Author: Desto22

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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