Author: Desto22

A mob of unmasked white men in Marengo County, Alabama, lynched Rufus Lesseur, a 24-year-old Black man, and left his body riddled with bullets.

Less than two days earlier, a white woman in Thomaston, Alabama, claimed that a Black man had entered her home and frightened her. After someone claimed that a hat found near the woman’s home belonged to Mr. Lesseur, a mob of white men formed and kidnapped him. The white men transported a terrified Mr. Lesseur into the nearby woods and locked him in a tiny calaboose, or makeshift jail, for more than a day.

Black people carried a heavy presumption of guilt during this era, and many hundreds of Black people across the South were lynched based on false allegations, accusations of non-serious crimes, and even for non-criminal violations of social customs and racial expectations. Such “offenses” could be something as simple as arguing with or insulting a white person or, as in this case, frightening a white woman.

At 3 am on August 16, without an investigation, trial, conviction of any offense, or a sentencing proceeding, a mob of white men broke into the locked shack, seized Mr. Lesseur, dragged him outside, and lynched him, riddling his body with bullets.

Although he was lynched by a mob of unmasked white men in a town with only 300 residents, state officials claimed that no one could be identified, arrested, or prosecuted for his murder. Mr. Lesseur is one of at least four Black victims of racial terror violence in Marengo County, Alabama, between 1877 and 1950.

Today, the makeshift jail where Mr. Lesseur was unlawfully held still stands in Thomaston.

Just after midnight, three firebombs were hurled through the windows of Holy Cross Church of God in Christ, a Black church in Providence, Rhode Island. The church had opened five weeks prior in an all-white part of the Federal Hill neighborhood.

The bombs shattered the church’s glass windows and lit several pews in the Sunday school classroom on fire. The perpetrators of the attack also vandalized a pillar by the church’s main entrance with a racial slur.

The bombing took place amidst a summer of virulent white backlash to the Black community’s efforts to integrate city housing and public schools.

At that time, Providence was one of the most racially segregated cities in the country, with nearly 80% of its Black population residing in South Providence. A 1965 University of Rhode Island study concluded that Providence was “as segregated as many cities of the Deep South.”

In Providence, as in much of the country at the time, many of the leaders of the campaign against segregation were prominent figures in the Black church. This made Black churches a target for white fear, anger, and violence.

Over 100 Black churches were burned, bombed, or vandalized during the civil rights era. While the majority of these racially motivated attacks took place in Southern cities such as Birmingham, where explosives placed by a white man killed four young Black girls at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963, Black churches outside the South were also targeted, in cities including Providence, Philadelphia, and Seattle.

A mob of white citizens gathered at the local jail in Springfield, Illinois, intent on lynching two Black men named George Richardson and Joe James. When the would-be lynch mob learned that the men had been taken from the jail to another city, a violent riot broke out.

Some members of the mob destroyed the business of Henry Loper, a man rumored to have helped transport Mr. Richardson and Mr. James from the jail. Others, convinced the men were still in the jail, attacked police and militia stationed at the facility. The two mob groups then rejoined and descended on homes and businesses in Springfield’s Black neighborhoods, stealing close to $150,000 worth of property and setting fire to whole blocks.

The violence climaxed early the next morning with the lynching of two Black men. After Scott Burton tried to defend himself against the attackers, he was shot four times, dragged through the streets, then hanged and mutilated until the militia interceded. William Donegan, an 84-year-old Black man married to a white woman, was taken from his home and hanged from a tree across the street, where his assailants cut his throat and stabbed him. Mr. Donegan was still alive when the militia arrived at the scene but died the next morning.

Amidst the terror of the riot, which left an estimated seven people dead, hundreds of Black citizens sought National Guard protection at nearby Camp Lincoln. Others fled the city. Police arrested 150 people suspected of participating in the violence, and 117 were indicted. Of the three individuals indicted for murder, one committed suicide and two were acquitted.

On the morning of August 13, 1955, white men shot and killed Lamar Smith, a 63-year-old Black farmer and veteran of World War I, in front of the Lincoln County Courthouse in Brookhaven, Mississippi, while he was encouraging African Americans to vote in a local run-off election.

Mr. Smith, a voting rights advocate affiliated with the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, had been threatened and warned to stop trying to register and organize African American voters in the community. His murder took place on the courthouse lawn in front of dozens of witnesses, including Sheriff Robert E. Case, who permitted one of the alleged assailants to leave the crime scene covered in blood. Days later, that man and two others were arrested in connection with the shooting. All three suspects were white.

In September 1955, a grand jury composed of 20 white men declined to indict the three suspects for murder after witnesses failed to come forward to testify. Following the grand jury’s report, District Attorney E.C. Barlow criticized the lack of witness cooperation and complained about the sheriff’s handling of the case. Despite the district attorney’s public promises to proceed with the investigation, the criminal case against the three suspects was dismissed and no one was held accountable for Lamar Smith’s murder.

The shooting of Lamar Smith was one of several racially motivated attacks in Mississippi in 1955. Others included the May murder of civil rights leader George Lee in Belzoni, the August abduction and murder of Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta, and the near-fatal shooting of Gus Courts in Belzoni in December 1955. Throughout the next decade and beyond, Mississippi would be known as one of the most violent and deadly environments in the fight for equal rights.

In 2019, EJI unveiled a new monument at the Peace and Justice Memorial Center that commemorates 24 men and women who were lynched or killed in racially motivated attacks during the 1950s, including Lamar Smith. Mr. Smith’s grandchildren, pictured below, traveled from Mississippi to attend the monument dedication ceremony.

After a white mob attempted to lynch a Black man and failed in their efforts, armed white residents engaged in widespread racial terrorism that forced Black residents to flee Whitesboro, Texas.

Lynching was a tool of racial terror used to maintain white supremacy and dominance by instilling fear in the entire Black community. It was common during this era of racial terrorism for a white mob’s focus to expand beyond a specific person accused of an offense. Lynch mobs frequently targeted members of a suspect’s family, neighbors, or any and all Black people unfortunate enough to be in the mob’s path, and it was not uncommon for Black people in the vicinity of white mobs to be beaten or killed as collateral violence.

Earlier in the day, a Black man, known as “Brown,” had been arrested after a local white woman reported that she had been criminally assaulted by a Black man. He was taken from jail by a mob of at least 100 white men and boys and hanged from a tree as the mob attempted to violently coerce a confession from him. As he was on the verge of becoming unconscious, a sheriff’s posse cut Mr. Brown down, determined he was still alive, and took him back into custody.

As news spread that they had failed in their attempt to lynch this Black man, the white mob unleashed a reign of terror on the entire Black community in Whitesboro. The mob went from house to house in the town’s Black neighborhood, destroying the homes, beating the Black people inside, and ordering all of them to leave Whitesboro. Black people fled by train that night, with contemporary news sources reporting that “outgoing trains on all roads were filled” with Black people. Hundreds of shots were reportedly fired by the armed mob, but the death toll of the terror remains unknown. Local authorities made no attempt to protect the town’s Black residents.

A few days later, armed white men rounded up the few remaining Black people in town, reported as just 17 people. The mob tied these 17 individuals to trees and whipped them mercilessly, ordering them again to leave town. Contemporary reports noted that after the conclusion of this violence, not a single Black person remained in Whitesboro.

More than 200 members of white supremacist, alt-right, neo-Nazi, and pro-Confederate groups from throughout the country converged on the University of Virginia in Charlottesville for a torch-lit march through central campus shouting slogans like “Blood and soil!” “You will not replace us!” “Jews will not replace us!” and “White lives matter!” The procession was the precursor to a planned “Unite the Right” rally scheduled to take place the next day to protest the Charlottesville City Council’s recent vote to remove a Confederate monument dedicated to Robert E. Lee. As the marchers paraded through the University’s campus, counter-protests quickly emerged and tensions escalated.

The next day, the rally began to form in recently renamed Emancipation Park, where the Lee statue stood. White nationalist rally-goers, many heavily armed, filed into the park amid the outcry of a diverse gathering of counter-protesters. Those opposing the white nationalists included members of anti-fascist groups, Black Lives Matter supporters, local residents, church congregations, and civil rights leaders. In the absence of police intervention, clashes between rally-goers and counter-protesters became more volatile and eventually led law enforcement to declare the rally an unlawful assembly.

As rally-goers and counter-protesters dispersed, sporadic clashes continued. Approximately two hours after the City of Charlottesville declared a local state of emergency, a neo-Nazi named James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car directly into a crowd of counter-protesters, wounding at least 18 people and killing a 32-year-old white woman named Heather Heyer.

The events in Charlottesville, Virginia, sparked national press coverage and debate regarding race, white supremacy, and Confederate iconography.

A white mob seized four Black people from a jail in Clarendon, Arkansas, and lynched them before they could stand trial.

A few weeks prior, a white woman named Erneze Orr allegedly hired Will Sanders, Rilla Weaver, Dennis Ricord, and Manse Castle to kill her husband, John T. Orr. After Mr. Sanders, Ms. Weaver, Mr. Ricord, and Mr. Castle were arrested for this alleged offense, a mob of white community members quickly formed—and on three separate occasions, the mob convened at the jail intent on lynching them. Despite these repeated threats, officers refused to move the group to a safer location as they awaited trial.

On August 10, the white mob stormed the jail a final time. Rather than protecting the people in his custody, the sheriff turned the jail keys over to the mob. Newspapers reported that he had been persuaded to open the jail doors and let the mob enter “by their earnestness.”

Mrs. Orr, the white woman who allegedly orchestrated her husband’s murder, was also being held at the jail. She reportedly poisoned herself shortly before the mob’s arrival. Though contemporary reports note that she was still alive when the mob stormed the jail, the mob left her and took only the four Black people from the jail.

The mob hung Mr. Sanders, Ms. Weaver, Mr. Ricord, and Mr. Castle from the tramway of a nearby sawmill with signs affixed to them that read “This is the penalty for murder and rape.” Their bodies were then left on display for hours to terrorize the entire Black community.

During this era of racial terror, mere suggestions of Black-on-white violence could provoke mob violence and lynching before the judicial system could or would act. The deep racial hostility permeating Southern society often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered, whether or not there was evidence to support the suspicion, and, even in situations like this case, where a white person was believed to be the orchestrator of the violence, accusations lodged against Black people were rarely subject to serious scrutiny. White lynch mobs regularly displayed complete disregard for the legal system, abducting Black people from courts, jails, and out of police custody. Law enforcement officials, charged with protecting those in their custody, often failed to intervene, as was the case here.

Mr. Sanders, Ms. Weaver, Mr. Ricord, and Mr. Castle were four of at least 493 documented lynching victims between 1877 and 1950 in the state of Arkansas.

A white police officer named Darren Wilson shot an unarmed Black teenager named Michael Brown to death in Ferguson, Missouri. According to reports, Officer Wilson stopped Michael on the street in the afternoon to ask him about a robbery at a nearby convenience store. Although the precise details of what happened next remain unclear, many eyewitness accounts suggest that Michael ran from the officer with his hands raised in the air. Officer Wilson then shot Michael six times and claimed that he had feared for his life. Michael’s body was found approximately 150 feet from the officer’s police vehicle. He had graduated from high school just eight days before and was scheduled to begin a vocational training program two days later.

There is a presumption of guilt and dangerousness that has unfairly made people of color, particularly young Black men, targets of police aggression and violence. The shooting and its aftermath sparked weeks of protests in Ferguson and beyond. Demonstrators chanting “hands up, don’t shoot” as a rallying cry against police brutality gathered in the streets, facing officers armed with military-grade equipment. Law enforcement’s heavy-handed response to the protests prompted national discussions about the militarization of inner-city police forces and the ways in which police officers used violence to repress dissent and maintain racially biased social conditions.

Despite nationwide pleas for accountability, no one was punished for Michael Brown’s death. A grand jury ultimately declined to bring criminal charges against Officer Wilson, and the Department of Justice also refused to file federal civil rights charges.

Ahmed Mohamed and his family filed a lawsuit against the city of Irving, Texas, and its school district for an ordeal that had begun nearly a year before. In September 2015, 14-year-old Ahmed, a Sudanese American boy, was arrested at school for showing his teacher a clock he had made at home.

Instead of receiving praise and encouragement, Ahmed was severely punished for his engineering project. The teacher, along with other school officials, later claimed they thought the clock was a bomb, but no one ordered an evacuation of the school or contacted a bomb squad. Instead, standard police officers were called to the school; they arrested Ahmed, took him to the police station for fingerprinting and a mug shot, and subjected him to two hours of interrogation without his parents’ permission. In the end, police arrested him on charges of bringing a hoax bomb to school. Even after those charges were subsequently dropped, school officials suspended Ahmed for three days.

When the incident was reported in the local and national press, Ahmed received an outpouring of support and the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed soon went viral on social media. President Barack Obama, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and thousands of others sent expressions of encouragement, and he was even invited to the White House.

In the meantime, local officials refused to admit that they had handled the situation improperly or that Ahmed’s identity as a brown, Muslim boy caused him to be profiled and criminalized. In November 2015, Ahmed and his family requested damages and a public apology from the City of Irving and its school district for civil rights violations and physical and mental anguish. The city refused to meet those demands. In late 2015—due to ongoing threats and harassment from conspiracy theorists who claimed Ahmed truly was a dangerous terrorist—the Mohamed family moved to Qatar for Ahmed to accept a government-offered educational scholarship.

A federal district court later dismissed the Mohamed family’s lawsuit against the Irving, Texas, School District on the basis of qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that limits remedies for victims of police violence and misconduct.

A white mob used crowbars and hammers to break into the Grant County jail in Marion, Indiana, to lynch three young Black men who had been arrested earlier that afternoon after being accused of murdering a white man and assaulting a white woman. Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, both 19, were severely beaten and lynched, and 16-year-old James Cameron was badly beaten but survived.

That afternoon, word of the charges against these young Black men spread, and a growing mob of angry white residents gathered outside the Grant County jail. Around 9:30 pm, the mob attempted to rush the jail and was repelled by tear gas. An hour later, members of the mob successfully barreled past the sheriff and three deputies, grabbed Mr. Shipp and Mr. Smith from their cells as they prayed, and dragged them into the street. By then, the crowd totaled between 5,000 and 10,000 people. While spectators watched and cheered, the mob beat, tortured, and hanged both men from trees in the courthouse yard, brutally murdering them without the benefit of trial or legal proof of guilt.

As the bodies of Mr. Shipp and Mr. Smith remained suspended above the crowd, members of the mob re-entered the jail and grabbed 16-year-old James Cameron, another Black youth accused of being involved in the crime. The mob beat the teenager severely and was preparing to hang him alongside the others, but when a member of the crowd intervened and said he was innocent, James was released.

The brutalized bodies of Mr. Shipp and Mr. Smith were hanged from trees in the courthouse yard and kept there for hours as a crowd of white men, women, and children grew by the thousands. Public spectacle lynchings, in which large crowds of white people, often numbering in the thousands, gathered to witness and participate in pre-planned heinous killings that featured prolonged torture, mutilation, dismemberment and/or burning of the victim, were common during this time. When the sheriff eventually cut the ropes off the corpses, the crowd rushed forward to take parts of the men’s bodies as “souvenirs” before finally dispersing.

Enraged by the lynching, the NAACP traveled to Marion to investigate and later provided the U.S. attorney general with the names of 27 people believed to have participated. Though the lynching was photographed and spectators were clearly visible, local residents claimed not to recognize anyone pictured. Charges were finally brought against the leaders of the mob, but all-white juries acquitted them despite this overwhelming evidence. In contrast, James Cameron, the Black teenager who survived, was tried for murder, convicted of being an accessory, and served four years in prison. The alleged assault victim, Mary Ball, later testified that she had not been raped.

After his release, James Cameron founded four NAACP chapters in Indiana, authored hundreds of essays on civil rights and a 1982 memoir, and on Juneteenth 1988 opened America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to document the African American Struggle. “I can forgive but I can never forget,” he was quoted as saying. “That’s why I started this museum.” Mr. Cameron was pardoned by the state of Indiana in 1993 and died in 2006.

A photograph of Mr. Shipp’s and Mr. Smith’s battered corpses hanging lifeless from a tree, with white spectators proudly standing below, remains one of the most iconic and infamous photographs of an American lynching. In 1937, an encounter with the photo inspired New York schoolteacher Abel Meeropol to write “Strange Fruit,” a haunting poem about lynching that later became a famous song recorded by Billie Holiday.