Author: Desto22

White students began to withdraw from the newly integrated Tuskegee High School in Alabama to avoid attending school with Black students. Within one week, all 275 white students had stopped attending the school.

In January 1963, African American parents of students in Macon County, Alabama, sued the Macon County Board of Education to desegregate the county’s public schools. Though the U.S. Supreme Court had declared school segregation unconstitutional nearly nine years earlier in Brown v. Board of Education, Macon County had taken no steps to integrate local schools. In August 1963, a federal court ordered the school board to begin integration immediately.

The school board selected 13 African American students to integrate Tuskegee High School that fall. On September 2, scheduled to be the first day of integrated classes, Alabama Governor George Wallace ordered the school closed due to “safety concerns.” The school reopened a week later, and withdrawals began soon after.

Most of Tuskegee High School’s former white students enrolled at Macon Academy, a newly formed, all-white private school. In support of the community’s efforts to sidestep federal law and maintain school segregation, Governor Wallace and the school board approved the use of state funds to provide scholarships for white students abandoning the public school system to use at Macon Academy. Meanwhile, the Macon County School Board ordered Tuskegee High School closed due to low enrollment and split its remaining African American students among all-white high schools in the towns of Notasulga and Shorter. White students in those high schools boycotted for several days in protest, and many eventually transferred to Macon Academy.

Now known as Macon East Academy and located near the city of Montgomery, the former Macon Academy is one of several private schools in the Alabama Black Belt with origins rooted in resistance to integration. As of the 2015-2016 school year, Macon-East Academy’s student body of 277 was 97% white and less than 3% African American.

As 19 Black six-year-olds integrated all-white elementary schools in Nashville, Tennessee, white church members—including one local minister—organized a persistent and violent campaign to oppose the integration of Nashville public schools. Outside Fehr Elementary School, one person held a sign that read “God is the author of segregation” and pursued two Black children walking to the school. Outside three different elementary schools that same morning, Fred Stroud, a white minister, sought to dissuade white parents from allowing their children to be educated alongside Black children by preaching damnation for those who did not uphold segregation.

The next day, 100 sticks of dynamite were thrown into Hattie Cotton Elementary School and exploded. Patricia Watson, the one Black elementary student who had been in class the previous morning, did not return. No Black children returned to Hattie Cotton Elementary School the following year, and no one faced criminal charges for the bombing.

Though Brown v. Board of Education determined in 1954 that school segregation was unconstitutional, for three years white residents in Nashville relied on intimidation and organized political resistance to maintain segregation in the public schools. In 1957, Nashville finally developed a “stair step program” which permitted a few Black elementary school students to enroll in eight elementary schools.

Throughout the summer of 1957, white segregationists in Nashville held intimidation rallies to terrorize Black families. In the days leading up to the first day of school, as Black parents pre-registered their children for school, mobs of white church members gathered outside buildings with signs calling segregation the “will of God.” One leader declared that “integration can be reversed” and that “blood will run the streets” before Nashville’s schools were integrated.

By the morning of September 9, out of the 126 Black children eligible to attend all-white elementary schools, only 19 Black children matriculated. Reverend Stroud gathered crowds at Glenn Elementary to preach about the evils of integration, and white people in cars outside of Jones Elementary held signs emblazoned with KKK iconography and Biblical quotes. As opposition grew throughout the morning, white mobs crowded the sidewalks and threw rocks and bottles at Black children and their parents who attempted to pass through the crowd. By the end of the day, half of the white students at Glenn Elementary School—nearly 250 children—had not arrived, as white parents chose to deny their children education rather than permit them to learn alongside Black children.

That evening, 300 white people gathered downtown and continued to threaten Black families who sent their children to school. They strung an effigy in blackface from a stoplight with a note pinned to its chest that read “this could be you.” As the mob around Fehr Elementary grew to at least 400, white people burned two outbuildings located on the property of a Black family that had sent their daughter to the school. The mob also continued to burn crosses on lawns of Black families who had dared to enroll their students that morning.

The Texas House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a resolution encouraging U.S. senators and congressmen to work toward repealing the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship to Black people born in the U.S.

The resolution was introduced by Representative Robert Yantis, who initially also advocated for the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted African American men the right to vote in the U.S.

During the House session on September 8, Representative Yantis argued that “the perpetuity of Caucasian supremacy depended on the disenfranchisement of the negro.” He added that “in the heart of every negro [is] a desire for social equality and Texas ought to take the initiative in securing the repeal of the amendment.” The resolution passed with a vote of 51-34.

Opposition to the Fourteenth Amendment began before it even became an enforceable part of the Constitution. After the amendment was passed by the Senate in 1866, 28 of the 37 states had to ratify it. Southern legislatures refused; 10 of the 11 former Confederate states rejected the amendment with overwhelming majorities, and Louisiana did so unanimously.

The Fourteenth Amendment was finally adopted in July 1868, after Congress imposed military rule on the South and required states seeking readmission to the Union to ratify the amendment.

Local merchants in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, began enforcing an ordinance that denied service to all members of the U.S. military, regardless of their race, to protest integration. In a choice between patriotic support for the U.S. military and a commitment to racial segregation, the parish chose bigotry.

The day before, a new local ordinance in Plaquemines Parish banning civilian restaurants from serving all military members and prohibiting parish residents from visiting the integrated Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base New Orleans took effect.

While Black veterans were often the target of physical violence and social humiliation, this restaurant ordinance barred all sailors from service, regardless of race, rather than comply with integration. At the time, segregationist Leander Perez knew that the ordinance would “hurt our good white boys who are in the military service” and would bring a significant loss in revenue, but he nevertheless argued that banning service for all troops was necessary because maintaining segregation was more important. Local merchants—including a shopkeeper named Mrs. Charles T. Boone who owned the Hummingbird Restaurant in Belle Chase, Louisiana—complied. On September 7, she pointed to a sign that read “Parish law forbids me to serve military personnel in uniform” and refused to serve coffee to two members of the U.S. Navy.

Mr. Perez championed the ordinance as an aggressive response to a report from President John F. Kennedy’s Committee on Equal Opportunity in the Armed Services (“The Geller Report”). The Geller Report issued a series of recommendations aimed at combatting racial discrimination in the armed services. In particular, the report urged military officers to declare segregated civilian establishments “off-limits” to those under their command.

Leander Perez, who defended the military service ban, served as district attorney, judge, and political boss in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, during the civil rights era. A devout Catholic, he took a segregationist position so extreme that the Archbishop of the Diocese of New Orleans excommunicated him from the church. An active member of his local white citizens’ council, Mr. Perez gave public speeches pledging to outlaw the NAACP, describing integration as the “mongrelization of the races,” and encouraging politicians to commit criminal contempt in defiance of desegregation orders.

12 Black men held at a prison farm in Richmond, Texas, were placed in an underground cell as punishment for not picking cotton fast enough. Eight of those men died of asphyxiation. The cell was nine feet long, seven feet wide, and seven feet high, and temperatures outside neared 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The only ventilation in the cell came from four small holes connected to pipes in the ceiling that were “just large enough to admit a quarter.” The next day, inspectors found that one of the holes had been plugged.

Accused of “laziness in picking cotton” while being forced to work on a prison farm, all 12 men were left in this cramped cell overnight. Three of the surviving men explained that they were each able to position themselves by one of the three working holes in the ceiling. The fourth survived by pressing his face against the crack at the bottom of the door. They cried out repeatedly to guards throughout the night; “Men are dying in here,” they yelled. The guards ignored them, claiming that “it is always the case for prisoners confined as the men were to make such cries.” Early the next morning, when the guard on duty heard the men shouting that one of them was dead, he opened the cell and had two of the prisoners remove one of the dead bodies. The guard “did not stop to ascertain” if any of the other men inside were dead. Instead, he waited for his manager to arrive before they reopened the cell to find eight of the men inside had suffocated to death.

No one was ever held accountable for the deaths of these men. The attorney general of Texas ultimately concluded that prison officials were not culpable because placing these men in this suffocating chamber, and failing to listen to their pleas for help, did not violate the law.

Four of the men were buried on the property at Jester State Prison Farm, which still houses inmates today. Learn more about how millions of Americans today continue to be incarcerated in overcrowded, violent, and inhumane jails and prisons that do not provide treatment, education, or rehabilitation, and how cultures of indifference within prisons and jails continue to result in death.

A white mob lynched a Black man named Robert Johnson in Princeton, West Virginia. After Mr. Johnson was accused of assaulting a white girl, sheriff’s officials anticipated a lynch mob would form and moved him from Bluefield to Princeton. When the move was discovered, an armed mob of white men came to Princeton and seized Mr. Johnson. The local judge urged the mob to let the court conduct a “speedy trial,” and the state governor warned that a lynching should not be allowed—but the mob was determined.

After kidnapping Mr. Johnson from police custody, the enraged mob beat Mr. Johnson with clubs and rocks, strung him to a telegraph pole “in the presence of the judge, sheriff, and armed guards,” and shot him hundreds of times. Despite their purported efforts to dissuade the mob, police did not attempt to use force to save Mr. Johnson’s life, and the judge did not order any members of the lynch mob arrested.

After the lynching, the growing mob patrolled the town terrorizing other African Americans, threatening to lynch other Black people they encountered—including those who attempted to cut down Mr. Johnson’s hanging corpse. Instead, the mob cut the dead body down, stripped off most of the clothing to keep as “souvenirs,” and then again hanged the corpse from the same pole.

According to press reports, authorities later acknowledged a growing possibility that Mr. Johnson had been wrongly identified and was innocent of the alleged assault. Nevertheless, a grand jury convened to investigate the murder declined to return a single indictment, and no one was ever arrested or prosecuted for his lynching.

Mr. Johnson is one of more than 4,000 documented African American victims of racial terror lynching killed in the U.S. between 1877 and 1950.

Republicans in Hinds County, Mississippi, held a barbecue and meeting in the town of Clinton that was attended by 3,000 people. Hoping to curb the risk of violent political conflict, Clinton authorities appointed special police and prohibited serving liquor. When the Republican speakers began making their political speeches in the afternoon, Democratic party representatives unexpectedly joined the meeting and requested speaking time.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln was the dominant political wing of the federal government working to restore national unity and enforce the new civil rights of Black people, while the Democratic Party largely represented the white South of the former Confederacy intent on regaining control of their state governments. The “Radical Republicans” were an arm of the Republican Party that advocated imposing severe penalties on the South for waging the Civil War and also ensuring full political and social equality for the millions of Black people in the South who were now American citizens.

Political realignment during the civil rights movement of the 1960s led to major shifts in party identification, as Southern elected officials and constituents largely left the Democratic Party in protest of civil rights advancements enacted by President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson, while the Republican Party stayed silent on civil rights issues to attract the defecting South and later embraced the coded language of “law and order” and “state’s rights” to dominate regional politics. But in 1875, Republican politicians in the South—a small minority—were considered agents of federal oppression, friends of African Americans, and enemies of the white supremacy many former Confederates wanted to reestablish.

At the Clinton, Mississippi, barbecue on that September evening, the risk of violent conflict between the political parties was great. In the interest of keeping the peace, Republican officials agreed to accommodate Democrats’ request to speak and arranged for a public discussion between Judge Amos R. Johnston, a Democratic candidate for state senate, and Captain H.T. Fisher, Republican editor of the the Jackson Times.

Both speakers were to be given an equal amount of speaking time, and Judge Johnston spoke first. When Mr. Fisher’s turn came, he expressed optimism that meetings between the parties could take place peacefully in the future—but eight minutes into his address, an altercation erupted in the crowd. A gunfight between Black and white people in the audience rang out, as bystanders panicked and rushed to escape the danger. Within 15 minutes, three white people and four Black people were dead, and six white people and 20 Black people were wounded.

Though newspapers reported that the Black people who had fired weapons were acting in self-defense, many white observers were enraged by the Black show of force. That night, armed white men from Clinton and Vicksburg formed roving bands targeting Black men. By the next day, an estimated 50 Black people had been killed. Many more had been forced into the woods and swampland to avoid an attack, where they remained until the attack subsided.

Alabama adopted a new state constitution that prohibited interracial marriage and mandated separate schools for Black and white children. The state constitutional convention’s primary purpose was to legally disenfranchise Black voters, and the new constitution also included several electoral policies designed to suppress Black political power.

Framers of this constitution knew that, because the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited race-based disenfranchisement, discriminatory constitutional provisions intended to maintain white supremacy had to appear race-neutral. To that end, the new constitution called for the appointment of three registrars from each county who had wide discretion when accepting registration applications and were chosen and trained to minimize registration by African Americans.

The constitution’s new registration rules also required voters to be able to read and write any section of the U.S. Constitution and have been lawfully employed for the previous 12 months. Anyone who did not meet the employment specification could still register if he or his wife had real estate and possessions taxed at $300. Though these requirements had severely limited the voting rights of African Americans and poor white people in Alabama, the constitutional drafters provided exceptions that allowed voters to register anyway if they were voters, descendants of voters, or could demonstrate an understanding of the U.S. Constitution. This provision offered a loophole much more likely to apply to white men (who had been eligible for military service in the South). The effect was intentional.

Alabama was home to approximately 75,000 registered African American voters before the new constitution was enacted, but drafters estimated the new rules would reduce that number to less than 30,000. Alabama delegates approved the constitution 132-12. The state amended the 1901 constitution since its adoption, but several of the discriminatory provisions of the 1901 constitution—including the mandate to maintain racially segregated public schools—remained until 2022.

In 1885, the Union Pacific Railroad employed 500 coal miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, two-thirds of whom were Chinese. White miners, angry that the railroad was hiring Chinese miners, decided to drive Chinese people out of Rock Springs.

On September 2, 1885, a dispute broke out between white and Chinese miners when both groups wanted to work in the same part of the mine. Later that day, 100 white miners gathered with guns, hatchets, and knives and marched toward “Chinatown” where the Chinese miners lived, to stage a brutal attack. When the Chinese residents attempted to flee, the white miners fired at them while they ran.

Twenty-eight Chinese people were killed in the massacre and another 15 were badly wounded. The white miners also looted and burned all 79 houses belonging to Chinese residents, leaving “Chinatown” demolished. In the days following this attack, federal troops brought in to establish order set up camp between the white area of town and “Chinatown,” to prevent more violence; troops remained there for the next 13 years. Although 14 white miners were arrested in connection with the massacre, none were ever convicted of any crime.

Today, there is little evidence of the massacre in Rock Springs. No marked gravesites exist for the victims because, at that time, “Orientals” were banned from white cemeteries. Instead, the victims were cremated and their ashes returned to China. Congress eventually authorized an indemnity to China in the amount of $147,748, but the U.S. government never assumed legal responsibility for the massacre.

During the week of September 1, 1884, Joseph and Mary Tape, immigrants from China who had lived in the U.S. for over a decade, attempted to enroll their eight-year-old, American-born daughter, Mamie Tape, in San Francisco’s Spring Valley School. The school principal denied the Tapes’ request because of Mamie’s race, and the state superintendent—noting that even the California Constitution described Chinese Americans as “dangerous to the well-being of the state”—supported that decision.

This incident took place in the midst of extensive discriminatory treatment of Chinese American children in California’s public schools. Until 1880, Asian American students were forbidden from attending public schools altogether, and the educational options available to them in the early 1880s were sparse, with vastly lower resources than the established schools for white children.

Facing these obstacles to securing meaningful education for their daughter, Mr. and Mrs. Tape sued the school and won. In January 1885, a California Superior Court judge ruled that the school’s refusal to admit Mamie Tape was a violation of California state law and the U.S. Constitution. The California Supreme Court confirmed that decision when the state appealed and held that Chinese students had a right to public education. The Court’s decision did not, however, prohibit the creation of segregated schools.

Recognizing that loophole, the California legislature soon passed a bill requiring public school districts to create separate schools for Chinese American students and prohibiting Chinese American students from attending schools attended by white children.

When Mamie Tape arrived for school immediately after the California Supreme Court’s decision, she was denied entry because her vaccinations were not up to date. By the time the Tape family was able to comply with the vaccination requirements, a new school had been opened for Chinese American students in compliance with the new state law, and Mamie was forced to enroll there. The California law banning Chinese American students from attending public schools with white students was enforced until the late 1920s.