Author: Desto22

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.

Like most other cities in the South, New Orleans, Louisiana, experienced social turmoil following the Civil War as Black citizens gained greater political and economic standing in a state that had not been willing to grant it voluntarily. The Louisiana Constitutional Convention of 1864 had granted Black people some citizenship rights but denied them the right to vote. In 1865, Louisiana joined other Southern states in enacting Black Codes to disenfranchise Black people, greatly angering Radical Republicans who had supported the Union during the Civil War and promoted full citizenship rights for Black people.

On July 30, 1866, Radical Republicans in the state reconvened the Louisiana Constitutional Convention in an attempt to seize control of the state government. The new convention had many Black supporters, including 200 Union Army veterans who had attended speeches by abolitionists and Radical Republicans a few days earlier. The speakers encouraged Black people to march upon the grounds of the Mechanics Institute in New Orleans to show solidarity with the convention.

After recessing at mid-day on July 30, convention members leaving the meeting were greeted by Black marchers. Across the street from the Mechanics Institute, a group of armed white men gathered to confront both marchers and convention delegates. The white mob, which included many Confederate war veterans, was convinced that the Radical Republicans sought to disenfranchise white voters while enfranchising Black voters. The mob attacked marchers and their political allies, chasing them into the Mechanics Institute. In the ensuing violence, often referred to as the New Orleans Massacre, 35 Black marchers and three white Radical Republicans were killed and about 100 Black marchers were injured.

Beginning on July 29, 1910, a white mob of hundreds massacred Black residents in and around Slocum, a majority-Black community near Palestine, Texas. According to some estimates, the mob killed as many as 200 Black people in the span of just two days. Hundreds more fled the area in the aftermath of the massacre, forced to leave their homes, farms, and businesses behind.

Local white citizens formed the mob after a series of minor events they perceived to have violated racial hierarchy, including a Black worker being appointed to a position of authority on a nearby road construction project.

Armed members of the mob rode through Slocum and the surrounding area on horseback, firing at any and all Black citizens they encountered. They chased those fleeing into forests and marshes, shooting many in the back as they ran.

Most newspapers downplayed the extent of the violence and claimed that the white mobs only shot at Black citizens after being threatened. However, contemporaneous and subsequent investigations found that the massacre was wholly unprovoked. A local sheriff commented to the New York Times that white men “were going about killing Negroes as fast as they could find them.” He continued, “These Negroes have done no wrong that I can discover … They hunted the Negroes down like sheep.”

While at least 11 members of the mob were arrested and seven were indicted, no one was ever prosecuted or convicted for their role in the massacre.

Two weeks after the massacre, a group of Black ministers called on President William Howard Taft to intervene in Texas to “suppress lynching, murder and other forms of lawlessness” and “make human life more valuable and law more universally respected.” President Taft declined to take action, characterizing the widespread racial violence as a state matter rather than a federal one.

The Slocum Massacre was not officially acknowledged in Texas by state or local officials until 2011—100 years after it took place. In 2016, descendants of victims of the massacre unveiled a historical marker recognizing the Slocum Massacre and commemorating those who were killed.

The chief of police in Louisville, Kentucky, announced the arrest of at least three people for interracial relations, or miscegenation. He also announced plans to open an investigation into the practice, which would “spare no effort” to prevent people from forming or maintaining interracial romantic relationships in Louisville.

Earlier that day, Louisville police made at least three arrests involving allegations of interracial romance. Authorities first arrested Harry Jenkins, a 34-year-old Black man, and Alice Shumaker, a 30-year-old woman who self-identified as Black but whom police believed to be white. Louisville law enforcement jailed both Mr. Jenkins and Ms. Shumaker on disorderly conduct charges, though they stood accused of little more than being found under the same roof together at the same time. Unwilling to accept Ms. Shumaker’s own racial self-identification, the local jailor forced her to submit to a blood test “to determine whether or not” she was Black.

The same white Louisville officers who arrested Mr. Jenkins and Ms. Shumaker also detained George Eaton, a 16-year-old Black boy. After subjecting George to a search, the officers found photographs of three teenaged white girls in his pocket. George claimed that the white girls had given him these photographs and refused to identify them. The officers arrested George, while the chief of police directed other high-ranking officials in his department to “make a round of photo galleries” in the city of Louisville to uncover the white girls’ identities.

Kentucky criminalized interracial marriages from the year it was admitted into the Union in 1792. At the time that Mr. Jenkins, Ms. Shumaker, and George were arrested, state law made it illegal for a Black person—defined by the Kentucky Supreme Court as a person with “one–fourth part or more of Negro blood”—to marry or live with a white person. Those found in violation of the law faced a fine of up to $5,000 and up to a year in jail. Black people charged with miscegenation faced dehumanizing treatment by law enforcement, and investigations and court proceedings were often humiliating and intrusive. Despite the fact that the Supreme Court invalidated all laws criminalizing interracial marriage in 1967, Kentucky did not repeal its anti-miscegenation statute until 1974.

During the Jim Crow era, one of the racial boundaries white people protected most fiercely was the prohibition on romantic contact between Black men and white women. Fear of intimate contact between Black men and white women was fueled by the pervasive myth that Black men were violent, sexually aggressive, and always in pursuit of white womanhood. In Kentucky and other states, these fears led to the aggressive enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws, the degradation of interracial couples, and the destruction of multiracial families.

A multi-day uprising of violent clashes between police and Black residents in Detroit ended. The conflict, which began on July 23, was the largest of the year and foreshadowed the violent unrest in cities across the nation the following year. At the conclusion of this conflict, dozens of people had been killed by law enforcement.

Beginning during World War I and continuing through the end of the 1960s, racial terror lynchings in the South fueled a massive exodus of African Americans from Southern states into urban ghettos in the North and West. In a brutal environment of racial subordination and terror, close to six million Black Americans fled the South’s racial caste system between 1910 and 1970. In 1910, Detroit’s population was 1.2% Black; by 1970, that number had risen to 43.7%.

After several years of postwar migration had increased Black populations in Northern cities, pervasive discrimination and segregation in employment, education, and housing resulted in the continuing exclusion of Black people from the benefits of economic progress. Police brutality was rampant in Black communities, and law enforcement was rarely, if ever, held accountable. In the summer of 1967, these issues culminated in a series of uprisings across several major Northern cities.

The Detroit rebellion began after police raided an after-hours club. Looting and fires broke out, and multiple law enforcement agencies were deployed. On July 26, police and National Guardsmen raided the Algiers motel looking for an alleged sniper. They found not a single gun on the premises, but instead tortured the Black men and white women they found there together and killed three Black teenagers, shooting two of them with shotguns at point-blank range. Despite two officers’ confessions, no one was ever convicted for their deaths. By the rebellion’s end, 33 African American and 10 white people had been killed, most at the hands of law enforcement.

Urban rebellions were widely dismissed as senseless “riots,” but many people today recount them as uprisings against oppressive and discriminatory practices that subjected Black residents to violence and inequality. “You see, you can only hold a person down for so long. After a while, they’re going to get tired. And that’s what happened,” explained Frank Thomas, who was 23 years old during the Detroit rebellion. “Basically, we wanted to be a part of the city of Detroit instead of being second-class citizens.”

On July 26, 1949, a mob of hundreds of white men tracked down and shot Ernest Thomas, a 26-year-old Black man, over 400 times while he was asleep under a tree in Madison County, Florida. Two days after being killed by a mob, a coroner’s jury ruled that Mr. Thomas’s death was “justifiable homicide.”

Ernest Thomas was one of the so-called Groveland Four, three young Black men and one 16-year-old Black boy, who in 1949 were falsely accused of raping 17-year-old Norma Padgett and assaulting her husband in Groveland, Florida. The deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society during this time period often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered or alleged, whether evidence supported that suspicion or not. Almost 25% of all lynchings involved allegations of inappropriate behavior between a Black man and a white woman that was characterized as “assault” or “sexual assault.” The mere accusation of sexual impropriety regularly aroused violent mobs and ended in lynching. Allegations against Black people were rarely subject to scrutiny.

On July 16, 1949, two young Black men, Samuel Shepherd, and Walter Irvin, and one 16-year-old Black boy, Charles Greenlee, were captured in a manhunt on charges of assaulting Ms. Padgett. Within hours of the accusations, mobs of white residents burned the homes and property of Black families in Groveland. They were taken to Lake County Jail, where they were tortured by the police. The next day, a mob of at least a hundred white men formed outside of the jail and demanded that the three men be released to them. Unable to access their intended targets, the heavily armed white mob went on a rampage of racial terror in Groveland’s Black neighborhoods, where they shot at residents and set fire to their homes. By the hundreds, the Black community fled Groveland, fearing for their lives. Mr. Thomas had evaded capture by the mob and fled too. The mob pursued him for 10 days before they caught him and shot him to death while he was sleeping.

Despite being beaten into giving false confessions, and the State failing to present crucial evidence, such as a medical examination of Norma Padgett, the three survivors of this violence remained incarcerated and were wrongly convicted by an all-white jury. Charles Greenlee was sentenced to life in prison, while Mr. Irvin and Mr. Shepherd, both 22, were sentenced to death.

In 1951, after the work of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Mr. Irvin’s and Mr. Shepherd’s convictions, stating they were entitled to a new trial. Before their trials could take place, Sheriff McCall shot Mr. Shepherd and Mr. Irvin while they were handcuffed together in his custody and being transferred from prison. Mr. Shepherd died, but Mr. Irvin, who was shot and was denied an ambulance because he was Black, survived. Mr. Irvin was then convicted again by an all-white jury in his retrial, and was sentenced to death. Nearing his execution date, Mr. Irvin received a stay, before finally having his sentence commuted and being released from prison in 1968. He died a year later. Charles Greenlee remained on a life sentence and was released on parole in 1962. He died on April 18, 2012.

No charges were ever filed against any of the white law enforcement officers or members of the mob who were active participants in this racial terror. Sheriff McCall, who was infamous for using violence to enforce segregation and terrorize the Black community, claimed that he acted in self-defense in shooting Mr. Irvin and Mr. Shepherd even though they were handcuffed. Not only was he cleared of all charges, but he was re-elected as sheriff on five subsequent occasions.

All four of these men were posthumously pardoned by the Governor of Florida in 2019. Mr. Thomas was one of at least 14 documented racial terror lynchings in Madison County, Florida. Learn more about how over 6,500 Black women, men, and children were victims of racial terror lynching in the U.S. between 1865-1950.

A white mob lynched two Black couples near Moore’s Ford Bridge in Walton County, Georgia, in what has been called “the last mass lynching in America.” The couples killed were George W. and Mae Murray Dorsey and Dorothy and Roger Malcolm. Mrs. Malcolm was seven months pregnant. Mr. Dorsey, a World War II veteran who had served in the Pacific for five years, had been home for only nine months.

On July 11, Roger Malcom was arrested after allegedly stabbing a white farmer named Barnette Hester during a fight. Two weeks later, J. Loy Harrison, the white landowner for whom the Malcoms and the Dorseys sharecropped, drove Mrs. Malcom and the Dorseys to the jail to post a $600 bond. On their way back to the farm, the car was stopped by a mob of 30 armed, unmasked white men who seized Mr. Malcom and Mr. Dorsey and tied them to a large oak tree. Mrs. Malcom recognized members of the mob, and when she called on them by name to spare her husband, the mob seized her and Mrs. Dorsey. Mr. Harrison watched as the white men shot all four people 60 times at close range. He later claimed he could not identify any members of the mob.

The Moore’s Ford Bridge lynchings drew national attention, leading President Harry Truman to order a federal investigation and offer $12,500 for information leading to a conviction. A grand jury returned no indictments, and the perpetrators were never held accountable. The FBI recently reopened its investigation into the lynching, only to encounter continued silence and obstruction at the highest levels. In response to charges that he was withholding information, Walton County Superior Court Judge Marvin Sorrells, whose father worked for Walton County law enforcement in 1946, vowed that “until the last person of my daddy’s generation dies, no one will talk.”

In recent years, the tragic lynching at the Moore’s Ford Bridge has inspired varied activism including an annual memorial march and legal efforts to gain access to sealed grand jury transcripts—all important ways of confronting the truth of this deadly hate and terror. In 2020, a federal court ruled that the grand jury records must remain sealed.

The Washington Star newspaper in Washington, D.C., published an article exposing details of an ongoing syphilis experiment that withheld diagnosis information and treatment from Black men in Alabama in order to study the effects of the disease. The article incited public outrage over the unethical treatment of participants, leading to the experiment’s termination later that year.

Forty years earlier, in 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) partnered with the Tuskegee Institute on a study to examine the effects of untreated syphilis in African American men in Macon County, Alabama. PHS workers persuaded 600 African American men—399 with syphilis, and 201 without the disease—to participate in the experiment. They were not given full details about the scope of the study and were just told they would be receiving treatment for “bad blood”—a vague term with many meanings in the rural, Southern community.

Nearly all of the men studied were poorly educated, impoverished sharecroppers. The study took advantage of their poverty, promising that their participation would be compensated with burial stipends, hot meals, and free medical exams. Those with syphilis were not told they were infected and did not receive treatment, even after Penicillin was discovered to be an effective cure for the disease in the 1940s. Their access to treatment outside of the study was also thwarted, as local health workers not affiliated with the project were prevented from caring for syphilis-infected individuals participating in the experiment.

Over the study’s 40-year span, 128 participants died of syphilis or syphilis-related complications. One year after the Washington Star broke the story, the NAACP represented survivors in a class action lawsuit. In 1974, the federal government settled for $10 million and agreed to provide survivors and their infected family members with free medical services. It would take another 23 years, however, for the government to issue a formal apology for its actions.

Governor Frank M. Dixon of Alabama refused to sign a contract that would help produce 1.7 million yards of cloth to assist the U.S. in World War II efforts, fearing that the nondiscrimination clause in the contract could require integration and choosing instead to uphold segregated workforces as a “basic necessity.”

The U.S.’s 1941 involvement in World War II spurred a reliance on government agencies to help finance and increase production of defense supplies. The Defense Supplies Corporation was established to help finance critical wartime supplies. When a non-discrimination clause was introduced into a contract with the Defense Supplies Corporation mandating that “the seller, in performing the work required by this contract, shall not discriminate against any worker because of race, creed, color or national origin,” white politicians throughout the South launched a massive campaign to resist the erosion of segregated working conditions—even if it meant hindering U.S. defense efforts.

Relying primarily on the labor of incarcerated people at Alabama cotton mills, the Defense Supplies Corporation’s contract with Alabama was meant to produce 1.7 million yards of cloth. However, on July 23, 1942, in a letter to the New York agent of the corporation, Governor Dixon explained his refusal to sign this contract, arguing that “demand[s] that Negroes be put in positions of responsibility” at cotton mills in Alabama were unacceptable.

Instead, Governor Dixon praised Jim Crow practices throughout the state of Alabama “under which the white and Negro races have lived in peace together in the South since Reconstruction.” In aligning himself with other Southern white politicians, Governor Dixon attested that the “the present emergency [World War II] should not be used as a pretext to bring about the abolition of the color lines in the South.” So fearful of the “intermingling” of Black and white workers, Governor Dixon explicitly praised “white supremacy,” and stated that “he will not permit the employees of the state to be placed in a position where they must abandon the principle of segregation.”

Governor Dixon was not alone in his decision to maintain segregation over assisting the U.S. in defense production. Earlier that week, an attorney named Horace Wilkerson in Birmingham made a public speech calling upon white people in Alabama to join in resisting integration under any circumstance. In stating that “a herculean effort is being made to break down and destroy segregation,” Wilkerson advocated for the establishment of a “league to maintain white supremacy.” Throughout the summer and fall of 1942, thousands of white businessmen and workers supported the governor’s decision to uphold segregation instead of signing the contract that would assist World War II efforts. Forty-two newspaper editorials were published in support of Governor Dixon’s decision. Though pressure for a skilled labor force eventually compelled Governor Dixon to rescind his refusal and permit the training and employment of Black people in defense industries in Alabama by the fall of 1942, he did so only with the understanding and agreement that Black workers must be segregated from white workers.

Two years later, when an executive order ended segregation at Maxwell Field in Montgomery, Alabama, former Governor Dixon wrote to the current governor, Chauncey Sparks: “It is heartbreaking thing for those of us in the South who realize what the destruction of segregation would mean … to have all our plans wrecked by the type of very dangerous thinking which produced this order.” Urging Governor Sparks to continue to stand against integration for “our people,” Dixon remained committed to maintaining white supremacy even after his term as governor.

On the morning of July 22, 1899, a white mob abducted Frank Embree from officers transporting him to stand trial and lynched him in front of a crowd of over 1,000 onlookers in Fayette, Missouri.

About one month earlier, Frank Embree had been arrested and accused of assaulting a white girl. Though his trial was scheduled for July 22, the town’s residents grew impatient and, rather than allow Mr. Embree to stand trial, took matters into their own hands by lynching Mr. Embree.

According to newspaper accounts, the mob attacked officers transporting Mr. Embree, seized him, loaded him into a wagon, and drove him to the site of the alleged assault. Once there, Mr. Embree’s captors immediately tried to extract a confession by stripping him naked and whipping him in front of the assembled crowd, but he steadfastly maintained his innocence despite this abuse. After withstanding more than 100 lashes to his body, Mr. Embree began screaming and told the men that he would confess. Rather than plead for his life, Mr. Embree begged his attackers to stop the torture and kill him swiftly. Covered in blood from the whipping, with no courtroom or legal system in sight, Mr. Embree offered a confession to the waiting lynch mob and was immediately hanged from a tree.

Black people accused of crimes during this era were regularly subjected to beatings, torture, and threats of lynching in efforts to obtain a confession, and the results of those coercive attacks were later used to “justify” the lynchings that followed. In fact, without fair investigation or trial, the confession of a lynching victim was more reliable evidence of fear than guilt.

Though published photographs of Mr. Embree’s lynching clearly depict the faces of many of his assailants, no one was ever arrested or tried for his death.