July 21, 1913

35 Black men at Oakley Farm, a segregated prison camp in Mississippi, burned to death when the neglected dormitory they were locked into at night caught fire.

Each night, the men who were forced to labor as convicts at Oakley Farm were locked into the second floor of an all-wooden building, where they slept on the floor together. The second floor had metal bars on each window and the building had only one exit—through a single door on the first floor, where the prison stored hay, molasses, and other flammable materials. The dormitory was referred to as an “antiquated convict cage,” and as one report later noted, “everything was in the fire’s favor.”

Shortly before midnight, two watchmen patrolling the prison noticed flames coming out of the windows of the first floor of one of the prison dormitories. Because the prison did not have any fire extinguishing gear, the watchmen simply stood by as the fire grew, failing to take any measures to try to save the individuals locked inside. As flames quickly engulfed the dormitory, the men imprisoned upstairs began shouting for help. With bars on all the windows and the singular exit blocked by the fire, they were left with no way out, and all 35 of the men in the dormitory burned to death.

After the Civil War, the abolition of slavery dealt a severe economic blow to Southern states whose agricultural economies had been built on the backs of unpaid Black people who had been held in bondage for generations. Mississippi, among other states, took advantage of the loophole included in the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime,” to create the system of convict leasing.

Through convict leasing, Southern states profited off of the labor of incarcerated people, who were subjected to brutal physical work each day and horrific living conditions—like those at Oakley Farm—that proved deadly for many. Black Codes, discriminatory laws passed by Southern states to criminalize Black people for “offenses” like loitering, vagrancy, or not carrying proof of employment, ensured that the majority of those imprisoned, leased, and forced to work at prison camps were Black people.

Today, the Oakley Youth Development Center, a juvenile correctional facility, operates on the grounds where the segregated Oakley Farm used to be.

July 20, 2015

In July 2015, the North Carolina legislature passed a law requiring legislative approval to change or remove monuments erected to honor “an event, person, or military service that is part of North Carolina’s history.”

Floor debate before the legislative vote clearly established that the bill was written as a response to efforts to remove Confederate flags and memorials in other states after a white supremacist shot and killed nine Black men and women in a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2015. The removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol grounds weeks after the shooting was welcomed by many but also sparked criticism and backlash from those who insisted it was a representation of heritage and history rather than racism and pro-slavery ideology.

“The whole purpose of the bill, as I see it, is to keep the flames of passion from overriding common sense,” said North Carolina Representative Michael Speciale. On July 20, 2015, the State House passed the bill. Days later, on July 23, Governor Pat McCrory signed it into law, citing his “commitment to ensuring that our past, present and future state monuments tell the complete story of North Carolina.”

According to a study by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the state has more monuments to the Confederacy than to any other subject, and more than half of the state’s counties have at least one Confederate memorial.

July 19, 1919

Rumors began circulating among white residents of Washington, D.C., that a Black man had been accused of attempting to sexually assault a white woman. When news spread that police had released a Black suspect from custody, white men across the city began planning a violent rampage against the Black community.

This incident, the latest in several weeks of sensationalized, rumor-mill allegations of sexual offenses by Black men against white women, lit a powder keg. During this era, any action by a Black man that could be interpreted as seeking or desiring contact with a white woman could spark deadly violence. Accusations of “assault” were often based on merely looking at or accidentally bumping into a white woman, smiling, winking, getting too close, or even being disagreeable. The mere accusation of sexual impropriety, even without evidence or facts, often aroused a mob and resulted in lynching before the judicial system could or would act.

In the summer of 1919, which later became known as “Red Summer,” major cities across the U.S. were sites of racialized attacks on Black communities. These conflicts were often set off by white lynch mobs clashing with Black World War I veterans standing up to defend their communities.

On the night of July 19, a mob of white men moved through a residential neighborhood near Pennsylvania Avenue NW, gathering weapons and more members as they traveled. The mob encountered a Black man named Charles Ralls near Ninth and D streets in Southwest D.C. and beat him severely. The mob beat its second victim, 55-year-old George Montgomery, badly enough to fracture his skull. Growing groups of white men, including civilians and military service members, spread out and continued their violent campaign deeper into the Black community for several days.

At the time, Washington, D.C.’s Black community was relatively prosperous and included many members of the military. As Black citizens realized the police were not going to protect them from the attacking mob, many took up arms in their own defense. By the third day of the conflict, armed Black groups were confronting white mobs in shootouts and street fights. On the fourth day, federal troops were deployed to quell the violence. The conflict left nine people dead, 30 severely wounded, and 150 beaten.

July 18, 1946

A white mob shot a 37-year-old Black veteran named Maceo Snipes at his home in Butler, Georgia. A day earlier, Mr. Snipes had exercised his constitutional right to vote in the Georgia Democratic Primary, becoming the only Black man to vote in the election in Taylor County. For this he was targeted and lynched.

Mr. Snipes had served in the U.S. Army for two and a half years during World War II and, after receiving an honorable discharge, had returned home to Taylor County, Georgia, to work as a sharecropper with his mother. Mr. Snipes’s family later recalled that he had received threats from the Ku Klux Klan in the days leading up to the election, but he still bravely went to vote in the gubernatorial primary on July 17, 1946.

Just two years before, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Smith v. Allwright had ruled it unconstitutional for political parties to hold “all-white primaries,” in which only white voters were permitted to participate in choosing the party’s candidate. This established that Mr. Snipes and other Black people were legally entitled to vote in the primary, but many white Georgians resented the ruling—including candidate Eugene Talmadge, who campaigned on a promise to restore white primaries in the state. A staunch white supremacist, Mr. Talmadge had been previously elected governor of Georgia on three occasions with a segregationist platform and the open support of white terrorists groups, including the Ku Klux Klan. “The South loves the Negro in his place,” Mr. Talmadge had said in a 1942 campaign speech, “but his place is at the back door.”

When the primary concluded, Mr. Talmadge had won the party’s nomination and received the most support in rural areas. When Taylor County votes were tallied, Mr. Talmadge had won all but one vote—and white community members believed that Mr. Snipes, known to be the only Black voter in the county, had cast that lone vote of opposition.

A day after the primary, a mob of white men, including a white veteran named Edward Williamson, arrived at Mr. Snipes’s grandfather’s house in a pickup truck and called out Mr. Snipes’s name. Mr. Snipes got up from the table where he was eating dinner with his mother and went outside to see who was there, only to be shot multiple times at his own front door. The truck of men then drove away.

Severely wounded and assisted by his mother, Mr. Snipes walked for several miles searching for help before he was finally transported to a hospital in Butler and admitted for care. According to his family, the hospital’s segregation policies delayed Mr. Snipes’s treatment for several hours; relatives later recounted that a doctor told them Mr. Snipes urgently needed a blood transfusion but could not get one because the hospital did not have any “Black blood” to use. Two days later, on July 20, 1946, Mr. Snipes died.

By assertively exercising his constitutional right to vote, Mr. Snipes had become a target for white people committed to maintaining white supremacy and racial hierarchy.

Mr. Snipes’s veteran status also added to his vulnerability. White people intent on maintaining Jim Crow and racial subjugation of Black people worried that military service would make Black men leaders in the fight for racial equality at home and frequently targeted Black veterans returning from World War II with racial violence for wearing their uniforms in public, asserting their rights, or denouncing inequality. Black veterans often faced horrible discrimination, mistreatment, and even murder at the hands of white Americans determined to suppress their potential activism. During the era of racial terror, lynching was meant to send a message of domination and to instill fear within the entire Black community. After threats of further attacks, Mr. Snipes’s body was buried in an unmarked grave and several members of his family fled with their young children to Ohio.

When local authorities investigated Mr. Snipes’s shooting, Edward Williamson admitted to killing him but claimed Mr. Snipes had pulled a knife on him when he went to the Snipes home to collect a debt. A member of a prominent white family in Taylor County, Mr. Williamson’s story was believed at face value despite contrary assertions in Mr. Snipes’s deathbed statement and his mother’s witness testimony. The coroner’s jury ultimately ruled that the shooting had been in “self-defense,” and no one was ever held accountable for Mr. Snipes’s death.

Between the end of Reconstruction and the years following World War II, thousands of Black veterans were accosted, assaulted, and attacked, and many were lynched. Brave Black men and women, like Mr. Maceo Snipes, risked their lives to defend this country’s freedom only to have their own freedom denied and threatened, or their lives tragically taken, because of racial bigotry.

July 17, 1956

In an attempt to undermine the local bus boycott by the Black community against seating segregation and unequal employment, the City Commission in Tallahassee, Florida, ordered a police crackdown on drivers who had volunteered to carpool with Black residents boycotting local buses.

Despite the fact that the riders were not charged regular fares, the city announced it would start arresting Black carpool drivers because they would now be violating the law by acting as public carriers without a license. The new ruling, passed by City Attorney James Messer, was designed to force Black residents to end their boycott and undermine civil rights activism.

The boycott began after two Black students, Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson, were arrested and charged with “inciting a riot” after they sat in the only two available seats on the bus, which happened to be in the “whites-only” section. They were told they would either have to stand or leave without reimbursement for their tickets. The women refused to leave the bus, and the police were called and arrested them. During the subsequent boycott, the Black community in Tallahassee used carpools to allow people to get to work and run errands without having to use public transportation. The bus boycott, which began May 28, was so successful that by July 1 the city had suspended its bus services because 70% of the usual bus riders were Black.

Despite the threat of police intimidation, arrests, and constant harassment from white residents in Tallahassee, the Black community’s activism and the boycott continued for months. Twenty-one people, including the Reverend C. K. Steele, a Black man and the head of the Inter-Civic Council, were arrested for their activism, resulting in about $11,000 in legal fees (the equivalent of roughly $105,000 today). Local white-owned newspapers, like the Tallahassee Democrat, argued that the arrests were justified.

In December 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Browder v. Gayle that similar segregation on city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, was unconstitutional. Despite the Court’s ruling that such practices were unconstitutional, the Tallahassee City Commission instituted a rule making all seats on the bus “by driver assignment only,” meaning that segregation on the city’s buses continued for many more months.

July 16, 1944

27-year-old Irene Morgan was traveling by bus from Virginia to Baltimore, Maryland, when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger.

Ms. Morgan, a Black woman, purchased a Greyhound ticket that day in Gloucester, Virginia, boarded the bus, and took a seat in the assigned “Black section.” About 30 minutes after the bus departed, however, Ms. Morgan and the passenger sitting beside her were asked to give up their seats for a white couple who had boarded and found no available seats in the “white section.” When Ms. Morgan refused and advised the passenger beside her to do the same, the bus driver drove to the local jail in Middlesex County, where a deputy sheriff boarded the bus and presented Ms. Morgan with a warrant for her arrest.

Under Virginia law at that time, racial segregation was mandatory on state-sponsored transportation. Ms. Morgan insisted that her presence on an interstate bus meant that Virginia law did not apply, and she refused to be removed from her seat. Police physically dragged the young Black woman from the bus, held her in the Saluda City Jail, and convicted her of violating the state segregation law.

Ms. Morgan appealed her conviction and, in March 1946, civil rights lawyers Thurgood Marshall and William H. Hastle argued her case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Less than three months later, in Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia, the Court reversed Ms. Morgan’s conviction, and held that state segregation laws were unconstitutional as applied to interstate bus travel.

July 15, 1954

At the direction of U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell and under the supervision of Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Commissioner Joseph Swing, the U.S. Border Patrol began the second phase of an immigration law enforcement initiative in the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. The program, officially known as “Operation Wetback,” employed the pejorative term “wetback” often used to refer to Mexican citizens who entered the U.S. by swimming across the Rio Grande River.

The operation had begun one month earlier, targeting Mexican immigrants in California and Arizona. Attorney General Brownell promoted the crackdown based on his assertion that “the Mexican wetback problem was becoming increasingly serious” because Mexican immigrants were “displacing domestic workers, affecting work conditions, spreading disease, and contributing to crime rates.” INS deployed hundreds of agents to the Rio Grande Valley to locate and deport to Mexico anyone they suspected of being in the U.S. without legal status. The following September, INS initiated a similar operation in the Midwest.

Border agents’ tactics included descending on Mexican American neighborhoods, demanding identification from “Mexican-looking” citizens on the street, invading private homes in the middle of the night, and raiding Mexican businesses. Without a hearing or oversight, agents often seized and deported people who were lawfully in the country. By the end of these crusades in California, Arizona, and Texas, as many as 200,000 Mexican immigrants had returned to Mexico—including many who were not undocumented and some who were U.S. citizens. Some immigrants left on their own in the face of the large-scale harassment, but most were taken under Border Patrol escort.

By the end of 1954, according to some reports, INS had deported one million Mexican immigrants nationwide. These mandatory deportations were done at the deportee’s expense and cost some people all the money they had earned while working in the U.S. At the program’s close, Attorney General Brownell praised the effort, which violently displaced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, as a success.

July 14, 1959

A New York committee organizing a fashion show for the American National Exhibition in Moscow, Russia, announced it would be removing three scenes that featured Black and white models together after dozens of fashion editors protested the representation of racial integration.

The fashion show, which was sponsored by the U.S. State Department and meant to illustrate daily American life, was to be exhibited in Moscow 10 days later. Before the exhibition opening, the organizing committee for the show hosted previews in New York, which dozens of American fashion editors were invited to attend.

Immediately after the previews, over 40 of the fashion editors in attendance signed and circulated a petition demanding that the committee remove three staged wedding scenes that showed racially integrated groups interacting with one another, claiming the scenes were not “representative of the American way of life.”

Within a day, on July 14, the fashion show’s organizing committee announced that it would be removing each of the racially integrated scenes, effectively eliminating the Black models from the show. A spokesman for the show added that the organizers had not yet decided what, if any, future role would exist for the Black models—who were only 3 of 47 total models involved in the show.

During this era, many white Americans throughout the U.S., including in Northern states like New York, openly supported and fought for racial segregation. As this event helps to illustrate, many white people considered even socializing between races to be fundamentally incompatible with American life.

July 13, 1929

A white mob drove more than 200 Black residents out of North Platte, Nebraska. The mob targeted the entire Black community with violence after a Black man was accused of killing a local white police officer.

The day before, two white police officers responded to a call at the North Platte home of a Black man named Louis “Slim” Seeman. When Mr. Seeman allegedly shot and killed one of the officers, a mob of white men and police descended on his home and trapped him inside of a chicken coop on the property. The mob then doused the coop with gasoline and set it ablaze with Mr. Seeman inside; when his body was pulled from the wreckage, it was clear he had died from a gunshot wound—either by his own hand or fired by a member of the mob.

Even after Mr. Seeman had been killed, the large gathering of white men remained enraged at the bold violation of racial hierarchy represented by a Black man taking the life of a white man. Determined to punish the entire Black community, 500 angry white citizens wielding sticks and ropes demanded that all local Black people leave the city. Facing the threat of deadly violence, and terrified after seeing Mr. Seeman’s fate, North Platte’s 200 Black residents departed that night by foot, train, and automobile, leaving behind most of their possessions.

A county sheriff later commented, “It was the understanding when they left that they were to stay away. The idea is to keep them out.”

July 12, 1898

An unmasked white mob abducted and lynched a Black man named John Henry James in a public spectacle lynching in Albemarle County, Virginia, near Charlottesville. Although 150 unmasked white men were involved in the lynching—and the police chief and county sheriff were present when Mr. James was lynched—no one was ever held accountable for Mr. James’s killing. Mr. James’s lynching was later celebrated by several hundred more white people who gathered to see his body as it was left hanging for hours.

Mr. James was arrested and falsely accused of assaulting a white woman on July 11. When mobs of white people gathered outside of the jail and open threats of lynching were made, Mr. James was quickly transported to a neighboring city. During the era of racial terror lynchings, charges of sexual assault against Black men, even when made with unsubstantiated evidence, regularly aroused violent white mobs.

The next morning, on July 12, Mr. James was aboard a train returning to Charlottesville when a mob of armed white men intercepted the train at Wood’s Crossing in Albemarle County and seized him. The mob—at least 150 strong—broke into the train car and put a rope around Mr. James’s neck. When news of the attack spread, a group of Black men attempted to stop the lynching, but they were outnumbered by the mob. The mob then dragged Mr. James from the train to a locust tree 40 yards away and hanged him before firing dozens of bullets into his body. Before he was hanged, Mr. James protested his innocence to the crowd. The crowd dispersed, leaving Mr. James’s body hanging for hours.

Those who lynched Mr. James made no effort to conceal their faces. As in the case of Mr. James’s lynching, celebratory atmospheres during or following a lynching were not atypical, and it was not uncommon for lynchers to leave the bodies of their victims hanging in plain sight. Newspapers reported that hundreds of white people visited the scene to view Mr. James’s body and cut off pieces of his clothing, his body, and the locust tree as “souvenirs.” These acts of violence not only victimized the individual, but traumatized and terrorized the wider Black community near and around Charlottesville; Mr. James’s proximity to the railroad tracks meant that hundreds more viewed his body from the passing train cars.

As part of EJI’s Community Remembrance Project, on July 12, 2019, Charlottesville community members and officials gathered in memory of Mr. James and unveiled a historical marker which recognized the lynching of Mr. James.