Author: Desto22

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.