors and soldiers spread throughout Los Angeles attacking any Latino youth wearing zoot suits, beating them with belt buckles and ropes and stripping them of their clothes. Law enforcement did not intervene in support of the Latino victims and instead charged them with vagrancy, while Los Angeles newspapers encouraged the violence and portrayed Latino youth as deserving of brutal treatment.

Critical observers, including those in the Black press, rejected the crime-control justifications for the attacks and linked “zoot suit” violence to historical prejudice against people of color in the U.S. “Zoot Riots are Race Riots,” declared a July 1943 article in The Crisis, a magazine published by the NAACP.

Incidents similar to these riots later occurred in cities throughout the U.S., as white members of the military and white employees of military contractors targeted Black and Latino youth with violence. By one estimate, 242 instances of racial violence occurred in 47 American cities in 1943 alone.

The U.S. Department of War—which had invited the families of veterans killed during World War I to visit their graves in Europe—denied a petition by Black mothers and spouses to travel on the same ship as white families and instead forced them to travel on segregated boats.

With the support of the NAACP, a group of 55 Black mothers and widows, known as Gold Star women, from 21 different states petitioned President Hoover, asking him to allow all of the grieving women to travel together.

“When the call to arms came from our government in 1917,” they wrote, “mothers, sisters and wives, regardless of race, color or creed, were asked to give their loved ones to the end that the world might be saved for democracy. This call we answered freely and willingly. In the years which have passed since death took our loved ones our anguish and sorrow have been assuaged by the realization that our loved ones who rest in the soil of France gave their lives to the end that the world might be a better place in which to live for all men, of all races and all colors.”

“Twelve years after the Armistice, the high principles of 1918 seem to have been forgotten. We who gave and who are colored are insulted by the implication that we are not fit persons to travel with other bereaved ones. Instead of making up parties of Gold Star Mothers on the basis of geographical location we are set aside in a separate group, Jim Crowed, separated and insulted.”

The petition was referred from President Hoover to the War Department, which ultimately declined the Black families’ request on May 29, 1930.

Though Black veterans bravely fought for democracy and freedom during World War I, many returned home to find their own freedom denied. It was not uncommon for family members of veterans to also be mistreated and subjected to racism and abuse, as was the case here.

Rather than being honored for their service, Black veterans and their families were often the targets of horrible discrimination, mistreatment, and even murder, at the hands of white Americans determined to reinforce white supremacy and to prevent the veterans from fighting for racial equality at home.

President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which authorized the president to grant land west of the Mississippi River in exchange for the lands of the American Indian tribes living primarily in the southeastern U.S. President Jackson’s message to Congress stated a double goal of the Indian Removal Act: freeing more land in southern states like Alabama and Mississippi, while also separating Native American people from “immediate contact with settlements of whites” in the hopes that they will one day “cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community.”

Although the act referred specifically to those “tribes and nations of Indians as may choose to exchange the lands where they now reside” and President Jackson described the removal as a “happy consummation” of the government’s “benevolent policy” toward Indigenous people, the legislation led to the brutal forced migration of thousands of Muscogee (Creek), Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Cherokee people to present-day Oklahoma. The journey came to be known as the “Trail of Tears.”

Numerous reports described epidemic illness, devastating exposure to the elements, and high rates of death along the migration paths. One eyewitness account published in the Arkansas Gazette stated, “No portion of American history can furnish a parallel of the misery and suffering at present endured by the emigrating Creeks.”

While Black journalist Ida B. Wells was away visiting Philadelphia, a white mob attacked and destroyed her newspaper’s office in Memphis, Tennessee, and threatened her with bodily harm if she returned to the city.

Just months before, in March, three Black men had been lynched in Memphis. Ms. Wells, 29, was a local Black schoolteacher, editor, and co-owner of The Free Speech and Headlight newspaper, and a friend of the three men. Though Ms. Wells was already a popular journalist and advocate of Black causes, the lynchings of her friends inspired her to examine the frequency of racial terror lynching and the false charges often used to justify it. She used the newspaper as a forum to share information she gathered.

Looking into the dominant white narrative that lynching was white manhood’s appropriate response to the rape of white women by Black men, Ms. Wells found that most Black lynching victims were actually killed for minor offenses or non-criminal transgressions such as failing to pay debts, public drunkenness, engaging in consensual interracial romance, or—as in the case of her friends—challenging white economic dominance.

“Nobody in this section of the country,” she wrote, “believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women.” Immediately, Memphis’s white newspapers denounced Ms. Wells’s editorial, deriding her as a “Black scoundrel” and fanning local white outrage. Just days later, the white mob attacked her newspaper and warned that she would be killed if she returned to the city.

Ms. Wells eventually settled in Chicago, where she married, raised a family, and remained a racial justice activist and vocal opponent of lynching until her death in 1931. Her investigations, speeches, and written publications challenged racial terror during her lifetime and ensured that critical history would not be lost or forgotten for future generations. Her work is a major foundation for EJI’s report, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, as well as the contents of the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice. A grove on the Memorial site is named in her honor.

The U.S. government enacted the eugenics-inspired Immigration Act of 1924, which completely prohibited immigration from Asia. Designed to limit all immigration to the U.S., the act was particularly restrictive for Eastern and Southern Europeans and Asians. Upon signing the act into law, President Calvin Coolidge remarked, “America must remain American.”

In 1917, Congress had passed a highly restrictive immigration law that required immigrants over age 16 to pass literacy tests and excluded immigrants from the “Asiatic Barred Zone.” Immigrants from China had been barred since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and this law expanded that ban to include many other Asian countries. The Act of 1924 eliminated immigration from Japan, violating the so-called “Gentleman’s Agreement” that had previously protected Japanese immigration from legal restrictions.

The 1924 Act also tightened the national origins quota system. Under this system, the number of immigrants allowed to come to the U.S. from a particular country was limited to the percentage of immigrants from that country already living in the U.S. The previous quota was based on population data from the 1910 census, but the 1924 Act based the quota on the 1890 census, which effectively lowered the quota numbers for non-white countries. The 1924 system also considered the national origins of the entire American population, including natural-born citizens, which increased the number of visas available to people from the British Isles and Western Europe. Finally, the 1924 Act excluded any person ineligible for citizenship, formalizing the ban on immigration from Asia based on existing laws that prohibited Asian immigrants from becoming naturalized citizens.

The act was supported by federally funded eugenicists who argued that “social inadequates” were polluting the American gene pool and draining taxpayer resources. Its quotas remained in place until 1965.

Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin forcefully pinned 46-year-old George Floyd to the ground and held his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck until he died.

A video of the incident showed Mr. Floyd, who was on the ground handcuffed, crying out “I can’t breathe” and begging for help while Officer Chauvin held his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes. Mr. Floyd eventually lost consciousness, and paramedics arrived to transport him to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

In the early evening on May 25, a Minneapolis store clerk contacted the police saying that Mr. Floyd had attempted to buy cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill. Four police officers—Derek Chauvin, Thomas Lane, Tou Thao, and J. Alexander Kueng—responded to the call and approached Mr. Floyd, who was sitting in his parked car nearby.

As Mr. Floyd attempted to step out of his vehicle, responding to the officers’ commands, Officer Lane drew his gun and pointed it at Mr. Floyd, who was unarmed. Body camera footage shows Officer Lane shouting expletives at Mr. Floyd, who continued apologizing to the officer though he had done nothing but follow their orders.

Soon after, Officers Lane and Kueng handcuffed Mr. Floyd and brought him to their police car across the street. As they forced Mr. Floyd into the back seat, he begged them to let him wait outside, telling them he was claustrophobic. When the officers continued forcing Mr. Floyd into the back of the car, he made his way to the other side of the vehicle and asked them to let him lie on the curb instead.

The three officers quickly pinned Mr. Floyd to the ground even though he remained handcuffed. Officer Chauvin knelt on Mr. Floyd’s neck while Officers Kueng and Lang held down his legs and wrists. Though Mr. Floyd yelled several times for help and bystanders begged the officers to attend to him, the officers continued to choke Mr. Floyd.

Officer Chauvin continued to press his knee into Mr. Floyd’s neck even after he became unresponsive and Officer Kueng failed to find a pulse.

Following protests in Minneapolis, the officers involved in Mr. Floyd’s death were fired. Reports later showed that Officer Chauvin had received at least 22 complaints over his two decades on the police force, and was disciplined for only one of them.

In April 2021, Derek Chauvin was convicted of murder in state court and sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison. He also pleaded guilty in federal court and was sentenced to 21 years in federal prison. He is serving the two sentences concurrently in federal custody. The other three officers involved in Mr. Floyd’s killing were each convicted in federal court and sentenced to several years in prison.

The bystander video of Mr. Floyd’s murder was widely shared, sparking global outcry over the plague of lethal police violence against Black people, systemic racism, and the presumption of guilt and dangerousness that people of color continue to be burdened with today.

Shortly before midnight, a mob of dozens of armed white men broke into the Okfuskee County jail in Okemah, Oklahoma, and abducted Laura Nelson and her young son, L.D. The mob took the Black woman and boy six miles away and hanged them from a bridge over the Canadian River, close to the town’s Black neighborhood; according to some reports, members of the mob also raped Mrs. Nelson, who was about 28 years old according to census records, before lynching her alongside her son. Their bodies were found the next morning.

A few weeks before, local police had reportedly come to the Nelsons’ cabin and accused Mr. Nelson of stealing meat. When a white deputy sheriff was shot and killed while searching the cabin, Mrs. Nelson and L.D.—who was reported as 14-16 years old in news reports, but was more likely just 12 years old according to census records—were accused of killing him. The entire Nelson family was arrested and jailed after the deputy’s shooting, and some reports indicate that a 2-year-old daughter—listed as Carry Nelson in the 1910 census—was also with Mrs. Nelson in jail.

The prosecution’s presentation at the preliminary hearing raised doubts about whether the State had sufficient evidence for a conviction. Many Black people were lynched across the U.S. under accusations of murder or assault. During this era of racial terror, mere suggestions of Black-on-white violence could provoke mob violence and lynching. Though these communities had developed and functioning judicial systems, white defendants were more likely to face trial while Black people regularly suffered death at the hands of a violent mob, without trial or any opportunity to present evidence of innocence or self-defense. In this case, after Laura and L.D. Nelson were lynched, it was revealed that they claimed to have shot the deputy as he reached for his gun and seemed about to shoot Mr. Nelson, unprovoked.

Before any trial could take place, however, newspaper accounts sensationalized the case, misreporting the mother’s and son’s ages and presuming their guilt. Press reports described Laura Nelson as “very small of stature, very black, about thirty-five years old and vicious,” while L.D. was described as “slender and tall, yellow and ignorant” and “raged.”

By the night of the lynching, Mrs. Nelson’s husband and L.D.’s father—whose first name is reported as Oscar or Austin in surviving records—had already been convicted of a lesser offense, sentenced to a prison term, and sent to the penitentiary; he was not present to defend his family against the mob. Unconfirmed reports vary regarding the fate of the Nelsons’ young daughter; some claim she was found drowned in the river, while others claim she was found alive and taken in to be raised by a local Black family.

After a Black boy reportedly found Laura Nelson’s and L.D. Nelson’s hanging corpses at the bridge the next morning, hundreds of white people from Okemah came to view the bodies. Some even posed on the bridge to have their photos taken with the bodies of the dead Black woman and boy. Those photographs were later reprinted as postcards and sold at novelty stores.

The mob’s choice to deprive the Nelsons of their basic rights to due process and hang them on a bridge frequented by Black people and near where many local Black residents lived was meant to maintain white supremacy by sending a message of terror and intimidation to the entire Black community. “While the general sentiment is adverse to the method,” the Okemah Ledger wrote a day after the lynchings, “it is generally thought that the negroes got what would have been due them.” When a special grand jury was called to investigate the lynching, the district judge instructed the white jurors to be mindful of their duty as members “of a superior race and greater intelligence to protect this weaker race.” No one was indicted, prosecuted, or held legally accountable for lynching Laura and L.D. Nelson.

A newspaper ad was placed seeking the return of Ona “Oney” Judge, an enslaved Black woman who had “absconded from the household of the President of the United States,” George Washington. Ms. Judge had successfully escaped enslavement two days earlier, fleeing Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and settling in freedom in New Hampshire.

Known to the Washingtons as “Oney,” Ms. Judge was “given” to Martha Washington by her father and had been held enslaved as part of the Washington estate since she was 10 years old. As George Washington gained political clout, Ms. Judge traveled with the family to states with varying laws regarding slavery—including lengthy residence in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act of 1780 declared that Black people enslaved by non-residents of the state were legally freed after living in Pennsylvania for six continuous months. To avoid enforcement of the law and prevent the men and women they enslaved from being legally freed, the Washingtons regularly sent Ms. Judge and others in the household out of state for brief periods, to restart the six-month residency requirement.

When her eldest granddaughter, Eliza Custis, married, Martha Washington promised to leave Ms. Judge to the new couple as a “gift” in her will. Distressed that she would be doomed to enslavement even after Martha Washington died, Ms. Judge resolved to run in 1796. On the night of May 21, while the Washingtons were packing to return to Mount Vernon, Ms. Judge made her escape from Philadelphia on a ship destined for Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She had befriended many enslaved people in Philadelphia and they helped her to send her belongings to New Hampshire before her escape.

The Washingtons tried several times to apprehend Ms. Judge, hiring head-hunters and issuing runaway advertisements like the one submitted on May 23. In the ad, she is described as “a light mulatto girl, much freckled, with very Black eyes and bushy Black hair. She is of middle stature, slender, and delicately formed, about 20 years of age.” The Washingtons offered a $10 reward for Ms. Judge’s return to bondage—but she evaded capture, married, had several children, and lived for more than 50 years as a free woman in New Hampshire. She died there, still free, on February 25, 1848.

A white mob numbering in the thousands brutally lynched a Black man named Ell Persons in Memphis, Tennessee.

Authorities in Memphis had arrested Mr. Persons after a killing that had taken place earlier in the month. During this era, the deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society burdened Black people with a presumption of guilt that often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered. A later investigation concluded that no evidence tied Mr. Persons to the killing.

The local sheriff and his men tortured Mr. Persons while he was in their custody. The authorities beat, whipped, and threatened Mr. Persons until he was said to have confessed. Black people accused of crimes in the South during this era were regularly subjected to physical and psychological violence during police interrogations. Local newspapers eagerly reported these confessions as truthful justifications for the brutal lynchings that followed, but without fair investigation, the confession of a lynching victim was always more reliable evidence of fear than guilt.

Before Mr. Persons could receive a trial, a white mob seized him from the authorities, who did little to stop them. Local newspapers advertised the planned time and location of the lynching in advance, and on May 22, thousands of people congregated at the site of the lynching near the Wolf River. One newspaper later reported that nearly 10,000 people were present. Newspapers described the day as having a “holiday” atmosphere and a “spirit of carnival.” Vendors sold food and drink to members of the mob. Many local parents sent notes to schools to excuse their children’s absences so they could attend the lynching.

When the crowd was assembled, the leaders of the mob dragged Mr. Persons to a clearing, tied him to a log, covered him with gasoline, and burned him alive.

After Mr. Persons was lynched, members of the mob fought each other for pieces of his body and clothes to take home as souvenirs. They then drove through town displaying Mr. Persons’ remains to terrorize the rest of the Black residents of Memphis.

Though the mob lynched Mr. Persons in broad daylight and the mob members did not attempt to hide their identities, no one was ever held accountable for lynching Mr. Persons.

Ell Persons was one of at least 236 documented Black victims of racial terror lynching killed in Tennessee between 1877 and 1950 and one of 20 victims killed in modern-day Shelby County.

More than 1,000 Black residents and civil rights leaders including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth attended a service at Montgomery’s First Baptist Church. The service, organized by the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, was planned to support an interracial group of civil rights activists known as the Freedom Riders. As the service took place, a white mob surrounded the church and vandalized parked cars.

The Freedom Riders began riding interstate buses in 1961 to test Supreme Court decisions that prohibited discrimination in interstate passenger travel. Their efforts were unpopular with white Southerners who supported continued segregation, and they faced violent attacks in several places along their journey. The day before the Montgomery church service, the Riders had arrived in Montgomery and faced a brutal attack at the hands of hundreds of white people armed with bats, hammers, and pipes. The May 21 service was planned by the local Black community to express support and solidarity.

As the surrounding mob grew larger and more violent, Dr. King called U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy from the church’s basement and requested help. Kennedy sent U.S. Marshals to dispel the riot; the growing mob pelted them with bricks and bottles, and the marshals responded with tear gas.

When police arrived to assist the marshals, the mob broke into smaller groups and overturned cars, attacked Black homes with bullets and firebombs, and assaulted Black people in the streets. Alabama Governor John Patterson declared martial law in Montgomery and ordered National Guard troops to restore order. Authorities arrested 17 white rioters and, by midnight, the streets were calm enough for those in the church to leave.

Three days later, troops escorted the Freedom Riders as they departed to Jackson, Mississippi, where they would face further resistance.

Freedom Riders traveling by bus through the South to challenge segregation laws were brutally attacked by a white mob at the Greyhound Station in downtown Montgomery, Alabama.

Several days before, on May 16, the Riders faced mob violence in Birmingham so serious that it threatened to prematurely end their campaign. The Freedom Riders were initially organized by the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), but after the Birmingham attacks, an interracial group of 22 Tennessee college students, known as the Nashville Student Movement, volunteered to take over and continue the ride through Alabama and Mississippi to New Orleans.

These new Freedom Riders reached Birmingham on May 17 but were immediately arrested and returned to Tennessee by Birmingham police. Undeterred, the Riders and additional reinforcements from Tennessee returned to Birmingham on May 18. Under pressure from the federal government, Alabama Governor John Patterson agreed to authorize state and city police to protect the Riders during their journey from Birmingham to Montgomery.

At Montgomery city limits, state police abandoned the Riders’ bus; the Riders continued to the bus station unescorted and found no police protection waiting when they arrived. Montgomery Public Safety Commissioner L.B. Sullivan had promised the Ku Klux Klan several minutes to attack the Riders without police interference, and, upon arrival, the Riders were met by a mob of several hundred angry white people armed with baseball bats, hammers, and pipes.

Montgomery police watched as the mob first attacked reporters and then turned on the Riders. Several were seriously injured, including a college student named Jim Zwerg and future U.S. Congressman John Lewis. John Seigenthaler, an aide to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was knocked unconscious. Ignored by ambulances, two injured Riders were saved by good samaritans who transported them to nearby hospitals.

A white mob from Brooks County, Georgia, lynched Mary Turner, a Black woman who was eight months pregnant, at Folsom’s Bridge 16 miles north of Valdosta for speaking publicly against the lynching of her husband the day before. The mob bound her feet, hanged her from a tree with her head facing down, threw gasoline on her, and burned the clothes off her body. Mrs. Turner was still alive when the mob took a large butcher’s knife to her abdomen, cutting the unborn baby from her body. When the baby fell from Mary Turner, a member of the mob crushed the crying baby’s head with his foot. The mob then riddled Mrs. Turner’s body with hundreds of bullets, killing her.

Mary Turner’s husband, Hayes Turner, had been lynched the day before. Hayes Turner was accused of being an accomplice in the killing of a notorious white farmer, Hampton Smith, who was well known for his abuse of Black farm workers. Mr. Smith would bail Black people accused of petty crimes out of jail and then require them to work off the fine at his farm. Sidney Johnson, a Black man working to pay a legal fee for “rolling dice,” confessed to killing Mr. Smith during a quarrel about being overworked. Police officers killed Mr. Johnson in a shootout. When news reached the white community, Mr. Turner and other Black farm workers who had previously been abused by Mr. Smith were targeted and accused of conspiracy.

Many Black people during this time were lynched based on mere accusations of murder against white people. The same was true here, as at least seven confirmed Black individuals were lynched by the white mob in response to Hampton Smith’s death, inflicting community-wide racial terror violence.

Mrs. Turner was grieving and spoke out against her husband’s death, promising to take legal action. Enraged by this, the white mob made an example out of Mrs. Turner, despite having no reason to fear actual legal repercussions from her promise as Black people at the time were not afforded judicial process. The white mob lynched Mary Turner and her unborn child to maintain white supremacy, silence her, and communicate to the Black community that no dissent from the racial order would be tolerated. No member of the mob was ever held accountable for the lynching of Mary Turner and her unborn baby.

The grotesque slaughter of a Black woman eight months pregnant reveals a great deal about the way in which Black women were dehumanized with impunity.

The U.S. Supreme Court released a 7-1 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, a case challenging racial segregation laws in Louisiana, holding that state-mandated segregation in intrastate travel was constitutional as long as the separate accommodations were equal.

The Court had heard arguments a month earlier on April 13. Homer Plessy, a Black man who had been arrested for boarding a “white only” passenger car, argued that the state segregation law violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, which abolished slavery and established equal protection of the laws.

In 1890, Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act, requiring railroad companies to provide separate passenger cars for Black and white travelers. The Comite des Citoyens (“Committee of Citizens”), a New Orleans group of Black men who employed civil disobedience to challenge segregation laws, wanted to challenge the law’s constitutionality. When Mr. Plessy—a Black man—was arrested for boarding a “white only” passenger car, the committee helped him to appeal, and the case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

On May 18, Justice Henry Brown wrote the majority opinion, which held that the Louisiana law did not violate the Thirteenth or Fourteenth Amendments because it did not interfere with an individual’s personal freedom or liberties. He claimed the Court could uphold the notion that all people are equal before the law in political and civil rights but could not override social inferiority based upon the distinction of race.

Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented, writing that the Louisiana law was in direct violation of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments’ promise of protection of all civil rights related to freedom and citizenship. Justice Harlan specified that the law was a blatant attempt to infringe upon the civil rights of African Americans and that the Court inappropriately yielded to public sentiment at the expense of constitutional safeguards. He predicted the Court’s decision would lead to racial confrontation.

Plessy v. Ferguson legally sanctioned racial segregation by establishing the “separate but equal” doctrine as national law. Public services and accommodations were segregated for decades, until the Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 overruled the application of “separate but equal” in public education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited it in public accommodations.

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that segregation in public education was unconstitutional, overturning the “separate but equal” doctrine in place since 1896 and sparking massive resistance among white Americans committed to racial inequality.

The Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education grew out of several cases challenging racial segregation in school districts across America, filed as part of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s strategy to bar the practice nationwide. In the named case, a Black man named Oliver Brown sued the Topeka, Kansas, Board of Education for refusing to allow his daughter, Linda, to attend the elementary school nearest her house solely due to her race.

When the case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall argued that segregated schools were harmful and saddled Black children with feelings of inferiority. Writing the majority opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren endorsed this argument and declared that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

The decision outraged white segregationists as much as it energized civil rights activists. Throughout the South, where state constitutions and state law mandated segregated schools, white people decried the decision as a tyrannical exercise of federal power. Many Southern white leaders and their constituents implemented a strategy of “massive resistance” to delay desegregation. These groups, made up of elected officials, business leaders, community residents, and parents, deployed a range of tactics and weapons against the growing movement for civil rights—including bombing and murdering civil rights activists, criminalizing peaceful protest, and wielding economic intimidation and threats to chill Black participation in civil rights activities.

These tactics worked: By 1960, only 98 of Arkansas’s 104,000 Black students attended desegregated schools, as did 34 of 302,000 in North Carolina, 169 of 146,000 in Tennessee, and 103 of 203,000 in Virginia. In the five Deep South states, every single one of 1.4 million Black schoolchildren attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960. By the start of the 1964-65 school year, less than 3% of the South’s African American children attended school with white students, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina that number remained substantially below 1%.

The Brown decision signaled the start of a massive cultural shift in racial dynamics in the U.S. and also launched an organized mass movement of opposition. Most white Americans, especially in the South, supported segregation.

White residents of Delray Beach, Florida, burned a cross to terrorize Black residents and prevent them from using the city’s “public” beach that had been open to only white visitors for decades.

The day before this racial violence, U.S. District Judge Emmett C. Choate had dismissed a federal civil rights lawsuit in which nine Black Delray residents had sued for access to Delray’s municipal beach. Though Black citizens had been barred by terrorism and de facto segregation for decades, the Delray Beach City Commission tried to avoid federal intervention by informing the court that the city had no written policy denying Black residents access to the beach. In dismissing the lawsuit on this basis, Judge Choate expressly recognized that the city was legally authorized to continue practicing segregation and recommended that the commission segregate portions of the beach by race.

Concerned that the commission’s statement denying a formal segregation policy threatened to weaken years of rigidly enforced, race-based exclusion, white citizens decided to take violent action to let Black residents know they were still unwelcome. After white residents burned a cross to send that message, local law enforcement declined to investigate or to hold white citizens accountable. On May 20, a group of Black residents attempted to gain access to the beach, only to be forced out by an angry gathering of 70 white people demanding they leave. Over the next several days, white citizens began stockpiling weapons from stores in Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, anticipating the return of Black beachgoers and preparing to respond with lethal violence.

On May 23, the city commission enacted a formal segregation ordinance that codified years of de facto segregation and barred Black residents from using the Delray municipal beach or pool. Within three weeks of the city’s enactment, three neighboring beachfront towns—Riviera Beach, Lake Worth, and Daytona Beach—had adopted identical segregation ordinances.

Over the next month, the Delray Beach City Commission attempted to get Black leaders in the Delray Civic League to “cooperate” in keeping their fellow Black residents off the municipal beach. The city initially proposed the construction of a separate and unequal beach for Black residents on a 100-foot strip of rocky land. Black leaders rejected this proposal, demanding access to city facilities on equal terms with white citizens. The Civic League requested a 500-foot section of beach and the immediate construction of a pool for Black residents.

In July, the city finally agreed to construct a swimming pool for Black residents, but conditioned the pool’s construction on continued exclusion of Black residents from the municipal beach. The city repealed the segregation ordinance, returning to its decades-long policy of de facto segregation, and subsequently abandoned all plans to construct a beach for Black residents.

Eleven days after National Guard troops fired into a crowd of unarmed anti-war protesters at Kent State University in Ohio, local and state police in Mississippi opened fire on a group of students at Jackson State College in Jackson. In a 30-second barrage of gunfire, police fired 150 rounds into the crowd, killing two Black students and injuring dozens more.

On the evening of May 14, students were gathered on Lynch Street, a road connecting the predominately Black college campus to the more affluent white neighborhood in Jackson. Police reports allege that the students had been throwing rocks and bottles at passing white motorists; students and white motorists had a tense relationship because the white motorists would yell racial slurs and taunt the students as they passed. Later that evening, a person not believed to be a student set fire to a dump truck. Firemen arriving to respond to the blaze called police, claiming to need protection from the gathering students.

When one glass bottle was allegedly thrown into the crowd of police shortly after midnight, officers responded by indiscriminately opening fire on the crowd of students and riddling a women’s dorm with bullets. Phillip Gibbs, 21, and James Green, 17, were killed. Officers later claimed a sniper in the women’s dorm had shot at them first. The President’s Commission on Campus Unrest later called the shootings an “unreasonable, unjustified overreaction,” but ultimately no one was charged. A local grand jury blamed the students, arguing that people who engage in civil disobedience must accept the risk of injury or death by law enforcement.

In 1974, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the officers had overreacted but they could not be held liable for the two deaths that resulted. In 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

In 1961, a group of civil rights activists known as the Freedom Riders began a desegregation campaign. The interracial group rode together on interstate buses headed south from Washington, D.C., and patronized the bus stations along the way, to test the enforcement of Supreme Court decisions that prohibited discrimination in interstate passenger travel. Their efforts were unpopular with white Southerners who supported segregation. The group encountered early violence in South Carolina but continued their trip toward the planned destination of New Orleans.

On Mother’s Day, a Greyhound bus carrying Freedom Riders arrived at the Anniston, Alabama, bus station shortly after 1 pm to find the building locked shut. Led by Ku Klux Klan leader William Chapel, a mob of 50 men armed with pipes, chains, and bats smashed windows, slashed tires, and dented the sides of the Riders’ bus. Though warned hours earlier that a mob had gathered at the station, local police did not arrive until after the assault had begun.

Once the attack subsided, police pretended to escort the damaged bus to safety but instead abandoned it at the Anniston city limits. Soon after the police departed, another armed white mob surrounded the bus and began breaking windows. The Freedom Riders refused to exit the vehicle but received no aid from two watching highway patrolmen. When a member of the mob tossed a firebomb through a broken bus window, others in the mob attempted to trap the passengers inside the burning vehicle by barricading the door. They fled when the fuel tank began to explode. The Riders were able to escape the ensuing flames and smoke through the bus windows and main door, only to be attacked and beaten by the mob outside.

After police finally dispersed their attackers, the Freedom Riders received limited medical care. They were soon evacuated from Anniston in a convoy organized by Birmingham Civil Rights leader the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth.

Six years after Brown v. Board of Education, South Carolina’s legislature passed a bill to preserve school segregation and stall Black citizens’ attempts to integrate public schools using the authority of federal courts.

On the last day of the 1960 legislative session, South Carolina lawmakers voted for a bill that, on its face, repealed language that declared the state would provide funding to “racially segregated schools only.” However, as local media accurately reported, the legislation was a “maneuver to thwart integration by the fiction of seeming to give in a little to it.” The bill did nothing to change another state law that mandated the closure of any school for white students that admitted a Black student. The bill also left in place provisions requiring racial segregation on school buses and in cafeterias.

In 1951, state lawmakers established the South Carolina School Committee, the first of its kind in the country. Despite its seemingly neutral name, the committee was composed of state legislators and members appointed by the governor and conducted “enormous research” during the 1950s and 1960s to identify ways to circumvent the Constitution and keep schools segregated. The press regularly referred to the group as a “segregation committee,” seemingly reflecting knowledge of its true purpose. During the 1956-1957 legislative sessions, the committee’s work led South Carolina lawmakers to pass the law restricting state funding to “racially segregated schools” and to also design a school-choice policy that allowed the state to continue operating all-white schools.

Committee members also designed this 1960 repeal bill as a way to “fight integration suits while in no way relaxing restrictions on the mixing of the races.” Legislators and other members of the Committee feared that keeping laws that included explicit language that mandated segregation would enable aggrieved Black students to successfully challenge South Carolina’s racist policies in federal court. By removing the plain language of segregation, the Committee aimed to keep Black plaintiffs “languishing for years” in state court by depriving them of the strong evidence of discriminatory intent, while still achieving the same result: segregated schools. Representative Joe Rogers of Clarendon County, South Carolina, a member of the Committee, publicly endorsed the new legislation and assured ardent segregationists that South Carolina was “as resolute as ever” in maintaining racial apartheid.

South Carolina Governor Ernest Hollings also applauded the legislation repealing the explicit segregation language, declaring it a move to “bolster, rather than to weaken, the state’s rigid stand against mixing the races in public schools.” However, lawmakers and the governor delayed signing the bill into law, since federal intervention was not yet actively enforcing desegregation in the state. In August 1960, the Committee reported that public schools remained “orderly” and segregated, and Governor Hollings let the bill quietly die. In 1961, as South Carolina faced the loss of federal education funding due to its insistence on maintaining racial segregation, the Committee revived the bill and Governor Hollings signed it into law in July 1961. School desegregation did not begin in the state for another two years.

The massive resistance campaign that white communities waged against efforts to desegregate public schools in the U.S. was largely successful in delaying implementation of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in the South. Until the fall of 1960, every single one of the 1.4 million Black school children in the five states of the Deep South attended segregated schools. By the start of the 1964-65 school year, less than 3% of the South’s Black children attended school with white students, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, that number remained substantially below 1%. In 1967, 13 years after Brown was decided, a report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights observed that white violence and intimidation against Black people “continue[d] to be a deterrent to school desegregation.”

The State of Louisiana adopted a new constitution with numerous restrictive provisions intended to exclude African American men from civic participation. At this time in the U.S., women of all races remained barred from voting, while Black men had recently gained the right to vote under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The new Louisiana Constitution, however, created a poll tax, literacy and property-ownership requirements, and a complex voter registration form all designed and enforced to disproportionately disenfranchise Black male voters.

The year 1865 included the Confederacy’s defeat in the Civil War, widespread emancipation, and the abolition of slavery. All of these developments threatened to overturn Southern culture and social relations, which were based on white supremacy and racial hierarchy. After Reconstruction ended in 1877 and white politicians and lawmakers regained control and power in the South, many efforts were made to restore that racial order through very strict laws that stripped Black people of many of their new civil rights—including the right to vote. In Louisiana, framers explicitly expressed their goal to “purify the electorate.”

When the restrictive voting provisions were first proposed for the 1898 Louisiana Constitution, some white officials expressed concern that the property and literacy requirements would also disenfranchise an estimated 25% of the white male population of voting age. In response, lawmakers drafted a “Grandfather Clause” which created an exception for those whose ancestors were registered to vote before 1867. This clause enabled many illiterate and poor white men to get around the literacy and property requirements. Black people remained blocked because Louisiana laws before 1867 disenfranchised nearly all Black men—especially those who were enslaved.

The 1898 Louisiana Constitution also eliminated the requirement of unanimous jury verdicts, allowing as much as a 9-3 split to still stand as a conviction. Because the U.S. Constitution now prevented states from wholly barring Black people from jury service, this provision was enacted to render small numbers of Black jurors inconsequential. Thomas Semmes, a former Confederate senator and head of the convention’s judiciary committee, praised the provision for success in its goal “to establish the supremacy of the white race in this State to the extent to which it could be legally and Constitutionally done.”

The 1898 Louisiana Constitution eliminated federally enforced voting rules that had enfranchised Black men in Louisiana during Reconstruction. As a result, in a state with 650,804 Black residents, the number of Black registered voters dropped from 130,000 before the new Constitution to just 5,000 by 1900. By 1904, the number dropped to just 1,000.

Throughout the Southern states, disenfranchisement laws targeted Black communities for generations. Louisiana’s 1898 Constitution was revised slightly in 1913, but most of its restrictive language remained until 1972. The non-unanimous jury rule remained in effect for more than a century, until Louisiana voters approved a Constitutional amendment to abolish it in November 2018.

A white mob tortured and lynched a young Black man named Henry Patterson in LaBelle, Florida, for attempting to ask for a drink of water.

Mr. Patterson had been working on a road construction project in LaBelle when he stopped at a nearby house to ask for a drink of water. A white woman who lived in the home saw Mr. Patterson walking towards the house and, frightened by the sight of a Black man approaching, ran screaming into the street.

Mr. Patterson fled the area in fear, but neighbors quickly assumed that the woman had been assaulted and began forming a search party to chase Mr. Patterson down. A mob of about 200 people—which included several local officials and prominent citizens—chased Mr. Patterson through the town, shooting at him several times and wounding him.

For their own amusement, the mob briefly allowed Mr. Patterson to outrun them. Mr. Patterson desperately searched for a place to hide, but as he attempted to jump a wire fence, the mob shot at him again and hit him. Mr. Patterson continued to bleed out as the mob placed him on a running board and paraded him down LaBelle’s main streets. He was still alive as members of the mob kicked him, stomped on his face, and cut off pieces of his flesh to wave at onlookers.

As the mob approached LaBelle’s courthouse, they hanged Mr. Patterson’s mutilated body from a nearby tree.

Though a local judge personally identified 17 white men he had seen in the mob—including a tax assessor, a town marshal, a school board member, a mail carrier, and the son of a county commissioner—a grand jury later failed to indict a single person involved in Mr. Patterson’s killing.

The South Carolina General Assembly enacted the “Bill for the better ordering and governing of Negroes and other slaves in this province,” also known as the Negro Act of 1740. The law prohibited enslaved African people from growing their own food, learning to read, moving freely, assembling in groups, and earning money. It also authorized white enslavers to whip and kill enslaved Africans for being “rebellious.”

South Carolina implemented this act after the unsuccessful Stono Rebellion in 1739, in which approximately 50 enslaved Black people resisted bondage and waged an uprising that killed between 20 and 25 white people. In addition to establishing a racial caste and property system in the colony, the assembly sought to prevent any additional rebellions by including provisions that mandated a ratio of one white person for every 10 enslaved people on a plantation. The Negro Act treated enslaved Africans as human chattel and revoked all forms of civil rights.

The law served as a model for other states; Georgia authorized slavery within its borders in 1750 and enacted its own “slave code” five years later. In 1865, the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment legally abolished slavery in the U.S. except as punishment for crime, but discriminatory Black Codes and Jim Crow laws developed to maintain the oppression of Black people, ensuring that the legacy of the Negro Act of 1740 and similar laws remained present throughout the country for more than two centuries.

21-year-old John Lewis, a young Black civil rights activist, was severely beaten by a mob at the Rock Hill, South Carolina, Greyhound bus terminal. A few days earlier, Mr. Lewis and 12 other Freedom Riders had left Washington, D.C., on a Greyhound bus headed to New Orleans. The Freedom Riders—seven of whom were Black and six of whom were white—sat interracially on the bus, planning to test a Supreme Court ruling that made segregation in interstate transportation illegal.

The Freedom Riders rode safely through Virginia and North Carolina but experienced violence when they stopped at the bus station in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and tried to enter the white waiting room together. John Lewis and two other Riders were brutally attacked before a white police officer, who had been present the entire time, finally intervened. The Freedom Riders responded with nonviolence and decided not to press charges, continuing their protest ride further south where they experienced continued violence from white mobs in Alabama.

Nearly 47 years later, Rock Hill Mayor Doug Echols apologized to John Lewis, by then a U.S. Congressman representing Georgia. In 2009, one of his attackers, former Klansman Elwin Wilson, also apologized. “I don’t hold the town any more responsible than those men who beat us,” Congressman Lewis has said about the community of Rock Hill, “and I saw those men as victims of the same system of segregation and hatred.”

Steven Joshua Dinkle of the Ozark, Alabama, chapter of the International Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), burned a cross in a local Black neighborhood. Joined by a KKK recruit named Thomas Windell Smith, Mr. Dinkle targeted the neighborhood because of the race of its residents.

Confederate veterans founded the Ku Klux Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1865. From beneath white hoods, they terrorized formerly enslaved Black people and their political allies with threats, beatings, and murder. They strived to undermine Reconstruction and restore racial subordination in the South. Faced with federal opposition, the Klan dissolved by the 1870s but reemerged early in the next century at the height of the era of racial terror. By the 21st century, several offshoot Klan organizations remained a small but persistent source of hate violence.

On the night of May 8, Mr. Dinkle and Mr. Smith built a wooden cross about six feet tall and drove it over to the entrance of the Black neighborhood around 8 pm. They dug a hole in the ground in view of several houses, then stood the cross upright in the hole and lit it on fire before driving away.

Both men were arrested and pled guilty to conspiracy to violate housing rights. At Mr. Dinkle’s plea hearing, he admitted that he burned the cross in order to scare the members of the African American community in Ozark and that he was motivated to burn the cross because he did not like that African Americans were occupying homes in that area.

The Reverend George Lee, co-founder of the Belzoni, Mississippi, NAACP and the first African American to register to vote in Humphreys County since Reconstruction, was shot and killed in Belzoni. He is considered one of the early martyrs of the civil rights movement.

The Rev. Lee first moved to Belzoni to preach but began working to register other African Americans to vote after the local NAACP was founded in 1953. He later served as chapter president and successfully registered some 100 African American voters in Belzoni—an extraordinary feat considering the significant risk of violent retaliation facing Black voters in the Deep South at the time.

Belzoni was also home to a White Citizen’s Council—a group of white residents actively working to suppress civil rights activism and maintain white supremacy through threats, economic intimidation, and violence. The council learned of the Rev. Lee’s voter registration efforts and targeted him with threats and intimidation, but he was undeterred.

While the Rev. Lee was driving home on the night of May 7, gunshots were fired into the cab of his car, ripping off the lower half of his face. He later died at Humphreys County Medical Center. When NAACP field secretary for Mississippi Medgar Evers came to investigate the death, the county sheriff boldly denied that any homicide had taken place; instead, he claimed that the Rev. Lee had died in a car accident and that the lead bullets found in his jaw were dental fillings.

An investigation revealed evidence against two members of the local White Citizen’s Council, but when the local prosecutor resisted moving forward, the case stalled. The NAACP memorial service held in the Rev. Lee’s honor was attended by more than 1,000 mourners.

In April 2019, the Equal Justice Initiative dedicated a monument honoring the Rev. George Lee and 23 other Black men, women, and children killed in acts of racial violence in the 1950s. Hundreds of community members gathered to support the act of remembrance, including family and community members connected to each of the named victims. Ms. Helen Sims, founder and operator of the Rev. George Lee Museum in Belzoni, was present to stand for the memory of the Rev. Lee.

President Chester A. Arthur signed into law the Chinese Exclusion Act. The first major law restricting voluntary immigration to the U.S., the act banned all immigrants from China for 10 years, prohibited Chinese immigrants from becoming American citizens, and restricted the entry and re-entry of Chinese nationals.

As Chinese people joined the flow of migrants to the West Coast of the U.S. after the Gold Rush of 1849, many white Americans resented economic competition from Chinese workers, denounced Chinese people as racially inferior, and blamed them for white unemployment and declining wages. The Exclusion Act kept many Chinese nationals from entering the U.S. and fueled mistreatment of Chinese people in America. Soon, anti-Chinese violence in states like Wyoming and Idaho left Chinese immigrants dead, wounded, and fleeing their homes in fear.

Though initially authorized to last 10 years, the Exclusion Act was extended and strengthened over the next 80. In 1892, Congress extended the act for another decade, and in 1902, lawmakers made the act permanent and added more discriminatory provisions. The legal ban on immigration from China was slightly loosened in 1943, but large-scale Chinese immigration was not restored until the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965.

Like Chinese immigrants did for generations, other hopeful immigrants to the U.S. continue to struggle against unjust laws and harmful abuse rooted in racial prejudice.

A new law went into effect in California, requiring that all marriage licenses indicate the race of the parties to be married. This law, passed unanimously by the all-white, all-male state legislature, was designed to help the state enforce its existing ban on interracial marriage. As California law declared at that time: “no license may be issued authorizing the marriage of a white person with a Negro, mulatto, Mongolian, or member of the Malay race.” Any interracial couple who defied the statute, or any clerk who provided a marriage license to an interracial couple, faced a fine of up to $10,000 or up to 10 years in prison.

“Anti-miscegenation laws,” or laws banning white people from marrying Black and other non-white partners, have a long history in this country—often predating the creation of the U.S. altogether. Northern and southern states alike passed these laws during the colonial era and throughout the first decades of the nation’s existence; by the start of the Civil War in 1861, 28 states had interracial marriage bans—and seven more passed them before the war’s end in 1865.

Though many northern states repealed their anti-miscegenation laws before or soon after the Civil War, many southern and western states responded to the emancipation of millions of enslaved Black people by strengthening their bans. Fears of a weakened racial hierarchy were especially intense in the South, where the bulk of newly freed Black Americans resided, and where white people had long feared that ending slavery would be “the first step to total social equality and unrestricted sex across racial lines.” Similarly, many western states feared that the end of the Civil War would bring an influx of emancipated Black people, and lawmakers saw bans on interracial marriage as one way to reinforce the racial order.

California had banned interracial marriage between white and Black people since first achieving statehood in 1850. Under a law passed that year, “all marriages of whites with negroes or mulattoes are declared to be null and void.” California later expanded the law to also ban white people from marrying people defined as “mongolian” or “malay,” in response to a subsequent increase in immigration from Asia. The state’s white community widely supported the enactment of these policies and the officials who passed them.

The California Supreme Court struck down both the 1943 statute requiring race on marriage licenses and the state’s much older ban on interracial marriage on October 1, 1948 in the case of Perez v. Sharp. Nearly 20 years later, on June 12, 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decided Loving v. Virginia, declaring bans on interracial marriage unconstitutional and striking down such laws in the 16 total states that still had them. This decision overturned the Court’s 1883 decision in Pace v. Alabama, which had upheld the constitutionality of laws banning interracial relations, enabling those laws to persist throughout the country for more than 80 additional years.

Even after the law changed, social and political support for interracial marriage bans lingered. In 2000, Alabama became the last state to repeal its interracial marriage ban when residents voted to remove an anti-miscegenation provision from the state constitution—more than 30 years after Loving made it unenforceable.

The Chicago Real Estate Board voted unanimously to expel members from the board who sold property to Black families in neighborhoods where white people lived. The president of the board, M. L. Smith, openly expressed his commitment to maintaining segregation throughout Chicago and advocated for a plan to exclude Black families from most of Chicago’s available housing.

During the era of racial terror lynchings beginning during Reconstruction, white mobs terrorized millions of Black women, men, and children throughout the American South. At the turn of the century, seeking freedom from the constant and widespread terror of lynching and other racial violence, more than six million Black people left the South in what became known as the Great Migration. As a consequence, the population of western and northern cities like Chicago saw an increase in Black people who sought to make their homes away from the violence they had experienced in the South.

Seeking housing and employment, Black people in cities like Chicago were met with steady, violent, and constant resistance to integration. In the 1920s, white real estate agents and the Chicago Real Estate Board began organizing white citizens throughout Chicago to establish “neighborhood covenants,” or contractual agreements among property owners prohibiting them from leasing or selling their properties to Black people. Drafted by a lawyer who was a member of the Chicago Planning Commission, a template racial restrictive covenant, which was circulated by the Real Estate Board, targeted anyone with “1/8 part or more negro blood” or who had “any appreciable admixture of negro blood” from buying or renting a home in neighborhoods where white people already lived.

On May 4, 1921, the Chicago Real Estate Board voted unanimously to expel members of the board who did not join this project of residential segregation. If members sold property to Black people “in a block where there are only white owners,” they would be met by “immediate expulsion.” Unsatisfied with this, the Chicago Real Estate Board launched a campaign for the next decade to increase the use of neighborhood covenants to restrict nearly all of Chicago to white residents, including organizing a series of speakers who traveled around the city of Chicago to promote residential segregation. Advocating for residential segregation, board president M.L. Smith supported the expansion of the South Side of Chicago—where Black people were permitted to live—stating, “if you provide the places, the negroes will segregate themselves.”

By the end of the 1920s, the Board’s efforts meant that restrictions for Black homeowners and renters were so far widespread that these covenants, according to the Hyde Park Herald, stretched “like a marvelous delicately woven chain of armor” from “the northern gates of Hyde Park at 35th and Drexel Boulevard to Woodlawn, Park Manor, South Shore, Windsor Park, and all the far-flung white communities of the South Side.” At the end of the decade, close to 90% of Chicago neighborhoods were covered by covenants restricting access for Black people.

White real estate associations, homeowners, and politicians in Chicago remained committed to residential segregation well into the later half of the 20th century.

California enacted the Alien Land Law, barring Asian immigrants from owning land. California tightened the law further in 1920 and 1923, barring the leasing of land and land ownership by American-born children of Asian immigrant parents or by corporations controlled by Asian immigrants. These laws were supported by the California press, as well as the Hollywood Association, the Japanese and Korean (later Asiatic) Exclusion League, and the Anti-Jap Laundry League. The latter two groups were founded by labor unions, and combined these groups claimed tens of thousands of members.”

Though especially active in California, animosity for Asian immigrants operated on the national level too. In May 1912, President Woodrow Wilson wrote to a California backer: “In the matter of Chinese and Japanese coolie immigration I stand for the national policy of exclusion (or restricted immigration)…We cannot make a homogeneous population out of people who do not blend with the Caucasian race…Oriental coolieism will give us another race problem to solve, and surely we have had our lesson.”

California did not stand alone. Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming all enacted discriminatory laws restricting Asians’ rights to hold land in America. In 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed various versions of the discriminatory land laws—and upheld every single one. Most of these discriminatory state laws remained in place until the 1950s, and some even longer. Kansas and New Mexico did not repeal their provisions until 2002 and 2006, respectively. Florida’s state constitution contained an alien land law provision until 2018, when voters passed a ballot measure to repeal it.

More than 1,000 Black children peacefully protested racial segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, as part of the Children’s Crusade, beginning a movement that sparked widely publicized police brutality that shocked the nation and spurred major civil rights advances.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had launched the Children’s Crusade to revive the Birmingham anti-segregation campaign. As part of that effort, more than 1,000 African American children trained in nonviolent protest tactics walked out of their classes on May 2 and assembled at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to march to downtown Birmingham. Though hundreds were assaulted, arrested, and transported to jail in school buses and paddy wagons, the children refused to relent their peaceful demonstration.

The next day, when hundreds more children began to march, Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor directed local police and firemen to attack the children with high-pressure fire hoses, batons, and police dogs. Images of children being brutally assaulted by police and snarling canines appeared on television and in newspapers throughout the nation and world, provoking global outrage. The U.S. Department of Justice soon intervened.

The campaign to desegregate Birmingham ended on May 10 when city officials agreed to desegregate the city’s downtown stores and release jailed demonstrators in exchange for an end to SCLC’s protests. The following evening, disgruntled proponents of segregation responded to the agreement with a series of local bombings.

In the wake of the Children’s Crusade, the Birmingham Board of Education announced that all children who participated in the march would be suspended or expelled from school. A federal district court upheld the ruling, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ultimately reversed the decision and ordered the students re-admitted to school.

On Christmas Eve 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, Confederate President Jefferson Davis issued orders to the Confederate Army “that all negro slaves captured in arms be at once delivered over to the executive authorities of the respective States to which they belong, to be dealt with according to the law of said States.”

Several months later, on May 1, 1863, a joint resolution adopted by the Confederate Congress and signed by Davis adjusted this policy and declared that all “negroes or mulattoes, slave or free, taken in arms should be turned over to the authorities in the state in which they were captured and that their officers would be tried by Confederate military tribunals for inciting insurrection and be subject, at the discretion of the court and the president, to the death penalty.”

As the Confederacy fought a war against the U.S. government to secede from the Union and form a separate nation rooted in the continued enslavement of Black people, its forces and leaders were especially angered by the Union’s enlistment of Black troops. When those troops were captured or defeated in battle, their treatment at Confederate hands was sometimes deadly and brutal—evidenced by well-documented atrocities, such as the massacre of surrendering Black troops at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, in April 1864.

White police officers in Memphis, Tennessee, assaulted Black soldiers, setting off a wave of horrific violence against Black community members. In total, white police and mobs killed nearly 50 Black people, raped at least five Black women, and burned down around 100 buildings in South Memphis, the part of the city where the majority of Black people in Memphis lived.

Following the Civil War, Memphis and other large southern cities were popular destinations for newly emancipated Black people seeking safety, resources, and opportunity. Memphis was a particularly sought-after location because it was the site of a Freedmen’s Bureau office and a location where federal troops were stationed, and the Black population in Memphis quickly surged.

On April 30, many Black Union soldiers stationed in Memphis completed their service but had to remain in the city for a few days to receive their pay. Black soldiers had become the target of violence by police officers and by other white members of the public who resented their presence. On the night of their discharge, three Black soldiers were confronted by four white policemen, who forced them off the sidewalk. This caused one of the soldiers to fall, and a policeman stumbled over him in the street. The policemen began attacking the soldiers, brandishing knives and striking the men with their pistols.

News of an altercation between the white policemen and Black soldiers quickly spread throughout the city, and white citizens of Memphis embellished the encounter and seized upon it as a pretext for organized violence. In the afternoon of May 1, angry white mobs set out to inflict terror upon South Memphis. City Recorder John C. Creighton called on the mobs to “kill every damned one” of the Black residents and to “burn up the cradle.”

For the next several days, white mobs indiscriminately beat, robbed, tortured, shot, raped, and killed Black women, men, and children. The mobs set fire to dozens of Black homes—many with residents still inside—and destroyed all of the city’s Black churches and schools.

Black survivors of the brutal violence later testified before a Congressional committee formed to investigate the massacre. One woman recalled that, when her 16-year-old daughter tried to save a neighbor from his burning home, a white mob surrounded the building and shot her to death when she exited. Another witness reported seeing a white mob fire weapons into the Freedmen’s Hospital, injuring multiple patients, including a small paralyzed child.

Black residents received little protection from local authorities during the attacks, as the city’s mayor was reportedly drunk during the massacre, and many law enforcement officials were members of the mob. “Instead of protecting the rights of persons and property as is their duty,” the Freedmen’s Bureau’s investigation later concluded, “[local police] were chiefly concerned as murderers, incendiaries, and robbers. At times they even protected the rest of the mob in their acts of violence.” Even Union troops stationed in the city claimed their forces were too small to take on the deadly white mobs. According to the Freedmen’s Bureau report, the mob only dispersed after several days “from want of material to work on” after most Black people had hidden or fled into the countryside.

Though many of the perpetrators were known, none of the white people who carried out the Memphis Massacre were arrested or tried for their actions. Even after the massacre’s toll of death and destruction was clearly revealed, Memphis’s white community refused to take responsibility, and the Freedmen’s Bureau investigation reported that most white people only regretted the violence’s financial costs.

In the wake of the massacre, one quarter of the Black population of Memphis permanently fled the city.

An all-white jury in California chose to acquit three of the four Los Angeles Police Department officers who beat Rodney King during a violent arrest in March of 1991 and could not agree on a verdict for the fourth officer, despite video evidence establishing their culpability.

On March 3, 1991, Mr. King was driving in downtown Los Angeles when the LAPD pulled him over and began beating him after he allegedly resisted arrest. Four LAPD officers kicked Mr. King, who was on the ground, and beat him with batons for nearly 15 minutes while more than a dozen law enforcement officers stood by. Mr. King sustained life-threatening injuries, including skull fractures and permanent brain damage.

A man standing on his balcony witnessed the violent arrest and captured it on tape. Video of the unrelenting assault was played at trial and broadcasted into homes across the nation and around the world.

Just months before the officers were acquitted, a federal court had concluded that Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies continued to use racially motivated “terrorist-type tactics” to violate the civil rights of Black people. Still, none of the officers involved in Mr. King’s assault faced punishment at trial.

The legal system’s refusal to hold these officers accountable was not unique—the Los Angeles Black community had already endured decades of racial discrimination, violence, and police brutality—but many community members found the outcome inexplicable given that the officers’ conduct had been caught on camera. The same month that Rodney King was beaten, a Korean store owner in South Central Los Angeles shot and killed a 15-year-old Black girl named Latasha Harlins after accusing her of trying to steal a bottle of orange juice. Latasha was clutching money when she was killed, but the store owner received only probation and a $500 fine.

The verdict drew shock and anguish across the county, and members of the Black community in Los Angeles took to the streets in protests that lasted until May 4, 1992.

The protests echoed the unrest that broke out in Los Angeles’s Watts neighborhood in the summer of 1965, after police beat and arrested two young Black men following a traffic stop. A commission convened to investigate the so-called “Watts Riots” concluded that the unrest stemmed from Black residents’ dissatisfaction with policing, high rates of unemployment, and inadequate schools. Despite these conclusions, little changed in the decades that followed.

A mob of 40 white men in Colbert, Georgia, shot a Black farmer named Lint Shaw to death just eight hours before he was scheduled to stand trial on allegations of attempting to assault two white women.

During the era of racial terror, accusations of “attempted assault” lodged against Black men were often based on merely looking at or accidentally bumping into a white woman, smiling, winking, getting too close, or being alone with a white woman in the wrong place. The deep racial hostility permeating Southern society meant that accusations lodged against Black people—especially against Black men by white women or girls—were rarely subject to serious scrutiny by the police, press, or lynch mobs.

Following his arrest, Mr. Shaw was at constant risk of lynching and was moved multiple times to avoid mob attack. During a transfer to the jail at Danielsville, Georgia, Mr. Shaw was shot twice and rushed to Atlanta for protection and medical attention. Mr. Shaw survived those injuries and was then returned to Danielsville to await trial, but a threatening mob again led him to be transferred. While Mr. Shaw was being transported back to the jail on April 28, a group of angry men seized him. The mob riddled Mr. Shaw’s body with bullets and tied his corpse to a pine tree near a creek in Colbert, Georgia.

Lint Shaw was one of at least six African American victims of racial terror lynching killed in Madison County, Georgia. No one was ever prosecuted for his murder.

A white mob in Lee County, Georgia, lynched a Black man named Mitchell Daniel for “talking too much” about the brutal lynching of Sam Hose, another Black man, that had taken place days earlier.

Mr. Hose had been employed in Newnan, Georgia, by a wealthy white man named Alfred Cranford. Mr. Cranford owed Mr. Hose money but refused to pay him, and as arguments escalated between the two men, Mr. Cranford bought a gun and threatened Mr. Hose. When Mr. Cranford was killed soon after, Mr. Hose was accused of killing the white man and assaulting his wife. Soon an angry mob formed and set off to catch and lynch Mr. Hose.

A $500 reward was posted for Mr. Hose’s capture, and hundreds of white residents launched what was described as the “largest manhunt in the state’s history.” Local newspapers published sensationalized accounts of the allegations against Mr. Hose, dehumanizing him and reinforcing dangerous racial stereotypes of Black men as predators.

Many Black people were lynched across the South under accusations of murder or assault. During this era of racial terror, mere suggestions of Black-on-white violence could provoke mob violence and lynching. Though these communities had developed and functioning judicial systems, white defendants were more likely to face trial while Black people regularly suffered death at the hands of a violent mob, without trial or any opportunity to present evidence of innocence or self defense.

On April 23, 1899, after Mr. Hose was turned into authorities, a white mob in Newnan seized him from the jail and staged a brutal public spectacle lynching before a crowd of thousands of white people. The mob chained Mr. Hose to a tree, dismembered and mutilated his body as he screamed in agony, then set him on fire while he was still alive. Afterward, residents fought over Mr. Hose’s remains, and some spectators reportedly claimed pieces of his bones and organs as “souvenirs” of the lynching. Black sociologist and activist W. E. B. Du Bois later disgustedly reported seeing Mr. Hose’s severed knuckles on display in an Atlanta store window one day after the lynching.

This horrific spectacle of murder went well beyond an attempt to punish any alleged crime; instead, Mr. Hose’s lynching was meant to terrorize all Black people living in the town of Newnan, in the state of Georgia, and throughout the U.S., where it soon became national news. Terroristic violence targeting the Black community was common during this period, when white mobs used widespread, unchecked racial violence to instill fear and discourage organized opposition to pervasive Jim Crow laws and other forms of racial oppression.

News of Mr. Hose’s brutal lynching spread quickly and far. A Black man named Mitchell Daniel heard the news within days, despite living 150 miles away from Newnan, and reacted with more outrage than fear. As a Black community leader, Mr. Daniel reportedly spoke out against the injustice of lynching and denounced Mr. Hose’s fate. This soon made him a target.

Just four days after Mr. Hose’s lynching, Mitchell Daniel’s dead body was discovered on the side of a Lee County, Georgia, road—riddled with bullets. Sparse local news reports attributed the lynching to Mr. Daniel’s white neighbors, but no one was ever held accountable for his death.

The California State Legislature levied a burdensome tax on Chinese workers as part of a campaign to “protect free white labor” and discourage Chinese migration to the state.

Chinese people first came to California alongside tens of thousands of other migrants during the California Gold Rush that began in 1849. By 1860, roughly 10% of the state’s population was Chinese. Many white citizens, politicians, and labor organizations resented economic competition from Chinese workers and promoted myths about the racial inferiority of Asian people.

In his inaugural address in January of 1862, California Governor Leland Stanford, who later co-founded Stanford University, announced:

To my mind it is clear, that the settlement among us of an inferior race is to be discouraged by every legitimate means. Asia, with her numberless millions, sends to our shores the dregs of her population. … There can be no doubt but that the presence among us of numbers of degraded and distinct people must exercise a deleterious influence upon the superior race.

Three months after Gov. Leland’s speech, on April 26, the California legislature passed “An Act to Protect Free White Labor Against Competition with Chinese Coolie Labor, And to Discourage the Immigration of the Chinese into the State of California,” which created a monthly tax of $2.50 on Chinese workers in all but the least-desirable industries. The tax amounted to around 10% of the salary that Chinese laborers made at that time, and tax collectors were empowered to seize and sell the property of anyone who did not pay the tax.

Although this tax and several other measures targeting Chinese immigrants were later declared unconstitutional by the state supreme court, white Californian lawmakers persisted in efforts to dehumanize, subordinate, and exclude Chinese people. In 1879, the state approved a new constitution that declared Chinese people “dangerous to the well-being of the State,” banned corporations and local and state governments from hiring Chinese workers, and gave municipalities the authority to confine Chinese residents to one section of town or evict them from city limits altogether.

California’s decades-long campaign against Chinese people served as a precursor to anti-Chinese efforts on the federal level that culminated in 1882 with the U.S. Congress’s passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese laborers from immigrating to the U.S. and prohibited Chinese immigrants already living in the country from becoming American citizens.

A white mob in Mississippi killed a Black man named Mack Charles Parker. Mr. Parker had been accused of raping a white woman but emphatically denied the accusations. Statements from those in the community suggested that the woman fabricated the rape claims to hide her consensual affair with a white man in a nearby town, and police officers garnered no conclusive evidence implicating Mr. Parker. Nevertheless, local white men formed a mob intent on killing Mr. Parker before he could stand trial.

Days after Mr. Parker was transferred from the Hinds County Jail in Jackson to the Pearl River County Jail, a mob seized him from his cell, beat him, and dragged him outside. Bleeding profusely, Mr. Parker begged for his life, but the mob drove to the Bogalusa Bridge, pulled him from the car, and shot him. The mob then put chains around Mr. Parker’s body and threw him into the Pearl River; his body was found more than a week later.

Despite an FBI investigation that identified many members of the lynch mob, no one was ever indicted in Mr. Parker’s murder.

On orders from President Rutherford B. Hayes, federal troops withdrew from the state house in Louisiana—the last federally defended state house in the South—just 12 years after the end of the Civil War. This withdrawal marked the end of Reconstruction and paved the way for the unrestrained resurgence of white supremacist rule in the South, carrying with it the rapid deterioration of political rights for Black people.

After the Confederacy’s 1865 defeat in the Civil War, Reconstruction amendments to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery, established the citizenship of formerly enslaved Black people, and granted Black people civil rights—including granting Black men the right to vote. For the Reconstruction period, federal officials and troops remained in Southern states helping to enforce these new rights and administer educational and other programs for the formerly enslaved. As a result, Black people in the South, for the first time, constituted a community of voters and public officials, landowners, wage earners, and free American citizens.

The federal presence also addressed deadly violence Black people faced on a daily basis. Continued support for white supremacy and racial hierarchy meant that slavery in America did not end—it evolved. The identities of many white Americans, especially in the South, were grounded in the belief that they were inherently superior to African Americans. Many white people reacted violently to the requirement to treat their former “human property” as equals and pay for their labor. Plantation owners attacked Black people simply for claiming their freedom. In the first two years after the war, thousands of Black people were murdered for asserting freedom or basic rights, sometimes in attacks by white mobs in communities like Memphis and New Orleans.

Congressional efforts to provide federal protection to formerly enslaved Black people were undermined by the U.S. Supreme Court, which overturned laws that provided remedies to Black people facing violent intimidation. In the 1870s, Northern politicians began retreating from a commitment to protect Black rights and lives, culminating in the withdrawal of troops from all Southern state houses in 1877. In response, racial terror and violence directed at Black people intensified and legal systems quickly emerged to restore racial hierarchy: white Southerners barred Black people from voting; created an exploitative economic system of sharecropping and tenant farming that would keep African Americans indentured and poor for generations; and made racial segregation the law of the land.

William L. Moore was found dead on U.S. Highway 11 near Attalla, Alabama—only four days shy of his 36th birthday. Mr. Moore, a white man, was in the midst of a one-man civil rights march to Jackson, Mississippi, to implore Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett to support integration efforts. He wore signs that read: “End Segregation in America, Eat at Joe’s-Both Black and White” and “Equal Rights For All (Mississippi or Bust).”

Mr. Moore, a resident of Baltimore, Maryland, was a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and had staged other lone protests in the past. On his first protest, he walked to Annapolis, Maryland, from Baltimore. On his second march, he walked to the White House. For what proved to be his final march, Mr. Moore planned to walk from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Jackson.

About 70 miles into the march, a local radio station reporter named Charlie Hicks interviewed Mr. Moore after the radio station received an anonymous tip of his whereabouts. After the interview, Mr. Hicks offered to drive Moore to a hotel where he would be safe, but Mr. Moore continued on his march instead. Less than an hour later, a passing motorist found his body. Mr. Moore had been shot in the head with a .22-caliber rifle that was traced to Floyd Simpson, a white Alabamian. Mr. Simpson was arrested but never indicted for Mr. Moore’s murder.

When activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and CORE attempted to finish Mr. Moore’s march using the same route, they were beaten and arrested by Alabama state troopers.

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a Black man’s death penalty appeal grounded in claims of racial inequality and instead accepted proven racial sentencing disparities as “an inevitable part of our criminal justice system.”

In October 1978, a Black man named Warren McCleskey was convicted of killing a white police officer during a robbery and was sentenced to death. On appeal, Mr. McCleskey’s lawyers argued that Georgia’s capital punishment system was racially biased in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. In support of his argument, the lawyers presented statistical evidence that race significantly impacted the likelihood of a death sentence.

University of Iowa professor David Baldus had conducted a rigorous statistical analysis of more than 2,000 Georgia murder cases and found that prosecutors were more likely to seek the death penalty and juries were more likely to impose it in cases involving Black defendants and white victims. Even after controlling for crime-specific variables, the Baldus study concluded Black defendants accused of killing white victims faced the highest likelihood of receiving the death penalty.

In its 5-4 decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, the Court accepted the Baldus study’s findings as valid but held that the evidence was not enough to reverse the conviction and sentence because there was no proof that any individual had intentionally discriminated against Mr. McCleskey on the basis of race. In other words, without clear evidence that the discrimination was impactful and purposeful, the Court would not act. In dissent, Justice William Brennan wrote that the majority was motivated to deny relief by a “fear of too much justice.”

The Court’s ruling upheld the constitutionality of racially biased capital punishment in America and remains the law today. The U.S. has executed more than 1,200 people since 1987, including Warren McCleskey, who died in the electric chair on September 26, 1991.

Turner County High School students attended the school’s first racially integrated prom. Located in Ashburn, Georgia, a small, rural, peanut-farming town of 4,400 residents, the school’s racial demographics reflected those of the local community: 55% Black and 45% white. The prom theme, “Breakaway,” was chosen to signify a break from the tradition of privately-funded, separate “white” and “Black” proms sponsored by parent groups.

The school administration’s handbook provided for funding an official school-wide prom but stipulated that the senior class officers and student body had to express genuine support for an integrated event. During the 2006-2007 school year, the school’s four senior class officers—two white and two Black—approached the principal to discuss holding a school-wide prom. Regarding the segregated proms, senior class president James Hall said, “Everybody says that’s just how it’s always been. It’s just the way of this very small town. But it’s time for a change.”

Turner County High School’s class of 2007 also abandoned the “tradition” of electing both a white and a Black homecoming queen. White parents still held a private, white-only prom one week before the school-wide event and some parents refused to allow their children to attend the integrated prom. Principal Chad Stone, who is white, said he would not make efforts to end private proms for future classes but favored the integrated approach, “We already go to school together. Let’s start a tradition so that 20 years from now, this is no big deal at all.”

An all-white jury acquitted Lester Maddox of all charges after the white man threatened three young Black seminary students at gunpoint for attempting to enter his racially segregated Atlanta restaurant. The jury deliberated for only 47 minutes before returning its not guilty verdict.

On July 3, 1964, just one day after the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed to prohibit racial segregation in public accommodations like restaurants and hotels, three Atlanta University Center ministerial students named George Willis Jr., Woodrow Lewis, and Albert L. Dunn met for lunch at the Pickrick restaurant. Before they could enter, owner Lester Maddox began yelling at them: “You no good dirty devils! You dirty Communists!” He then pulled out his pistol and pointed it at them, telling them “Get the hell out of here or I’ll kill you.”

Rather than help the three unarmed customers being held at gunpoint, the white patrons eating at the restaurant responded by grabbing “pickrick drumsticks”—pick handles Mr. Maddox kept hanging on his restaurant wall to intimidate Black community members. Mr. Maddox and the group of white customers then chased the three Black men out of the restaurant and into the parking lot, threatening them with violence.

Mr. Maddox later claimed he had pulled out his pistol in self defense, but no reports or evidence indicated that the young Black students were anything other than customers lawfully attempting to eat at the Pickrick, or that they had threatened him in any way.

After Mr. Maddox was arrested and released on $1,000 bond, white Americans from all over the country rallied to his support, endorsing his open defiance of the Civil Rights Act and demonstrating that acceptance and enforcement of the new law would take much more than a presidential signature. People ran ads fundraising for his defense fund, and the restaurant saw an increase in white patrons. Mr. Maddox even began selling souvenir “pickrick drumsticks” complete with his autograph.

The Pickrick continued to refuse to serve Black community members, even as Mr. Maddox awaited trial. He vowed to close the restaurant before serving Black customers, and he did exactly that in February 1965, after a federal district judge ruled he was in civil contempt for continuing to violate the Civil Rights Act.

After his acquittal for threatening these Black men, Mr. Maddox capitalized on his increased notoriety and broad white support for his segregationist positions by mounting a campaign for governor of Georgia the following year. With the KKK’s endorsement, he won. During his term in office, Mr. Maddox promoted a racist, segregationist agenda, vigorously opposed integrating Georgia public schools, and refused to permit Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to lie in state after his April 1968 assassination.

As late as 2001, Mr. Maddox remained an advocate of racial segregation. “I want my race preserved,” he said in an interview, “and I hope most everybody else wants theirs preserved.”

Elected and supported by the majority of white Americans, segregationists like Lester Maddox operated as private citizens and at the highest levels of government, wielding violence and criminalization to oppose the civil rights movement and target the courageous activists who fueled it.

A white woman was brutally raped and beaten in New York City’s Central Park. Police officers soon arrested a dozen young men and eventually charged five teenage boys ranging from 14-16 years of age.

Police subjected Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana Jr., Korey Wise, Yusef Salaam, and Antron McCray to hours of intense interrogation and ultimately extracted confessions. Each of them later recanted and insisted that he had been coerced into making false confessions despite having no involvement in the crime. Though there was no physical evidence to link them to the attack, all five boys were convicted of attempted murder and rape and sentenced to prison terms ranging from 5-13 years.

From the time of their arrest, many observers and commentators readily believed that this group of teenage boys—four who were Black and one who was Latino—had committed the attack and deserved the harshest possible punishment. Donald Trump, then a well-known businessman in New York City, took out multiple full-page newspaper ads denouncing the Central Park attack, praising the power of hate, and demanding officials “bring back the death penalty” as a defense against “roving bands of wild criminals.” Trump went on to win election to the White House in 2016.

The five teenagers convicted of the Central Park attack faced a presumption of guilt and dangerousness rooted in America’s history of slavery and lynching, which remains with us today and leaves minority communities particularly vulnerable to the unfair administration of criminal justice. At the time of the Central Park case, the idea of the young, non-white “super-predator” was gaining legitimacy among criminologists and policymakers. By stoking unsubstantiated fears of increasing violence and criminality among Black children, researchers built support for harsh proposals to abandon the juvenile system’s focus on rehabilitation and instead funnel younger and younger children into an adult system primarily focused on punishment.

In 2002, another man confessed to the rape and beating committed in Central Park 13 years before, and DNA evidence confirmed his guilt. That same year, New York Supreme Court Justice Charles J. Tejada granted the motions of defense attorneys and District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, vacating the convictions of the “Central Park Five.” Police detectives nevertheless continued to maintain that the defendants were accomplices in the assault and refused to admit misconduct for their handling of the case.

After their convictions were vacated, all five of the young men had completed their prison sentences but still faced the difficult journey of rebuilding their lives and recovering from spending years of their childhoods imprisoned for a crime they did not commit. They ultimately sued the city for malicious prosecution, racial discrimination, and emotional distress. “You all don’t really understand what we went through,” Kevin Richardson said. “People called us animals, a wolf pack…It still hurts me emotionally.” New York City refused to settle the suits for over a decade, but in June 2014 agreed to pay the men $40 million in damages.

In 2019, 30 years after the five teens’ arrests, a Netflix mini-series dramatically depicted their ordeal and continuing struggle to recover, sparking renewed interest in the case’s history and its connection to injustice and racial bias still plaguing our courts and prisons.

“I was shocked, because I had no idea that something like this could happen to anyone—especially people who were my age at the time,” Ethan Herisse, who played Yusef Salaam in the mini-series, said in an interview after completing production. “I’m at a different place now, where seeing that this thing happened and is still happening, even now—if I were going to be put anywhere near our system, I wouldn’t feel completely safe.”

New Jersey enacted a law which bound enslaved Black people to indefinite servitude as “apprentices for life” to work at the will of their white enslavers.

Under the new law, called “An Act to Abolish Slavery,” white enslavers continued to exploit and profit from the labor of Black people who were now referred to as “apprentices” instead of “slaves,” but who were still unable to obtain freedom without a written certificate of discharge from their “masters or mistresses.”

Though enacting the law allowed New Jersey to claim its state laws no longer permitted “slavery,” the act did not meaningfully change the plight of Black people living in bondage there. Many of the same oppressive provisions that defined enslavement in New Jersey and elsewhere remained in place under this new law. The act prohibited Black “apprentices” from leaving the State of New Jersey, for instance, and imposed criminal penalties on any person who hid or harbored an “apprentice” or helped them run away.

Decades earlier, in 1804, New Jersey had passed the “Gradual Abolition Act,” becoming the last Northern state to take any steps towards the process of ending enslavement within its borders. That law had also fallen far short of abolishing slavery, instead delaying abolition for decades and ensuring that Black children not yet born would spend their youth in bondage. The 1804 act provided that children of enslaved people born after July 4, 1804, would be freed only when they reached the age of 21 for women and the age of 15 for boys. Despite the passage of this 1804 act, there were still more than 2,000 Black people enslaved in New Jersey by 1830.

Like the 1804 law, the 1846 act also failed to abolish—or even attempt to abolish—enslavement in New Jersey. It took the Civil War and the 1865 ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment—which abolished slavery in the U.S. except as punishment for crime—to emancipate the remaining Black people still involuntarily bound as “apprentices” in the state.

In the early morning hours, a Black man named Caesar Sheffield was taken from jail and shot to death by a mob of white men near Lake Park, Georgia. Mr. Sheffield, a husband and father in his 40s, had been arrested and jailed for allegedly stealing meat from a smokehouse owned by a local white man. Before he could be tried for this alleged offense, white men formed a mob and seized him from the unprotected jail.

During this era of racial terror lynching, the deep racial hostility that permeated American society burdened Black people with a presumption of guilt that often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered, whether evidence supported that suspicion or not. This racial hostility and presumption of guilt frequently proved deadly, even for petty offenses like theft. Although the Constitution’s presumption of innocence is a bedrock principle of American criminal justice, Black Americans like Caesar Sheffield were often denied this protection or their right to a fair trial and instead were lynched by white mobs.

The mob had little difficulty abducting Mr. Sheffield from the jail, since the building had been completely abandoned and no law enforcement officials were present. As was often the case during this era, police and jail officials charged with protecting those in their custody abdicated that responsibility and left Black people like Mr. Sheffield vulnerable and unprotected from the known threat of lynching. Once they had Mr. Sheffield, the white men shot him to death in a nearby field; his body was found later that day, riddled with bullets.

No arrests were made following the lynching of Caesar Sheffield, and no one was ever held accountable for his death.

The Boston Red Sox reluctantly held a Major League tryout for Black ballplayers in the Negro Baseball League that many regarded as some of the best players in the world, but the team refused to sign any of them due to “an unwritten rule at that time against hiring Black players.”

Future Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson, along with Marvin Williams and Sam Jethroe, traveled thousands of miles to attend the tryouts. During the workout, which was attended only by Red Sox team management, players were taunted and endured shouts from the stands including “get those niggers off the field.” Red Sox managers abandoned all three Black ballplayers and sent them home without contracts or even the courtesy of a response from the team managers.

Wendell Smith, a Black sports writer, had arranged the tryouts. Prior to the event, Mr. Smith approached Isadore Muchnick, a politician who was running for re-election in a predominantly Black district in Boston, and encouraged him to use his political power to ensure these tryouts happened. It was only after Mr. Muchnick threatened to ban Boston baseball clubs from playing on Sundays that the Red Sox and Braves, another Boston team at the time, agreed to host tryouts for Black ballplayers. Both teams delayed the tryouts on numerous occasions, and the Braves ultimately cancelled theirs altogether. While the Red Sox technically held their try out, as Mr. Jethroe would later note, it was “a joke.”

Major League Baseball remained racially segregated until 1947, sustained by the tacit agreement among team managers that Black players were not to be signed by teams and should be restricted to playing in their own separate “Negro league.”

Two years after this tryout, Jackie Robinson formally broke the baseball “color line” when he played his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers in April of 1947. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962, and his uniform number, 42, was formally retired from Major League Baseball after his retirement to honor his achievements. In April 1950, Sam Jethroe, who many considered the fastest man in baseball, was finally signed to a major league contract with the Boston Braves and won the National League Rookie of the Year Award at the age of 33. Marvin Williams never received an MLB contract.

The Boston Red Sox remained segregated until 1959—14 years after Jackie Robinson’s original tryout and two seasons after Mr. Robinson retired. The team rostered its first Black player, Pumpsie Green, only after the NAACP charged them with racial discrimination and the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination forced them to integrate. They were the last team in MLB to accept Black players.

A mob of several thousand white people in Joplin, Missouri, battered down the wall of the city jail, forcibly removed a 20-year-old Black man named Thomas Gilyard, and lynched him in broad daylight. The mob hanged Mr. Gilyard from a telephone pole two blocks from the jail.

Mr. Gilyard had been accused of killing a white police officer. Many Black people were lynched during this era based on an accusation of murder. During this era of racial terror, mere suggestions of Black-on-white violence could provoke mob violence and lynching before the judicial system could or would act. The deep racial hostility permeating society often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered, whether or not there was evidence to support the suspicion, and accusations lodged against Black people were rarely subject to serious scrutiny. Here, though Mr. Gilyard maintained his innocence, he was offered no protection by local officials and was lynched before any trial could take place.

An immense crowd of white people assembled to participate in this lynching, with some climbing up trees and to the rooftops of nearby buildings to witness the event. Brutally lynching Mr. Gilyard did not mark the end of their violence. Unsatisfied by killing Mr. Gilyard, the mob was intent on destroying the lives of the hundreds of Black people who lived in Joplin.

First, the crowd demanded that a local white man, named “Hickory Bill,” who was in jail for attacking a Black person, be released, which city officials willingly accommodated.

The white mob then gathered on Main Street and drove all of the Black people from downtown into a segregated Black district north of Joplin. There, the white residents of Joplin launched a devastating terrorist attack on the Black community—they robbed and burnt down their homes, shot and stoned the Black people they came across, and forced every Black person from the district out of the city. They blocked the local fire department from extinguishing the flames on the burning homes, ensuring that the Black community would have nowhere to return.

Determined to force every Black person from Joplin, the mob then traveled to another Black district south of the town and found that all of the Black residents had already fled out of fear. The mob proceeded to burn their homes down too. It is unknown how many people were killed by the white mob’s ruthless violence.

During the era of racial terror lynching, white mobs regularly terrorized Black people with violence and murder to maintain racial hierarchy. These acts of lawlessness were committed with impunity by mobs who rarely faced arrest, prosecution, or even public shame for their actions. Racial terror violence in this era displaced entire Black communities, and hundreds of thousands of Black people fled as refugees from violent campaigns that used fear and intimidation to ensure white supremacy and racial hierarchy.

Thomas Gilyard was one of at least 60 Black people lynched in Missouri between 1865 and 1950.

Shortly before midnight, two innocent Black men named Horace Duncan and Fred Coker (also known as Jim Copeland) were abducted from the county jail by a white mob of several thousand participants and lynched in Springfield, Missouri. Two days following the public lynchings of Mr. Duncan and Mr. Coker, a newspaper reported that “now the great state of Missouri faces the probable disgrace of letting two innocent men be hanged by a mob.”

The day before the lynching, a white woman reported that she had been assaulted by two African American men. Despite having “no evidence against them,” Mr. Duncan and Mr. Coker were “arrested on suspicion” by local police. The men were taken to the county jail to await trial, even though their employer had also provided an alibi for them to confirm that they had not been involved in the alleged assault.

During this era, race—rather than guilt—made African Americans vulnerable to indiscriminate suspicion and false accusation after a reported crime, even when there was no evidence tying them to the alleged offense. White people’s allegations against African Americans were rarely subject to scrutiny, and the mere accusation that a Black man had been sexually inappropriate with a white woman often aroused violent reprisal before the judicial system could or would act. In the case of Mr. Duncan and Mr. Coker, one newspaper reported the lynch mob “was bent on vengeance and in no mood to discriminate between guilt and innocence.”

When the mob arrived at the county jail, local law enforcement did little to stop the mob from seizing Mr. Duncan and Mr. Coker, though the officers were armed and responsible for protecting the men in their custody. When the mob dragged Mr. Duncan and Mr. Coker outside, the gathered crowd of nearly 3,000 angry white men, women, and children began shouting, “Hang them!” and “Burn them!” At the public square, the mob hanged both men from the railing of the Gottfried Tower, then set a fire underneath and watched as both corpses were reduced to ashes in the flames.

Continuing their rampage, the mob returned to the jail and proceeded to lynch another African American man—Will Allen. Local police had abandoned the prisoners, and it was only when the state militia arrived that the mob was dispersed and prevented from seizing anyone else from the jail.

Two days after the lynching of these three men, the woman who reported being assaulted issued a statement that she was “positive” that [Mr. Coker and Mr. Duncan] “were not her assailants, and that she could identify her assailants if they were brought before her.” But the lynch mob’s act of racial terror had made its mark, terrorizing the entire Black community. Many local Black residents had fled their jobs and homes to escape the mob attack.

Following the lynchings and mob violence, a grand jury was called to indict anyone who had participated in the mob. By April 19, four white men had been arrested and 25 warrants were issued. Only one white man was tried, however, and no one was ever convicted.

Horace Duncan, Fred Coker, and Will Allen were three of at least 60 African American victims of racial terror lynching in Missouri between 1877 and 1950.

On Easter Sunday—a mob of hundreds of white men killed an estimated 150 Black people while attacking the Grant Parish courthouse in Colfax, Louisiana. Many of the Black victims were murdered in cold blood after surrendering. Only three white men died.

The Colfax Massacre was precipitated by the hotly contested 1872 Louisiana gubernatorial election. During the Reconstruction era, as many newly emancipated Black Americans began mobilizing and participating in politics, white communities determined to reinforce white supremacy began terrorizing Black people through acts of brutal violence.

After the 1872 election, when a federal judge declared William Kellogg the winner, he began making appointments to fill local parish offices. Meanwhile, Gov. Kellogg’s white supremacist opponent John McEnery and his supporters declared Mr. McEnery the winner of the election. In the ensuing unrest, Black voters who supported Gov. Kellogg staged a peaceful occupation, surrounding the Grant Parish courthouse and other municipal buildings in Colfax to prevent Mr. McEnery’s supporters from taking them over.

In response, more than 300 armed white men attacked the courthouse building to forcefully remove Gov. Kellogg’s Black supporters. When the white mob aimed a cannon to fire on the courthouse, some of the 60 Black defenders fled; others surrendered then, and more surrendered after the courthouse was set on fire. Many surrendering, unarmed Black men were nevertheless shot and killed by the white mob—some while fleeing.

After the massacre, the federal government indicted over 100 members of the white mob under the Enforcement Act of 1870. The law was specifically enacted during Reconstruction to protect newly freed Black voters from the terrorist threats of the Ku Klux Klan and other disgruntled white Southerners. Only three members of the mob were convicted, and they appealed.

On March 27, 1876, in United States v. Cruikshank, the Supreme Court issued a ruling dismissing charges against the three white men. The Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment was only a protection against state actions and did not empower the federal government to punish the acts of one citizen towards another not clearly motivated by racial animus. In the eyes of the Court, racialized political violence did not qualify.

The Cruikshank decision severely limited the federal government’s authority to legally enforce Black civil rights and protect Black citizens from racial terror at the hands of mobs intent on restoring white racial dominance in the post-Civil War South. As a result of the decision, white terrorist groups continued to repress Black Americans’ rights through voter suppression and acts of terror and violence.

Up until 2021, a historical marker on the site of the Colfax Massacre referred to it as the “end of carpetbag misrule in the South.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and at least 55 others, almost all of whom were Black, were jailed for “parading without a permit” during a march against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama.

A crowd of over 1,000 activists joined Dr. King, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy on a non-violent march toward the downtown area as hundreds more people lined the streets to support them. The peaceful marchers, embarking from Sixth Avenue Zion Hill Church in a predominantly Black neighborhood and headed for City Hall, met a first police barricade and continued on in a different direction. When the marchers neared a second police barricade, Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor gave the officers clear orders: “Stop them… Don’t let them go any further!”

Connor was a notorious segregationist with close ties to the Ku Klux Klan. At his command, several motorcycle patrolmen surrounded the crowd of peaceful marchers and began violent mass arrests. Police officers arrested Dr. King and the Rev. Abernathy first, then continued grabbing and hitting the marchers. At least 54 more people were arrested that day, including the Rev. Shuttlesworth.

The arrested marchers were charged with violating an injunction barring “racial protests” in Birmingham. City officials had obtained the injunction from a circuit judge earlier that same week, after arguing that civil rights protests attracted violence—even though the protests were always explicitly non-violent, and the violence that did occur was regularly wielded by police targeting the demonstrating activists. Throughout activists’ 1963 Birmingham campaign to challenge racial segregation, the entire world witnessed the police’s brutal treatment of nonviolent activists through newspaper photographs and televised footage depicting demonstrators being bitten by dogs, beaten by officers, and slammed into walls by fire hoses.

Dr. King and others were held in the Birmingham Jail for several days after their arrest, while allies worked to raise money for bail. During this time, Dr. King drafted his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in response to a joint letter several white ministers had published in the local press that decried the march and civil rights activists’ methods.

“For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’” Dr. King wrote. “It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’”

We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’ We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. . . . [and] we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place.

Dr. King was released on bond on April 20, 1963, but continued his work as a civil rights leader until he was assassinated five years later.

Most white Americans, especially in the South, supported segregation and opposed the civil rights activism that Dr. King and many others waged against it. As civil rights advocates began to win important judicial and legislative victories, white Americans implemented a strategy of massive resistance, deploying a range of tactics and weapons to discourage activism and slow the tide of progress. Some of these methods, such as criminalizing, arresting, and imprisoning peaceful protestors, foreshadowed the modern mass incarceration era. Other methods, such as bombing and murdering civil rights activists, used lethal violence to maintain white supremacy just as white mobs had used lynching throughout the era of racial terror.

Recently inaugurated President Woodrow Wilson received Postmaster General Albert Burleson’s plan to segregate the Railway Mail Service. Burleson reported that he found it “intolerable” that white and Black employees had to work together and share drinking glasses and washrooms. This sentiment was shared by others in Wilson’s administration; William McAdoo, secretary of the treasury, argued that segregation was necessary “to remove the causes of complaint and irritation where white women have been forced unnecessarily to sit at desks with colored men.”

By the end of 1913, Black employees in several federal departments had been relegated to separate or screened-off work areas and segregated lavatories and lunchrooms. In addition to physical separation from white workers, Black employees were appointed to menial positions or reassigned to divisions slated for elimination. The government also began requiring photographs on civil service applications to better enable racial screening.

Although the plan was implemented by his subordinates, President Wilson defended racial segregation in his administration as in the best interest of Black workers. He maintained that harm was interjected into the issue only when Black people were told that segregation was humiliation. Meanwhile, segregation in federal employment was seen as a significant blow to Black Americans’ rights and seemed to signify official presidential approval of Jim Crow policies in the South.

Segregated lavatory signs were eventually removed after backlash that included organized protests by the NAACP—but discriminatory customs persisted, and there was little concrete evidence of actual policy reversal. The federal government continued to require photographs on civil service applications until 1940.

African American singer and pianist Nat King Cole was performing before an all-white audience of 4,000 at the Municipal Auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama, when he was attacked and knocked down by a group of white men. Before the attack, a drunk man near the front row jeered at Mr. Cole, “Negro, go home.”

Nat King Cole was born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1919 and moved with his family to Chicago as a child. Mr. Cole was a popular national entertainer when he performed in Birmingham in 1956 and, due to the city’s racial segregation laws, he was required to schedule separate shows for white and Black audiences.

The night before the attack, he performed before a segregated audience in Mobile, Alabama, and was booed by scattered members of the crowd.

Police were present at the Birmingham concert in case of trouble and apprehended Mr. Cole’s attackers quickly; four men were charged with inciting a riot while two others were held for questioning. Outside the arena, officers later found a car containing rifles, a blackjack, and brass knuckles.

After the attack during the segregated “white only” Birmingham show, Mr. Cole returned to the stage; the remaining audience gave him a 10-minute standing ovation, but he did not finish the concert. “I just came here to entertain you,” he told the white crowd. “That was what I thought you wanted. I was born in Alabama. Those folks hurt my back. I cannot continue, because I need to see a doctor.”

After being examined by a physician, Mr. Cole went on to perform at the show scheduled for a Black audience later that night.

After being denied the use of every indoor auditorium in Washington, D.C. because of her race, world-renowned Black opera singer Marian Anderson instead performed for an audience gathered outside the Lincoln Memorial.

Ms. Anderson, a contralto, had been invited to sing at the nation’s capital on this day as part of a concert series hosted by Howard University. Because Ms. Anderson was already well known at the time, having spent years touring in Europe and the U.S., the university tried to book Constitution Hall, a large indoor auditorium, for her performance. However, the Daughters of the American Revolution, which owned the auditorium and had a “white-artists-only” clause in all of their contracts, refused to let Ms. Anderson perform in the space. Eleanor Roosevelt, who was first lady at the time and a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, resigned over the organization’s decision, but the Daughters of the American Revolution still refused to allow Ms. Anderson to perform.

Ms. Anderson then asked to use one of the local white public school’s auditoriums, but the D.C. Board of Education denied her request as well.

Because no other indoor venues in the city could or would accommodate Ms. Anderson’s performance, Ms. Anderson’s manager and Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP, persuaded the Secretary of the Interior to allow her to perform on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial instead.

Despite the humiliation of being denied the same accommodations granted to white artists, Ms. Anderson performed on April 9, dressed in a winter coat to keep herself warm and standing atop a makeshift stage built over the Lincoln Memorial’s steps. A crowd of over 75,000 people attended the event, and millions more listened over the radio. Ms. Anderson opened her performance with “America (My Country, ‘Tis of Thee),” a patriotic song written in 1831.

Over a decade after this show, Ms. Anderson performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1955, becoming the first Black artist to do so. Throughout her career, Ms. Anderson continued to perform all over the world while also lending her talent to the struggle against racial injustice. The granddaughter of Black people once enslaved in Virginia, she sang at the March on Washington in 1963 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom that same year.

The Banner Mine near Birmingham, Alabama, exploded, killing 128 mine workers. According to the official investigation report, “about 90 percent were negro convicts. The other men in the mine were white convicts and free negroes who were employed as shot firers and foremen.”

By 1910, the State of Alabama had become the sixth largest coal producer in the U.S. Between 1875 and 1900, Alabama’s coal production grew from 67,000 tons to 8.4 million tons. This growth was driven in large part by the expansion of convict leasing in the state; in Birmingham, the center of the state’s coal production, more than 25% of miners were leased convicts. In addition, more than 50% of all miners in the state had learned to mine while working as convicts.

State officials quickly learned how to use the convict leasing system to disproportionately exploit Black people. In an average year, 97% of Alabama’s county convicts were Black. When coal companies’ labor needs increased, local police swept small-town streets, targeting Black Alabamians for quick arrest on charges of vagrancy, gambling, drunkenness, or theft. These citizens were then tried and convicted, sentenced to 60- or 90-days hard labor plus court costs, and handed over to the mines. Employers frequently held and worked convicts well beyond their scheduled release dates since local officials had no incentive to intervene and prisoners lacked the resources and power to demand enforcement.

Conditions in the mines were deplorable. Imprisoned men were often chained together in ankle-deep water, working 12- to 16-hour shifts with no breaks and surviving on fistfuls of spoiled meat and cornbread stuffed into the rags they wore for uniforms. Describing the experience, a Black former convict laborer recalled that the prisoners had slept in their chains, covered with “filth and vermin,” and the powder cans used as slop jars frequently overflowed and ran over into their beds.

Prisoner safety was not a priority for the mines’ owners and operators. After the deadly explosion, local newspapers reported on the deaths as a humorous event rather than a tragedy of lost life. Coverage listed the victims’ names alongside their conviction offenses: vagrancy, weapons violations, bootlegging, and gambling. One rural newspaper reported, “Several negroes from this section… were caught in the Banner mine explosion. That is a pretty tight penalty to pay for selling booze.”

The Ku Klux Klan held a series of revival events at a white Presbyterian church in Evergreen, Conecuh County, Alabama. For weeks prior, newspapers advertised the recurring events planned to last two weeks and encouraged white community members—especially white women—to participate in celebrating white supremacy on the church’s grounds.

Beginning at 7 pm on April 7, white people from Evergreen and the surrounding area gathered at the Presbyterian church to participate in this KKK revival. The program’s events included lectures that melded scripture and the “teachings” of the KKK, titled “Daniel’s Vision of the Ku Klux Klan” and “Chalk Talks on Biblical Figures.” On the first night, 100 people registered to join as official members of the KKK. The series of events ended on April 17.

Throughout the nation’s history, white churches have played a critical role in supporting violent white supremacy in America. During the era of enslavement, while some Protestant churches initially supported abolition, white Christians, who were committed to holding Black people in bondage, embraced interpretations of the Bible that advanced white supremacy and justified enslavement. For decades, white churches across the country barred Black clergymen and advocated and upheld the institutionalization of Jim Crow segregation in the U.S. In many cases, congregation and clergy membership of churches included white people who openly advocated for and participated in Klan activities and violence.

After the Civil War, the rise of racial violence and organizations like the Ku Klux Klan came in direct response to emancipation and calls for Black equality. Functioning from its inception as a political paramilitary arm of white supremacist interests, the Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1865 by six Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee. The KKK launched a campaign of terror, violence, and murder targeting African Americans and white people who supported Black civil rights.

The KKK underwent a massive resurgence in the first few decades of the 20th century when white Americans sought to recommit themselves to white supremacy in the face of increasing Black migration out of the South and a growing movement for civil rights. By the 1920s, millions of white people were members of the Klan; in almost all cases, membership was exclusively reserved for white Christians.

Like those who attended this revival, most KKK members in the U.S. were white, middle-class Protestants. The KKK had more than 150,000 members in Alabama by the 1920s, including prominent political figures like Bibb Graves, Grand Cyclops of the Montgomery Klan chapter, who was elected Governor of Alabama in 1926, assumed office in 1927, and ultimately served two terms. Rather than marginalized extremists, KKK members during this era included respected professionals, community leaders, elected officials and even clergy who supported and often participated in the organization’s racist, violent tactics. As a direct result of this 10-day long revival, Conecuh County’s KKK chapter recorded a total membership of 600 people.

A mob of at least 80 white men broke into the jail in Charles City, Virginia, removed a Black man named Isaac Brandon from his cell and, ignoring the pleas of his young son, lynched him on the courthouse lawn.

A few days prior, several white women alleged that a Black man had broken into their home and tried to assault them. When news of this event spread, suspicion quickly turned to Mr. Brandon. The deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society during this time period often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered or alleged, whether evidence supported that suspicion or not. Almost 25% of all lynchings involved allegations of inappropriate behavior between a Black man and a white woman that was characterized as “assault” or “sexual assault.” The mere accusation of sexual impropriety regularly aroused violent mobs and ended in lynching. Allegations against Black people were rarely subject to scrutiny.

Mr. Brandon was promptly arrested and brought to the jail. Although no evidence linked him or his young son—whose name is not recorded in contemporary newspapers—to the alleged crime, both of them were arrested and held for several days in the jail. On the evening of April 6, a mob of at least 80 white men arrived at the home of the sheriff and shared their plan to lynch Mr. Brandon. Although he was armed and charged with protecting those in his custody, the sheriff failed to protect Mr. Brandon or his son from the mob’s actions and the mob successfully broke through the jailhouse door without incident.

As Mr. Brandon and his son pleaded with the mob not to carry out the lynching, Mr. Brandon maintained his innocence, claiming: “You are going to hang an innocent man.” Mr. Brandon’s young son clung to him as the mob bound Mr. Brandon’s hands. Soon after, the mob forced Mr. Brandon’s son back into the jail cell, carried Mr. Brandon away, and hanged him from a tree on the courthouse lawn.

Mr. Brandon’s body was left hanging outside the courthouse until the next morning, and contemporary accounts noted that members of the Black community were forced to bear witness to his body in the town square. As was characteristic of racial terror violence, white mobs often committed lynchings in prominent community locations to dehumanize their victims and to send a message of terror and intimidation to the entire Black community.

Mr. Brandon was one of at least 84 Black people who were victims of racial terror lynching in Virginia between 1877 and 1950.

In the early hours of the morning on April 5, 1880, Cadet Johnson Whittaker, one of the first Black students in the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, was brutally beaten by white cadets while sleeping in his barracks. Three white cadets ambushed Cadet Whittaker, slashed his head and ears, burned his Bible, threatened his life, and then left him in his underwear, tied to the bed and bleeding profusely.

Born enslaved in South Carolina in 1858, Cadet Whittaker received a congressional appointment to the U.S. Military Academy in 1876. For most of his time at West Point, Cadet Whittaker was the only Black cadet at the institution; he endured social exclusion and racial terrorism perpetrated at the hands of white cadets and faculty alike. Twenty-three Black cadets attended West Point between 1870 and 1890, but due to the violent discrimination that they faced, only three graduated. Cadet Whittaker would later testify that he had “read and heard about the treatment that [Black] cadets received there, and expected to be ostracized.”

After Cadet Whittaker reported to West Point administrators that he had been attacked, the institution opened an investigation into him and declined to hold his white attackers accountable. Administrators instead claimed that Cadet Whittaker had staged the attack to get out of his final exams, and in May, a West Point court of inquiry found Cadet Whittaker guilty of that charge. He was forced to take his final exams while incarcerated and withstand court-martial proceedings in New York City where the army prosecutor repeatedly referred to Black people as an “inferior race” known to “feign and sham.”

In January 1881, Brigadier General N.A. Miles affirmed Cadet Whittaker’s conviction and authorized him to be expelled from West Point, dishonorably discharged from the military, and held for continued imprisonment. Cadet Whittaker’s case was ultimately forwarded to President Chester A. Arthur for approval, and, a year later, President Arthur issued an executive order overturning the conviction based on a finding that military prosecutors had relied on improperly admitted evidence. By the time of President Arthur’s intervention, Cadet Whittaker had been incarcerated for nearly two years; even after his conviction was overturned, West Point reinstated Cadet Whittaker’s expulsion, claiming he had failed an exam.

Johnson Whittaker went on to work in several professional fields and raise a family, including several generations of descendants who served in the U.S. military. In 1995, more than 60 years after his death, Mr. Whittaker’s heirs accepted the commission he would have received upon graduating West Point. At the ceremony, President Bill Clinton remarked: “We cannot undo history. But today, finally, we can pay tribute to a great American and we can acknowledge a great injustice.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed while standing on a hotel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. Dr. King was in the city to speak on his growing Poor People’s Campaign and to support an economic protest by Black sanitation workers.

About two months earlier, 1,300 African American Memphis sanitation workers began a strike to protest low pay and poor treatment. When city leaders largely ignored the strike and refused to negotiate, the workers sought assistance from civil rights leaders, including Dr. King. He enthusiastically agreed to help and, on March 18, visited the city to speak to a crowd of more than 15,000 people.

Dr. King also planned a march of support. When the first attempt was violently suppressed by police, leaving one protestor dead, Dr. King resolved to stage another peaceful march on April 8. He returned to Memphis by plane on April 3, braving a bomb threat on his scheduled flight. Once in Memphis, he stayed at the Lorraine Motel and gave a short speech reflecting on his own mortality.

The next evening, April 4, Dr. King was shot as he stepped out onto the motel balcony. He was rushed to nearby St. Joseph’s Hospital and pronounced dead at 7:05 pm, leaving a nation in shock and sparking mournful uprisings in more than 100 cities across the country. Just 39 years old, Dr. King left behind a wife, Coretta Scott King, and four young children. James Earl Ray, a white man, was later convicted of his assassination.

President William Howard Taft directed the U.S. Army to expel the Ninth Cavalry, an all-Black unit, from San Antonio, Texas. Earlier that day, the president had met with San Antonio’s U.S. Congressman, John Garner, who urged President Taft to expel the Black cavalrymen from the entire State of Texas because their protest of segregated seating on city streetcars threatened local “law and order.” Immediately afterward, President Taft issued a memorandum to General Leonard Wood, the Army’s chief of staff, directing the nation’s highest-ranking army official to remove the Ninth Cavalry from San Antonio.

Two days later, the Black soldiers were relocated to Rio Grande City, Texas, a city near the Mexican border. Local white residents protested the arrival of the Black cavalry soldiers, claiming that Black men who volunteered to serve their country were “continually looking for an opportunity to exercise brutality.” Facing mounting hostility from this white opposition, President Taft ultimately rescinded the order and had the Black troops returned to San Antonio. White Rio Grande City residents adopted a resolution commending the decision, while white San Antonio residents were outraged. In July 1911, the Black soldiers of the Ninth Cavalry were again removed from San Antonio, this time relocated to Fort Russell, Wyoming.

On the same day that Rep. Garner lobbied for the removal of Black soldiers from San Antonio, he announced plans for legislation that would repeal the Army Organization Act of 1866. That Reconstruction-era law had required the War Department to establish and maintain two Black cavalry units and four Black infantry units in the U.S. Army to enable Black men to serve in the otherwise all-white, segregated U.S. military. In 1911, the nation’s army remained segregated, and Black soldiers were barred from serving in all but these six units. Rep. Garner’s proposal repealing the 1866 Act would have given the War Department discretion to abolish the all-Black units—and thus prevent any Black citizens from serving in the military. Rep. Garner in fact intended for his proposed legislation to exclude Black soldiers entirely, as he believed that no high-ranking official in the military would permit Black Americans to serve if federal law did not require it.

Though the bill did not pass, its proposal—and the punitive treatment of Black soldiers simply fighting for civil rights— reflects the extreme levels of white resistance to Black military service that characterized the highest offices of government and military institutions.

Georgia ceded its western territory—the land that would become Alabama and Mississippi—under the condition that slavery would be legal there.

The Northwest Ordinance, passed by Congress in 1787, had laid out the procedures for adding new states to the U.S. that were located in the Northwest Territory (lands above the Ohio River between Pennsylvania and the Mississippi River). The law stipulated that slavery would be banned in these lands.

However, when the State of Georgia agreed to relinquish claims to its western territory (lands below Tennessee between the Chattahoochee River and the Mississippi River), it chose, with the federal government’s agreement, to deviate from the Northwest ordinance in one major respect: Georgia’s act of cession stated that the Northwest Ordinance “shall, in all its parts, extend to the territory contained in the present act of cession, that article only excepted which forbids slavery.”

Georgia’s cession of its western territory was part of a strategy by the “slave states” to shore up their power. At the time, there were eight “slave states” and eight free states. By creating new states in which slavery was legal, the U.S. Senate would add senators who supported slavery. In 1790, North Carolina had similarly ceded its western territories to create the “slave states” of Tennessee and Kentucky. As long as the Southern states held enough power in the Senate, they could block federal legislation pertaining to the issue of slavery in Congress.

Because of the slavery clause in Georgia’s act of cession, hundreds of thousands of Black people would become enslaved in Alabama and Mississippi. The enslaved population of Alabama grew from under 40,000 when the cession occurred to over 435,000 in 1860. In Mississippi, the enslaved population grew from under 33,000 to over 435,000 in 1860 as well.

Ohio began legally prohibiting Black people from testifying in cases involving white people as parties. As a result, for the next four decades, white people could act with impunity in filing baseless civil suits against Black people barred from testifying to defend themselves and committing crimes against Black people with no fear that the victim or any Black witnesses would be permitted to give evidence against them. This law made Black people vulnerable to exploitation and abuse and ensured that they could not rely on the courts for protection or justice.

Between 1800 and 1810, the Black population of Ohio increased by more than 550%. When Ohio became a state in 1803, the Ohio legislature launched a coordinated campaign to prevent “fugitive slaves” and freed Black people from settling in the state. Enacted between 1804 and 1807, Ohio’s “Black Laws” sought to restrict the movement and freedom of Black people already living in the state, deny all Black people the right to public education, and require Black people to register with local authorities and “prove” their freedom on demand. Other laws restricted Black people from competing economically with white Ohioans; an 1807 law fined any white person for hiring a Black person who did not possess proof of freedom. Within 20 days of arriving in Ohio, Black people seeking residence there were required to post a $500 bond guaranteed by two white men.

The “testimony law,” which went into effect on April 1, 1807, built on these racial restrictions. The law prohibited any Black person from “be[ing] sworn or giv[ing] evidence in any court of record where either party is a white person, or in any prosecution … against any white person.” This meant that Black people could not testify against white people who committed crimes against them or others. In civil cases, white plaintiffs could easily win lawsuits against Black people, who were unable to protect themselves from even clearly frivolous lawsuits. This dramatically undermined the reliability of the legal system and furthered the racial injustice and inequality facing Black people living in Ohio.

During this period, the Colored American, a Black newspaper in Cincinnati, reported numerous examples of white people swindling money from Black people and also highlighted cases in which authorities failed to prosecute white-on-Black violence after this law kept Black eyewitnesses from testifying. In 1841, after two white men murdered a Black man named Charles Scott in his Hamilton County home, a white judge relied on the 1807 testimony law to prohibit Mr. Scott’s widow—an eyewitness to the murder—from testifying at the white men’s trial. Although the men were convicted after the judge admitted the testimony of a different eyewitness—whom the judge deemed “white enough” under a broad interpretation of the law—Mrs. Scott was barred from helping to prosecute the men who killed her husband. The testimony law, which prioritized white supremacy over justice, was on the books for 42 years and not repealed until 1849.

A white lynch mob in Wagoner County, Oklahoma, seized a 17-year-old Black girl named Marie Scott from the local jail, dragged her screaming from her cell, and hanged her from a nearby telephone pole. Days before, a young white man named Lemuel Pierce was stabbed to death while he and several other white men were in the city’s “colored section”; Marie was accused of being involved.

The Associated Press wire report and accounts published by Northern papers explained that the group of white men had ventured into the Black residential area to sexually assault Black women and attempted to rape Marie Scott. According to some of these accounts, Marie stabbed Pierce in self-defense; in others, Marie’s brother killed Pierce in an effort to defend her, and Marie was only arrested and lynched because her brother escaped. Local press reports, on the other hand, did not say anything about why the white youth were in the Black neighborhood or what they did while there and simply claimed that Marie Scott stabbed Pierce unprovoked and in cold blood.

For generations of Black women, racial terror included the constant threat of sexual assault and a complete lack of legal protection. The same communities that lynched and legally executed Black men for the scarcest allegations of sexual contact with white women regularly tolerated and excused white men’s sexual attacks against Black women and girls.

Given this history, Marie Scott may have been among the many Black women targeted for sexual violence during this era by white men who knew that they would face no judgment or consequences for rampaging her community. Whether she acted in her own defense or was protected by her brother, Marie Scott died at the hands of a mob, the victim of a society that devalued her life and body; deprived her of the chance to defend herself at trial; and denied her the right to be free from rape, terrorism, and racial violence.

The Sovereignty Commission, a Mississippi state agency, voted to continue funding pro-segregation campaigns organized by white citizens’ councils. Among the commission members were Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, Lt. Governor Paul B. Johnson, and the attorney general.

In the nine months leading up to the decision, the state commission invested the equivalent of over $600,000 today into pro-segregation campaigns broadcasted on national radio and television. The group helped finance over a dozen campaigns that aired in Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Mississippi.

One of the campaigns characterized life for Black Mississippians as superior: “Negroes receive better treatment and more consideration of their welfare in Mississippi than any other state in the nation,” the campaign stated.

In reality, racial terror violence and extreme opposition to equal rights for Black people were widespread in Mississippi. Mississippi was among the first Southern states to adopt a new state constitution in the 1890s designed to disenfranchise Black citizens, which succeeded in excluding Black Mississippians from political participation and power for decades.

Mississippi continued to symbolically resist racial equality throughout the 20th century; the state did not formally ratify the Thirteenth Amendment—which prohibited slavery except as punishment for crime—until 1995.

Several white churches in Jackson, Mississippi, barred three Black men—including one minister—from attending Easter Sunday services, forcibly removing them from church or blocking their entrance. Two of the Black men and seven white clergymen who had accompanied them were arrested and jailed after the churches turned them away; their bonds were set at $1,000 each.

When Methodist Bishops Charles Golden, a Black man, and James Matthews, a white man, tried to enter the Galloway Memorial Church that morning, ushers on the church steps refused to let them enter, citing “church policies.” As ranking members of the Methodist denomination, the two bishops asked to speak to the church minister, but the ushers refused to let them. While the men stood outside the church deciding what to do next, a white crowd harassed them with taunts and jeers until the men left the church grounds. In an interview, Bishop Golden would later question the wisdom of “those who presume to speak and act for God in turning worshipers away from his house.”

Bishop Golden and Bishop Matthews were able to leave freely, but 10 blocks away, an interracial group of nine men were arrested when they attended Easter service at the Capitol Street Methodist Church. Ushers on the church steps tried to block them from entering, and when the group of men tried to go around the ushers, they were arrested and charged with trespassing and disturbing the peace. The group included two young Black men named Robert Talbert and Dave Walker and seven white men—clergy, theological teachers, and deans from several schools and colleges outside of Mississippi—who had accompanied them to the service. The men had carried with them a statement that read “To exclude some of those whom Christ would draw unto himself from church…on Easter…because of color is a violation of human dignity.”

The day after their arrests, a judge convicted all nine men of “disturbing public worship” and sentenced them each to six months in jail and a $500 fine.

Several weeks earlier, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had announced plans to lead anti-segregation protests in St. Augustine, Florida, over Easter, in response to recent violence against civil rights activists there. Dr. King urged Northern supporters of civil rights to travel South to join “pray-in” and “kneel-in” demonstrations at the city’s segregated churches, and that Florida effort likely helped to inspire the activism in Jackson. Like in Mississippi, several St. Augustine protesters were also arrested—and even beaten—for trying to integrate Easter services at all-white churches.

This racist treatment of individuals seeking to attend church illustrates how many white denominations—particularly those in the South—remained defiantly committed to racial segregation as an essential component of white supremacy and racial inequality, even a decade after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Three months later, in June 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the law outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin but could not immediately end white Americans’ massive resistance.

A 22-year-old Black man named Jeremiah Reeves was executed by the state of Alabama after police tortured him until he gave a false confession as a 16-year-old child.

In July 1951, Jeremiah, who was a 16-year-old high school student at the time, and Mabel Ann Crowder, a white woman, were discovered having sex in her home. Ms. Crowder claimed she had been raped by Jeremiah, and he was immediately arrested and taken to Kilby Prison for “questioning.” Police strapped the frightened boy into the electric chair and told him that he would be electrocuted unless he admitted to having committed all of the rapes white women had reported that summer. Under this terrifying pressure, he falsely confessed to the charges in fear. Though he soon recanted and insisted he was innocent, Jeremiah was convicted and sentenced to death after a two-day trial during which the all-white jury deliberated for less than 30 minutes.

The local Black community believed—and in some cases, knew—that Jeremiah Reeves and Mabel Crowder had been involved in an ongoing, consensual affair. Concerned about the injustice of the young man’s conviction, the Montgomery NAACP became involved and helped attract the attention of national lawyer Thurgood Marshall. These advocates were able to win reversal of Jeremiah’s conviction on December 6, 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the trial judge had been wrong to prevent the jury from hearing evidence of the torture police used to get his confession.

Jeremiah’s case also became a flashpoint for Montgomery’s nascent civil rights movement. Claudette Colvin, who was arrested at 15 for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a Birmingham bus in March 1955, was inspired to take that protest action as a show of support for Jeremiah, her friend and schoolmate. Ms. Colvin later became one of four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, the case that led the Supreme Court to order buses desegregated in 1956. Rosa Parks exchanged letters with Jeremiah while he was jailed and helped him to get his poetry published in the Birmingham World; she went on to repeat Ms. Colvin’s protest in December 1955, facing arrest for resisting bus segregation and sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

At a second trial in June 1955, Jeremiah was again convicted and sentenced to death. This time, all appeals were denied. Jeremiah had spent much of his time in prison writing poetry, and he willed his final poem to his mother. He remained on death row until 1958, when he reached what was considered the minimum age for execution.

On April 6, 1958, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at an Easter rally in Montgomery, Alabama. Standing on the marked spot on the Capitol steps where Jefferson Davis had been sworn in as president of the Confederacy in 1861, Dr. King decried Jeremiah Reeves’s wrongful conviction and execution, which had been carried out a little over a week before.

As mourners and activists gathered at the Capitol for the rally, they were confronted by Ku Klux Klansmen determined to disrupt the peaceful demonstration. Undeterred, Dr. King forcefully denounced the unequal treatment of white and Black defendants and victims in the courts. “Truth may be crucified and justice buried,” he declared, “but one day they will rise again. We must live and face death if necessary with that hope.”

Afterward, a group of 39 local white ministers released a statement decrying the activists’ “exaggerated emphasis on wrongs and grievances.”

Alabama Representative James Thomas Heflin shot Louis Lundy, a Black man, after he allegedly cursed in front of a white woman while riding on a Washington, D.C., streetcar. The congressman claimed that Mr. Lundy’s cursing was “raising a disturbance,” and he received an outpouring of support from the white public and his fellow representatives after shooting Mr. Lundy through his neck. He was never held accountable for shooting Mr. Lundy.

That afternoon, Rep. Heflin was reportedly on his way to deliver a message about “temperance” at a local church in Washington, D.C. As he boarded a streetcar on Sixth Street with a colleague, he focused his attention on Mr. Lundy, who was riding the streetcar with friends. Claiming that Mr. Lundy had used profanity in the presence of a white woman also on the streetcar, Rep. Heflin quickly became enraged and violent, striking Mr. Lundy with the butt of his pistol and pulling him off of the streetcar.

Congressman Heflin then re-boarded the streetcar and, unsatisfied to simply leave Mr. Lundy assaulted on the street, fired two gunshots at the Black man through the streetcar window. One bullet struck Mr. Lundy’s neck—wounding Mr. Lundy and confining him to a local hospital in critical condition.

Rep. Heflin was arrested on the spot but immediately received an outpouring of support from colleagues and local white residents of Washington, D.C. A newspaper reported that Rep. Heflin received a bouquet of roses from a local Baptist minister with an accompanying note stating that the clergyman “approved highly of his courageous chivalry.” After being released on bond the following day, Rep. Heflin returned to the legislative session and was greeted enthusiastically by his colleagues, who vowed to “do everything possible to aid” him. In response, the congressman publicly said of shooting Mr. Lundy: “I only did what any other gentleman would do.”

J. Thomas Heflin built a political career around maintaining white supremacy, demonstrated by his continued and persistent support for convict leasing and segregation, as well as his opposition to interracial marriage. A drafter of the Alabama Constitution in 1901, Heflin said, “God Almighty intended the negro to be the servant of the white man,” and often boasted that his father enslaved more people than anyone else in Randolph County. Just months before shooting Mr. Lundy, he had introduced a bill that advocated for segregated seating on streetcars in Washington, D.C., to prevent Black men from sitting next to white women, and he called interracial seating on streetcars “an offensive and irritating condition.” Although the bill did not pass, Rep. Heflin’s commitment to segregation and white supremacy made him popular among his colleagues and white constituents. The charges against Rep. Heflin for shooting Mr. Lundy in 1908 were dismissed and he was never held accountable for that attack.

Rep. Heflin served as a representative of Alabama until 1920 and as a U.S. senator from Alabama from 1920 to 1931.

A group of white men brutally lynched the Rev. Isaac Simmons, a Black minister and farmer, so they could steal his land in Amite County, Mississippi. Members of his family, some of whom witnessed his murder, fled the state, fearing for their lives. The white men responsible for lynching him successfully stole the Simmons’s land and were never convicted for their crimes.

Before his death, the Rev. Simmons controlled more than 270 acres of debt-free Amite County land that his family had owned since 1887. This was very unusual among Black families in the South, where racism and poverty had posed obstacles to economic advancement for generations. The Rev. Simmons worked the land with his children and grandchildren, producing crops and selling the property’s lumber.

In 1941, a rumor spread that there was oil in Southwest Mississippi. A group of six white men decided they wanted the Simmons’s land and warned the Rev. Simmons to stop cutting lumber. The Rev. Simmons consulted a lawyer to work out the dispute and ensure his children would be the sole heirs to the property.

On Sunday, March 26, 1944, a group of white men arrived at the home of the Rev. Simmons’s eldest son, Eldridge, and told him to show them the property line. He agreed to do so, but while Eldridge Simmons rode with the men in their vehicle, they began to beat him and shouted that the Simmons family thought they were “smart niggers” for consulting a lawyer. The men then dragged the Rev. Simmons from his home about a mile away and began beating him, too. They drove both Simmons men further onto the property and ordered the Rev. Simmons out of the car, then killed him brutally–shooting him three times and cutting out his tongue. The men let Eldridge Simmons go but told him he and his relatives had 10 days to abandon the family property.

The white men who committed the lynching took possession of the land. The constable and sheriff concluded immediately that the Rev. Simmons had “met his death at the hands of parties unknown” even though his son, Eldridge, and his daughter, Laura, were present and able to identify by name at least four of the six men responsible. The family fled Amite County over the next two days, fearing for their lives, before their father’s funeral on March 29. Eldridge remained in Amite for his father’s funeral but was taken into police custody the next day supposedly for his own protection. Held in jail for more than a week despite being the victim, Eldridge was released from jail on April 8 and was urged to leave the county altogether.

Only one of the six white men responsible was ever prosecuted for the Rev. Simmons’s lynching. On November 1, 1944, more than seven months after their father was lynched, Eldridge and his sister, Laura, were arrested in New Orleans, LA, on charges that they had fled the state in order to avoid testifying as witnesses in the trial of the only white man prosecuted for murdering their father. During the trial on November 11, 1944, Eldridge and Laura refused to name the perpetrators in the testimony because they feared for their lives in the event of a conviction. The one white man was ultimately acquitted by an all-white jury because of “lack of evidence.”

During the era of racial terror, white mobs regularly terrorized Black people with violence and murder to maintain the racial hierarchy and exert economic control. These acts of lawlessness were committed with impunity, by mobs who rarely faced arrest, prosecution, or even public shame for their actions. Black people could expect little protection from law enforcement and knew that protesting their own abuse or a loved one’s lynching could result in even more violence and death.

The Rev. Simmons was one of at least 14 Black people lynched in Amite County, Mississippi, between 1865 and 1950.

Nine Black teenagers riding a freight train through Alabama and north toward Memphis, Tennessee, were arrested after being falsely accused of raping two white women. After nearly being lynched, they were brought to trial in Scottsboro, Alabama.

Despite evidence that exonerated the teens, including a retraction by one of their accusers, the state pursued the case. All-white juries delivered guilty verdicts, and all nine defendants, except the youngest, were sentenced to death. From 1931 to 1937, during a series of appeals and new trials, they languished in Alabama’s Kilby prison, where they were repeatedly brutalized by guards.

In 1932, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded in Powell v. Alabama that the Scottsboro defendants had been denied adequate counsel at trial. In 1935, in Norris v. Alabama, the Court again ruled in favor of the defendants, overturning their convictions because Alabama had systematically excluded Black people from jury service.

Finally, in 1937, four of the defendants were released and five were given sentences from 20 years to life; four of the defendants sentenced to prison time were released on parole between 1943 and 1950, while the fifth escaped prison in 1948 and fled to Michigan. One of the Scottsboro Boys, Clarence Norris, walked out of Kilby Prison in 1946 after being paroled; he moved North to make a life for himself and did not receive a full pardon until 30 years later.

The U.S. government began army-directed evictions and evacuations, forcing over 200 Japanese American residents on Bainbridge Island in Washington state to evacuate their homes within six days. Any person of Japanese ancestry found on the island after noon on March 30 was subjected to criminal penalties.

During the early 20th century, prejudice against Japanese Americans was rampant in the U.S. After Japanese military forces bombed American forces at the Pearl Harbor naval base in Hawaii in December 1941, the U.S. entered World War II. Anti-Japanese bigotry quickly worsened, and many political leaders and media outlets called for the internment of individuals of Japanese descent residing in the western portion of the country. Bainbridge Island was cited as a high sensitivity area due to its proximity to the Puget Sound Navy Yard.

Just hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the FBI arrested and detained over a thousand Japanese religious and community leaders and searched the private homes of thousands of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. By February, advisors to President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that “the Japanese race is the enemy race” and, on February 19, 1942, the president signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing military leaders to detain Japanese Americans in camps, en masse, without due process.

Although the Department of Justice and the FBI insisted that people of Japanese descent did not pose a security threat, the internment process began soon after this executive order was signed. On March 24, 1942, the U.S. military ordered all individuals of Japanese ancestry residing on Bainbridge Island in Washington to report to concentration camps within seven days. Individuals possessing “at least 1/16 Japanese blood” were required to leave their homes and dispose of their possessions and businesses and were given a paper identification tag. Couples who possessed different ancestry under these guidelines were separated. In the concentration camps, conditions were prison-like: armed guards and barbed wire surrounded the camps and housing areas were overcrowded and filthy.

Internment was politically popular and faced no serious opposition from elected officials or the courts. In 1944, the Supreme Court decided Korematsu v. United States, upholding the constitutionality of the internment order and authorizing the continued detention of Japanese Americans. Between 1942 and 1944, 120,000 individuals of Japanese descent were interned, 70,000 of whom were American citizens.

When the internment order was officially rescinded in January 1945, after the end of the war, individuals were released from internment but received no compensation for their lost property and mistreatment. More than four decades later, in 1988, the United States passed an act formally apologizing for internment and authorizing a $20,000 redress payment to each living internment survivor.

The Tennessee legislature approved House Bill 527, which permitted hotels, inns, public transportation, and amusement parks to refuse admission and service to any person for any reason. Three weeks before, federal authorities had enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which guaranteed African Americans equal treatment in public accommodations and jury service. By enacting a state law that allowed for all kinds of discrimination, including on the basis of race, Tennessee officials had defiantly authorized the very discrimination the federal law prohibited.

In July 1866, after ratifying the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, Tennessee became the first Confederate state readmitted to the Union. However, many white residents in the state had not accepted the outcome of the recent Civil War and remained intent on maintaining their dominance over a political and social system that now included many free Black citizens.

In 1869, racialized political movements restored former Confederates to legislative power in Tennessee. Newly elected lawmakers quickly undertook efforts to “redeem” the South by restoring white supremacy and the exploitation of Black labor. Legislators quickly repealed a state statute passed in 1868 under the Reconstruction government that had outlawed racial discrimination in railroad travel. In 1870, Tennessee lawmakers went further, amending the state constitution to prohibit racial integration of Tennessee public schools.

Many other border states passed similar laws aimed at limiting Black Americans’ new constitutional rights and protections. Congress’s passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875 was an attempt to enforce Black Americans’ rights and equality, and it set off a legal conflict between state and federal power.

The U.S. Supreme Court settled that conflict in 1883 when it found the Civil Rights Act to be an unconstitutional exercise of Thirteenth Amendment powers. The opinion, issued in Civil Rights Cases, empowered Tennessee and other states to retain and expand their discriminatory laws and cleared the way for several more generations of Jim Crow rule.

A white woman and a Black man were arrested in Atlanta, Georgia, and accused of walking and talking together on Whitehall Street. In a news article entitled, “Color Line Was Ignored,” The Atlanta Constitution newspaper reported that Mrs. James Charles, “a handsomely dressed white woman of prepossessing appearance,” and C.W. King, “a Negro cook,” were arrested after Officer J.T. Shepard reported having seen the two talk to each other and then “walk side by side for several minutes.”

After the Confederacy’s defeat in the Civil War, emancipation and the granting of civil rights to Black people threatened to overturn traditional Southern culture and social relations rooted in white supremacy and racial hierarchy. After Reconstruction ended and white politicians and lawmakers regained control and power in the South, many set out to restore that racial order through very strict laws that mandated segregation and made it illegal for Black and white people to interact as equals. Under these policies, interracial marriage or romance—particularly between Black men and white women—was strictly banned, as was integrated education and even interracial athletic events.

After her arrest for allegedly walking and talking with a Black man, Mrs. Charles gave a statement that did not challenge the law but instead fervently denied the accusation. She insisted she had exchanged no words with Mr. King and merely smiled as she passed him dancing on the street:

“As I paused to listen to the music I noticed a negro man, the one arrested with me, dancing on the sidewalk,” she said. “I smiled at his antics and was about to pass on when a policeman touched me on the arm and said he wanted to talk to me. I stopped and he asked why I talked to a negro. I denied having spoken to any negro. I told him I was a southern born woman, and his insinuations were an insult.”

Mr. King also denied having spoken to Mrs. Charles and said he never knew there was a white woman near him. No further reporting on the arrests was published, and it is not clear whether they were convicted and fined when tried the next afternoon.

The narrative of racial difference created to justify slavery—the myth that white people are superior to Black people—was not abolished by the Emancipation Proclamation or the Thirteenth Amendment, and it outlived slavery and Reconstruction. White Americans committed to the myth of Black inferiority used the law and violence to relegate Black Americans to second-class citizenship at the bottom of a racial caste system.

A 19-year-old Black man named Michael Donald was beaten, strangled, slashed at the throat, and hanged in Mobile, Alabama, by two members of the United Klans of America. Initially, local police wrongly attributed Mr. Donald’s death to drug violence, but his family insisted he had not been involved in drug activity and demanded a more thorough investigation. Tests also showed no trace of drugs in Mr. Donald’s body.

Authorities later charged Klansmen Henry Hays and James Knowles with Mr. Donald’s murder and charged Benjamin Cox Jr. as an accomplice. Evidence revealed that local Klan leaders had been monitoring the trial of Josephus Anderson, a Black man charged with killing a white police officer in Birmingham, Alabama. When that trial ended in mistrial on March 21 because the jury was unable to reach a verdict, members of the Klan in Mobile sought to make a violent response. “If a Black man can get away with killing a white man,” said Benny Hays, a high-ranking Klansman and the father of Henry Hays, “we ought to be able to get away with killing a Black man.” Michael Donald was killed that night.

All three white men charged with Michael Donald’s death were convicted; Mr. Knowles and Mr. Cox received life sentences and were later paroled, while Mr. Hays was sentenced to death and executed by the State of Alabama in 1997. In 1984, Michael Donald’s mother, Beulah Donald, sued the United Klans of America. She ultimately won a $7 million wrongful death suit, and though very little money was ever collected, the ruling did bankrupt the white supremacist organization.

Harry Laughlin, a leader in the eugenics movement, drafted a Model Eugenical Sterilization Law that Virginia adopted and enacted on March 20, 1924. The law, which allowed for the forced sterilization of people confined to state institutions as a “benefit both to themselves and society,” was passed on the same day that the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 became law. The Racial Integrity Act required the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics to record a racial description of every newborn baby and outlawed marriages between “white” and “non-white” partners. Together, the laws sought to “purify the white race.”

Eugenics, named for the Greek word meaning “well-born,” is a selective breeding philosophy that seeks to eliminate “undesirable” traits by preventing certain kinds of people from reproducing. Sir Francis Galton developed the term in 1883 and described eugenics as “the study of the agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally.” As eugenics gained widespread support throughout the U.S. at the beginning of the 20th century, states began to authorize doctors to forcibly sterilize their patients.

When the Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s Eugenical Sterilization Act in Buck v. Bell in 1927, Virginia’s law became a model for the rest of the country and facilitated the forced sterilization of more than 60,000 men and women nationwide. Children as young as 10 years old were targeted for sterilization. Later, Virginia’s law was co-opted by Nazi Germany and relied upon as precedent for the Nazis’ race purity programs. Though eugenical theory was criticized after World War II, forced sterilization persisted long after in the U.S.

Just months after he prevailed in a lawsuit to force the University of Missouri to accept him to its all-white law school, a young Black man named Lloyd Gaines went missing and was never seen again.

After graduating from the historically Black Lincoln University in 1935, Lloyd Gaines applied for admission to the segregated University of Missouri School of Law—the only law school in the state. In March of 1936, the school notified Mr. Gaines that his application had been rejected and instead offered to subsidize his tuition elsewhere (at a historically Black law school or a non-segregated law school in another state).

With the NAACP’s support, Mr. Gaines rejected the offer and sued the University of Missouri to challenge its policy that barred him from attending law school in his home state merely because of his race. Mr. Gaines lost in state courts and appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he won the case in December 1938. As a result, the University of Missouri was ordered to accept Mr. Gaines to its law school or create an in-state law school for African Americans.

The Missouri legislature responded by hastily establishing a separate, unequal law school for African Americans that the NAACP insisted did not comply with the Court’s decision. However, when the NAACP was preparing to file another legal challenge, it learned that Mr. Gaines was missing. A housekeeper at his residence in Chicago reported last seeing him on March 19, 1939. Without a plaintiff, the desegregation lawsuit against the University of Missouri was dismissed; it would be another decade before the school would admit its first African American student.

Family members suspected that Mr. Gaines was abducted and murdered for his activism, while state officials claimed he fled and assumed another identity in response to threats against him and his loved ones. To this day, Mr. Gaines’s fate is unknown.

Beginning in 1827, the State of Georgia enacted legislation that nullified Cherokee laws and appropriated Cherokee lands. In response to Georgia’s extension of its law over the Cherokee Nation, the Cherokee filed suit in the U.S. Supreme Court, challenging the legislation and citing treaties the nation had previously entered into with the U.S. government. The Cherokee argued that those treaties established the Cherokee Nation as a sovereign and independent state.

On March 18, 1831, the Supreme Court issued an opinion in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, sidestepping the issue of whether Georgia could extend its law over the Cherokee tribes and instead ruling that the Cherokee Nation was not a “foreign nation”—so the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction to hear its claims.

The Court observed that while Native Americans had an “unquestioned right to the lands they occupy, until that right shall be extinguished by a voluntary cession to our government; it may well be doubted whether those tribes which reside within the acknowledged boundaries of the United States can, with strict accuracy, be denominated foreign nations.” The Court emphasized that Native Americans were “domestic dependent nations” with a “relation to the United States [that] resembles that of a ward to his guardian” and concluded that Indigenous communities could not bring suit in an American court.

The Court refused to enforce the treaties that would have protected the Cherokee from state and federal interference, instead leaving them vulnerable to the Indian Removal Act—which resulted in the Cherokee’s forcible removal later that year.

On March 17, 1886, 23 Black people were killed when a white mob stormed the courthouse in Carroll County, Mississippi, and opened fire on local Black residents. Black residents were in court following accusations against a white man for the assault of two brothers, Ed and Charley Brown.

The brothers, who were Black, had accused local attorney James Monroe Liddell, who was white, of assaulting them during an altercation in February 1886. That Black residents would use the legal system to try to hold a white person accountable for a crime infuriated white residents of the county. On March 17, the day of the trial, a group of 50 to 100 white men rode into town and ran into the courthouse, opening fire and killing 23 of the Black residents in attendance. None of the white people in attendance were hit by bullets.

Though the killings sparked outrage nationwide, no action was taken by the county or the state of Mississippi. No one was ever tried for the murders. The governor of Mississippi, Robert Lowry, commented that “the riot was provoked and perpetrated by the outrage and conduct of the Negroes.”

In Washington, D.C., Black politicians met with President Grover Cleveland and introduced legislation in Congress calling for an investigation into the massacre, but the federal government also refused to respond.

Bullet holes remained in the courthouse walls until the building was renovated in the 1990s.

After failing for 130 years to ratify the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery except as punishment for crime, the state of Mississippi finally ratified the Thirteenth Amendment on March 16, 1995.

Soon after the Confederacy’s defeat in the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment was designed to abolish slavery nationwide. The text of the amendment reads, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

After Congress passed the amendment on January 31, 1865, three-fourths of the states (27 of 36) needed to ratify it before it could become part of the Constitution. Mississippi’s economy was built on slavery and the state had the largest enslaved population in the country at the start of the Civil War. On December 5, 1865, the state legislature voted against ratification, becoming one of several Southern states that refused to endorse the Thirteenth Amendment. Ultimately, the amendment received enough votes from other states so that it was ratified the following day despite Mississippi’s opposition to the end of enslavement.

Almost 130 years later, in 1994, a clerk in the Texas Legislature named Gregory Watson discovered that Mississippi still had not ratified the Thirteenth Amendment. He notified each of the Black members of the Mississippi legislature and sent them a draft of a resolution that Mississippi could adopt in order to rectify the situation. On March 16th of the next year, the Mississippi legislature reached a largely symbolic vote to unanimously ratify the abolition of slavery in the U.S.—becoming the last of the eligible states to do so.

After the vote, however, Mississippi state officials failed to send the necessary documentation to the federal register, so the ratification was not formally filed as required. Nearly 20 years later, in late 2012, two Mississippi residents discovered that the ratification was not yet official and notified the Secretary of State. Several weeks later, the required paperwork was filed, and Mississippi’s ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment was legally recorded on February 7, 2013.

A white mob in Rome, Tennessee, lynched a Black woman named Ballie Crutchfield. Ms. Crutchfield was not accused of any crime. She was targeted simply because the mob had earlier that night failed in its attempt to lynch her brother.

A week earlier, a white man in Rome had reportedly lost a wallet containing $120. As word spread that a young Black boy had found the wallet and given it to a young Black man named William Crutchfield, white residents accused William of stealing the wallet.

During this era, the deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society burdened Black people with a presumption of guilt that often served to focus suspicion on Black communities who were accused of crimes that may or may not have been committed. Though there was no evidence supporting the claim that William Crutchfield had stolen the wallet, he was promptly arrested and taken to the local jail. That night, a white mob stormed the jail and abducted Mr. Crutchfield from police custody, but as they prepared to lynch him, he escaped.

The lynch mob searched but failed to find Mr. Crutchfield; determined to take out their vengeance on someone, they instead seized his sister, Ballie Crutchfield, from her home. Though she was not even alleged to be in any way involved with the lost wallet, the mob took Ms. Crutchfield—whose first name was also reported as “Sallie”—to a bridge a short distance from the town, tied her hands behind her back, shot her in the head, and threw her body into the creek below.

Lynching was a tool of racial terror used to maintain white supremacy and dominance by instilling fear in the entire Black community. This brutal violence was often unpredictable and arbitrary. As was the case for Ms. Crutchfield, it was extremely common during this era for a lynch mob’s focus to expand beyond a specific person accused of an offense. Lynch mobs frequently targeted members of a suspect’s family, neighbors, or any and all Black people unfortunate enough to be in the mob’s path. Countless Black people were victims of racial terror lynchings not because they were accused of any crime, but simply because they were Black and present when the lynch mob could not locate its intended victim.

Ms. Crutchfield’s body was recovered from the creek the morning after she was killed, and the coroner’s jury quickly concluded that she had met her death “at the hands of parties unknown.” No one was held accountable for her lynching.

Ms. Crutchfield is one of at least 237 Black people lynched in Tennessee between 1877 and 1950 and one of more than 6,500 victims of racial terror lynching that EJI has documented between 1865 and 1950.

The Missouri General Assembly passed a law that required free Black people to apply for a license to remain in the state. Black people who failed to do so faced fines up to $100, incarceration, and expulsion from Missouri. Fearful of a growing Black population, white legislators enacted the law in an attempt to force Black people out of the state and empowered authorities to seize any free Black person that they suspected lacked a license.

Missouri’s law imposed onerous requirements on applicants. Free Black residents had to establish continuous residency for at least a decade and “produce satisfactory evidence… that [the applicant] is of good character and behavior, and capable of supporting [themselves] by lawful employment.” The law also obligated Black people to obtain a new license each time they moved to a different county.

In 1837, the Missouri Supreme Court upheld the license law in the case of a free Black man arrested and jailed by the mayor of St. Louis. In challenging his confinement, the man argued that the U.S. Constitution entitled him to the protections of birthright citizenship and that the license law violated his constitutional rights. The court rejected the Black man’s appeal and upheld the power of local authorities to arrest free Black people without a license.

Very few protections existed under state laws for free Black people during the era of enslavement, and their actions were strictly regulated. Between 1822 and 1854, courts in 11 other states, including Pennsylvania and California, ruled that free Black people were not citizens. For example, in 1805, Maryland enacted a law requiring all free Black people to petition the court for a “Certificate of Freedom” as a condition of residency. In 1811, Delaware passed a law providing that any free Black person who left the state for six months or more forfeited state residency. In 1822, South Carolina passed a law prohibiting free Black people from moving to or from the state.

In other states, it was a crime to be free and Black. In 1806, Virginia passed a law mandating that all free Black people leave the state within one year or face re-enslavement. In 1830, North Carolina passed a law providing that enslaved people could only be granted freedom on the condition that they left the state within 90 days and “never returned.” In 1833, the Alabama legislature banned all free Black people from entering the state, and under Alabama law the color of a Black person’s skin gave rise to a presumption that he or she was enslaved. The following year, the Alabama legislature expanded on this law, making it illegal to emancipate an enslaved Black person within Alabama’s borders.

Louisville police officers shot and killed Breonna Taylor during a nighttime no-knock raid of her apartment. Ms. Taylor, who was 26, worked as an emergency room technician and dreamed of becoming a nurse.

Shortly after midnight on March 13, Ms. Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, awoke to the sound of loud banging on their apartment door. Mr. Walker believed someone was trying to break into their home, and when several men forced their way inside the apartment using a battering ram, he fired his licensed firearm in self-defense. Mr. Walker struck one officer in the leg and the officers fired back—hitting Ms. Taylor at least five times.

According to Mr. Walker, Ms. Taylor struggled to breathe for at least five minutes after she was shot and received no medical attention for over 20 minutes. Mr. Walker was taken into custody and charged with attempted murder of a police officer, though the charges were dismissed in May of 2020.

The officers—who wore plain clothes during the raid—had been executing a no-knock warrant, which allows police to forcibly enter people’s homes without warning. Louisville officials have since banned no-knock warrants.

The warrant had been issued as part of an investigation into two men believed to be selling drugs from a location more than 10 miles from Ms. Taylor’s home. Police asserted that one of the men used Ms. Taylor’s apartment to receive packages, but no drugs were found in the apartment—and attorneys for Mr. Walker and Ms. Taylor’s family later reported that the police had already located the main suspect in the case before they broke into Ms. Taylor’s home.

In August 2020, nearly five months after Ms. Taylor’s killing and following national protests, the U.S. Department of Justice charged four officers involved in Ms. Taylor’s death with federal civil rights violations. One former detective pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and admitted that she had falsified a search warrant application for Ms. Taylor’s apartment. Brett Hankison, an officer who fired 10 bullets into Ms. Taylor’s apartment on the night of the raid, was acquitted of charges of wanton endangerment.

In March 2023, a Justice Department investigation into the Louisville Metro Police Department detailed serious misconduct and widespread discrimination against Black residents—including unlawful car stops, uses of excessive force, and harassment. “Breonna Taylor was a symptom of problems that we have had for years,” one unnamed police leader told the DOJ shortly after the investigation began.

By March 12, 1956, Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia convinced 101 of the 128 congressmen representing the 11 states of the old Confederacy to sign “The Southern Manifesto on Integration.” In total, 19 Senators and 82 Representatives—almost one-fifth of Congress—signed their name and declared their opposition to integration. The document claimed that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared racially segregated public education unconstitutional, constituted an abuse of power in violation of federal law.

The manifesto accused the Court of jeopardizing the social justice of white people and “their habits, traditions, and way of life” and also claimed that the Brown ruling would “[destroy] the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through 90 years of patient effort by the good people of both races.” The time period they referenced was in fact an era characterized by racial terror and a Jim Crow legal caste system that had targeted Black Americans for violence and inequality since the end of Reconstruction.

Eight southern states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia—enacted their own versions of the Southern Manifesto. Called “interposition resolutions,” these statements tried to elevate the state’s legal interpretation over that of the Supreme Court. These states also used legislative acts and voter referenda to enact tuition grant statutes that authorized state governments to fund privately run schools in order to preserve racially segregated education.

In early March 1965, a peaceful crowd of 600 people began a protest march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to show their support for Black voting rights. Police armed with batons, pepper spray, and guns attacked the marchers on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge in a violent assault that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”

After the attack, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other organizers remained determined to complete the march. Dr. King urged clergy to come to Selma and join the march to Montgomery. Hundreds of clergy from across the country heeded the call and traveled to Selma; one of them was the Reverend James Reeb, a 38-year-old white Unitarian minister from Boston.

On March 9th, Dr. King led 2,500 marchers onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge for a short prayer session. That evening, three white ministers–Orloff Miller, Clark Olsen, and James Reeb–were attacked and beaten by a group of white men opposed to their civil rights work. The Rev. Reeb was struck in the head with a club and suffered a severe skull fracture and brain damage.

Fearing that he would not be treated at the “white only” Selma Hospital, doctors at Selma’s Black Burwell Infirmary ordered the Rev. Reeb rushed to the Birmingham hospital. After a series of unfortunate events, including car trouble and confrontations with local police, the Rev. Reeb reached the hospital in Birmingham in critical condition. He died on March 11, 1965, leaving behind his wife and four children. Three white men later indicted for the Rev. Reeb’s murder were ultimately acquitted by an all-white jury.

More widely reported than the death of local Black activist Jimmie Lee Jackson a few weeks earlier, the Rev. Reeb’s death brought national attention to the voting rights struggle. The death also moved President Lyndon B. Johnson to call a special session of Congress, where he urged legislators to pass the Voting Rights Act. Congress did so, and President Johnson signed the act into law in August 1965.

Confederate soldiers hanged Amy Spain, a young Black woman, from a sycamore tree on the courthouse lawn in Darlington, South Carolina. Accused of “treason and conduct unbecoming a slave,” Amy was sentenced to death by a military tribunal and killed just weeks before the end of the Civil War.

When Union soldiers arrived in Darlington in early 1865, many enslaved people in the area believed it marked the end of bondage. A large number of Darlington’s white residents had deserted the area as Union forces approached, and the soldiers allowed the Black men and women to take whatever belongings had been left behind. Amy, who had been enslaved by Major Albertus C. Spain, reportedly took “linens, sheets, pillow cases, flour, sugar, lard, and some furniture” from the Spain home, where she had been enslaved and worked without pay for years.

When the Union soldiers left Darlington, Confederate troops returned and white residents who had remained in town during the occupation reported that Amy had been a “ringleader” of the “looting.” They also accused her of leading the Union forces to hidden valuables. Soon after, Amy was tried, sentenced to death, and hanged. According to newspaper reports, her punishment “was acquiesced in and witnessed by most of the citizens of the town.”

On April 9, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to the Union, preparing for the end of the Civil War. By the end of the year, ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, except as punishment for crime—but no one was ever held accountable for the hanging of Amy Spain.

A white mob stormed the Memphis jail, seized three Black men held inside, and brutally lynched them without trial.

Earlier that year, these same three Black men—Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and William “Henry” Stewart—opened the People’s Grocery Company in Memphis, Tennessee. Located across the street from a white-owned grocery store that had previously had a monopoly in the local Black community, the men’s new business reduced the white store’s profits. The venture also threatened the racial order by forcing white businessmen to compete economically with Black businessmen.

In the midst of this tension, a small fight between Black and white children grew into a larger conflict between Black and white men in the area. Afterward, some white men accused the People’s Grocery of being a meeting place for Black men planning an attack on white residents. This was largely a pretext to target the store for destruction, and the grocery owners and other Black men gathered with arms to defend the store against attack.

When the white mob attacked the store one evening soon after, shots were exchanged and three white men were wounded. Mr. Moss, Mr. McDowell, and Mr. Stewart were quickly arrested, and sensational newspaper reports published the next day fanned the flames of racial outrage. The lynching came soon after. In his last words before death, Thomas Moss reportedly declared, “Tell my people to go west. There is no justice for them here.”

Ida B. Wells, a 29-year-old Black schoolteacher and journalist living in Memphis, was a friend of the three murdered men and was deeply impacted by their deaths. She published an editorial echoing Mr. Moss’s last words and urging local Black residents to “save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.” More than 6,000 African Americans heeded her call and left Memphis soon after.

Ms. Wells was later forced to leave Memphis for Chicago due to threats on her own life, but she would devote her entire life to documenting and challenging the injustice of lynching through research, writing, speaking, and activism. No one was ever punished for the lynching deaths of Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and William “Henry” Stewart. They are among at least 20 African American victims of racial terror lynching killed in Shelby County, Tennessee, between 1877 and 1950.

Pennsylvania militiamen and frontiersmen murdered 96 pacifist Indigenous people, most of whom were members of the Delaware tribe, in the village of Gnadenhutten near present-day New Philadelphia, Ohio.

The members of the Pennsylvania militia, led by Capt. David Williamson, were seeking revenge for alleged raids by Native Americans in the area. They arrived at the houses of a group of Delaware who were not responsible for the alleged raids and had remained neutral in the conflict between the U.S. and the British. Nevertheless, Capt. Williamson’s men feigned friendliness, disarmed the members of the tribe, and confined the Indigenous men in one building and the women and children in another.

The soldiers held a vote on whether to execute those captured. Out of over 100 soldiers, all but a handful voted in favor of killing them.

Informed of the impending execution, the captured Indigenous people spent the night praying and singing hymns. The next day, the militiamen bludgeoned them to death and scalped them. Children made up the largest group among those killed. The militiamen then burned the bodies together with the village. Only two children escaped alive.

The Gnadenhutten Massacre has been called the greatest atrocity of the Revolutionary War. When the U.S. Congress learned of the incident, it ordered an investigation. However, the investigation was soon called off due to concerns an inquiry would “produce a confusion and ill will amongst the people.”

State and local police used billy clubs, whips, and tear gas to attack hundreds of civil rights activists beginning a march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol in Montgomery. The activists were protesting the denial of voting rights to African Americans as well as the murder of 26-year-old activist Jimmie Lee Jackson, who had been fatally shot in the stomach by police during a peaceful protest just days before.

The march was led by John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Reverend Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge and found themselves facing a line of state and county officers poised to attack. When demonstrators did not promptly obey the officers’ order to disband and turn back, troopers brutally attacked them on horseback, wielding weapons and chasing down fleeing men, women, and children. Dozens of civil rights activists were later hospitalized with severe injuries.

Horrifying images of the violence were broadcast on national television, shocking many viewers and helping to rouse support for the civil rights cause. Activists organized another march two days later, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. urged supporters from throughout the country to come to Selma to join. Many heeded his call, and the events helped spur passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 three months later.

In Dred Scott v. Sandford, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Black people were not American citizens and could not sue in courts of law. The Court ruled against Dred Scott, an enslaved Black man who tried to sue for his freedom.

For years before this case began, Dred Scott was enslaved by Dr. John Emerson, a military physician who traveled and resided in several states and territories where slavery was illegal—always accompanied by Dred Scott. Dr. Emerson eventually took Mr. Scott back to Missouri, where slavery was legal. When Dr. Emerson died there in 1843, Mr. Scott was still enslaved.

After Dr. Emerson’s death, Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet, sought freedom in the Missouri state courts. The Scotts argued that their prior residence in free territories had voided their enslavement. The Missouri Supreme Court ruled against the Scotts and authorized Dr. Emerson’s widow, Irene, to continue to enslave them. When Irene Emerson later gave her estate, including the Scotts, to her brother, John Sandford, Dred Scott brought suit in federal court.

Written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision held that the Fifth Amendment did not allow the federal government to deprive a citizen of property, including enslaved people, without due process of law. This ruling kept the Scotts legally enslaved, invalidated the Missouri Compromise, and re-opened the question of slavery’s expansion into the territories. The resulting legal uncertainty greatly increased sectional tensions between Northern and Southern states and pushed the nation forward on the path toward civil war.

Unable to win liberty in the courts, Dred and Harriet Scott were freed by a subsequent enslaver a few months after the decision. Dred Scott died just months later of tuberculosis, while Harriet Scott lived until 1876.

21 Black teenagers died in a building fire after being left alone and locked inside of their dormitory at a neglected and segregated “reform” school in Arkansas.

The children were living at the Negro Boys Industrial School (NBIS), a juvenile work farm located just outside the predominantly Black town of Wrightsville, Arkansas. Boys between the ages of 13 and 17 who were orphaned, homeless, or considered delinquent because of extremely minor “crimes” were sent to live at NBIS. At the time, any action by a Black person that threatened the racial hierarchy could be deemed criminal. One boy had been sent to NBIS for riding a white boy’s bicycle, even though the white boy’s mother told law enforcement that the Black boy had permission to ride the bike. Another Black boy had been sent to NBIS for a Halloween prank—soaping windows.

The disparities between the segregated white reform schools and Black reform schools in Arkansas could not have been more evident. White institutions were predominantly geared towards education, treating white boys like students and teaching them vocational skills like carpentry and metal work. Meanwhile, the boys at NBIS were treated like prisoners and subjected to manual labor, forced to farm the land around the school.

The Black teenagers at NBIS were also forced to live in horrifically dangerous conditions, even prior to this fire. When a sociologist toured NBIS in 1956, three years before the deadly fire, he reported appalling conditions. “Many boys go for days with only rags for clothes,” he wrote. “More than half of them wear neither socks nor underwear…[It is] not uncommon to see youths going for weeks without bathing or changing clothes.” The water at the school was also considered undrinkable.

The night of the fire at NBIS, the boys’ dormitory was completely abandoned by staff members and was locked from the outside, as it was each night, making it impossible for 21 of these Black teenagers to escape.

While 48 of the Black teenagers in the dormitory that night managed to break their way out of the burning building by jumping out of a window, 21 teenagers remained trapped and burned to death. A committee investigated the fire, but no one was ever held responsible.

Today, the Arkansas Department of Corrections runs an adult prison called the Wrightsville Unit on the land where NBIS was formerly located. Though Black people make up only 15% of the population of Arkansas, they constitute 42% of the prison population, including 38% of the population in the Wrightsville Unit.

A white mob in Baker County, Georgia, that was searching the area to find and lynch a Black man named Zema Anthony came upon a Black man named William Anderson walking down the road and lynched him instead.

Two days before, allegations spread that Mr. Anthony had killed a white sheriff and shot another white man in the town of Newton, Georgia. Without investigation or trial, a mob of white men intent on lynching him gathered and began searching the county with no success. After more than a day of the fruitless manhunt, the heavily armed white mob confronted Mr. Anderson on Friday afternoon as he was simply walking down the road. Terrified, Mr. Anderson ran from the mob, and the white men quickly shot him to death.

Shortly after Mr. Anderson was killed, the body of Mr. Anthony’s aunt was reportedly found floating in a stream. At least one newspaper reported that the same lynch mob had likely killed the Black woman for allegedly harboring Mr. Anthony and helping him to avoid capture. The press coverage did not report her name.

During this era, lynching was a tool of racial terror used to maintain white supremacy and dominance by instilling fear in the entire Black community through brutal violence that was often unpredictable and arbitrary. As in the case of Mr. Anderson, it was common during this era for a lynch mob’s focus to expand beyond a specific person accused of an offense to also target members of the suspect’s family, neighbors, or any and all Black people unfortunate enough to be in the mob’s path. Many Black people were lynched not because they were accused of any crime, but simply because they were Black and present when the lynch mob could not locate its preferred victim.

In the days following the lynching of William Anderson, the members of the mob that killed him claimed that they mistook him for Zema Anthony. Though the mob had no legal authority to kill Mr. Anthony, Mr. Anthony’s aunt, Mr. Anderson, or anyone else, the white men were not arrested or prosecuted and faced no consequences for the deaths of Mr. Anderson or Mr. Anthony’s aunt.

Mr. Anthony was reportedly shot and killed by police in Maryland that July.

At least 10 Black victims of racial terror lynching were killed in Baker County, Georgia, between 1877 and 1950. EJI has documented over 6,500 racial terror lynchings that occurred between 1865 and 1950.

The U.S. Congress enacted the Civilization Fund Act, authorizing the president, “in every case where he shall judge improvement in the habits and condition of such Indians practicable” to “employ capable persons of good moral character” to introduce to any tribe adjoining a frontier settlement the “arts of civilization.”

The fund paid white missionaries and church leaders to partner with the federal government to establish schools in “Indian territories” to teach Native children to replace tribal practices with Christian practices. In 1824, the federal government established the Bureau of Indian Affairs to oversee the fund and implement programs to “civilize” the Native people.

In the following years, as the U.S. systematically removed tribes from their homelands to land west of the Mississippi River, the U.S. turned to policies purportedly aimed at achieving “the great work of regenerating the Indian race.”

According to Indian Commissioner Luke Lea, it was “indispensably necessary that they be placed in positions where they can be controlled, and finally compelled by stern necessity…until such time as their general improvement and good conduct may supersede the necessity of such restrictions.” Over the ensuing decades, the U.S.’s orientation to Native peoples changed from adversarial to paternalistic, focused on killing Native American culture.

On the eve of a primary election in Wrightsville, Johnson County, Georgia, at least 300 white men and women belonging to the Ku Klux Klan held a parade in the town’s center. The gathering featured speeches inciting racial hatred and violence, and participants burned crosses on the lawn of the county courthouse. The event was organized to threaten and intimidate the county’s 400 registered Black voters into not voting in the primary the following day, and the terror tactics worked: fearing for their safety and knowing they had no expectation of protection from law enforcement, not a single Black citizen of Wrightsville cast a vote in the primary.

White voters and politicians in the U.S., and particularly in the South, have actively sought to suppress Black voter turnout and political representation since the establishment of Black voting rights. Following Emancipation, many states instituted laws and requirements, such as poll taxes, felony disenfranchisement policies, and literacy tests, to infringe on Black Americans’ right to participate in the political process. In addition to these legislative methods, white residents emboldened by the support of corrupt law enforcement used violent threats, intimidation, and racial terror lynching to terrorize and sometimes kill Black voters. Unchecked racialized violence and disenfranchisement of Black voters kept America’s racial hierarchy intact for generations after the abolition of American chattel slavery.

In 1940, 77% of Black Americans still lived in the South, where they made up 24% of the population but only 3.5% of registered voters. Because Southern districts included large numbers of Black residents, the disenfranchisement of Southern Black people translated into the super-enfranchisement of Southern white people: in a 50% Black Southern district where no Black people voted, each white vote carried twice the influence of a Northern vote cast in a fully enfranchised district. In this way, the disenfranchisement of Southern Black people empowered Southern white voters at the expense of almost everyone else.

In Johnson County, this history of intimidation and unjust laws meant that a community with more than 1,500 Black adult residents (according to the 1950 census) registered just 400 Black voters and held an election in which not one Black person cast a vote. This disenfranchisement was consequential in Johnson County in 1948, as the primary election helped choose the community’s county sheriff and the judge of the city court. Prior to the election, Judge W.C. Brinson—a white man—announced that any voter who showed up at the polls would be required to sign a “white supremacy pledge” and a commitment to racial segregation in Georgia. The plan was ultimately abandoned prior to the election, but Judge Brinson, chairman of one of the county’s political parties, was re-elected to the position of City Court Judge by the all-white electorate. Unconcerned by the disenfranchisement of all of his Black constituents, Judge Brinson later blamed local Black voters for their own mistreatment and low turnout, claiming they had not voted due to a lack of interest “in county affairs”—completely ignoring the Klan parade and threats of violence the local Black community had faced just days before Election Day.

In the 1960s, activists eventually achieved passage of landmark civil rights legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars racial discrimination in workplaces and public accommodations, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which finally created federal oversight to protect African American voting rights. The Voting Rights Act brought widespread enfranchisement to Black communities for the first time since Reconstruction. Just three years after the law passed, Black voter registration in the South had increased by 1.3 million people. The greatest changes were in the states most targeted by the new law. In Mississippi, 60% of eligible Black voters were registered in 1968, up from just 7% in 1965.

In 2010, Alabama’s Republican-controlled state government filed a lawsuit challenging the Voting Rights Act as “no longer necessary.” Three years later, in Shelby County v. Holder, a divided Supreme Court effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act by striking down the requirement that states like Alabama obtain “pre-clearance” from the federal government before changing their voting laws. In dissent, late Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that the Court was turning its back to history. “The sad irony of today’s decision lies in its utter failure to grasp why the [Voting Rights Act] has proven effective,” she wrote.

Idaho amended its anti-miscegenation law to include additional restrictions on interracial marriage. Idaho passed its first anti-miscegenation law in 1864, which banned marriage between a white person and “any person of African descent, Indian or Chinese.” The punishment for marrying in violation of the statute was imprisonment for up to two years. Idaho also passed a law banning interracial cohabitation in 1864, violation of which could result in a $100-$500 fine, six to 12 months in jail, or both. The anti-miscegenation law was amended in 1867 to increase the range of fines and the maximum possible prison time to 10 years.

The 1921 amendment to the law banned marriage between white people and “mongolians, negroes, or mulattoes,” although the state’s population at the time was less than .02% African American. The Idaho state legislature repealed the anti-miscegenation law in 1959.

Idaho was not unique in its attempts to obstruct marriage between the races. In the 1920s, Social Darwinism had captured the attention of the country’s elite, who became concerned with maintaining and promoting the eugenic racial purity of the white race by controlling procreation. Concerned that states were not adequately enforcing their anti-miscegenation laws, eugenicists pushed for stronger measures against racial mixing and stricter classifications to determine who qualified as white when seeking a marriage license. Like Idaho, many states added the racial category “mongolian” during this time in response to an influx of Japanese immigrants to the U.S.

Students at Alabama State College, a traditionally African American institution in Montgomery, Alabama, staged an anti-segregation sit-in at a segregated lunch counter in the Montgomery County Courthouse on February 25, 1960. Four days later, Alabama Governor John Patterson held a news conference to condemn the sit-in.

Governor Patterson, who was also chairman of the State Board of Education, threatened to terminate Alabama State College’s funding unless it expelled the student organizers and warned that “someone [was] likely to be killed” if the protests continued. The next day, more than 1,000 Alabama State College students marched on the state capitol. On March 2, 1960, the college expelled the nine student leaders of the courthouse sit-in.

More than 1,000 students immediately pledged a mass strike, threatened to withdraw from the school, and staged days of demonstrations; 37 students were arrested. Montgomery Police Commissioner L.B. Sullivan recommended closing the college, which he claimed produced only “graduates of hate and racial bitterness.” Meanwhile, six of the nine expelled students sought reinstatement through a federal lawsuit. In August 1960, in Dixon v. Alabama, a federal court upheld the expulsions as “justified and, in fact, necessary” and barred the students’ readmission to the school.

On February 25, 2010, in a ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of the sit-in, Alabama State University (formerly Alabama State College) President William Harris reinstated the nine students, criticized Governor Patterson’s “arbitrary, illegal and intrusive” role in forcing the expulsions, and praised the student protest as “an important moment in civil rights history.”

Black families attempted to move into their new homes in Detroit, Michigan, but were met with violence and intimidation from white mobs and were ultimately denied entry to their homes.

Before and during World War II, the city of Detroit was a hub for economic activity that attracted a large influx of new residents. Many newcomers were African Americans fleeing racial violence and inequality in the rural South, in a wave known as the Great Migration. Those who resettled in Detroit felt the city offered new opportunities for economic mobility.

Housing scarcity was a major challenge for growing Detroit, as new construction did not keep pace with the increasing population, and residential segregation created dangerous slums. Black families were banned from most public housing, restricted to over-crowded neighborhoods, and often forced to pay higher rents to live in dilapidated homes without indoor plumbing. They also faced hostility from the local Ku Klux Klan, police, and groups of white workers.

In June 1941, Detroit policymakers approved plans to build the Sojourner Truth Homes, a public housing project for African Americans, located in a white neighborhood. Over protest from local white people, construction was completed that year and the city authorized Black families to move in starting February 28, 1942.

One day before, growing crowds of local white people marched through the housing project. On move-in day, only a few Black families braved the harassment and intimidation. Some were struck with rocks. Police responded by halting the moves and arresting more than 200 Black people and only three white individuals. The new residents were displaced until April, when six Black families moved in under the protection of 2,000 city and state officials.

Congress voted against seating John Willis Menard, the first Black man ever elected to the House of Representatives. James Garfield, then a member of Congress who later became the president, confirmed the decision, arguing that “it was too early to admit a Negro to the U.S. Congress, and that the seat [should] be declared vacant, and the salary of $5,000″ saved. By this vote, Mr. Menard was barred from ever being seated and his constituents denied their chosen representative and all representation until the following election.

Mr. Menard was a poet, newspaper publisher, and politician. He won at least 64% of the vote in a special election held in Louisiana’s 2nd congressional district—New Orleans—in November 1868 after the incumbent died. Despite an overwhelming victory, his election faced fierce opposition, led by the white man who lost the election, Caleb S. Hunt. The House Committee on Elections held a hearing to decide whether or not to seat Mr. Menard and the debate then moved to the entire House on February 27. During the debate, Mr. Menard became the first Black man to speak on the floor of the House of Representatives. Mr. Hunt’s claims of protest against the election’s validity were defeated convincingly by the House, as Mr. Hunt did not even show up to testify and presented no evidence supporting his claims. However Congress refused to seat Mr. Menard by a vote of 130 to 57, because he was a Black man.

In the early years of Reconstruction after the Civil War, Black men were able to exercise their vote for the first time. By the time of Mr. Menard’s election in 1868, in 10 of the 11 former Confederate states, approximately 80% of eligible Black men were registered voters. Consequently, many Black officials, particularly in the South where Black populations were much larger, were elected into public office. These officials faced fierce opposition and backlash from white people desperate to maintain a racial hierarchy. Throughout the South, white southerners turned to violence, mass lynchings, and lawlessness in order to suppress and intimidate Black voters who were seeking to express themselves lawfully at the ballot box. White officials in the North and West similarly rejected racial equality, codified racial discrimination, and occasionally embraced the same tactics of violent control seen in the South.

On the rainy evening of February 26, 2012, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a Black boy, was fatally shot in a gated residential community in Sanford, Florida, while walking home from a nearby convenience store. George Zimmerman, a local resident and neighborhood watch coordinator, saw Trayvon and decided the Black youth in a hooded sweatshirt was “suspicious.” Zimmerman called 911 to report Trayvon’s presence while following him at a close distance and, despite the dispatcher’s contrary instructions, confronted the teen and fatally shot him. The teen was carrying only iced tea and a bag of Skittles.

Police questioned Zimmerman and, based on Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which permits the use of deadly force even in avoidable confrontations, they released him with no charges. Trayvon’s unidentified body went to the morgue and his family learned his fate the next morning only after they reported him missing.

Outraged by the lack of police response, Trayvon’s parents worked with advocates to publicize their son’s murder. The story sparked national and international outrage, symbolizing for many the continuing danger of being a young Black male in America. On March 21, 2012, hundreds participated in a “Million Hoodie March” in New York City, calling for prosecutors to file criminal charges against Zimmerman. President Barack Obama called for a complete investigation and reflected, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”

George Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder in April 2012 but later acquitted of all charges. The presumption of guilt and dangerousness assigned to African Americans has made minority communities particularly vulnerable to the unfair administration of criminal justice.

During the second half of the 19th century, an increase in mining activity and railroad construction led to a massive influx of Chinese immigrants into Washington Territory, which later became the State of Idaho. By 1870, Idaho was home to more than 4,000 Chinese residents, and they comprised nearly 30% of the population. “Chinatowns” existed in many Idaho cities, and the new immigrants formed thriving communities.

Chinese immigrants in Idaho faced severe hostility, which manifested in discriminatory statutes, disparate treatment in courts, and even violence. In 1866, the Idaho Territorial Legislature levied a tax of $5 per month on all Chinese residents. Chinese residents were not permitted to testify against white people in court, and acts of violence committed against Chinese citizens were rarely investigated or punished. Idaho public sentiment against Chinese people culminated in an anti-Chinese convention organized in Boise on February 25, 1886. At the convention, white residents of Idaho voted to expel Chinese citizens.

In the decades following, white Idaho residents undertook a campaign of violent removal of Idaho’s Chinese population. Mobs frequently destroyed Chinese homes and businesses, and in 1887, a white mob murdered 31 Chinese miners in the Hell’s Canyon Massacre.

During the 1890s and 1900s, a number of towns including Bonners Ferry, Clark Fork, Hoodoo, Moscow, and Twin Falls forcibly expelled their Chinese residents. By 1910, Idaho’s once-thriving Chinese population had nearly disappeared.

The Kentucky General Assembly refused to endorse the end of slavery in America when it voted against ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery except as punishment for crime.

As the Civil War began in 1861, Kentucky, a border state, remained in the Union, but the state’s legislature did not fully support President Abraham Lincoln or his Republican administration because lawmakers worried that Lincoln would abolish slavery. Throughout 1861, President Lincoln assured Kentuckians he had no intention of interfering with the state’s “domestic institutions.”

In March 1862, President Lincoln proposed a plan of gradual emancipation for the border states, offering to compensate enslavers who freed the Black people they enslaved. When the congressional delegations for the border states turned down that offer, President Lincoln issued a draft Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862 and signed the final version on January 1, 1863, which applied only to enslaved people in states that were in rebellion. Thus, it allowed for enslavement to continue in Kentucky, along with Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Tennessee, as well as portions of Virginia and Louisiana that were occupied by the Union.

Kentucky legislators continued to oppose all efforts to abolish slavery in the coming years, and on February 24, 1865, the Kentucky General Assembly rejected the Thirteenth Amendment. Prominent politicians and other public figures harshly criticized President Lincoln and members of Congress, and the Kentucky legislature expressed their disapproval of the amendment’s adoption by politically siding with the former Confederacy throughout the post-Civil War era. Kentucky did not officially adopt the Thirteenth Amendment until 1976.

25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery was shot and killed by two white men while he was out jogging in Satilla Shores, Georgia, the suburban neighborhood he had been living in with his mother. After the shooting, Mr. Arbery’s killers (an ex-police officer and his son) were allowed to leave the scene and faced no consequences for months, as local officials refused to fully investigate, misrepresented the circumstances surrounding the shooting, and rejected efforts to hold the men accountable. It was not until video footage of the shooting surfaced and national attention focused that officials finally arrested the two white men.

Mr. Arbery, a high school football star, ran regularly in the neighborhood. That morning he jogged past Gregory McMichael, a 64-year-old former police officer and retired investigator for the Brunswick district attorney’s office who was standing in his front yard.

Mr. McMichael called out to his son, Travis McMichael, to tell him that Mr. Arbery “looked like” the suspect in a string of break-ins that had occurred in the neighborhood. The two men grabbed guns, got into their pick-up truck, and began chasing Mr. Arbery, shouting at him to stop running.

Once they caught up to Mr. Arbery, Travis McMichael jumped out of the truck with his shotgun, startling Mr. Arbery. After a struggle over the gun, Travis McMichael shot Mr. Arbery, who was unarmed, three times, killing him.

The Glynn County Police Department arrived on the scene to investigate, but rather than treat the McMichaels as suspects who had chased and killed an unarmed Black jogger, the officers let both men go home. A police investigator then called Mr. Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, and lied to her, saying her son had been involved in a burglary during which the homeowner killed him.

The prosecutor assigned to Mr. Arbery’s case concluded that the McMichaels were legally carrying their guns under Georgia’s open carry law and were within their rights to chase Mr. Arbery under the citizen’s arrest statute. He also suggested that the two armed white men were right to be suspicious and afraid of unarmed Mr. Arbery because he had an “aggressive nature,” underlining the presumption of dangerousness and guilt young Black men are forced to navigate on a daily basis. Evidence later revealed that Travis McMichael and William Bryan repeatedly used overtly racist language in text messages and social media posts before and after Mr. Arbery’s murder.

In early May 2020, nearly three months after Mr. Arbery was killed, a video of the shooting filmed by William Bryan, who had been following the McMichaels in a second vehicle, was released online. The video drew national attention to Mr. Arbery’s case and outrage over the fact that no one had been prosecuted for the killing.

Under national scrutiny, and only after the video of Mr. Arbery’s shooting was widely distributed across news outlets and social media, District Attorney Tom Durden announced a grand jury would decide whether charges would be brought.

Seventy-four days after killing Mr. Arbery, the McMichaels were arrested. A grand jury later indicted them, as well as William Bryan, on charges of malice murder, felony murder, and aggravated assault. In November 2021, a jury found the McMichaels and Mr. Bryan guilty of murder. Three months later, following a federal hate crimes trial, a second jury determined that the defendants had been motivated by racism and found them guilty of hate crimes. “As a mother I will never heal,” Ahmaud Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, said following the verdict. “They gave us a small sense of victory, but we will never get victory because Ahmaud is dead.”

Frazier Baker, a 40-year-old Black man from Lake City, South Carolina, and his infant daughter, Julia, were murdered by a lynch mob. Mr. Baker was the first African American to be elected as U.S. postmaster for Lake City. Despite vehement opposition to his appointment from the white community, Mr. Baker held the position for six months. During that time, he was shot at twice and received many death threats.

The Bakers lived in a small building just outside Lake City. Their home was a former schoolhouse that had recently been converted into a residential dwelling and post office. Witnesses reported that a number of white men circled the Baker house at night, set the building on fire, and fired up to 100 bullets at the house while Mr. and Mrs. Baker and their six children were inside. Mr. Baker was shot to death while trying to escape the burning house. As Mrs. Baker fled the burning house carrying Julia, the baby was shot dead in her mother’s arms. Mrs. Baker and her other children managed to escape with their lives, but three of the children were wounded by gunshots and permanently maimed.

Mr. Frazier and Julia’s remains were burned beyond recognition—the local white newspaper insensitively reported that they had been “cremated in the flames.” The federal post office building and all of its equipment were consumed by the fire, and the citizens of Lake City were left without a post office.

Members of the Black community held a mass meeting at Pilgrim Baptist Church and drafted a public statement expressing outrage about the lynching. The murder prompted a national campaign of letter-writing, activism, and advocacy spearheaded by Ida B. Wells and others, which ultimately persuaded President McKinley to order a federal investigation that resulted in the prosecution of 11 white men implicated in the Baker lynching. Despite ample evidence, an all-white jury refused to convict any of the defendants.

Malcolm X, a religious and civil rights leader, was assassinated during a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. Malcolm X was just 39 years old and left behind his wife, Betty Shabazz, and six young daughters—including twins born after his death.

Born Malcolm Little and later known as el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, Malcolm X rose to the national stage as a leading Black voice in the 1950s and 1960s. After being appointed a minister and spokesman for the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X brought tens of thousands of new members to the religious organization in the mid-1900s. His powerful oration and innate charisma drew large crowds and supporters, but his criticism of white society and calls for a Black nationalist movement drew controversy and opponents. Fearing his power and influence as a Black leader, the FBI followed Malcolm X throughout his public life.

After a falling out with Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X left and started his own movement. As his popularity grew, so did the threats on his life. Just a week before Malcolm X spoke in Manhattan, he and his wife, along with their four daughters, were forced to abandon their home in the middle of the night after it was firebombed.

After Malcolm X’s assassination, thousands of people traveled to the Unity Funeral Home in Harlem to view his body and pay their respects.

Malcolm X was buried on February 27 during a funeral attended by family, friends, and civil rights leaders, including John Lewis, Bayard Rustin, and Andrew Young. Actor and activist Ossie Davis gave the eulogy.

Malcolm X’s legacy far outlasted his life. Through his bestselling autobiography and powerful speeches, his beliefs later inspired the Black Power movement and remain influential on activism in America and throughout the world today.

Local officials issued warrants for the arrests of civil rights activists, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jo Ann Robinson, Rosa Parks, and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, for organizing the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The following day, a grand jury indicted 89 of the leaders of the boycott, accusing them of violating a 1921 statute forbidding boycotts without “just cause.”

African Americans in Montgomery, Alabama, began boycotting city buses in December 1955 to protest the poor treatment Black passengers received on the segregated vehicles. The segregated buses reinforced the myth of racial hierarchy; Black passengers were required by law to give up their seats to white passengers and were only allowed to sit or stand at the back of the buses, which also made far fewer stops in Black residential communities than in white ones.

In the grand jury report that accompanied the indictment, the grand jurors repudiated anti-segregation efforts. “In this state we are committed to segregation by custom and law; we intend to maintain it,” they wrote. “The settlement of differences over school attendance, public transportation and other facilities must be made within those laws which reflect our way of life.”

As the indicted boycott leaders surrendered themselves into custody at the police station, hundreds of African Americans gathered outside in a show of support for their efforts to challenge racial discrimination and fight segregation in Alabama.

Of those indicted, only Dr. King was prosecuted. Despite defense evidence that the boycott was peaceful and that discriminatory bus service inflicted harm on the Black community, Dr. King was quickly convicted, fined $1,000, and given a suspended jail sentence of one year of hard labor.

The indictment, along with Dr. King’s conviction, strengthened local African Americans’ resolve to fight segregation and attracted national attention to the growing civil rights movement.

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling legally barring all Indians from becoming U.S. citizens and revoking citizenship from many who had attained it. Bhagat Singh Thind, an Indian Sikh man born in Punjab, migrated to the U.S. in 1913. After enlisting in the U.S. Army, Mr. Thind applied and obtained approval for citizenship in 1920. Though Mr. Thind entered the country prior to the Immigration Restriction Act of 1917, which barred all immigration to the U.S. from Asia, the Bureau of Naturalization appealed the grant of his citizenship request and the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Mr. Thind had filed for citizenship under the Naturalization Act of 1906, which said that citizenship is available for “free whites.” Mr. Thind argued to the Supreme Court that, under anthropological classifications of the time, Indians of the “high caste” from his native region of Punjab were “Aryan” and thus white for purposes of American law. The Court conceded that, ethnologically, Indians were “Aryan” and thus Caucasian; however, the court ruled that the words “white people” in American statutory language had to be taken at their common meaning and that “the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences.” The Court reasoned that Indians are not able to assimilate the way more typical “white” immigrants can and held that a scientific study cannot determine citizenship. As a result, they held that Mr. Thind was not white and was legally barred from becoming a U.S. citizen.

The decision had a significant impact. Many Indians who had previously obtained U.S. citizenship in the U.S. now had their citizenship revoked and lost many rights and privileges as a result. In California, the 1913 Alien Land Act barred non-citizens from owning land, and Indian Americans in the state who lost their citizenship also lost their land. Following the third decision, America’s Indian immigrant population dropped by half.

A group of civil rights activists gathered at the Zion United Methodist Church in Marion, Alabama, for a night march in support of James Orange, the field secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference who had been recently arrested. As the demonstration started, protestors were met by Alabama State Troopers, who ordered the crowd to disperse and then attacked the protestors.

Jimmie Lee Jackson, his mother, Viola Jackson, and his 82-year-old grandfather, Cager Lee, were among those who fled the escalating violence. Surrounded by panicking demonstrators, the three sought shelter in Mack’s Cafe. Police followed them into the cafe and physically assaulted them. When Jimmie Lee Jackson came to the aid of his mother and grandfather, he was shot twice in the abdomen by Trooper James Fowler.

Despite his wounds, Mr. Jackson managed to escape from the cafe before collapsing. He died eight days later at a local hospital. In an impassioned eulogy, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. honored Mr. Jackson, saying: “I never will forget as I stood by his bedside a few days ago…how radiantly he still responded, how he mentioned the freedom movement and how he talked about the faith that he still had in his God. Like every self-respecting Negro, Jimmie Jackson wanted to be free…We must be concerned not merely about who murdered him but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderer.”

Though he readily admitted to the shooting in the event’s aftermath, James Fowler did not face any criminal charges until 2007. Mr. Jackson’s death has been cited as one of the catalysts for the March 7, 1965, march from Selma to Montgomery, which became known as “Bloody Sunday.”

Willie Earle, a 24-year-old African American man, was being held in the Pickens County Jail in South Carolina on charges of assaulting a white taxi cab driver. A mob of white men—mostly taxi cab drivers—seized Mr. Earle from the jail, took him to a deserted country road near Greenville, brutally beat him with guns and knives, and then shot him to death.

When arrested, 26 of the 31 defendants gave full statements admitting participation in Mr. Earle’s death. As the trial began, Judge J. Robert Martin warned that he would “not allow racial issues to be injected in this case.” During the 10-day trial, the defendants chewed gum and chuckled each time the victim was mentioned. The defense did not present any witnesses or evidence to rebut the confessions and instead blamed “northern interference” for bringing the case to trial at all. At one point, the defense attorney likened Mr. Earle to a “mad dog” that deserved killing, and the mostly white spectators laughed in support.

Despite the undisputed confession, the all-white jury acquitted the defendants of all charges on May 21, 1947, and the judge ordered them released. Some Greenville leaders cited the trial as progress in Southern race relations: “This was the first time that South Carolina has brought mass murder charges against alleged lynchers. This jury acquitted them. If there should be another case, perhaps we may get a mistrial with a hung jury. Eventually, the south may return convictions.”

In 1948, when Mr. Earle’s mother attempted to collect under a state law ordering counties to pay $2,000 to the family of a lynching victim, her claim was denied on the grounds that, due to the acquittals, there was no proof her son had been lynched. In 2010, a historical marker was erected near the site of Willie Earle’s murder.

The legislature of Missouri passed an act that prohibited “Negroes and mulattoes” from learning to read and write and assembling freely for worship services. The act also forbade the migration of free Black people to the state. The penalty for anyone violating any of the law’s provisions was a fine not to exceed $5,000 (the equivalent of $180,000 today), a jail term not to exceed six months, or a combination of fine and jail sentence.

The 1847 law supplemented a Missouri law passed in 1825 that imposed various restrictions on free Black people. The 1825 law defined a Black person as anyone having at least one Black grandparent. The 1825 law also prohibited free Black people from keeping or carrying weapons without a special permit and settling in Missouri without a certificate of citizenship from Missouri or another state. Free Black people who migrated to or through Missouri without citizenship documents faced arrest, a court order to leave the state within 30 days, and a punishment of 10 lashes. Under the 1825 law, white ship captains and labor bosses were permitted to bring free Black people into the state as workers, though for no longer than six months at a time.

In 1840, nearly 13% of Missouri’s population was composed of enslaved Black people, while free Black people made up less than 1% of the state’s residents. The 1847 law was enacted to place further limitations on the Black population and maintain white supremacy.

New Jersey passed a law providing for the “gradual emancipation of slaves” and in doing so became the last Northern state to begin the process of ending enslavement within its borders. Using the language of bondage, the 1804 act provided that children of enslaved people born after July 4, 1804, would be freed when they reached the age of 21 for women and the age of 25 for men.

To address the protests of enslavers who claimed to be concerned that they would have to support children of enslaved people who eventually would become free, the statute authorized enslavers to break apart families and abandon children of enslaved people to the state once they were more than 12 months old. These children were then bound out to work as “apprentices”—often to the same enslaver who abandoned them—while the state paid for the maintenance of the child.

The New Jersey Supreme Court held as late as 1827 that New Jersey’s law continued to permit the sale of Black children as so-called “apprentices.” In Ogden v. Price, the New Jersey Supreme Court upheld the sale of a 13-year-old Black girl despite language in the 1804 law providing that an apprentice was subject to assignment but not sale.

Around midnight on September 3, 1944, Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old Black, married mother, was walking with neighbors, headed home from a revival service at Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Before she made it home, a gang of white men kidnapped her, drove to a remote area in the woods, and raped her at gunpoint. After six of the men took turns raping her, they blindfolded her, drove her back to the road, and left her to walk home.

Mrs. Taylor soon contacted the police, and the sheriff identified one of the suspects based on her description of the car. Hugo Wilson, the owner of the car, identified the six white men who raped Mrs. Taylor as: Herbert Lovett, Luther Lee, Joe Culpepper, Dillard York, Billy Howerton, and Robert Gamble. Yet none of the men were arrested.

When the NAACP branch office in Montgomery, Alabama, heard of Mrs. Taylor’s rape and local officials’ failure to respond, the chapter president sent NAACP Secretary Rosa Parks to investigate. After gathering details, Mrs. Parks established the Committee for Equal Justice to demand prosecution of Mrs. Taylor’s attackers. Amid the publicity, Alabama Governor Chauncey Sparks also launched an investigation.

In the course of the subsequent proceedings, Mrs. Taylor’s character became the main matter of dispute; four of the six accused attackers admitted to having intercourse with her but claimed she was a “prostitute” and “a willing participant.” The sheriff accused Mrs. Taylor of being “nothing but a whore” and alleged that she had been treated for venereal disease. Meanwhile, other white men in Abbeville described Mrs. Taylor as an “upstanding respectable woman who abided by the town’s racial and sexual mores.” And one of the accused attackers, Joe Culpepper, admitted that Mrs. Taylor had been gang-raped at gunpoint and that he and his fellow attackers had been looking for a woman that night.

Despite this information and widespread national support for Mrs. Taylor’s cause, on February 14, 1945, an all-white, all-male grand jury failed to return an indictment against any of the men accused of raping Mrs. Taylor. The men were never prosecuted.

In the months after Mrs. Taylor’s attack, she received constant death threats and her home was firebombed by white supremacists. The Recy Taylor case, though rarely cited, is credited as being a catalyst for the modern civil rights movement. In 2011, the Alabama Legislature apologized to Mrs. Taylor for the state’s failure to prosecute her attackers.

In February 1960, hundreds of volunteers—primarily Black college students—huddled into the basement of First Baptist Church in Nashville, Tennessee, for what became the first mass meeting of the sit-in movement. The students planned a series of sit-ins designed to challenge racial segregation at lunch counters.

On February 13, 1960, 500 students from Nashville’s four Black colleges—Fisk University, Tennessee State, Meharry Medical, and the Baptist Seminary—filed into the downtown stores to request service at segregated establishments. White merchants refused to serve the Black students and petitioned the police to arrest them for “trespassing” and “disorderly conduct.” On February 26, the chief of police warned student demonstrators that their “grace period” was over and threatened legal retaliation. The demonstrators were not dissuaded.

The next morning, scores of students marched downtown silently to stage sit-ins at their designated stores. As they passed, white teenagers gathered to scream racial epithets and hurl rocks and lit cigarettes at them. Instead of intervening to prevent the assaults and harassment, police arrested 77 African American student demonstrators and five white students who had joined their protest.

The 82 arrested activists were tried and convicted in a consolidated one-day trial on February 29. Afterward, they were given a “choice” between jail time and a monetary fine. A 22-year-old Fisk University student named Diane Nash informed the judge that 14 of the convicted demonstrators had chosen jail. Standing in open court, she explained that paying the fine “would be contributing to and supporting the injustice and immoral practices that have been performed in the arrest and conviction of the defendants.” Ms. Nash’s speech persuaded more than 60 of the convicted demonstrators to change their minds and also serve jail time rather than pay the fine.

The sight of dozens of Black college students being carted off to jail convinced the mayor of Nashville to release the students and appoint a biracial committee to make recommendations for desegregating downtown stores. The success of the Nashville sit-ins quickly made them a model for other segregated Southern communities to emulate. By the end of February, sit-in campaigns were underway in 31 Southern cities across eight states.

As a result of her persistence and bravery, Diane Nash emerged as a civil rights leader. She joined the Freedom Rides in 1961 and helped achieve the desegregation of interstate buses and facilities.

Sergeant Isaac Woodard, a Black World War II veteran, boarded a Greyhound bus in Georgia heading home to his wife in North Carolina. He had been honorably discharged from service just hours earlier.

When the bus stopped outside of Augusta, South Carolina, Sgt. Woodard, who was still in uniform, asked the driver if there was time to use the restroom. The driver cursed at him and resumed driving. “Talk to me like I am talking to you,” Sgt. Woodard told him in response, adding: “I am a man just like you.”

After a brief argument, Sgt. Woodard returned to his seat. At the next stop in Batesburg, South Carolina, the bus driver exited and called Lynwood Shull, the local police chief, who arrived soon after. Officer Shull removed Sgt. Woodard from the bus and began brutally beating him with a blackjack. Sgt. Woodard, who was unconscious and badly injured, was then left in the Batesburg jail overnight. The next morning the city court fined him for disorderly conduct.

When Sgt. Woodard was finally transferred to a VA hospital in Columbia, South Carolina, doctors determined that the beating and delay in medical treatment had permanently blinded him.

In October 1946, President Harry S. Truman ordered his attorney general to bring federal charges against Chief Shull. The trial began a month later and was presided over by Judge J. Waties Waring, whose father was a Confederate soldier. After deliberating for less than 20 minutes, the all-white jury in the trial acquitted Officer Shull.

A white man named Alfred Moore of Hertford, North Carolina, offered a $20 reward to any white person who captured “Joe,” an enslaved Black man, and returned him or “secured [him] in the jail so that I can get to him.” Mr. Moore, an enslaver, did not believe that Joe intended to flee bondage; he wrote in the reward poster that the Black man was “probably lurking” in Pasquotank County, where his wife was enslaved.

The institution of slavery sought to reduce enslaved Black men, women, and children to commodities, denying their humanity and familial status as children, siblings, spouses, or even parents. Black families were regularly separated at the whim of an enslaver or auctioneer, never to see each other again. This was one of the most traumatizing features of enslavement. Most enslaved people were sold without a single other family member; it is estimated that more than half of all enslaved people held in the Upper South were separated from a parent or child through sale, and a third of all marriages between enslaved people were destroyed by human trafficking. Press accounts have documented the heartbreaking stories of enslaved mothers who jumped from buildings and enslaved fathers who slit their throats rather than be separated from their families.

Enslaved people frequently suffered extreme physical violence as punishment for or warning against transgressions like running away, visiting a spouse, or trying to prevent the sale of their relatives. These basic human instincts resulted in torturous whippings or extreme punishments. White men and women justified this cruelty by claiming Black people did not have emotional ties to each other. However, for years after the 1865 passage of the Thirteenth Amendment ended chattel slavery in the U.S., Black people throughout the country placed ads in church bulletins and local newspapers seeking help reconnecting with parents, children, spouses, and friends from whom they’d been separated by sale during enslavement—some of whom they had not seen in decades.

The historical record does not reveal whether this Black man, identified only as “Joe” in the reward poster, was ever captured and returned to Alfred Moore, reunited with his wife, or able to reach freedom. Nearly 40 years before the end of the Civil War, he was one of countless Black people enslaved in the U.S. who dared to love and to seek freedom, in a time when the laws of this nation denied Black people even those basic rights of humanity.

A mob of over 2,000 white people lynched a Black man named Eli Pigot in Brookhaven, Mississippi. Mr. Pigot was accused of assaulting a white woman and was brutally killed before he could be tried in a court of law. During this era, allegations against Black people were rarely subject to scrutiny and often sparked violent reprisals before the judicial system could or would act.

On the morning of February 10, according to news reports, police deputies and armed military guards transported Mr. Pigot from Jackson to Brookhaven to stand trial. Upon arrival in Brookhaven, the lynch mob scuffled briefly with the military guards before seizing Mr. Pigot, kicking and beating him, and then hanging him from a telephone pole less than 100 yards from the Lincoln County Courthouse. The mob then riddled Mr. Pigot’s corpse with bullets as it swung from the pole.

The racial hostility that permeated American society during this era burdened Black people with a presumption of guilt that frequently proved deadly. In particular, widespread stereotypes depicting Black men as dangerous, violent, and uncontrollable sexual aggressors led to a racialized state of hyper-vigilance, in which any action by a Black man that could be interpreted as seeking or desiring contact with a white woman could result in mob violence. At the peak of racial terror lynchings in this country, it was not uncommon for lynch mobs to seize their victims from jails, prisons, courtrooms, or out of the hands of guards, like in this case. Though they were armed and charged with protecting the men and women in their custody, police and other officials almost never used force to resist white lynch mobs intent on killing Black people. In some cases, police officials were even found to be complicit or active participants in lynchings.

After the lynching, press reports focused on the minor injuries sustained by military officials who, despite failing to protect Mr. Pigot from mob murder, were lauded for their “courage and effort.” The state governor denounced the mob’s actions, but nothing was done to bring the perpetrators to justice. Though the lynching took place in broad daylight with officers of the court present—the judge who was scheduled to preside over Mr. Pigot’s trial witnessed his brutal death and some white men scheduled to serve on the jury reportedly participated in the lynching—no one was ever held accountable for the murder of Eli Pigot.

Just four weeks before the Little Rock Central High School graduation, a bomb exploded at the home of Carlotta Walls, the youngest of the Little Rock Nine—Black students who integrated the school in 1957.

In September 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School by barring nine newly admitted Black students from entering the school building. In order to compel the school’s integration, President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the National Guard and ordered troops to escort the students into the school, but the students were still confronted by angry white crowds of students and adults. That group of Black students came to be known as the Little Rock Nine, and 14-year-old Carlotta Walls was the youngest among them.

In response to the admission of the Little Rock Nine, hundreds of white people attacked Black residents and reporters, causing nationally publicized “chaos, bedlam, and turmoil” that led a federal court to halt desegregation. The Supreme Court overturned that decision and ordered immediate integration, but in a move voters later approved in a referendum, Governor Faubus closed all public high schools in Little Rock for the 1958-1959 school year.

Carlotta Walls later described the integration experience as “painful” and recalled that Central High’s white students fell into three groups: those who tormented her and the other Black students, those who sympathized with them, and those who silently ignored the way they were treated.

Despite the open hostility that she encountered, young Carlotta Walls remained at Central High throughout her high school years. On February 9, 1960, four weeks before graduation, a bomb exploded at her home. Carlotta, her mother, and her sister were at home, but no one was injured by the blast. Police arrested and beat Carlotta Walls’ father in unsuccessful efforts to coerce a confession. Police then arrested two young Black men, Herbert Monts, a family friend, and Maceo Binns, Jr. Carlotta Walls never believed either man was responsible, but both were convicted and sentenced to five years in prison.

In 2010, Ms. Walls described the bombing and its aftermath as the worst part of the integration experience and firmly asserted that “the segregationists were behind all of it—the bombing and the arrests of Herbert and Maceo.”

The massive resistance by the white community, like the violence Carlotta Walls faced, was largely successful in preventing integration of schools in the South. In the five Deep South states, every single one of 1.4 million Black school children attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960. By the start of the 1964-65 school year, less than 3% of the South’s African American children attended school with white students, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina that number remained substantially below 1%. In 1967, 13 years after Brown v. Board of Education, a report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights observed that white violence and intimidation against Black people “continues to be a deterrent to school desegregation.”

White state troopers fired into a mostly African American crowd on the campus of South Carolina State College, a historically Black college in Orangeburg, South Carolina. In what became known as the “Orangeburg Massacre,” the troopers shot and wounded 28 people and killed three Black male students: Samuel Hammond, 18, a freshman from Florida; Henry Smith, 18, a sophomore from Marion, South Carolina; and Delano Middleton, 17, an Orangeburg high school student.

Two days before the shooting, SCSC students had attempted to desegregate a local “whites only” bowling alley. When the owner refused to serve the students, violence ensued, leaving nine students and one officer wounded. On the day of the shooting, students again protested the segregated bowling alley, this time building a bonfire in the street. Escorted by police armed with carbines, pistols, and riot guns, the fire department arrived to extinguish the fire. Police then fired into the crowd as students fled for safety. Police later claimed they were attacked first.

South Carolina Governor Robert McNair blamed “Black power advocates” for the violence and insisted officers had fired in self-defense while under attack from campus snipers. Witness accounts from reporters, firemen, and students contradicted this story; they reported that officers had fired on the crowd without warning. No evidence was ever presented that the protesters were armed.

None of the nine officers charged for their roles in the shooting were convicted of any wrongdoing, but Cleveland Sellers, a young Black man and program director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was convicted of rioting for his role in leading the protest. He served seven months in jail and was not pardoned until 1993.

As hundreds of white people watched and cheered, a Black man named Luther Holbert and an unidentified woman were tortured and killed in Doddsville, Mississippi, a Sunflower County town in the Mississippi Delta. Mr. Holbert was accused of shooting and killing James Eastland, a white landowner from a prominent, wealthy local family that owned a plantation where many of the area’s Black laborers worked. After his shooting, Mr. Eastland’s two brothers led the posse that captured Mr. Holbert and a Black woman. Some news reports identified the woman as Mr. Holbert’s wife, but later research suggested she was not; her identity remains unknown.

Reports of the events precipitating the shooting varied; some newspapers claimed that Mr. Holbert argued with Mr. Eastland when the white man ordered him to leave the plantation, while others stated Mr. Eastland had attacked Mr. Holbert for encouraging other indebted Black workers to flee the slavery-like conditions of bonded labor. Whatever the circumstances of Mr. Eastland’s death, the gruesome nature of the fate that befell Mr. Holbert and his woman companion were undisputed.

According to an eyewitness account published in the Vicksburg, Mississippi, Evening Post, Mr. Holbert and the unnamed Black woman were tied to trees while their funeral pyres were prepared. They were then forced to hold out their hands and watch as their fingers were chopped off, one at a time, and distributed as souvenirs. Next, the same was done to their ears. Mr. Holbert was then beaten so badly that his skull was fractured and one of his eyes hung by a shred from the socket. The lynch mob next used a large corkscrew to bore into the arms, legs, and bodies of the two victims, pulling out large pieces of raw flesh. The victims reportedly did not cry out, and they were finally thrown on the fire and allowed to burn to death. The event was described as a festive atmosphere, in which the audience of 600 spectators enjoyed deviled eggs, lemonade, and whiskey.

Soon after, one of James Eastland’s brothers who led the lynch mob had a son and named him James; that James Eastland later became Mississippi’s longest-serving U.S. Senator and spent his career championing white supremacy and opposing the civil rights movement.

A white mob seized Thomas Brown, a 19-year-old Black man, from a jail cell and lynched him on the Jessamine County Courthouse lawn in Nicholasville, Kentucky. Mr. Brown had been arrested for an alleged assault on a white woman but never had the chance to stand trial.

The deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society during this time period often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered or alleged, whether evidence supported that suspicion or not. Almost 25% of all lynchings involved allegations of inappropriate behavior between a Black man and a white woman which would be characterized as “assault” or “sexual assault.” The mere accusation of sexual impropriety regularly aroused violent mobs and ended in lynching. Allegations against Black people were rarely subject to scrutiny.

On the night of the lynching, a mob of 200 white men assembled at the jail and seized Mr. Brown from police. They then hung him from a tree in front of the county courthouse. Though news reports identified the young woman’s brother as a leader of the mob, no one was ever prosecuted for Mr. Brown’s murder and authorities concluded that he “met death by strangulation at the hands of parties unknown.”

During this era of racial terror, it was quite common for lynch mobs to include prominent community members and for the local press and police to help conceal lynchers’ identities to ensure no one was punished or held accountable.

Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1917, also known as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act. Intended to prevent “undesirables” from immigrating to the U.S., the act primarily targeted individuals migrating from Asia. Under the act, people from “any country not owned by the United States adjacent to the continent of Asia” were barred from immigrating to the U.S. The bill also utilized an English literacy test and an increased tax of eight dollars per person for immigrants aged 16 years and older.

The new bill was not meant to impact immigrants from Northern and Western Europe but targeted Asian, Mexican, and Mediterranean immigrants in an attempt to curb their migration. One author of the bill, Alabama Congressman John Burnett, estimated it would exclude approximately 40% of Mediterranean immigrants, 90% of those from Mexico, and all Indian and non-Caucasian immigrants.

The bill also restricted the immigration of people with mental and physical disabilities, the poor, and people with criminal records or suspected of being involved in prostitution. Proponents claimed the bill would keep burdensome immigrants from entering the country and thus “promote the moral and material prosperity” of new immigrants permitted to enter.

The bill remained law for 35 years, until the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 eliminated racial restrictions in immigration and naturalization statutes.

The Alabama state legislature voted to construct the first state-run prison on January 26, 1839. In 1841, the Wetumpka State Penitentiary was built in Wetumpka, Alabama. The prison received its first person in 1842: a white man sentenced to 20 years for “harboring a runaway slave.” In the antebellum penitentiary, 99% of incarcerated people were white, as free Black people were not legally permitted to live in the state, and enslaved Black people were instead subject to unregulated “plantation justice” at the hands of enslavers and overseers.

The penitentiary was supposed to be self-sufficient but soon proved costly as the prison industries of manufacturing wagons, buggies, saddles, harnesses, shoes, and rope failed to generate enough funds to maintain the facility. On February 4, 1846, the state legislature chose to lease the penitentiary to J.G. Graham, a private businessman, for a six-year term. Graham appointed himself warden and took control of the entire prison and the people incarcerated there, claiming all profits made from their labor and eliminating every other employment position except physician and inspector. Alabama continued to lease the prison to private businessmen until 1862, when warden/leaser Dr. Ambrose Burrows was murdered by an incarcerated person.

This initial leasing of the prison and the people incarcerated there marked the beginning of the convict leasing system in Alabama, and that system was soon renewed. In 1866, after the end of the Civil War, the government again authorized incarcerated people to be leased to work outside of the prison, and 374 people were leased to the firm Smith & McMillen to work rebuilding the Alabama & Chattanooga Railroad. In this post-emancipation society, Black people were no longer enslaved, and the convict population that was formerly almost all white was now 90% Black. The system of convict leasing became one that forced primarily Black people who were incarcerated—some convicted of minor or trumped-up charges—to work in hard, dangerous conditions for no pay. This practice continued until World War II.

Rosa Lee Ingram, a Black woman, and two of her children, Wallace, 17, and Sammie Lee, 14, were convicted by an all-white jury in a one-day trial in Ellaville, Georgia. The three family members were sentenced to death by electric chair for killing an armed white man in self-defense after he violently assaulted and threatened them.

On November 4, 1947, a white landowner named John Stratford, armed with a shotgun and pocket knife, attacked Ms. Ingram, a widow who worked as a sharecropper on his farm near Ellaville. Testimony later revealed that Mr. Stratford hit Ms. Ingram in the head with the butt of his rifle while threatening to sexually assault and shoot her.

Ms. Ingram’s sons rushed to their mother’s aid when they heard her screaming as she was being attacked. In her defense, one son struck Mr. Stratford with a farm tool, killing him. Ms. Ingram and her sons were arrested soon after Mr. Stratford was found dead. Even though the local sheriff admitted that the sons acted in defense of their mother, Rosa, Wallace, and Sammie Lee Ingram were all sentenced to death by electrocution, and their execution was scheduled for February 27, 1948. Though Wallace and Sammie Lee were both minors, they were eligible for execution under the law at the time; the U.S. Supreme Court did not ban the execution of children until 2005.

After a post-trial motion and pressure from civil rights activists, the trial judge changed the Ingrams’ sentences to life imprisonment—then in July 1948, the Georgia Supreme Court affirmed their convictions and life sentences. Though Ms. Ingram and her sons no longer had death sentences, they were sent to the state penitentiary and were each forced to serve more than a decade in prison for daring to defend themselves against a violent, armed assault by a white man. The Ingrams were not released on parole until 1959.

Learn more about how our history of racial injustice results in a presumption of guilt and dangerousness that continues to make Black people more likely to be wrongfully convicted, unfairly sentenced, or killed by police.

Drawn by its booming steel mills and factories, Black Americans were moving to industrial Pittsburgh in record numbers at the start of the 20th century. The men, women, and children who arrived on northbound trains were fleeing the racial terror lynchings, convict leasing, Black Codes, and other horrors of the Jim Crow South.

Pittsburgh held out the hope of jobs. There was also a vibrant Black community, with deep religious, cultural, and anti-slavery roots dating back to the days of the Underground Railroad. The heart of that community was a working-class district known as “the Hill.”

Steel worker

As in other Northern cities, newcomers to Pittsburgh were confronted with racial hostility and rigidly enforced segregation. Many crowded into boarding houses on the lower slopes of “The Hill” where they breathed in the sulfurous air of the steel mills.

And there loomed another, more immediate danger—the police.

On the moonless evening of February 2, 1909, as the men and women of the Hill were finishing their dinners and tucking in their children, a hundred white police officers fanned out across the district. Led by what one newspaper described as a “Negro-hating” police captain, they barged into homes, saloons, pool halls, and other places where people congregated, and arrested every Black man who could not immediately provide proof of employment. The men were crammed into police wagons waiting to deliver them to cells at Central Police Station. By 2 am all five wagons were full.

More than 200 innocent Black men were arrested in Pittsburgh that night. The pretense for the roundup was a series of vague, unsubstantiated reports of “assaults” on white women and girls, and the deep racial hostility that had burdened Black people with a presumption of guilt and dangerousness since before the nation’s birth led Pittsburgh police to target Black men.

More arrests followed in the days after the roundup—two men here, 15 there, as many as 150 for “loafing,” perhaps for warmth, by steel-industry coke ovens in a nearby town. Some of the people huddled by the long rows of ovens were said to have fled the raid. All told, Black men arrested in the roundup and in smaller-scale police actions around it totaled about 400.

Irene Lucas, 22, had moved to Pittsburgh from Philadelphia with her husband. They were boarding with a storekeeper in the Hill while they both looked for work. On February 4, two days after the raid, Mrs. Lucas, who was Black, wrote a letter to her mother back in Philadelphia:

“Rob and I can’t find work now…Police are raiding the pool rooms on [rumors] of a Negro assaulting a white girl…There are 223 in jail, all Black. This scared me so bad that I am afraid to go out on the street. I don’t know what to do. This is certainly a devil of a hole.”

Rial Robert Lucas

Three days later, both Lucases were arrested. Irene Lucas was sent to the workhouse on the trumped-up charge of being a “suspicious person.” Her husband, Rial Robert Lucas, was charged with assaulting a white woman. There was no evidence substantiating the charge and several witnesses confirmed that Mr. Lucas had been applying for a job at the Carnegie Institute at the time of the alleged attack. His accuser had already twice identified a different person as the alleged perpetrator before changing her story.

A jury took 16 minutes to find Mr. Lucas guilty. He was sentenced to nine years in prison.

Reference to lynchings pervaded the cases arising from the roundup. A crowd of white men chanted “Lynch him! Lynch him!” as a plainclothes officer wrestled a Black man he’d just arrested to the pavement. News accounts said the officer had to draw his revolver and wave it at the crowd to keep them from attacking the man.

During a court proceeding before Mr. Lucas’s trial, the prosecutor suggested he was lucky to avoid a lynching. “Had the defendant been caught and charged with such a crime south of the Mason and Dixon Line,” the prosecutor said in court, “he would never have been fortunate enough to be placed on trial.”

The Cases Go to Court

The day after the roundup, the Black men caught up in it faced hours of “grilling examination,” as a newspaper said, by a white magistrate judge in a jam-packed courtroom.

And one by one, in nearly every case where men were accused of crimes, what little evidence was presented fell apart in court. Some accusers changed their minds and recanted. Others admitted they were not sure the defendant was the right man. A Hill clerk named Clarence Cook was exonerated after six witnesses testified that he was in a restaurant with them on Wylie Avenue, the Hill’s main thoroughfare, on the evening when police claimed he was in another part of town assaulting a white girl.

Even when criminal charges against Black men had not been proved, the magistrate sent them to the workhouse anyway on grounds that they were vagrants or suspicious persons. Two teenage white girls, who had reported being chased down a suburban road by two Black men, declined to testify against men police arrested, Tobias Sharkey and a man identified as E. Woodford. So a magistrate dismissed the charges but sentenced both Black men to 90 days in the workhouse for vagrancy.

John Moulton, a 39-year-old janitor, was sentenced to six months in the workhouse even though the magistrate admitted, “There is no evidence that you attempted to assault the girl.” Then he pronounced Mr. Moulton a suspicious person, and announced, “I will impose the maximum sentence, to show others, black or white, that women must be protected.”

In one case, the magistrate sent a white woman to the workhouse for 60 days for having been arrested at a Hill saloon in the company of Black men. But first, he lectured her about the perils of race mixing. The police “are endeavoring to protect white women against Negroes, and here you are, associating with Negroes, spending your time in a Negro dive,” the magistrate said, “giving the Negro the idea that a white woman is his legitimate prey.”

By then, Black community leaders were speaking out about the raid. The Rev. L.D.W. Mason, a Baptist minister who lived near Wylie Avenue in the Hill, beseeched the Pittsburgh Press to stop reporting allegations of crime in the Hill “until some are proven before the courts.” He wrote: “It is a sad thing to think of the great onslaught on my people made by the police. It is a thing which makes our nerves tremble, our limbs quake, and our very hearts reach up toward heaven in prayer for consolation.”

The Black community took pride in its activist history. Aging Civil War veterans still paraded in their U.S. Colored Troop uniforms. The Hill celebrated Frederick Douglass’s birthday every year. It drew much of its civic energy from its churches—more than two dozen of them citywide. Among the ministers who pressed fearlessly for equal rights was the Rev. Carlton M. Tanner, pastor of the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s Brown Chapel. He was the son of AME Bishop Benjamin Tucker Tanner and brother of the painter Henry Ossawa Tanner. He would soon be profiled among the “Men Of The Month” in the new NAACP magazine, The Crisis. He urged Pittsburgh’s white trade unions to integrate. Wanting to help Black residents fleeing racial terror from the South, he pushed fellow clergy to “meet them at the trains.”

The Laws Behind the Roundup

The laws that authorities used in the raid were about so-called “summary offenses.” Today a typical summary offense is a parking ticket, but all through the 19th and most of the 20th century, summary offenses included vagrancy (being out of work or unable to prove employment) and being an alleged “suspicious person.” These laws were used to target Black people and these were the charges brought against the vast majority of those arrested in the raid.

Soon after slavery was outlawed, Southern states began enacting vagrancy laws and other discriminatory policies and using them to criminalize and re-enslave Black people. These laws set the stage for “convict leasing,” in which tens of thousands of Black people were arrested on charges such as vagrancy and imprisoned and then leased to private railways, mines, and large plantations, where they earned no pay and labored under horrific and often deadly conditions.

Group of incarcerated men in convict leasing system

As Black people migrated to Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York City, and Chicago in increasing numbers to escape the Jim Crow South, Northern cities also began to pass new laws—and apply existing ones in discriminatory ways—to trap Black people and maintain racial hierarchy. These mass arrests in Pittsburgh are just one example of the way Black people were targeted and forced into involuntary labor for decades in America.

Though Pennsylvania did not allow its prisons to contract out incarcerated people’s labor, as in the South, its prisoners were still forced into hard labor without pay. The Allegheny County Workhouse, where magistrates sent Mrs. Lucas and many others arrested during and after the raid, forced its prisoners to work without pay until they hit a required quota—after which they could choose to do even more work and get paid tiny sums for it.

Pennsylvania passed vagrancy laws in the 19th century as a way to regulate and police formerly enslaved Black people in the state. In 1842, the Supreme Court ruled in Prigg v. Pennsylvania that the state could capture Black people in Pennsylvania labeled “fugitive slaves” and send them South to be re-enslaved—reasoning that Black people escaping slavery were analogous to vagrants.

Vagrancy laws were Pennsylvania’s version of Black Codes. Indeed, a study of early 19th-century court records found that in Philadelphia, nearly half of those convicted as vagrants were African American—a figure wildly disproportionate to the city’s minority Black population.

In Pittsburgh, after the roundup, the city’s top police officials publicly slandered the Black community as “a lot of bad Negroes” and “idlers”—that is, vagrants.

In fact, Pittsburgh’s Black community boasted a symphony orchestra, a mandolin string quartet, an orphanage, and a long list of literary societies and fraternal organizations. While most Black Pittsburghers worked as maids, launderers, laborers, janitors, and teamsters, they also held better-paid jobs as cement finishers, pharmacists, plasterers, and paperhangers. In 1909, a researcher counted 85 Black-owned businesses in Pittsburgh, including print shops, restaurants, a caterer, an insurance firm, a savings and loan, and a coal-and-coke company in nearby Homestead with 1,000 employees. An analysis of the 1900 Census found fewer than 1 in 15 Black adults unemployed. Public high schools were integrated, though the school board refused to hire Black teachers.

A young Black entrepreneur named Robert Vann was about to launch the Pittsburgh Courier as a national weekly (it would become one of the most widely read Black newspapers in the country). The Homestead Grays and Pittsburgh Crawfords were soon to become Negro League baseball titans.

The Workhouse and August Wilson

The great playwright August Wilson, who was born in the Hill in 1945, said that much of his work was informed by his early days spent listening to the stories of the Hill’s oldtimers. In his play Seven Guitars, set in 1948, Floyd Barton gets 90 days in the workhouse for vagrancy because he spent his last cent on his mom’s funeral; police arrest Red Carter for having “more money than the law allowed.”

Pittsburgh hill street

‘The Negro-Hating Officer’ and the Police Chief

A letter to the editor signed “Ladies of the East End” praised Police Captain J.D. Murray and Magistrate Frank J. Brady for “the way they gave it to those [n-word]s who were raided the other day.” Captain Murray, who helped organize the roundup, was quoted afterward suggesting it might pay to “hang a few of them offhand.”

As police and the men arrested awaited hearings before a magistrate, the captain said he considered it a crime for a Black man to wave at a white woman, “and I will act accordingly.”

Black people who had filled “the little police court” that morning to support arrested friends heard him, “and the vicious remark of the negro-hating officer started a loud outcry,” according to a newspaper account. The story claimed: “Local orators are inflaming the negroes in resistance, and the feeling is high.” Police Superintendent Thomas McQuaide countered with a warning of his own:

“Those fellows who are talking had better keep their mouths shut. We are going to get rid of a lot of bad negroes now in Pittsburgh, and we will send anyone who tries to protect them to the workhouse with them.”

It was not a hollow threat. With city elections 13 days away, a Black political meeting on the Hill drew 50 police officers who arrested two participants.

“A Nightmare of Cruelty”

A white man who had been incarcerated there from 1905 to 1906 after serving time in a state prison called the Allegheny County Workhouse “a nightmare of cruelty, infinitely worse than the most inhuman aspects of the penitentiary.” His memoir told of workhouse guards beating prisoners on the least pretense, and of one guard who regularly shoved prisoners down flights of stairs.

Inspector Bartley Defends the Roundup

Three years after the raid, Police Inspector Lawrence Bartley bragged that it stopped “a reign of terror in the Hill District, caused by Negroes attacking white girls…Every known rendezvous for black men in the Hill District was raided, and 218 [were] brought to Central Station.”

By then, Black Pittsburgh looked to its new Black-owned Courier, whose editor, Robert Vann, assured readers “your news is not Jim-Crowed in this paper.” Inspector Bartley’s testimony had smeared a whole community by portraying “the Negro of Pittsburgh as a brute and a thug,” the Courier editorialized. “We deny that such is the case.”

Rial Robert Lucas made the Courier’s point—after he served his sentence, he remained married to Irene, and found work at last, as a laborer for Pittsburgh Crucible Steel Company, in nearby Midland, Pennsylvania. At age 39 he was still willing to serve his country. On September 12, 1918, with World War One still raging, he registered for the military draft.

The mass arrests that had sent Mr. Lucas to prison presaged stop-and-frisk and other police tactics against Black citizens that persist today, along with the mass incarceration that disproportionately affects people of color. In Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, Black residents consistently comprise over 60% of the jail population despite making up just 13% of Allegheny County residents. Roughly 80% of people in those jails have not been convicted of a crime.

In early 1965, civil rights groups including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) began concentrating on voter registration in Selma, Alabama—a city with the lowest voter registration record in the state’s Black Belt region.

Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark, others in local law enforcement, and county registration employees regularly used violence, discrimination, and intimidation to prevent Black residents of Selma from registering to vote. Though African Americans constituted approximately 50% of Selma’s population in the 1960s, only 1-2% were registered voters.

On February 1, 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led more than 250 activists to the Dallas County Courthouse to register to vote. All of them were arrested during the peaceful demonstration and charged with parading without a permit. In a letter written from the local jail that same night, and later published in the New York Times, Dr. King decried the racist conditions in Selma and observed that “there are more Negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls.”

The arrests of Dr. King and the other civil rights activists resulted in protests in which African Americans were injured and killed. Despite these attacks, Dr. King and other civil rights leaders continued their work and organized another voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery the following month.

The night before he was set to move to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Louis Allen was ambushed outside his property in Liberty, Mississippi, and shot twice in the face with a shotgun. He died almost instantly. Mr. Allen was the victim of racially motivated violence in a system where he was offered no protection by the rule of law.

Several years before, in September 1961, a local white state legislator named E.H. Hurst had shot and killed Herbert Lee in an Amite County, Mississippi, cotton gin in front of several eyewitnesses. Mr. Lee was a member of the Amite County, Mississippi, NAACP and worked with Bob Moses of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on a voter registration drive. Mr. Allen witnessed the murder and was initially coerced into saying that Mr. Hurst killed Mr. Lee in self-defense; he later recanted and told the FBI that Mr. Hurst had shot Mr. Lee for registering Black voters.

Knowing the considerable risk of violence that came with speaking out against racial violence in Mississippi, Mr. Allen told federal authorities that he would need protection in order to cooperate in their investigation. The FBI refused to provide protection, and Mr. Allen did not testify against Mr. Hurst—but news still spread in the local community that Mr. Allen had spoken with federal investigators.

Beginning in 1962, Mr. Allen was targeted for harassment and violence: local white residents cut off business to his logging company; he was jailed on false charges; and on one occasion, sheriff Daniel Jones broke Louis Allen’s jaw with a flashlight. The son of a high-ranking local Klansman, Sheriff Jones was also suspected to be a member of the KKK. Louis Allen filed complaints and testified before a federal grand jury regarding the abuse he suffered at the hands of Sheriff Jones, but his claims were dismissed.

By 1964, Mr. Allen had resigned himself to leaving Mississippi for his own safety. After Mr. Allen was murdered, Sheriff Daniel Jones was the main suspect. Sheriff Jones later told Mr. Allen’s widow, “If Louis had just shut his mouth, he wouldn’t be layin’ there on the ground.” No one was ever charged or convicted for the murder of Louis Allen.

One month after the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott, the home of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was bombed while his wife Coretta, seven-week-old daughter Yolanda, and a neighbor were inside. The front of the home was damaged but no one was injured.

Dr. King was speaking at a large meeting when he learned about the bombing. He rushed home to find a large crowd gathered outside, some carrying weapons and prepared to take action in his defense. The crowd cheered at Dr. King’s arrival, and the mayor and police commissioner urged the crowd to remain calm and promised the bombing would be fully investigated.

Dr. King confirmed his family was safe and then addressed the anxious and angry crowd, many of whom were members of his church. He advocated for nonviolence. “If you have weapons,” he pleaded, “take them home; if you do not have them, please do not seek them. We cannot solve this problem through violence. We must meet violence with nonviolence.” The crowd dispersed peacefully after Dr. King assured them, “Go home and don’t worry. We are not hurt, and remember, if anything happens to me there will be others to take my place.”

No one was ever prosecuted or held accountable for this bombing on Dr. King’s home.

In November 1881, a jury in Clarke County, Alabama, convicted Tony Pace, a Black man, and Mary Cox, a white woman, under section 4189 of the Alabama Code, which criminalized “fornication” and “adultery” between persons of different races and outlawed interracial marriage. Mr. Pace and Ms. Cox were sentenced to two years in prison.

On January 29, 1883, in Pace v. Alabama, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld their convictions, reasoning that the anti-miscegenation statute was not discriminatory and did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because the penalty applied equally to each member of the interracial couple.

Pace failed to overturn the reasoning of the Alabama Supreme Court, which had held that fornication between persons of different races was exceptionally “evil” because it could result in the “amalgamation of the two races, producing a mongrel population and a degraded civilization, the prevention of which is dictated by a sound public policy affecting the highest interests of society and government.”

State courts in the South relied on Pace to uphold anti-miscegenation laws until 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned it in Loving v. Virginia and invalidated anti-miscegenation statutes in the 16 states that still enforced them.

In the early morning, a group of Texas Rangers, alongside U.S. Cavalry soldiers and local white ranchers, arrived in Porvenir, Texas, a small farming village that was home to refugees of the Mexican Revolution. The officers, looking for a robbery suspect, woke up the residents of the town and searched them at gunpoint for weapons and stolen goods. The officers found only one antique rifle and a pistol that belonged to the only white resident of the town. Nevertheless, they tied up 15 Mexican American men and boys from the village and shot them until they ran out of bullets.

The officers later tried to defend their actions by claiming that the residents were “thieves, informers, spies, and murderers.” However, a report by an adjutant general of Texas found that the victims were “defenseless and unarmed” and killed “without provocation.”

After the executions, the surviving residents fled Porvenir, returning only to bury the bodies of their loved ones. The victims, who ranged in age from 16 to 72, were Antonio Castañeda, Longino Flores, Pedro Herrera, Vivian Herrera, Severiano Herrera, Manuel Moralez, Eutimio Gonzalez, Ambrosio Hernandez, Alberto Garcia, Tiburcio Jáques, Roman Nieves, Serapio Jimenez, Pedro Jimenez, Juan Jimenez, and Macedonio Huertas.

The U.S. Army subsequently burned the whole village, and no participants in the massacre were ever prosecuted for their actions.

The Porvenir Massacre was part of La Matanza, a period of horrific anti-Mexican violence in Texas between 1910 and 1920 during which hundreds of people of Mexican descent were killed by Texas law enforcement officials.

Jefferson County sheriff deputies went to the home of Robert Lacey, a Black father of six, to enforce a law requiring him to take the family dog to the veterinarian. The police engaged in a confrontation with Mr. Lacey and shot him to death.

The Laceys’ dog had allegedly bitten a neighborhood child recently and the health department had instructed the family to take the dog in for a rabies test—however, the family did not own a car and had no means of transporting the animal. When deputies knocked at the door, Mr. Lacey answered after getting out of the shower, and the officers ordered him to get dressed and come with them. Mr. Lacey asked why and asked the officers to just take the dog, but the officers refused. As Mr. Lacey complied with the order to get dressed, a gun he kept in his drawer fell to the floor, and the officers quickly pinned him to the wall and began to handcuff him. Mr. Lacey offered to come to the police car of his own free will, to which one of the officers reportedly replied, “Boy, you gonna leave here with handcuffs on, dead or alive.”

Mr. Lacey was a large man; as the deputies attempted to wrestle him down, one of them fell to the ground, and the other then shot Mr. Lacey in the leg. The deputies later claimed Mr. Lacey lunged at them before the second shot, but Mr. Lacey’s family insisted Mr. Lacey fell to the ground before the deputy shot him again, “between the eyes.” Neighbors who ran to the house after the shooting were instructed by police to move the body before the coroner arrived.

Mr. Lacey was the second Black man killed by Jefferson County law enforcement within nine days and would be one of 10 total law enforcement killings of Black men in the Birmingham, Alabama, area within a 14-month period spanning from 1966 to 1967.

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision upholding the Georgia Supreme Court’s decision to close a local public park in Macon, Georgia, rather than open it to Black residents.

In 1911, U.S. Senator Augustus O. Bacon executed his will, devising to the city of Macon “a park and pleasure ground” for white residents only. He explained that “in limiting the use and enjoyment of this property perpetually to white people, I am not influenced by any unkindness of feeling . . . I am, however, without hesitation in the opinion that in their social relations the two races . . . should be forever separate.”

A large and lush recreation space, Baconsfield Park opened in 1920. As a trustee of the park, Macon honored Senator Bacon’s wishes and for decades operated it as a “white only” facility. That changed in 1963 when the city determined that, as a public entity, it could no longer constitutionally enforce segregation. Disgruntled, Baconsfield’s Board of Managers sued to remove Macon as trustee and preserve the park as one for white residents only.

In May 1963, Black citizens intervened, filing a lawsuit challenging Baconsfield’s racial restriction as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. However, in February 1964, Macon resigned as trustee; several months later the court appointed three private individuals as new trustees, and the racial segregation policy continued.

Black residents appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In January 1966, the Court held in Evans v. Newton that Baconsfield could no longer be operated on a racially discriminatory basis: “the public character of this park requires that it be treated as a public institution subject to the command of the Fourteenth Amendment, regardless of who now has title under state law.” Rather than integrate, however, the Georgia Supreme Court responded by terminating the Baconsfield trust and closing the park to the public altogether.

Black residents of Macon again appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, contending that the state court’s action violated the Fourteenth Amendment. But on January 26, 1970, in Evans v. Abney, the Court upheld the Georgia Supreme Court’s order, writing: “When a city park is destroyed because the Constitution requires it to be integrated, there is reason for everyone to be disheartened.” Baconsfield Park remained closed and is now a strip mall. Georgia’s Bacon County remains named for Senator Bacon.

The Virginia Senate unanimously passed a bill that required separate cars for white and Black passengers aboard trains. The legislation mandated that every compartment of a car be divided with “a good and substantial partition” and “bear in some conspicuous place appropriate words in plain letters indicating the race for which it is set apart.” The law also empowered railroad workers to remove passengers from the train who did not sit in the area assigned by the railroad official. It took effect on July 1 of that year.

This was Virginia’s first statewide segregation law. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld Louisiana’s 1890 Separate Car Act, gave legal sanction to racially segregated spaces.

Prior to this legislation, Black and white Virginians could travel together on most transit in the state. The passage of the bill was precipitated by an event on Christmas Eve, 1899, when a Black person allegedly took a seat next to a white woman on a train and refused to move. The Richmond Times publicized the incident and declared that “God Almighty drew the color line and it cannot be obliterated.” Early in the year, Virginia’s white governor J. Hoge Tyler, who went on to sign the separate-car bill, had personally voiced displeasure at having to share a sleeping car with several Black people on his trip by rail from Virginia to Georgia.

In subsequent years, Virginia formally segregated steamboats (1900), schools (1902), streetcars (1906), prisons (1918), and public halls (1926). Most transportation and public spaces in Virginia would remain legally segregated until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

A white mob in Clark County, Arkansas, lynched a Black man named Ben Daniels and his two sons. Earlier in the day, when Mr. Daniels tried to pay for something with a $50 bill, the white merchant assumed a Black man could only have that much money if he had stolen it. The merchant called the police to report Mr. Daniels as a suspect in a local theft that had recently occurred. A few days prior, a white farmer named R. M. Duff woke in the middle of the night to find his home and barn in flames. Mr. Duff later claimed that someone ran into the home and stole money as Mr. Duff evacuated with his wife, but he was not able to provide any description of this person and no one was reported burned in the blaze.

Without any evidence tying Mr. Daniels to this alleged theft, police responded to the merchant’s call by promptly arresting Mr. Daniels solely based on his possession of a $50 bill.

Police later claimed that, while in custody on the day of his arrest, Mr. Daniels confessed to stealing money from the Duff home and implicated his sons in the crime as well. During the era of racial terror, Black suspects were often subjected to beatings, torture, and threats of lynching during police interrogations. While news reports often reported these alleged confessions as justifications for the brutal terror lynchings that followed, the confession of a lynching victim was always more reliable evidence of fear than guilt.

The sheriff took Mr. Daniels’ sons into custody that same day as well. Later that night, before the Danielses could be tried, a mob of white men “overpowered” the sheriff who was supposed to be guarding them and lynched all three men. Some sources indicated that the two sons lynched with Mr. Daniels were the only ones arrested, while others reported that a third son was also arrested, not lynched, and remained in jail awaiting trial. News reports did not include the sons’ names.

During this era of racial terror lynchings, it was not uncommon for lynch mobs to seize their victims out of police hands. In some cases, police officials were even found to be complicit or active participants in lynchings. While law enforcement officials were obligated to defend anyone in their custody, in most instances, as here, law enforcement failed to extend any protection to Black citizens or to take any action to arrest and prosecute the perpetrators of lynchings.

After hanging the Daniels men from a tree, the white mob left their bodies on display as a way to further terrorize the Black community of Clark County, Arkansas. Between 1865 and 1950, more than 6,500 Black women, men, and children were killed in racial terror lynchings throughout the U.S., with at least 492 reported lynchings in Arkansas alone.

Over 150 Blackfeet—most of whom were women, children, the elderly, and those suffering from disease—were massacred by U.S. soldiers led by Major Eugene Baker near the Marias River (referred to as the Bear River by the Blackfeet) in the Montana Territory.

At dawn, Maj. Baker and his men came upon a Blackfeet camp led by a man named Heavy Runner. The majority of the Blackfeet men had gone out to hunt, while the rest of the band lay sleeping. Maj. Baker was told by a subordinate that the people in the camp were not engaged in a military conflict with the U.S. government. Heavy Runner, after being awoken, presented papers to the U.S. soldiers attesting to friendly relations with U.S. authorities.

In spite of this, Heavy Runner was promptly shot, and Baker ordered his soldiers to attack the rest of the camp. The U.S. soldiers shot indiscriminately into lodges. They also shot at the tops of dwellings so the structures would collapse upon the central fires and burn those inside.

According to a survivor, who was taken prisoner during the massacre, U.S. soldiers killed 90 women, 50 children, and 15 men in Heavy Runner’s band and destroyed 44 buildings. Other accounts put the number of Blackfeet murdered at over 200. A single member of the U.S. Army died. Neither Maj. Baker nor any of his men received disciplinary action for this atrocity.

Maj. Baker’s soldiers also stole over a hundred horses and burned clothing and provisions, making it difficult for the surviving Blackfeet to endure the 30-degree-below-zero temperature. Many subsequently froze to death.

The Bear River Massacre (also known as the Marias Massacre or the Baker Massacre) was the largest massacre of Indigenous people in present-day Montana and one episode in the bloody campaign by the U.S. Army to dispossess the Blackfeet and other Indigenous groups of the territory. Whereas in the early 1800s the Blackfeet had a population of 20,000, by the end of the century, violence, disease, and starvation brought the number down to just 5,000.

The U.S. Supreme Court in United States v. Harris dismissed indictments against a Tennessee sheriff and other white men accused of attacking four Black men and killing one. The Court held that the Force Act, a federal law passed to protect Black Americans from violent terrorism, was unconstitutional because the Fourteenth Amendment limited Congress to taking remedial steps against state action that violated the Fourteenth Amendment and applied only to acts by states, not to acts of individuals.

In 1876, Crockett County Sheriff R. G. Harris and 19 armed men removed four African American men from jail. They severely beat Robert Smith, William Overton, and George Wells Jr. and killed P. M. Wells. Federal prosecutors brought criminal charges against Sheriff Harris and his accomplices under the Force Act of 1871, commonly known as the Ku Klux Klan Act or the Civil Rights Act of 1871.

Introduced by progressive Republicans to extend the protection of federal law to African Americans in states that refused to protect them from racial terror and violence, the act made it a federal crime for individuals to conspire for the purpose of depriving others of their right to the equal protection of the law.

The Court’s decision in Harris, striking down the Force Act, dealt a devastating blow to congressional efforts to combat the widespread violence and terrorism targeting Black Southerners during Reconstruction and left African Americans unprotected against lynching and other violence.

Senator James Eastland of Mississippi led a successful campaign to block an anti-lynching bill, which would have held members of lynch mobs and local law enforcement officers accountable for their role in racial terror lynchings. Before the Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing, Senator Eastland—an ardent segregationist and supporter of white supremacy—proclaimed that “time has cured” lynchings and refused to acknowledge the role that law enforcement had played for decades in the lynchings of thousands of Black Americans.

Senator Eastland, a wealthy plantation owner who served as U.S. senator from Mississippi from 1942 to 1978, built his political career on promoting white supremacy, defending racial segregation, and blocking civil rights bills. His campaign to block anti-lynching legislation in the Senate was supported by dozens of Southern white politicians who successfully filibustered every anti-lynching bill since the first one was introduced in 1918.

At the January 21 hearing, Senator Eastland launched unfounded attacks on the constitutionality of the bill, which would make lynching a federal crime, and disparaged the U.S. Supreme Court as “not judicially honest.” In contending there was no need for an anti-lynching bill, Senator Eastland incorrectly declared that “we don’t have any lynchings now.” Though the number of racial terror lynchings had declined by 1948, more than four dozen lynchings were recorded during the 1940s, including at least six in the senator’s home state.

Senator Eastland’s attempt to downplay the history and continuing threat of lynching was particularly blatant given that Mississippi is among the states with the highest number of documented racial terror lynchings from 1877 to 1950, and considering Senator Eastland’s own family ties to that violence. In 1904, the same year Eastland was born, his father, Woods Eastland, led a lynch mob that captured and brutally lynched a Black man named Luther Holbert and an unidentifiable Black woman without trial or due process of law. The two lynching victims were mutilated and burned alive before a crowd of 600 picnicking spectators, and no one was ever punished for their deaths. Mr. Holbert had been accused of killing the future senator’s plantation-owning uncle, for whom he was named.

As the federal government refused to protect Black Americans, racial terror lynchings remained an ongoing threat to Black communities for nearly a century. Victims of racial terror lynchings were hanged, shot, stabbed, drowned, and burned alive, killed by mobs who never faced prosecution for their actions. It was not uncommon for lynch mobs to seize their victims from jails, prisons, courtrooms, or police custody, and in many cases, law enforcement officials were complicit or active participants in lynchings.

The anti-lynching bill that came before the Senate in 1948 proposed to hold law enforcement accountable for lynchings of people who were in their custody. Due to the efforts of Southern white politicians like Senator Eastland, this bill failed. Out of more than 200 anti-lynching bills introduced in Congress, only three passed the House and none passed the Senate until 2018. It wasn’t until 2022 that the Emmett Till Antilynching Act was passed by both houses of Congress. It was signed by President Biden on March 29, 2022, making lynching a federal hate crime.

Hiram Rhodes Revels was elected to the U.S. Senate, becoming the first African American to serve in the U.S. Congress. Revels was elected in Mississippi to fill the vacancy left after the state’s secession from the Union prior to the Civil War.

After the Confederacy’s 1865 defeat in the Civil War, Reconstruction amendments to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery, established the citizenship of formerly enslaved Black people, and granted Black people civil rights—including granting Black men the right to vote. For the brief Reconstruction period, which lasted until 1877, federal officials and troops remained in Southern states and enforced these new rights. As a result, Black people in the South were for the first time voters, political candidates, and election winners. Mr. Revels was one of those winners.

However, immediately upon Mr. Revels’s arrival in Washington, Southern white politicians still committed to the ideas of white supremacy and racial hierarchy were determined to block his seating to the U.S. Congress. They declared his election null and void, asserting various dubious objections, including a claim that Mr. Revels was ineligible for the Senate because—like all Black Americans—he was not a U.S. citizen until the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Hiram Revels was eventually seated in the Senate on February 25, 1870, after a Senate vote of 48 to 8. However, the attempt to prevent Mr. Revels from taking his rightful place in office was an early illustration of the deeply rooted racial animus and belief in inequality that remained in the South and in the nation that would continue to terrorize and plague Black people for generations—especially after federal protection was withdrawn.

Beginning on January 19, 1930, mobs of up to 500 white people roamed Watsonville, California, and the surrounding towns and farms, attacking Filipino farmworkers and their property after Filipino men were seen dancing with white women at a newly opened local dance hall.

In the days and weeks before the rioting, politicians and community leaders had ramped up their anti-Filipino rhetoric, calling the farmworkers “a menace” and demanding that Filipino residents be deported so “white people who have inherited this country for themselves and their offspring could live.” A local judge stated, “The worst part of [the Filipino man] being here is his mixing with young white girls from 13 to 17. He gives them silk underwear and makes them pregnant and crowds whites out of jobs in the bargain.”

One Watsonville mob was initially turned away from the dance hall by security guards and the armed owners of the hall but returned in full force to beat dozens of Filipino farmworkers. The beatings continued elsewhere in the area, and on the night of January 22, a mob ransacked Filipino farmworkers’ homes and shot into the dwellings, killing Fermin Tobera. No one was ever charged with that murder. Seven men were later convicted of rioting but received either probation or 30 days in jail.

The anti-Filipino violence continued in California in the months after the Watsonville riots ended on January 23, with violence breaking out in Stockton, Salinas, San Francisco, and San Jose. In 1933, California enacted a law to prohibit marriages between Filipino and white residents. And in 1934, answering in part a long-standing request of California’s government, Congress reduced Filipino immigration to the U.S. to just 50 people per year. In September 2011, the California legislature officially expressed regret and apologized for these events and actions.

The North Carolina General Assembly approved the disbursement of public funds to enslavers as compensation for the executions of Black people they held in bondage. Nearly a dozen enslavers received money from the state, including a white man in Duplin County who was given 80 pounds—the equivalent of over $18,000 today—following the government-led execution of a man he enslaved by the name of George.

In nine of 13 colonies, laws provided economic support and compensation to white people after the execution of Black people they enslaved, with the earliest compensation law established in 1705 in Virginia. In a system that subsidized enslavers and permitted the continued trafficking of humans and their summary execution, the state could enact capital punishment without consequence or complaint from enslavers. For decades, if an enslaved person was executed by the state or if an enslaved person died from injuries induced during any other corporal punishment, enslavers could receive an uncapped sum of money and up to 80 pounds by the late 1700s in North Carolina.

Consequently, between 1734 and 1786, the North Carolina government authorized the execution of 86 enslaved people that involved compensation to enslavers. Critically, these executions were carried out without any formal legal process. North Carolina’s Slave Code of 1741 denied enslaved people their right to due process, founded in the belief that enslaved people were not suitable for the legal system. Enslaved people were tried before a tribunal composed of enslavers who were quick to deliver convictions and punishments, often on the same day. In 1793, this practice was re-codified in North Carolina as enslaved people were only entitled to a “trial” made up of a jury of “good and lawful men, owners of slaves.” Before imposing execution, the enslaver tribunal assigned a monetary amount that would be given to enslavers.

Half of the claims approved by the North Carolina General Assembly on January 18 came in the wake of executions of enslaved people who committed “felonies” which were loosely defined and took the form of petty crimes, arson, “witchcraft,” or attempts to escape bondage.

In the wake of these executions, on January 18, North Carolina dispersed nearly 1,000 pounds, or the equivalent of $230,000 today, to enslavers following the executions of 13 enslaved people.

The Alabama State Legislature passed Act 44 as part of a series of increasingly restrictive laws governing the behavior of free and enslaved Black people, which prohibited Black people from being freed within the state and authorized re-enslavement of any free Black person who entered the state.

In the immediate aftermath of the infamous Nat Turner slave rebellion in Virginia, Alabama passed a statute in 1833 that made it unlawful for free Black people to settle in Alabama. That statute provided that freed Black people found in Alabama would be given 30 days to vacate the state. After 30 days, they could be subject to a penalty of 39 lashes and receive an additional 20-day period to leave the state. After that period had expired, the free person could be sold back into slavery with proceeds of the sale going to the state and those who participated in apprehending him or her.

In 1834, Act 44 expanded on this legislation by specifying a series of procedures that had to be followed for an enslaved Black person to be freed within the state. For one, the law required that the emancipation of an enslaved person could only take effect outside of Alabama’s borders. Further, if an emancipated Black person returned to Alabama after being freed, he or she could be lawfully captured and sold back into slavery. In fact, Act 44 required sheriffs and other law enforcement officers to actively attempt to apprehend freedmen and freedwomen who entered Alabama for any reason—rendering all free Black people within the state vulnerable to kidnapping and enslavement with no legal protection.

In an effort designed to make aspects of daily life illegal and drive Muscogee (Creek) and Cherokee people from their land through abuse and fraud, the General Assembly of Alabama enacted provisions prohibiting them from practicing customs or making laws that conflicted with Alabama law. The provision stated, “All laws, usages and customs now used, enjoyed, or practiced, by the Creek and Cherokee nations of Indians, within the limits of this State, contrary to the constitution and laws of this State, be, and the same are hereby abolished.”

This statute was created just three years after another law effectively extended the jurisdiction of Alabama into Muscogee territory. In response to that first law and white settlers’ increasing unlawful encroachment into the Muscogee Nation, the Muscogee Council repeatedly—yet unsuccessfully—petitioned the federal government for assistance and protection.

Even without federal support, many Muscogee people refused to succumb to mounting pressure to emigrate west of the Mississippi River, and their leaders continued organizing efforts to secure their tribal lands. This 1832 law frustrated those efforts by declaring it illegal for tribal leaders to “meet in any counsel, assembly, or convention” and create “any law for said tribe, contrary to the laws and constitution of this State.” Punishment for violating this law was imprisonment “in the common jail of the proper county, for not less than two, nor more than four, months.”

The 1832 law also provided that Cherokee and Muscogee people could only testify in court in suits involving other members of the Cherokee and Muscogee nations, effectively ensuring that Muscogee people defrauded and illegally deprived of their land by white intruders would have no recourse in the Alabama courts. White settlers, speculators, and those intending to illegally occupy tribal lands were enticed by the law preventing any suit for trespass by Muscogee people and traveled to Muscogee territory in Alabama to take advantage of the law, stealing land without consequence. Both the Alabama and federal government hoped to remove tribal communities from Alabama to the Western Territory and this law furthered those aims. Indeed, Dixon Hall Lewis, an Alabama House representative, argued for the passage of the 1832 law by specifically noting that when the Muscogee people “see and feel some palpable act of legislation under the authority of the state, that their veneration for their own law and customs will induce them speedily to remove to that region of the country west of Mississippi.”

By 1837, 23,000 Muscogee people had been forced out of the Southeast.

The U.S. Supreme Court issued an opinion lifting a lower court’s desegregation decree and authorizing Oklahoma City schools to resegregate into de facto one-race schools.

In 1972, a federal court ordered the Board of Education of Oklahoma City Schools to adopt a busing program to desegregate the city’s public schools in compliance with the U.S. Supreme Court’s desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The school board complied for five years and then filed a motion to lift the order. The federal court found that integration had been achieved, granted the motion, and ended the busing program.

In 1984, the school board adopted a new student assignment plan that significantly reduced busing and resegregated Oklahoma City schools. Local parents of Black students initiated litigation challenging the new assignment plan and asking for reinstatement of the 1972 busing decree. In 1989, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit reinstituted the decree, and the school board appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

On January 15, 1991, the Court declared in a 5-3 decision written by Chief Justice William Rehnquist that federal desegregation injunctions were intended to be temporary. Despite troubling evidence that Oklahoma City schools were resegregating under the district’s new plan, the Court sent the case back to the lower federal court for assessment under a less stringent standard, which ultimately permitted the school board to proceed with the new plan.

Justice Thurgood Marshall—who argued and won the Brown case in 1954—wrote a dissent, joined by Justices Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens, arguing that a desegregation decree should not be lifted when doing so recreates segregated “conditions likely to inflict the stigmatic injury condemned in Brown.” Justice Marshall argued that by reaching its decision, “the majority today suggests that 13 years of desegregation was enough.”

After being overwhelmingly elected by white Alabama voters, George Wallace, the infamous segregationist and white supremacist, delivered his inaugural address as the governor of Alabama and called for “segregation now… segregation tomorrow… segregation forever!” Throughout his speech he condemned integration and criticized federal intervention in state affairs.

Running for office almost a decade after Brown v. Board of Education, Governor Wallace’s 1962 campaign used the slogan “Stand up for Alabama,” and he vowed to fight integration at the University of Alabama. Six months later, Governor Wallace launched himself into the national spotlight by physically blocking two Black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from enrolling at the University of Alabama. The dramatic “stand in the schoolhouse door” was broadcast on national television, and within a week, Wallace received over 100,000 telegrams from white people commending his actions.

The political legacy of four-time Alabama governor and four-time presidential candidate George Wallace is enduring and increasingly relevant today. Governor Wallace developed a political identity that combined racial demagoguery and fiery rhetoric to defend segregation under the veneer of “states’ rights.” By appealing to racial sentiments, Wallace gained the support of voters who felt threatened by increasing Black political power.

During the 1968 presidential election campaign, a year fraught with racial injustice after, among other things, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Governor Wallace ran as an independent candidate on the back of his racially charged message. At a campaign stop where he was asked about the year’s protests against racial injustice, Governor Wallace said: “We don’t have riots in Alabama! They start a riot down there, first one of ’em to pick up a brick gets a bullet in the brain, that’s all. And then you walk over to the next one and say, ‘All right, pick up a brick. We just want to see you pick up one of them bricks now!” Governor Wallace was overwhelmingly popular with Southern white people and became the most successful and popular independent candidate in modern presidential election history—receiving almost 10,000,000 votes during the general election and winning the electoral votes of five states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

Today, a portion of Interstate 10 in Alabama and community colleges in the cities of Dothan and Eufaula bear George Wallace’s name. He remains one of the most infamous and influential segregationist leaders of his era.

Segregationists like Governor Wallace, operating at the highest levels of government, represented and advanced the views of the majority of white citizens at the time.

A mob of white people lynched a Black man known as General Lee in Reevesville, South Carolina, for allegedly knocking on the door of a white woman’s house. The night before, a white woman reported that she had opened the door to her home after hearing a knock and saw a Black man running away from her house.

The next day, a group of white men from the town went to the local magistrate to seek a warrant for the arrest of Mr. Lee, whose foot they claimed could have made a track similar to the ones found outside the woman’s home. Authorities arrested Mr. Lee on the evening of January 13 and charged him with “criminally assaulting a white woman” for allegedly knocking on her door.

One mile outside of Reevesville, a mob of 50 white men seized Mr. Lee from police officers who were transferring him by buggy to a local jail. The police officers who abandoned Mr. Lee reported hearing gunshots as they fled the scene. Two days later, Mr. Lee was found tied to a tree and shot to death. Newspapers reported that the woman who reported the alleged “crime” knew Mr. Lee and never claimed she believed he was the man at her home that night.

No one was arrested in connection to the murder of General Lee. In a letter to the governor of South Carolina, the local sheriff in Reevesville justified the mob’s actions by suggesting that Mr. Lee was in “bad-standing” with the local community and that people were surprised Mr. Lee “had not been dealt with in like manner several years ago.”

During this era of racial terror, white allegations against Black people were rarely subject to scrutiny and often sparked violent reprisal even when, as here, there was no evidence tying the accused to any offense. Between 1877 and 1950, thousands of Black men were lynched in the U.S., and nearly 1 in 4 were targeted based on the allegation of raping a white woman. These men were subjected to mob murder without investigation or trial, at a time when the definition of Black-on-white “rape” in the South was incredibly broad and required no allegation of force because white institutions, laws, and most white people rejected the idea that a white woman could or would willingly consent to sex with a Black man. This meant that any action by a Black man that could be interpreted as seeking or desiring contact with a white woman might prove deadly. Throughout the lynching era, Black men were lynched for delivering a letter to a white woman, for entering a room where white women were sitting, or, as Mr. Lee was, for knocking on the door of a white woman’s home.

Mr. Lee was one of at least three documented Black lynching victims in Dorchester County and one of 189 in South Carolina between 1865 and 1950. Learn more about this era of racial terror and how over 6,500 Black women, men, and children were victims of racial terror lynching in the U.S. between 1865 and 1950.

A mob of 2,000 white men, women, and children seized a Black man named Raymond Gunn, placed him on the roof of the local white schoolhouse, and burned him alive in a public spectacle lynching meant to terrorize the entire Black community in Maryville, Missouri.

Days before, a white school teacher had been found murdered and suspicion fell on Mr. Gunn, who was arrested. Many Black people were lynched across the South under accusation of murder. During this era of racial terror, mere suggestions of Black-on-white violence could provoke mob violence and lynching before the judicial system could or would act. The deep racial hostility permeating Southern society often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered, whether or not there was evidence to support the suspicion, and accusations lodged against Black people were rarely subject to serious scrutiny.

Following Mr. Gunn’s arrest, police took Mr. Gunn to jail in a neighboring county due to threats of lynching. At the peak of racial terror lynchings in this country, it was not uncommon for lynch mobs to seize their victims from jails, prisons, courtrooms, or out of the hands of guards like in this case. Though they were armed and charged with protecting the men and women in their custody, police and other officials almost never used force to resist white lynch mobs intent on killing Black people. In some cases, police officials were even found to be complicit or active participants in lynchings.

On the morning of Mr. Gunn’s arraignment, a mob of 2,000 white men, women, and children gathered outside the courthouse. Despite the previous attacks and threats of violence, the local sheriff did not request assistance from the National Guard. With little resistance from local law enforcement, and 60 members of the National Guard at ease in an armory one block from the courthouse, Mr. Gunn was seized by the white mob and marched four miles down the road to the white schoolhouse. The mob chained Mr. Gunn to the rooftop of the building, doused the building in gasoline, and celebrated as it burned Mr. Gunn alive.

Southern lynching was not only intended to impose “popular justice” or retaliation for a specific crime. Rather, lynchings like that of Mr. Gunn were meant to send a broader message of domination and to instill fear within the entire Black community.

A mob of 20 white men set fire to the home of Patrick and Charlotte “Lottie” Morris in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, killing them both. Mr. Morris, a white railroad hand, and his wife, a Black woman, were targeted because of their interracial marriage, as well as their operation of a gathering place and hotel for Black people.

The white mob first attempted to burn down the Morrises’ home at 11 pm that night, but Mr. Morris discovered the fire and extinguished it. By midnight, the white mob had set a second fire that could not be controlled. When the couple attempted to escape the flames through the front door of their home, the mob attacked them with a barrage of gunfire. Mrs. Morris was shot and killed at the doorstep while Mr. Morris was maimed by a shot to his leg before being killed as well.

The Morrises’ 12-year-old son, Patrick Morris Jr., witnessed the events and escaped through the back door of the home. As the boy ran for safety, the mob shot into the darkness after him but missed. Patrick spent the night hiding underneath a nearby home in the neighborhood.

The next morning, community members found that much of the Morrises’ home had been destroyed by the fire. Mr. and Mrs. Morris’s charred remains were found inside the home, and a coroner’s examination revealed that one of the bodies had been decapitated; it was unclear whether this act was carried out before or after death. Despite eye-witness statements from their son, no one was ever held accountable for their deaths.

In the early morning hours, two carloads of armed Ku Klux Klan members drove onto the property of Vernon Dahmer and his family, 10 miles outside of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The white men set fire to the Dahmers’ grocery store and house and blasted the buildings with gunfire. Mrs. Dahmer and three of their children managed to escape, but Mr. Dahmer sustained fatal lung damage while holding off attackers as his family fled; he died later that day.

For years, Vernon Dahmer and his wife, Elli, had slept in shifts to keep watch over their home in anticipation of attacks from local white terrorists. As a successful Black businessman and NAACP leader active in the voting rights movement, Mr. Dahmer and his family were the targets of local white residents’ hostility and violent attacks.

Following Mr. Dahmer’s murder, a massive crowd of Black residents gathered at the local courthouse, and President Lyndon B. Johnson sent a wire expressing condolences. Mr. Dahmer’s funeral was well attended and local residents raised money to restore the family’s house. Four of the Dahmers’ sons, who were serving in the U.S. military at the time, obtained leave to come home for their father’s funeral and to help their mother rebuild.

Fourteen klansmen were arrested and charged with murder, arson, and conspiracy in the attack on the Dahmer home. Four of the men were convicted and a fifth pleaded guilty, but none served more than four years. In 1998, prosecutors reopened the case against Sam Bowers, the klansman who ordered the attack. Mr. Bowers, at age 74, was convicted on August 21, 1998, and sentenced to life in prison; he died in 2006.

Thousands of white people violently rioted because Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes registered at the University of Georgia, becoming the university’s first Black students. Their enrollment came days after federal judge William Bootle ordered the university to admit them, ending a two-year administrative and legal fight to integrate the school.

When Ms. Hunter and Mr. Holmes arrived to register for classes they were met by nearly 100 white students opposing their admission. The crowd grew in the coming hours and the opposition escalated into full-scale riots, involving nearly 2,000 white students, local residents, and Ku Klux Klan members. The rioters set fires outside Ms. Hunter’s dormitory, hurled rocks inside, and yelled racist epithets. At least one student in the dormitory was injured by a flying object. After several hours, campus officers, city police, and local firefighters quelled the riot.

In response to this violent white mob, composed of many white students from the university, officials forced Ms. Hunter and Mr. Holmes to withdraw from the university and Georgia state troopers escorted them home. White student leaders gloated at their victory, and one cited the University of Alabama’s violent reaction to the enrollment of Autherine Lucy in 1956 as inspiration for their own demonstration.

Days later, Judge Bootle ordered the university to readmit Ms. Hunter and Mr. Holmes. They both completed their studies in 1963, becoming the first Black undergraduate students to graduate from the University of Georgia.

Newly elected Governor Austin Crothers, a former judge, prosecutor, and state senator, declared it his administration’s “high and momentous obligation” to “eliminate the illiterate and irresponsible” Black voters from Maryland’s electorate.

Governor Crothers expressed his administration’s commitment to “secure and safeguard” the right to vote “in the hands of our white citizens, both native and naturalized.” He characterized the Fifteenth Amendment as an impediment to white supremacy and a constraint that his administration must evade in order to preserve an all-white electorate. “Let us execute unflinchingly the purpose of [our] pledge by all lawful and constitutional means to maintain the political supremacy of the white race in Maryland,” he declared.

Governor Crothers advocated for a racially targeted disenfranchisement plan. He sought to dispense with existing laws restricting the right to vote, such as literacy tests and strict rules for ballot-marking, because even though these provisions were designed to disenfranchise Black people, they unintentionally disenfranchised some white Marylanders as well. Governor Crothers explained that lawmakers enacted these provisions “to restrict the evils of a large body of unreflecting” Black voters but that, “unfortunately, [they have] entailed much inconvenience to many of our white voters.”

During his first month in office, Governor Crothers coordinated with white Maryland legislators to draft a constitutional amendment that categorically disenfranchised almost all Black people while preserving the right of all white citizens to vote. The proposed amendment imposed hereditary, property ownership, and education-based qualifications that would have disenfranchised the majority of Maryland’s Black population. The Colored Voters Suffrage League of Maryland formally opposed the legislation, asking the Governor and legislature, “if the franchise is so essential to white men, who have at hand every conceivable social and economic opportunity,” why was it less essential to Black voters who have suffered “centuries of oppression?”

While Maryland’s electorate ultimately rejected the statewide amendment, individual municipalities—including Maryland’s capital, Annapolis—adopted legislation that mirrored the Crothers plan, restricting the right to vote to individuals owning over $500 in property, naturalized citizens, and descendants of white men authorized to vote prior to 1868. This resulted in the disenfranchisement of thousands of Black citizens of Maryland.

A U.S.-registered trafficking vessel delivered 88 kidnapped and enslaved African passengers into Charleston, South Carolina. The ship, named “Fair American,” originally kidnapped 101 Africans from Iles de Los, an island chain off the coast of contemporary Conakry, Guinea, in West Africa. However, nearly 15% of these forced passengers perished on the grueling journey across the Atlantic.

The port of Charleston imported more enslaved Africans during the Transatlantic slave trade than any other city in North America—more than one-third of all Africans trafficked in the Transatlantic slave trade into the U.S. were trafficked through Charleston. From its beginnings as a British proprietary colony in 1663, South Carolina entrenched the institution of chattel slavery. South Carolina’s proprietors incentivized enslavers to immigrate, offering 10-20 acres of free land for every enslaved Black person that a white migrant forcibly brought to the colony. By 1720, South Carolina was importing an average of 1,000 enslaved Africans annually. This figure rose to 3,000 by 1770. By the middle of the 18th century, enslaved people made up more than 70% of Charleston’s population.

The kidnapping, trafficking, and sale of Africans escalated dramatically in Charleston between 1803 and 1807. Anticipating a constitutional ban on the Transatlantic trade beginning in 1808, traffickers in Charleston imported more than 40,000 kidnapped Africans during these five years alone. The 88 kidnapped Africans trafficked into Charleston on this day in 1807 would be some of the first of more than 21,000 kidnapped Africans who would be brought through Charleston in 1807, accounting for 95% of the total Africans trafficked into the U.S. in 1807.

As mortality rates on the Fair American illustrate, the Middle Passage subjected kidnapped passengers to brutal, traumatic conditions, with many perishing before reaching North American shores. At least 13% of all kidnapped Africans destined for Charleston during the Transatlantic slave trade died during the Middle Passage. Africans trafficked to Charleston faced equally brutal conditions following disembarkation. Many spent weeks quarantined on Sullivan’s Island in Charleston Harbor or detained in the city’s warehouses, where thousands died awaiting sale at downtown markets.

Africans trafficked to South Carolina faced a lifetime of involuntary servitude on labor-intensive rice plantations. Rice required 10 times the labor to produce, when compared to other colonial cash crops. Further, in South Carolina, enslavers had complete discretion over the sentencing and punishment of enslaved people accused of wrongdoing, resulting in brutal physical torture and summary executions. South Carolina’s rice plantations had alarming mortality rates among enslaved people—higher than anywhere else in the South. About one third of enslaved Africans who landed in South Carolina died within a year.

Richard and Mildred Loving were convicted of interracial marriage, given a one-year suspended sentence, and banished from the state of Virginia by court order.

After marrying in Washington, D.C., in 1958, the Lovings returned to their native Caroline County, Virginia, to build a home and start a family. Their union was a criminal act in Virginia because Richard was white, Mildred was Black, and the state’s Racial Integrity Act, passed in 1924, criminalized interracial marriage.

Caroline County police arrested the Lovings in their home in an early morning raid and took them to jail. They were charged with marrying interracially out of state and then returning to reside in Virginia. “Miscegenation,” a felony, carried a penalty of up to five years in prison.

On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty to both charges. The judge agreed to impose a suspended one-year prison sentence, so long as the couple left the state of Virginia for 25 years. Before entering judgment, Judge Leon Bazile condemned the Lovings’ marriage and declared that God’s decision to place the races on different continents demonstrated a divine intent to avoid intermarriage.

After their conviction and release, the Lovings relocated to Washington, D.C., but remained unsettled by their criminalization and exile. They later fought the law that had branded their love a crime and, on June 12, 1967, won a U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down all bans on interracial marriage throughout the country.

A mob of over 200 white men attacked the Black community in Rosewood, Florida, killing over 30 Black women, men, and children, burning the town to the ground, and forcing all survivors to permanently flee Rosewood.

On January 1, 1923, in Sumner, Florida, a young, married white woman named Fannie Taylor claimed she had been assaulted by Jesse Hunter, a Black man who had escaped a prison chain gang. Though there was no evidence against Mr. Hunter, local white men launched a manhunt in Rosewood, a nearby town of about 200 Black people. On January 2nd, a mob of white men kidnapped, tortured, and lynched Sam Carter, a Black craftsman from Rosewood, on suspicion that he had helped Jesse Hunter escape.

White men continued to terrorize Rosewood searching for Mr. Hunter, and Black residents armed themselves in defense. Late on the night of January 4th, a white posse fired into the home of Black Rosewood resident Sylvester Carrier (whom they suspected of harboring Mr. Hunter) and killed an elderly woman. A gunfight between Carrier and the mob lasted into the early morning, killing people on both sides.

Outraged that Black residents had fought back, the posse left the scene to regroup and returned with more men. On January 5, a mob of between 200 to 300 white men attacked Rosewood, killing an estimated 30 to 40 Black men, women, and children on sight and burning the town to the ground. Black residents hid in the woods and fled by train to Gainesville, Florida, never to return. Survivors later recounted that Fannie Taylor had made false accusations against Jesse Hunter to conceal her extramarital affair with a white man.

The city of Montgomery, Alabama, announced that it would remove waiting area seats, lock bathrooms, and plug water fountains at the municipal airport rather than comply with integration orders.

City Attorney Calvin Whitesell announced the plans in a televised response to orders from federal judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. that the city remove segregation signs posted throughout the airport and allow Black passengers to use all facilities. Mr. Whitesell added that the restaurant at the airport would remain open “for the time being,” but that he would order it closed if residents make a “concerted effort” to integrate it.

Opposition to civil rights and racial equality was a mass movement, and most white Americans—especially in the South—supported segregation. Even after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred racial discrimination in workplaces and public accommodations, most white Americans—including white community leaders, clergy, and educators—fought tirelessly to defend racial hierarchy and white supremacy. Southern officials continued to use their power to hamper civil rights activism and, as was the case here, violate Black Americans’ constitutional rights.

On this day in 1895, federal authorities imprisoned 19 Hopi leaders at Alcatraz Island on sedition charges for opposing the U.S. government’s forced education and assimilation of Indigenous children.

In the late 1800s, the U.S. government sought to “Americanize” Native American children by forcing them into white-run assimilationist schools, often far from their homes and families. In 1887, the government established Keams Canyon Boarding School in modern-day Arizona and pressured Native American parents from the Hopi tribe to enroll their children. Hopi families that complied with the government’s order and sent their children to school were deemed “Friendlies,” while those who refused were branded “Hostiles.” When most parents refused to part with their children voluntarily, the government resorted to force, sending soldiers to round up children and send them to Keams Canyon.

At the same time, tensions were rising regarding the limited land that the government claimed to still belong to Hopi communities. In October 1894, 50 Hopi returned to plant on land that had traditionally belonged to their tribe. The U.S. government, claiming to act in defense of the rights of Friendlies, responded by ordering troops to arrest the Hopi leaders. Justifying the order for military involvement, one government official wrote that “[t]he Friendlies must be protected in their rights and encouraged to continue in the Washington way.”

After the January 1895 arrests, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that “[n]ineteen murderous-looking Apache Indians” had been imprisoned at Alcatraz, “because they would not let their children go to school.” The paper added that they “have not hardship aside from the fact that they have been rudely snatched from the bosom of their families and are prisoners and prisoners they shall stay until they have learned to appreciate the advantage of education.” The Hopi leaders were imprisoned in the wooden cells of Alcatraz for nearly one year.

15-year-old Willie James Howard, a Black boy, was kidnapped and lynched by three white men in Suwannee County, Florida, after being accused of sending a love note to the daughter of one of the men.

During Christmas 1943, Willie Howard sent cards to all of his co-workers at the Van Priest Dime Store in Live Oak, Florida. Unlike the other cards, Willie’s card to Cynthia Goff, a white store employee, revealed a youthful crush. His greeting expressed hope that white people would someday like Black people and concluded: “I love your name. I love your voice. For a S.H. [sweetheart] you are my choice.”

After reading the card, Cynthia’s father, Phil Goff, brought two friends to the Howard home and demanded to see Willie. Despite his mother’s pleading, the men dragged Willie away and then kidnapped Willie’s father, James Howard, from work. The men drove the two Howards to the embankment of the Suwanee River, bound Willie’s hands and feet, stood him at the edge of the water, and told him to either jump or be shot. Willie jumped into the cold water below and drowned while his father was forced to watch at gunpoint. Willie’s dead body was pulled from the river the next day.

Goff and his accomplices later admitted to the local sheriff that they took Willie to the river to punish him, but claimed the teen had become hysterical and jumped into the water unprovoked at the thought of being whipped by his father. Fearful for his own life and the other members of his family, James Howard signed a statement supporting Goff’s account. He and his family fled Live Oak three days later and then shared the story of Willie’s lynching.

Slavery was not abolished by the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Issued in the midst of the Civil War, the proclamation applied only to enslaved people in states that were in rebellion in 1863, namely South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Arkansas, and North Carolina. Tennessee and portions of Virginia and Louisiana that were occupied by the Union were exempt. Slavery was left untouched in the border states of Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri.

Many Southern planters in rebelling states attempted to hide news of the proclamation from enslaved people, using threats and violence to force silence and attacking those who dared attempt to flee. Where federal troops were present, however, many enslaved people courageously fled bondage and sought protection and freedom in Union camps. For the many more enslaved people living where federal forces were absent or unreachable, Lincoln’s declaration did nothing, and the hold of enslavement lasted well beyond 1863. Up until the war’s end in 1865, local newspapers in Montgomery, Alabama, continued to advertise auction sales of enslaved people and publish ads seeking the return of “runaways.”

Exercising his powers as commander in chief, President Abraham Lincoln issued the proclamation primarily as a wartime measure. Key provisions allowing for the service of formerly enslaved Black people in the Union Army and Navy opened the door to the gradual enlistment of almost 200,000 Black men.

Slavery did not become illegal until the Thirteenth Amendment was officially ratified on December 6, 1865 (though even then, the provision allowed for legal enslavement “as punishment for crime”). Many Southern states refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment even after the Civil War ended. Delaware and Kentucky rejected ratification, and slavery persisted in those states for several more years before the practice ceased. Mississippi did not officially ratify the amendment until 1995—130 years after it was adopted.

On New Year’s Eve, in his last address as Savannah City Judge, Thomas Norwood, former U.S. senator, argued to a crowd of white Savannah residents for the execution of Black men involved in consensual interracial relationships with white women. Referring to consensual interracial relationships as the “curse of the South,” Judge Norwood alleged that Black people in interracial relationships caused other Black people to commit “deeds of violence” and “created disorder,” and that, consequently, “miscegenation must be repressed by the most vigorous laws.”

In his speech, Judge Norwood depicted Black people as dangerous and subhuman. He based his assertions on encounters with “12,000 Black people,” while admitting that he only interacted with Black citizens when they appeared before him as defendants in court. Judge Norwood described Black people as naturally violent and inherently sexually promiscuous. He advanced degrading, false narratives of Black families as prone to intimate partner violence and child abuse.

Judge Norwood relied on these myths to justify the widely held belief among white citizens that criminalizing, incarcerating, and executing Black men represented the only way to protect white people. He claimed that, “In Africa, [the Black man] knew no government but physical force.” According to Judge Norwood, Black men, who had been trafficked to North America but had now been emancipated, availed themselves of “the white man’s inventions” by securing “razors, pistols, and guns,” and “prowling through the woods to murder white men and assault white women.”

Senator Norwood viewed Black communities as undeserving of state-funded education. Adamant that Black students lacked the ability to do anything more than imitate the achievements of white people, he called for the return of chattel slavery as an alternative to investing resources in Black children. Evincing his commitment to white supremacy, he proposed execution as punishment for Black men caught in interracial relationships, while advocating life imprisonment for white women similarly charged.

Judge Norwood’s rhetoric urging a death sentence for consensual sexual relations had deadly consequences. During the era of racial terror lynching, myths about Black male sexuality fueled white violence against Black men accused of associating with white women. Between 1877 and 1950, thousands of Black men were lynched in the U.S., and nearly 1 in 4 were targeted based on the allegation of raping a white woman. These men were subjected to mob murder without investigation or trial, at a time when the definition of Black-on-white “rape” in the South was incredibly broad and required no allegation of force because white institutions, laws, and most white people rejected the idea that a white woman could or would willingly consent to sex with a Black man. This meant that any action by a Black man that could be interpreted as seeking or desiring contact with a white woman might prove deadly. Throughout the lynching era, Black men were lynched for knocking on the door of a white woman’s home, for delivering a letter to a white woman, or for entering a room where white women were sitting. A white woman’s claim of victimization at the hands of a Black man, whether true or not, could and often did lead to brutal and deadly violence.

During the same era, Black women were routinely targeted for sexual violence and assault by white men who committed rape and other criminal assaults with impunity and no expectation of accountability.

In Savannah, Georgia, slave traders aboard the Susannah removed 90 abducted people to sell them into enslavement. Subjected to horrific conditions during the Middle Passage aboard the Susannah, 20 of the 110 kidnapped Africans were killed during the long and deadly Transatlantic journey.

On September 25, 1766, the British-built trafficking vessel Susannah embarked from London. Tasked with the sole purpose of kidnapping and enslaving African men, women, and children, the ship’s captain and crew arrived in a slave-trading port in West Central Africa months later. Dozens of kidnapped Africans were forced aboard the Susannah, where they were subjected to a deadly journey averaging four to six months in duration known as the Middle Passage.

Sometime before their arrival in Savannah, the crew and captain landed in St. Helena, an island occupied by the British in the Atlantic Ocean, where they kidnapped additional enslaved people to be sold in the U.S. While 110 enslaved people in all were forced aboard the Susannah, at least 20 people died during the journey.

On December 30, the surviving 90 enslaved Africans were disembarked in Savannah, where they were bought and sold by white traders, enslavers, plantation owners, and other businessmen.

Across the eastern seaboard, cities like Savannah served as the points of entry into the U.S., where hundreds of thousands of kidnapped Africans were bought and sold into slavery. For almost two decades before the Susannah disembarked, Savannah was an active slave-trading port, and Savannah would continue to serve as a port in the Transatlantic Slave Trade and trafficking site for kidnapped Africans for three more decades. Over 23,000 Black people were trafficked into Savannah in at least 300 different voyages during this time period, making it one of the most active slave-trading ports in the U.S. In 1767, city officials in Savannah were committed enough to the lucrative practice of trafficking enslaved people to invest in and construct a nine-story quarantine facility. This site would detain enslaved women, men and children.

The African people aboard the Susannah in the summer of 1767 were among the estimated 12 million people who were transported from West Africa on ships and sold into slavery in the Americas. During the Transatlantic Slave Trade, which began in the 15th century and continued “legally” until 1808 in North America, nearly two million people died during the brutal voyage due to horrific conditions.

Hundreds of U.S. troops surrounded a Lakota camp and opened fire, killing more than 300 Lakota women, men, and children in a violent massacre.

In December 1890, Sioux Chief Sitting Bull—who led his people during years of resistance to U.S. government policies—was killed by Indian Agency Police on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation as authorities attempted to arrest him for his involvement in the Ghost Dance movement.

In the late 19th century, the U.S. Government began forcefully relocating Native Americans onto reservations, where they were dependent on the government for food and clothing. In response, some Native American people embraced a religion called Ghost Dance, which promoted the belief that Native Americans would become bulletproof and return to their freedom following a great apocalypse. The Ghost Dance performance and religion frightened the U.S. federal government, and sensationalist newspapers across the country stoked fears about an uprising by Native Americans.

Shortly after Sitting Bull’s killing, the Sioux surrendered and were marched to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. On the morning of December 29, 1890, 500 troops of the U.S. 7th Calvary Regiment surrounded a group of Lakota Sioux where they had made camp at Wounded Knee Creek. The troops entered the camp to disarm the Lakota. During a brief scuffle between a soldier and a Lakota man who refused to surrender his weapon, the rifle fired, alarming the rest of the troops. The troops began firing on the Lakota, many of whom tried to recapture weapons or flee the assault. The attack lasted for more than an hour and left more than 300 Lakota dead; over half of those killed were women, children, and elderly tribal members, and most of the dead were unarmed.

Barely one week after the Montgomery Bus Boycott had ended and the busing system in Montgomery was finally integrated, sniper gunshots struck Rosa Jordan, a 22-year-old Black woman who was eight months pregnant, as she rode an integrated bus through a Black neighborhood.

From December 1, 1955, until December 20, 1956, Black residents of Montgomery, Alabama, boycotted the city bus system to protest their poor treatment on the racially segregated buses. Participants faced threats, violence, and harassment, but were ultimately victorious in December 1956 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled bus segregation unconstitutional in Browder v. Gayle.

After the ruling and official repeal of the city’s bus segregation policies, the Black community returned to integrated buses. But Black riders now faced the threat of violence from white residents who resented the boycott and its results. In a terrifying development, snipers began to target the buses soon after integrated riding commenced.

On the evening of December 28, a sniper shot at a desegregated bus traveling through a Black neighborhood, and Ms. Jordan was shot in both legs. Ms. Jordan was transported to Oak Street General Hospital, but doctors were hesitant to remove a bullet lodged in her leg for fear that it could spark premature labor. Instead, Ms. Jordan was told she would have to remain in the hospital for the duration of her pregnancy.

After the bus driver and passengers were questioned at police headquarters, the bus resumed service. Less than an hour later, near the same neighborhood, the same bus was again targeted by snipers. This time, no one was hit.

These shootings followed two earlier sniper attacks on Montgomery buses that occurred the week before but targeted buses carrying no passengers and resulted in no injuries. On the night of Ms. Jordan’s shooting, Montgomery Police Commissioner Clyde Sellers ordered all buses to end service for the night. The following day, three city commissioners met with a bus company official and decided to suspend all night bus service after 5:00 pm until after the New Year’s holiday. The curfew policy did not end until January 22, 1957.

A 23-year-old Black veteran named Powell Green was lynched by a mob of white men near Franklinton, North Carolina.

After a “prominent” white movie theater owner was shot and killed, Powell Green was arrested for allegedly committing the crime. During the era of racial terror, white allegations against Black people were rarely subject to scrutiny and often sparked violent reprisal even when there was no evidence tying the accused to any offense. Many African Americans were lynched across the South under the accusation of murder when mere suggestions of Black-on-white violence could provoke mob violence and lynching before the judicial system could or would act. While policemen were moving Powell Green from the jail in Franklinton to the larger city of Raleigh, before he could be tried or mount a defense, a mob kidnapped and brutally killed him.

The mob tied Mr. Green to a car and dragged him for half a mile before shooting him with dozens of bullets and hanging his body. It was not uncommon for lynch mobs to seize their victims from jails, prisons, courtrooms, or out of police hands. Though they were armed and charged with protecting the men and women in their custody, police almost never used force to resist white lynch mobs intent on killing Black people. In some cases, police officials were even found to be complicit or active participants in lynchings. Newspaper sources suggest this was the case in the lynching of Powell Green; one witness reportedly testified that, though there were five officers in the police vehicle transporting Mr. Green, he was “taken from the car [by the mob] without the least trouble.”

Mr. Green’s body was found the next morning riddled with bullets and hanged from a small pine tree along a road two miles from Franklinton. According to press accounts, “souvenir hunters” cut buttons and pieces of clothing from the body and later cut down the tree to yield grotesque keepsakes.

Mr. Green was only 23 years old when lynched and had served in the army during World War I. Rather than thanked for their patriotic service, Black veterans returning from war during the era of racial terrorism were targeted for violence by white supremacists who worried military service would make these men leaders in the Black community and render them committed to fighting for racial equality at home. One news account of Mr. Green’s lynching blamed him for his own death, stating, “it seems that he was disposed to think well of himself and was self-assertive.” Powell Green’s lynching was the second in five months in Franklin County, North Carolina.

U.S. forces hanged 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota. President Abraham Lincoln ordered the executions following the Dakota War of 1862, a six-week uprising of Dakota people against white settlers after the U.S. broke its promise to deliver food and supplies to local tribes in exchange for the surrender of tribal land. Commenting on the starving Native Americans, a white trader named Andrew Myrick reportedly said, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.”

Following the uprising, 2,000 Dakota people were captured and several hundred were sentenced to death. President Lincoln pardoned all but 39 men. One of these men was later granted a reprieve, but the other 38 were left to be executed. An onlooker wrote about the mass execution in the St. Paul Pioneer:

“They still kept up a mournful wail, and occasionally there would be a piercing scream. The ropes were soon arranged around their necks, not the least resistance being offered…. Then ensued a scene that can hardly be described, and which can never be forgotten. All joined in shouting and singing, as it appeared to those who were ignorant of the language. The tones seemed somewhat discordant, and yet there was harmony in it….”

The most touching scene on the drop was their attempts to grasp each other’s hands, fettered as they were. They were very close together, as many succeeded. Three or four in a row were hand in hand, and all hands swaying up and down with the rise and fall of their voices…We were informed by those who understood the language that their singing and shouting was only to sustain each other; that there was nothing defiant in their last moments, and that no ‘death-song,’ strictly speaking, was shouted on the gallows. Each one shouted his own name, and called on the name of his friend, saying, in substance, ‘I’m here! I’m here!’”

Ku Klux Klan members in Alabama bombed the home of civil rights activist Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. Rev. Shuttlesworth was home at the time of the bombing with his family and two members of Bethel Baptist Church, where he served as pastor. The 16-stick dynamite blast destroyed the home and caused damage to Rev. Shuttlesworth’s church next door, but no one inside the home suffered serious injury. White supremacists would attempt to murder Rev. Shuttlesworth four more times in the next seven years. In an attack in 1957, a white mob brutally beat Rev. Shuttlesworth with chains and bats and stabbed his wife after the couple attempted to enroll their daughters in an all-white high school.

Rev. Shuttlesworth became a popular target of white supremacists in the early 1950s after assuming leadership of the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama. As founder and president of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, Rev. Shuttlesworth organized and participated in numerous protests and boycotts challenging Jim Crow customs and policies in Birmingham and across the South. The day before the Christmas bombing, Rev. Shuttlesworth had called upon local African Americans to desegregate the city buses starting on December 26. Undeterred by the Klan’s assassination attempt, Rev. Shuttlesworth proceeded as planned with the December 26 protest rides.

Rev. Shuttlesworth was involved in nearly every pivotal civil rights event of the 1960s, including the 1961 Freedom Rides and the Birmingham Children’s Crusade in May 1963. His tireless activism in the face of violent opposition led Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to describe him as “the most courageous civil rights fighter in the South.”

A group of former Confederate soldiers established what would become the first chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, or KKK, in Pulaski, Tennessee. Named for the Greek word “kyklos,” which means circle, the KKK was devoted to white supremacy and to ending Reconstruction in the South. The Klan’s first leader, called a Grand Wizard, was former Confederate Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest.

During Reconstruction, the KKK’s political activity was closely tied to the goals of Southern politicians still loyal to the cause of white supremacy. To support this agenda, the Klan engaged in a campaign of terror, violence, and murder, targeting African Americans as well as white voters who supported racial equality and civil rights. Writing in 1935, scholar W.E.B. DuBois described Klan attacks as “armed guerilla warfare” and estimated that, between 1866 and mid-1867, the KKK was responsible for 197 murders and 548 aggravated assaults in North and South Carolina alone. Reconstruction-era KKK terror went largely unopposed by local authorities, spurring federal intervention. In 1871, the U.S. Congress passed the Force Bill, which allowed for prosecution of Klan members in federal court and dramatically slowed Klan activity; by the early 1870s, the Klan had all but disappeared.

The KKK underwent a massive resurgence in the first few decades of the 20th century, due in large part to the film Birth of a Nation, which glorified the group’s 19th-century activities. In the first half of the 20th century, Klan membership became a core qualification for public office in Southern states. Many influential national figures were Klansmen at some point in their lives, including Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) and former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. The Klan persists today but is estimated to have only about 3,000 active members, down from a high of more than 2,000,000 members in the 1920s.

The all-white University of Tennessee basketball team chose to forfeit its game against Duquesne University rather than play on the court with Duquesne’s one Black player.

The University of Tennessee arrived in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, on December 23 to play Duquesne University in a Monday night basketball game. When the all-white team from Tennessee arrived to find that their opponents planned to play their Black center and star player, freshman Chuck Cooper, Coach John Mauer from Tennessee called a meeting. The Tennessee coach announced that both he and his players refused to play the scheduled game if Duquesne allowed their Black player to compete.

The two coaches argued for two hours, until the Duquesne coach finally agreed that he would not play Mr. Cooper “unless he had to, in a close game.” So committed to segregation, the University of Tennessee men’s basketball team walked off the court and forfeited the game entirely, rather than risk having to play even for a short time against a Black player. More than 2,600 fans who had already congregated in the gym were sent home after Tennessee forfeited. Chuck Cooper would later become the first Black player drafted by an NBA team.

During this era, across the country, college teams repeatedly refused to permit white and Black players to play together on the court or field, resulting in dozens of cancelled or forfeited games. That same fall in 1946, the all-white Miami University and Mississippi State basketball teams also refused to play against racially integrated opponents.

It would be nearly two decades before a Black player would be permitted to play on the University of Tennessee basketball courts in Knoxville.

The Macon Republican newspaper in Tuskegee, Alabama, published a notice from Sheriff G.W. Nuckolls advertising the planned sale of a 23-year-old enslaved Black man named Bob. According to the ad, the Macon County Circuit Court had ordered the sale as part of a ruling settling a debt dispute against a white man named Joseph B. Wynn—Bob’s enslaver.

The bodies of Black men, women, and children enslaved in the U.S. were assigned monetary values throughout their lives. An enslaved person’s purchase price was a painful reminder of the way his or her life was commodified. Banks and creditors accepted enslaved human “property” as collateral when underwriting loans, and they were authorized to “repossess” enslaved people if a debtor failed to repay the loan. Enslaved people were also appraised as human “assets” to allow enslavers to report on their “property” holdings for the purposes of insurance, wills, and taxes. Values for enslaved people could reach more than $5,000—equal to more than $150,000 today.

Through the Domestic Slave Trade, which facilitated the sale of enslaved people from the Upper South to the Lower South in the first half of the 19th century, newly settled Southern territories like Alabama and Mississippi became home to sprawling, profitable cotton plantations worked by enslaved Black labor. It is estimated that more than half of all enslaved people were separated from a parent or child through sale. Meanwhile, between 1819 and 1860, the enslaved population of Alabama grew from 40,000 to 435,000, amassing wealth and economic power for the state, fueling the growth of Northern industry, and inflicting horrific inhumanity upon the Black people held in bondage.

Slavery is a prominent though largely ignored foundation of this nation’s wealth and prosperity. The sale and labor of countless enslaved people—including a man named Bob who was advertised for auction on this day in 1853—laid the path for the Industrial Revolution, helped to build Wall Street, and funded many of the U.S.’s most prestigious schools.

Following an anti-slavery speech by Vermont representative William Slade, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly renewed and expanded a rule that prohibited any future discussion about the abolition of slavery in the House. The so-called “Gag Rule”—initially passed in 1836—remained in effect until 1844, preventing the topic of abolition from even being discussed for almost a decade.

The debate over slavery had divided the House, but the Constitutional provision that counted enslaved people as “three-fifths” of a person for the purposes of determining Congressional representation gave Southern representatives the majority they needed to completely shut down any debate on the subject. In December of 1835, South Carolina representative James Hammond proposed the initial Gag Rule that required, under the pretext of maintaining order in the House, that petitions or discussions about slavery should be immediately tabled without consideration or discussion.

The rule, which effectively silenced any representatives who opposed slavery, was instituted in May of the following year under James K. Polk, who was speaker of the House at the time and would later become U.S. President.

This laid the foundation for Virginia representative John Mercer Patton, who responded to William Slade’s anti-slavery speech in 1837 by renewing the Gag Rule. His resolution declared that “all petitions, memorials, and papers, touching the abolition of slavery, or the buying, selling, or transferring of slaves, in any State, District, or Territory, of the United States, be laid on the table, without being debated, printed, read, or referred, and that no further action whatever shall be had thereon.”

The 1837 Gag Rule was a more extreme version of the 1836 version, applying not just to current U.S. states but also to U.S. territories, which were administered by the federal government. It allowed the House to ignore without discussion the tens of thousands of petitions sent by citizens calling on the chamber to forbid the expansion of slavery into these territories.

The extraordinary act of barring all discussion of a central moral and political issue that was shaping the nation created untold challenges and is part of a legacy of avoidance and silence about racial injustice in America.

23-year-old Michael Griffith and his friends Cedric Sandiford and Timothy Grimes were traveling from Brooklyn to Queens in New York. When their car broke down in Howard Beach, a predominantly white, middle-class Queens neighborhood, the three young Black men walked to a local restaurant and asked to use the phone. When they were refused, the young men sat down at a table where they were soon confronted by a group of white teenagers. After a brief verbal altercation, the white teens left to attend a party, where one announced: “There’s some niggers in the pizza parlor—let’s go kill them.”

When Mr. Griffith, Mr. Sandiford, and Mr. Grimes exited the restaurant soon after, the white teens had returned with baseball bats and tree limbs. Mr. Grimes ran fast enough to escape the attack, but Mr. Griffith and Mr. Sandiford were brutally beaten. Fleeing the blows, Mr. Griffith ran into traffic on the busy Belt Parkway and was struck and killed by a car. The attack against Mr. Sandiford continued even as Mr. Griffith lay dying.

News of the attack spread quickly, sparking outrage and protests from the Black community and inspiring an anti-racism march through Howard Beach that crowds of white residents gathered to harass. In the press, many reports of the attack used dehumanizing language to describe Michael Griffith only by his race, while in some cases describing the young men accused of killing him as “teenagers” and “baby-faced.”

When Queens District Attorney John Santucci charged Scott Kern, Jason Ladone, and Jon Lester with reckless endangerment for their suspected roles in Mr. Griffith’s death, Santucci was accused of being inappropriately lenient and removed from the case, replaced by special prosecutor Charles Hynes. After the three defendants were prosecuted and convicted for Michael Griffith’s murder, Judge Thomas Demakos sentenced Scott Kern to 6-18 years imprisonment; Jason Ladone to 5-15 years; and Jon Lester, the accused instigator, to 10-30 years. While passing down his rulings, Judge Demakos asked, “What kind of individual do I have before me who, after witnessing a young Black man get crushed by a car, continues his reckless conduct by savagely beating another Black male with a bat?”

South Carolina passed a law that forced recently emancipated Black citizens into subservient social relationships with white landowners, stating that “all persons of color who make contracts for service or labor, shall be known as servants, and those with whom they contract, shall be known as masters.”

Following the Civil War and emancipation, many freed Black people in the South remained subjugated by their former white enslavers. In South Carolina and other former slaveholding states, many freed people continued to reside in the same communities, sometimes on the same land, working for white people who had previously claimed they “owned” them as property. Freedmen had limited opportunities to earn money to support themselves and their families and often continued to work as manual laborers in slavery-like conditions. Black Codes enacted following emancipation sought to maintain white control over freedmen and perpetuated the exploitation Black people had experienced during slavery.

South Carolina’s Black Codes, like others, contained many laws that applied only to Black people. The new law passed on this day required Black “servants” to work from dawn to dusk and to maintain a “polite” demeanor. South Carolina reached even further into Black laborers’ personal lives, prohibiting apprentices to marry without their masters’ permission, forbidding farmers living on their masters’ land to have visitors, and imposing a curfew. Another Black Code sought to restrict the upward mobility of the Black community by forbidding freedmen in South Carolina from pursuing any occupation other than laborer unless able to pay a $100 fee.

Anticipating that the U.S. Supreme Court would soon strike down racial segregation in public schools, Georgia Governor and ardent segregationist Herman Talmadge announced he would end public education in the state rather than integrate. “There is only one solution in the event segregation is banned by the Supreme Court,” Talmadge declared at a press conference, “And that is abolition of the public school system.”

Governor Talmadge was stringently opposed to the possibility of racially-integrated schools. Instead, he proposed amending the state’s constitution to create a state-subsidized, racially-segregated private school system. The public/private distinction was critical, since even as a Court decision striking down public school segregation seemed imminent, private facilities including schools were still seen as legally-immune to integration litigation (though that too would soon change). Governor Talmadge’s plan involved leasing existing public schools for $1 to a “suitable man or woman” tasked with setting up and operating a private school system and using that system to maintain segregation. White students enrolled in these schools would receive a $200 annual tuition subsidy from the State. The plan to restructure the state’s education system had no other objective than to enforce racial segregation, leaving in place State infrastructure, schools, teachers, and administrators, with the change being in name only to permit segregation to continue.

Though Governor Talmadge’s plan did not specify what would happen with Black students, a similar plan was implemented in Virginia in the following years. The Virginia plan, which mirrored Governor Talmadge’s idea, resulted in zero funding for Black students, and in most Black students going without school for five years, before the plan was eventually struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Governor Talmadge successfully campaigned on a promise to white constituents that white students and Black students “will not attend the same schools as long as I am Governor of Georgia,” and his December 18 announcement represented just one of many State attempts to preserve white supremacy and racial segregation during his tenure. During the 1952 legislative session, for example, the Georgia General Assembly passed an appropriations bill, signed by Governor Talmadge, denying State funding to any school that enrolled both Black and white students.

Following the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, Governor Talmadge warned that “blood will run in the streets of Atlanta” and reaffirmed that “we intend to maintain separate schools in Georgia one way or another, come what may.” The same year, Georgia voters approved an amendment to the Georgia constitution allowing for the abolition of public schools, and two years later, the state legislature gave the then-sitting governor the authority to abolish public schools if integration was forced on them by federal courts. However, the threat of abolishing public education in the state was never realized in the immediate aftermath of Brown because Georgia and other Southern states were permitted to resist integration through delay well into the 1960s. In the five Deep South states, every single one of 1.4 million Black school children attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960. Consequently, Georgia was not required to integrate their schools until Governor Talmadge was out of office.

Governor Talmadge’s commitment to segregation made him highly popular among white voters in Georgia, who voted for him repeatedly. While Talmadge was barred by the state constitution from seeking another term as governor after 1954, he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1956 and served as a staunch opponent to civil rights for 24 years until a financial scandal sunk his bid for a fifth term in 1980.

Segregationists like Governor Talmadge, operating at the highest levels of government, represented and advanced the views of the majority of white citizens at the time.

Union General Ulysses S. Grant issued Order No.11, expelling all Jewish people from the Tennessee District, which encompassed portions of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi. In the midst of the Civil War between Union forces and Confederate forces attempting to secede from the U.S., the Tennessee District consisted of areas within these Southern states held under Union control.

General Grant, who would later be elected president, issued his order based on anti-Semitic stereotypes and rumors. General Grant was in charge of black market cotton trading and blamed the Jewish community for corruption and speculation. These views were heavily influenced by the pervasive prejudice that Jewish people engaged in war profiteering. Under Order No. 11, Jewish residents of the Tennessee District were prohibited from obtaining trade licenses and risked imprisonment if they did not leave the district boundaries within one day. “The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders,” the order read, “are hereby expelled from the department twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.” As a result, Jewish families were forced to move with only the belongings they could carry.

At the end of the 19th century, the targeting of groups by race and religion continued to be a feature of government policy, and the legacy of group-based bias can still be seen today, especially with immigration policies that target people who are Muslim and from particular countries. When President Abraham Lincoln learned of the order in January 1863, he quickly expressed his disapproval and Grant rescinded the order soon after.

On December 16, 1945, the Fontana, California, home of the Short family erupted in flames, killing Helen Short and her two children, Barry, 9, and Carol Ann, 7. Husband and father O’Day H. Short survived the explosion but stayed in critical condition at a nearby hospital for several weeks until he also succumbed to his injuries. Until their deaths, the Shorts were the first and only Black family living in their neighborhood.

Initially organized as a collection of chicken farms and citrus groves in the early 20th century, by the early 1940s, the small San Bernardino County town of Fontana had been transformed by the opening of a wartime steel mill into an industrial center. As the community grew and became more diverse, strict segregation lines emerged: Black families moving out of the overcrowded Los Angeles area were relegated to living in the rocky plains of “North Fontana” and working in the dirtiest departments of the mill. Ku Klux Klan activity also surged throughout Southern California during this time period, with white supremacists poised to terrorize Black and Chicano veterans of WWII returning with ideas of racial equality.

This was the reality in the fall of 1945, when O’day H. Short—a Mississippi native and Los Angeles civil rights activist—purchased a tract of Fontana land in the white section of town and made arrangements to move there with his family. As the Shorts built their modest home and prepared to live in it full time, local forces of all kinds tried to stop them. In early December 1945, “vigilantes” visited Mr. Short and ordered him to move or risk harm to his family; he refused and reported the threats to the FBI and local sheriff. Sheriff’s deputies did not offer protection and instead reiterated the warning that Short should leave before his family was harmed. Soon after, members of the Fontana Chamber of Commerce visited the home, encouraging Mr. Short to move to the North Fontana area and offering to buy his home. He refused.

Just days later, an explosion “of unusual intensity” destroyed the home, killing Mr. Short’s wife and children. He survived for two weeks, shielded from the knowledge of the other deaths, but died in January 1946 after the local D.A. bluntly informed him of his family’s fate during an investigative interview.

Local officials initially concluded that the fire was an accident, caused by Mr. Short’s own lighting of an outdoor lamp. After surviving family members, the Black press, and the Los Angeles NAACP protested, a formal inquest was held, at which an independent arson investigator obtained by the NAACP testified that the fire had clearly been intentionally set. Despite this testimony and evidence of the harassment the Short family had endured in the weeks leading up to the fire, local officials again concluded the explosion was an accident and closed the case. No criminal investigation was ever opened, no arrests or prosecutions were made, and residential segregation persisted in Fontana for over 25 more years.

A white mob of 400 men lynched an African American man named Tom Waller in Lawrence County, Mississippi. Mr. Waller was accused of helping to murder a white family, despite a lack of evidence against him and his strenuous claims of innocence. Without a legal trial or investigation, an angry white mob hanged him from a tree the same night he was arrested.

A week earlier, after a white family was found murdered, a surviving 5-year-old child claimed a Black man did it. Officials brought several Black male “suspects” before her and she identified one—a man named Charles Lewis—as the perpetrator. A mob of hundreds immediately formed and lynched Mr. Lewis on December 10. During this era, the deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society burdened Black people with a presumption of guilt that often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered, whether evidence supported that suspicion or not.

Although early accounts alleged only one perpetrator, the white community was unsatisfied to lynch only one man, and continued to “investigate” the white family’s murders. Several days later, a group of 30 white men approached a group of Black men, including an acquaintance of Mr. Lewis, and coerced him into saying that a man named Tom Waller had also been involved in the crime. Though another man in the group insisted this was not true, the unsubstantiated allegation was enough to seal Mr. Waller’s fate.

During this era of racial terror, mobs often used violence to force confessions or false identifications from African Americans fearful of the mob. News reports reported these facts later as justifications for the lynching of Mr. Waller but without a fair investigation or trial, the accusation against Mr. Waller was more reliable evidence of the acquaintance’s fear than of Mr. Waller’s guilt. Though he professed his innocence and there was no actual evidence against him, Mr. Waller was arrested on December 15—and was dead before dawn the next day.

Soon after he was taken into custody, a growing mob of 400 people seized Mr. Waller from law enforcement and conducted a “sham trial”; newspapers reported that several men “held court under a tree,” where Mr. Waller was interrogated as a rope was placed around his neck. Some men reportedly suggested that the “trial” be delayed a week because the “evidence” was so scant, but the rest of the mob rejected that idea and instead insisted that Mr. Waller be lynched that night. Newspapers later explained that the mob preferred to lynch Mr. Waller immediately because waiting “meant standing guard all night in the cold, and most of those present did not relish this at all.” To the mob, the low temperature and their own discomfort mattered more than the guilt or innocence of the Black man they planned to kill.

As the hundreds of white men in the mob grew “hungry,” press accounts described, “a wagon load of provisions” including fish and lobster was brought forward and everyone “indulged in a hearty supper” before continuing their deadly plan. Racial terror lynchings were often conducted as public spectacles; large white crowds came to cheer on the violence and participate in the brutal acts in a carnival-like atmosphere with food and souvenirs.

The mob ultimately hanged Tom Waller on the night of December 15, on the same hill where Mr. Lewis had been lynched five days earlier, and left his body hanging until 10am the next morning. Mr. Waller is one of the more than 4,400 documented African American victims of racial terror lynching killed in the U.S. between 1877 and 1950, and there is no indication anyone was ever punished for his death.

Local police found two 12-year-old white girls alone in the area of University Park, Maryland. The girls told police officers that they had been “attacked” by a Black man “with a big knife” who had tried to tear their clothes off. This barebones accusation sent 60 Maryland state and D.C. police to the University Park area, where officers wrongly arrested and detained 17 Black men for questioning.

Hours later, the girls confessed that they fabricated the entire story. After getting lost on the way to view holiday decorations in downtown Washington, D.C., the girls admitted to police, they tore their own clothes and acted “hysterical” in the hopes of “getting a ride.” Rather than investigate the girls’ story from the start, which could have quickly exposed inconsistencies and established it as a lie, police had instead launched an immediate, massive manhunt, rounding up Black men for arrest on sight and subjecting them to interrogation to prove their innocence.

For decades, Black Americans have been subjected to repeated harassment, mistreatment, and police attacks, along with widespread racial discrimination. Black people are burdened with a presumption of guilt and dangerousness that is deeply rooted in our history of racial injustice and fueled by the myth of racial difference. Young Black men in particular are seen as threatening figures who should be feared, monitored, and even hunted.

This ongoing presumption of guilt and dangerousness is inextricably tied to a history of racial terror lynching. Between 1877 and 1950, thousands of Black men were lynched in the U.S., and nearly one in four were targeted based on the allegation of raping a white woman. These men were subjected to mob murder without investigation or trial, at a time when the definition of Black-on-white “rape” in the South was incredibly broad and required no allegation of force because white institutions, laws, and most white people rejected the idea that a white woman could or would willingly consent to sex with a Black man. This meant that any action by a Black man that could be interpreted as seeking or desiring contact with a white woman might prove deadly. Throughout the lynching era, Black men were lynched for knocking on the door of a white woman’s home, for delivering a letter to a white woman, or for entering a room where white women were sitting. A white woman’s claim of victimization at the hands of a Black man, whether true or not, could and often did lead to brutal and deadly violence.

Soon after the hoax was revealed, police announced that no charges would be filed against the two white girls, despite their serious false report resulting in the wrongful arrest of 17 innocent Black men—and creating the potential for much worse. The police also issued no apology for the way their overreach and unlawful detainment had targeted these Black men without any evidence.

Judge Householder of Knoxville, Tennessee, sent an entire family to jail on felony miscegenation charges. Setting bond at $500, he jailed a Black man named Jim McFarland, and his mother, Ms. McFarland, a Black woman, Henry Whitehead, a Black man, Harriet Smith, who newspapers and local authorities reported was a white woman, and her children from prior relationships with white men, Lydia Smith and John Smith. At the time of arrest, the multigenerational family lived in the same household. The court’s order left a young child at home without a caregiver. The family spent over a month in jail before facing trial in January.

Newspapers at the time noted that Ms. Smith had reported to them “with shameless candor,” that she was actually a Black woman—while her mother was white, her father was a light-skinned Black man—and that she had never pretended to be white. Local news speculated further that since Ms. Smith’s children had white fathers, those children living with Black men and women might violate the miscegenation codes as written “even should the taint of negro blood be traced to the remote degree claimed.”

Local media praised Squire Householder’s actions, reporting that he “came to the rescue of the community” by “starting a war on the crime of miscegenation.” The white community in Knoxville universally commended the judge’s decision to incarcerate the family. White citizens viewed the case as an opportunity to expand the reach of a state law criminalizing relationships between Black and white people. While Tennessee law classified interracial marriage as a felony, at the time of the family’s arrest, no state supreme court decision addressed whether interracial cohabitation was a felony or a misdemeanor. The press and the courts hoped to eliminate interracial relationships entirely by terrorizing interracial couples with the threat of extreme punishment. As the Knoxville Sentinel wrote:

“There is no crime so common in Knoxville as white people living together with [Black people], and to make the matter more revolting, it generally happens that it is a white woman living with a [Black man]…. These [Black men] and their white mistresses will soon abandon their loathsome relations when they find that they must go to the penitentiary if they continue to live together.”

Ultimately, a month after her arrest, Ms. Smith was tried before a jury that determined she was “of colored stock,” and acquitted her and Henry Whitehead of miscegenation. However, the jury still convicted them both of lewdness for living together, and they were each sentenced to 11 months in the workhouse. The cases against her children were dropped by the prosecutor after this verdict.

In December 1922, a mob of more than 1,000 white people lynched two Black men in Taylor County, Florida.

On December 2, 1922, a white schoolteacher was found killed in Perry, Florida. Though items found near the woman’s body belonged to a local white man, police insisted the perpetrator had to be a Black man and quickly focused on a Black man named Charles Wright as a suspect. The deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society during this time period often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered, whether evidence supported that suspicion or not. This was especially true in cases of violent crime against white victims.

After several days of violent manhunts that terrorized the Black community and left at least one Black man dead, police arrested Charles Wright with a friend named Arthur Young. Before the men could be investigated or tried, a white mob seized Mr. Wright as they were being transported to jail and burned him alive.

Four days later, on December 12, the lynch mob attacked again. As officers were moving Arthur Young to another jail, the white mob seized him, riddled his body with bullets, and left his body hanging from a tree on the side of a highway in Perry, Florida.

The public lynching of Arthur Young, like that of Charles Wright, was not only intended to inflict harm on these individual men; it was also meant to terrorize the entire Black community. Following these murders, members of the mob turned on the Black community of Perry, burning several Black-owned homes, a church, the Masonic hall, and a school. Dozens of Black families fled the area, moving to the North as refugees from racial violence. No one was ever held accountable for the lynchings of Arthur Young and Charles Wright. They are among 15 documented African American victims of racial terror lynching killed in Taylor County, Florida, between 1877 and 1950.

The U.S. Army executed 13 Black soldiers who had been previously court-martialed and denied any right to appeal. In July 1917, the all-Black 3rd Battalion of the 24th United States Infantry Regiment was stationed at Camp Logan, near Houston, Texas, to guard white soldiers preparing for deployment to Europe. From the beginning of their assignment at Camp Logan, the Black soldiers were harassed and abused by the Houston police force.

Early on August 23, 1917, several soldiers, including a well-respected corporal, were brutally beaten and jailed by police. Police officers regularly beat African American troops and arrested them on baseless charges; the August 23 assault was the latest in a string of police abuses that had pushed the Black soldiers to their breaking point.

Seemingly under attack by local white authorities, over 150 Black soldiers armed themselves and left for Houston to confront the police about the persistent violence. They planned to stage a peaceful march to the police station as a demonstration against their mistreatment by police. However, just outside the city, the soldiers encountered a mob of armed white men. In the ensuing violence, four soldiers, four policemen, and 12 civilians were killed.

In the aftermath, the military investigated and court-martialed 157 Black soldiers, trying them in three separate proceedings. In the first military trial, held in November 1917, 63 soldiers were tried and 54 were convicted on all charges. At sentencing, 13 were sentenced to death and 43 received life imprisonment. The 13 condemned soldiers were denied any right to appeal and were hanged on December 11, 1917.

The second and third trials resulted in death sentences for an additional 16 soldiers; however, those men were given the opportunity to appeal, largely due to negative public reactions to the first 13 unlawful executions. President Woodrow Wilson ultimately commuted the death sentences for 10 of the remaining soldiers facing death, but the remaining six were hanged. In total, the Houston unrest resulted in the executions of 19 Black soldiers. NAACP advocacy and legal assistance later helped secure the early release of most of the 50 soldiers serving life sentences. No white civilians were ever brought to trial for involvement in the violence.

Black college football players from California’s Humboldt State College were banned from “mixing” with white people during their stay in Florida for the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) National Championship Football Game. After an undefeated season, the racially integrated team earned the right to compete in the Holiday Bowl on December 10 in St. Petersburg, Florida, for the national title. However, segregated facilities forbade Humboldt State’s Black players from sleeping under the same roof as their white teammates.

The 1960 Holiday Bowl in St. Petersburg brought together the Humboldt State Lumberjacks team and the all-white Lenoir-Rhyne University Bears from North Carolina. The five Black players who traveled to Florida as part of the Lumberjacks team—fullbacks Dave Littleton, Earl Love, and Ed White; tackle Vester Flanagan; and guard Walt Mosely—were denied entrance to the hotel where their white teammates were permitted to stay.

As in most cities across the South, St. Petersburg’s Jim Crow laws stringently defined and dominated all aspects of life from the major to the mundane. Segregation laws barred any “race mixing” in public hospitals, schools, transportation, and other public accommodations. Due to these policies, Black men, women and children experienced the daily humiliation of a system designed to maintain racial hierarchy and uphold white supremacy.

Even in 1960, college football remained segregated throughout the South, largely because colleges and universities in the region remained segregated. Though the U.S. Supreme Court struck down school segregation in its 1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education, Southern lawmakers’ defiant resistance to that decision greatly delayed implementation; by 1960, flagship state schools in Alabama and Mississippi had not yet allowed a Black student to enroll, and Southern white schools achieved all-white athletic competition by segregating themselves into all-white athletic conferences. This meant that Black athletes living in the South were restricted to attending and playing for Historically Black Colleges and Universities in segregated conferences within the region, or relocating to play at integrated schools in the North and West.

Integrated and segregated schools still met in competition when paired in bowl and national title games; and when they did, racial prejudice was pervasive. The all-white University of Alabama football team refused to play any integrated teams for years, until it accepted a bid in the 1959 Liberty Bowl against Penn State and lineman Charley Janerette became the first Black player to face the Crimson Tide (Penn State won, 7-0). Just one year later, the NAIA arranged a national title game to take place in Florida, and Humboldt State’s Black players received virtually no support from the athletic conference or their school administrators.

Despite calls from some students and organizers that humiliating Black players to submit to racist segregation requirements was unacceptable, players were nonetheless compelled to play. Humboldt State’s head coach, Phil Sarboe, praised the treatment the team had received in St. Petersburg, denied that players were unhappy about the segregated facilities, and expressed that Humboldt State would “like to come back next year.”

The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a report revealing the CIA’s use of torture against Muslim detainees during the “War on Terror.” The report detailed dozens of horrific accounts of Muslim people being dehumanized to such an extent that they were likened to “dogs who had been kenneled.”

The story of Gul Rahman is illustrative of what the Senate Select Committee uncovered about the CIA’s practices between 2001 and 2006. In November 2002, Mr. Rahman was subjected to “48 hours of sleep deprivation, auditory overload, total darkness, isolation, a cold shower, and rough treatment.” Immediately following this experience, he was labeled as “uncooperative,” stripped of his clothing, shackled to the wall of his cell, and “forced to sit on the bare concrete floor without pants.” His autopsy revealed that he most likely died from hypothermia. Three months after Mr. Rahman froze to death, the CIA approved a plan to strip detainees nude in rooms set to near freezing temperatures. No officials were charged for Mr. Rahman’s death, and one of his interrogators was recommended to receive a $2,500 bonus for his “consistently superior work.”

In addition to exposing stories similar to Mr. Rahman’s (including accounts of people being subjected to force-feeding, mock executions, and sexual violence), the report concluded that the CIA had misled Congress about its practices, under-reported the number of people it had detained and tortured, and falsely incarcerated more than 20% of its detainees. One of the people unlawfully detained was a man with an intellectual disability who was used as “leverage” to obtain information from a family member. Despite these troubling findings, there have been few attempts to hold anyone accountable for the harm that U.S. officials perpetrated against Muslim detainees.

A white mob in New Hope near Columbus, Mississippi, raped and lynched a Black woman named Cordelia Stevenson and left her body hanging for days near a railroad track to terrorize Black residents.

Several months earlier, the barn of a white man named Gabe Frank burned down, and the town quickly focused suspicion on Black community members, including Mrs. Stevenson’s son. The deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society during this time period often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered or alleged, whether evidence supported that suspicion or not. Though Mrs. Stevenson insisted that her son had moved out of town months before the barn burned, and though no evidence tied him to the fire, local authorities seized Mrs. Stevenson and her husband, Arch, for questioning.

The local police ultimately concluded the Stevensons’ son had not been involved in the barn fire, and released them both. Soon after, on December 8, a white mob gathered outside the Stevenson home, forced their way into the house while the couple slept, and kidnapped Mrs. Stevenson. The mob raped and lynched her, then left Mrs. Stevenson’s naked, brutalized body hanging by the railroad track for two days, where she was visible to thousands of people traveling by train.

No one was ever held responsible for her death.

Cordelia Stevenson was one of at least 20 victims of racial terror lynching killed in Lowndes County, Mississippi, and one of at least 655 Black people lynched in Mississippi between 1877 and 1950.

White mobs attacked and killed dozens of Black citizens of Vicksburg, Mississippi, who had organized a political meeting in support of a duly elected Black sheriff, who had been improperly removed from office.

During the Reconstruction era that followed Emancipation and the Civil War, Black Mississippians made progress toward political equality. Despite the passage of Black Codes designed to oppress and disenfranchise Black people in the South, under the protection of federal troops in place to enforce the newly established civil rights of Black people, many Black men voted and served in political office on federal, state, and local levels.

In the 1870s, Peter Crosby, a formerly enslaved Black man, was elected sheriff in Vicksburg, Mississippi—but shortly after taking office, Sheriff Crosby was indicted on false criminal charges and a violent white mob removed him from his position.

On December 7, 1874, Black citizens in Vicksburg organized an effort to try to help Mr. Crosby regain his office. In response, white mobs attacked and killed dozens of Black citizens in an act of racial terrorism, which would later become known as the “Vicksburg Massacre.”

Following this brutal attack, federal troops were sent to Vicksburg and Mr. Crosby was appointed as sheriff again. However, in early 1875, a white man named J.P. Gilmer was hired to serve as Sheriff Crosby’s deputy. After Sheriff Crosby tried to have Mr. Gilmer removed from office, Mr. Gilmer shot Sheriff Crosby in the head on June 7, 1875. Mr. Gilmer was arrested for the attempted assassination but never brought to trial. Mr. Crosby survived the shooting but never made a full recovery, and had to serve the remainder of his term through a representative white citizen.

The violence and intimidation tactics utilized by white Mississippians intent on restoring white supremacy soon enabled forces antagonistic to the aims of Reconstruction and racial equality to regain power in Mississippi.

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision upholding the Expatriation Act of 1907, which stripped American women of their citizenship when they married a non-citizen. Under that act, women who lost their U.S. citizenship could apply to be naturalized if their husbands later became American citizens—but since virtually all Asian immigrants were legally barred from becoming U.S. citizens at the time, an American woman who married an Asian man would lose her citizenship permanently. Similarly, women of Asian descent who were American citizens by birth had no means of regaining their U.S. citizenship if they lost it through marriage to a foreigner—even if the foreigner was white—because Asian men and women were ineligible for naturalization in all circumstances.

Meanwhile, American men who married foreign women were permitted to keep their citizenship.

Mackenzie v. Hare was an attempt to challenge the Expatriation Act and reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court upheld the law, ruling that an involuntary revocation of citizenship would be unconstitutional, but stripping a woman of citizenship upon marriage to a foreign husband was permissible because such women voluntarily enter into such marriages, “with knowledge of the consequences.”

The Expatriation Act remained in full effect until 1922, when Congress amended the law to permit most women to retain their American citizenship after marriage to a non-U.S. citizen—but still stripped citizenship from American women married to Asian immigrants ineligible for citizenship until discriminatory immigration laws were reformed in the 1960s. In 2014, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution expressing regret for the past revocation of American women’s citizenship under this law.

Chief Justice Shepard of the District Court of Appeals in Washington D.C., ruled that Isabel Wall, an eight-year-old girl, was prohibited from attending the local white public school because she was 1/16th Black. The court held that any child with an “admixture of colored blood” would be classified as such; thus, Isabel would be made to attend a separate school for Black children.

The decision in Oyster v. Wall came just over a decade after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which held that the U.S. Constitution permitted the racial segregation of public facilities. Isabel’s parents filed a lawsuit against the D.C. School Board objecting to the law providing for segregated schooling, but also arguing that, even if segregation was appropriate, their child was not Black.

Growing up, Isabel had been “treated and recognized by her neighbors and friends” as white, according to court filings. The School Board, however, refused to admit her into Brookland White School on account of her “blood,” which they believed made her ineligible to attend school with white students.

Justice Shepard sided with the School Board and ruled that, if “the child is of negro blood of one eighth to one sixteenth; that her racial status is that of the negro.” His decision asserted that “no matter what the complexion,” any person who has “an appreciable admixture of negro blood” would be considered “colored.” Justice Shepard ruled that physical characteristics of an individual were irrelevant as “the sense of sight is but one avenue for the conveyance of information upon the subject of racial identity to the mind of the investigator.” Justice Shepard’s decision thus relied on bigoted views of racial groups, and suggested that even where Black ancestry was not easily detectable in someone’s physical appearance, Blackness manifested itself in racial “traits.”

Justice Shepard acknowledged the disparities in the quality of education and funding between schools attended by white students and schools attended by Black students, as well as the fallacy of “separate but equal.” He knew that Isabel Wall, like all other Black students, would be greatly disadvantaged in the quality of education she could receive at the underfunded segregated school. Justice Shepard even recognized that as a “cruel hardship,” but justified the decision by insisting it would be a “greater evil” to allow a child with even one Black great-great-grandparent to attend a white school.

Around 4:30 am, plainclothes officers from the Chicago Police Department armed with shotguns and machine guns kicked down the door of the Chicago apartment where several Black Panther Party members were staying and opened fire on them. Though the Party members were asleep at the time and posed no threat, the officers fired over 90 bullets into the apartment, killing Fred Hampton, 21, and Mark Clark, 22—two leaders of the Black Panther Party—and critically wounding four other Party members. Mr. Hampton had been asleep next to his fiancé, who was eight-months-pregnant when he was killed.

Following Mr. Hampton and Mr. Clark’s assassinations on December 4, seven Panthers at the apartment that night, who had allegedly wounded two officers, were charged with attempted murder. In a statement released after the shooting, Edward Hanrahan, the Cook County state’s attorney who had ordered the violent raid, said: “The immediate, violent, criminal reaction of the occupants in shooting at announced police officers emphasizes the extreme viciousness of the Black Panther Party.”

Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in Oakland, California, in 1966. Spurning civil rights tactics of marches, sit-ins, and boycotts, the Black Panther Party was inspired by the self-determination philosophy of Malcolm X and the “Black Power” speeches of Kwame Ture (born Stokely Carmichael). The Party founded youth centers and free breakfast programs, organized legally-armed patrols to guard against police brutality in Black neighborhoods, and became popular among Black urban youth as chapters spread throughout the country. In the 1968-69 school year, the Black Panther Party fed as many as 20,000 children.

Despite their goals of community empowerment and self-help, the Party was condemned by President Lyndon B. Johnson and other national leaders. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the group “the most dangerous threat to the internal security of the country” in the late 1960s. The FBI also launched an aggressive counter-intelligence program aimed at dismantling the Black Panther Party through misinformation, infiltration, and by facilitating violent attacks against the group.

Just four days after the Chicago shooting, on December 8, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) violently raided the Black Panther Party’s headquarters in Los Angeles, California. In 1968, as urban riots were spreading across the country in response to police brutality, the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party formed to help combat the growing threat. The Party established monitoring patrols in Black neighborhoods and worked to ensure police accountability.

On December 8, the LAPD set out to serve a warrant to search Party headquarters at 41st Street and Central Avenue for stolen weapons. Though the warrant was obtained using false information provided by the FBI, police used it as the basis to ambush about twelve Party members inside the building. More than 200 police officers, including the newly militarized Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team descended on the headquarters, armed with 5,000 rounds of ammunition, gas masks, a helicopter, a tank, and a military-grade grenade. During the coordinated attack, three officers and six members of the Black Panther Party were wounded.

In 1976, five years after the FBI’s counterintelligence program was shut down, a Senate committee concluded that the bureau’s tactics “were indisputably degrading to a free society” and “gave rise to the risk of death and often disregarded the personal rights and dignity of the victims.”

Cesar Chavez was jailed for his refusal to end a boycott on farmers that engaged in coercive, violent, and unjust labor practices against Latino migrant farmworkers. During the summer of 1970, farm owners in California’s Salinas Valley, with the assistance of the Teamsters Union, used coercive tactics to prevent Latino migrant farm workers from joining Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers union. In response, the United Farm Workers union organized a massive strike in the Salinas Valley.

As retaliation for participating in the strike, farm owners fired hundreds of Latino migrant farmworkers and targeted the workers with violence. Striking farmworkers and leaders of the United Farm Workers were attacked and beaten throughout the strike, and in November 1970, the offices of the United Farm Workers in the Salinas Valley were bombed.

As the strike continued, movement leader Cesar Chavez organized a boycott of lettuce produced by farms that had used coercive tactics against the United Farm Workers. The farm owners sought an anti-boycott injunction, which was granted by a Monterey County judge. When Mr. Chavez refused to end the boycott, he was charged with contempt of court for violating the injunction. On December 3, 1970, Judge Gordon Campbell sentenced Mr. Chavez to an indefinite jail term and warned him that “improper and evil methods cannot be used to achieve even noble objectives.”

Cesar Chavez spent 21 days in jail before being released on December 24, 1970. He was held in an isolation cell but received visits from Coretta Scott King, widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Ethel Kennedy, widow of Robert F. Kennedy. In early 1971, the California Supreme Court held that the injunction against the strike was unconstitutional, and Cesar Chavez’s contempt conviction was overturned.

A white police officer named Donald Foster shot and killed Bernard Whitehurst Jr., a 32-year-old Black man, after mistaking him for a crime suspect. Rather than acknowledge the mistake, Foster and other officers planted a gun near Mr. Whitehurst’s body as part of an elaborate cover-up of tragic police violence. There was no autopsy report, and Mr. Whitehurst’s family was not even notified that he had been killed; they found out about his death shortly after when one family member heard about it on the radio.

Six months after Mr. Whitehurst’s killing, an investigation urged by the Whitehurst family revealed that the gun officers claimed had been found near his body had actually been picked up during a drug raid a year earlier. Mr. Whitehurst’s body was exhumed soon after, and an autopsy confirmed that he had been shot in the back—and not in the chest as the officers who had been chasing him initially claimed.

In 1976, three police officers who had helped plant the gun near Mr. Whitehurst after he was shot were indicted on charges of perjury but only one case went to trial. It resulted in a hung jury. Soon after, the state attorney general, William Baxley, made a deal with police and government officials that if the officers involved in the alleged cover-up could all pass polygraph tests confirming their innocence, charges against them would be dropped. Rather than take the tests, the city’s mayor, the public safety director, and eight police officers resigned or were fired. Mr. Whitehurst’s mother filed a civil suit against the police department but a federal judge ruled that any conspiracy to violate Mr. Whitehurt’s civil rights had ended with his death, and the jury ultimately returned a verdict in favor of the former police chief, his top aide, and Officer Foster. To this day, no one has been held accountable for Mr. Whitehurst’s death.

Montgomery, Alabama, police arrested seamstress and activist Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated city bus. Her stand helped spark the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which remains one of the most well-known campaigns of the civil rights movement. However, Mrs. Parks’s work for racial justice long preceded this courageous act. She was very active in the local chapter of the NAACP since joining as the chapter’s only woman member in 1943, and had served as both the youth leader and secretary. Mrs. Parks frequently traveled throughout Alabama to interview Black people who had suffered racial terror, violence, or other injustices. In 1944, she investigated the Abbeville, Alabama, gang-rape of a young Black woman named Recy Taylor, and joined with other civil rights activists to organize a national campaign demanding prosecution of the white men responsible.

On the evening of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks began her bus ride home from work sitting in the “colored section.” Montgomery’s segregated bus service designated separate seating areas for Black and white passengers; during peak operating hours, if the white seating area became full, the bus driver could expand its boundaries and request that African Americans stand to relinquish their seats to white people. While Black riders were not legally obligated to comply, city bus drivers were notorious for their hostile treatment of Black riders and their requests were rarely refused.

As more white passengers boarded, the bus driver asked Mrs. Parks and three other Black passengers who were seated to give up their seats to white riders. When Mrs. Parks was the only one to refuse, the driver summoned police and she was arrested. Mrs. Parks later recalled that she had refused to stand, not because she was physically tired, but because she was tired of giving in. That same night, Jo Ann Robinson and other local activists began organizing what would become the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

A statue of Mrs. Parks was dedicated in Montgomery on December 1, 2019, near the location where she boarded the bus on the day of her arrest.

A mob of white men in Ballinger, Texas, seized Robert Murtore, a 15-year-old Black boy, from the custody of law enforcement and, in broad daylight, shot him to death.

After a 9-year-old white girl alleged that she had been assaulted by an unknown Black boy, suspicion immediately fell on Robert, who worked in the same hotel as the white girl’s mother. He was arrested and held in the Ballinger jail, but word soon spread. On the morning of November 30, a white mob formed outside of the jail in an attempt to lynch Robert. Local law enforcement removed Robert from his cell for transport away from Ballinger; it is unclear whether this was to facilitate or block the lynching.

As the sheriff and Robert drove away from town, an armed mob of white men blocked the road and demanded that the sheriff turn Robert over to them. Though he was armed and charged with protecting Robert while he was in his custody, the sheriff willingly turned the Black teenager over to the mob without a fight.

During this era of racial terror lynchings, it was not uncommon for lynch mobs to seize their victims out of police hands. In some cases, police officials were even found to be complicit or active participants in lynchings. In this case, instead of pursuing the mob to try to stop the lynching or identify the mob members, the sheriff left the mob to its murderous task and rode back to the station at Ballinger to report Robert’s fate.

Unchallenged, the lawless mob seized Robert, drove him to a nearby grove, tied him to a post, and riddled his body with 50 bullets. A Texas newspaper described the mob as “orderly,” leaving “peacefully” after violently taking the young boy’s life.

American troops murdered more than 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho people who were living peacefully along Sand Creek in eastern Colorado. Days before the massacre, white officials had assured chiefs of the village that their community would not be harmed.

At dawn on November 29, hundreds of U.S. soldiers led by Colonel John Chivington surrounded the village. Residents responded by waving white flags and pleading for mercy; one of the chiefs even raised the American flag in an attempt to demonstrate that he, too, was American. Ignoring these symbols of surrender and peace, the white troops opened fire with carbines and cannons, slaughtering more than 150 Native American people. Most of the victims of the massacre were women, children, and the elderly and infirm. After the massacre, the troops burned the village, mutilated the bodies of the deceased, and removed body parts to keep as trophies. Some scalps of the dead became props in plays that the troops later performed to celebrate, as one soldier boasted, “almost an annihilation of the entire tribe.”

Violence against Indigenous people in the U.S. had been overlooked and ignored for decades. Many white settlers in America cultivated a view that Native people were less human and worthy of dignity and respect than white people. This was evident in the horrific violence and slaughter on display at Sand Creek. Officers tried to justify the massacre by asserting a false narrative that described Indigenous people as less than human, and dangerous, and claimed that the soldiers who committed the massacre had acted in self-defense. This fabricated account was disputed by other American soldiers who witnessed the massacre and felt compelled to tell the truth. “Hundreds of women and children were coming towards us, and getting on their knees begging for mercy,” described U.S. Captain Silas Soule in an 1865 letter to Congress, “[only to be shot] and have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized.”

A mob of 7,000 white men, women, and children seized an 18-year-old Black man named Lloyd Warner from the jail in St. Joseph, Missouri, hanged him, and burned his body in a brutal public spectacle lynching.

Just hours before, news spread that a Black man had allegedly assaulted a white girl. Mr. Warner was quickly accused of being the perpetrator, arrested, and placed in jail. As was typical of the era, the mere accusation that a Black man had sexually assaulted a white girl aroused a violent white mob that gathered outside the jail armed with ice picks, firearms, and knives. Mr. Warner professed his innocence to a court-appointed lawyer who remained at the jail with him, but the threat of lynching grew.

Outside, the crowd swelled to 1,000 people, and the state governor deployed National Guardsmen, allegedly to quell the mob. For at least three hours, in a standoff with local law enforcement and national troops, mob members demanded the sheriff turn over Mr. Warner. Neither the National Guardsmen nor local law enforcement took actions to defend the jail or dispel the mob, even as mob members smashed jail windows and attempted to knock down the jail door.

Instead, around 11 pm that evening, the sheriff announced that officials would turn Mr. Warner over if the mob would cease the attack on the jail and leave other prisoners unharmed. To prevent “further property damage” to the jail, the sheriff abandoned his duty to protect Mr. Warner from lynching.

Once the mob was permitted to enter the jail, several white men descended upon Mr. Warner, beating, choking and stabbing him. One member of the mob halted the assault on Mr. Warner, stating that he wished to “make this Black boy suffer” before he died. At this request, the mob dragged Mr. Warner down the street, attracting larger crowds that included women and children.

The mob hanged Mr. Warner near the courthouse, then drenched his body with gasoline and set him on fire. Newspapers reported that three children had climbed the tree to fasten the rope that hanged Mr. Warner and, in jumping from the tree, hoisted Mr. Warner’s body in the air. Before Mr. Warner’s body was burned, members of the crowd cut pieces of his leather belt and pants as souvenirs. For two hours, the mob that had by then grown to 7,000 people watched Mr. Warner burn; some witnesses even said that he may have been alive when he was set on fire.

In the wake of Lloyd Warner’s lynching, the white girl he had allegedly attacked reportedly told several newspapers, “they might have gotten the wrong one.”

No one was ever held accountable for the lynching of Mr. Warner. He is one of over 6,500 Black women, men, and children killed in racial terror lynchings in the U.S. between 1865-1950.

The Weekly Standard published an article by Princeton University political science professor John Dilulio. Entitled “The Coming of the Super-Predators,” the article predicted the U.S. would be home to 270,000 violent youth by 2010. According to Dilulio, growing rates of “moral poverty” were causing aggressive behavior among poor and minority youth and were building toward a crisis.

Dilulio’s “super-predator” language came to be commonly used in conjunction with dire predictions that a vast increase in violent juvenile crime was looming. Theorists suggested that the nation would soon see “elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches” and who “have absolutely no respect for human life.” Much of the frightening imagery was racially coded. For example, in “My Black Crime Problem, and Ours,” Dilulio warned of “270,000 more young predators on the streets than in 1990, coming at us in waves over the next two decades … as many as half of these juvenile super-predators could be young Black males.”

Panic over the impending crime wave expected from these “radically impulsive, brutally remorseless” children led nearly every state to enact legislation mandating automatic adult prosecution for children, permitting sentences of life without parole or death for children, and/or allowing children to be housed with adult prisoners. But the predictions proved wildly inaccurate. Lower rates of juvenile crime from 1994 to 2000 despite simultaneous increases in the juvenile population led academics who had originally supported the “super-predator” theory to back away from their predictions, including Dilulio himself. In 2001, the U.S. Surgeon General labeled the “super-predator” theory a myth.

Efforts to reverse the policies that grew from the “super-predator” myth have seen some success in the Supreme Court, which in 2005 decided in Roper v. Simmons that the death penalty is unconstitutional for juveniles. In 2010, the Court in Graham v. Florida prohibited life imprisonment without parole sentences for children convicted of non-homicide crimes. And in 2012, the Court’s decision in Miller v. Alabama invalidated mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles convicted of homicide. Meaningful implementation of these decisions, as well as further reform, remains an ongoing effort and challenge. But tens of thousands of children prosecuted as adults as a result of this misguided, racially biased rhetoric still remain in American jails and prisons today.

During a special Legislative session called to pass segregation laws, the Texas legislature voted overwhelmingly (115-26) to pass a bill giving Governor Price Daniel the power to immediately close any school where federal troops might be sent to enforce integration.

The Texas legislature passed the bill just a few months after President Dwight Eisenhower deployed federal troops to Arkansas and commanded the Arkansas National Guard to escort nine Black students, known as the Little Rock Nine, to their first day of school at Central High School amid violent threats from white community members. In passing this bill, the state legislators made clear that they would rather everyone at a school be denied education than allow Black students to attend previously all-white schools.

During the same session another bill was passed that provided school districts with legal aid should integration suits be brought against them.

Bills like these, and the broader massive resistance to integration by white officials and community members, were largely successful in preventing integration of schools in the South. In the five Deep South states, every single one of 1.4 million Black school children attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960. By the start of the 1964-65 school year, less than 3% of the South’s Black children attended school with white students, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina that number remained substantially below 1%. In 1967, 13 years after Brown v. Bd. of Education, a report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights observed that white violence and intimidation against Black people “continues to be a deterrent to school desegregation.”

For decades, the University of North Carolina had an active slave leasing program, whereby the University “leased” hundreds of enslaved Black people to students for a fee. On November 25, 1829, after a Black man escaped the University grounds and sought his freedom, rewards were issued to effectuate his recapture and re-enslavement on UNC grounds.

Through this slave leasing program, UNC engaged in the active trafficking of enslaved Black people, by collecting fees from students to “lease” enslaved Black people back to them. Students paid a yearly fee in their tuition directly to the University for the labor of enslaved Black people. The University maintained contract agreements with plantations and local enslavers in Orange and Chatham County, as well as the University’s employees, trustees, and presidents, who “leased” Black people they enslaved to the University. Consequently, through this trafficking program, UNC not only increased its revenue, but also enriched local enslavers.

Until 1845, students from families who enslaved Black people were permitted to bring enslaved people with them to campus. After 1845, the University prohibited students from bringing enslaved people to campus, but still authorized students to pay the University to “lease” enslaved Black people on campus. In 1860, 464 Black people were enslaved for the benefit of students, faculty, and employees at UNC.

On November 25, 1829, as part of this trafficking scheme, a graduate of UNC issued rewards for the capture of a Black man named James who had been trafficked to work at the University for the prior four years. James had sought his freedom from enslavement and ran away from campus. The ad was placed in several local newspapers, and encouraged people with information about James’s whereabouts to direct their correspondence to UNC to effectuate his recapture.

In addition to the leasing program which trafficked enslaved Black people onto the grounds of the University, UNC participated in and profited from the sale of Black people. In its founding charter in 1789, the University was given the right to sell enslaved Black people who had been enslaved by local white people who died without heirs. Under this agreement, white enslavers’ “property,” including enslaved Black people, was escheated to the University’s Board of Trustees. In the 1840s, 10 years after the reward for James was announced, following the death of a local enslaver, the University sold the Black people that person had enslaved, earning $2,800, which amounts to approximately $83,000 dollars today.

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decided Shuttlesworth vs. Birmingham Board of Education, rejecting a challenge to Alabama’s School Placement Law. The law, designed to defy the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and maintain school segregation, allowed Alabama school boards to assign individual students to particular schools at their own discretion with little transparency or oversight.

Alabama’s School Placement Law, which claimed to allow school boards to designate placement of students based on ability, availability of transportation, and academic background, was modeled after the Pupil Placement Act in North Carolina—enacted on March 30, 1955, in response to the Brown decision. Virginia passed the second placement law on September 29, 1956. In 1957, after the North Carolina law was upheld by a higher court, legislatures in other Southern states passed similar pupil placement laws; by 1960, such laws were on the books in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and the city of Atlanta, Georgia.

After the Alabama law’s passage, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth sued on behalf of four African American students in Birmingham who had been denied admission to white schools that were closer to their homes. In its unanimous decision, the Supreme Court wrote, “The School Placement Law furnishes the legal machinery for an orderly administration of the public schools in a constitutional manner by the admission of qualified pupils upon a basis of individual merit without regard to their race or color. We must presume that it will be so administered.”

Between the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 and 1958, a total of 376,000 African American children were enrolled in integrated schools in the South. This growth slowed significantly as states passed obstructive legislation like these pupil placement laws; the figure rose by just 500 students between 1958 and 1959, and by October 1960, only 6% of African American children in the South were attending integrated schools. Crucially, in the five Deep South states, including Alabama, every single one of 1.4 million Black schoolchildren attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960.

Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black boy, died from injuries inflicted when he was shot by a white police officer the day before. Tamir was playing in a park near his Cleveland, Ohio, home when a police car approached him; within seconds, before Tamir could be questioned or warned, Officer Timothy Loehmann shot Tamir in the stomach.

The officers were responding to a 911 dispatch in which a caller had reported that someone in the park was playing with a gun. The caller also explained to the dispatcher that the person was “probably a juvenile” and the gun was “probably fake.” Tamir was, in fact, playing with a toy gun in the park—as countless children have—and was immediately shot to death by police despite posing no threat to anyone.

Immediately after the shooting, police tackled Tamir’s 14-year-old sister as she rushed to his side, handcuffed her, and held her in the back of their squad car unable to comfort her injured brother. Tamir’s mother was also prevented from going to her son and threatened with arrest if she did not “calm down.” Neither Officer Loehmann nor his partner, Frank Garmback, attempted to administer critical lifesaving procedures to Tamir as he lay bleeding immediately after the shooting.

After the December autopsy was released, Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner Thomas Gilson reaffirmed his initial ruling that the shooting was a homicide, and in June 2015, the Cleveland Municipal Court found probable cause for prosecutors to proceed with charges of murder and other offenses against Officer Loehmann. County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty instead declared that he would wait to follow a grand jury’s recommendation. A grand jury ultimately refused to indict Officer Loehmann on any charges.

The Mississippi legislature passed “An Act to regulate the relation of master and apprentice, as relates to freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes.” Under the law, sheriffs, justices of the peace, and other county civil officers were authorized and required to identify all minor Black children in their jurisdictions who were orphans or whose parents could not properly care for them. Once identified, the local probate court was required to “apprentice” Black children to white “masters or mistresses” until age 18 for girls and age 21 for boys.

After the physical and economic devastation of the Civil War, Southern states faced the daunting task of rebuilding their infrastructures and economies. At the same time, the young white male population had been drastically reduced by war-time casualties and emancipation had freed the formerly enslaved Black labor that had largely built the entire region. In response, some Southern state legislatures passed race-specific laws to establish new forms of labor relations between Black workers and white “employers” that complied with the letter of the law, but actually sought to recreate the enslaver-enslaved conditions of involuntary servitude that existed prior to emancipation.

Though the law did not require white “employers” to pay the children they “hired” a wage, the law did require them to pay the county a fee for the apprentice arrangement. The law claimed to require white “masters” to provide their apprentices with education, medical care, food, and clothing, but it also re-instituted many of the more notorious features of slavery. The children’s former enslavers were given first opportunity to hire those formerly enslaved by them, for example. In addition, the law authorized white “masters” to “re-capture” any apprentice who left their employment without consent and threatened children with criminal punishment for refusing to return to work.

In Gong Lum v. Rice, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Chinese American Lum family and upheld Mississippi’s power to force nine-year-old Martha Lum to attend a “colored school” outside the district in which she lived. Applying the “separate but equal” doctrine established in 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the Court held that the maintenance of separate schools based on race was “within the constitutional power of the state legislature to settle, without intervention of the federal courts.”

First adopted in 1890 following the end of Reconstruction, the Mississippi Constitution divided children into racial categories of Caucasian or “brown, yellow, and Black,” and mandated racially segregated public education. In 1924, the state law was applied to bar Martha Lum from attending Rosedale Consolidated High School in Bolivar County, Mississippi—a school for white students. Martha’s father, Gong Lum, sued the state in a lawsuit that did not challenge the constitutionality of segregated education but instead challenged his daughter’s classification as “colored.”

When the Mississippi Supreme Court held that Martha Lum could not insist on being educated with white students because she was of the “Mongolian or yellow race,” her father appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In its decision siding with the state of Mississippi, the Court reasoned that Mississippi’s decision to bar Martha from attending the local white high school did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment because she was entitled to attend a “colored” school. This decision extended the reach of segregation laws and policies in Mississippi and throughout the nation by classifying all non-white individuals as “colored.”

A white church board in Durant, Mississippi, voted unanimously to fire a Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Marsh Callaway, after he defended racial integration and spoke out against the White Citizens’ Council in Holmes County.

In September, a group of white people in nearby Tchula, Mississippi, demanded that Dr. David Minter and Eugene Cox, two white men who operated a cooperative farm, leave the community for supporting racial integration. Dr. Minter served as a physician and, alongside Mr. Cox, had assisted the Black community in Holmes County with medical care and aid over the prior 17 years. When news spread that the two men supported racial integration and allegedly permitted Black and white teenagers to swim in a pond together near the farm, an officer of the White Citizens’ Council called a meeting to vote to remove these two men from the community.

Like White Citizens’ Councils across the country, the White Citizens’ Council in Holmes County was committed to preserving racial segregation and white supremacy in all aspects of life. In 1955, 250 White Citizens’ Councils had formed throughout the South, composed of a total of 60,000 members, and by 1957, membership reached 250,000.

During the meeting attended by at least 400 white people from Holmes County, as individuals gathered to vote on the removal of Dr. Minter and Mr. Cox from the community, the Rev. Callaway, a minister at the Durant Presbyterian Church, stood up in opposition, calling the meeting “undemocratic and un-Christian.” He praised Mr. Cox as “a fine Christian man,” to which the crowd booed and hissed him into silence. Shortly after the meeting, the Rev. Callaway was asked by his white congregation to resign as minister because his support for integration caused “many of the church members to lose faith in the minister.”

In the week prior to the Rev. Callaway’s public condemnation of the White Citizens’ Council, Durant Presbyterian had one of the “largest crowds in several months” attend church services. The following week, church members of the Durant Presbyterian Church boycotted services because the Rev. Callaway had spoken out at the meeting. On November 20, members of the church voted unanimously for the Rev. Callaway’s immediate removal, citing “personal conflict.” He was fired after approval by the Central Mississippi Presbytery.

Dozens of Black veterans who were wrongfully discharged from the 25th Infantry Regiment, a segregated unit stationed at Fort Brown, Texas, went to San Antonio seeking work. In a coordinated effort, white employers throughout the city uniformly refused to hire these men in an attempt to drive them out of town.

Over the summer of 1906, Black soldiers of the segregated 25th Infantry Regiment were stationed by the U.S. Government in Fort Brown, Texas, even though the War Department recognized that Black soldiers would “not be welcomed” there and would be at risk for racial violence. While stationed at Fort Brown, Black soldiers were subjected to segregated facilities and barred from most establishments and parks in nearby Brownsville.

On the evening of August 13, 1906, shots were fired into civilian homes in Brownsville by an unknown group of individuals. When police arrived at the scene, an altercation ensued, leaving a white man, who was hit by stray bullets, dead and a police officer wounded. Without any evidence identifying those responsible, suspicion quickly turned to a group of Black soldiers of the 25th Regiment.

When questioned by authorities, Fort Brown’s all-white military commanders corroborated the alibis of these Black soldiers, affirming that the soldiers remained in their barracks at the time of the shooting. Despite this strong evidence of their innocence, Brownsville authorities charged 12 Black soldiers with murder. The soldiers repeatedly and consistently stated they had no knowledge of the attack or those who were involved.

Attempting to force confessions from this group of innocent Black soldiers, the federal government gave the entire regiment a deadline to come forward with information about the August 13 incident or face the consequences. When no soldiers came forward, in an action unprecedented in U.S. history, President Theodore Roosevelt issued an executive order dishonorably discharging not only the 12 accused men, but the entire unit—167 Black soldiers of the B, C, and D companies of the 25th Infantry—from the U.S. Army on November 6 for their “conspiracy of silence.” The order further barred the men from ever re-enlisting in the U.S. military or applying for a civil service position with the federal government.

In the wake of being discharged, these innocent Black veterans, who had bravely chosen to serve the U.S., were forced to navigate the presumption of guilt and dangerousness, despite never having a trial or being convicted of any crime, and were subjected to mistreatment and abuse, as exemplified by the white employers in San Antonio who colluded to deny them employment. Some of these veterans had served in the military for over 20 years, but because of this action, were denied their pensions.

In 1972, the U.S. government re-investigated the incident and exonerated all soldiers in the 25th Infantry.

A Black man named James Cody was beaten with a flashlight, subjected to electric shock on his testicles and buttocks, and threatened with castration by officers acting under Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge. Over the course of almost 30 years, Commander Burge oversaw and participated in the torture of over 100 Black men, resulting in scores of forced confessions. When Commander Burge first took command of the jurisdiction known as Area 2 as a detective in 1972, he and his men—known as the “Midnight Crew”—began forcing confessions using brutal torture practices such as beating, suffocation, electric shock, burning, Russian roulette, and mock execution.

In 1982, Cook County State’s Attorney Richard Daley was notified of Commander Burge’s tactics through a letter detailing Commander Burge’s abuse of a man named Andrew Wilson, who was beaten, shocked, suffocated, burned with a radiator, and threatened with a gun in his mouth. Mr. Wilson sued the city in one of numerous complaints and lawsuits alleging torture by Commander Burge and his men. Despite these complaints, the State’s Attorney’s office continued to use confessions obtained by Commander Burge’s team to convict and incarcerate dozens of Black men over the next 10 years.

An investigation into the torture allegations was not launched until 1991, following pressure from advocacy groups, international human rights organizations, and torture survivors. Two years later, Commander Burge was fired, and 15 years after that, he was convicted of perjury for lying under oath in one of the civil suits; he served less than four years in prison. In 2015, the city of Chicago approved a $5.5 million reparations package for survivors of the Burge-led torture campaign. The settlement included a formal apology as well as curricular reforms that would highlight the survivors’ stories in schools. Despite the review and reversal of many convictions that were obtained under Commander Burge’s command, in 2015 more than a dozen survivors remained in prison and had not yet had their cases reviewed.

Over 1,000 white students and faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill gathered to attend a speech openly advocating for white supremacy by the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Dr. Hiram Evans. The UNC Political Science Department and the Carolina Political Union hosted the event, entitled “America and the Klan.” Amidst the rise of Nazism in Europe, Dr. Evans told students, “What America needs most now to restore the good old days when nations loved each other is a universal dose of the Ku Klux Klan.”

Dr. Evans said that “the Klan will continue to insist on white supremacy, for experience has shown that nations that have mixed breeds with the Black race have found themselves headed for destruction.” Dr. Evans also urged that “America had admitted too many foreigners” who were “responsible for most of our country’s social and economic ills” and that “America must be dominated by Americans, not by Negroes or aliens.” He warned students of the rise of Black leadership in the South, urging white students and faculty to join the Klan to combat Black political power.

As Dr. Evans spewed racism and intolerance, the more than 1,000 white students and faculty showed support and enjoyment of racial insults and threats throughout the event.

Locals viewed Dr. Evans’ visit as an attempt to launch a new public KKK chapter. In covering Dr. Evans’ 1937 speech, the Daily Tar Heel, Carolina’s student newspaper, noted that since the chapter first launched privately in 1921, “The KKK has grown to the strongest secret organization in existence.”

Carolina’s ties to the Klan persisted well into the 21st century. In the 1920s, UNC named Saunders Hall, a campus building, after William Saunders, the leader of the North Carolina Ku Klux Klan.

Despite decades of student activism seeking to change this name, Saunders Hall remained the name on the building until 2015.

A 15-year-old Black teenager named Preston “John” Porter Jr. was burned alive while chained to a railroad stake in Limon, Colorado. A mob of more than 300 white people from throughout Lincoln County gathered to participate in the brutal public spectacle lynching.

Earlier in the year, Preston, his father, Preston Porter Sr., and his brother, Arthur Porter, moved to the Limon, Colorado, area from Lawrence, Kansas, to seek work on the railroad. When a white girl named Louise Frost was found dead in Limon on November 8, a search began for possible suspects. Newspapers reported that the Porter family had left Limon for Denver a few days after the girl was found dead, and white authorities focused suspicions on them. On November 12, all three were arrested and taken to the city jail in Denver.

During this era, the deep racial hostility that permeated American society burdened Black people and communities with presumptions of guilt and dangerousness when crimes were discovered. Allegations against Black people were rarely subject to serious scrutiny, and mere accusations of assault or violence by a Black person towards a white person often incited mob violence and the threat of lynching.

After the Porters had been in jail for four days, newspapers reported that Preston had confessed to the crime “in order to save his father and brother from sharing the fate that he believes awaits him.” Black suspects were often subjected to beatings, torture, and threats of lynching during police interrogations. While news reports often reported these confessions as justifications for the brutal terror lynchings that followed, the confession of a lynching victim was always more reliable evidence of fear than guilt.

Despite the Governor’s order to not transfer Preston back to Lincoln County for at least eight days following Preston’s confession, the sheriff of Lincoln County prematurely transported Preston by train from the Denver jail to return to Lincoln County. When the train stopped just outside of Limon, a mob of 300 or more people—including Louise Frost’s father—were waiting. Newspapers described the lynching as follows:

[Preston] was said to have been reading a Bible and was allowed to pray before his lynching. When the flames reached his body, reports documented his screams for help as he writhed in pain, crying, “Oh my God, let me go men!…Please let me go. Oh, my God, my God!” When the ropes binding [Preston] to the stake had burned through, such that his body had fallen partially out of the fire, members of the mob threw additional kerosene oil over him and added wood to the fire. It was reported that [Preston’s] last words were “Oh, God, have mercy on these men, on the little girl and her father!”

Despite ample press coverage identifying multiple members of the mob, no investigation into the lynching was conducted and the coroner concluded Preston died “at the hands of parties unknown.” Following the lynching, Preston’s father and brother left Colorado to return to Kansas and soon afterward the Colorado legislature voted to reinstate the state’s death penalty to avoid future “lawlessness” like the lynching in Limon.

Preston “John” Porter Jr. is one of more than 6,500 documented African American victims of racial terror lynching killed in the U.S. between 1865 and 1950, and one of five killed in Colorado.

North Carolina passed two laws designed to limit the influence of an anti-slavery pamphlet and discourage its dissemination, mandating the punishment of death for those who twice violated the law. About a year earlier, in September 1829, David Walker, a free Black abolitionist and activist living in Boston, Massachusetts, published An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. The anti-slavery pamphlet advocated for racial equality and called for free and enslaved Black people to actively challenge injustice, racial oppression, and the institution of slavery.

The Appeal was the first published document to demand the immediate and uncompensated emancipation of enslaved people in America. Mr. Walker also indirectly targeted his pamphlet to white readers, urging them to cease their inhumane treatment of enslaved people.

The pamphlet was quickly and clandestinely circulated among Black people, especially in the South, inciting anger among many white people and sometimes swift and harsh punishment. Jacob Cowan, a literate enslaved man in North Carolina, was sold “downriver” to Alabama after he was caught with 200 copies of the pamphlet for distribution to other enslaved people in the community. Copies of the pamphlet found by Southern officials were destroyed, the State of Georgia offered a bounty for Mr. Walker’s capture, and several Southern states—like North Carolina—eventually passed laws to further oppress both enslaved and free Black people.

Titled “An Act to Prevent the Circulation of Seditious Publications,” North Carolina’s first law banned bringing into the state any publication with the tendency to inspire revolution or resistance among enslaved or free Black people; a first violation of the law was punishable by whipping and one-year imprisonment, while those convicted of a second offense would “suffer death without benefit of clergy.”

The second law forbade all persons in the state from teaching the enslaved to read and write. A white person convicted of violating the law would be subject to a $100-200 fine or imprisonment; a free Black person would face a fine, imprisonment, or between 20 and 39 lashes; and an enslaved Black person convicted of teaching other enslaved people to read or write would receive 39 lashes.

Four federal marshals escorted six-year-old Ruby Bridges to her first day of first grade as the first Black student to attend previously all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana. A riotous white mob organized by the local White Citizens’ Council gathered to protest her arrival, screaming hateful slurs, threats, and insults.

In August 1955, African American parents in New Orleans, Louisiana, sued the Orleans Parish School Board for failing to desegregate local schools in compliance with the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The following February, a federal court ordered the school board to desegregate the city’s schools. For the next four years, the school board and state lawmakers defied the federal court’s order and resisted school desegregation.

On May 16, 1960, Judge J. Skelly Wright issued a federal order demanding the gradual desegregation of New Orleans public schools, beginning with the first grade—but the Orleans Parish School Board convinced Judge Wright to accept an even more limited desegregation plan, requiring African American students to apply for transfer into all-white schools. Only five of the 137 African American first graders who applied for a transfer were accepted; four agreed to attend, including six-year-old Ruby Bridges, who was the sole Black student assigned to William Frantz Elementary.

After getting past the angry white crowd to enter the school, Ruby arrived in her assigned classroom to find that she and the teacher were the only two people present; it would remain that way for the rest of the school year. Within a week, nearly all of the white students assigned to the newly-integrated elementary schools in New Orleans had withdrawn.

Despite threats and retaliation against her family, including her grandparents’ eviction from the Mississippi farm where they worked as sharecroppers, Ruby remained at Frantz Elementary. The next year, Ruby advanced to the second grade, and the school’s incoming first grade class had eight Black students.

Longview, Texas, Police Chief Roy Stone threatened four top-ranking NAACP officers—Reverend S.Y. Nixon, I.S. White, E.C. Hawkins, and Rance James—phoning each of the men at home and stating he would jail them if they did not produce NAACP membership records immediately. Chief Stone acted under the authority of a new Longview city ordinance that gave the City Manager the power to demand membership lists from any organization operating within the city’s limits, and to impose criminal fines for non-compliance. Within 24 hours, Chief Stone made good on his threat, arresting Mr. Nixon, Mr. White, Mr. Hawkins, and Mr. James, and detaining them in the city jail. Longview City Judge Henry Atkinson set bail at $200.

On October 9, the Texas NAACP announced plans to host the organization’s annual state conference in Longview. During planning meetings, local white officials refused to allow the Texas NAACP to convene in Longview unless they produced membership lists. During one meeting on October 23, white Longview journalist Carl Estes physically assaulted Field Secretary Washington and forced Black organizers out of his office after the NAACP declined to disclose confidential information about its members.

The following day, the Longview City Commission passed the mandatory disclosure ordinance targeting the Texas NAACP. Every city commissioner endorsed enforcement of the ordinance, knowing that requiring the NAACP to disclose its membership lists could have disastrous and deadly consequences for its members. On October 27, NAACP Field Secretary Washington announced plans to move the Texas annual conference to Dallas, considering “the pressures, threats, ugliness, and distress” that Black civil rights leaders faced in Longview.

Membership in the NAACP or participation in civil rights work often meant that Black people would be fired from their jobs, harassed by the police and become targets of vigilante violence and hate crimes. African Americans joined despite the threats because of their commitment to end racial inequality, but the risks were real.

The passage of this ordinance in Longview led to the passage of a new state law, enacted in December 1957, modeled on the Longview ordinance, which authorized county judges to demand confidential records from civil rights organizations. In 1958, in NAACP v. Alabama ex rel Patterson, the U.S. Supreme Court declared these mandatory disclosure laws unconstitutional, as violative of the First Amendment right to freedom of association.

A mob of at least 700 white men, women, and children killed two teenaged Black boys—15-year-old Ernest Collins and 16-year-old Benny Mitchell—in Colorado County, Texas, in a public spectacle lynching. Afterward, officials called the lynching “justice,” and no one in the mob was punished.

In October 1935, a young white woman’s body was found in a creek near her family’s farm in Columbus, Texas. When local officials concluded she had been murdered, suspicion soon focused on Ernest Collins and Benny Mitchell: two Black teens who had been seen picking pecans near the same creek. During this era, the deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society burdened Black people with a presumption of guilt that often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered, whether evidence supported that suspicion or not.

Law enforcement officers arrested Ernest and Benny and, soon after, reported that the young men had confessed to the crime. Black suspects in the South during this time were regularly subjected to beatings, torture, and threats of lynching during police interrogations. News reports eagerly reported Ernest’s and Benny’s alleged confessions as truthful justifications for the brutal lynchings that followed, but without fair investigation or trial, their supposed confessions serve as more reliable evidence of fear than guilt.

The boys were held in Houston after arrest until they had to return to Columbus for a trial on November 12. While the sheriff was transporting Benny and Ernest to the Colorado County courthouse, several cars filled with armed white men stopped them on a bridge crossing and demanded to lynch the two boys. The sheriff handed them over.

Immediately, the white mob brought Ernest and Benny to a live oak tree about a mile from the young white girl’s home and prepared to kill them. A crowd of at least 700 people gathered to watch and repeatedly “burst into jeering screams” as Ernest and Benny, who had been chained together by their necks, were led to the tree. Several members of the mob placed ropes around the boys’ necks and hanged them until dead.

The next day, the white community proudly boasted and praised the lynchings. The county attorney publicly said the lynching was “an expression of the will of the people” and a local judge called the lynchings “justice.” Several newspapers reporting on the lynchings printed an image of two local sheriff officials posing with one of the lynching ropes, and both ropes were exhibited in a local drug store. Local press was silent about the lynching’s impact on the local Black community. Though the mob members and spectators were widely known, no one was immediately arrested or charged for their actions.

Since the end of Reconstruction in 1877, racial terror lynchings targeting Black communities had killed thousands of men, women, and children throughout the U.S., but repeated calls for a federal anti-lynching law had failed due to obstruction by Southern white lawmakers. In 1935, the same year that Benny Mitchell and Ernest Collins were lynched, the Costigan-Wagner anti-lynching bill was introduced in the U.S. Senate. Texas’s own Sen. Tom Connally opposed the bill, and claimed that states were capable of stopping lynching without “federal interference.” Within weeks of the lynchings of Benny and Ernest, the NAACP protested the lack of any state or local investigation and insisted it clearly showed that many states could not—or would not—act to stop the lynching of Black people. The bill ultimately failed, and the U.S. Congress never passed anti-lynching legislation during the 20th century.

Ernest Collins and Benny Mitchell are two of at least seven African American victims of racial terror lynching killed in Colorado County, Texas, between 1877 and 1950. No one was ever held accountable for their deaths.

After a rushed trial and conviction, an enslaved Black man named Nat Turner was hanged in Jerusalem, Virginia, after being convicted of leading a revolt against his enslavers.

On August 21, 1831, Mr. Turner led a group of Black people in a revolt against slavery. Other enslaved Black people joined the uprising, and Mr. Turner’s troops grew to 60 to 70 people who fought white enslavers before being defeated by a militia. Many of Mr. Turner’s followers were killed or captured immediately, but Mr. Turner escaped and evaded searchers for weeks before being captured on October 30, 1831.

Enslavers and defenders of slavery throughout Virginia wanted Nat Turner and all who participated in the revolt harshly punished as an example to others who might be inspired by his efforts. At least 18 Black participants in the uprising were executed along with Nat Turner.

However, in the months after the rebellion, angry white mobs began to torture and murder hundreds of Black people who had not participated in the revolt, terrorizing enslaved and free Black people. Conditions of enslavement worsened for thousands of enslaved Black people as more cruel, barbaric, and traumatizing forms of control were implemented.

In response to Mr. Turner’s revolt, at least nine states—Virginia, Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee—passed laws targeting enslaved and free Black people and limiting their mobility. These laws prohibited Black people from assembling freely, conducting independent religious services, or preaching to a crowd of more than five people. Some states passed laws criminalizing the education of Black people, prohibiting Black people from learning to read or write. Some states also passed laws barring free Black people from living in the state.

Rather than retreat from the horrors of slavery as was happening in Central and South America, slave states in America committed to a new era of harsher conditions, dehumanizing control, and brutal punishment of enslaved people.

In the late 1890s, Wilmington, North Carolina, a port city between the Atlantic’s barrier islands and the banks of the Cape Fear River, became an island of hope for a new America.

Residents of the city’s thriving Black community made themselves a political force, exercising the rights of citizenship guaranteed to them after the Civil War by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Across the South, such activity had triggered deadly white violence against Black voters, organizers and officeholders in the decades since the war. But in Wilmington, a city of 20,000, the votes of 8,000 Black men helped a rare biracial “Fusion” alliance elect candidates of both races.

Three of the 10 aldermen were Black. The city had Black health inspectors, postmasters, magistrates, and policemen, albeit under orders not to arrest anyone white. The county coroner, jailer and treasurer were Black, as was the register of deeds. Black business people pooled their money in three Black-owned banks. Families a generation removed from enslavement owned their homes and read a local Black newspaper.

Two men with rifles approach a Black politician seated at a desk.

As modern-day Wilmingtonian Tim Pinnick, a genealogist, put it, “Things functioned the way they were meant to function as a result of Emancipation.”

But if Wilmington looked to some Americans like a model for the South, powerful white leaders, including the president of Wilmington Cotton Mills Company, the editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, and the chairman of the state Democratic party, could not abide it. They set out to topple what the newspaper editor labeled “Negro rule.”

One hundred and twenty-five years ago, on November 10, 1898, a shocking coup d’etat was executed.

The plotters had set the stage by creating what they called the “White Supremacy Campaign.” They printed falsehoods about Black men preying on white women and stockpiling guns. They targeted the Fusion officeholders and the Black newspaper, summoned militias and white vigilantes known as Red Shirts, and terrorized Black voters at the polls.

“If you see the negro out voting tomorrow, tell him stop,” one of the leaders, former Confederate Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell, told a gun-waving white audience on the eve of Wilmington’s 1898 election. “If he doesn’t, shoot him down. Shoot him down in his tracks.” Mr. Waddell vowed to “choke the current of the Cape Fear River” with Black bodies if he had to.

On November 10, Red Shirts, militiamen, and white mobs surged through Wilmington’s streets and massacred 60 or more Black men. “They gave their lives to vote,” said Hesketh “Nate” Brown, a retired New York City transit manager whose great-great-grandfather, Joshua Halsey, tried to flee the militiamen.

The remains of the office of the Black-owned newspaper the Daily Record after it was burned in the Wilmington coup and massacre, November 10, 1898. (McCool/Alamy)

The Red Shirts torched the Black newspaper’s office, posed for pictures in front of its smoking ruins, installed Mr. Waddell as mayor, and sent hundreds of Black residents fleeing into the woods. Some ran west toward the river; others, east to the Black cemetery. Athalia Howe was 12 when her family and others took refuge in Pine Forest, a cemetery that dated back to the period before Emancipation. It was said that families sheltered next to graves of their loved ones.

Uncovering a History of Racial Injustice

For years no one in Ms. Howe’s family said much about those events, as her great-granddaughter, Cynthia Brown, told The Washington Post. But one day, when she was about eight years old, a distant look filled her great-grandmother’s eyes and she grabbed Ms. Brown’s wrist.

“If it ever happens again, run!” Ms. Brown remembered her shouting. “Don’t let it happen to you!”

Ms. Brown set out to discover what “it” was.

So did Mr. Pinnick, the Black schoolteacher from Illinois who learned of the coup in recent years when he retired to Wilmington. And Nate Brown, the retired transit manager who found his great-great-grandfather’s name in an 1898 newspaper clipping about the “Race War.” (The article blamed Black “aggressors.”) And Sonya Patrick-AmenRa, who counts among her ancestors four soldiers of the United States Colored Troops who helped win the Civil War.

Now, Mr. Brown, Ms. Brown (they are not related), Mr. Pinnick, Ms. AmenRa, and other Wilmingtonians, along with ministers, activists, authors, educators, and a documentary filmmaker whose ancestor aided the plotters, are helping change the historical narrative.

Over the last two decades a school and park named after leaders who directed the murder of dozens of Black people have been renamed. Community activists have set out to learn the names of everyone who was killed and every Black Wilmingtonian who survived the 1898 massacre. They are marking the coup’s 125th anniversary, November 10, with a week of events that include “racial-equity and trauma training,” documentary film showings, and descendants’ stories.

“There is a need to focus on that horrible day to understand it,” Mr. Pinnick said. “And yet, it’s a testimony to surviving that the story should be told.”

For nearly a century the story was told falsely—in textbooks, clippings and memoirs that cast the horrific violence as a spontaneous “riot” and the plotters as heroes who restored racial order to Wilmington.

In 2006, a state-commissioned report debunked the longstanding false narratives about Wilmington’s history.

Even so, Deborah Dicks Maxwell, president of the county’s NAACP chapter, said many local residents still don’t know about it. “This is Wilmington,” she told USAToday last year. “There’s a distance to progress.”

That was evident in the unguarded words of three white Wilmington police officers in 2020, weeks after George Floyd’s killing. A routine audit of patrol-car videotapes revealed the longtime officers discussing killing “f—ing n—s.”

A civil war was coming, Officer Michael Piner said. “We are just gonna go out and start slaughtering them f—ing n—s.” The officers told investigators they had been “venting” and blamed the “stress of today’s climate in law enforcement.”

Their words were “painful, hurtful,” Chief Donny Williams, a Wilmington officer for nearly three decades, told NPR. “Being from this community, and then working alongside these people for so long, so just hurt—and not just me.”

A Legacy of Political Violence

The full toll of the 1898 massacre and the political legacy it created is still not known.

Estimates of the number of Black people killed range from dozens to hundreds. The state’s 2006 study described the coup in detail and blamed all levels of government for not intervening; it said Black merchants and workers “suffered losses after 1898 in terms of job status, income, and access to capital.” Black businesses moved or closed. Some 2,100 Black residents fled. Black literacy rates plunged.

By the turn of the century, Southern states were using poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses to deny Black men the right to vote, which the Fifteenth Amendment had guaranteed them since 1870. Between 1896 and 1902, the number of Black voters registered in North Carolina fell from 126,000 to 6,100. Wilmington did not elect another Black candidate until 1972.

The violence in Wilmington was not unique. Historians and EJI researchers have documented at least 34 instances of mass violence during Reconstruction where scores of Black people were murdered by white mobs intent on reestablishing white supremacy and resisting Black political participation. It is a history that is not well known but is critically relevant for understanding the continuing struggle for racial justice and the many obstacles that still remain.

Confronting History

Hesketh Brown has tracked down the deed for the home that his great-great-grandfather, Joshua Halsey, who was born before Emancipation, owned at 812 North Sixth Street in Wilmington. David Zucchino’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2020 book, Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy, described what happened there on November 10, 1898: A rumor of gunfire from a Black dance hall caused white militiamen to hunt for Mr. Halsey, searching house to house until someone gave them his address.

One of Joshua and Sallie Halsey’s four daughters—Mary, Susan, Satira and Bessie—saw the militiamen marching toward the house and begged her father, who was said to be deaf, to flee.

He “ran out the back door in frantic terror to be shot like a dog by armed soldiers ostensibly sent to preserve the peace,” a white neighbor wrote in her diary.

Jars of sandy soil from the spot where Mr. Halsey died were collected in 2021 as part of EJI’s Community Remembrance Project. One jar has a place of honor 500 miles away, in the library of Mr. Brown’s home in Queens.

Another jar was part of a ceremonial burial for Mr. Halsey in 2021. After attending the event on that bitterly cold November day, Mr. Brown visited the Cape Fear River. “I just pictured myself being one of those people many years ago—stuck between that river and armed racists and needing to choose,” he said. “It was the first time I felt anger.”

He and Tim Pinnick want to tell the story of 1898. “I want my legacy here to be that I reconnected people, or connected them to their legacy—their great-grandfather lived next door to Joshua Halsey, or around the corner, or a newspaper account connects them, or a marriage document,” Mr. Pinnick said.

He knows how long the truth of what happened went unwritten. Not anymore.

“Someone’s going to write your history,” Mr. Pinnick said. “You can let someone else write it, or you can write it.”

A Texas law entitled “An Act to provide for the employment of Convicts for petty offenses” was approved, authorizing county authorities to employ jailed men and women in public works and/or lease them out to private employers. These jailed workers were to receive a “wage” of $1 per day, applied toward unpaid fines or costs owed to the county. Just days later, the legislature passed another law, authorizing the leasing of state prisoners.

The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, was then and is still today celebrated as the legislative act that ended American slavery. However, the amendment’s text includes an exception: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

In Southern states that had long relied on enslaved Black people to perform the agricultural work so critical to the region’s economy, emancipation upended the social, economic, and political systems. The abolition amendment’s exception permitting the continued enslavement of people with criminal convictions, however, enabled the South to continue exploiting the labor of Black people and many states seized that opportunity.

In addition to passing Black Codes that criminalized acts like unemployment and public assembly when committed by freedmen, many Southern states also passed laws authorizing the leasing of the larger, predominately Black convict populations these statutes created. Rather than create a financial burden for the state, increased prison populations could create profit. In Texas and throughout the South, these arrangements would prove profitable for the state and deadly for the workers, nearly all Black, who were forced to work in dangerous, inhumane conditions.

A white mob took 18-year-old Orion “Owen” Anderson from the jail in Leesburg, Virginia, and lynched him. Mr. Anderson, a young Black man, allegedly wore a sack on his head and frightened the daughter of a prominent white man in Loudoun County on her walk to school. Though there were no witnesses and the girl could not identify who had scared her, Mr. Anderson was arrested after a sack was found near him. He was jailed and later reports claimed he confessed to attempting to frighten her.

During the era of racial terror, Black suspects were often subjected to beatings, torture, and threats of lynching during police interrogations. While news reports often reported these confessions as justifications for the brutal terror lynchings that followed, the confession of a lynching victim was always more reliable evidence of fear than guilt.

In the early morning on November 8, a group of 40 white men rode into Leesburg on horseback. Three of the men gained entry to the jail by pretending that they had a prisoner who needed to be admitted. Once inside, they took Mr. Anderson from his cell, carried him to the freight depot of the Richmond & Danville Railroad, hanged him, and shot his body full of bullets. The members of the mob were seen riding through town on horseback afterward, but no one tried to apprehend them or claimed to recognize them. Owen Anderson was buried in the town’s pauper’s cemetery.

Leesburg’s newspaper, the Mirror, reported the lynching on November 14, calling it “a terrible warning,” and stating, “The fate of the self-confessed author of the outrage should serve as a terrible admonition to the violators of the law for the protection of female virtue.” Owen Anderson is one of over 6,500 Black women, men, and children who were victims of racial terror lynching in the U.S. between 1865-1950.

Dean Juliette Derricotte of Fisk University in Nashville was driving three students to her parents’ home in Atlanta when an older white man driving a Model T car suddenly swerved and struck Dean Derricotte’s car, overturning it into a ditch. The white driver stopped to yell at Dean Derricotte and her passengers for damaging his own vehicle, then left the scene without rendering any aid. Others tried to get care for the injured Black passengers, but the nearby Hamilton Memorial Hospital in Dalton, Georgia—a segregated facility—refused to admit African American patients. Instead, Dean Derricotte and the three students were treated by a white doctor at his office in Dalton. Though Dean Derricotte and one of the students, Nina Johnson, were critically injured, following their treatment they were left to recuperate in the home of a local African American woman.

Six hours after the accident, one of the other students who sustained less serious injuries was able to reach a Chattanooga hospital by phone, and arrangements were made to transport Dean Derricotte and Ms. Johnson to that facility, which was 35 miles away. However, the delay proved fatal: Dean Derricotte died on her way to the hospital, at age 34, and Ms. Johnson died the next day.

The Committee on Interracial Cooperation opened an investigation into the incident, and Walter White, secretary of the New York-based NAACP, traveled south in December 1931 to learn more. He later concluded, “The barbarity of race segregation in the South is shown in all its brutal ugliness by the willingness to let cultured, respected, and leading colored women die for lack of hospital facilities which are available to any white person no matter how low in social scale.”

Six white police officers shot an unarmed 25-year-old Black military veteran named Roland T. Price outside of a bar in Rochester, New York. The shooting was deemed “justified” even though evidence showed that Mr. Price did not resist the officers’ demands.

Mr. Price was the recipient of the Purple Heart medal, awarded in the name of the president to those wounded or killed while serving, which he was wearing when he entered the bar in his military uniform that evening. After buying a drink, Mr. Price and the white bartender got into an argument over whether Mr. Price had been given the correct amount of change. In response, the bartender then drew a gun on Mr. Price and one of the waitresses called the police.

Patrolman William Hamill entered the restaurant with his gun drawn and ordered Mr. Price at gunpoint to step outside. Mr. Price complied with this order, exiting the bar to find five police officers waiting for him.

Despite seeing no weapon on Mr. Price, police confronted the veteran, who was in uniform, and ultimately opened fire on Mr. Price, shooting him multiple times, including twice in the chest and once in the head. After his death, a search of his body confirmed that he was unarmed. None of the police officers involved were indicted for Mr. Price’s death, and the shooting was deemed “justified.”

The repeated shootings of unarmed Black men by police and widespread racial discrimination against Black people have traumatized communities of color for decades. The legacy of this violence and a lack of response continues to haunt the U.S.

A five-man territorial commission representing the U.S. government sentenced 303 Dakota men to death for their participation in the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.

In the early 1800s, white settlers increasingly encroached upon the land of the Dakota people in Minnesota. To maintain peace, the Dakota agreed to a series of treaties, the first of which was signed in 1805, exchanging their land for the promise of financial payments and goods.

After the American Civil War began in 1861, the U.S. government failed to pay the money promised to the Dakota. This monetary deficit, coupled with further settler incursion onto Dakota hunting and farming lands, pushed the Dakota to the brink of starvation, prompting Dakota men to begin making incursions into white settlements for food in the summer of 1862.

In response, the U.S. organized a military force composed of federal troops and local militia, and the conflict escalated. Outnumbered, the Dakota forces surrendered in September of 1862. Over 2,000 Dakota were taken into custody.

On November 5, 1862, a territorial commission composed of five military officers sentenced the captured Dakota men accused of participating in the war. Of the nearly 500 Dakota tried, 303 were sentenced to be executed. These men had no access to lawyers, and some of the trials lasted fewer than five minutes. After ordering a review of the trial records, President Abraham Lincoln commuted all but 39 of the death sentences; the execution of the condemned Dakota men on December 26, 1862, remains the largest single mass execution in American history.

Benjamin Ryan Tillman was elected governor of South Carolina. An outspoken white supremacist, Mr. Tillman created his identity as a politician based on white supremacy, a deep commitment to blocking any educational opportunity for Black people, and advocating for violence against Black voters. Concerning the education of Black people, Mr. Tillman argued, “when you educate a Negro, you educate a candidate for the penitentiary or spoil a good field hand.”

Mr. Tillman’s political career began after his involvement in the 1876 Hamburg Massacre, where white men rioted and killed nine people in a predominantly Black town in South Carolina. In his gubernatorial campaign, Mr. Tillman promised to keep the state’s Black population in a position of permanent inferiority. In his inaugural address and throughout his administration, he emphasized white supremacy and the necessity to revoke Black Americans’ rights.

Mr. Tillman served two terms as governor and played a critical role in the 1895 South Carolina Constitutional Convention. In order to vote under the revised constitution, a man had to own property, pay a poll tax, pass a literacy test, and meet certain educational standards. The 1895 constitution disenfranchised Black voters in intent and effect and served as a model for other Southern states.

After serving as governor, Mr. Tillman was elected U.S. senator from South Carolina in 1895, and served in this capacity for 24 years. Throughout his tenure, he staunchly opposed Black equality and women’s suffrage. Mr. Tillman’s philosophy helped shape the era of oppression and abuse of Black Americans throughout the South. A statue honoring Mr. Tillman still stands on the grounds of South Carolina’s State Capitol.

On Election Day, local white residents in Eufaula, Alabama, determined to regain political dominance in the county that they had lost during Reconstruction, used terror and intimidation to suppress Black votes, ultimately waging a violent, deadly massacre.

As the 1874 election neared, white employers openly fired any Black workers who intended to vote for Elias Keils, a white candidate who supported the aims of Reconstruction, for the position of City Court Judge. False rumors spread that Black residents planned to violently drive white voters from the polls, and white residents began stockpiling guns near Eufaula polling sites.

Judge Keils tried to notify state and federal officials of the danger, but Alabama’s Attorney General rebuffed the warning and federal troops stationed in Eufaula refused to intervene.

Despite the risk, hundreds of Black men marched to the downtown Eufaula polling site on November 3. Some Black voters were immediately arrested and jailed on fraud accusations. Around noon, several white men forced a Black man into an alley and threatened to arrest him if he did not vote against civil rights. As witnesses protested, a single gunshot was fired by an unknown individual, harming no one.

Soon afterward, a large mob of white men retrieved the stockpiled guns stored nearby and fired “indiscriminately” into the crowd of mostly unarmed Black voters. Within minutes, 400 shots had been fired, killing at least six Black people, and possibly many more based on some estimates; as many as 80 additional Black people were left injured. Many survivors fled, including an estimated 500 Black people who had not yet voted.

Later that day, a white mob attacked another county polling station in Spring Hill, Alabama, where Judge Keils was the election supervisor. The mob destroyed the ballot box, burned the ballots inside, and killed Judge Keils’s teenage son Willie.

Although the identities of many white perpetrators of the massacre were known, no white person was ever convicted. Instead, a Black man named Hilliard Miles was convicted and imprisoned for perjury after identifying members of the white mob. Decades later, Braxton Bragg Comer, whom Mr. Miles had named as a perpetrator of the massacre, was elected governor of Alabama.

The Eufaula Massacre and its aftermath showed Black residents that exercising their new legal rights—particularly by voting—made them targets for deadly attacks and that they could not depend on authorities for protection.

The result was mass voter suppression. While 1,200 Black Eufaula residents voted in the 1874 election, only 10 cast ballots in 1876. That legacy remains. Today, the population of Barbour County is nearly 50% Black but white officials hold 8 of 12 elected county positions. In 2016, the county had the highest voter purge rate in the U.S.

On Election Day, white mobs in Ocoee, Florida, began a campaign of terror and violence designed to stop Black citizens in Ocoee from voting that resulted in the deaths of dozens of Black people and the destruction of the Black community.

With the election approaching, Black residents in Ocoee who owned land and businesses were eager to vote. Despite a terrorizing and threatening march by white citizens through the streets of Orlando three days earlier aimed at deterring Black people from participating in the election, Mose Norman and other Black Americans went to the polls to vote on November 2. Mr. Norman, however, was turned away, allegedly on the grounds that he had not paid his poll tax.

After seeking advice from an Orlando Judge, John Cheney, Mr. Norman again attempted to vote. This time, armed white men stationed at the polls immediately assaulted him. He fled to the nearby home of his friend and business associate, Julius “July” Perry.

As word spread of Mr. Norman’s attempts to vote, a mob of white residents seeking to capture him and Mr. Perry surrounded and burned Mr. Perry’s home. Mr. Norman escaped, but the mob severely wounded Mr. Perry. He was arrested, taken to Orlando, and locked in the Orange County Jail.

The next morning, a lynch mob took Mr. Perry from police custody, brutally beat him, and hanged him within sight of Judge Cheney’s home. His lifeless body was shot repeatedly.

Over a two-day span, a mob of white Floridians killed dozens of Black people and burned 25 Black homes, two Black churches, and a masonic lodge in Ocoee. Estimates of the total number of Black Americans killed during the violence range from six to over 30. Estimates of the total number of Black Americans killed during the violence range from six to over 30. There is no adequate accounting of this violence because neither the government nor the newspapers at the time thought it was important to establish how many Black people were killed during the attack.

The Ocoee Election Day Massacre represents one of the bloodiest days in American political history. Black survivors fled the community, never to return. The entire Black community of Ocoee was driven out within a year, forced to abandon or sell land and homes they owned. No Black Americans resided in the City of Ocoee for the following 60 years.

The lynching of July Perry and countless others, and the destruction of the Black community with impunity, showed Black residents that exercising their legal right to vote made them targets for deadly attacks and that they could not depend on authorities for protection.

As part of the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Project, in June 2019, EJI staff joined hundreds of community members, including Mr. Perry’s descendants, in downtown Orlando to unveil a historical marker honoring July Perry and the victims of the Ocoee Election Day Massacre.

Over several decades in the 19th and 20th centuries, thousands of Native children were forced away from their families and sent to off-reservation boarding schools in misguided efforts to “civilize” them. After the U.S. Congress created the Civilization Fund and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, boarding schools for Native children were established and children were forcibly compelled to attend these schools, which were designed to eradicate Native youth’s tribal ties and assimilate them into white culture so that they would grow into adults supportive of the American economy. The consequences of this horrific abuse are still felt today.

The first such school to open was Carlisle Indian School, opened in Carlisle, Pennsylvania on November 1, 1879. The founder, Captain Richard Pratt, described his philosophy for educating Native children as: “All the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” The federal government used Carlisle as a model for other boarding schools designed to forcefully assimilate Native children into white culture. Young children were taken from their families to attend these schools, and parents who resisted were forced to flee, hide, or face imprisonment. Many parents sent their children because Native children were not permitted to attend local public schools with white students, making assimilation boarding schools the only available opportunity for formal education.

The federal government’s views on educating Native children were rooted in racism and prejudice. While the government believed a white youth’s “moral character and habits are already formed and well-defined” when he leaves for school, a Native youth was thought to be “born a savage and raised in an atmosphere of superstition and ignorance” without the “advantages which are inherited by his white brother.” In the eyes of the government, “if [a Native American child] is to rise from his low estate the germs of a nobler existence must be implanted in him and cultivated. He must be taught to lay aside his savage customs like a garment and take upon himself the habits of civilized life.”

Reflecting these genocidal biases, Native children attending boarding schools were given English names, forced to cut their hair, and forbidden from speaking their Native languages. Students received vocational training but very little academic instruction, with the expectation that they would make their living as farmers or manual laborers. Conditions in many schools were poor and students were often the victims of physical and sexual abuse.

These schools continued to exist for decades with funding and support from the federal government.

In the early morning, a white mob of more than 50 men tightened a noose around the neck of an 18-year-old Black man named Silas Esters, dragged him from the LaRue County Jail in Hodgenville, Kentucky, and lynched him.

According to newspaper reports at the time, Mr. Esters had been accused of “coercing” a 15-year-old white boy to commit a crime. However, newspapers reported that Mr. Esters’s alleged offense was “unpunishable by any statute.” Despite having committed no crime, Mr. Esters was arrested by local white police and placed in jail.

During this era of racial terror, law enforcement officers, tasked with protecting the people in their custody, often witnessed or directly participated in deadly mob violence. In this instance, when the white mob arrived at the LaRue County Jail intent on lynching Mr. Esters, the white police officers gave the mob the keys to the jail and made no effort to protect Mr. Esters as he was violently removed and lynched.

After being seized by the mob, newspapers reported that Mr. Esters slipped free and began to run away—but made it only 100 yards before the white mob riddled his body with bullets. The mob then placed a noose around his neck, dragged his lifeless body to the courthouse, and swung it from the top steps.

At the time, newspapers reported that Granville Ward and his father, Thomas Ward, were the leaders of this mob. Though the identities of at least two individuals who participated in Mr. Esters’s murder were known, no one was ever held accountable for his lynching. Mr. Esters was one of over 6,500 Black women, men, and children who were documented victims of racial terror lynching in the U.S. between 1865-1950.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy were arrested and forced to begin serving sentences in Birmingham jail because they led peaceful protests against unconstitutional bans on “race mixing” in Birmingham in 1963. In April 1963, a series of civil rights protests occurred in Birmingham, Alabama, to challenge segregation in Birmingham’s public accommodations. Pro-segregation white residents and local police, led by the city’s notorious public safety commissioner, Bull Connor, responded to the protests with violence and legal suppression.

On April 10, 1963, a state judge granted city officials an injunction banning all anti-segregation protest activity in the city of Birmingham. Dr. King and the Rev. Abernathy chose to lead a march in defiance of the injunction and were arrested on April 12, 1963. Dr. King spent eight days in jail before being released on bail, and during that time wrote his famed “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

Dr. King and the Rev. Abernathy were still prosecuted after posting bail, and on April 26, 1963, they were convicted of contempt of court. Dr. King and the Rev. Abernathy unsuccessfully appealed and, on October 30, 1967, returned to Birmingham to each serve five-day jail sentences. Dozens of supporters protested outside of Birmingham’s jail for the duration of their incarceration.

A white mob attacked and brutally whipped a 52-year-old Black man named Abram Colby because of his political advocacy. Abram Colby was born into slavery in Greene County, Georgia, in approximately 1817. The son of an enslaved Black woman and a white landowner, Mr. Colby was emancipated 15 years before the end of American slavery and worked tirelessly to organize newly free Black people following the Civil War. A Radical Republican who stood for racial equality, Mr. Colby was elected to serve in the Georgia House of Representatives during Reconstruction. His impassioned advocacy for Black civil rights earned him the attention of the local Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist organization founded in 1865 to resist Reconstruction and restore white supremacy through targeted violence against Black people and their white political allies.

Three years after being attacked by a mob of white Klansmen, when called to Washington, D.C., to testify about the assault before a Congressional committee investigating reports of racial violence in the South, Mr. Colby bravely identified his attackers as some of the “first class men in our town. One is a lawyer, one a doctor, and some are farmers.” Shortly before the attack, Mr. Colby explained, the men had tried to bribe him to change parties or give up his office. Mr. Colby refused to do either and days later they returned:

On October 29,1869, [the white mob] broke my door open, took me out of bed, took me to the woods and whipped me three hours or more and left me for dead. They said to me, “Do you think you will ever vote another damned Radical ticket?” I said, “If there was an election tomorrow, I would vote the Radical ticket.” They set in and whipped me a thousand licks more, with sticks and straps that had buckles on the ends of them.

Mr. Colby told the committee that the attack had “broken something inside of [him],” and that the Klan’s continued harassment and violent assaults had forced him to abandon his re-election campaign. Mr. Colby testified most emotionally about the attack’s impact on his daughter, who was home when the white mob seized him to be whipped: “My little daughter begged them not to carry me away. They drew up a gun and actually frightened her to death. She never got over it until she died. That was the part that grieves me the most.”

A mob of white men in Monroe, North Carolina, stormed the home of a nine-year-old Black boy named James Hanover Thompson, threatening to lynch him after a white girl told her parents that she kissed him on the cheek when they were playing together earlier that day. James and another Black boy named David “Fuzzy” Simpson, eight years old, who the girl had also kissed on the cheek, were arrested by police, beaten, held in jail without contact with their families for days, denied an attorney, and sentenced to indefinite terms, ultimately serving over three months.

Earlier in the day, a group of children including James and David were playing together outside when they started a “kissing game,” during which a white girl their age named Sissy kissed both boys on the cheek. After the girl mentioned the kisses to her parents, her father grabbed a shotgun and arranged a mob to go to the Thompsons’ home, where they threatened to lynch James, David, and their mothers. The boys were not home when the mob arrived, but the police found them shortly thereafter and “jumped out with their guns drawn” before taking them into custody, where they were beaten by the police.

James and David, unaware of why they were in custody, remained in jail for six days without being allowed to speak to their parents or any attorneys. On October 31, a group of police officers broke into the boys’ cell wearing white sheets to intimidate them, while white residents of Monroe burned a cross on the Thompsons’ lawn and fired shots into their home throughout the boys’ detention. Both Evelyn Thompson and Jennie Simpson, the mothers of the two boys, were fired from their jobs. After a brief hearing on November 4 in which they were denied the right to an attorney, James and David were charged with assault and molestation and sentenced to “indefinite terms” at the state reformatory in Hoffman, North Carolina, because they were kissed on the cheek by a white girl.

Robert Williams, the president of the Monroe NAACP, began a campaign urging officials to send the boys back to their families and sent a telegram on November 13 to President Eisenhower, who ultimately did not intervene. Finally, on February 13, 1959, over three months after James and David were sentenced to the reformatory, North Carolina’s governor pardoned the boys and released them to go home. Neither the governor nor the court admitted to any wrongdoing, and no officials ever apologized to the boys or their families.

President Ronald Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. The law created a significant disparity in the sentences imposed in federal courts for crimes involving powder cocaine versus those imposed for crimes involving crack cocaine, with mandatory minimum sentences set at a 100:1 ratio.

For instance, a drug crime involving five grams of crack cocaine resulted in a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in federal prison, while crimes involving up to 500 grams of powder cocaine received a lower sentencing recommendation.

This sentencing disparity was not based on credible scientific evidence about a differing biological impact between cocaine in powder form versus crack form, but it had clear racial results. In the years following the enactment of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, the number of Black people sent to federal prison ballooned from approximately 50 in 100,000 adults to nearly 250 in 100,000 adults. During the same period, there was almost no change in the number of white people incarcerated in federal prison. Disparities in sentence lengths also increased: in 1986, Black people received drug sentences 11% longer than sentences received by white defendants, on average, but that disparity increased to 49% in the years following the law’s enactment.

This law, along with the “War on Drugs” overall, significantly contributed to huge increases in the American prison and jail population, which grew from approximately 500,000 in 1980 to nearly 2.3 million in 2013.

Prior to the Civil War, many Southern states, including Texas, barred enslaved or free Black people from testifying against white people in court proceedings. Following the Confederacy’s defeat, those states were forced to comply with certain requirements in order to be readmitted to the Union, including altering their laws and state constitutions to respect Black Americans’ new status as citizens with civil rights.

On October 26, 1866, the Texas legislature passed a law redefining the circumstances in which Black people could testify in court. Rather than simply declare that Black people had full and equal rights to testify, the new law provided that “persons of color shall not testify” except in cases where “the prosecution is against a person who is a person of color; or where the offense is charged to have been committed against the person or property of a person of color.”

In civil cases between white parties, and in criminal prosecutions of white people not charged with offenses against a Black person, Black people remained second-class citizens with no right to testify in a court of law. In addition, even in the cases in which Black witnesses were permitted to speak, their testimony was often given little to no weight by white decisionmakers.

Boston police officers scoured predominantly Black communities searching for anyone who fit the vague description provided by Charles Stuart, a white businessman, who lied to police, claiming a Black man shot him and his pregnant wife, Carol, two nights before.

Late on October 23, Mr. Stuart called 911 and reported he and his wife Carol had been robbed and injured in Roxbury: “My wife’s been shot. I’ve been shot,” he told the police. Charles Stuart later told police that a Black gunman had forced his way into the couple’s car and told him to drive to the Mission Hill neighborhood, where the man robbed and shot them both. Carol Stuart, seven months pregnant, died of her injuries; their son, Christopher, was delivered at the hospital but died days later.

The case quickly sparked public outrage and nationwide media coverage as local law enforcement faced heavy pressure to solve the case. Black men and boys were publicly strip-searched, repeatedly interrogated, and terrorized, while city officials, lawmakers, and police used the case as a symbol of growing “urban crime” and vowed to crack down on “gun-wielding criminals.” Some even used the alleged crime as a reason that Massachusetts should reinstate its death penalty.

Within a week of the shooting, police had narrowed the list of suspects to “a chosen few.” William Bennett, an African American man who had spent 13 years in prison, soon became a prime suspect; during a lineup, Mr. Stuart claimed that Mr. Bennett looked “most like” the shooter, and several witnesses testified against Mr. Bennett before a specially convened grand jury. The judicial system was poised to prosecute Mr. Bennett to the full extent of the law until, in January 1990, Charles Stuart’s brother, Matthew, came forward with evidence implicating Mr. Stuart himself in the shootings. Matthew Stuart told police he and a friend met Mr. Stuart in the Mission Hill neighborhood on the night of the shootings and agreed to dispose of a gun, Carol’s purse, and several other items. Matthew Stuart agreed, thinking it was just an insurance scam, and did not learn of the murder plot until press coverage later.

The day after his brother’s admission to police, Charles Stuart committed suicide by jumping from the Tobin Bridge. The public soon learned the truth about Mr. Stuart’s crime and lies, motivated by greed and a desire for life insurance money. Many expressed disgust for the ease with which he was able to concoct false allegations and exploit racist prejudices about Black criminality to convince police to target the Black community for harassment and civil rights violations.

Although some city officials and lawmakers made apologies, the Stuart case illustrated the insidiousness of racial bias and the continuing burden of presumed guilt and dangerousness borne by African Americans, generations after the peak of racial terror lynching, and even decades after the civil rights movement. In 2014, William Bennett’s niece recalled the trauma of watching police search her grandmother’s house as an eight-year-old child and the fear and chaos that gripped the neighborhood during the intense police crackdown targeting Black men and boys.

In response to a federal court decision that Birmingham’s racially segregated parks, golf courses, and playgrounds were unconstitutional, Birmingham officials publicly announced that they would close all public parks and facilities rather than racially integrate them.

Under the Birmingham city code, interracial games of pool, cards, dice, dominoes, checkers, and billiards were illegal. Interracial play was not permitted in public parks including ball parks, tennis courts, golf courses, and football fields, as well as theaters, auditoriums, swimming pools, and playgrounds. After 15 Black leaders, including civil rights legend Reverend F. L. Shuttleworth, sued Birmingham’s Parks and Recreation board, a federal district judge ruled that Birmingham’s segregated facilities and parks were unconstitutional.

In response to the October 24 court ruling, Birmingham’s mayor, Art Hanes, and the city’s police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, immediately announced the plan to close all city parks. By December, the city had eliminated funding to almost all of its parks and closed 67 of them, along with 38 playgrounds, four golf courses, and eight swimming pools.

Bull Connor defended the necessity of the city’s decision, insisting that integrating the parks “would only be the first step in total integration of our schools, churches, hotels, restaurants and everything else.” Mr. Connor received a flood of support from white Birmingham residents who wrote letters applauding the decision. One local newspaper, The Jeffersonian, applauded the closures and stated the move helped the white community “retain our white race and culture.”

What happened in Birmingham was not unique. As courts ruled on the unconstitutionality of segregated facilities, white people across the South remained so committed to preventing racial integration that they voluntarily shut down public parks, swimming pools, and other recreational facilities—choosing to deny all citizens these benefits rather than to extend them to Black people. In some areas, this commitment to preserving and upholding segregation lasted a long time. Birmingham parks remained closed for two years, while some communities reopened parks but permanently shut down facilities like public pools.

A white mob from Maryland boldly attempted to lynch a Black man just blocks from the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., in a dramatic display of the lawless reign of terror against Black people that defined this era. The mob dispersed only after D.C. police promised to turn over the intended lynching victim the next morning.

On October 22, a Black man was accused of attacking a white girl during a robbery near Landover, Maryland. When news of the incident spread and Walter Ford, a 26-year-old Black man, was targeted as the suspect, Mr. Ford was seized by local police in Washington, D.C., where he lived. During this era, allegations against Black people were rarely subject to scrutiny and often sparked violent reprisal even when there was no evidence tying the accused to any offense. Mr. Ford was detained by the Washington, D.C., police department.

That evening and into the next day, a white lynch mob of more than 100 people from nearby Prince George’s County, Maryland, arrived at the jail, committed to lynching Mr. Ford. Just blocks from the Capitol grounds and in the face of D.C. law enforcement, the mob wielded shotguns, pitchforks, and revolvers. For hours, they attempted to seize Mr. Ford from the jail. In the early hours of the morning on October 23, the would-be lynchers dispersed only after law enforcement promised to turn over Mr. Ford to the mob the next morning. While police ultimately did not turn Mr. Ford over, the mob believed this promise would be kept given widespread law enforcement complicity in lynchings.

The lawlessness that prevailed during this era was possible because state and federal governments retreated from the rule of law, allowing more than 6,500 Black women, men, and children to become victims of racial terror lynching in the U.S. between 1865-1950. These lynch mobs acted with impunity, and in many cases acted in tandem with members of law enforcement who were charged with protecting those in their custody. The federal government’s failure to protect citizens was a serious obstacle to protecting Black people from racial violence and terrorism. No one from the Prince County lynch mob was ever arrested or held responsible for attempting to lynch Mr. Ford just blocks away from the U.S. Capitol.

Five white men who beat to death Leon McAtee, a Black man, were freed by the court in Holmes County, Mississippi, even though one of the five had confessed to his own involvement in the murder and implicated the other four men. Before the trial ended, Judge S.F. Davis acquitted Spencer Ellis and James Roberts, finding the evidence insufficient to prove their guilt. The all-white jury then deliberated for 10 minutes before acquitting Jeff Dodd Sr., Jeff Dodd Jr., and Dixie Roberts.

As a tenant on Jeff Dodd Sr.’s farm, Leon McAtee worked a small plot of land for very little pay. When Mr. Dodd’s saddle went missing, he suspected Mr. McAtee of stealing it and had the Black man arrested. On July 22, 1946, Mr. Dodd withdrew the charges and police released Mr. McAtee into Mr. Dodd’s custody. Mr. Dodd then called Dixie Roberts and together they took Mr. McAtee back to Mr. Dodd’s home, where Jeff Dodd Jr., James Roberts, and Spencer Ellis awaited them.

Inside the home, all five men beat Mr. McAtee and whipped him with a three-quarter-inch rope. The men then drove the badly beaten man to his home and presented him to his wife, who later reported that her husband was dazed and muttering about a saddle. The men then drove away with Mr. McAtee in their truck, and Mrs. McAtee fled with her children. Her husband was found dead in a bayou two days later.

William Lloyd Garrison was a prominent white abolitionist and newspaper editor in the 19th century. Born in 1805 to English immigrants in Newburyport, Massachusetts, Mr. Garrison co-founded his first newspaper at age 22 and began to focus on the issue of slavery. In 1829, Mr. Garrison became the co-editor of the Baltimore-based Genius of Universal Emancipation, through which he and his colleagues criticized proponents of slavery.

Unlike most American abolitionists at the time, Mr. Garrison demanded immediate emancipation of enslaved Black people rather than gradual emancipation. In 1830, he founded The Liberator, which continued to publish criticisms of slavery. By that time, Mr. Garrison had become a vocal opponent of the American Colonization Society, which sought to reduce the number of free Black people in America by relocating them to Africa. In 1832, Mr. Garrison helped to organize the American Anti-Slavery Society and sought to keep the organization unaffiliated with any political party. He also advocated for women’s equal participation in the organization, a radical stance nearly 90 years before white women in America obtained the right to vote.

On October 21, 1835, Mr. Garrison attended a meeting held by the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society to hear remarks from George Thompson, a British abolitionist and personal friend. When Mr. Thompson was warned that a pro-slavery mob planned to tar and feather him, he canceled his appearance. Instead, the mob seized Mr. Garrison, dragged him through the streets by a rope around his waist, and threatened to kill him. Mr. Garrison was rescued by police and spent the night in a city jail before leaving Boston the next morning. He nevertheless remained a staunch opponent of slavery and lived to see the institution’s abolition 30 years later.

The Virginia Colonial Assembly enacted a law that removed criminal penalties for enslavers who killed enslaved people resisting authority. The assembly justified the law on the grounds that “the obstinacy of many [enslaved people] cannot be suppressed by other than violent means.” The law provided that an enslaver’s killing of an enslaved person could not constitute murder because the “premeditated malice” element of murder could not be formed against one’s own property.

In subsequent years, Virginia continued to reduce legal protections for enslaved people. In 1723, the assembly removed all penalties for the killing of enslaved people during “correction,” meaning that an enslaved person could be killed for an “offense” as minor as picking bad tobacco. The willful or malicious killing of an enslaved person could constitute murder, in theory, but the law excused the killing of an enslaved person if the killing was in any way provoked. In effect, enslavers could kill enslaved people with impunity in colonial-era Virginia, and the situation was similar in most other colonial territories.

Following the American Revolution, many states created penalties for killing enslaved people—but the loophole permitting the killing of an enslaved person during “correction” or to prevent “resistance” remained. As a result, throughout the course of slavery in this country’s history, enslavers were rarely punished for killing enslaved people.

Fifty-two individuals, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., were arrested in downtown Atlanta, Georgia, after refusing to leave their seats at segregated department store lunch counters. Under the heavily-enforced Jim Crow segregation laws and customs in Atlanta at the time, Black and white people were required to use separate water fountains, bathrooms, ticket booths, and other public spaces. In addition, Black people were banned from being served at department store lunch counters.

Similar laws in other Southern states had recently become the focus of a “sit-in” movement, in which Black college students calmly and peacefully sat at segregated lunch counters and refused to leave until they were served. In February 1960, three North Carolina A&T students held the first sit-in at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina. Soon, many more students joined their protest and word of the tactic spread to students in other states. By August 1961, sit-ins had attracted more than 70,000 participants, generated over 3,000 arrests and, in cities like Nashville, Tennessee, successfully led to desegregation.

Dr. King was invited to join the student-organized Atlanta sit-in, and ended up arrested alongside students and local activists under a 1960 law that made refusing to leave private property a misdemeanor offense. Charges against 16 of the 51 protesters were dismissed at their first court appearance, but Dr. King (the most high-profile of the group) was held on charges that his arrest violated a term of state probation imposed earlier that year. After Dr. King was sentenced to six months of hard labor, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy reached out to the King family, helped secure Dr. King’s release, and earned pivotal Black votes that would help him win the presidency weeks later.

A mob of at least 2,000 white residents of Princess Anne, Maryland, beat, hanged, dragged, and burned George Armwood to death. Mr. Armwood, who was reportedly intellectually disabled, had been accused of assaulting an 80-year-old woman who was also the mother of a local white policeman. Shortly after being arrested, Mr. Armwood was dragged out of the jail and an 18-year-old boy immediately cut off his ear with a butcher knife. The growing mob then beat George Armwood nearly to death and dragged him to a tree, where he was hanged. Afterward, the mob cut down his corpse, dragged it through the streets, hanged it again, and then staged a public burning. The New Journal and Guide reported that “[m]en, women and children, participated in the savage orgy.” The Afro American reported that the mob danced around Mr. Armwood’s charred remains. The report quoted one white man, who said, “It would have cost the state $1000 to hang the man. It cost us 75 cents.”

Mr. Armwood’s lynching sparked a national outcry and calls for prosecution of the lynchers, yet investigations at the county, state, and federal levels faced obstacles and delays. Inquiries following the lynching were marked by residents’ refusal to identify participants as well as mockery and intimidation of Black witnesses. The American Civil Liberties Union, frustrated with the silence, began offering a $1,000 reward to people willing to name leaders of the mob.

Even when finally presented with identifying evidence, the county prosecutor refused to act. When the Maryland Attorney General ordered troops to arrest eight named participants, white residents who supported the accused lynchers waged riots of protest. Four white men were ultimately tried for the lynching of George Armwood and acquitted by all-white juries.

Founded in December 1865 by former Confederate Army officers, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) operated as a secret vigilante group targeting Black people and their allies with violent terrorism to resist Reconstruction and re-establish a system of white supremacy in the South.

KKK violence was so intense in South Carolina after the Civil War that U.S. Attorney General Amos Akerman and Army Major Lewis Merrill traveled there to investigate. In York County alone they found evidence of 11 murders and more than 600 whippings and other assaults. When local grand juries failed to take action, Mr. Akerman urged President Ulysses S. Grant to intervene, describing the counties as “under the domination of systematic and organized depravity.” Mr. Merrill said the situation was a “carnival of crime not paralleled in the history of any civilized community.”

In April 1871, President Grant signed the Ku Klux Klan Act, which made it a federal crime to deprive American citizens of their civil rights through racial terrorism. On October 12, 1871, President Grant warned nine South Carolina counties with prevalent KKK activity that martial law would be declared if the Klan did not disperse. The warning was ignored. On October 17, 1871, President Grant declared martial law and suspended the writ of habeas corpus in the same nine counties. Once he did so, federal forces were allowed to arrest and imprison KKK members and instigators of racial terrorism without bringing them before a judge or into court.

Many affluent Klan members fled the jurisdiction to avoid arrest but by December 1871 approximately 600 Klansmen were in jail. More than 200 arrestees were indicted, 53 pleaded guilty, and five were convicted at trial. Klan terrorism in South Carolina decreased significantly after the arrests and trials but racial violence targeting Black people continued throughout the South for decades.

Black Olympic sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who engaged in a silent protest on the medal stand to bring light to the racial discrimination and violence against Black people in the U.S., were met with hostility by white supporters and the media, and were eventually suspended for their protest.

The 1968 Olympics followed a summer of racial unrest and protest following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in April, and the murder of Robert Kennedy in June. Police violence and poverty burdened Black communities in ways that attracted international attention.

Mr. Smith and Mr. Carlos placed first and third in the 200-meter dash at the Olympic Games in Mexico City. As the U.S. national anthem played during the medal ceremony, the two men bowed their heads and raised black gloved fists in a protest against racial discrimination in the U.S. Both men wore black socks with no shoes, and Mr. Smith also wore a black scarf around his neck. Mr. Smith raised his right fist to represent Black power, while Mr. Carlos raised his left fist to represent Black unity. Mr. Smith said his black scarf represented Black pride and their black socks without shoes signified Black poverty in America.

The following day, the U.S. Olympic Committee threatened other athletes with stern disciplinary action if they engaged in demonstrations. Acting USOC Director Everett Barnes issued a formal statement to the Olympic International Committee, condemning Mr. Smith and Mr. Carlos, and claiming that the sprinters “made our country look like the devil.”

The USOC suspended Mr. Smith and Mr. Carlos from the U.S. Olympic team following a midnight meeting. In the early hours of the morning on October 18, the Committee ordered both men to vacate the Olympic village in Mexico within 48 hours.

Despite their medal-winning performances, the two athletes faced intense criticism in the media and received death threats upon returning home. At the time, their protest was wrongly perceived as a show of disrespect directed toward the American flag and national anthem.

In 1875, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which forbade racial discrimination in access to public accommodations and facilities. A number of African Americans subsequently sued businesses that refused to serve Black customers. The Supreme Court heard five of those cases in 1883 and on October 15, 1883, it struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 in an 8-1 decision known as the Civil Rights Cases.

The Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment, which was cited as the constitutional authorization for the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and mandates “equal protection of the laws,” did not apply to private citizens or entities. The Court decided that the Equal Protection Clause applied only to actions taken or laws passed by state governments. Writing for the majority less than 20 years after the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, Justice Joseph Bradley questioned the necessity and appropriateness of laws aimed at protecting Black people from discrimination:

“When a man has emerged from slavery, and, by the aid of beneficent legislation, has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen or a man are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected.”

The Supreme Court’s decision in the Civil Rights Cases eliminated the only federal law that prohibited racial discrimination by individuals or private businesses, and left African Americans who were victims of private discrimination to seek legal recourse in unsympathetic state courts. Racial discrimination in housing, restaurants, hotels, theaters, and employment became increasingly entrenched and persisted for generations. It would be more than 80 years before Congress tried again to outlaw discrimination by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

President Ronald Reagan announced plans to create 12 new drug task force units and hire 1,200 additional prosecutors, at an estimated cost of $200 million annually, further fueling mass incarceration, particularly in targeted Black communities.

President Reagan’s expansion of the “War on Drugs” built on the actions of President Richard Nixon, who announced a drug war in 1971. Nixon officials later admitted that the president intended to criminalize Black people.

During his two terms as president, Reagan tripled the federal drug law enforcement budget, hired over 4,000 additional prosecutors, tripled the number of drug cases prosecuted, and doubled conviction rates for drug crimes. He supported death sentences for individuals convicted of drug crimes and conscripted the U.S. Military in support of drug prosecutions.

When addressing the nation on the drug war, President Reagan used language that dehumanized people with addiction or dependency problems, calling them, in a 1988 speech, “parasites” and “vermin” who “peddled toxins” in government-subsidized housing. Drug enforcement targeted low-income Black communities and other vulnerable people and further entrenched the presumption of guilt and dangerousness that burdens people of color in the U.S.

The “War on Drugs” contributed to an eight-fold increase in the U.S. prison population and the over-incarceration of Black people. In 1980, only 25,000 people were in state and federal prison for drug violations—today, over 300,000 people are in prison for violations of drug laws. Further, countless studies document that, despite Black people and white people using drugs at similar rates, Black people face a higher risk of arrest, pre-trial detention, incarceration, and extreme sentencing. Learn more about how EJI is working to challenge the devastating consequences of the drug war, such as extreme sentencing and high rates of incarceration.

Members of the Black community in Roxboro, North Carolina, were terrorized by an ongoing campaign from a white lynch mob, threatening them to leave their homes or face racial violence.

In July 1920, a mob of local white residents in Roxboro seized an innocent Black farmworker, Ed Roach, from the Person County Jail where he was being held for the alleged assault of a white girl. In broad daylight, the mob took Mr. Roach to the churchyard, hanged him from a tree, and riddled his body with bullets. In the days after the lynching, Mr. Roach’s employer signed a written statement affirming Mr. Roach’s innocence, stating that he had been working with him when the crime occurred. No one was held accountable for his death.

After lynching an innocent man, the white mob sought to further terrorize members of the Black community. The self-identified “Person County Mob” claimed credit for the lynching and began distributing letters and threatening death, bombing, and other violence in an attempt to drive the Black community out of Person County.

In the early weeks of October, a Black community member received a letter signed from the “Person County Mob” that instructed him to leave town “or face a fate similar to that suffered by Ed Roach.” For weeks, each day, more letters were sent by the “Person County Mob” that called for the removal of the Black community from Roxboro or threatened violence.

An older Black woman who lived in a predominantly white area of the county received a letter telling her to move from her home within one week or face violence. She refused to move, and sticks of dynamite were detonated at her home while she was in it, tearing out the windows and doors of her house. She survived but was forced to move from her home.

In addition, white landowners were told to assist in getting Black tenants to leave and everyone was required to support the eviction of Black residents. No one was ever held accountable for this violence and terrorism in Person County.

Racial terror violence displaced entire Black communities throughout the South, and hundreds of thousands of Black people fled as refugees from violent campaigns that used fear and intimidation to ensure white supremacy and racial hierarchy.

Jonny Gammage, cousin and business partner of Pittsburgh Steelers football player Ray Seals, was detained during a traffic stop while driving Mr. Seals’s Jaguar in the working-class suburb of Brentwood. According to witness testimony, Lt. Milton Mullholland pulled Mr. Gammage over for tapping his brakes and called Officer John Votjas for backup. The officers later claimed that Mr. Gammage, who was 5’6″ and 165 pounds, pointed an object at the officers—which turned out to be a cell phone—and struggled. Mr. Mullholland and Mr. Votjas, along with Officer Michael Albert, Sergeant Keith Henderson, and Officer Sean Patterson, ultimately pinned Mr. Gammage face-down on the pavement. After several minutes, the officers’ use of force suffocated Mr. Gammage and he died.

On November 27, 1995, Mr. Mulholland and Mr. Votjas were charged with third-degree murder, and Mr. Albert was charged with involuntary manslaughter. The charges against Mr. Mullholland and Mr. Votjas were later reduced to involuntary manslaughter. Mr. Henderson and Mr. Patterson were not charged in the incident.

Officer Votjas was acquitted by an all-white jury and, a year later, promoted to sergeant; Judge Joseph McCloskey dismissed charges against Mr. Mulholland and Mr. Albert after two trials resulted in mistrials. In January 1996, Brentwood police chief Wayne Babish, who had called for a complete investigation into Mr. Gammage’s death, was fired by the Brentwood City Council for failing to support the charged officers.

Multiple public protests were held in Pittsburgh and elsewhere, calling for “Justice for Jonny” and federal intervention. However, in 1999 the Department of Justice declined to file civil rights charges, stating that there was not enough evidence that unreasonable force had been used.

Tarrant County Sheriff Carl Smith and Deputy Tom Snow shot David Bunn, a handcuffed Black man, as he fled to escape a white lynch mob.

Four days before these officers shot Mr. Bunn, white mobs made three separate attempts to lynch him. On October 7, a mob of over 500 white men, women, and children surrounded the Tarrant County Jail, where Sheriff Carl Smith stood guard. The mob selected a committee of 15 white men to carry out the lynching, and Sheriff Smith permitted them to enter the jail. Finding no evidence of Mr. Bunn in that jail, the crowd selected a new lynching committee, whose members broke into the Fort Worth City Jail. After inspecting that jail and failing to locate Mr. Bunn, 21 white men got in their cars and drove across the county line to Dallas, intent on seizing Mr. Bunn from the Dallas County Jail and lynching him, but they failed in their attempt.

Threats of a future lynching continued to circulate in Dallas and Tarrant counties over the next several days. Sheriff Smith and Deputy Snow knew that white mobs intended to kidnap and lynch Mr. Bunn as they transported him from the Dallas County Jail to the Tarrant County Courthouse, so they planned to move him in the early morning hours, allegedly to avoid detection.

At 2:30 am on the morning of October 11, the officers handcuffed Mr. Bunn and loaded him into a police car. Mr. Bunn sat in terror as they drove, even saying to the officers that he feared being lynched. As they crossed the county line near Arlington, Sheriff Smith observed four automobiles approaching, and identified these vehicles as members of the lynch mob, saying to Mr. Bunn “I think that’s them…”

Fearing for his life, Mr. Bunn jumped, in handcuffs, from the police car. Rather than capture Mr. Bunn and return him to their car, Sheriff Smith and Deputy Snow shot and killed him as the mob approached. Four bullets were lodged in his body before Mr. Bunn fell into a roadside ditch and died. No one faced charges or accountability for Mr. Bunn’s murder.

Three Mexican nationals were killed in central California during cotton growers’ attempts to break a strike waged by roughly 15,000-18,000 cotton pickers and cotton gin workers. Roughly 95% of the strikers were Mexican migrant workers, whose pay had fallen more than 75% since 1930—even as the price of cotton rose 150% in 1932. The strikers were demanding pay of $1 per 100 pounds of cotton picked; the owners offered 60 cents.

Dolores Hernandez, a picker, and Delfino Davila, a Mexican consular representative, were shot and killed in Pixley, California, when at least 30 armed white ranchers confronted dozens of unarmed Mexican laborers who had gathered to hear one of the strike leaders speak. Eight other strikers were shot and wounded by the ranchers. Pedro Subia, the third person killed that day, was shot in a separate incident when other armed growers and police confronted strikers at a nearby farm; three other strikers were shot and wounded alongside Mr. Subia.

Days earlier, growers had tried to break the strike by evicting the Mexican workers and their families from housing on the growers’ property. When the workers and families maintained the strike and camped in nearby fields, growers conspired with local authorities and businesses to refuse them access to food. Even the federal government promised food aid only if the migrant farmworkers acceded to the growers’ demands; over the course of two weeks, seven children of strikers reportedly died from malnutrition.

The strike ended on October 26, 1933, when the growers agreed to pay strikers 75 cents per 100 pounds of cotton. In February 1934, eight ranchers standing trial for the murder of Dolores Hernandez and Delfino Davila were found not guilty by an all-white local jury. No one was ever tried for killing Pedro Subia.

A Black man named Bob Hudson was shot to death by a white lynch mob in Weakley County, Tennessee, near the town of Dresden. According to reports, Mr. Hudson’s wife filed charges of assault and battery against a white man, who was subsequently arrested and fined. In retaliation, 10 masked white men dragged Mrs. Hudson from her home and whipped her severely. When Mr. Hudson ran to his wife’s defense, the mob shot and killed him.

During this era of racial terrorism, white men committed sexual violence against Black women with impunity, while the most baseless fears of sexual contact between a Black man and white woman regularly resulted in deadly violence. Nearly one in four Black men lynched between 1877 to 1945 were accused of improper contact with a white woman. Meanwhile, white men were rarely arrested, let alone convicted or punished for assaulting Black women—or committing lynchings—and, as in this case, if Black people even dared to seek help from authorities, they could be subjected to lethal violence.

Including Bob Hudson, at least six African American victims of racial terror lynching were killed in Weakley County, Tennessee, between 1877 and 1950. Learn more about how over 6,500 Black women, men, and children were victims of racial terror lynching in the U.S. between 1865-1950.

In Birmingham, Alabama, Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor announced that a planned All-Star baseball game organized by Jackie Robinson—almost a decade after he integrated Major League Baseball—would not be permitted to play in the city. Mr. Robinson, who previously toured the country with an all-Black team, signed notable white players Al Rosen, Ralph Branca, and Gil Hodges to join the interracial All-Stars. Ten days before the game was to take place, Commissioner Connor notified the public that the event would be banned if white players were going to play because “there is a city ordinance that forbids mixed athletic events.”

Bull Connor was a notorious segregationist with close ties to the Ku Klux Klan, and this was one of many actions he would take during his tenure to resist integration. In addition, Mr. Connor facilitated—and in some cases ordered—acts of violence against peaceful protestors. In 1961, he allowed a white mob armed with pipes to attack the Freedom Riders, Black and white college students who rode buses through the South to challenge illegal segregation in interstate transportation. In 1963, the entire world witnessed Mr. Connor’s brutality when Martin Luther King Jr. came to Birmingham to lead a children’s protest against racial segregation. Mr. Connor ordered the fire department to blast nonviolent protestors—most of them children—with high-pressure firehoses and commanded police to attack them with batons and police dogs. Mr. Connor never repudiated his defense of white supremacy or denounced his use of police violence.

Jackie Robinson devoted his life not only to baseball, but also to the fight for civil rights and equality for all. After being the first Black player to integrate major league baseball and leading the Brooklyn Dodgers to the World Series, he devoted himself to civil rights causes in his retirement.

After careful consideration and discussions with members of the Birmingham community, Mr. Robinson decided to move forward with the game and bench the white players rather than cancel. This decision was partly made in response to fears that successfully shutting down the game entirely might help Mr. Connor win a bid for Birmingham mayor. The game did happen, with only Black players participating, and marked the intense resistance to racial integration that defined Alabama for generations.

Hundreds of Black Selma residents attempting to register to vote were met by state and local officials who used stalling and intimidation tactics to deny them that right and violence against supporters attempting to give them food and water as they waited in line.

In 1963, representatives of civil rights organizations such as the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Dallas County Voter’s League (DCVL) organized Black residents of Selma, Alabama, to challenge discriminatory voter registration practices. At the time, Dallas County was 58% Black, but less than 1% of eligible Black residents were registered to vote. During 1963, Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark met their voter registration efforts with harassment and violent resistance, joined by other local law enforcement officers and segregationist supporters who participated in violence against Black residents with impunity. Hundreds of Black residents were arrested, beaten, or threatened in Selma during the first half of 1963.

On the morning of October 7th, on what SNCC and DCVL called “Freedom Day,” 350 Black residents of Selma bravely lined up at the county courthouse—risking their livelihoods—and attempted to register to vote. The registrars intentionally slowed down the proceedings, limiting registration to only a few people every hour and ensuring that only a small handful of those waiting in line would be able to register. Sheriff Clark, his deputies, and supporters forbade Freedom Day participants from leaving the line to eat, drink, or use the restroom.

At 12:30 pm, a group of 40 state troopers arrived and assisted local law enforcement in intimidating the Freedom Day participants. Because those waiting to register to vote could not leave the line to eat or drink, at one point, a group of organizers attempted to bring food and water to the Black residents waiting in line. These organizers were beaten and shocked with cattle prods by the state and local officials. A reporter was also beaten by state troopers. Representatives of the FBI and the Department of Justice witnessed these unlawful attacks but did nothing to intervene.

Beth Humphrey, a white woman from Hammond, Louisiana, called Keith Bardwell, a white justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, to ask him to sign a license for her to marry Terence McKay, a Black man. Mr. Bardwell’s wife informed Ms. Humphrey that he would not sign a marriage license for an interracial couple.

Mr. Bardwell, a justice of the peace for over 30 years, later estimated he had denied marriage licenses to several interracial couples during the previous two and a half years. After his refusal was publicized and generated controversy, Mr. Bardwell defended his actions, insisting that he “does not believe in mixing races in that way.”

Ms. Humphrey expressed shock at Mr. Bardwell’s views: “That was one thing that made this so unbelievable. It’s not something you expect in this day and age.”

Throughout most of the 20th century, there were legal bans on interracial marriage. In 1967, in Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down such bans, holding that they violated the Equal Protection Clause. But resistance to enforcing this constitutional mandate was slow. The State of Alabama did not change the prohibition on interracial marriage in its constitution until 2000.

A white mob lynched four innocent Black men named Fulton Smith, Ray Field, Ben Givens, and Sam Duncan in Macclenny, Florida. According to news reports at the time, a prominent, young, white farmer named John Harvey was shot and killed at a turpentine camp near Macclenny on October 4. The suspected shooter, a young Black man named Jim Givens, fled immediately afterward and mobs of armed white men formed to pursue him. Mr. Givens’s brother, Ben Givens, and two other Black men connected to him—Mr. Smith and Mr. Field—were questioned and jailed during the search. Though there was no evidence or accusation that they had been involved in Mr. Harvey’s killing, they were held simply for having a connection to the man the mob wanted.

At around 1 am on October 5, a mob of about 50 white men overtook the jail, seized the three men from their cells, and took them to the outskirts of town, where they tied them to trees and shot them to death. A fourth Black man, Sam Duncan, was found shot to death nearby later in the day. He also had no ties to the killing of John Harvey, and was thought to have been killed by the mob simply for being a Black man who they encountered.

Three days later, the Chicago Defender, a Northern Black newspaper, reported that white mobs continued to search for Jim Givens while most of the Black community of Macclenny had fled the area in fear of further violent attacks.

Members of the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) voted to exclude Black players from competitions.

The ACBL was founded in 1937 and became the largest organization devoted to the card game in the U.S. White bridge organizations in this era strictly enforced racial segregation, forcing Black bridge players to create their own bridge association called the American Bridge Association (ABA). Racial exclusion was reinforced by laws in several states that officially banned card games between Black and white players.

In 1949, several Black bridge players applied for membership in the ACBL, challenging the organization’s “white only” policy. In response, the ACBL board of directors held a vote among its 28,000 members. Nearly 60% voted to reject allowing Black bridge players to be admitted.

The ACBL’s president said after the vote that his organization “is not a political organization but is primarily social in character. Social customs are based on public opinion and we do not seek either to perpetuate or to destroy them.”

It would be over a decade until the ACBL began allowing Black players to compete, at first only in select events. In 1962, a Black bridge player named Joseph L. Henry, a top player in the ABA who had coordinated the effort to integrate the ACBL, led a team to the ACBL national title. The ACBL did not formally open its membership to Black players in all of its events until 1967.

Long after laws banning interracial games and sporting events were declared unconstitutional, many social clubs and associations, especially those most popular among upper-income white people, maintained segregated membership. For example, some of the U.S.’s most prominent golf clubs—including Augusta National, the home of the Masters Tournament—did not begin allowing Black members until the 1990s.

Frank Wigfall, a Black man who had been threatened with mob violence at a Wyoming jail, was moved to the state penitentiary for “safe keeping” where he was soon lynched by 100 white prisoners.

Mr. Wigfall had been accused of assaulting a white woman and was taken to the Carbon County Jail. During the era of racial terror lynchings, charges of sexual assault against Black men, even when made with unsubstantiated evidence, regularly aroused violent white mobs. Shortly after his detention at the jail, a white mob attempted to seize Mr. Wigfall to lynch him. In response, the local Sheriff transferred him from the county jail to the state penitentiary for “safe keeping.” The next morning, 100 white prisoners attacked Mr. Wigfall while he was getting his breakfast, one of them producing a rope, and they proceeded to hang him from the balcony inside the state penitentiary.

The white inmates had been shouting their intentions to lynch Mr. Wigfall from their cells all morning. Notwithstanding their repeated threats, the prison provided no security, which allowed 100 white prisoners to abduct Mr. Wigfall before hanging him by a rope. No one was held accountable for Mr. Wigfall’s death although it was widely known which prison officials and prisoners were culpable.

Mr. Wigfall was one of at least four documented racial terror lynchings in Wyoming.

White neighbors violently attacked a house in Greeley, Colorado, where six Black students who were enrolled at a teachers college lived with their house mother. The assailants threw bricks, fired gunshots at the building, and used iron bars to smash the windows and screens on the house, terrorizing the Black women inside. The attack took place at 2 am and the women had been living in the house for less than a week.

Before the assault, an “indignation meeting” had been organized by white residents in the area who objected to these Black women living in the neighborhood. White residents said that these were the first Black residents to rent a house in the area and they objected to the college housing students in the neighborhood despite the college’s presence in the same area. After the attack, all seven Black women fled and relocated to another area. No one was ever charged for the racially motivated attack on these women inside their home.

This attack on seven Black women in Greeley is one of thousands of instances throughout American history where white Americans have terrorized Black people in their homes to maintain racial segregation. Throughout the Jim Crow era, white people used intimidation, physical force, and the threat of lethal violence to prevent integration in American neighborhoods and to stifle the political, social, and economic conditions of Black Americans.

Sampson County, North Carolina, Sheriff C.C. Tart arrested a young Black woman for helping Andrew Troublefield, a 21-year-old Black man, avoid being lynched. The previous day two white women accused Mr. Troublefield of assault. Without verifying the women’s stories, Sheriff Tart led a mob of 500 white people in pursuit of Mr. Troublefield with the intention, as newspapers reported, to lynch him without trial if he was caught. A young Black woman who saw the mob on its way shouted after Mr. Troublefield as he fled, attempting to warn him. Sheriff Tart arrested and detained this woman for her efforts. He also arrested Mr. Troublefield’s younger brother, who encouraged him to flee from the mob.

Black people were often prosecuted or even lynched for complaining about white mob violence or assisting other Black people in avoiding lynch mobs. Mary Turner was lynched in Georgia in 1918 for complaining about the lynching of her husband. Jim Cross condemned a lynching in Letohatchee, Alabama, in 1900, and a white mob came to his house and lynched him, his wife, and both of his children. Criminal prosecution, threat, and violence were tactics used to insulate perpetrators of racial terror lynchings from accountability.

The Sampson County lynch mob grew to over 1,000 white people. They spent over a week in the woods searching for Mr. Troublefield, until police from neighboring Wayne County arrested him on October 8. Wayne County’s chief of police transferred Mr. Troublefield directly to North Carolina’s death row, despite him being convicted of no crime at the time. Mr. Troublefield remained on death row until his trial in February.

On February 15, 1940, Judge R. Parker sentenced Mr. Troublefield to 30 years in prison for attempted rape. The conviction rested entirely on the testimony of the two alleged victims. During the trial, white mobs stood on the courthouse lawn, demanding a more severe sentence and grumbling about “what ought to have been done” to Mr. Troublefield. Threats of violence continued as the highway patrol transported Mr. Troublefield back to Central Prison in Raleigh. Neither the Sheriff nor any of the mob leaders were ever held accountable for this attempted lynching.

Racial terror lynchings and near lynchings inflicted massive trauma on entire Black communities. White mobs acted with impunity, lynching entire families, conducting lynchings in public, and terrorizing Black people who tried to help their neighbors. Perpetrators of these lynchings hoped to keep Black people in a state of perpetual fear and subordination.

Approximately 100 Black farmers attended a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America at a church in Phillips County, Arkansas. Many of the farmers were sharecroppers on white-owned plantations in the area, and the meeting was held to discuss ways they could organize to demand fairer payments for their crops.

Black labor unions such as the Progressive Farmers were deeply resented among white landowners throughout the country because unions threatened to weaken white aristocratic power. The union also made efforts to subvert racial divisions in labor relations and had hired a white attorney to negotiate with land owners for better cotton prices.

Knowing that Black union organizing often attracted opposition, Black men stood as armed guards around the church while the Phillips County meeting took place. When a group of white people from the Missouri-Pacific Railroad attempted to intrude and spy on the meeting, the guards held them back and a shootout erupted. At least two white men were killed, and enraged white mobs quickly formed.

The mobs descended on the nearby Black town of Elaine, Arkansas, destroying homes and businesses and attacking any Black people in their path over the coming days. Terrified Black residents, including women, children, and the elderly, fled their homes and hid for their lives in nearby woods and fields. A responding federal troop regiment claimed only two Black people were killed, but many reports challenged the white soldiers’ credibility and accused them of participating in the massacre. Today, historians estimate hundreds of Black people were killed in the massacre.

When the violence was quelled, 67 Black people were arrested and charged with inciting violence, while dozens more faced other charges. No white attackers were prosecuted, but 12 Black union members convicted of riot-related charges were sentenced to death. The NAACP, along with local African American lawyer Scipio Africanus Jones, represented the men on appeal and successfully obtained reversals of all of their death sentences.

The Alabama legislature passed a law forbidding “white female nurses” from working “in wards or rooms in hospitals, either public or private in which negro men are placed for treatment, or to be nursed.”

The Jim Crow racial segregation laws enacted and enforced in the American South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries enforced the strict boundaries of a legalized racial caste system and worked to restore and maintain white supremacy in the region. Even after the Civil War and Reconstruction amendments had ended slavery and declared Black people to be citizens with civil rights and the power to vote, many Southern state and local lawmakers passed laws forbidding Black and white people from playing checkers or pool together, entering a circus through the same entrance, or being buried in the same cemetery.

In some instances, these laws interfered with the provision of very important services, including education and health care. The statute mandated segregated nursing and threatened violators with a fine of $10-$200 and up to six months incarceration or hard labor. Learn more about these laws here.

Today, historians acknowledge that Black patients of the Jim Crow era were often relegated to overcrowded, under-resourced basement wards in segregated hospitals—and sometimes denied care altogether. In the neighboring state of Georgia in 1931, two Black women injured in a car accident died from their injuries after the local hospital refused them care due to their race. At a time when many institutional barriers limited the number of Black people able to become doctors and nurses in Alabama, and restricted them from practicing in most state hospitals and other medical facilities, laws like this one inflicted further harm on Black people in need of care.

Racialized political violence erupted in Opelousas, Louisiana, when white residents resentful of African Americans’ new voting rights attacked and killed dozens of people.

When Louisiana voters took to the polls in April 1868, most voted to accept the new Reconstruction constitution and supported Union-loyalist Republic politicians in local elections. St. Landry Parish was an anomaly; voters there rejected the constitution and supported white supremacist, former Confederate Democratic candidates—but the narrow margins showed the community’s white voters that they shared the ballot box with a large, politically powerful Black electorate.

After half-hearted efforts to sway Black voters to the white-controlled Democratic party failed, many white voters in St. Landry resorted to violent intimidation tactics. In response, Republicans like Emerson Bentley, a white journalist who published the radical St. Landry Progress newspaper, organized and encouraged Black people to become politically active. Racial and political tensions continued to escalate as the 1868 presidential election neared.

On September 28, a group of local white men threatened and then physically attacked Mr. Bentley in Opelousas, the parish seat, while he was teaching at a local school he had helped to establish for Black children. The students fled, shouting, and in the confusion, many Black people in the streets wrongly believed Mr. Bentley had been killed. Fearing they were next, Black men in the community armed themselves for protection and 27 were soon arrested by white mobs.

The next night, the white mob marched these 27 Black men from jail and shot them dead, with the sheriff’s full cooperation. For the next two weeks, murderous violence swept the parish as white mobs terrorized the Black community. The fear was so great that Black people stayed off the streets and tied red strings around their arms to signify to white patrols that they had surrendered and sought white protection. When the attacks subsided, at least six white people had been killed, three Republican and three Democrat, while an estimated 200 Black people were dead.

As a means of political and racial intimidation, the Opelousas Massacre was very effective, terrorizing Black voters into silence. St. Landry was one of the few Louisiana parishes not politically controlled by Republicans by late 1868. Mr. Bentley and other white Radical Republicans fled the area, leaving a solidly Democratic white electorate, while Black voters had learned the consequences of opposing white political will. In the November 1868 presidential election, held just weeks after the massacre and just a few months after St. Landry’s Black voters had solidly supported Republican candidates in state and local races, Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant did not receive a single vote.

Following violent resistance and political conflict from the white community over attempts to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, city residents voted to close local public schools rather than comply with federal desegregation orders.

After the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, school boards across the country were ordered to draft desegregation plans. The school board in Little Rock, Arkansas, drafted a plan for small numbers of Black students to begin attending previously all-white schools during the 1957-1958 school year. But when nine Black students, known as the Little Rock Nine, made their way to Central High School for the first day of classes in September 1957, they were met by angry crowds and the Arkansas National Guard blocked their entry. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus encouraged the protestors and did everything in his power to hinder integration. Eventually, President Dwight Eisenhower deployed federal troops to Arkansas and commanded the Arkansas National Guard to escort the students to school.

Still committed to resisting integration, Governor Faubus devised another plan. After the academic year ended in spring 1958, the Little Rock School Board petitioned the federal court for a delay in the implementation of its desegregation plan, and was granted a waiver until 1961. The NAACP promptly appealed and the case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In September 1958, the Court overturned the granted delay and ordered Little Rock to integrate immediately.

In anticipation of such a development, the Arkansas Legislature had recently passed a law allowing Governor Faubus to close public schools as an emergency measure, and later hold a special election to determine public support. Immediately after the Supreme Court released its decision, the governor put the new law to use, ordering four public high schools closed. Shortly after, in a vote on September 27, an overwhelming majority of voters (19,470 to 7,561) supported continuing the school closure rather than integrating. The schools would remain closed for the entire 1958-1959 academic term, known as “the lost year.” Following the schools’ closures, voters continued to support Governor Faubus; he was re-elected four times and served as Governor until 1967.

The massive resistance by the white community was largely successful in preventing integration of schools in the South. In the five Deep South states, every single one of 1.4 million Black schoolchildren attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960. By the start of the 1964-65 school year, less than 3% of the South’s African American children attended school with white students, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina that number remained substantially below 1%. In 1967, 13 years after Brown, a report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights observed that white violence and intimidation against Black people “continues to be a deterrent to school desegregation.”

The Alabama Supreme Court upheld the contempt conviction of Mary Hamilton, a Black woman who was demeaned in court by a white prosecutor. The prosecutor refused to use the word “Miss” when addressing Ms. Hamilton, and insisted on calling her by her first name, a practice that was widely used in the American South to demean and disrespect Black people.

In June 1963, Mary Hamilton was a field secretary for the Congress of Racial Equality in Alabama, and one of hundreds of activists arrested during civil rights protests in the city of Gadsden. At a court hearing to determine the legitimacy of those arrests, Ms. Hamilton took the witness stand for questioning. When Etowah County Solicitor William Rayburn addressed her by her first name only, after addressing earlier white witnesses as “Miss,” Ms. Hamilton refused to answer and Judge A.B. Cunningham held her in contempt.

‘Q What is your name, please?
‘A Miss Mary Hamilton.
‘Q Mary, I believe—you were arrested—who were you arrested by?
‘A My name is Miss Hamilton. Please address me correctly.
‘Q Who were you arrested by, Mary?
‘A I will not answer a question——
‘BY ATTORNEY AMAKER: The witness’s name is Miss Hamilton.
‘A —your question until I am addressed correctly.
‘THE COURT: Answer the question.
‘THE WITNESS: I will not answer them unless I am addressed correctly.
‘THE COURT: You are in contempt of court——
‘ATTORNEY CONLEY: Your Honor—your Honor——
‘THE COURT: You are in contempt of this court, and you are sentenced to five days in jail and a fifty dollar fine.’

Ms. Hamilton served the jail time but refused to pay the fine and was allowed out on bond to appeal the conviction. The Alabama Supreme Court—a panel of all-white justices—upheld the conviction unanimously.

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court and urged the nation’s highest court to take action. “Petitioner’s reaction to being called ‘Mary’ in a court room where, if white, she would be called ‘Miss Hamilton,’ was not thin-skinned sensitivity,” LDF lawyers argued in their written filings. “She was responding to one of the most distinct indicia of the racial caste system. This is the refusal of whites to address Negroes with titles of respect.”

In March 1964, with three of nine justices dissenting, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Ms. Hamilton’s contempt citation.

In the early hours of September 25, 1962, St. Matthew Baptist Church in Macon, Georgia, was burned to the ground. Though there was no conclusive evidence that the fire was intentionally set or racially motivated, St. Matthew—which had served its Black congregation for nearly a decade—was the latest in a long list of Black churches attacked in the U.S. In the past few weeks in Georgia alone, four other Black churches had been destroyed by fire.

During the civil rights era, Black churches were well-established social and political spaces that served as organizational and meeting headquarters for African Americans fighting against racial segregation and oppression. In the course of that activism, Black churches became the targets of racially-motivated violence. Churches in Montgomery and Birmingham in Alabama were sites of highly-publicized and, in some cases, deadly bombings that aimed to thwart civil rights efforts and terrorize the entire Black community. The most infamous example of racist church destruction occurred on September 15, 1963, when the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was fire-bombed, killing four young Black girls attending Sunday school services.

By the late 1990s, at least 80 Black churches had been burned, firebombed, or vandalized. “In the African American community,” the Department of Justice noted in a 1998 report on church arson, “the church historically has been a primary community institution, so… it was decidedly disturbing to see the number of churches being burned.”

In November 2008, hours after the election of President Barack Obama, the Macedonia Church of God in Christ in Springfield, Massachusetts, was burned to the ground by three white men. Two of the men later admitted to dousing the partially-built church with gas and setting it aflame to denounce the election of the nation’s first Black president.

A decade after Brown v. Board of Education ruled that schools must be racially integrated, a crowd of at least 7,500 demonstrators, almost all of whom were white, marched outside New York City Hall to protest a policy aimed at increasing racial integration in the city’s public school system. The protest was organized by two groups formed by white parents: the Parents and Taxpayers Coordinating Council and the Joint Council for Better Education.

The protestors arrived at City Hall with placards to picket against the Board of Education’s decision to institute a compulsory busing program, transferring students to and from only eight elementary schools in the New York City area; four of these schools had mostly white students and four were predominantly Black.

The week prior, the same two groups of white parents sponsored a two-day school boycott at the start of the school year to protest the busing policy. During the boycott, pupil absences were more than double the usual number. The boycott resulted in the loss of $1.6 million in school aid to the New York City public school system because the aid, “intended to compensate communities with rising school populations,” was calculated on the basis of the number of students in attendance at the start of September.

Outside City Hall on September 24, the crowd carried signs that read “we’d rather fight than bus.” The executive secretary of the Parents and Taxpayers Coordinating Council, a white woman named Rosemary Gunning, argued that they were “asking only that the [City] Council take a position in favor of the traditional neighborhood school concept.” Protestors attempted to storm the City Hall after the council members inside voted to uphold the busing initiative, but they were stopped by the police.

An all-white jury in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, acquitted Roy Bryant and John Milam, the two white men who murdered Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy. Despite the fact that Black citizens comprised over 63% of Tallahatchie County’s population, not a single Black person served on the jury. Under state law, only registered voters qualified as jurors, and not one Black citizen in Tallahatchie County was able to register to vote at the time.

During the summer of 1955, Emmett Till traveled from Chicago to Mississippi to visit his family. One day, Emmett and a group of friends and cousins went to a local store to buy candy. Emmett was later accused of acting “familiar” with the young white female storekeeper, Carolyn Bryant. In response, Roy Bryant, Carolyn’s husband, and John Milam, Mr. Bryant’s half-brother, abducted Emmett from his great-uncle’s home. The men drove Emmett to a storage shed on Milam’s property in Drew, Mississippi, where they took turns torturing and beating him with a pistol, before forcing him to load a 74-pound fan into the back of their pick-up truck. The men then drove Emmett to the edge of the Tallahatchie River, ordered him to remove his clothes, and shot him in the head. Once the child was dead, Bryant and Milam chained the fan to his corpse and rolled it into the river.

At trial, several Black witnesses bravely testified for the State against Mr. Bryant and Mr. Milam, despite threats on their life if they dared to testify, including Mose Wright, who testified that Mr. Bryant and Mr. Milam were the men that took Emmett Till from his home. Emmett’s mother, Mamie Bradley, also courageously traveled from Chicago to attend the trial and identify her son’s body.

Mrs. Bryant testified as well, describing the alleged harassment, including a man trying to hold her hand and whistle at her, and identifying the person responsible as a Black man, but refusing to identify Emmett by name. In asking the jury to acquit, defense lawyers called the State’s theory of motive “illogical,” despite the fact that white mobs in the South had murdered hundreds of Black men accused of similar conduct, with little to no evidence of guilt.

Lawyers for the defense and the prosecution appealed to white jurors’ commitment to racial hierarchy. Defense lawyer John Whitten accused civil rights groups of planting Emmett’s body in the river as a challenge to the “Southern way of life.” District Attorney Gerald Chatham told the jury that Emmett deserved punishment for “insulting white womanhood,” but argued that Mr. Bryant should have limited his vengeance to “beating [him] with a razor strap.”

The jury only deliberated 67 minutes before returning a verdict of not guilty. One juror later said: “We wouldn’t have taken so long if we hadn’t stopped to drink pop.”

After local newspapers reported sensational allegations that several white women had been assaulted by Black men, mobs of angry white men gathered in the streets of Atlanta, Georgia, to attack and kill Black men on sight. The mobs seized Black men on streetcars, trapping them inside and shooting or beating them to death. When the streetcars suspended service due to the violence, the rioting mobs ransacked Black businesses and chased, beat, and shot Black men wherever they could find them. The police and fire departments called upon to quell the unrest failed to restore order, and the militia was unable to stop the violence.

In a public statement during the rioting, Atlanta Mayor James Woodward placed blame on the Black men being killed rather than the white men doing the killing. “The only remedy is to remove the cause,” Woodward said. “As long as the Black brutes assault our white women, just so long will they be unceremoniously dealt with.”

Mayor Woodward’s statement empowered the mobs, and the massacre continued. For a total of four days, Black people were violently terrorized throughout Atlanta and its surroundings with little protection from authorities. In contrast, when Black citizens of the nearby Brownsville suburb attempted to arm themselves in defense, Georgia troops raided their homes, taking weapons and arresting those in possession of weapons. After four days of riots, at least 25 people were dead and countless more were injured.

The State of Georgia executed Troy Davis despite evidence of his innocence. Mr. Davis, a Black man, was sentenced to death in the 1989 fatal shooting of white off-duty police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah, Georgia. Supporters of Mr. Davis, including the NAACP, Amnesty International, former President Jimmy Carter, and Pope Benedict XVI, had been encouraged by a 2009 U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing Mr. Davis to present evidence of his innocence in court. But when the federal trial judge denied relief, the Supreme Court refused to review the case and an execution date was set.

In Georgia, the state Board of Pardons and Paroles—not the governor—has exclusive authority to grant clemency. Two days before Mr. Davis’s scheduled execution, the board held a full clemency hearing and heard statements from Mr. Davis’s attorneys and supporters, prosecutors, and the victim’s family. By that time, seven of the prosecution’s nine key witnesses against Mr. Davis had either recanted or backed off their trial testimony, while new witnesses had come forward to give sworn statements that a different person had confessed to the shooting.

The new evidence of Mr. Davis’s innocence was so compelling that three of the original jurors who sentenced him to death in 1991 urged the board to stop the execution. In addition, more than 600,000 people worldwide signed petitions supporting clemency, and expressed concerns that executing a man amid so much uncertainty about his guilt would deeply undermine the public’s confidence in the justice system.

Despite these developments and broad-based support, Georgia’s Board of Pardons and Parole denied clemency on September 20, 2011, clearing the way for Troy Davis to be executed the next day. In his final words, Mr. Davis professed his innocence, expressed condolences to Officer MacPhail’s family, and expressed appreciation to his family and supporters. Mr. Davis was executed by lethal injection on September 21 and pronounced dead at 11:08 pm. He was 42 years old.

At least 15,000 protesters, including celebrities and civil rights activists, came together in Jena, Louisiana, to show solidarity with six local Black high school students facing serious criminal charges after a conflict with white classmates.

At the beginning of the 2006 school year, a Black student at Jena High School sat under a large tree where white students typically congregated. The next day, several white students hung nooses in the tree and were written up for the expression of racial animus. Officials initially recommended that the white students be expelled, but the school board later reduced their punishment to a short suspension. Following the noose incident, racial tensions on campus increased and confrontations among the school’s 90% white and 10% Black student body grew frequent.

At school on December 4, a white student was bragging to his friends about a weekend fight in which a Black student had been beaten by a white man. Several Black students overheard the white student’s comments and confronted him in a fight that turned physical. In the end, the white student suffered a concussion, swelling to his eye, and minor injuries to his face, neck, and hands. Six Black students were arrested and charged with aggravated assault. When the district attorney upgraded the charges to attempted murder despite the student’s relatively minor injuries, the case drew national attention. Many throughout the country decried the unfairly harsh treatment of the “Jena 6” and criticized the school district’s insufficient response to the earlier noose incident.

“It is sobering to know that in 2007, Martin Luther King’s dream of equal treatment, respect, fairness and opportunity is still not realized,” said Darryl Matthews, one of many speakers at the September 20 protest and then-General President of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. Though the Black students’ charges were later reduced, and five of the six ultimately received no jail time, the case continued to be a symbol of the criminalization of Black youth and the school-to-prison pipeline.

As Black politicians and supporters held a peaceful political rally, mobs of white people in Camilla, Georgia, led by the sheriff, opened fire, killing at least seven Black people, including a Black mother and her infant child, in a mass lynching, and assaulting and wounding at least 30 others. The political rally, which started in Albany, Georgia, and culminated in Camilla, Georgia, was held to protest the expulsion of Black elected officials from the Georgia Assembly. In an effort to terrorize Black communities further, over the weeks following the massacre, white men from Camilla and the surrounding areas intimidated and assaulted Black people throughout the Georgia countryside, threatening to kill any Black person who dared to vote in the next election.

In the period after the Civil War, Black men seized new opportunities for political power by exercising their right to vote, running for office, and holding political positions. In an effort to uphold racial hierarchy, white state legislators devised a strategy to purge the Georgia Assembly of the 33 Black and mixed race men who had been democratically elected. On September 3, ignoring the results of the democratic process, the white majority successfully voted to expel all Black and mixed race lawmakers from the Assembly.

On the morning of September 19, one of the expelled Black lawmakers named Philip Joiner organized a 25-mile peaceful march from Albany, Georgia, to the town of Camilla, Georgia. The group, composed of a few hundred people, marched with a plan to deliver political speeches in Camilla. An armed white man and the sheriff met them outside town and warned them that white residents were prepared to respond with violence if they honored their speaking engagement. When the men refused to be intimidated, the sheriff informed them that “the people would not allow Radical[s] to speak at Camilla.”

By the time the group reached the courthouse square in Camilla, they were met by the sheriff who, instead of protecting their constitutional right to assembly, had mobilized white men in Camilla to ambush the group. Stationed outside of storefronts and surrounding the courthouse square, armed white men shot at the lawmakers and their supporters, and then pursued them with bloodhounds, horses, and shotguns for 10 miles outside of Camilla. Eyewitness accounts later recounted that shots were fired at Black people as they ran for cover in the woods outside town and even those already wounded or dead on the ground were shot repeatedly.

By the end of this mass lynching, at least seven Black people lay dead. At least 30 more people were wounded. One 20-year-old Black man reported that after being pursued by a group of armed white men into a ditch, he was struck on the head with a gun and forced to go back to Camilla to pick up the bodies before he escaped.

The Camilla Massacre not only took the lives of Black people on September 19, but traumatized Black communities and served as a deterrent to those who dared to exercise their political rights.

The NAACP and the governor of Pennsylvania publicly denounced remarks by Johnstown, Pennsylvania, Mayor Joseph Cauffiel, who had threatened Black and Mexican migrants, telling them to leave town or risk violence.

This was a period of migration within the U.S., as many African Americans began to move out of the South to the West and North, seeking work in industrial factories and refuge from the racial violence and discrimination so prevalent in the South. The Black population of Johnstown had more than tripled over the course of a decade, growing from fewer than 500 people in 1910 to more than 1,600 in 1920—and the growth was continuing. The Mexican immigrant community in Johnstown was smaller, but also growing, and many white residents resented both.

When a Black man killed several law enforcement officers in a Johnstown shootout in August 1923, growing white intolerance toward the Black newcomers came to a head. In late August, Mayor Joseph Cauffiel publicly announced that all Black and Mexican residents who had lived in Johnstown for fewer than seven years had to leave town “for their own safety”—implying that they would be targeted with violence if they chose to stay.

Later criticized for his remarks, Cauffiel defended his actions as justified. “We have been sitting on a bomb in this city… I feared an outbreak against the negroes unless I acted quickly,” he said. “Many of the newcomers were bad people, including ex-convicts.” The NAACP protested and urged Governor Gifford Pinchot to take action, while the Mexican Embassy also pressured state officials to respond. On September 18, the governor sent the NAACP a telegram vowing that “the whole power of this Commonwealth will be used, if necessary, to maintain constitutional rights” in Johnstown.

Mayor Cauffiel then backtracked on his statements, claiming that he had meant to make a mere “suggestion.” But by that time, over 2,000 families had fled in fear. No attempt was made to facilitate their return or compensate them for their losses. Such backlash against African Americans and other non-white communities in the North became more prominent in the years following the great migration, during which demographic shifts brought latent tensions to the forefront.

The Virginia Assembly sentenced Hugh Davis, a white man, to be whipped for having a relationship with a Black person. According to records, the Assembly asserted that Mr. Davis “abus[ed] himself to the dishonor of God and shame of Christians, by defiling his body in lying with a negro.” Mr. Davis was sentenced to public whipping in front of an audience of Black people, which some historians argue was intended to serve as an example to the Black population. Some evidence suggests that Mr. Davis’s partner may have been a Black man, which could have provided additional motivation for the harsh punishment imposed.

Hugh Davis’s case is the first known time Virginia authorities punished an individual for interracial sexual relations, but not the last. Throughout the rest of the 17th century, documentation shows that a number of other people—Black and white, enslaved and free—were punished for the same behavior in Virginia. Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and other territories also enforced prohibitions on interracial relationships during this era.

In the first decades after enslaved Africans arrived in the English Colonies, authorities worked to establish white supremacy as law, racial difference as legal fact, and enslavement as a permanent, hereditary status centrally tied to race. All of those goals required the maintenance of a strict racial hierarchy that, while often allowing the sexual exploitation and abuse of Black men and women by white enslavers, did not condone sexual relationships between Black and white partners interacting as equals.

In 1691, the Virginia Assembly officially moved beyond regulating sexual relations and explicitly outlawed marriage between free white and free Black people. This prohibition remained in effect for nearly 300 years and was enforced well into the 20th century. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court held that laws prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia, bringing to an end more than three centuries of anti-miscegenation laws that began with the case of Hugh Davis.

A Category 4 hurricane with winds of 140 miles per hour made landfall in Palm Beach County, Florida. The hurricane destroyed a levee that protected a number of small, low-lying farming communities from the waters of Lake Okeechobee. Water from Lake Okeechobee rushed in when the levee was destroyed, killing thousands. Most residents in these areas were Black migrant farm workers.

After the hurricane, Black survivors were forced to recover the bodies of those killed. The officials in charge of the recovery effort ordered that food would be provided only to those who worked, and some people who refused to work were shot.

The bodies of white storm victims were buried in coffins in local cemeteries, but local officials refused to provide coffins or proper burials for Black victims. Instead, their corpses were stacked in piles by the side of the roads, doused in fuel oil, and burned. Authorities bulldozed the bodies of 674 Black victims into a mass grave in West Palm Beach. The mass grave was not marked, and the site was later sold for private industrial use—first used as a garbage dump, then a slaughterhouse, and then a sewage treatment plant.

The city of West Palm Beach purchased the land containing the mass grave in 2000. Eight years later, on the 80th anniversary of the storm, officials erected a plaque and historical marker at the site.

On the morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, a white man was seen placing a box under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Shortly afterward, the explosives inside detonated, devastating the church building and the 400 congregants inside. Parents rushed to the Sunday school classroom to check on their children and soon discovered that four young girls had been killed in the blast: Denise McNair (11), Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Robertson (14), and Cynthia Wesley (14). More than 20 others were injured.

In 1963, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was the largest Black church in Birmingham, Alabama, and served as a meeting place for civil rights activities. As demonstrations to desegregate public spaces and secure Black voting rights became more frequent and visible, meeting places like the church became targets for white segregationists looking to terrorize Black activists and their supporters.

Immediately after the bombing, violence surged throughout the city as police clashed with enraged members of the Black community. Before the day ended, at least two other African American children had been slain: 16-year-old Johnny Robinson was shot by police as he fled down an alley, and 13-year-old Virgil Ware was shot and killed by white youths while riding his bicycle.

More than a decade later, in 1977, Ku Klux Klan leader Robert Chambliss was convicted of murder for participating in the church bombing and later died in prison. Several decades later, in the early 2000s, Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton were also convicted of murder for their roles in the bombing; both men were sentenced to life imprisonment.

1,500 members of the White League—a militia of Confederate veterans opposed to the civil rights goals of Reconstruction—attacked New Orleans and overthrew the Louisiana government. Two years before, a pro-Reconstruction politician named William Pitt Kellogg was elected governor of Louisiana, largely on the strength of his support among African American voters. That same year, Caesar Carpenter Antoine, an African American man, was elected lieutenant governor.

The electoral success of the integrated Kellogg-Antoine ticket angered many white men committed to white supremacy. Attempts to overthrow the elected government began nearly as soon as Governor Kellogg and Lt. Governor Antoine took office in 1873, and continued into the next year. During the summer of 1874, Frederick Nash Ogden, a former colonel in the Confederate army, began to organize an armed resistance force that became known as the White League. On September 14, they made their move.

After cutting the city’s telegraph lines and killing at least 13 members of the integrated New Orleans police force, the White League overran the state house and attempted to establish a new government. After three days, President Ulysses S. Grant ordered the U.S. Army to put down the rebellion and the elected government was restored. Though unsuccessful, the attempted coup was emblematic of the political violence that occurred during Reconstruction—and white Southerners’ attempts to overthrow elected, integrated governments and restore white supremacy under law foreshadowed a nearing future.

After Reconstruction ended prematurely in 1877 as part of a political compromise, former Confederates regained control of state government and implemented laws and policies to suppress Black political power. In 1891, the new power structure installed a monument celebrating the 1874 coup attempt as the “overthrow of carpetbag government ousting the usurpers.”

In 1974, a marker was placed near the monument to express how it did not reflect the city’s position on race relations. In July 2015, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu proposed removing the monument and by December of that same year, the New Orleans City Council voted in agreement. The monument was finally removed on April 24, 2017.

The Michigan Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church voted against ordaining Black bishops. The vote denied Black clergy leadership positions even within predominantly Black congregations. Delegates expressed concern that Black bishops may eventually lead white congregations and claimed that the moral inferiority of Black people required Black preachers to submit to white spiritual leadership.

Early Methodists actually supported the abolition of slavery and preached a theology of egalitarianism that resonated with free and enslaved Black people. By the late 1700s, Black Methodists comprised 24% of the church.

But white Methodist support for abolition did not last long. As Methodism spread across the South, enslavers resented Methodist teachings on human dignity and feared the opportunities that the church created for Black self-determination. They sought assurances from the church against disruption of the existing racial caste system.

The Methodist church complied, adopting policies against the ordination of Black clergy. The church further embraced an interpretation of the Bible that defended white supremacy and justified enslavement as God-ordained. In 1845, Southern Methodists separated and formed a new denomination, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, to preserve their ability to enslave fellow human beings. However, even after the split, Northern congregations continued to enforce policies that subordinated Black people, and worked to entrench segregation both inside and outside the church into the 20th Century.

White protestant congregations often played critical roles in defending slavery and institutionalizing Jim Crow segregation in the U.S.

250 Black students attempted to integrate Grenada, Mississippi, schools on the first day of class. Though it was 12 years after the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling held racially-segregated public schooling unconstitutional, the city of Grenada, Mississippi, had not stopped operating a segregated school system. In August 1966, a federal judge ordered Grenada officials to enroll African American students in the formerly white-only schools, and approximately 450 students had enrolled by the start of the 1966 school year.

On September 2, the school district postponed the start of school by 10 days. During that time, white leaders tried to coerce African American parents into withdrawing their children from the white schools by threatening them with firing or eviction. As a result, 200 students withdrew.

When the remaining 250 Black students arrived for classes on September 12, a large white mob surrounded the school and turned them away. As the students retreated, members of the mob pursued them through the streets, beating them with chains, pipes, and clubs. At lunchtime, the mob returned to the school to attack the few Black students who had made it inside that morning. As the students left for lunch, members of the mob attacked them, leaving some hospitalized with broken bones. Some reporters covering the story were also beaten.

The mob violence continued for several days with no intervention from law enforcement. On September 16, a federal judge ordered protection for the students, and on September 17, 13 members of the mob were arrested by the FBI.

South Carolina officials met to rewrite the state constitution with the express purpose of disenfranchising the state’s African American voters and restoring white supremacy in all matters political. The convention’s most prominent figure was Benjamin Tillman, a senator and former governor affectionately nicknamed “Pitchfork Ben.” A renowned orator, Tillman spoke at great length during the convention.

“[A]ll that is necessary to bring about chaos,” he warned the convention delegates, “is for a sufficient number of white men, actuated by hate, or ambition, or from any unpatriotic motive, to climb up and cut it loose, mobilize and register the negroes, lead them and give them a free vote and fair count under manhood suffrage.” He continued:

The poor, ignorant cotton field hand, who never reaped any advantage, nor saw anything except a pistol, blindly followed like sheep wherever their Black and white leaders told them to go, voted unanimously every time for the Republican ticket during that dark period, and these results were achieved solely and wholly by reason of the ballot being in the hands of such cattle. Is the danger gone? No. How did we recover our liberty? By fraud and violence…How did we bring it about? Every white man sunk his personal feelings and ambitions. The white people of the State, illustrating our glorious motto, “Ready with their lives and fortunes.” came together as one. By fraud and violence, if you please, we threw it off. In 1878 we had to resort to more fraud and violence, and so again in 1880. Then the Registration Law and eight-box system was evolved from the superior intelligence of the white man to check and control this surging, muddy stream of ignorance…

The delegates followed Ben Tillman’s guidance and enacted a constitution that effectively disenfranchised Black residents, with little federal interference, for nearly 70 years. Today, a statue of Tillman stands in front of the South Carolina State House and his name adorns a number of buildings throughout the state—including the main building on the campus of Clemson University.

White students began to withdraw from the newly integrated Tuskegee High School in Alabama to avoid attending school with Black students. Within one week, all 275 white students had stopped attending the school.

In January 1963, African American parents of students in Macon County, Alabama, sued the Macon County Board of Education to desegregate the county’s public schools. Though the U.S. Supreme Court had declared school segregation unconstitutional nearly nine years earlier in Brown v. Board of Education, Macon County had taken no steps to integrate local schools. In August 1963, a federal court ordered the school board to begin integration immediately.

The school board selected 13 African American students to integrate Tuskegee High School that fall. On September 2, scheduled to be the first day of integrated classes, Alabama Governor George Wallace ordered the school closed due to “safety concerns.” The school reopened a week later, and withdrawals began soon after.

Most of Tuskegee High School’s former white students enrolled at Macon Academy, a newly formed, all-white private school. In support of the community’s efforts to sidestep federal law and maintain school segregation, Governor Wallace and the school board approved the use of state funds to provide scholarships for white students abandoning the public school system to use at Macon Academy. Meanwhile, the Macon County School Board ordered Tuskegee High School closed due to low enrollment and split its remaining African American students among all-white high schools in the towns of Notasulga and Shorter. White students in those high schools boycotted for several days in protest, and many eventually transferred to Macon Academy.

Now known as Macon East Academy and located near the city of Montgomery, the former Macon Academy is one of several private schools in the Alabama Black Belt with origins rooted in resistance to integration. As of the 2015-2016 school year, Macon-East Academy’s student body of 277 was 97% white and less than 3% African American.

As 19 Black six-year-olds integrated all-white elementary schools in Nashville, Tennessee, white church members—including one local minister—organized a persistent and violent campaign to oppose the integration of Nashville public schools. Outside Fehr Elementary School, one person held a sign that read “God is the author of segregation” and pursued two Black children walking to the school. Outside three different elementary schools that same morning, Fred Stroud, a white minister, sought to dissuade white parents from allowing their children to be educated alongside Black children by preaching damnation for those who did not uphold segregation.

The next day, 100 sticks of dynamite were thrown into Hattie Cotton Elementary School and exploded. Patricia Watson, the one Black elementary student who had been in class the previous morning, did not return. No Black children returned to Hattie Cotton Elementary School the following year, and no one faced criminal charges for the bombing.

Though Brown v. Board of Education determined in 1954 that school segregation was unconstitutional, for three years white residents in Nashville relied on intimidation and organized political resistance to maintain segregation in the public schools. In 1957, Nashville finally developed a “stair step program” which permitted a few Black elementary school students to enroll in eight elementary schools.

Throughout the summer of 1957, white segregationists in Nashville held intimidation rallies to terrorize Black families. In the days leading up to the first day of school, as Black parents pre-registered their children for school, mobs of white church members gathered outside buildings with signs calling segregation the “will of God.” One leader declared that “integration can be reversed” and that “blood will run the streets” before Nashville’s schools were integrated.

By the morning of September 9, out of the 126 Black children eligible to attend all-white elementary schools, only 19 Black children matriculated. Reverend Stroud gathered crowds at Glenn Elementary to preach about the evils of integration, and white people in cars outside of Jones Elementary held signs emblazoned with KKK iconography and Biblical quotes. As opposition grew throughout the morning, white mobs crowded the sidewalks and threw rocks and bottles at Black children and their parents who attempted to pass through the crowd. By the end of the day, half of the white students at Glenn Elementary School—nearly 250 children—had not arrived, as white parents chose to deny their children education rather than permit them to learn alongside Black children.

That evening, 300 white people gathered downtown and continued to threaten Black families who sent their children to school. They strung an effigy in blackface from a stoplight with a note pinned to its chest that read “this could be you.” As the mob around Fehr Elementary grew to at least 400, white people burned two outbuildings located on the property of a Black family that had sent their daughter to the school. The mob also continued to burn crosses on lawns of Black families who had dared to enroll their students that morning.

Lawyers at the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a nonprofit civil rights law firm in Montgomery, Alabama, mailed a copy of Slavery by Another Name to client Mark Melvin, then incarcerated at Kilby Correctional Facility. The Pulitzer Prize-winning book written by award-winning journalist Douglas Blackmon documents the history of convict leasing in Alabama in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

As the book’s title suggests, the exploitative and inhumane convict leasing system strongly resembled slavery. Under the pretext of criminal punishment, African Americans arrested on frivolous charges were sold to plantations, turpentine farms, mining companies, and railroads and forced to work in perilous conditions to pay off “debt” accumulated from unjust court costs and fines.

Kilby prison officials prohibited Mr. Melvin from receiving Slavery by Another Name when it arrived in the mail, based on a judgment that the book was “too provocative.” When Mr. Melvin used the internal grievance process to appeal the book’s banning, prison officials defended their decision and insisted the book was properly banned under a rule prohibiting material that incites “violence based on race, religion, sex, creed, or nationality, or disobedience toward law enforcement officials or correctional staff.”

This was not the first time Alabama prison officials had limited imprisoned people’s access to portrayals of Southern racial history. In the early 2000s, wardens in some Alabama prisons prohibited prisoners from watching a re-broadcast of the Roots miniseries. In September 2011, EJI lawyers helped Mr. Melvin sue the Alabama Department of Corrections for access to Slavery By Another Name. The civil litigation was settled in February 2013, when state officials finally agreed to allow Mr. Melvin, and anyone else in the state’s prison system, to read the book.

Local merchants in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, began enforcing an ordinance that denied service to all members of the U.S. military, regardless of their race, to protest integration. In a choice between patriotic support for the U.S. military and a commitment to racial segregation, the Parish chose bigotry.

The day before, a new local ordinance in Plaquemines Parish banning civilian restaurants from serving all military members and prohibiting parish residents from visiting the integrated Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base New Orleans took effect.

While Black veterans were often the target of physical violence and social humiliation, this restaurant ordinance barred all sailors from service, regardless of race, rather than comply with integration. At the time, segregationist Leander Perez knew that the ordinance would “hurt our good white boys who are in the military service” and would bring a significant loss in revenue, but he nevertheless argued that banning service for all troops was necessary because maintaining segregation was more important. Local merchants—including a shopkeeper named Mrs. Charles T. Boone who owned the Hummingbird Restaurant in Belle Chase, Louisiana—complied. On September 7, she pointed to a sign that read “Parish law forbids me to serve military personnel in uniform” and refused to serve coffee to two members of the U.S. Navy.

Mr. Perez championed the ordinance as an aggressive response to a report from President John F. Kennedy’s Committee on Equal Opportunity in the Armed Services (“The Geller Report”). The Geller Report issued a series of recommendations aimed at combatting racial discrimination in the armed services. In particular, the report urged military officers to declare segregated civilian establishments “off-limits” to those under their command.

Leander Perez, who defended the military service ban, served as district attorney, judge, and political boss in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, during the civil rights era. A devout Catholic, he took a segregationist position so extreme that the Archbishop of the Diocese of New Orleans excommunicated him from the church. An active member of his local white citizens’ council, Mr. Perez gave public speeches pledging to outlaw the NAACP, describing integration as the “mongrelization of the races,” and encouraging politicians to commit criminal contempt in defiance of desegregation orders.

12 Black men held at a prison farm in Richmond, Texas, were placed in an underground cell as punishment for not picking cotton fast enough. Eight of those men died of asphyxiation. The cell was nine feet long, seven feet wide, and seven feet high, and temperatures outside neared 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The only ventilation in the cell came from four small holes connected to pipes in the ceiling that were “just large enough to admit a quarter.” The next day, inspectors found that one of the holes had been plugged.

Accused of “laziness in picking cotton” while being forced to work on a prison farm, all 12 men were left in this cramped cell overnight. Three of the surviving men explained that they were each able to position themselves by one of the three working holes in the ceiling. The fourth survived by pressing his face against the crack at the bottom of the door. They cried out repeatedly to guards throughout the night; “Men are dying in here,” they yelled. The guards ignored them, claiming that “it is always the case for prisoners confined as the men were to make such cries.” Early the next morning, when the guard on duty heard the men shouting that one of them was dead, he opened the cell and had two of the prisoners remove one of the dead bodies. The guard “did not stop to ascertain” if any of the other men inside were dead. Instead, he waited for his manager to arrive before they reopened the cell to find eight of the men inside had suffocated to death.

No one was ever held accountable for the deaths of these men. The Attorney General of Texas ultimately concluded that prison officials were not culpable because placing these men in this suffocating chamber, and failing to listen to their pleas for help, did not violate the law.

Four of the men were buried on the property at Jester State Prison Farm, which still houses inmates today.

A white mob lynched a Black man named Robert Johnson in Princeton, West Virginia. After Mr. Johnson was accused of assaulting a white girl, sheriff’s officials anticipated a lynch mob would form and moved him from Bluefield to Princeton. When the move was discovered, an armed mob of white men came to Princeton and seized Mr. Johnson. The local judge urged the mob to let the court conduct a “speedy trial,” and the state governor warned that a lynching should not be allowed—but the mob was determined.

After kidnapping Mr. Johnson from police custody, the enraged mob beat Mr. Johnson with clubs and rocks, strung him to a telegraph pole “in the presence of the judge, sheriff, and armed guards,” and shot him hundreds of times. Despite their purported efforts to dissuade the mob, police did not attempt to use force to save Mr. Johnson’s life, and the judge did not order any members of the lynch mob arrested.

After the lynching, the growing mob patrolled the town terrorizing other African Americans, threatening to lynch other Black people they encountered—including those who attempted to cut down Mr. Johnson’s hanging corpse. Instead, the mob cut the dead body down, stripped off most of the clothing to keep as souvenirs, and then again hanged the corpse from the same pole.

According to press reports, authorities later acknowledged a growing possibility that Mr. Johnson had been wrongly identified and was innocent of the alleged assault. Nevertheless, a grand jury convened to investigate the murder declined to return a single indictment, and no one was ever arrested or prosecuted for his lynching.

Mr. Johnson is one of more than 4,000 documented African American victims of racial terror lynching killed in the U.S. between 1877 and 1950.

Republicans in Hinds County, Mississippi, held a barbecue and meeting in the town of Clinton that was attended by 3,000 people. Hoping to curb the risk of violent political conflict, Clinton authorities appointed special police and prohibited serving liquor. When the Republican speakers began making their political speeches in the afternoon, Democratic party representatives unexpectedly joined the meeting and requested speaking time.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln was the dominant political wing of the federal government working to restore national unity and enforce the new civil rights of Black people, while the Democratic Party largely represented the white South of the former Confederacy intent on regaining control of their state governments. The “Radical Republicans” were an arm of the Republican Party that advocated imposing severe penalties on the South for waging the Civil War and also ensuring full political and social equality for the millions of Black people in the South who were now American citizens.

Political realignment during the civil rights movement of the 1960s led to major shifts in party identification, as Southern elected officials and constituents largely left the Democratic Party in protest of civil rights advancements enacted by President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson, while the Republican Party stayed silent on civil rights issues to attract the defecting South, and later embraced the coded language of “law and order” and “state’s rights” to dominate regional politics. But in 1875, Republican politicians in the South—a small minority—were considered agents of federal oppression, friends of African Americans, and enemies of the white supremacy many former Confederates wanted to re-establish.

At the Clinton, Mississippi, barbecue on that September evening, the risk of violent conflict between the political parties was great. In the interest of keeping the peace, Republican officials agreed to accommodate Democrats’ request to speak and arranged for a public discussion between Judge Amos R. Johnston, a Democratic candidate for state senate, and Captain H.T. Fisher, Republican editor of the Jackson Times.

Both speakers were to be given an equal amount of speaking time, and Johnston spoke first. When Mr. Fisher’s turn came, he expressed optimism that meetings between the parties could take place peacefully in the future—but eight minutes into his address, an altercation erupted in the crowd. A gunfight between Black and white people in the audience rang out, as bystanders panicked and rushed to escape the danger. Within 15 minutes, three white people and four Black people were dead, and six white people and 20 Black people were wounded.

Though newspapers reported that the Black people who had fired weapons were acting in self-defense, many white observers were enraged by the Black show of force. That night, armed white men from Clinton and Vicksburg formed roving bands targeting Black men. By the next day, an estimated 50 Black people had been killed. Many more had been forced into the woods and swampland to avoid an attack, where they remained until the attack subsided.