Author: Desto22

Federal troops withdraw from Louisiana, marking the end of Reconstruction.

In Newnam, GA, thousands gather to watch the brutal lynching of Sam Hose, a Black man who is mutilated and burned alive; spectators afterwards gather body parts to sell as souvenirs.

U.S. Supreme Court upholds death penalty in McCleskey v. Kemp despite proof it is racially biased, reasoning that racial discrimination in the criminal justice system is “inevitable.”

Turner County High School in Ashburn, Georgia, holds first racially integrated prom; in prior years, parents had organized private, segregated proms for white and Black students.

First decision under North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act finds that racial bias infected Marcus Robinson’s capital trial 18 years earlier and commutes his death sentence to life without parole.

Five Black and Latino teens are arrested for raping a jogger in New York City’s Central Park and spend more than a decade in prison before being exonerated.

Navy veteran Davis Knight marries a white woman in Ellisville, Mississippi; he is later sentenced to five years in prison for miscegenation based on testimony that his great grandmother was Black.

David Ritcheson, a Latino 16-year-old who was brutally beaten and sexually assaulted after trying to kiss a white girl at a party in Texas, testifies before Congress in support of hate crime laws.

In Washington, D.C., over 70 enslaved Africans are captured during the nation’s largest ever escape attempt; in the aftermath, pro-slavery mobs target abolitionists in multi-day riots.

This week U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments in Plessy v. Ferguson; its decision on May 18 adopts “separate but equal” doctrine to uphold Southern segregation laws and practices.