Author: Desto22

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.