Author: Desto22

The Virginia Assembly sentenced Hugh Davis, a white man, to be whipped for having a relationship with a Black person. According to records, the Assembly asserted that Mr. Davis “abus[ed] himself to the dishonor of God and shame of Christians, by defiling his body in lying with a negro.” Mr. Davis was sentenced to public whipping in front of an audience of Black people, which some historians argue was intended to serve as an example to the Black population. Some evidence suggests that Mr. Davis’s partner may have been a Black man, which could have provided additional motivation for the harsh punishment imposed.

Hugh Davis’s case is the first known time Virginia authorities punished an individual for interracial sexual relations, but not the last. Throughout the rest of the 17th century, documentation shows that a number of other people—Black and white, enslaved and free—were punished for the same behavior in Virginia. Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and other territories also enforced prohibitions on interracial relationships during this era.

In the first decades after enslaved Africans arrived in the English Colonies, authorities worked to establish white supremacy as law, racial difference as legal fact, and enslavement as a permanent, hereditary status centrally tied to race. All of those goals required the maintenance of a strict racial hierarchy that, while often allowing the sexual exploitation and abuse of Black men and women by white enslavers, did not condone sexual relationships between Black and white partners interacting as equals.

In 1691, the Virginia Assembly officially moved beyond regulating sexual relations and explicitly outlawed marriage between free white and free Black people. This prohibition remained in effect for nearly 300 years and was enforced well into the 20th century. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court held that laws prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia, bringing to an end more than three centuries of anti-miscegenation laws.

A Category 4 hurricane with winds of 140 miles per hour made landfall in Palm Beach County, Florida. The hurricane destroyed a levee that protected a number of small, low-lying farming communities from the waters of Lake Okeechobee. Water from Lake Okeechobee rushed in when the levee was destroyed, killing thousands. Most residents in these areas were Black migrant farm workers.

After the hurricane, Black survivors were forced to recover the bodies of those killed. The officials in charge of the recovery effort ordered that food would be provided only to those who worked, and some people who refused to work were shot.

The bodies of white storm victims were buried in coffins in local cemeteries, but local officials refused to provide coffins or proper burials for Black victims. Instead, their corpses were stacked in piles by the side of the roads, doused in fuel oil, and burned. Authorities bulldozed the bodies of 674 Black victims into a mass grave in West Palm Beach. The mass grave was not marked, and the site was later sold for private industrial use—first used as a garbage dump, then a slaughterhouse, and then a sewage treatment plant.

The city of West Palm Beach purchased the land containing the mass grave in 2000. Eight years later, on the 80th anniversary of the storm, officials erected a plaque and historical marker at the site.

On the morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, a white man was seen placing a box under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Shortly afterward, the explosives inside detonated, devastating the church building and the 400 congregants inside. Parents rushed to the Sunday school classroom to check on their children and soon discovered that four young girls had been killed in the blast: Denise McNair (11), Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Robertson (14), and Cynthia Wesley (14). More than 20 others were injured.

In 1963, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was the largest Black church in Birmingham, Alabama, and served as a meeting place for civil rights activities. As demonstrations to desegregate public spaces and secure Black voting rights became more frequent and visible, meeting places like the church became targets for white segregationists looking to terrorize Black activists and their supporters.

Immediately after the bombing, violence surged throughout the city as police clashed with enraged members of the Black community. Before the day ended, at least two other African American children had been slain: 16-year-old Johnny Robinson was shot by police as he fled down an alley, and 13-year-old Virgil Ware was shot and killed by white youths while riding his bicycle.

More than a decade later, in 1977, Ku Klux Klan leader Robert Chambliss was convicted of murder for participating in the church bombing and later died in prison. Several decades later, in the early 2000s, Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton were also convicted of murder for their roles in the bombing; both men were sentenced to life imprisonment.

1,500 members of the White League—a militia of Confederate veterans opposed to the civil rights goals of Reconstruction—attacked New Orleans and overthrew the Louisiana government. Two years before, a pro-Reconstruction politician named William Pitt Kellogg was elected governor of Louisiana, largely on the strength of his support among African American voters. That same year, Caesar Carpenter Antoine, an African American man, was elected lieutenant governor.

The electoral success of the integrated Kellogg-Antoine ticket angered many white men committed to white supremacy. Attempts to overthrow the elected government began nearly as soon as Governor Kellogg and Lt. Governor Antoine took office in 1873 and continued into the next year. During the summer of 1874, Frederick Nash Ogden, a former colonel in the Confederate army, began to organize an armed resistance force that became known as the White League. On September 14, they staged a coup.

After cutting the city’s telegraph lines and killing at least 13 members of the integrated New Orleans police force, the White League overran the state house and attempted to establish a new government. After three days, President Ulysses S. Grant ordered the U.S. Army to put down the rebellion, and the elected government was restored. Though unsuccessful, the attempted coup was emblematic of the political violence that occurred during Reconstruction—and white Southerners’ attempts to overthrow elected, integrated governments and restore white supremacy under law foreshadowed a nearing future.

After Reconstruction ended prematurely in 1877 as part of a political compromise, former Confederates regained control of state government and implemented laws and policies to suppress Black political power. In 1891, the new power structure installed a monument celebrating the 1874 coup attempt as the “overthrow of carpetbag government ousting the usurpers.”

In 1974, a marker was placed near the monument to express how it did not reflect the city’s position on race relations. In July 2015, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu proposed removing the monument, and by December of that same year, the New Orleans City Council voted in agreement. The monument was finally removed on April 24, 2017.

The Michigan Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church voted against ordaining Black bishops. The vote denied Black clergy leadership positions even within predominantly Black congregations. Delegates expressed concern that Black bishops may eventually lead white congregations and claimed that the moral inferiority of Black people required Black preachers to submit to white spiritual leadership.

Early Methodists actually supported the abolition of slavery and preached a theology of egalitarianism that resonated with free and enslaved Black people. By the late 1700s, Black Methodists comprised 24% of the church.

But white Methodist support for abolition did not last long. As Methodism spread across the South, enslavers resented Methodist teachings on human dignity and feared the opportunities that the church created for Black self-determination. They sought assurances from the church against disruption of the existing racial caste system.

The Methodist church complied, adopting policies against the ordination of Black clergy. The church further embraced an interpretation of the Bible that defended white supremacy and justified enslavement as God-ordained. In 1845, Southern Methodists separated and formed a new denomination, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, to preserve their ability to enslave fellow human beings. However, even after the split, Northern congregations continued to enforce policies that subordinated Black people and worked to entrench segregation both inside and outside the church into the 20th Century.

250 Black students attempted to integrate Grenada, Mississippi, schools on the first day of class. Though it was 12 years after the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling held racially segregated public schooling unconstitutional, the city of Grenada, Mississippi, had not stopped operating a segregated school system. In August 1966, a federal judge ordered Grenada officials to enroll African American students in the formerly white-only schools, and approximately 450 students had enrolled by the start of the 1966 school year.

On September 2, the school district postponed the start of school by 10 days. During that time, white leaders tried to coerce African American parents into withdrawing their children from the white schools by threatening them with firing or eviction. As a result, 200 students withdrew.

When the remaining 250 Black students arrived for classes on September 12, a large white mob surrounded the city’s elementary school and high school and turned them away. As the students retreated, members of the mob pursued them through the streets, beating them with chains, pipes, and clubs. At lunchtime, the mob returned to the school to attack the few Black students who had made it inside that morning. As the students left for lunch, members of the mob attacked them, leaving some hospitalized with broken bones. Some reporters covering the story were also beaten.

The mob violence continued for several days with no intervention from law enforcement. On September 16, a federal judge ordered protection for the students, and on September 17, 13 members of the mob were arrested by the FBI.

South Carolina officials met to rewrite the state constitution with the express purpose of disenfranchising the state’s African American voters and restoring white supremacy in all matters political. The convention’s most prominent figure was Benjamin Tillman, a senator and former governor nicknamed “Pitchfork Ben.” A well-known orator, Tillman spoke at great length during the convention.

“[A]ll that is necessary to bring about chaos,” he warned the convention delegates, “is for a sufficient number of white men, actuated by hate, or ambition, or from any unpatriotic motive, to climb up and cut it loose, mobilize and register the negroes, lead them and give them a free vote and fair count under manhood suffrage.” He continued:

The poor, ignorant cotton field hand, who never reaped any advantage, nor saw anything except a pistol, blindly followed like sheep wherever their Black and white leaders told them to go, voted unanimously every time for the Republican ticket during that dark period, and these results were achieved solely and wholly by reason of the ballot being in the hands of such cattle. Is the danger gone? No. How did we recover our liberty? By fraud and violence…How did we bring it about? Every white man sunk his personal feelings and ambitions. The white people of the State, illustrating our glorious motto, “Ready with their lives and fortunes.” came together as one. By fraud and violence, if you please, we threw it off. In 1878 we had to resort to more fraud and violence, and so again in 1880. Then the Registration Law and eight-box system was evolved from the superior intelligence of the white man to check and control this surging, muddy stream of ignorance…

The delegates followed Tillman’s guidance and enacted a constitution that effectively disenfranchised Black residents, with little federal interference, for nearly 70 years. Today, a statue of Tillman stands in front of the South Carolina State House and his name adorns a number of buildings throughout the state—including the main building on the campus of Clemson University.

White students began to withdraw from the newly integrated Tuskegee High School in Alabama to avoid attending school with Black students. Within one week, all 275 white students had stopped attending the school.

In January 1963, African American parents of students in Macon County, Alabama, sued the Macon County Board of Education to desegregate the county’s public schools. Though the U.S. Supreme Court had declared school segregation unconstitutional nearly nine years earlier in Brown v. Board of Education, Macon County had taken no steps to integrate local schools. In August 1963, a federal court ordered the school board to begin integration immediately.

The school board selected 13 African American students to integrate Tuskegee High School that fall. On September 2, scheduled to be the first day of integrated classes, Alabama Governor George Wallace ordered the school closed due to “safety concerns.” The school reopened a week later, and withdrawals began soon after.

Most of Tuskegee High School’s former white students enrolled at Macon Academy, a newly formed, all-white private school. In support of the community’s efforts to sidestep federal law and maintain school segregation, Governor Wallace and the school board approved the use of state funds to provide scholarships for white students abandoning the public school system to use at Macon Academy. Meanwhile, the Macon County School Board ordered Tuskegee High School closed due to low enrollment and split its remaining African American students among all-white high schools in the towns of Notasulga and Shorter. White students in those high schools boycotted for several days in protest, and many eventually transferred to Macon Academy.

Now known as Macon East Academy and located near the city of Montgomery, the former Macon Academy is one of several private schools in the Alabama Black Belt with origins rooted in resistance to integration. As of the 2015-2016 school year, Macon-East Academy’s student body of 277 was 97% white and less than 3% African American.

As 19 Black six-year-olds integrated all-white elementary schools in Nashville, Tennessee, white church members—including one local minister—organized a persistent and violent campaign to oppose the integration of Nashville public schools. Outside Fehr Elementary School, one person held a sign that read “God is the author of segregation” and pursued two Black children walking to the school. Outside three different elementary schools that same morning, Fred Stroud, a white minister, sought to dissuade white parents from allowing their children to be educated alongside Black children by preaching damnation for those who did not uphold segregation.

The next day, 100 sticks of dynamite were thrown into Hattie Cotton Elementary School and exploded. Patricia Watson, the one Black elementary student who had been in class the previous morning, did not return. No Black children returned to Hattie Cotton Elementary School the following year, and no one faced criminal charges for the bombing.

Though Brown v. Board of Education determined in 1954 that school segregation was unconstitutional, for three years white residents in Nashville relied on intimidation and organized political resistance to maintain segregation in the public schools. In 1957, Nashville finally developed a “stair step program” which permitted a few Black elementary school students to enroll in eight elementary schools.

Throughout the summer of 1957, white segregationists in Nashville held intimidation rallies to terrorize Black families. In the days leading up to the first day of school, as Black parents pre-registered their children for school, mobs of white church members gathered outside buildings with signs calling segregation the “will of God.” One leader declared that “integration can be reversed” and that “blood will run the streets” before Nashville’s schools were integrated.

By the morning of September 9, out of the 126 Black children eligible to attend all-white elementary schools, only 19 Black children matriculated. Reverend Stroud gathered crowds at Glenn Elementary to preach about the evils of integration, and white people in cars outside of Jones Elementary held signs emblazoned with KKK iconography and Biblical quotes. As opposition grew throughout the morning, white mobs crowded the sidewalks and threw rocks and bottles at Black children and their parents who attempted to pass through the crowd. By the end of the day, half of the white students at Glenn Elementary School—nearly 250 children—had not arrived, as white parents chose to deny their children education rather than permit them to learn alongside Black children.

That evening, 300 white people gathered downtown and continued to threaten Black families who sent their children to school. They strung an effigy in blackface from a stoplight with a note pinned to its chest that read “this could be you.” As the mob around Fehr Elementary grew to at least 400, white people burned two outbuildings located on the property of a Black family that had sent their daughter to the school. The mob also continued to burn crosses on lawns of Black families who had dared to enroll their students that morning.

The Texas House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a resolution encouraging U.S. senators and congressmen to work toward repealing the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship to Black people born in the U.S.

The resolution was introduced by Representative Robert Yantis, who initially also advocated for the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted African American men the right to vote in the U.S.

During the House session on September 8, Representative Yantis argued that “the perpetuity of Caucasian supremacy depended on the disenfranchisement of the negro.” He added that “in the heart of every negro [is] a desire for social equality and Texas ought to take the initiative in securing the repeal of the amendment.” The resolution passed with a vote of 51-34.

Opposition to the Fourteenth Amendment began before it even became an enforceable part of the Constitution. After the amendment was passed by the Senate in 1866, 28 of the 37 states had to ratify it. Southern legislatures refused; 10 of the 11 former Confederate states rejected the amendment with overwhelming majorities, and Louisiana did so unanimously.

The Fourteenth Amendment was finally adopted in July 1868, after Congress imposed military rule on the South and required states seeking readmission to the Union to ratify the amendment.