Vernon Dahmer, Black businessman and voting rights advocate, dies after his home in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, is fire-bombed.
January 9, 1961
Mobs of white students riot and school officials suspend Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes after they become the first Black students to integrate the University of Georgia.
January 8, 1811
Largest slave insurrection in U.S. history begins in Louisiana Territory; after their defeat, many of the 500 rebelling enslaved people are mutilated, decapitated, and burned alive.
January 7, 1966
After student activist Samuel Younge Jr. is killed by a white gas station attendant because Young insisted on using the white bathroom, Tuskegee University students march in protest.
January 6, 1959
Richard and Mildred Loving plead guilty to violating Virginia law against inter-racial marriage and receive one-year sentences in prison unless they leave the state for 25 years.
January 5, 1923
After a white woman falsely accuses a Black man of rape, a white mob attacks the thriving Black town of Rosewood, Florida, in multi-day massacre that destroys the town and leaves up to 80 dead.
January 4, 2008
Ohio SWAT team fatally shoots Black mother, injures baby in her arms.
January 4, 1876
Mississippi “pig law” punishes farm animal theft by five years in prison; state allows leasing of prisoners to private employers.
January 3, 1895
Nineteen Hopi leaders are imprisoned on Alcatraz Island for opposing government assimilation efforts, which included confining farming to plots and forcibly enrolling Hopi children in boarding schools.
January 2, 1944
William James Howard, a Black 15-year-old, is lynched by three white men in Suwannee County, Florida, after one of the men accuses Howard of writing a love note to his daughter.