Author: Desto22

U.S. Army begins enforcement of internment order forcing over 200 Japanese Americans to leave their homes in Washington for internment camps within six days or face arrest.

Tennessee passes laws authorizing racial discrimination in hotels, public transportation, and “places of amusement.”

A white woman and a Black man were arrested in Atlanta, Georgia, and accused of walking and talking together on Whitehall Street. In a news article entitled, “Color Line Was Ignored,” The Atlanta Constitution newspaper reported that Mrs. James Charles, “a handsomely dressed white woman of prepossessing appearance,” and C.W. King, “a Negro cook,” were arrested after Officer J.T. Shepard reported having seen the two talk to each other and then “walk side by side for several minutes.”

After the Confederacy’s defeat in the Civil War, emancipation and the granting of civil rights to Black people threatened to overturn traditional Southern culture and social relations rooted in white supremacy and racial hierarchy. After Reconstruction ended and white politicians and lawmakers regained control and power in the South, many set out to restore that racial order through very strict laws that mandated segregation and made it illegal for Black and white people to interact as equals. Under these policies, interracial marriage or romance—particularly between Black men and white women—was strictly banned, as was integrated education, and even interracial athletic events.

After her arrest for allegedly walking and talking with a Black man, Mrs. Charles gave a statement that did not challenge the law but instead fervently denied the accusation. She insisted she had exchanged no words with Mr. King, and merely smiled as she passed him dancing on the street:

“As I paused to listen to the music I noticed a negro man, the one arrested with me, dancing on the sidewalk,” she said. “I smiled at his antics and was about to pass on when a policeman touched me on the arm and said he wanted to talk to me. I stopped and he asked why I talked to a negro. I denied having spoken to any negro. I told him I was a southern born woman, and his insinuations were an insult.”

Mr. King also denied having spoken to Mrs. Charles, and said he never knew there was a white woman near him. No further reporting on the arrests was published, and it is not clear whether they were convicted and fined when tried the next afternoon.

The narrative of racial difference created to justify slavery—the myth that white people are superior to Black people—was not abolished by the Emancipation Proclamation or the Thirteenth Amendment, and it outlived slavery and Reconstruction. White Americans committed to the myth of Black inferiority used the law and violence to relegate Black Americans to second-class citizenship at the bottom of a racial caste system.

After a Mobile, Alabama, jury acquits a Black man of killing a white police officer, Ku Klux Klan members randomly kidnap and kill 19-year-old Michael Donald, a Black man, and hang his body from a tree.

Harry Laughlin, a leader in the eugenics movement, drafted a Model Eugenical Sterilization Law that Virginia adopted and enacted on March 20, 1924. The law, which allowed for the forced sterilization of people confined to state institutions as a “benefit both to themselves and society,” was passed on the same day that the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 became law. The Racial Integrity Act required the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics to record a racial description of every newborn baby, and outlawed marriages between “white” and “non-white” partners. Together, the laws sought to “purify the white race.”

Eugenics, named for the Greek word meaning “well-born,” is a selective breeding philosophy that seeks to eliminate “undesirable” traits by preventing certain kinds of people from reproducing. Sir Francis Galton developed the term in 1883, and described eugenics as “the study of the agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally.” As eugenics gained widespread support throughout the U.S. at the beginning of the 20th century, states began to authorize doctors to forcibly sterilize their patients.

When the Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s Eugenical Sterilization Act in Buck v. Bell in 1927, Virginia’s law became a model for the rest of the country and facilitated the forced sterilization of more than 60,000 men and women nationwide. Children as young as 10 years old were targeted for sterilization. Later, Virginia’s law was co-opted by Nazi Germany and relied upon as precedent for the Nazis’ race purity programs. Though eugenical theory was criticized after World War II, forced sterilization persisted long after in the U.S.

Just months after he prevailed in a lawsuit to force the University of Missouri to accept him to its all-white law school, a young Black man named Lloyd Gaines went missing and was never seen again.

After graduating from the historically Black Lincoln University in 1935, Lloyd Gaines applied for admission to the segregated University of Missouri School of Law—the only law school in the state. In March of 1936, the school notified Mr. Gaines that his application had been rejected, and instead offered to subsidize his tuition elsewhere (at a historically Black law school or a non-segregated law school in another state).

With the NAACP’s support, Mr. Gaines rejected the offer and sued the University of Missouri to challenge its policy that barred him from attending law school in his home state merely because of his race. Mr. Gaines lost in state courts and appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he won the case in December 1938. As a result, the University of Missouri was ordered to accept Mr. Gaines to its law school or create an in-state law school for African Americans.

The Missouri legislature responded by hastily establishing a separate, unequal law school for African Americans that the NAACP insisted did not comply with the Court’s decision. However, when the NAACP was preparing to file another legal challenge, they learned that Mr. Gaines was missing. A housekeeper at his residence in Chicago reported last seeing him on March 19, 1939. Without a plaintiff, the desegregation lawsuit against the University of Missouri was dismissed; it would be another decade before the school would admit its first African American student.

Family members suspected that Mr. Gaines was abducted and murdered for his activism, while state officials claimed he fled and assumed another identity in response to threats against him and his loved ones. To this day, Mr. Gaines’s fate is unknown.

The State of Georgia enacted legislation that nullified Cherokee laws and appropriated Cherokee lands. In response to Georgia’s extension of its law over the Cherokee Nation, the Cherokee filed suit in the U.S. Supreme Court, challenging the legislation and citing treaties the nation had previously entered into with the U.S. government. The Cherokee argued that those treaties established the Cherokee Nation as a sovereign and independent state.

On March 18, 1831, the Supreme Court issued an opinion in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, sidestepping the issue of whether Georgia could extend its law over the Cherokee tribes, and instead ruling that the Cherokee Nation was not a “foreign nation”—so the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction to hear its claims.

The Court observed that while Native Americans had an “unquestioned right to the lands they occupy, until that right shall be extinguished by a voluntary cession to our government; it may well be doubted whether those tribes which reside within the acknowledged boundaries of the United States can, with strict accuracy, be denominated foreign nations.” The Court emphasized that Native Americans were “domestic dependent nations” with a “relation to the United States [that] resembles that of a ward to his guardian,” and concluded that Indigenous communities could not bring suit in an American court.

The Court refused to enforce the treaties that would have protected the Cherokee from state and federal interference, instead leaving them vulnerable to the Indian Removal Act—which resulted in the Cherokee’s forcible removal later that year.

At the annual meeting of the Louisiana Medical Association, Dr. Samuel Cartwright presented a committee report entitled, “A Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race.” Filled with claims of “scientific racism,” the report also documented a new disease: Drapetomania.

More than a year before, in December 1849, the Louisiana State Medical Convention had selected Dr. Cartwright, a pro-slavery advocate, to chair a committee tasked with investigating and reporting on diseases unique to Black people. In the resulting report, Dr. Cartwright claimed Black people were very different physiologically from white people, possessing smaller brains, more sensitive skin, and overdeveloped nervous systems. These unique traits, he claimed, gave Black people an especially high propensity for servitude. Citing “scientific” evidence and scripture, Dr. Cartwright argued that “the Negro is a slave by nature and can never be happy…in any other condition.”

Dr. Cartwright invented the term Drapetomania, derived from the Greek words for “runaway slave” and “crazy,” to describe a new “curable mental disease.” When infected with this affliction, he claimed, enslaved Black people were struck with an urge to flee bondage and seek freedom. He further explained that the disease was triggered by enslavers who unwisely treated enslaved people as their equals. Dr. Cartwright prescribed “treatment” such as severe whipping and amputation of the toes.

Couched in pseudo-science and presented as medical assertions, Dr. Cartwright’s report was an effort to justify and defend the institution of slavery as natural and optimal for both white enslavers and the Black people they enslaved.

White men targets three Atlanta-area spas in mass shooting that kills eight people including six Asian women.

Ballie Crutchfield, a Black woman, is lynched in Tennessee by a white mob that was looking for her brother.