Author: Desto22

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.

Southern Railway, an interstate railroad company based in Washington, D.C., adopted a policy effectively denying dining service to Black passengers on its rail cars.

For years, the Southern Railway policy mandated that trains serve white passengers and Black passengers meals at different times, which often resulted in the denial of meals to Black passengers. In 1942, Southern Railway further entrenched its commitment to segregation and to denying its Black customers service by adopting a policy which reserved 10 of the train’s 11 dining tables exclusively for white passengers at all times. The one remaining table in the dining car that was theoretically open to Black passengers was also available for use by white passengers and was to be given to white passengers upon request. If Black passengers requested service while white passengers were dining, “they should be advised that they will be served just as soon as those compartments are vacated.”

In 1942, Elmer W. Henderson, a Black attorney, civil rights leader, member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practices Commission, and one of the first Black graduates of Georgetown University Law Center, boarded a Southern Railway train, traveling first-class from Washington, D.C., to Atlanta, Georgia. The train’s dining car remained occupied with white passengers for the duration of his journey, and railroad employees denied Mr. Henderson a dining table based on his race. At 9 pm, the train reached Greensboro, North Carolina, and the dining car ceased serving passengers. Neither Mr. Henderson nor any other Black passengers ever had a chance to eat dinner.

Mr. Henderson subsequently filed a complaint with the federal Interstate Commerce Commission, alleging that the railroad’s policy violated the Interstate Commerce Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The ICC denied relief, finding that Mr. Henderson “had sustained no compensable damage as a result of the disadvantage caused him” by Southern Railway. It would take five years for the Supreme Court to reexamine Mr. Henderson’s case. While ruling in Henderson v. United States that Southern Railway’s policies violated the Interstate Commerce Act, the Court avoided declaring racial segregation unconstitutional, paving the way for that practice to continue for years.

A white man named Wade Michael Page opened fire on worshippers at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing six people and seriously injuring several others before taking his own life. Between 30 and 35 people, including several children, were inside the temple that morning as community members prepared for their usual Sunday services.

Though police investigating the attack initially declined to categorize the shooting as a hate crime, Mr. Page had openly expressed white supremacist beliefs in the years leading up to the attack. The investigation later revealed images of Mr. Page wearing a “white power” shirt and posing in front of Nazi flags, which he had posted to public social media pages.

The six people killed in the attack were Sita Singh, Ranjit Singh, Satwant Singh Kaleka, Prakash Singh, Suveg Singh Khattra, and Paramjit Kaur Saini. Baba Punjab Singh, a priest at the temple, initially survived a gunshot wound to the head that left him paralyzed; he died from his injuries in 2020.

After 9/11, crimes against South Asian, Muslim, and Arab Americans became more common. Sikh men in particular, who often wear turbans, increasingly became victims of racial profiling and racialized attacks. In the year leading up to the Oak Creek shooting, two Sikh men in a Sacramento suburb were killed in a hate attack; a Sikh temple in Michigan was vandalized; and a New York hate crime left one Sikh man severely beaten.

A month after the August 5 shooting, Harpreet Singh Saini, whose mother Paramjit Kaur Saini was killed in the attack, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee to urge the Department of Justice to begin federally tracking hate crimes against Sikh, Arab, and Hindu people.

“I came here today to ask the government to give my mother the dignity of being a statistic,” Mr. Saini said. “The FBI does not track hate crimes against Sikhs. My mother and those shot that day will not even count on a federal form. We cannot solve a problem we refuse to recognize.”

The FBI began formally tracking hate crimes against Sikh, Arab, and Hindu Americans in 2015.

Following several weeks of national news coverage and an intensive search by federal authorities, the bodies of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman were found in Longdale, Mississippi. The three men, who went missing after being released from a local Mississippi jail, had been shot to death and buried in a shallow grave.

Earlier that year, Michael Schwerner had traveled to Mississippi to organize Black citizens to vote. A white New Yorker working with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Mr. Schwerner worked extensively with a Black CORE member from Meridian, Mississippi, named James Chaney. The activist pair led an effort to register Black voters and helped Mt. Zion Methodist Church, a Black church in Longdale, create an organizing center. These developments angered local members of the Ku Klux Klan; on June 16, while Mr. Schwerner and Mr. Chaney were away, Klansmen torched the church and assaulted its members.

On June 21, Mr. Schwerner, Mr. Chaney, and a new white CORE member named Andrew Goodman investigated the church burning and then headed for Meridian, Mississippi. Knowing that they were in constant danger of attack, Schwerner told colleagues in Meridian to search for them if they did not arrive by 4 pm. While passing through the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, the three men were stopped by Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price.

A member of the Ku Klux Klan, Mr. Price had been monitoring the activities of the civil rights workers. He arrested the men on traffic charges and held them in jail for about seven hours before releasing them on bail. Mr. Price escorted Mr. Schwerner, Mr. Chaney, and Mr. Goodman out of town but soon re-arrested the men and held them until other Klansmen could join. They were not seen alive again.

When the three activists did not arrive in Meridian, they were reported missing and soon became the subjects of a highly publicized FBI search and investigation. As the days turned into weeks, some Mississippi officials and white segregationists accused civil rights leaders of fabricating the workers’ disappearance to gain support for their cause. Once the three men’s bodies were discovered on August 4, however, no one could deny their fates.

While their disappearance resulted in national news stories, Michael Schwerner’s wife and fellow CORE worker, Rita Schwerner, admonished reporters in 1964: “The slaying of a Negro in Mississippi is not news. It is only because my husband and Andrew Goodman were white that the national alarm has been sounded.” Indeed, investigators searching Mississippi’s woods, swamps, and rivers that summer found the remains of at least two more Black men: Henry Dee and Charles Moore, college students who were kidnapped, beaten and murdered in May 1964.

Several days of racial violence targeting Black communities in Chicago, Illinois, came to an end after intervention by the National Guard. After five days of gunfire, beatings, and burnings, 23 African Americans and 15 white people had been killed, 537 people injured, and 1,000 African American families left homeless.

During the Great Migration, Chicago was a popular destination for many Black people leaving the South in search of economic opportunity and a refuge from racial terror lynching. From 1910 to 1920, the city’s Black population swelled from 44,000 to 109,000 people. The new arrivals joined thousands of white immigrants also relocating to Chicago in search of work. Many Black newcomers settled on Chicago’s South Side, in neighborhoods adjacent to communities of European immigrants, close to plentiful industrial jobs.

Although African American people had fled the Southern brand of racial violence, once in Chicago they still faced racial animosity and discrimination that created challenging living conditions like overcrowded housing, inequality at work, police brutality, and segregation by custom rather than law.

In the second decade of the 20th century, segregation in Chicago was not as legally regulated as in Southern cities, but unwritten rules restricted Black people from many neighborhoods, workplaces, and “public” areas—including beaches. On July 27, 1919, a Black youth named Eugene Williams drowned at a Chicago beach after a white man struck him with a rock for drifting to the “white” side of Lake Michigan. When police refused to arrest the man who had thrown the rock, Black witnesses protested; white mobs responded with widespread violence that lasted five days.

Over that terrifying period, white mobs attacked Black people on sight, set fire to more than 30 properties on Chicago’s South Side, and even attempted to attack Provident Hospital—which served mostly Black patients. Six thousand National Guard troops were called in to quell the unrest, and many Black people left Chicago after the terrifying experience.

Though state officials announced a plan to investigate and punish all parties responsible for violence and destruction of property during the unrest, many more Black people were arrested than white. The subsequent grand jury proceedings resulted in the indictment of primarily Black defendants. Later testifying before a commission investigating the roots of the Chicago violence, the Cook County district attorney admitted this was due to bias in his department of white officers.

“There is no doubt that a great many police officers were grossly unfair in making arrests,” he said in 1922. “They shut their eyes to offenses committed by white men while they were very vigorous in getting all the colored men they could get.”

North Carolina approved a constitutional amendment that required residents to pass a literacy test in order to register to vote. Under the provision, illiterate registrants with a relative who had voted in an election prior to the year 1863 were exempt from the requirement.

These provisions effectively disenfranchised most of the state’s African American voting population. At the same time, the rules preserved the voting rights of most of the state’s poor and uneducated white residents—who were much more likely to have a relative eligible to vote in 1863, before the abolition of slavery and passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. To the drafters and supporters of the amendment, this outcome was by design.

In the days and months leading up to the special election to vote on the literacy test proposal, campaign events throughout the state encouraged white citizens to cast their votes in favor of the policy that would achieve Black disenfranchisement. On the eve of the election, judicial candidate and former Confederate officer William A. Guthrie proclaimed to a crowd of over 12,000:

“The people of the east and west are coming together. The amendment will pass and the negro curbed in every part of the state. Good government will be restored everywhere. Then our ladies can walk the streets of our towns in safety, day or night. White women will not be afraid to go about alone in the country. We will teach the colored race that our people must be respected. We have restrained and conquered other races. They obeyed our demands or were exterminated with the sword. We are at a crisis. Let us rise to the occasion. Come together!”

The campaign was also marked by widespread attempts to suppress African Americans’ participation in the election. “No negro must vote. All white men must vote,” insisted one prominent politician. “We’ll try to bring this about by law. If that don’t go—well, we can try another tack. The white man must and will rule in North Carolina, no matter what methods are necessary to give him authority.”

The effect of racially discriminatory voting laws in North Carolina and throughout the South would persist for generations, effectively disenfranchising Black people throughout the region with little federal intervention until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

White employees of the Philadelphia Transit Company (PTC) launched a strike to protest the company’s decision to promote eight Black workers to the position of trolley driver—a job previously reserved for white men. The Black men were promoted after President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Orders 8802 and 9436, which prohibited companies with government contracts from discriminating on the basis of race or religion and required companies to include a nondiscrimination clause in their contracts.

As the U.S. prepared to enter World War II in the 1940s, Philadelphia quickly became one of the country’s largest war production sources. As many as 600,000 workers relied on the PTC to get to their workplaces, including many factories. The strike threatened the entire city’s ability to function and severely hampered critical wartime production.

White PTC employees James McMenamin, James Dixon, Frank Thompson, and Frank Carney led the strike and threatened to maintain the protest until the Black workers were demoted. The strike grew to include over 6,000 workers, prevented nearly two million people from traveling, and cost businesses almost $1 million per day.

On the strike’s third day, President Roosevelt authorized the War Department to take control of the PTC. Two days later, 5,000 U.S. Army troops moved into Philadelphia to prevent uprisings and protect PTC employees who crossed the picket line. Despite the military presence, the confrontation resulted in at least 13 acts of racial violence, including several non-fatal shootings.

After more than a week, the strike ended when PTC employees facing threats of termination, loss of draft deferments, and ineligibility for unemployment benefits chose to return to work without achieving their goal of blocking Black workers’ opportunity for advancement. By September 1944, the PTC’s first Black trolley drivers were on duty.

Almost a decade after Brown v. Board of Education prohibited racial segregation in public schools, the University of North Alabama, known at the time as Florence State College, denied admission to Wendell Gunn, a Black applicant, based solely on his race. The school’s rejection letter stated explicitly, “Neither the Alabama Legislature nor the State Board of Education ha[s] authorized the college to accept Negroes.”

UNA officials later admitted that it was evident from Mr. Gunn’s application that he had a “very good academic record.” At the time, Mr. Gunn was a chemistry major at Tennessee Agricultural & State Normal School, a historically Black college that later became Tennessee State University. Despite the fact that Mr. Gunn lived just 10 miles from UNA, he had been forced to attend college out-of-state because Alabama insisted on keeping its schools all-white.

Three weeks after being denied admission, Mr. Gunn filed suit in federal court. A U.S. District Judge ordered UNA to admit Mr. Gunn for the fall term, which began in September.

In response to the court order, white citizens in Alabama criticized UNA for discriminating in such a blatant, written form, rather than discriminating in the covert methods typically used. White citizens complained that the school’s actions “eliminated any chance of stalling tactics by school officials” and undermined “pieces of legislation carefully written to slow school integration.” Others predicted that Governor George Wallace would block Mr. Gunn’s admission by physical force, in defiance of the court order, as he attempted to do in June, when Black students Vivian Malone and James Hood integrated the University of Alabama. Due to the level of hostility in the white community and the potential for violence, UNA held a separate, after-hours enrollment session for Mr. Gunn, after white students left campus for the day on September 11.

Historically segregated public colleges in Alabama, like the University of North Alabama, which had been an all-white state-funded institution since 1830, declined to admit a single Black student in the nine years following Brown. Violent white resistance to integration necessitated federal intervention to protect Black students on multiple occasions in Alabama, but Alabama continued to defy federal integration orders, to deny admission to Black applicants, and to enforce discriminatory state laws that conflicted with the U.S. Constitution.