Author: Desto22

A white mob of 400 men lynched an African American man named Tom Waller in Lawrence County, Mississippi. Mr. Waller was accused of helping to murder a white family, despite a lack of evidence against him and his strenuous claims of innocence. Without a legal trial or investigation, an angry white mob hanged him from a tree the same night he was arrested.

A week earlier, after a white family was found murdered, a surviving 5-year-old child claimed a Black man did it. Officials brought several Black male “suspects” before her and she identified one—a man named Charles Lewis—as the perpetrator. A mob of hundreds immediately formed and lynched Mr. Lewis on December 10. During this era, the deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society burdened Black people with a presumption of guilt that often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered, whether evidence supported that suspicion or not.

Although early accounts alleged only one perpetrator, the white community was unsatisfied to lynch only one man and continued to “investigate” the white family’s murders. Several days later, a group of 30 white men approached a group of Black men, including an acquaintance of Mr. Lewis, and coerced him into saying that a man named Tom Waller had also been involved in the crime. Though another man in the group insisted this was not true, the unsubstantiated allegation was enough to seal Mr. Waller’s fate.

During this era of racial terror, mobs often used violence to force confessions or false identifications from African Americans fearful of the mob. News reports reported these facts later as justifications for the lynching of Mr. Waller but without a fair investigation or trial, the accusation against Mr. Waller was more reliable evidence of the acquaintance’s fear than of Mr. Waller’s guilt. Though he professed his innocence and there was no actual evidence against him, Mr. Waller was arrested on December 15—and was dead before dawn the next day.

Soon after he was taken into custody, a growing mob of 400 people seized Mr. Waller from law enforcement and conducted a “sham trial”; newspapers reported that several men “held court under a tree,” where Mr. Waller was interrogated as a rope was placed around his neck. Some men reportedly suggested that the “trial” be delayed a week because the “evidence” was so scant, but the rest of the mob rejected that idea and instead insisted that Mr. Waller be lynched that night. Newspapers later explained that the mob preferred to lynch Mr. Waller immediately because waiting “meant standing guard all night in the cold, and most of those present did not relish this at all.” To the mob, the low temperature and their own discomfort mattered more than the guilt or innocence of the Black man they planned to kill.

As the hundreds of white men in the mob grew “hungry,” press accounts described, “a wagon load of provisions” including fish and lobster was brought forward and everyone “indulged in a hearty supper” before continuing their deadly plan. Racial terror lynchings were often conducted as public spectacles; large white crowds came to cheer on the violence and participate in the brutal acts in a carnival-like atmosphere with food and “souvenirs.”

The mob ultimately hanged Tom Waller on the night of December 15, on the same hill where Mr. Lewis had been lynched five days earlier, and left his body hanging until 10 am the next morning. Mr. Waller is one of the more than 4,400 documented African American victims of racial terror lynching killed in the U.S. between 1877 and 1950, and there is no indication anyone was ever punished for his death.

Local police found two 12-year-old white girls alone in the area of University Park, Maryland. The girls told police officers that they had been “attacked” by a Black man “with a big knife” who had tried to tear their clothes off. This barebones accusation sent 60 Maryland state and D.C. police to the University Park area, where officers wrongly arrested and detained 17 Black men for questioning.

Hours later, the girls confessed that they fabricated the entire story. After getting lost on the way to view holiday decorations in downtown Washington, D.C., the girls admitted to police, they tore their own clothes and acted “hysterical” in the hopes of “getting a ride.” Rather than investigate the girls’ story from the start, which could have quickly exposed inconsistencies and established it as a lie, police had instead launched an immediate, massive manhunt, rounding up Black men for arrest on sight and subjecting them to interrogation to prove their innocence.

For decades, Black Americans have been subjected to repeated harassment, mistreatment, and police attacks, along with widespread racial discrimination. Black people are burdened with a presumption of guilt and dangerousness that is deeply rooted in our history of racial injustice and fueled by the myth of racial difference. Young Black men in particular are seen as threatening figures who should be feared, monitored, and even hunted.

This ongoing presumption of guilt and dangerousness is inextricably tied to a history of racial terror lynching. Between 1877 and 1950, thousands of Black men were lynched in the U.S., and nearly one in four were targeted based on the allegation of raping a white woman. These men were subjected to mob murder without investigation or trial, at a time when the definition of Black-on-white “rape” in the South was incredibly broad and required no allegation of force because white institutions, laws, and most white people rejected the idea that a white woman could or would willingly consent to sex with a Black man. This meant that any action by a Black man that could be interpreted as seeking or desiring contact with a white woman might prove deadly. Throughout the lynching era, Black men were lynched for knocking on the door of a white woman’s home, for delivering a letter to a white woman, or for entering a room where white women were sitting. A white woman’s claim of victimization at the hands of a Black man, whether true or not, could and often did lead to brutal and deadly violence.

Soon after the hoax was revealed, police announced that no charges would be filed against the two white girls, despite their serious false report resulting in the wrongful arrest of 17 innocent Black men—and creating the potential for much worse. The police also issued no apology for the way their overreach and unlawful detainment had targeted these Black men without any evidence.

Judge Householder of Knoxville, Tennessee, sent an entire family to jail on felony miscegenation charges. Setting bond at $500, he jailed a Black man named Jim McFarland, his mother, Ms. McFarland, a Black woman, Henry Whitehead, a Black man, Harriet Smith, who newspapers and local authorities reported was a white woman, and her children from prior relationships with white men, Lydia Smith and John Smith. At the time of arrest, the multigenerational family lived in the same household. The court’s order left a young child at home without a caregiver. The family spent over a month in jail before facing trial in January.

Newspapers at the time noted that Ms. Smith had reported to them “with shameless candor,” that she was actually a Black woman—while her mother was white, her father was a light-skinned Black man—and that she had never pretended to be white. Local news speculated further that since Ms. Smith’s children had white fathers, those children living with Black men and women might violate the miscegenation codes as written “even should the taint of negro blood be traced to the remote degree claimed.”

Local media praised Squire Householder’s actions, reporting that he “came to the rescue of the community” by “starting a war on the crime of miscegenation.” The white community in Knoxville universally commended the judge’s decision to incarcerate the family. White citizens viewed the case as an opportunity to expand the reach of a state law criminalizing relationships between Black and white people. While Tennessee law classified interracial marriage as a felony, at the time of the family’s arrest, no state supreme court decision addressed whether interracial cohabitation was a felony or a misdemeanor. The press and the courts hoped to eliminate interracial relationships entirely by terrorizing interracial couples with the threat of extreme punishment. As the Knoxville Sentinel wrote:

“There is no crime so common in Knoxville as white people living together with [Black people], and to make the matter more revolting, it generally happens that it is a white woman living with a [Black man]…. These [Black men] and their white mistresses will soon abandon their loathsome relations when they find that they must go to the penitentiary if they continue to live together.”

Ultimately, a month after her arrest, Ms. Smith was tried before a jury that determined she was “of colored stock” and acquitted her and Henry Whitehead of miscegenation. However, the jury still convicted them both of lewdness for living together, and they were each sentenced to 11 months in the workhouse. The cases against her children were dropped by the prosecutor after this verdict.

On December 2, 1922, a white schoolteacher was found killed in Perry, Florida. Though items found near the woman’s body belonged to a local white man, police insisted the perpetrator had to be a Black man and quickly focused on a Black man named Charles Wright as a suspect. 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, whether evidence supported that suspicion or not. This was especially true in cases of violent crime against white victims.

After several days of violent manhunts that terrorized the Black community and left at least one Black man dead, police arrested Charles Wright with a friend named Arthur Young. Before the men could be investigated or tried, a white mob seized Mr. Wright as they were being transported to jail and burned him alive.

Four days later, on December 12, the lynch mob attacked again. As officers were moving Arthur Young to another jail, the white mob seized him, riddled his body with bullets, and left his body hanging from a tree on the side of a highway in Perry, Florida.

The public lynching of Arthur Young, like that of Charles Wright, was not only intended to inflict harm on these individual men; it was also meant to terrorize the entire Black community. Following these murders, members of the mob turned on the Black community of Perry, burning several Black-owned homes, a church, the Masonic hall, and a school. Dozens of Black families fled the area, moving to the North as refugees from racial violence. No one was ever held accountable for the lynchings of Arthur Young and Charles Wright. They are among 15 documented African American victims of racial terror lynching killed in Taylor County, Florida, between 1877 and 1950.

The U.S. Army executed 13 Black soldiers who had been previously court-martialed and denied any right to appeal. In July 1917, the all-Black 3rd Battalion of the 24th United States Infantry Regiment was stationed at Camp Logan, near Houston, Texas, to guard white soldiers preparing for deployment to Europe. From the beginning of their assignment at Camp Logan, the Black soldiers were harassed and abused by the Houston police force.

Early on August 23, 1917, several soldiers, including a well-respected corporal, were brutally beaten and jailed by police. Police officers regularly beat African American troops and arrested them on baseless charges; the August 23 assault was the latest in a string of police abuses that had pushed the Black soldiers to their breaking point.

Seemingly under attack by local white authorities, over 150 Black soldiers armed themselves and left for Houston to confront the police about the persistent violence. They planned to stage a peaceful march to the police station as a demonstration against their mistreatment by police. However, just outside the city, the soldiers encountered a mob of armed white men. In the ensuing violence, four soldiers, four policemen, and 12 civilians were killed.

In the aftermath, the military investigated and court-martialed 157 Black soldiers, trying them in three separate proceedings. In the first military trial, held in November 1917, 63 soldiers were tried and 54 were convicted on all charges. At sentencing, 13 were sentenced to death and 43 received life imprisonment. The 13 condemned soldiers were denied any right to appeal and were hanged on December 11, 1917.

The second and third trials resulted in death sentences for an additional 16 soldiers; however, those men were given the opportunity to appeal, largely due to negative public reactions to the first 13 unlawful executions. President Woodrow Wilson ultimately commuted the death sentences for 10 of the remaining soldiers facing death, but the remaining six were hanged. In total, the Houston unrest resulted in the executions of 19 Black soldiers. NAACP advocacy and legal assistance later helped secure the early release of most of the 50 soldiers serving life sentences. No white civilians were ever brought to trial for involvement in the violence.

Black college football players from California’s Humboldt State College were banned from “mixing” with white people during their stay in Florida for the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) National Championship Football Game. After an undefeated season, the racially integrated team earned the right to compete in the Holiday Bowl on December 10 in St. Petersburg, Florida, for the national title. However, segregated facilities forbade Humboldt State’s Black players from sleeping under the same roof as their white teammates.

The 1960 Holiday Bowl in St. Petersburg brought together the Humboldt State Lumberjacks team and the all-white Lenoir-Rhyne University Bears from North Carolina. The five Black players who traveled to Florida as part of the Lumberjacks team—fullbacks Dave Littleton, Earl Love, and Ed White; tackle Vester Flanagan; and guard Walt Mosely—were denied entrance to the hotel where their white teammates were permitted to stay.

As in most cities across the South, St. Petersburg’s Jim Crow laws stringently defined and dominated all aspects of life from the major to the mundane. Segregation laws barred any “race mixing” in public hospitals, schools, transportation, and other public accommodations. Due to these policies, Black men, women and children experienced the daily humiliation of a system designed to maintain racial hierarchy and uphold white supremacy.

Even in 1960, college football remained segregated throughout the South, largely because colleges and universities in the region remained segregated. Though the U.S. Supreme Court struck down school segregation in its 1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education, Southern lawmakers’ defiant resistance to that decision greatly delayed implementation; by 1960, flagship state schools in Alabama and Mississippi had not yet allowed a Black student to enroll, and Southern white schools achieved all-white athletic competition by segregating themselves into all-white athletic conferences. This meant that Black athletes living in the South were restricted to attending and playing for Historically Black Colleges and Universities in segregated conferences within the region, or relocating to play at integrated schools in the North and West.

Integrated and segregated schools still met in competition when paired in bowl and national title games; when they did, racial prejudice was pervasive. The all-white University of Alabama football team refused to play any integrated teams for years, until it accepted a bid in the 1959 Liberty Bowl against Penn State and lineman Charley Janerette became the first Black player to face the Crimson Tide (Penn State won, 7-0). Just one year later, the NAIA arranged a national title game to take place in Florida, and Humboldt State’s Black players received virtually no support from the athletic conference or their school administrators.

Despite calls from some students and organizers that humiliating Black players to submit to racist segregation requirements was unacceptable, players were nonetheless compelled to play. Humboldt State’s head coach, Phil Sarboe, praised the treatment the team had received in St. Petersburg, denied that players were unhappy about the segregated facilities, and expressed that Humboldt State would “like to come back next year.”

The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a report revealing the CIA’s use of torture against Muslim detainees during the “War on Terror.” The report detailed dozens of horrific accounts of Muslim people being dehumanized to such an extent that they were likened to “dogs who had been kenneled.”

The story of Gul Rahman is illustrative of what the Senate Select Committee uncovered about the CIA’s practices between 2001 and 2006. In November 2002, Mr. Rahman was subjected to “48 hours of sleep deprivation, auditory overload, total darkness, isolation, a cold shower, and rough treatment.” Immediately following this experience, he was labeled as “uncooperative,” stripped of his clothing, shackled to the wall of his cell, and “forced to sit on the bare concrete floor without pants.” His autopsy revealed that he most likely died from hypothermia. Three months after Mr. Rahman froze to death, the CIA approved a plan to strip detainees nude in rooms set to near freezing temperatures. No officials were charged for Mr. Rahman’s death, and one of his interrogators was recommended to receive a $2,500 bonus for his “consistently superior work.”

In addition to exposing stories similar to Mr. Rahman’s (including accounts of people being subjected to force-feeding, mock executions, and sexual violence), the report concluded that the CIA had misled Congress about its practices, under-reported the number of people it had detained and tortured, and falsely incarcerated more than 20% of its detainees. One of the people unlawfully detained was a man with an intellectual disability who was used as “leverage” to obtain information from a family member. Despite these troubling findings, there have been few attempts to hold anyone accountable for the harm that U.S. officials perpetrated against Muslim detainees.

A white mob in New Hope near Columbus, Mississippi, raped and lynched a Black woman named Cordelia Stevenson and left her body hanging for days near a railroad track to terrorize Black residents.

Several months earlier, the barn of a white man named Gabe Frank burned down, and the town quickly focused suspicion on Black community members, including Mrs. Stevenson’s son. 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. Though Mrs. Stevenson insisted that her son had moved out of town months before the barn burned, and though no evidence tied him to the fire, local authorities seized Mrs. Stevenson and her husband, Arch, for questioning.

The local police ultimately concluded the Stevensons’ son had not been involved in the barn fire and released them both. Soon after, on December 8, a white mob gathered outside the Stevenson home, forced their way into the house while the couple slept, and kidnapped Mrs. Stevenson. The mob raped and lynched her, then left Mrs. Stevenson’s naked, brutalized body hanging by the railroad track for two days, where she was visible to thousands of people traveling by train.

No one was ever held responsible for her death.

White mobs attacked and killed dozens of Black citizens of Vicksburg, Mississippi, who had organized a political meeting in support of a duly elected Black sheriff, who had been improperly removed from office.

During the Reconstruction era that followed Emancipation and the Civil War, Black Mississippians made progress toward political equality. Despite the passage of Black Codes designed to oppress and disenfranchise Black people in the South, under the protection of federal troops in place to enforce the newly established civil rights of Black people, many Black men voted and served in political office on federal, state, and local levels.

In the 1870s, Peter Crosby, a formerly enslaved Black man, was elected sheriff in Vicksburg, Mississippi—but shortly after taking office, Sheriff Crosby was indicted on false criminal charges and a violent white mob removed him from his position.

On December 7, 1874, Black citizens in Vicksburg organized an effort to try to help Mr. Crosby regain his office. In response, white mobs attacked and killed dozens of Black citizens in an act of racial terrorism, which would later become known as the “Vicksburg Massacre.”

Following this brutal attack, federal troops were sent to Vicksburg and Mr. Crosby was appointed as sheriff again. However, in early 1875, a white man named J.P. Gilmer was hired to serve as Sheriff Crosby’s deputy. After Sheriff Crosby tried to have Mr. Gilmer removed from office, Mr. Gilmer shot Sheriff Crosby in the head on June 7, 1875. Mr. Gilmer was arrested for the attempted assassination but never brought to trial. Mr. Crosby survived the shooting but never made a full recovery and had to serve the remainder of his term through a representative white citizen.

The violence and intimidation tactics utilized by white Mississippians intent on restoring white supremacy soon enabled forces antagonistic to the aims of Reconstruction and racial equality to regain power in Mississippi.

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision upholding the Expatriation Act of 1907, which stripped American women of their citizenship when they married a non-citizen. Under that act, women who lost their U.S. citizenship could apply to be naturalized if their husbands later became American citizens—but since virtually all Asian immigrants were legally barred from becoming U.S. citizens at the time, an American woman who married an Asian man would lose her citizenship permanently. Similarly, women of Asian descent who were American citizens by birth had no means of regaining their U.S. citizenship if they lost it through marriage to a foreign person—even if the foreign person was white—because Asian men and women were ineligible for naturalization in all circumstances.

Meanwhile, American men who married foreign women were permitted to keep their citizenship.

Mackenzie v. Hare was an attempt to challenge the Expatriation Act and reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court upheld the law, ruling that an involuntary revocation of citizenship would be unconstitutional, but stripping a woman of citizenship upon marriage to a foreign husband was permissible because such women voluntarily enter into such marriages, “with knowledge of the consequences.”

The Expatriation Act remained in full effect until 1922, when Congress amended the law to permit most women to retain their American citizenship after marriage to a non-U.S. citizen—but still stripped citizenship from American women married to Asian immigrants ineligible for citizenship until discriminatory immigration laws were reformed in the 1960s. In 2014, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution expressing regret for the past revocation of American women’s citizenship under this law.