Author: Desto22

Malcolm X is assassinated in front of his wife and young daughters while giving a speech at the Audobon Ballroom in Harlem, New York.

Civil Rights activists arrested for organizing bus boycott to protest mistreatment and segregation in Montgomery, Alabama.

Supreme Court decides U.S. v Thind, upholding a government ruling that an Indian Sikh man born in Punjab is ineligible for U.S. citizenship because he’s not a “free white man.”

Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old Black man, is shot by a white officer after police attack a peaceful civil rights protest in Marion, Alabama; he dies eight days later.

In Greenville, South Carolina, a mob of white men lynches Willie Earle, slashing chunks of flesh from his body before blasting him with a shot gun; 31 men charged with the murder are later acquitted.

Missouri outlaws education of Black people and bans immigration of free Black people into the state.

New Jersey passes gradual emancipation act, delaying the end of slavery in the state for decades.

All-white grand jury refuses to indict any of six white men accused of raping Mrs. Recy Taylor in Abbeville, Alabama; they are never prosecuted.

In February 1960, hundreds of volunteers—primarily Black college students—huddled into the basement of First Baptist Church in Nashville, Tennessee, for what became the first mass meeting of the sit-in movement. The students planned a series of sit-ins designed to challenge racial segregation at lunch counters.

On February 13, 1960, 500 students from Nashville’s four Black colleges—Fisk University, Tennessee State, Meharry Medical, and the Baptist Seminary—filed into the downtown stores to request service at segregated establishments. White merchants refused to serve the Black students and petitioned the police to arrest them for “trespassing” and “disorderly conduct.” On February 26, the chief of police warned student demonstrators that their “grace period” was over and threatened legal retaliation. The demonstrators were not dissuaded.

The next morning, scores of students marched downtown silently to stage sit-ins at their designated stores. As they passed, white teenagers gathered to scream racial epithets and hurl rocks and lit cigarettes at them. Instead of intervening to prevent the assaults and harassment, police arrested 77 African American student demonstrators and five white students who had joined their protest.

The 82 arrested activists were tried and convicted in a consolidated one-day trial on February 29. Afterward, they were given a “choice” between jail time and a monetary fine. A 22-year-old Fisk University student named Diane Nash informed the judge that 14 of the convicted demonstrators had chosen jail. Standing in open court, she explained that paying the fine “would be contributing to and supporting the injustice and immoral practices that have been performed in the arrest and conviction of the defendants.” Ms. Nash’s speech persuaded more than 60 of the convicted demonstrators to change their minds and also serve jail time rather than pay the fine.

The sight of dozens of Black college students being carted off to jail convinced the mayor of Nashville to release the students and appoint a biracial committee to make recommendations for desegregating downtown stores. The success of the Nashville sit-ins quickly made them a model for other segregated Southern communities to emulate. By the end of February, sit-in campaigns were underway in 31 Southern cities across eight states.

As a result of her persistence and bravery, Diane Nash emerged as a civil rights leader. She joined the Freedom Rides in 1961 and helped achieve the desegregation of interstate buses and facilities.

As the rest of the country acted to abolish slavery by ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment, states such as Delaware, Kentucky, and the Territory of Oklahoma refused to ratify. Delaware’s General Assembly refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, calling it an illegal extension of federal power over the state.

Delaware rejected several previous proposals to abolish slavery, including Lincoln’s 1861 proposal to compensate Delaware’s slaveholders using federal funds if they would free the Black people they held in bondage. The Delaware legislature replied to Lincoln’s proposal with a resolution stating that “when the people of Delaware desire to abolish slavery within her borders, they will do so in their own way, having due regard to strict equity.”

Not only did the Delaware legislature reject initial ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, but it also rejected the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 and the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870, which extended civil rights and voting privileges, respectively, to Black people, including the formerly enslaved. Finally, on February 12, 1901, Delaware ratified the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery—more than 30 years after the rest of the nation.