Author: Desto22

In Savannah, Georgia, traffickers aboard the Susannah removed 90 abducted people to sell them into enslavement. Subjected to horrific conditions during the Middle Passage aboard the Susannah, 20 of the 110 kidnapped Africans were killed during the long and deadly Transatlantic journey.

On September 25, 1766, the British-built trafficking vessel Susannah embarked from London. Tasked with the sole purpose of kidnapping and enslaving African men, women, and children, the ship’s captain and crew arrived in a trafficking port in West Central Africa months later. Dozens of kidnapped Africans were forced aboard the Susannah, where they were subjected to a deadly journey averaging four to six months in duration known as the Middle Passage.

Sometime before their arrival in Savannah, the crew and captain landed in St. Helena, an island occupied by the British in the Atlantic Ocean, where they kidnapped additional enslaved people to be sold in the U.S. While 110 enslaved people in all were forced aboard the Susannah, at least 20 people died during the journey.

On December 30, the surviving 90 enslaved Africans were disembarked in Savannah, where they were bought and sold by white traders, enslavers, plantation owners, and other businessmen.

Across the eastern seaboard, cities like Savannah served as the points of entry into the U.S., where hundreds of thousands of kidnapped Africans were bought and sold into slavery. For almost two decades before the Susannah disembarked, Savannah was an active trafficking port, and Savannah would continue to serve as a port in the Transatlantic Slave Trade and trafficking site for kidnapped Africans for three more decades. Over 23,000 Black people were trafficked into Savannah in at least 300 different voyages during this time period, making it one of the most active trafficking ports in the U.S. In 1767, city officials in Savannah were committed enough to the lucrative practice of trafficking enslaved people to invest in and construct a nine-story quarantine facility. This site would detain enslaved women, men, and children.

The African people aboard the Susannah in the summer of 1767 were among the estimated 12 million people who were transported from West Africa on ships and sold into slavery in the Americas. During the Transatlantic Slave Trade, which began in the 15th century and continued “legally” until 1808 in North America, nearly two million people died during the brutal voyage due to horrific conditions.

Hundreds of U.S. troops surrounded a Lakota camp and opened fire, killing more than 300 Lakota women, men, and children in a violent massacre.

In December 1890, Sioux Chief Sitting Bull—who led his people during years of resistance to U.S. government policies—was killed by Indian Agency Police on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation as authorities attempted to arrest him for his involvement in the Ghost Dance movement.

In the late 19th century, the U.S. Government began forcefully relocating Native Americans onto reservations, where they were dependent on the government for food and clothing. In response, some Native American people embraced a religion called Ghost Dance, which promoted the belief that Native Americans would become bulletproof and return to their freedom following a great apocalypse. The Ghost Dance performance and religion frightened the U.S. federal government, and sensationalist newspapers across the country stoked fears about an uprising by Native Americans.

Shortly after Sitting Bull’s killing, the Sioux surrendered and were marched to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. On the morning of December 29, 1890, 500 troops of the U.S. 7th Calvary Regiment surrounded a group of Lakota Sioux where they had made camp at Wounded Knee Creek. The troops entered the camp to disarm the Lakota. During a brief scuffle between a soldier and a Lakota man who refused to surrender his weapon, the rifle fired, alarming the rest of the troops. The troops began firing on the Lakota, many of whom tried to recapture weapons or flee the assault. The attack lasted for more than an hour and left more than 300 Lakota dead; over half of those killed were women, children, and elderly tribal members, and most of the dead were unarmed.

Barely one week after the Montgomery Bus Boycott had ended and the busing system in Montgomery was finally integrated, sniper gunshots struck Rosa Jordan, a 22-year-old Black woman who was eight months pregnant, as she rode an integrated bus through a Black neighborhood.

From December 1, 1955, until December 20, 1956, Black residents of Montgomery, Alabama, boycotted the city bus system to protest their poor treatment on the racially segregated buses. Participants faced threats, violence, and harassment, but were ultimately victorious in December 1956 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled bus segregation unconstitutional in Browder v. Gayle.

After the ruling and official repeal of the city’s bus segregation policies, the Black community returned to integrated buses. But Black riders now faced the threat of violence from white residents who resented the boycott and its results. In a terrifying development, snipers began to target the buses soon after integrated riding commenced.

On the evening of December 28, a sniper shot at a desegregated bus traveling through a Black neighborhood, and Ms. Jordan was shot in both legs. Ms. Jordan was transported to Oak Street General Hospital, but doctors were hesitant to remove a bullet lodged in her leg for fear that it could spark premature labor. Instead, Ms. Jordan was told she would have to remain in the hospital for the duration of her pregnancy.

After the bus driver and passengers were questioned at police headquarters, the bus resumed service. Less than an hour later, near the same neighborhood, the same bus was again targeted by snipers. This time, no one was hit.

These shootings followed two earlier sniper attacks on Montgomery buses that occurred the week before but targeted buses carrying no passengers and resulted in no injuries. On the night of Ms. Jordan’s shooting, Montgomery Police Commissioner Clyde Sellers ordered all buses to end service for the night. The following day, three city commissioners met with a bus company official and decided to suspend all night bus service after 5:00 pm until after the New Year’s holiday. The curfew policy did not end until January 22, 1957.

On the night of December 27, 1919, a 23-year-old Black veteran named Powell Green was lynched by a mob of white men near Franklinton, North Carolina.

After a “prominent” white movie theater owner was shot and killed, Powell Green was arrested for allegedly committing the crime. During the era of racial terror, white allegations against Black people were rarely subject to scrutiny and often sparked violent reprisal even when there was no evidence tying the accused to any offense. Many African Americans were lynched across the South under the accusation of murder when mere suggestions of Black-on-white violence could provoke mob violence and lynching before the judicial system could or would act. While policemen were moving Powell Green from the jail in Franklinton to the larger city of Raleigh, before he could be tried or mount a defense, a mob kidnapped and brutally killed him.

The mob tied Mr. Green to a car and dragged him for half a mile before shooting him with dozens of bullets and hanging his body. It was not uncommon for lynch mobs to seize their victims from jails, prisons, courtrooms, or out of police hands. Though they were armed and charged with protecting the men and women in their custody, police almost never used force to resist white lynch mobs intent on killing Black people. In some cases, police officials were even found to be complicit or active participants in lynchings. Newspaper sources suggest this was the case in the lynching of Powell Green; one witness reportedly testified that, though there were five officers in the police vehicle transporting Mr. Green, he was “taken from the car [by the mob] without the least trouble.”

Mr. Green’s body was found the next morning riddled with bullets and hanged from a small pine tree along a road two miles from Franklinton. According to press accounts, “souvenir hunters” cut buttons and pieces of clothing from the body and later cut down the tree to yield grotesque keepsakes.

Mr. Green was only 23 years old when lynched and had served in the army during World War I. Rather than thanked for their patriotic service, Black veterans returning from war during the era of racial terrorism were targeted for violence by white supremacists who worried military service would make these men leaders in the Black community and render them committed to fighting for racial equality at home. One news account of Mr. Green’s lynching blamed him for his own death, stating, “it seems that he was disposed to think well of himself and was self-assertive.” Powell Green’s lynching was the second in five months in Franklin County, North Carolina.

U.S. forces hanged 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota. President Abraham Lincoln ordered the executions following the Dakota War of 1862, a six-week conflict between Dakota people and white settlers that began after the U.S. broke its promise to deliver food and supplies to local tribes in exchange for the surrender of tribal land. Commenting on the starving Native Americans, a white trader named Andrew Myrick reportedly said, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.”

Following the U.S.-Dakota war, 2,000 Dakota people were captured and several hundred were sentenced to death. President Lincoln pardoned all but 39 men. One of these men was later granted a reprieve, but the other 38 were left to be executed. An onlooker wrote about the mass execution in the St. Paul Pioneer:

“They still kept up a mournful wail, and occasionally there would be a piercing scream. The ropes were soon arranged around their necks, not the least resistance being offered…. Then ensued a scene that can hardly be described, and which can never be forgotten. All joined in shouting and singing, as it appeared to those who were ignorant of the language. The tones seemed somewhat discordant, and yet there was harmony in it….”

The most touching scene on the drop was their attempts to grasp each other’s hands, fettered as they were. They were very close together, as many succeeded. Three or four in a row were hand in hand, and all hands swaying up and down with the rise and fall of their voices…We were informed by those who understood the language that their singing and shouting was only to sustain each other; that there was nothing defiant in their last moments, and that no ‘death-song,’ strictly speaking, was shouted on the gallows. Each one shouted his own name, and called on the name of his friend, saying, in substance, ‘I’m here! I’m here!’”

Ku Klux Klan members in Alabama bombed the home of civil rights activist the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. The Rev. Shuttlesworth was home at the time of the bombing with his family and two members of Bethel Baptist Church, where he served as pastor. The 16-stick dynamite blast destroyed the home and caused damage to the Rev. Shuttlesworth’s church next door, but no one inside the home suffered serious injury. White supremacists would attempt to murder the Rev. Shuttlesworth four more times in the next seven years. In an attack in 1957, a white mob brutally beat the Rev. Shuttlesworth with chains and bats and stabbed his wife after the couple attempted to enroll their daughters in an all-white high school.

The Rev. Shuttlesworth became a popular target of white supremacists in the early 1950s after assuming leadership of the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama. As founder and president of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, the Rev. Shuttlesworth organized and participated in numerous protests and boycotts challenging Jim Crow customs and policies in Birmingham and across the South. The day before the Christmas bombing, the Rev. Shuttlesworth had called upon local African Americans to desegregate the city buses starting on December 26. Undeterred by the Klan’s assassination attempt, the Rev. Shuttlesworth proceeded as planned with the December 26 protest rides.

The Rev. Shuttlesworth was involved in nearly every pivotal civil rights event of the 1960s, including the 1961 Freedom Rides and the Birmingham Children’s Crusade in May 1963. His tireless activism in the face of violent opposition led Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to describe him as “the most courageous civil rights fighter in the South.”

A group of former Confederate soldiers established what would become the first chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, or KKK, in Pulaski, Tennessee. Named for the Greek word “kyklos,” which means circle, the KKK was devoted to white supremacy and to ending Reconstruction in the South. The Klan’s first leader, called a Grand Wizard, was former Confederate Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest.

During Reconstruction, the KKK’s political activity was closely tied to the goals of Southern politicians still loyal to the cause of white supremacy. To support this agenda, the Klan engaged in a campaign of terror, violence, and murder, targeting African Americans as well as white voters who supported racial equality and civil rights. Writing in 1935, scholar W.E.B. DuBois described Klan attacks as “armed guerilla warfare” and estimated that, between 1866 and mid-1867, the KKK was responsible for 197 murders and 548 aggravated assaults in North and South Carolina alone. Reconstruction-era KKK terror went largely unopposed by local authorities, spurring federal intervention. In 1871, the U.S. Congress passed the Force Bill, which allowed for prosecution of Klan members in federal court and dramatically slowed Klan activity; by the early 1870s, the Klan had all but disappeared.

The KKK underwent a massive resurgence in the first few decades of the 20th century, due in large part to the film Birth of a Nation, which glorified the group’s 19th-century activities. In the first half of the 20th century, Klan membership became a core qualification for public office in Southern states. Many influential national figures were Klansmen at some point in their lives, including Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) and former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black. The Klan persists today but is estimated to have only about 3,000 active members, down from a high of more than 2,000,000 members in the 1920s.

The all-white University of Tennessee basketball team chose to forfeit its game against Duquesne University rather than play on the court with Duquesne’s one Black player.

The University of Tennessee arrived in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, on December 23 to play Duquesne University in a Monday night basketball game. When the all-white team from Tennessee arrived to find that their opponents planned to play their Black center and star player, freshman Chuck Cooper, Coach John Mauer from Tennessee called a meeting. The Tennessee coach announced that both he and his players refused to play the scheduled game if Duquesne allowed their Black player to compete.

The two coaches argued for two hours, until the Duquesne coach finally agreed that he would not play Mr. Cooper “unless he had to, in a close game.” So committed to segregation, the University of Tennessee men’s basketball team walked off the court and forfeited the game entirely, rather than risk having to play even for a short time against a Black player. More than 2,600 fans who had already congregated in the gym were sent home after Tennessee forfeited. Chuck Cooper would later become the first Black player drafted by an NBA team.

During this era, across the country, college teams repeatedly refused to permit white and Black players to play together on the court or field, resulting in dozens of canceled or forfeited games. That same fall in 1946, the all-white Miami University and Mississippi State basketball teams also refused to play against racially integrated opponents.

It would be nearly two decades before a Black player would be permitted to play on the University of Tennessee basketball courts in Knoxville.

The Macon Republican newspaper in Tuskegee, Alabama, published a notice from Sheriff G.W. Nuckolls advertising the planned sale of a 23-year-old enslaved Black man named Bob. According to the ad, the Macon County Circuit Court had ordered the sale as part of a ruling settling a debt dispute against a white man named Joseph B. Wynn—Bob’s enslaver.

The bodies of Black men, women, and children enslaved in the U.S. were assigned monetary values throughout their lives. An enslaved person’s purchase price was a painful reminder of the way his or her life was commodified. Banks and creditors accepted enslaved human “property” as collateral when underwriting loans, and they were authorized to “repossess” enslaved people if a debtor failed to repay the loan. Enslaved people were also appraised as human “assets” to allow enslavers to report on their “property” holdings for the purposes of insurance, wills, and taxes. Values for enslaved people could reach more than $5,000—equal to more than $150,000 today.

Through the Domestic Slave Trade, which facilitated the sale of enslaved people from the Upper South to the Lower South in the first half of the 19th century, newly settled Southern territories like Alabama and Mississippi became home to sprawling, profitable cotton plantations worked by enslaved Black labor. It is estimated that more than half of all enslaved people were separated from a parent or child through sale. Meanwhile, between 1819 and 1860, the enslaved population of Alabama grew from 40,000 to 435,000, amassing wealth and economic power for the state, fueling the growth of Northern industry, and inflicting horrific inhumanity upon the Black people held in bondage.

Slavery is a prominent though largely ignored foundation of this nation’s wealth and prosperity. The sale and labor of countless enslaved people—including a man named Bob who was advertised for auction on this day in 1853—laid the path for the Industrial Revolution, helped to build Wall Street, and funded many of the U.S.’s most prestigious schools.

Following an anti-slavery speech by Vermont representative William Slade, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly renewed and expanded a rule that prohibited any future discussion about the abolition of slavery in the House. The so-called “Gag Rule”—initially passed in 1836—remained in effect until 1844, preventing the topic of abolition from even being discussed for almost a decade.

The debate over slavery had divided the House, but the Constitutional provision that counted enslaved people as “three-fifths” of a person for the purposes of determining Congressional representation gave Southern representatives the majority they needed to completely shut down any debate on the subject. In December of 1835, South Carolina representative James Hammond proposed the initial Gag Rule that required, under the pretext of maintaining order in the House, that petitions or discussions about slavery should be immediately tabled without consideration or discussion.

The rule, which effectively silenced any representatives who opposed slavery, was instituted in May of the following year under James K. Polk, who was speaker of the House at the time and would later become U.S. President.

This laid the foundation for Virginia representative John Mercer Patton, who responded to William Slade’s anti-slavery speech in 1837 by renewing the Gag Rule. His resolution declared that “all petitions, memorials, and papers, touching the abolition of slavery, or the buying, selling, or transferring of slaves, in any State, District, or Territory, of the United States, be laid on the table, without being debated, printed, read, or referred, and that no further action whatever shall be had thereon.”

The 1837 Gag Rule was a more extreme version of the 1836 version, applying not just to current U.S. states but also to U.S. territories, which were administered by the federal government. It allowed the House to ignore without discussion the tens of thousands of petitions sent by citizens calling on the chamber to forbid the expansion of slavery into these territories.

The extraordinary act of barring all discussion of a central moral and political issue that was shaping the nation created untold challenges and is part of a legacy of avoidance and silence about racial injustice in America.