Author: Desto22

Bunk Richardson, a Black man, is lynched by a white mob in Gadsden, Alabama, terrorizing the Black community and forcing his relatives to abandon their businesses and leave town.

Mob of 2,000 white people lynches Eli Pigot in Brookhaven, Mississippi.

A bomb explodes at the home of Carlotta Walls, the youngest of nine Black students who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, three years prior.

White state troopers fire into crowd of African American students at South Carolina State College, killing three and injuring 28, after students attempt to desegregate a bowling alley.

A Black man named Luther Holbert and an unidentified Black woman are tortured, mutilated, and burned alive in front of 600 picnicking white spectators in Doddsville, Mississippi.

A white mob seized Thomas Brown, a 19-year-old Black man, from a jail cell and lynched him on the Jessamine County Courthouse lawn in Nicholasville, Kentucky. Thomas had been arrested for an alleged assault on a white woman but never had the chance to stand trial.

The deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society during this time period often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered or alleged, whether evidence supported that suspicion or not. Almost 25% of all lynchings involved allegations of inappropriate behavior between a Black man and a white woman which would be characterized as “assault” or “sexual assault.” The mere accusation of sexual impropriety regularly aroused violent mobs and ended in lynching. Allegations against Black people were rarely subject to scrutiny.

On the night of the lynching, a mob of 200 white men assembled at the jail and seized Thomas Brown from police. They then hung him from a tree in front of the county courthouse. Though news reports identified the young woman’s brother as a leader of the mob, no one was ever prosecuted for Thomas Brown’s murder and authorities concluded that he “met death by strangulation at the hands of parties unknown.”

During this era of racial terror, it was quite common for lynch mobs to include prominent community members, and for the local press and police to help conceal lynchers’ identities to ensure no one was punished or held accountable.

Learn more about how over 6,500 Black women, men, and children were victims of racial terror lynching in the U.S. between 1865-1950.

Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1917, also known as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act. Intended to prevent “undesirables” from immigrating to the U.S., the act primarily targeted individuals migrating from Asia. Under the act, people from “any country not owned by the United States adjacent to the continent of Asia” were barred from immigrating to the U.S. The bill also utilized an English literacy test and an increased tax of eight dollars per person for immigrants aged 16 years and older.

The new bill was not meant to impact immigrants from Northern and Western Europe but targeted Asian, Mexican, and Mediterranean immigrants in an attempt to curb their migration. One author of the bill, Alabama Congressman John Burnett, estimated it would exclude approximately 40% of Mediterranean immigrants, 90% of those from Mexico, and all Indian and non-Caucasian immigrants.

The bill also restricted the immigration of people with mental and physical handicaps, the poor, and people with criminal records or suspected of being involved in prostitution. Proponents claimed the bill would keep burdensome immigrants from entering the country and thus “promote the moral and material prosperity” of new immigrants permitted to enter.

The bill remained law for 35 years, until the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952 eliminated racial restrictions in immigration and naturalization statutes.

Alabama launches convict leasing by leasing Wetumpka State Penitentiary and its inmates to a private businessman.

Rosa Lee Ingram and her two teen sons are sentenced to die in Georgia for killing an armed white mon who assaulted them.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, police arrest ore than 200 Black men for “vagrancy” and sentence them the next day to forced labor at the city workhouse.