Author: Desto22

A white bus driver employed by the city of Alexandria, Louisiana, shot and killed Private Edward Green, a 23-year-old Black soldier from New York, after he refused to sit in the segregated section of a city bus.

At the time of his death, Private Green was stationed with an army field artillery unit at Camp Livingston, Louisiana. He boarded city bus no. 7 around 10 pm on the evening of March 13, and took a seat near the front of the bus. As soon as he saw Private Green, the bus driver, Odell Lachney, shouted at him to move. When Private Green remained in his seat, Mr. Lachney stopped the bus, got up from the driver’s seat, and walked toward Private Green brandishing a club.

Mr. Lachney, who later claimed Private Green had reached into his pocket, grabbed a pistol. A white passenger sitting directly behind the drivers’ seat, cautioned Mr. Lachney: “Don’t shoot him on the bus.” Apparently heeding this advice, Mr. Lachney forced Private Green onto the street as he pleaded, “Don’t kill me, I’ll get off.” Despite the Black soldier’s words, Mr. Lachney shot Private Green at 10:15pm at the intersection of Vance Avenue and Hickory Street, killing him with a bullet in the heart.

During this era, no one was more at risk of experiencing targeted violence than Black veterans who had proven their valor and courage as soldiers during the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Military service sparked dreams of racial equality for generations of African Americans, but rather than being welcomed home and honored for their service, many Black veterans were targeted for mistreatment, violence, and murder during the lynching era due to their race and military experience. Between the end of Reconstruction and the years following World War II, the experience of military service for Black Americans often inflamed an attitude of defiant resistance to the status quo that could prove deadly in a society where racial subordination was violently enforced. All throughout the American South, as well as in parts of the Midwest and the Northeast, dozens of Black veterans died at the hands of mobs and persons acting under the color of official authority.

The coroner held an inquest the afternoon after Private Green was shot and killed. Though five white jurors returned a verdict that “Private Edward Green came to his death from gunshot wounds at the left breast by the hand of Odell Lachney,” no criminal charges were filed. Mr. Lachney was released from police custody and the local media did no subsequent reporting on Private Green’s death.

To learn more about the targeting of Black soldiers and veterans and the history of racial injustice directed towards them, read EJI’s report, Lynching in America: Targeting Black Veterans.

Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia convinced 101 of the 128 congressmen representing the 11 states of the old Confederacy to sign “The Southern Manifesto on Integration.” In total, 19 Senators and 82 Representatives—almost one-fifth of Congress—signed their name and declared their opposition to integration. The document claimed that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared racially segregated public education unconstitutional, constituted an abuse of power in violation of federal law.

The manifesto accused the Court of jeopardizing the social justice of white people and “their habits, traditions, and way of life,” and claimed that the Brown ruling would “[destroy] the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through 90 years of patient effort by the good people of both races.” The time period they referenced was in fact an era characterized by racial terror and a Jim Crow legal caste system that had targeted Black Americans for violence and inequality since the end of Reconstruction.

Eight southern states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia—enacted their own versions of the Southern Manifesto. Called “interposition resolutions,” these statements tried to elevate the state’s legal interpretation over that of the Supreme Court. These states also used legislative acts and voter referenda to enact tuition grant statutes that authorized state governments to fund privately-run schools in order to preserve racially segregated education.

Learn more about how a campaign of massive resistance to integration by white politicians and the broader white community succeeded in keeping schools segregated for years after the decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

Reverend James Reeb, a white supporter of Black voting rights, dies two days after he is beaten by angry white people in Selma, Alabama.

During the civil war, Confederate forces in South Carolina hang a young enslaved Black woman named Amy Spain for aiding the Union Army.

Ida B. Wells’s friends Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart are lynched in Memphis, Tennessee, sparking her lifelong crusade against lynching.

Virginia Colony court rules against John Casor, a Black indentured servant who sued for his freedom after being forced to work past his term, and declares him enslaved for life.

On March 7, 1965, state and local police used billy clubs, whips, and tear gas to attack hundreds of civil rights activists beginning a march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol in Montgomery. The activists were protesting the denial of voting rights to African Americans as well as the murder of 26-year-old activist Jimmie Lee Jackson, who had been fatally shot in the stomach by police during a peaceful protest just days before.

The march was led by John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Reverend Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge and found themselves facing a line of state and county officers poised to attack. When demonstrators did not promptly obey the officers’ order to disband and turn back, troopers brutally attacked them on horseback, wielding weapons and chasing down fleeing men, women, and children. Dozens of civil rights activists were later hospitalized with severe injuries.

Horrifying images of the violence were broadcast on national television, shocking many viewers and helping to rouse support for the civil rights cause. Activists organized another march two days later, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. urged supporters from throughout the country to come to Selma to join. Many heeded his call, and the events helped spur passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 three months later.

On March 6, 1857, in Dred Scott v. Sandford, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Black people were not American citizens and could not sue in courts of law. The Court ruled against Dred Scott, an enslaved Black man who tried to sue for his freedom.

For years before this case began, Dred Scott was enslaved by Dr. John Emerson, a military physician who traveled and resided in several states and territories where slavery was illegal—always accompanied by Dred Scott. Dr. Emerson eventually took Mr. Scott back to Missouri, where slavery was legal. When Dr. Emerson died there in 1843, Mr. Scott was still enslaved.

After Dr. Emerson’s death, Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet, sought freedom in the Missouri state courts. The Scotts argued that their prior residence in free territories had voided their enslavement. The Missouri Supreme Court ruled against the Scotts and authorized Dr. Emerson’s widow, Irene, to continue to enslave them. When Irene Emerson later gave her estate, including the Scotts, to her brother, John Sandford, Dred Scott brought suit in federal court.

Written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision held that the Fifth Amendment did not allow the federal government to deprive a citizen of property, including enslaved people, without due process of law. This ruling kept the Scotts legally enslaved, invalidated the Missouri Compromise, and re-opened the question of slavery’s expansion into the territories. The resulting legal uncertainty greatly increased sectional tensions between Northern and Southern states and pushed the nation forward on the path toward civil war.

Unable to win liberty in the courts, Dred and Harriet Scott were freed by a subsequent enslaver a few months after the decision. Dred Scott died just months later of tuberculosis, while Harriet Scott lived until 1876.

21 Black teenagers died in a building fire after being left alone and locked inside of their dormitory at a neglected and segregated “reform” school in Arkansas.

The children were living at the Negro Boys Industrial School (NBIS), a juvenile work farm located just outside the predominantly Black town of Wrightsville, Arkansas. Boys between the ages of 13 and 17 who were orphaned, homeless, or considered delinquent because of extremely minor “crimes” were sent to live at NBIS. At the time, any action by a Black person that threatened the racial hierarchy could be deemed criminal. One boy had been sent to NBIS for riding a white boy’s bicycle, even though the white boy’s mother told law enforcement that the Black boy had permission to ride the bike. Another Black boy had been sent to NBIS for a Halloween prank—soaping windows.

The disparities between the segregated white reform schools and Black reform schools in Arkansas could not have been more evident. White institutions were predominantly geared towards education, treating white boys like students and teaching them vocational skills like carpentry and metal work. Meanwhile, the boys at NBIS were treated like prisoners and subjected to manual labor, forced to farm the land around the school.

The Black teenagers at NBIS were also forced to live in horrifically dangerous conditions, even prior to this fire. When a sociologist toured NBIS in 1956, three years before the deadly fire, he reported appalling conditions. “Many boys go for days with only rags for clothes,” he wrote. “More than half of them wear neither socks nor underwear…[It is] not uncommon to see youths going for weeks without bathing or changing clothes.” The water at the school was also considered undrinkable.

The night of the fire at NBIS, the boys’ dormitory was completely abandoned by staff members and was locked from the outside, as it was each night, making it impossible for 21 of these Black teenagers to escape.

While 48 of the Black teenagers in the dormitory that night managed to break their way out of the burning building by jumping out of a window, 21 teenagers remained trapped and burned to death. A committee investigated the fire but no one was ever held responsible.

Today, the Arkansas Department of Corrections runs an adult prison called the Wrightsville Unit on the land where NBIS was formerly located. Though Black people make up only 15% of the population of Arkansas, they constitute 42% of the prison population, including 38% of the population in the Wrightsville Unit.

While walking down a Georgia road, a Black man named Willie Anderson is shot and killed by a white lynch mob that later admit they mistook him for someone else.