Author: Desto22

A bright, warm afternoon in late October 1958, in rural Monroe, North Carolina: two Black children, nine-year-old James Hanover Thompson and his eight-year-old friend David “Fuzzy” Simpson, were playing with a group of white boys and girls in the yard next to one of the white children’s homes. Jim Crow laws were rigidly enforced at the time, but it was not unusual for Black and white children to play together when their separate, segregated schools let out for the day. They knew each other. The mothers of the Black children cooked and cleaned for the mothers of the white children.

As afternoon gave way to evening that day, October 28, and some of the children left, a kissing game began. One of the white girls, seven-year-old Sissy Sutton, kissed first David on the cheek, and then James, before heading home. Retrieving their wagons, which held a stash of empty bottles they hoped to sell, the two friends walked toward the center of town. They had no way of knowing they’d done anything wrong, and that white Monroe was about to severely punish them, and their families—for a kiss.

Sissy Sutton mentioned the kiss to her parents when she got home. James’s mother had worked for Sissy’s mother; his grandmother had worked for Sissy’s grandmother. Reportedly in hysterics and threatening to kill James, Sissy’s mother notified police. Rumors raced through the white community. Sissy’s father grabbed his shotgun and, joined by a mob threatening a lynching, he crossed the railroad tracks that divided Monroe’s white and Black neighborhoods. The Thompsons’ house was dark. James’s mother, Evelyn Thompson, would tell a reporter months later that “some white people in Monroe” had warned her “that my family would be killed if I didn’t get out of town.”

James and David were pulling their wagons when police accosted them, with guns drawn. Shouting racial epithets and calling them “little rapists,” police handcuffed the boys and shoved them into a patrol car. “When we got down to the police station, we understood that they said we had raped a little white girl,” James Thompson would recall more than half a century later. “They took us down in the bottom of the police station to a cell … They started beating us, they were beating us to our body, you know? They didn’t beat us to the face where nobody could see it. They just punched us all in the stomach and back and legs. We was hollering and screaming. We thought they were going to kill us.”

For the next six days they were kept locked up and barred from seeing their parents. Police entered their cell on Halloween, pretending to be Klansmen. “These men came with sheets over their heads,” Mr. Thompson would recall later. “They said they were going to hang us, lynch us. I was crying. I was scared to death.”

So began the infamous “kissing case,” as it came to be called, a case that shined an international spotlight on the bigotry and racial injustice in the South. The lives of James Thompson and David Simpson and their families were shattered and the entire Black community was traumatized, but as the spotlight shifted, with the exception of a television interview with Oprah Winfrey in 1993 and a 2011 interview for StoryCorps and NPR, the kissing case all but disappeared from public view.

“It’s been swept under the rug,” James Thompson’s younger brother, Dwight “Dee“ Thompson, 62, said in a recent interview with EJI, revisiting the “kissing case” as the 65th anniversary approached. “It’s history—American history. It’s shameful history.”

The boys were charged with assault and molestation. A juvenile court judge, J. Hampton Price, prepared to hear the case—but first he contacted the Morrison Training School in Hoffman, North Carolina, to secure places for the boys. The reformatory was founded as the State Training School for Negro Boys and renamed for Cameron Morrison, a North Carolina governor who had been a leader of the white supremacist Red Shirts.

Judge Price held his first hearing with just Sissy Sutton and her parents, thus denying the boys their right to confront their accuser. Then he held what he called a “separate but equal” hearing, and without attorneys there to defend them, he ruled the boys were guilty. He would later cite the boys’ silence when confronted with the charges as an admission of their guilt. On November 3, the judge sentenced the boys to spend the rest of their childhoods at the Morrison school. They would be eligible for release when they turned 21.

Within days, Evelyn Thompson’s white landlord sent her an eviction notice. Mrs. Thompson and David Simpson’s widowed mother, Jennie Simpson, were fired from their $15 a week jobs as domestic workers.

At night, shots were fired at the Thompson home. “My mom and them, they would go out in the morning and sweep bullets off the porch,” James’s older sister, Brenda Lee Graham, recalled in the StoryCorps interview.

Evelyn Thompson didn’t sleep. “She would be up walking the floors and praying,” Ms. Graham said. She also remembered “that at night you could see them burning crosses … right down the front yard.”

“They ran our family out of town,” Dwight Thompson told EJI. The NAACP moved both families into public housing in Charlotte for their own safety. That’s where Dwight was born, in 1961. “After everything that happened,” he said, “my mother had the audacity to have another child.”

Kelly Alexander, of the Wadesboro, North Carolina, NAACP, comforts James and David following an unsuccessful habeas corpus hearing. (Jet Magazine)

None of Monroe’s three newspapers or any of the state’s white newspapers covered the hearing or, initially, any of the events surrounding the kissing case. James and David might have spent years at the Morrison school but for the involvement of Robert Williams, the president of Monroe’s NAACP, who took up their cause, and Ted Poston, a rarity in 1958, a Black reporter for a major white newspaper, the New York Post, who agreed to write about the case.

On November 10, Mr. Poston’s story—which included the detail that the two boys had been threatened with lynching—ran on the Post’s front page. A Black civil rights attorney from New York, Conrad Lynn, got in touch with Robert Williams, offering to represent the boys.

Mr. Williams had already drawn the ire of white residents in Monroe. Weeks before the kissing episode he had petitioned, unsuccessfully, for his children to attend the segregated public elementary school. The previous year, he’d tried, and failed, to get Monroe to integrate its public swimming pool for even one day a week. Black children had drowned in local swimming holes and creeks, but officials said desegregation would be too costly because they would have to drain and clean the pool after Black swimmers used it.

Thanks in part to Mr. Williams’s efforts, newspapers elsewhere began picking up the story of the kissing case. Joyce Egginton, a reporter for the London News-Chronicle, traveled to Monroe. Accompanied by the boys’ mothers, along with Robert Williams and Conrad Lynn, the London reporter, posing as a social worker and with a camera concealed under a fruit basket, visited James and David at the reformatory.

On December 18, her story and a photo of the boys with their mothers ran on the News-Chronicle’s front page. Papers across Europe picked up the story, sparking an international campaign aimed at winning the boys’ freedom. Thousands of schoolchildren in the Netherlands sent letters to North Carolina Governor Luther H. Hodges. Clergy on both sides of the Atlantic protested. So did union members and college students in the North.

The NAACP appealed the case in North Carolina courts. On January 12, 1959, state superior court judge Walter Johnston presided over a two-hour hearing at which both boys and their mothers were present, along with their lawyer, Conrad Lynn, who argued for their innocence. In his testimony, Judge Price twice referred to the boys with the “n-word,” according to the Winston-Salem Journal. David fell asleep, with his head on his friend James’s shoulder, waking up to hear Judge Johnston say he was sending both boys back to the reformatory. The judge said he had heard no evidence that the boys should not have been convicted. Newspapers reported that David and James both cried.

Embarrassed by worldwide attention to the case, Gov. Hodges, Judge Price, and other white officials went on the offensive. They enlisted the state’s white media to publicly blame the boys and their mothers, and in violation of the requirement to protect juveniles’ privacy, they freely offered details they said had been provided by social service workers, teachers, and police. The said they were acting to correct “misinformation” and “inaccuracies” in the national and international media.

Officials branded James and David as “incorrigible” and “wayward” delinquents with irresponsible mothers. They said the boys had been sent to the reformatory for their own good, claimed Mrs. Thompson “has a bad reputation” in her community, and charged that Mrs. Simpson’s children were often in trouble with police. Local and state news outlets repeated those officials’ words in articles that showed little concern about accuracy.

“This is my family’s history,” Dwight Thompson told EJI. The local and state mainstream media coverage, which he reviewed as part of his own research, did not portray the mother who had raised him. “My mother is my hero. I can’t imagine what she endured.”

Led by Black journalists, national media attention continued to spread and on February 13, 1959, bowing to public pressure, Gov. Hodges—who went on to become U.S. Secretary of Commerce—pardoned the boys. Released from the reformatory, they joined their families, who had been relocated by the NAACP to public housing in Charlotte.

James Hanover Thompson (left) and his brother Dwight Thompson in 2011. (StoryCorps)

A couple days later, an AP reporter interviewed both mothers in Charlotte. All the boys had been doing on that October afternoon, Mrs. Thompson said, were innocent things—“raking leaves for a white lady,” a game of “cowboys and Indians” with their friends, and “playful-like” kisses on the cheek. But that night a policeman came to the house and told her James had been arrested. “We haven’t had much peace since it happened,” she said.

The media spotlight quickly moved on, but the stigma remained for both boys.

David Simpson said a police sergeant from Monroe told Charlotte police to look for him whenever crimes occurred. “I was never able to get out of the system,” he told Oprah Winfrey in 1993.

James Thompson remembered the words of the state psychologist he was required to visit weekly in Charlotte after being released from the state reformatory. “He said, ‘What are you, some kind of maniac? We should sterilize you.’ ”

This was not a hollow threat. North Carolina sterilized more than 7,000 people between the 1920s and the 1970s. A recent study by scholars identified the Morrison Training School as one of the “feeder” institutions that sent children to be sterilized. Black people were sterilized in the 1960s at a much higher rate than white people, the study found.

After James returned home from Morrison, his sister, Brenda Lee Graham, recalled during the StoryCorps interview, “It was like seeing somebody different that you didn’t even know. He never talked about what he went through there. But ever since then, his mind just hadn’t been the same.”

Both boys were repeatedly arrested and incarcerated as they got older.

James said to his brother Dwight, who interviewed him for StoryCorps, “I always sit around and wonder if this hadn’t happened to me, you know, what could I have turned out to be? Could I have been a doctor? Could I have gone off to some college or some great school? It just destroyed our life.”

“I still feel the hurt and the pain from it,” James told his younger brother. “And nobody ever said, ‘Hey, look, I’m sorry what happened to y’all. It was wrong.’”

Still today, no one—no local or state officials or the media—has ever apologized to Mr. Thompson or Mr. Simpson or their families, or compensated them for violating their rights.

Sissy Sutton never spoke about the kiss publicly. In 1993, Oprah Winfrey asked Mr. Thompson and Mr. Simpson, “Do you blame her?”

Both men responded immediately that the little girl should not be held responsible. “I don’t blame her,” Mr. Thompson said. “We were kids, kids do innocent things.”

“It wasn’t her fault,” Mr. Simpson said. “Children [are] only taught what their parents feed them.”

President Ronald Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. The law created a significant disparity in the sentences imposed in federal courts for crimes involving powder cocaine versus those imposed for crimes involving crack cocaine, with mandatory minimum sentences set at a 100:1 ratio.

For instance, a drug crime involving five grams of crack cocaine resulted in a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in federal prison, while crimes involving up to 500 grams of powder cocaine received a lower sentencing recommendation.

This sentencing disparity was not based on credible scientific evidence about a differing biological impact between cocaine in powder form versus crack form, but it had clear racial results. In the years following the enactment of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, the number of Black people sent to federal prison ballooned from approximately 50 in 100,000 adults to nearly 250 in 100,000 adults. During the same period, there was almost no change in the number of white people incarcerated in federal prison. Disparities in sentence lengths also increased: in 1986, Black people received drug sentences 11% longer than sentences received by white defendants, on average, but that disparity increased to 49% in the years following the law’s enactment.

This law, along with the “War on Drugs” overall, significantly contributed to huge increases in the American prison and jail population, which grew from approximately 500,000 in 1980 to nearly 2.3 million in 2013.

Prior to the Civil War, many Southern states, including Texas, barred enslaved or free Black people from testifying against white people in court proceedings. Following the Confederacy’s defeat, those states were forced to comply with certain requirements in order to be readmitted to the Union, including altering their laws and state constitutions to respect Black Americans’ new status as citizens with civil rights.

On October 26, 1866, the Texas legislature passed a law redefining the circumstances in which Black people could testify in court. Rather than simply declare that Black people had full and equal rights to testify, the new law provided that “persons of color shall not testify” except in cases where “the prosecution is against a person who is a person of color; or where the offense is charged to have been committed against the person or property of a person of color.”

In civil cases between white parties, and in criminal prosecutions of white people not charged with offenses against a Black person, Black people remained second-class citizens with no right to testify in a court of law. In addition, even in the cases in which Black witnesses were permitted to speak, their testimony was often given little to no weight by white decisionmakers.

Boston police officers scoured predominantly Black communities searching for anyone who fit the vague description provided by Charles Stuart, a white businessman, who lied to police, claiming a Black man shot him and his pregnant wife, Carol, two nights before.

Late on October 23, Mr. Stuart called 911 and reported he and his wife Carol had been robbed and injured in Roxbury: “My wife’s been shot. I’ve been shot,” he told the police. Charles Stuart later told police that a Black gunman had forced his way into the couple’s car and told him to drive to the Mission Hill neighborhood, where the man robbed and shot them both. Carol Stuart, seven months pregnant, died of her injuries; their son, Christopher, was delivered at the hospital but died days later.

The case quickly sparked public outrage and nationwide media coverage as local law enforcement faced heavy pressure to solve the case. Black men and boys were publicly strip-searched, repeatedly interrogated, and terrorized, while city officials, lawmakers, and police used the case as a symbol of growing “urban crime” and vowed to crack down on “gun-wielding criminals.” Some even used the alleged crime as a reason that Massachusetts should reinstate its death penalty.

Within a week of the shooting, police had narrowed the list of suspects to “a chosen few.” William Bennett, an African American man who had spent 13 years in prison, soon became a prime suspect; during a lineup, Mr. Stuart claimed that Mr. Bennett looked “most like” the shooter, and several witnesses testified against Mr. Bennett before a specially convened grand jury. The judicial system was poised to prosecute Mr. Bennett to the full extent of the law until, in January 1990, Charles Stuart’s brother, Matthew, came forward with evidence implicating Mr. Stuart himself in the shootings. Matthew Stuart told police he and a friend met Mr. Stuart in the Mission Hill neighborhood on the night of the shootings and agreed to dispose of a gun, Carol’s purse, and several other items. Matthew Stuart agreed, thinking it was just an insurance scam, and did not learn of the murder plot until press coverage later.

The day after his brother’s admission to police, Charles Stuart committed suicide by jumping from the Tobin Bridge. The public soon learned the truth about Mr. Stuart’s crime and lies, motivated by greed and a desire for life insurance money. Many expressed disgust for the ease with which he was able to concoct false allegations and exploit racist prejudices about Black criminality to convince police to target the Black community for harassment and civil rights violations.

Although some city officials and lawmakers made apologies, the Stuart case illustrated the insidiousness of racial bias and the continuing burden of presumed guilt and dangerousness borne by African Americans, generations after the peak of racial terror lynching, and even decades after the civil rights movement. In 2014, William Bennett’s niece recalled the trauma of watching police search her grandmother’s house as an eight-year-old child and the fear and chaos that gripped the neighborhood during the intense police crackdown targeting Black men and boys.

In response to a federal court decision that Birmingham’s racially segregated parks, golf courses, and playgrounds were unconstitutional, Birmingham officials publicly announced that they would close all public parks and facilities rather than racially integrate them.

Under the Birmingham city code, interracial games of pool, cards, dice, dominoes, checkers, and billiards were illegal. Interracial play was not permitted in public parks including ball parks, tennis courts, golf courses, and football fields, as well as theaters, auditoriums, swimming pools, and playgrounds. After 15 Black leaders, including civil rights legend the Reverend F. L. Shuttlesworth, sued Birmingham’s Parks and Recreation board, a federal district judge ruled that Birmingham’s segregated facilities and parks were unconstitutional.

In response to the October 24 court ruling, Birmingham’s mayor, Art Hanes, and the city’s police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, immediately announced the plan to close all city parks. By December, the city had eliminated funding to almost all of its parks and closed 67 of them, along with 38 playgrounds, four golf courses, and eight swimming pools.

Bull Connor defended the necessity of the city’s decision, insisting that integrating the parks “would only be the first step in total integration of our schools, churches, hotels, restaurants and everything else.” Mr. Connor received a flood of support from white Birmingham residents who wrote letters applauding the decision. One local newspaper, The Jeffersonian, applauded the closures and stated the move helped the white community “retain our white race and culture.”

What happened in Birmingham was not unique. As courts ruled on the unconstitutionality of segregated facilities, white people across the South remained so committed to preventing racial integration that they voluntarily shut down public parks, swimming pools, and other recreational facilities—choosing to deny all citizens these benefits rather than to extend them to Black people. In some areas, this commitment to preserving and upholding segregation lasted a long time. Birmingham parks remained closed for two years, while some communities reopened parks but permanently shut down facilities like public pools.

On this day in 1909, a white mob from Maryland boldly attempted to lynch a Black man just blocks from the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., in a dramatic display of the lawless reign of terror against Black people that defined this era. The mob dispersed only after D.C. police promised to turn over the intended lynching victim the next morning.

On October 22, a Black man was accused of attacking a white girl during a robbery near Landover, Maryland. When news of the incident spread and Walter Ford, a 26-year-old Black man, was targeted as the suspect, Mr. Ford was seized by local police in Washington, D.C., where he lived. During this era, allegations against Black people were rarely subject to scrutiny and often sparked violent reprisal even when there was no evidence tying the accused to any offense. Mr. Ford was detained by the Washington, D.C., police department.

That evening and into the next day, a white lynch mob of more than 100 people from nearby Prince George’s County, Maryland, arrived at the jail, committed to lynching Mr. Ford. Just blocks from the Capitol grounds and in the face of D.C. law enforcement, the mob wielded shotguns, pitchforks, and revolvers. For hours, they attempted to seize Mr. Ford from the jail. In the early hours of the morning on October 23, the would-be lynchers dispersed only after law enforcement promised to turn over Mr. Ford to the mob the next morning. While police ultimately did not turn Mr. Ford over, the mob believed this promise would be kept given widespread law enforcement complicity in lynchings.

The lawlessness that prevailed during this era was possible because state and federal governments retreated from the rule of law, allowing more than 6,500 Black women, men, and children to become victims of racial terror lynching in the U.S. between 1865-1950. These lynch mobs acted with impunity, and in many cases acted in tandem with members of law enforcement who were charged with protecting those in their custody. The federal government’s failure to protect citizens was a serious obstacle to protecting Black people from racial violence and terrorism. No one from the Prince County lynch mob was ever arrested or held responsible for attempting to lynch Mr. Ford just blocks away from the U.S. Capitol.

Five white men who beat to death Leon McAtee, a Black man, were freed by the court in Holmes County, Mississippi, even though one of the five had confessed to his own involvement in the murder and implicated the other four men. Before the trial ended, Judge S.F. Davis acquitted Spencer Ellis and James Roberts, finding the evidence insufficient to prove their guilt. The all-white jury then deliberated for 10 minutes before acquitting Jeff Dodd Sr., Jeff Dodd Jr., and Dixie Roberts.

As a tenant on Jeff Dodd Sr.’s farm, Leon McAtee worked a small plot of land for very little pay. When Mr. Dodd’s saddle went missing, he suspected Mr. McAtee of stealing it and had the Black man arrested. On July 22, 1946, Mr. Dodd withdrew the charges and police released Mr. McAtee into Mr. Dodd’s custody. Mr. Dodd then called Dixie Roberts and together they took Mr. McAtee back to Mr. Dodd’s home, where Jeff Dodd Jr., James Roberts, and Spencer Ellis awaited them.

Inside the home, all five men beat Mr. McAtee and whipped him with a three-quarter-inch rope. The men then drove the badly beaten man to his home and presented him to his wife, who later reported that her husband was dazed and muttering about a saddle. The men then drove away with Mr. McAtee in their truck, and Mrs. McAtee fled with her children. Her husband was found dead in a bayou two days later.

William Lloyd Garrison was a prominent white abolitionist and newspaper editor in the 19th century. Born in 1805 to English immigrants in Newburyport, Massachusetts, Mr. Garrison co-founded his first newspaper at age 22 and began to focus on the issue of slavery. In 1829, Mr. Garrison became the co-editor of the Baltimore-based Genius of Universal Emancipation, through which he and his colleagues criticized proponents of slavery.

Unlike most American abolitionists at the time, Mr. Garrison demanded immediate emancipation of enslaved Black people rather than gradual emancipation. In 1830, he founded The Liberator, which continued to publish criticisms of slavery. By that time, Mr. Garrison had become a vocal opponent of the American Colonization Society, which sought to reduce the number of free Black people in America by relocating them to Africa. In 1832, Mr. Garrison helped to organize the American Anti-Slavery Society and sought to keep the organization unaffiliated with any political party. He also advocated for women’s equal participation in the organization, a radical stance nearly 90 years before white women in America obtained the right to vote.

On October 21, 1835, Mr. Garrison attended a meeting held by the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society to hear remarks from George Thompson, a British abolitionist and personal friend. When Mr. Thompson was warned that a pro-slavery mob planned to tar and feather him, he canceled his appearance. Instead, the mob seized Mr. Garrison, dragged him through the streets by a rope around his waist, and threatened to kill him. Mr. Garrison was rescued by police and spent the night in a city jail before leaving Boston the next morning. He nevertheless remained a staunch opponent of slavery and lived to see the institution’s abolition 30 years later.

The Virginia Colonial Assembly enacted a law that removed criminal penalties for enslavers who killed enslaved people resisting authority. The assembly justified the law on the grounds that “the obstinacy of many [enslaved people] cannot be suppressed by other than violent means.” The law provided that an enslaver’s killing of an enslaved person could not constitute murder because the “premeditated malice” element of murder could not be formed against one’s own property.

In subsequent years, Virginia continued to reduce legal protections for enslaved people. In 1723, the assembly removed all penalties for the killing of enslaved people during “correction,” meaning that an enslaved person could be killed for an “offense” as minor as picking bad tobacco. The willful or malicious killing of an enslaved person could constitute murder, in theory, but the law excused the killing of an enslaved person if the killing was in any way provoked. In effect, enslavers could kill enslaved people with impunity in colonial-era Virginia, and the situation was similar in most other colonial territories.

Following the American Revolution, many states created penalties for killing enslaved people—but the loophole permitting the killing of an enslaved person during “correction” or to prevent “resistance” remained. As a result, throughout the course of slavery in this country’s history, enslavers were rarely punished for killing enslaved people.

52 individuals, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., were arrested in downtown Atlanta, Georgia, after refusing to leave their seats at segregated department store lunch counters. Under the heavily enforced Jim Crow segregation laws and customs in Atlanta at the time, Black and white people were required to use separate water fountains, bathrooms, ticket booths, and other public spaces. In addition, Black people were banned from being served at department store lunch counters.

Similar laws in other Southern states had recently become the focus of a “sit-in” movement, in which Black college students calmly and peacefully sat at segregated lunch counters and refused to leave until they were served. In February 1960, four North Carolina A&T students held the first sit-in at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina. Soon, many more students joined their protest and word of the tactic spread to students in other states. By August 1961, sit-ins had attracted more than 70,000 participants, generated over 3,000 arrests, and, in cities like Nashville, Tennessee, successfully led to desegregation.

Dr. King was invited to join the student-organized Atlanta sit-in and ended up arrested alongside students and local activists under a 1960 law that made refusing to leave private property a misdemeanor offense. Charges against 16 of the 52 protesters were dismissed at their first court appearance, but Dr. King (the most high-profile of the group) was held on charges that his arrest violated a term of state probation imposed earlier that year. After Dr. King was sentenced to six months of hard labor, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy reached out to the King family, helped secure Dr. King’s release, and earned pivotal Black votes that would help him win the presidency weeks later.