All-white jury in Holmes County, Mississippi, takes ten minutes to acquit three white men of lynching Leon McAtee, a Black man they flogged to death for stealing a saddle.
October 21, 1835
A pro-slavery white mob assaults white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and drags him through the streets of Boston, Massachusetts.
October 20, 1956
Twenty-one people in Tallahassee, Florida, are sentenced to jail for operating a carpool in support of those boycotting the city’s segregated buses.
October 19, 1960
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. joins sit-in protest in department store in downtown Atlanta, Georgia, and is arrested with 51 others for attempting to desegregate the city’s stores and restaurants.
October 18, 1933
Mob of 2,000 in Princess Anne, Maryland, takes George Armwood from jail, beats him, hangs him, drags his body through the streets, then hangs and burns his corpse.
October 17, 1871
President Ulysses S. Grant declares martial law in South Carolina due to widespread Ku Klux Klan violence.
October 16, 1968
U.S. sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raise black-gloved fists on medal stand at Olympics in Mexico to protest racial inequality in U.S.; they receive death threats for years after returning home.
October 15, 1883
U.S. Supreme Court facilitates the expansion of Jim Crow laws in the South by declaring unconstitutional the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which banned discrimination in public places.
October 14, 1982
Declaring drugs a threat to national security, President Ronald Reagan doubles down on the Nixon Administration’s “war on drugs” and calls for new laws to impose prison sentences for drug use.
October 13, 1892
In Monroeville, Alabama, a lynch mob seizes from jail, four young Black men from 15 to 19 years old and shoots them to death without a trial.