Author: Desto22

Dean Juliette Derricotte of Fisk University in Nashville was driving three students to her parents’ home in Atlanta when an older white man driving a Model T car suddenly swerved and struck Dean Derricotte’s car, overturning it into a ditch. The white driver stopped to yell at Dean Derricotte and her passengers for damaging his own vehicle, then left the scene without rendering any aid. Others tried to get care for the injured Black passengers, but the nearby Hamilton Memorial Hospital in Dalton, Georgia—a segregated facility—refused to admit African American patients. Instead, Dean Derricotte and the three students were treated by a white doctor at his office in Dalton. Though Dean Derricotte and one of the students, Nina Johnson, were critically injured, following their treatment they were left to recuperate in the home of a local African American woman.

Six hours after the accident, one of the other students who sustained less serious injuries was able to reach a Chattanooga hospital by phone, and arrangements were made to transport Dean Derricotte and Ms. Johnson to that facility, which was 35 miles away. However, the delay proved fatal: Dean Derricotte died on her way to the hospital, at age 34, and Ms. Johnson died the next day.

The Committee on Interracial Cooperation opened an investigation into the incident, and Walter White, secretary of the New York-based NAACP, traveled south in December 1931 to learn more. He later concluded, “The barbarity of race segregation in the South is shown in all its brutal ugliness by the willingness to let cultured, respected, and leading colored women die for lack of hospital facilities which are available to any white person no matter how low in social scale.”

Six white police officers shot an unarmed 25-year-old Black military veteran named Roland T. Price outside of a bar in Rochester, New York. The shooting was deemed “justified” even though evidence showed that Mr. Price did not resist the officers’ demands.

Mr. Price was the recipient of the Purple Heart medal, awarded in the name of the president to those wounded or killed while serving, which he was wearing when he entered the bar in his military uniform that evening. After buying a drink, Mr. Price and the white bartender got into an argument over whether Mr. Price had been given the correct amount of change. In response, the bartender then drew a gun on Mr. Price and one of the waitresses called the police.

Patrolman William Hamill entered the restaurant with his gun drawn and ordered Mr. Price at gunpoint to step outside. Mr. Price complied with this order, exiting the bar to find five police officers waiting for him.

Despite seeing no weapon on Mr. Price, police confronted the veteran, who was in uniform, and ultimately opened fire on Mr. Price, shooting him multiple times, including twice in the chest and once in the head. After his death, a search of his body confirmed that he was unarmed. None of the police officers involved were indicted for Mr. Price’s death, and the shooting was deemed “justified.”

The repeated shootings of unarmed Black men by police and widespread racial discrimination against Black people have traumatized communities of color for decades. The legacy of this violence and a lack of response continues to haunt the U.S.

A five-man territorial commission representing the U.S. government sentenced 303 Dakota men to death for their participation in the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.

In the early 1800s, white settlers increasingly encroached upon the land of the Dakota people in Minnesota. To maintain peace, the Dakota agreed to a series of treaties, the first of which was signed in 1805, exchanging their land for the promise of financial payments and goods.

After the American Civil War began in 1861, the U.S. government failed to pay the money promised to the Dakota. This monetary deficit, coupled with further settler encroachment onto Dakota hunting and farming lands, pushed the Dakota to the brink of starvation, prompting Dakota men to begin making incursions into white settlements for food in the summer of 1862.

In response, the U.S. organized a military force composed of federal troops and local militia, and the conflict escalated. Outnumbered, the Dakota forces surrendered in September of 1862. Over 2,000 Dakota were taken into custody.

On November 5, 1862, a territorial commission composed of five military officers sentenced the captured Dakota men accused of participating in the war. Of the nearly 500 Dakota tried, 303 were sentenced to be executed. These men had no access to lawyers, and some of the trials lasted fewer than five minutes. After ordering a review of the trial records, President Abraham Lincoln commuted all but 39 of the death sentences; the execution of the condemned Dakota men on December 26, 1862, remains the largest single mass execution in American history.

Benjamin Ryan Tillman was elected governor of South Carolina. An outspoken white supremacist, Mr. Tillman created his identity as a politician based on white supremacy, a deep commitment to blocking any educational opportunity for Black people, and advocating for violence against Black voters. Concerning the education of Black people, Mr. Tillman argued, “when you educate a Negro, you educate a candidate for the penitentiary or spoil a good field hand.”

Mr. Tillman’s political career began after his involvement in the 1876 Hamburg Massacre, where white men rioted and killed nine people in a predominantly Black town in South Carolina. In his gubernatorial campaign, Mr. Tillman promised to keep the state’s Black population in a position of permanent inferiority. In his inaugural address and throughout his administration, he emphasized white supremacy and the necessity to revoke Black Americans’ rights.

Mr. Tillman served two terms as governor and played a critical role in the 1895 South Carolina Constitutional Convention. In order to vote under the revised constitution, a man had to own property, pay a poll tax, pass a literacy test, and meet certain educational standards. The 1895 constitution disenfranchised Black voters in intent and effect and served as a model for other Southern states.

After serving as governor, Mr. Tillman was elected U.S. senator from South Carolina in 1895 and served in this capacity for 24 years. Throughout his tenure, he staunchly opposed Black equality and women’s suffrage. Mr. Tillman’s philosophy helped shape the era of oppression and abuse of Black Americans throughout the South. A statue honoring Mr. Tillman still stands on the grounds of South Carolina’s State Capitol.

On Election Day, local white residents in Eufaula, Alabama, determined to regain political dominance in the county that they had lost during Reconstruction, used terror and intimidation to suppress Black votes, ultimately waging a violent, deadly massacre.

As the 1874 election neared, white employers openly fired any Black workers who intended to vote for Elias Keils, a white candidate who supported the aims of Reconstruction, for the position of city court judge. False rumors spread that Black residents planned to violently drive white voters from the polls, and white residents began stockpiling guns near Eufaula polling sites.

Judge Keils tried to notify state and federal officials of the danger, but Alabama’s attorney general rebuffed the warning, and federal troops stationed in Eufaula refused to intervene.

Despite the risk, hundreds of Black men marched to the downtown Eufaula polling site on November 3. Some Black voters were immediately arrested and jailed on fraud accusations. Around noon, several white men forced a Black man into an alley and threatened to arrest him if he did not vote against civil rights. As witnesses protested, a single gunshot was fired by an unknown individual, harming no one.

Soon afterward, a large mob of white men retrieved the stockpiled guns stored nearby and fired “indiscriminately” into the crowd of mostly unarmed Black voters. Within minutes, 400 shots had been fired, killing at least six Black people, and possibly many more based on some estimates; as many as 80 additional Black people were left injured. Many survivors fled, including an estimated 500 Black people who had not yet voted.

Later that day, a white mob attacked another county polling station in Spring Hill, Alabama, where Judge Keils was the election supervisor. The mob destroyed the ballot box, burned the ballots inside, and killed Judge Keils’s teenage son Willie.

Although the identities of many white perpetrators of the massacre were known, no white person was ever convicted. Instead, a Black man named Hilliard Miles was convicted and imprisoned for perjury after identifying members of the white mob. Decades later, Braxton Bragg Comer, whom Mr. Miles had named as a perpetrator of the massacre, was elected governor of Alabama.

The Eufaula Massacre and its aftermath showed Black residents that exercising their new legal rights—particularly by voting—made them targets for deadly attacks and that they could not depend on authorities for protection.

The result was mass voter suppression. While 1,200 Black Eufaula residents voted in the 1874 election, only 10 cast ballots in 1876.

On Election Day, white mobs in Ocoee, Florida, began a campaign of terror and violence designed to stop Black citizens in Ocoee from voting that resulted in the deaths of dozens of Black people and the destruction of the Black community.

With the election approaching, Black residents in Ocoee who owned land and businesses were eager to vote. Despite a terrorizing and threatening march by white citizens through the streets of Orlando three days earlier aimed at deterring Black people from participating in the election, Mose Norman and other Black Americans went to the polls to vote on November 2. Mr. Norman, however, was turned away, allegedly on the grounds that he had not paid his poll tax.

After seeking advice from an Orlando judge, John Cheney, Mr. Norman again attempted to vote. This time, armed white men stationed at the polls immediately assaulted him. He fled to the nearby home of his friend and business associate, Julius “July” Perry.

As word spread of Mr. Norman’s attempts to vote, a mob of white residents seeking to capture him and Mr. Perry surrounded and burned Mr. Perry’s home. Mr. Norman escaped, but the mob severely wounded Mr. Perry. He was arrested, taken to Orlando, and locked in the Orange County Jail.

The next morning, a lynch mob took Mr. Perry from police custody, brutally beat him, and hanged him within sight of Judge Cheney’s home. His lifeless body was shot repeatedly.

Over a two-day span, a mob of white Floridians killed dozens of Black people and burned 25 Black homes, two Black churches, and a masonic lodge in Ocoee. Estimates of the total number of Black Americans killed during the violence range from six to over 30. There is no adequate accounting of this violence because neither the government nor the newspapers at the time thought it was important to establish how many Black people were killed during the attack.

The Ocoee Election Day Massacre represents one of the bloodiest days in American political history. Black survivors fled the community, never to return. The entire Black community of Ocoee was driven out within a year, forced to abandon or sell land and homes they owned. No Black Americans resided in the City of Ocoee for the following 60 years.

The lynching of July Perry and countless others, and the destruction of the Black community with impunity, showed Black residents that exercising their legal right to vote made them targets for deadly attacks and that they could not depend on authorities for protection.

As part of the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Project, in June 2019, EJI staff joined hundreds of community members, including Mr. Perry’s descendants, in downtown Orlando to unveil a historical marker honoring July Perry and the victims of the Ocoee Election Day Massacre.

Over several decades in the 19th and 20th centuries, thousands of Native children were forced away from their families and sent to off-reservation boarding schools in misguided efforts to “civilize” them. After the U.S. Congress created the Civilization Fund and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, boarding schools for Native children were established and children were forcibly compelled to attend these schools, which were designed to eradicate Native youth’s tribal ties and assimilate them into white culture so that they would grow into adults supportive of the American economy. The consequences of this horrific abuse are still felt today.

The first such school to open was Carlisle Indian School, opened in Carlisle, Pennsylvania on November 1, 1879. The founder, Captain Richard Pratt, described his philosophy for educating Native children as: “All the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” The federal government used Carlisle as a model for other boarding schools designed to forcefully assimilate Native children into white culture. Young children were taken from their families to attend these schools, and parents who resisted were forced to flee, hide, or face imprisonment. Many parents sent their children because Native children were not permitted to attend local public schools with white students, making assimilation boarding schools the only available opportunity for formal education.

The federal government’s views on educating Native children were rooted in racism and prejudice. While the government believed a white youth’s “moral character and habits are already formed and well-defined” when they leave for school, a Native youth was thought to be “born a savage and raised in an atmosphere of superstition and ignorance” without the “advantages which are inherited by his white brother.” In the eyes of the government, “if [a Native American child] is to rise from his low estate the germs of a nobler existence must be implanted in him and cultivated. He must be taught to lay aside his savage customs like a garment and take upon himself the habits of civilized life.”

Reflecting these genocidal biases, Native children attending boarding schools were given English names, forced to cut their hair, and forbidden from speaking their Native languages. Students received vocational training but very little academic instruction, with the expectation that they would make their living as farmers or manual laborers. Conditions in many schools were poor, and students were often the victims of physical and sexual abuse.

These schools continued to exist for decades with funding and support from the federal government.

In the early morning, a white mob of more than 50 men tightened a noose around the neck of an 18-year-old Black man named Silas Esters, dragged him from the LaRue County Jail in Hodgenville, Kentucky, and lynched him.

According to newspaper reports at the time, Mr. Esters had been accused of “coercing” a 15-year-old white boy to commit a crime. However, newspapers reported that Mr. Esters’s alleged offense was “unpunishable by any statute.” Despite having committed no crime, Mr. Esters was arrested by local white police and placed in jail.

During this era of racial terror, law enforcement officers, tasked with protecting the people in their custody, often witnessed or directly participated in deadly mob violence. In this instance, when the white mob arrived at the LaRue County Jail intent on lynching Mr. Esters, the white police officers gave the mob the keys to the jail and made no effort to protect Mr. Esters as he was violently removed and lynched.

After being seized by the mob, newspapers reported that Mr. Esters slipped free and began to run away—but made it only 100 yards before the white mob riddled his body with bullets. The mob then placed a noose around his neck, dragged his lifeless body to the courthouse, and swung it from the top steps.

At the time, newspapers reported that Granville Ward and his father, Thomas Ward, were the leaders of this mob. Though the identities of at least two individuals who participated in Mr. Esters’s murder were known, no one was ever held accountable for his lynching. Mr. Esters was one of over 6,500 Black women, men, and children who were documented victims of racial terror lynching in the U.S. between 1865 and 1950.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy were arrested and forced to begin serving sentences in Birmingham jail because they led peaceful protests against unconstitutional bans on “race mixing” in Birmingham in 1963. In April 1963, a series of civil rights protests occurred in Birmingham, Alabama, to challenge segregation in Birmingham’s public accommodations. Pro-segregation white residents and local police, led by the city’s notorious public safety commissioner, Bull Connor, responded to the protests with violence and legal suppression.

On April 10, 1963, a state judge granted city officials an injunction banning all anti-segregation protest activity in the city of Birmingham. Dr. King and the Rev. Abernathy chose to lead a march in defiance of the injunction and were arrested on April 12, 1963. Dr. King spent eight days in jail before being released on bail, and during that time wrote his famed “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

Dr. King and the Rev. Abernathy were still prosecuted after posting bail, and on April 26, 1963, they were convicted of contempt of court. Dr. King and the Rev. Abernathy unsuccessfully appealed and, on October 30, 1967, returned to Birmingham to each serve five-day jail sentences. Dozens of supporters protested outside of Birmingham’s jail for the duration of their incarceration.

A white mob attacked and brutally whipped a 52-year-old Black man named Abram Colby because of his political advocacy. Abram Colby was born into slavery in Greene County, Georgia, in approximately 1817. The son of an enslaved Black woman and a white landowner, Mr. Colby was emancipated 15 years before the end of American slavery and worked tirelessly to organize newly free Black people following the Civil War. A Radical Republican who stood for racial equality, Mr. Colby was elected to serve in the Georgia House of Representatives during Reconstruction. His impassioned advocacy for Black civil rights earned him the attention of the local Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist organization founded in 1865 to resist Reconstruction and restore white supremacy through targeted violence against Black people and their white political allies.

Three years after being attacked by a mob of white Klansmen, when called to Washington, D.C., to testify about the assault before a Congressional committee investigating reports of racial violence in the South, Mr. Colby bravely identified his attackers as some of the “first class men in our town. One is a lawyer, one a doctor, and some are farmers.” Shortly before the attack, Mr. Colby explained, the men had tried to bribe him to change parties or give up his office. Mr. Colby refused to do either and days later they returned:

On October 29,1869, [the white mob] broke my door open, took me out of bed, took me to the woods and whipped me three hours or more and left me for dead. They said to me, “Do you think you will ever vote another damned Radical ticket?” I said, “If there was an election tomorrow, I would vote the Radical ticket.” They set in and whipped me a thousand licks more, with sticks and straps that had buckles on the ends of them.

Mr. Colby told the committee that the attack had “broken something inside of [him]” and that the Klan’s continued harassment and violent assaults had forced him to abandon his re-election campaign. Mr. Colby testified most emotionally about the attack’s impact on his daughter, who was home when the white mob seized him to be whipped: “My little daughter begged them not to carry me away. They drew up a gun and actually frightened her to death. She never got over it until she died. That was the part that grieves me the most.”