Author: Desto22

In an ongoing battle with federal agencies and the U.S. Supreme Court, the Alabama Senate passed a law that made it illegal for public schools in the state to enter into desegregation plans with federal officials.

A decade after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, many school districts throughout the South still maintained segregated public schools. In 1964, the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which contained a provision that required local school districts to comply with integration orders to receive federal funding.

In 1966, 12 years after Brown, the U.S. Office of Education issued regulations providing guidance and standards regarding school desegregation. These regulations required segregated school districts to submit integration plans to the federal government. Noncompliant districts risked losing federal funds.

In response, Governor George Wallace, whose 1963 inauguration speech had vowed to maintain “segregation forever,” proposed a new state law to forbid Alabama school districts from entering into desegregation agreements with the federal Office of Education. In legislative hearings, representatives of Alabama’s teachers’ unions spoke against the bill and warned that it would risk $24 million of federal funding. Nevertheless, the Alabama Senate approved the bill on August 31, almost unanimously: only seven members voted against the measure.

The Alabama House of Representatives passed the bill soon after, and Governor Wallace signed it into law on September 9.

The massive resistance by the white community was largely successful in preventing the integration of schools in the South. In the five Deep South states, every single one of 1.4 million Black schoolchildren attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960. By the start of the 1964-65 school year, less than 3% of the South’s African American children attended school with white students, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina that number remained substantially below 1%. In 1967, 13 years after Brown, a report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights observed that white violence and intimidation against Black people “continues to be a deterrent to school desegregation.”

The first day of school, mobs of white pro-segregationists guarded Mansfield High School and patrolled the streets threatening to use guns and other weapons to prevent Black children from registering. Outside the school, the mob hung an African American effigy at the top of the school’s flag pole and set it on fire. Attached to one pant leg of the effigy was a sign that read, “This Negro tried to enter a white school. This would be a terrible way to die.” On the other leg, a sign read, “Stay Away, Niggers.” A second effigy was hung on the front of the school building.

In 1956, Mansfield, Texas, was a small farming town of 1,500 people. Its schools were strictly segregated and facilities for Black students were run-down and under-funded. Before the start of the 1956-1957 school year, in compliance with a federal desegregation order and the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision barring racial segregation in schools, the Mansfield school board approved a plan to admit 12 Black students to the all-white Mansfield High School. However, many local white residents opposed integration, and some took to the streets in protest.

In response to the unrest on the first day of school, Texas Governor Allan Shivers sent six Texas Rangers to Mansfield with instructions to “maintain law and order” and transfer any students “white or colored, whose attendance or attempts to attend Mansfield High School would be reasonably calculated to incite violence.” Soon afterward, the Mansfield School Board voted to “exhaust all legal remedies to delay integration.”

Though the U.S. Supreme Court in December 1956 rejected the Mansfield school district’s request to delay integration due to local opposition, resistance and non-compliance continued for years. Mansfield, Texas, public schools did not officially desegregate until 1965.

A white man named Billy Jack Caston, who was the first cousin of the Amite County sheriff, attacked Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader Bob Moses as he accompanied two Black residents—Curtis Dawson and the Reverend Alfred Knox—to register to vote. Two other white men stood by and witnessed the brutal beating.

In the early 1960s, approximately 70% of white adults in Mississippi were registered to vote, but only 6.7% of eligible Black Mississippians were registered. These rates lagged behind even other states in the Deep South, such as Alabama (23%) and Louisiana (32%), and were an intentional consequence of Mississippi’s efforts to disenfranchise Black people in the state over the prior decades.

During Reconstruction, Black Mississippians participated in state politics in large numbers and comprised a majority of the state’s electorate by 1870. However, white Mississippians quickly resorted to violence and discriminatory legislation to deprive Black citizens of their voting rights. As early as 1875, armed groups intercepted Black people as they attempted to register to vote. From 1876 through the 1960s, Mississippi enacted a series of targeted voter suppression measures that disenfranchised Black people. These measures included publishing the names of Black registrants in the local paper to incite violent reprisal, all-white primary elections, a poll tax, stringent residency requirements, and a voter registration test administered at the complete discretion of local white registrars. The test required that Black people prove literacy, knowledge of state law and government, and “good moral character.” These laws maintained the voting rights of white people by exempting those already registered (and their children) from burdensome registration requirements. Further, in 1960, Mississippi adopted legislation providing for the destruction of voter registration records to insulate its discriminatory practices from federal review.

In the 1960s, civil rights activists in Mississippi were working to get Black voters registered. At the time he was attacked, Mr. Moses was working as a vote tutor, training Black applicants to pass Mississippi’s discriminatory registration test.

As Mr. Moses, Mr. Dawson, and the Reverend Knox approached the Amite County Courthouse, Mr. Caston, the sheriff’s first cousin, demanded that Mr. Moses disclose the group’s intentions. Without waiting for a response, he slammed Mr. Moses onto the ground and kneeled over his body for several minutes, beating him with a blunt instrument. Several white men stood nearby watching but did nothing to intervene. Mr. Moses sustained lacerations to his head and required several stitches.

The day he was beaten, Mr. Moses attempted to seek redress from the local authorities for the violence committed against him. The county sheriff refused to help Mr. Moses and directed him to the local justice of the peace, who was “out of the office” that day.

Mr. Moses finally succeeded in filing a formal complaint. However, an all-white jury acquitted the white man who attacked him. Mr. Moses’s complaint marked the first time that a Black person prosecuted a white person for violence in Amite County, Mississippi.

Two white men named Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam abducted a 14-year-old Black boy named Emmett Till from his great-uncle’s home in Money, Mississippi. The men drove Emmett to a storage shed on Milam’s property in Drew, Mississippi, where they took turns torturing and beating him with a pistol, before forcing him to load a 74-pound fan into the back of their pick-up truck. The men then drove Emmett to the edge of the Tallahatchie River, ordered him to remove his clothes, and shot him in the head. Once the child was dead, Bryant and Milam chained the fan to his corpse and rolled it into the river.

Just over one week before, on August 20, Emmett had traveled by train from Chicago to Mississippi to spend two weeks visiting family. A few days into his visit, he and a group of friends and cousins went into a nearby store to buy candy; Emmett was later accused of acting “familiar” with the young white female storekeeper, Carolyn Bryant.

This was a dangerous allegation in the racial caste system of the Mississippi Delta, which was very different from Chicago and unfamiliar to young Emmett. Within a few days, word of the interaction reached Carolyn Bryant’s husband, Roy, and he enlisted his half-brother J.W. in the deadly violence that followed. Two young boys found Emmett Till’s mutilated and bloated body on August 31.

Devastated by the brutal murder and badly disfigured corpse, Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley, defiantly held an open-casket funeral in Chicago, where thousands gazed in horror at what was left of her son. To show the world the brutality Emmett had suffered, his mother also distributed a photograph of his corpse for publication in newspapers and magazines and later explained her motivation: “The whole nation had to bear witness to this.”

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16-year-old NAACP Youth Council President Rodney Hurst and dozens of his peers staged a peaceful sit-in protest at a “whites only” Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Jacksonville, Florida. Throughout that month, Youth Council members had successfully organized peaceful sit-ins at Morrison’s Cafeteria and other prominent lunch counters in the city. On this Saturday, however, the young Black demonstrators were violently attacked by a mob of more than 200 white people armed with baseball bats and ax handles.

The attack began when white onlookers angered by the demonstration began spitting on the sit-in protesters and yelling racial slurs at them. When the Black demonstrators refused to respond and continued sitting peacefully, the violence escalated. The white people beat the demonstrators with wooden ax handles and baseball bats and soon spread into the streets of downtown Jacksonville, attacking Black people indiscriminately. According to reports, members of the Ku Klux Klan organized the “Ax Handle Saturday” attack, which left more than 50 people injured.

As bloodied and battered Black children fled to a nearby church to seek refuge, many white police officers joined the mob violence, arrested the fleeing civil rights demonstrators, or did nothing. “The intent was to scare, intimidate, and bring physical harm,” Rodney Hurst later recalled. “Many times you could not draw a line between the Klan and law enforcement, because law enforcement were at least accomplices to a lot of the things the Klan did.”

A mob of white men seized 16 Black men from the Gibson County Jail in Trenton, Tennessee, and lynched them. The group had been transferred from Picketsville, a neighboring town where they had been arrested and accused of shooting at two white men.

Around 2 am that morning, a contingent of 400-500 masked white men who were mounted on horses and armed with shotguns demanded entrance to the Gibson County Jail. The men confronted the jailer and threatened to kill him if he did not relinquish the keys to the cell holding the African American men. After the jailer gave the leader of the mob the key, the members of the mob bound the Black men by their hands and led them out of the jail cell. The jailer would later testify that he soon heard a series of gun shots in the distance.

Soon afterward, the jailer found six of the men lying along nearby Huntingdon Road—four were dead, their bodies “riddled with bullets.” Two of the men who were found wounded but alive later died before receiving medical attention. The bodies of the 10 remaining men were later found at the bottom of a river about one mile from town.

Local white officials held an inquest that concluded the men were killed by “shots inflicted by guns in the hands of unknown parties.” Though all the victims of the violence had been Black, the town mayor expressed concern that local white people were in danger because Black people throughout the county might be planning to violently retaliate.

Just one day after the mass murder of 16 Black men by hundreds of white men who remained unidentified and free, the mayor ordered police to take all guns belonging to Trenton’s Black residents and threatened to shoot those who resisted.

On the night of August 25, 1956, several sticks of dynamite were thrown into the yard of Pastor Robert Graetz’s home in Montgomery, Alabama. The dynamite exploded, breaking the home’s front windows and damaging the front door.

Pastor Graetz, a young white minister serving the city’s primarily African American Trinity Lutheran Church, was also a member of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). The MIA was the community group that had planned and guided the city’s bus boycott, waged to protest racially discriminatory treatment toward Black bus riders. Pastor Graetz had been an outspoken supporter of the ongoing bus boycott since it began on December 5, 1955, and was known to regularly provide transportation to boycott participants traveling to and from work.

At the time of the explosion, Pastor Graetz was attending an integration workshop in Tennessee. Fortunately, his wife and children were not at home and no one was injured in the blast. Earlier that year, in January, the Montgomery homes of local minister Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and E.D. Nixon, former president of the local NAACP, had also been bombed. Both men were active boycott leaders.

After the bombing of Pastor Graetz’s home, Montgomery Mayor W. A. Gayle made baseless allegations that it was “an inside job” and “just a publicity stunt to build up interest of the Negroes in their campaign.” No one was ever arrested, charged, or convicted for the attack.

Virginia Governor Thomas Stanley pledged to close Virginia’s public schools rather than permit any racial integration. “If we accept admission of one Negro child into a white school, it’s all over…we will have given up,” he said.

Governor Stanley’s remarks flagrantly defied the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation in public education was unconstitutional. The governor’s remarks also signaled his rejection of a rival plan by some Virginia politicians— who sought to preserve segregation while appearing to abide by the Court’s decision—that would give all students in the state the choice between attending a segregated school or an integrated one.

The same day, the governor received a petition signed by 30,000 Virginians asking him to “do everything” to maintain segregation in the state’s schools and Governor Stanley claimed his plan was “supported by at least 95 percent of all white people in Virginia.”

The next month, the Virginia General Assembly approved Governor Stanley’s so-called “Stanley Plan,” under which the governor could close and withdraw funding from any school that tried to integrate. Nine schools were soon closed in Warren County, Charlottesville, and Norfolk.

Additionally, the state school system was placed in the hands of the governor, who created a board to oversee individually all transfers of students between schools. The governor’s office made 450,000 pupil assignments without ever permitting a Black child to attend a school with white children.

Lawmakers also enacted a tuition grant program that gave over $1 million to white students to attend segregated private schools.

While aspects of the Stanley Plan were eventually ruled unconstitutional by state and federal courts, white Virginians were largely successful in preventing the integration of public schools in the state. Five years after the Brown ruling, fewer than 1% of Black students in Virginia attended an integrated public school. Ten years after Brown, that number had only increased to 5%.

16-year-old Yusef Hawkins and three friends went to the predominately white Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, New York, to inquire about a used car for sale. While walking through the neighborhood, the four Black boys encountered a group of 30 white youths gathered in the street. Armed with baseball bats and at least one handgun, the white boys set upon the Black boys. Yusef was shot twice in the chest and was later pronounced dead at the nearby Maimonides Medical Center.

Later investigation revealed that a neighborhood girl, Gina Feliciano, had recently spurned the advances of a young white man in the neighborhood and was rumored to be dating an African American. Angry, the rejected white boy gathered friends to lay in wait for the Black boyfriend they believed would be visiting Ms. Feliciano. Yusef Hawkins, who had no connection to the white girl, walked into this scene of racial tension and lost his life.

Yusef Hawkins was the third Black male to be murdered by a white mob in increasingly racially polarized 1980s New York. Shortly after the slaying, the Rev. Al Sharpton led a protest march through Bensonhurst. Neighborhood residents met the protesters with such intense resistance that one marcher said she had “not been through an experience like this since the 60s.” A year after Yusef Hawkins’s murder, 18-year-old Joseph Fama was convicted of second-degree murder and a string of lesser charges and was sentenced to 32 years in prison. Five other participants were charged in connection with Yusef Hawkins’s murder and received lesser sentences.

An African American man named Charles Julius Miller and an unnamed African American woman entered the Café Neapolitan in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The couple was immediately refused service and ordered to leave. When Mr. Miller refused to exit, a “free-for-all” ensued in which white patrons and staff attacked Mr. Miller, who pulled out a gun for protection after being attacked. The violence left many people injured and resulted in approximately 50 arrests. Mr. Miller was among those hospitalized for his injuries.

Racial segregation and violence plagued the U.S. throughout the early 20th century and was not an exclusively Southern problem. Riots and disturbances like these took place throughout the country, and racial segregation and bias remained pervasive problems nationwide.

As was common at the time, mainstream, white-run newspapers reported the Pittsburgh restaurant incident as having been caused by the African American who dared enter an establishment where he did not belong and made no critique of the injustice of racial segregation.