White miners upset about competition for jobs kill 28 Chinese workers in Rock Springs, Wyoming, causing hundreds to flee and sparking anti-Chinese violence across the West.
September 1, 1884
Superintendent denies Mamie Tape, a Chinese American child, admission to public school in San Francisco this week, saying Chinese Americans are “dangerous to the well-being of the state.”
August 31, 1966
The Alabama Senate passes a law to prevent school integration by making it illegal for public schools in the state to enter into desegregation plans with federal officials.
August 30, 1956
On the first day of school, mobs of white segregationists guard Mansfield High School and use weapons to prevent Black children from registering for school.
August 29, 2005
Hurricane Katrina devastates the U.S. Gulf Coast; the subsequent disaster response is criticized for mistreating many severely impacted Black citizens.
August 28, 1955
Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, white members of the Ku Klux Klan, abduct 12-year-old Emmett Till from his great-uncle’s cabin in Mississippi and murders him.
August 27, 1960
Segregationists wielding bats and axe handles attack civil rights activists staging a lunch counter sit-in in Jacksonville, Florida.
August 26, 1874
Mob of 400 masked men on horseback and armed with shotguns kidnaps 16 Black men from jail in Gibson County, Tennessee, and lynches them.
August 25, 1956
Montgomery, Alabama, home of Robert Graetz, white minister of Trinity Lutheran Church and Montgomery Improvement Association board member, is bombed.
August 24, 1923
White men in Jacksonville, Florida, lynch Black farmhand Ben Hart for allegedly peeping into a white woman’s room; he is later exonerated.