U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments in U.S. v Cruikshank, in which three white men win reversal of convictions under the Ku Klux Klan Act for massacre of 150 Black people in Colfax, Louisiana.
March 31, 1914
A white mob lynches Marie Scott, a 17-year-old Black teenage girl, in Wagoner County, Oklahoma.
March 30, 1902
A white mob lynches a Black man named George Franklin in Claiborne Parish, Louisiana.
March 29, 1944
Reverend Isaac Simmons, a Black man, is buried three days after he is murdered by six white men who want to steal his family’s land in Mississippi; his father is threatened and flees Amite County.
March 28, 1951
Four white men abduct a 27-year-old Black man, Melvin Womack, from his home in Oakland, Florida, beat him, shoot him, and leave him to die days later from his injuries.
March 27, 1974
Delbert Tibbs, a Black hitchhiker from Chicago, is indicted for murder of a white man and rape of a white woman in Florida; he is wrongfully convicted by an all-white jury and spends two years on death row.
March 26, 1931
In Scottsboro, Arkansas, nine Black teens are accused of raping two white women and almost lynched; the “Scottsboro Boys” gain national attention after their racially biased trial results in their death sentences.
March 25, 1965
Viola Liuzzo, a white woman from Detroit, Michigan, is shot and killed after driving voting rights activists to Selma, Alabama.
March 24, 1832
Creek Indians sign Treaty of Cusseta with U.S. under which they are stripped of land in Alabama; they are forcibly removed from the state by 1837.
March 23, 1875
Tennessee passes laws authorizing racial discrimination in hotels, public transportation, and “places of amusement.”