Author: Desto22

The Weekly Standard published an article by Princeton University political science professor John Dilulio. Entitled “The Coming of the Super-Predators,” the article predicted the U.S. would be home to 270,000 violent youth by 2010. According to Professor Dilulio, growing rates of “moral poverty” were causing aggressive behavior among poor and minority youth and were building toward a crisis.

Professor Dilulio’s “super-predator” language came to be commonly used in conjunction with dire predictions that a vast increase in violent juvenile crime was looming. Theorists suggested that the nation would soon see “elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches” and who “have absolutely no respect for human life.” Much of the frightening imagery was racially coded. For example, in “My Black Crime Problem, and Ours,” Professor Dilulio warned of “270,000 more young predators on the streets than in 1990, coming at us in waves over the next two decades … as many as half of these juvenile super-predators could be young Black males.”

Panic over the impending crime wave expected from these “radically impulsive, brutally remorseless” children led nearly every state to enact legislation mandating automatic adult prosecution for children, permitting sentences of life without parole or death for children, and/or allowing children to be housed with adult prisoners. But the predictions proved wildly inaccurate. Lower rates of juvenile crime from 1994 to 2000 despite simultaneous increases in the juvenile population led academics who had originally supported the “super-predator” theory to back away from their predictions, including Professor Dilulio himself. In 2001, the U.S. surgeon general labeled the “super-predator” theory a myth.

Efforts to reverse the policies that grew from the “super-predator” myth have seen some success in the Supreme Court, which in 2005 decided in Roper v. Simmons that the death penalty is unconstitutional for juveniles. In 2010, the Court in Graham v. Florida prohibited life imprisonment without parole sentences for children convicted of non-homicide crimes. And in 2012, the Court’s decision in Miller v. Alabama invalidated mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles convicted of homicide. Meaningful implementation of these decisions, as well as further reform, remains an ongoing effort and challenge. But tens of thousands of children prosecuted as adults as a result of this misguided, racially biased rhetoric still remain in American jails and prisons today.

During a special legislative session called to pass segregation laws, the Texas legislature voted overwhelmingly (115-26) to pass a bill giving Governor Price Daniel the power to immediately close any school where federal troops might be sent to enforce integration.

The Texas legislature passed the bill just a few months after President Dwight Eisenhower deployed federal troops to Arkansas and commanded the Arkansas National Guard to escort nine Black students, known as the Little Rock Nine, to their first day of school at Central High School amid violent threats from white community members. In passing this bill, the state legislators made clear that they would rather everyone at a school be denied education than allow Black students to attend previously all-white schools.

During the same session another bill was passed that provided school districts with legal aid should integration suits be brought against them.

Bills like these, and the broader massive resistance to integration by white officials and community members, were largely successful in preventing integration of schools in the South. In the five Deep South states, every single one of 1.4 million Black schoolchildren attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960. By the start of the 1964-65 school year, less than 3% of the South’s Black children attended school with white students, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina that number remained substantially below 1%. In 1967, 13 years after Brown v. Bd. of Education, a report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights observed that white violence and intimidation against Black people “continues to be a deterrent to school desegregation.”

For decades, the University of North Carolina had a program whereby the university “leased” hundreds of enslaved Black people to students for a fee. On November 25, 1829, after a Black man escaped the university grounds and sought his freedom, rewards were issued to effectuate his recapture and re-enslavement on UNC grounds.

Through this program, UNC engaged in the active trafficking of enslaved Black people, by collecting fees from students to “lease” enslaved Black people back to them. Students paid a yearly fee in their tuition directly to the university for the labor of enslaved Black people. The university maintained contract agreements with plantations and local enslavers in Orange and Chatham County, as well as the university’s employees, trustees, and presidents, who “leased” Black people they enslaved to the university. Consequently, through this trafficking program, UNC not only increased its revenue, but also enriched local enslavers.

Until 1845, students from families who enslaved Black people were permitted to bring enslaved people with them to campus. After 1845, the university prohibited students from bringing enslaved people to campus, but still authorized students to pay the university to “lease” enslaved Black people on campus.

On November 25, 1829, as part of this trafficking scheme, a graduate of UNC issued rewards for the capture of a Black man named James who had been trafficked to work at the university for the prior four years. James had sought his freedom from enslavement and ran away from campus. The ad was placed in several local newspapers and encouraged people with information about James’s whereabouts to direct their correspondence to UNC to effectuate his recapture.

In addition to the leasing program which trafficked enslaved Black people onto the grounds of the university, UNC participated in and profited from the sale of Black people. In its founding charter in 1789, the university was given the right to sell enslaved Black people who had been enslaved by local white people who died without heirs. Under this agreement, white enslavers’ “property,” including enslaved Black people, was escheated to the university’s Board of Trustees. In the 1840s, 10 years after the reward for James was announced, following the death of a local enslaver, the university sold the Black people that person had enslaved, earning $2,800, which amounts to approximately $83,000 dollars today.

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decided Shuttlesworth vs. Birmingham Board of Education, rejecting a challenge to Alabama’s School Placement Law. The law, designed to defy the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and maintain school segregation, allowed Alabama school boards to assign individual students to particular schools at their own discretion with little transparency or oversight.

Alabama’s School Placement Law, which claimed to allow school boards to designate placement of students based on ability, availability of transportation, and academic background, was modeled after the Pupil Placement Act in North Carolina—enacted on March 30, 1955, in response to the Brown decision. Virginia passed the second placement law on September 29, 1956. In 1957, after the North Carolina law was upheld by a higher court, legislatures in other Southern states passed similar pupil placement laws; by 1960, such laws were on the books in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and the city of Atlanta, Georgia.

After the Alabama law’s passage, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth sued on behalf of four African American students in Birmingham who had been denied admission to white schools that were closer to their homes. In its unanimous decision, the Supreme Court wrote, “The School Placement Law furnishes the legal machinery for an orderly administration of the public schools in a constitutional manner by the admission of qualified pupils upon a basis of individual merit without regard to their race or color. We must presume that it will be so administered.”

Between the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 and 1958, a total of 376,000 African American children were enrolled in integrated schools in the South. This growth slowed significantly as states passed obstructive legislation like these pupil placement laws; the figure rose by just 500 students between 1958 and 1959, and by October 1960, only 6% of African American children in the South were attending integrated schools. Crucially, in the five Deep South states, including Alabama, every single one of 1.4 million Black schoolchildren attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960.

Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black boy, died from injuries inflicted when he was shot by a white police officer the day before. Tamir was playing in a park near his Cleveland, Ohio, home when a police car approached him; within seconds, before Tamir could be questioned or warned, Officer Timothy Loehmann shot Tamir in the stomach.

The officers were responding to a 911 dispatch in which a caller had reported that someone in the park was playing with a gun. The caller also explained to the dispatcher that the person was “probably a juvenile” and the gun was “probably fake.” Tamir was, in fact, playing with a toy gun in the park—as countless children have—and was immediately shot to death by police despite posing no threat to anyone.

Immediately after the shooting, police tackled Tamir’s 14-year-old sister as she rushed to his side, handcuffed her, and held her in the back of their squad car unable to comfort her injured brother. Tamir’s mother was also prevented from going to her son and threatened with arrest if she did not “calm down.” Neither Officer Loehmann nor his partner, Frank Garmback, attempted to administer critical lifesaving procedures to Tamir as he lay bleeding immediately after the shooting.

After the December autopsy was released, Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner Thomas Gilson reaffirmed his initial ruling that the shooting was a homicide, and in June 2015, the Cleveland Municipal Court found probable cause for prosecutors to proceed with charges of murder and other offenses against Officer Loehmann. County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty instead declared that he would wait to follow a grand jury’s recommendation. A grand jury ultimately refused to indict Officer Loehmann on any charges.

The Mississippi legislature passed “An Act to regulate the relation of master and apprentice, as relates to freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes.” Under the law, sheriffs, justices of the peace, and other county civil officers were authorized and required to identify all minor Black children in their jurisdictions who were orphans or whose parents could not properly care for them. Once identified, the local probate court was required to “apprentice” Black children to white “masters or mistresses” until age 18 for girls and age 21 for boys.

After the physical and economic devastation of the Civil War, Southern states faced the daunting task of rebuilding their infrastructures and economies. At the same time, the young white male population had been drastically reduced by war-time casualties and emancipation had freed the formerly enslaved Black labor that had largely built the entire region. In response, some Southern state legislatures passed race-specific laws to establish new forms of labor relations between Black workers and white “employers” that complied with the letter of the law, but actually sought to recreate the enslaver-enslaved conditions of involuntary servitude that existed prior to emancipation.

Though the law did not require white “employers” to pay the children they “hired” a wage, the law did require them to pay the county a fee for the apprentice arrangement. The law claimed to require white “masters” to provide their apprentices with education, medical care, food, and clothing, but it also re-instituted many of the more notorious features of slavery. The children’s former enslavers were given first opportunity to hire those formerly enslaved by them, for example. In addition, the law authorized white “masters” to “re-capture” any apprentice who left their employment without consent and threatened children with criminal punishment for refusing to return to work.

In Gong Lum v. Rice, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the Chinese American Lum family and upheld Mississippi’s power to force nine-year-old Martha Lum to attend a “colored school” outside the district in which she lived. Applying the “separate but equal” doctrine established in 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the Court held that the maintenance of separate schools based on race was “within the constitutional power of the state legislature to settle, without intervention of the federal courts.”

First adopted in 1890 following the end of Reconstruction, the Mississippi Constitution divided children into racial categories of Caucasian or “brown, yellow, and Black,” and mandated racially segregated public education. In 1924, the state law was applied to bar Martha Lum from attending Rosedale Consolidated High School in Bolivar County, Mississippi—a school for white students. Martha’s father, Gong Lum, sued the state in a lawsuit that did not challenge the constitutionality of segregated education but instead challenged his daughter’s classification as “colored.”

When the Mississippi Supreme Court held that Martha Lum could not insist on being educated with white students because she was of the “Mongolian or yellow race,” her father appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In its decision siding with the state of Mississippi, the Court reasoned that Mississippi’s decision to bar Martha from attending the local white high school did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment because she was entitled to attend a “colored” school. This decision extended the reach of segregation laws and policies in Mississippi and throughout the nation by classifying all non-white individuals as “colored.”

A white church board in Durant, Mississippi, voted unanimously to fire a Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Marsh Callaway, after he defended racial integration and spoke out against the White Citizens’ Council in Holmes County.

In September, a group of white people in nearby Tchula, Mississippi, demanded that Dr. David Minter and Eugene Cox, two white men who operated a cooperative farm, leave the community for supporting racial integration. Dr. Minter served as a physician and, alongside Mr. Cox, had assisted the Black community in Holmes County with medical care and aid over the prior 17 years. When news spread that the two men supported racial integration and allegedly permitted Black and white teenagers to swim in a pond together near the farm, an officer of the White Citizens’ Council called a meeting to vote to remove these two men from the community.

Like White Citizens’ Councils across the country, the White Citizens’ Council in Holmes County was committed to preserving racial segregation and white supremacy in all aspects of life. In 1955, 250 White Citizens’ Councils had formed throughout the South, composed of a total of 60,000 members, and by 1957, membership reached 250,000.

During the meeting attended by at least 400 white people from Holmes County, as individuals gathered to vote on the removal of Dr. Minter and Mr. Cox from the community, the Rev. Callaway, a minister at the Durant Presbyterian Church, stood up in opposition, calling the meeting “undemocratic and un-Christian.” He praised Mr. Cox as “a fine Christian man,” to which the crowd booed and hissed him into silence. Shortly after the meeting, the Rev. Callaway was asked by his white congregation to resign as minister because his support for integration caused “many of the church members to lose faith in the minister.”

In the week prior to the Rev. Callaway’s public condemnation of the White Citizens’ Council, Durant Presbyterian had one of the “largest crowds in several months” attend church services. The following week, church members of the Durant Presbyterian Church boycotted services because the Rev. Callaway had spoken out at the meeting. On November 20, members of the church voted unanimously for the Rev. Callaway’s immediate removal, citing “personal conflict.” He was fired after approval by the Central Mississippi Presbytery.

Dozens of Black veterans who were wrongfully discharged from the 25th Infantry Regiment, a segregated unit stationed at Fort Brown, Texas, went to San Antonio seeking work. In a coordinated effort, white employers throughout the city uniformly refused to hire these men in an attempt to drive them out of town.

Over the summer of 1906, Black soldiers of the segregated 25th Infantry Regiment were stationed by the U.S. government in Fort Brown, Texas, even though the War Department recognized that Black soldiers would “not be welcomed” there and would be at risk for racial violence. While stationed at Fort Brown, Black soldiers were subjected to segregated facilities and barred from most establishments and parks in nearby Brownsville.

On the evening of August 13, 1906, shots were fired into civilian homes in Brownsville by an unknown group of individuals. When police arrived at the scene, an altercation ensued, leaving a white man, who was hit by stray bullets, dead and a police officer wounded. Without any evidence identifying those responsible, suspicion quickly turned to a group of Black soldiers of the 25th Regiment.

When questioned by authorities, Fort Brown’s all-white military commanders corroborated the alibis of these Black soldiers, affirming that the soldiers remained in their barracks at the time of the shooting. Despite this strong evidence of their innocence, Brownsville authorities charged 12 Black soldiers with murder. The soldiers repeatedly and consistently stated they had no knowledge of the attack or those who were involved.

Attempting to force confessions from this group of innocent Black soldiers, the federal government gave the entire regiment a deadline to come forward with information about the August 13 incident or face the consequences. When no soldiers came forward, in an action unprecedented in U.S. history, President Theodore Roosevelt issued an executive order dishonorably discharging not only the 12 accused men, but the entire unit—167 Black soldiers of the B, C, and D companies of the 25th Infantry—from the U.S. Army on November 6 for their “conspiracy of silence.” The order further barred the men from ever re-enlisting in the U.S. military or applying for a civil service position with the federal government.

In the wake of being discharged, these innocent Black veterans, who had bravely chosen to serve the U.S., were forced to navigate the presumption of guilt and dangerousness, despite never having a trial or being convicted of any crime, and were subjected to mistreatment and abuse, as exemplified by the white employers in San Antonio who colluded to deny them employment. Some of these veterans had served in the military for over 20 years, but because of this action, were denied their pensions.

A Black man named James Cody was beaten with a flashlight, subjected to electric shock on his testicles and buttocks, and threatened with castration by officers acting under Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge. Over the course of almost 30 years, Commander Burge oversaw and participated in the torture of over 100 Black men, resulting in scores of forced confessions. When Commander Burge first took command of the jurisdiction known as Area 2 as a detective in 1972, he and his men—known as the “Midnight Crew”—began forcing confessions using brutal torture practices such as beating, suffocation, electric shock, burning, Russian roulette, and mock execution.

In 1982, Cook County State’s Attorney Richard Daley was notified of Commander Burge’s tactics through a letter detailing Commander Burge’s abuse of a man named Andrew Wilson, who was beaten, shocked, suffocated, burned with a radiator, and threatened with a gun in his mouth. Mr. Wilson sued the city in one of numerous complaints and lawsuits alleging torture by Commander Burge and his men. Despite these complaints, the State’s Attorney’s office continued to use confessions obtained by Commander Burge’s team to convict and incarcerate dozens of Black men over the next 10 years.

An investigation into the torture allegations was not launched until 1991, following pressure from advocacy groups, international human rights organizations, and torture survivors. Two years later, Commander Burge was fired, and 15 years after that, he was convicted of perjury for lying under oath in one of the civil suits; he served less than four years in prison. In 2015, the city of Chicago approved a $5.5 million reparations package for survivors of the Burge-led torture campaign. The settlement included a formal apology as well as curricular reforms that would highlight the survivors’ stories in schools. Despite the review and reversal of many convictions that were obtained under Commander Burge’s command, in 2015 more than a dozen survivors remained in prison and had not yet had their cases reviewed.