Author: Desto22

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 had barely entered statehood in 1803 when thousands of Black Americans began arriving there from the South. Many were escaping to this “free” state from enslavers in Virginia and Kentucky, just across the Ohio River. Some people even swam across the mile-wide river, or walked across its ice in winter, believing that freedom and opportunity awaited them on the other side. Abolitionism had many supporters in Ohio. Cincinnati, along the river, had a growing Black community. Ohio’s Black population quintupled between 1800 and 1810, from a little over 300 people to nearly 1,900.

But most of the white men who wrote the state’s 1802 constitution and its earliest laws came from Virginia and other “slave” states. Many had been enslavers before moving to the Ohio Territory, where slavery was outlawed. The document they drafted did not change that, but it took away a right Black men had had in the Ohio Territory before statehood—the right to vote. And that was only the beginning.

To stop Black people from moving to the state, the all-white state legislature approved “An Act to Regulate Black and Mulatto Persons” in 1804, and amended it three years later, stripping Black residents of their rights in the courts. Starting April 1, 1807, Black people in Ohio were barred from testifying in any case, civil or criminal, in which one of the parties was white. Ohio’s “Black Laws,” as the measures became known, gave white supremacy priority over justice.

Black residents had to register with the county clerk within two years of arriving in Ohio, pay a fee of 12 1/2 cents, and obtain a court order attesting to their being free. They had to be able to produce this proof of freedom at any time.

White employers who hired unregistered Black workers faced fines of $50 per employee. If the employee turned out to be a fugitive from slavery, the employer was fined 50 cents for each day of employment—paid to the enslaver. Anyone who harbored alleged “fugitives” or hindered their capture could be fined from $10 to $50.

Ohio’s new system of tax-supported “common” schools—public schools—was for white children only. That part of the law would be reinterpreted several times over the next few decades but never allowed Black children to attend tax-supported schools with white children.

Though Ohio was a “free” state, the law all but made its courts, constables, and sheriffs tools of Southern enslavers. Enslavers or their agents needed little evidence to get Ohio judges or local justices of the peace to order people who were alleged to have escaped from slavery arrested. The law required sheriffs and constables to execute those orders—and enslavers paid them for their efforts.

The law offered Ohioans a cash incentive to inform on their neighbors by alerting local authorities whenever a white employer hired Black workers who had not registered or did not have proof of freedom. Half the fines imposed on employers for each such hiring would be paid to the “informer.”

The 1807 amendments not only closed the courts to Black Ohioans—they made it harder than ever for Black people to scrape together a living. The fines on white employers for hiring unregistered Black workers were tripled to $150—or about $4,000 today—per employee. (That meant more money for informers, too.) Many employers minimized the risk by refusing to hire Black workers altogether.

The amendments also required newly arriving Black citizens to persuade two white Ohio landowners to put up a $500 “good behavior” bond, agreeing to pay authorities that amount if the Black person got in legal trouble. Abolitionists pointed out that few white Ohioans could afford that—$500 in 1807 would be worth more than $13,000 today. And the law set the bar impossibly high: a Black person needed to recruit those well-off white sponsors within 20 days of arriving in Ohio.

The testimony law barring Black people from testifying against white people meant white criminals could, and did, rob and assault Black people with impunity. It meant unscrupulous white merchants could, and did, defraud Black customers with no fear of being successfully sued for their frauds. Black residents who got swindled out of land could not turn to the courts.

The harsher requirements added to the “Black Laws” in 1807 may have been prompted in part by a Virginia law, enacted in 1806, that gave newly emancipated people 12 months to leave that state or else be re-enslaved.

But one thing was certain: the “Black Laws” codified white supremacy in Ohio. So did laws and court rulings that followed—barring Black men from the militia, barring Black adults from juries, barring Black children from learning alongside white children in public schools, and barring racial intermarriage.

Cases in which Black people were scammed, robbed, or even killed evaporated in court because of the testimony law. The Ohio Anti-Slavery Society’s 1835 report told of a Black family whose home had been broken into and looted the year before. The evidence was clear—one perpetrator even confessed—but defense lawyers said the law invalidated the family’s sworn claims to the stolen items, “and the robbers were cleared.” Another judge barred testimony from eight Black men who had witnessed a white man “murdering a colored man…[and] the murderer escaped unpunished.”

Excluded from steady jobs, many Black Ohioans resorted to piece work, which in turn made them vulnerable to more crimes; profiteering kidnappers snatched free Black people off Northern streets and sold them to Southern enslavers. The New York Colored American reported that some offers of short-term work for Black men—moving livestock to or from Kentucky, for example—were ruses that ended with kidnappings.

In 1840, Charles Scott and his brother, free Black men living near Cincinnati, found short-term work driving cattle across the Ohio River—but on the Kentucky side, the white men who had hired them “clapped them in jail, as runaway slaves,” The Liberator reported. Jailed for six weeks before he could prove his freedom, Charles Scott sued the white men for false imprisonment. They demanded he withdraw his suit. When he refused, they came to his cabin on a Saturday night.

Mr. Scott, his wife, and a friend—a light-skinned, mixed-race woman—were singing by the fireplace when the white men arrived. Mr. Scott was “shot dead by his own hearth-stone, while singing to his wife,” The Liberator said. His killers were arrested, but the “Black Laws” barred his widow from testifying against them.

A white judge interpreted the law broadly—perhaps giving priority to justice, not white supremacy. He allowed the Scotts’ light-skinned friend to testify, reasoning that she was more white than Black. The killers were convicted. The Colored American’s editors said the result, if not the reasoning, foretold a day when “the Black Laws will soon give way to make room for just ones.”

In page after page, the Ohio anti-slavery group’s report described how mechanics, carpenters, and other skilled Black tradespeople were denied jobs because of the “Black Laws” and the racist attitudes of many white employers and workers. “This combined oppression of public sentiment and law reduced the colored people to extreme misery,” the report said.

John Malvin, a free Black carpenter who came to the state from Virginia in 1827, later wrote: “I thought upon coming to a free state like Ohio, that I would find every door thrown open to receive me, but from the treatment I received by the people generally, I found it little better than in Virginia…I found every door closed against the colored man in a free state, excepting the jails and penitentiaries.”

Like many other Black citizens, Mr. Malvin was not just trying to make a living. He was also trying to buy freedom for a loved one—his father-in-law, enslaved in Kentucky. The antislavery group’s reports told of Black families in similar straits, such as a girl about 10 years old, working to help purchase her father’s freedom, and a husband who’d negotiated a price of $420 for his enslaved wife, saved up that amount, and headed south to buy her freedom only to learn that her enslaver had raised the price to $450 because she was “in a family way.”

Since Ohio’s public schools were only open to white children, abolitionists started their own schools for Black children—and periodically faced attacks by white citizens. A “vigilance committee” in one town threatened to tar and feather a white Oberlin College senior “and ride her on a rail” if she kept teaching the town’s Black children.

Historians note that in some years, the bond and registration requirements of the “Black Laws” went largely unenforced. In other years they were applied with a vengeance—to entire Black communities.

By 1829 Cincinnati’s Black community had grown to about 2,200 people, almost 10% of the city. Black and Irish workers competed for jobs on the docks. On June 30, the city announced it would enforce the “Black Laws” en masse. Within 30 days, registrations would be required, proofs of freedom demanded, and Black residents lacking two white sponsors willing to post the $500 bond would be banished.

Black Cincinnatians persuaded the city to grant them 30 extra days. They dispatched representatives to Canada to ask if they could relocate there. Canadian officials said yes.

But white Cincinnati men were already forming mobs. For several days in August 1829, they terrorized Black neighborhoods, pillaging some homes and torching others. Some residents were beaten, and hundreds fled. Nearly half of Cincinnati’s Black residents eventually resettled in Canada.

On January 21, 1831, an announcement appeared in the Portsmouth, Ohio, Courier: “The citizens of Portsmouth are adopting measures to free the town of its colored population.”

A hundred white residents of the southern Ohio town had signed a petition vowing to expel Black neighbors who had not registered and secured the $500 bond. African Americans called that January day “Black Friday.”

Eighty Black residents of Portsmouth packed their belongings and headed north, hoping to resettle in a less hostile part of Ohio.

A year later, when a bill to modify the testimony law (by allowing testimony from a Black man if a white man vouched for him) faced votes in the legislature, a Dayton newspaper asked readers:

“Are you ready for this state of things? We appeal to the laboring portion of our fellow countrymen. Are you ready to be placed on a level with the ‘n____s’ in the political rights for which your fathers contended? Are you ready to share with them your hearth and your house? Are you ready to compete with them in your daily vocations?”

In 1846, after a wealthy white Virginian bequeathed freedom to 383 Black people he had enslaved, the executor of his will prepared to resettle the formerly enslaved people on farmland purchased in Mercer County, Ohio, near the Indiana line. But local white farmers, many of them recently arrived from Germany, issued a warning: “Resolved, that we will not live among negroes, as we have settled here first…that we will resist the settlement of blacks and mulattoes in this county to the full extent of our means, the bayonet not excepted.”

Southern legislatures imposed barbaric laws on Black residents, whether enslaved or free, for centuries. Ohio was among the first Northern “free” states to legislate white supremacy, but it was not the last.

In 1847, Missouri passed a law that prohibited Black people from learning to read or write. (Missouri State Archives)

In 1843, Indiana barred Black children from public schools. Eight years later it closed its doors to African Americans wanting to settle in the state and fined anyone who helped or hired them. In 1847 Missouri outlawed schools that offered “the instruction of negroes or mulattoes, in reading or writing.” California’s 1850 law prohibited Black testimony in white defendants’ criminal cases. Illinois required $1,000 bonds from new Black citizens, barred Black witnesses’ testimony against white people, and prohibited Black people from meeting in groups of three or more.

Faith Memorial Chapel in Ohio, a church and school established after the Civil War for African American children denied public school educations. (New York Public Library)

Ohio’s “Black Laws” were officially repealed in 1849—or “modified,” as one historian put it. Black citizens could now testify, regardless of litigants’ race. They no longer needed the $500 bond. Their children could attend public school—albeit in separate schoolhouses, away from white children. Black Ohioans still could not be jurors, join the militia, receive public relief if they were in need, or vote.

If the main goal was to drive African Americans away, the laws failed. The nearly 1,900 Black Ohioans in 1810 more than doubled by 1820. The 1860 Census counted nearly 37,000 Black residents. And some of the laws’ victims found ways to fight back.

The 80 Black residents driven out of Portsmouth started their own Ohio town—and made it a station on the Underground Railroad. Their counterparts who had been turned away from Mercer County, too, formed communities elsewhere in Ohio. Mr. Malvin, the carpenter who’d found no Ohio doors open to him, helped start schools for Black children and, in 1865, was a delegate to a convention in Cleveland for a new national group launched by Frederick Douglass and other Black leaders. It was called the Equal Rights League.

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.

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.

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.