Author: Desto22

Three Mexican nationals were killed in central California during cotton growers’ attempts to break a strike waged by roughly 15,000-18,000 cotton pickers and cotton gin workers. Roughly 95% of the strikers were Mexican migrant workers, whose pay had fallen more than 75% since 1930—even as the price of cotton rose 150% in 1932. The strikers were demanding pay of $1 per 100 pounds of cotton picked; the owners offered 60 cents.

Dolores Hernandez, a picker, and Delfino Davila, a Mexican consular representative, were shot and killed in Pixley, California, when at least 30 armed white ranchers confronted dozens of unarmed Mexican laborers who had gathered to hear one of the strike leaders speak. Eight other strikers were shot and wounded by the ranchers. Pedro Subia, the third person killed that day, was shot in a separate incident when other armed growers and police confronted strikers at a nearby farm; three other strikers were shot and wounded alongside Mr. Subia.

Days earlier, growers had tried to break the strike by evicting the Mexican workers and their families from housing on the growers’ property. When the workers and families maintained the strike and camped in nearby fields, growers conspired with local authorities and businesses to refuse them access to food. Even the federal government promised food aid only if the migrant farmworkers acceded to the growers’ demands; over the course of two weeks, seven children of strikers reportedly died from malnutrition.

The strike ended on October 26, 1933, when the growers agreed to pay strikers 75 cents per 100 pounds of cotton. In February 1934, eight ranchers standing trial for the murder of Dolores Hernandez and Delfino Davila were found not guilty by an all-white local jury. No one was ever tried for killing Pedro Subia.

A Black man named Bob Hudson was shot to death by a white lynch mob in Weakley County, Tennessee, near the town of Dresden. According to reports, Mr. Hudson’s wife filed charges of assault and battery against a white man, who was subsequently arrested and fined. In retaliation, 10 masked white men dragged Mrs. Hudson from her home and whipped her severely. When Mr. Hudson ran to his wife’s defense, the mob shot and killed him.

During this era of racial terrorism, white men committed sexual violence against Black women with impunity, while the most baseless fears of sexual contact between a Black man and white woman regularly resulted in deadly violence. Nearly one in four Black men lynched between 1877 to 1945 were accused of improper contact with a white woman. Meanwhile, white men were rarely arrested, let alone convicted or punished for assaulting Black women—or committing lynchings—and, as in this case, if Black people even dared to seek help from authorities, they could be subjected to lethal violence.

Including Bob Hudson, at least six African American victims of racial terror lynching were killed in Weakley County, Tennessee, between 1877 and 1950. 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.

In Birmingham, Alabama, Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor announced that a planned All-Star baseball game organized by Jackie Robinson—almost a decade after he integrated Major League Baseball—would not be permitted to play in the city. Mr. Robinson, who previously toured the country with an all-Black team, signed notable white players Al Rosen, Ralph Branca, and Gil Hodges to join the interracial All-Stars. Ten days before the game was to take place, Commissioner Connor notified the public that the event would be banned if white players were going to play because “there is a city ordinance that forbids mixed athletic events.”

Bull Connor was a notorious segregationist with close ties to the Ku Klux Klan, and this was one of many actions he would take during his tenure to resist integration. In addition, Mr. Connor facilitated—and in some cases ordered—acts of violence against peaceful protestors. In 1961, he allowed a white mob armed with pipes to attack the Freedom Riders, Black and white college students who rode buses through the South to challenge illegal segregation in interstate transportation. In 1963, the entire world witnessed Mr. Connor’s brutality when Martin Luther King Jr. came to Birmingham to lead a children’s protest against racial segregation. Mr. Connor ordered the fire department to blast nonviolent protestors—most of them children—with high-pressure firehoses and commanded police to attack them with batons and police dogs. Mr. Connor never repudiated his defense of white supremacy or denounced his use of police violence.

Jackie Robinson devoted his life not only to baseball, but also to the fight for civil rights and equality for all. After being the first Black player to integrate major league baseball and leading the Brooklyn Dodgers to the World Series, he devoted himself to civil rights causes in his retirement.

After careful consideration and discussions with members of the Birmingham community, Mr. Robinson decided to move forward with the game and bench the white players rather than cancel. This decision was partly made in response to fears that successfully shutting down the game entirely might help Mr. Connor win a bid for Birmingham mayor. The game did happen, with only Black players participating, and marked the intense resistance to racial integration that defined Alabama for generations.

Hundreds of Black Selma residents attempting to register to vote were met by state and local officials who used stalling and intimidation tactics to deny them that right and violence against supporters attempting to give them food and water as they waited in line.

In 1963, representatives of civil rights organizations such as the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Dallas County Voter’s League (DCVL) organized Black residents of Selma, Alabama, to challenge discriminatory voter registration practices. At the time, Dallas County was 58% Black, but less than 1% of eligible Black residents were registered to vote. During 1963, Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark met their voter registration efforts with harassment and violent resistance, joined by other local law enforcement officers and segregationist supporters who participated in violence against Black residents with impunity. Hundreds of Black residents were arrested, beaten, or threatened in Selma during the first half of 1963.

On the morning of October 7th, on what SNCC and DCVL called “Freedom Day,” 350 Black residents of Selma bravely lined up at the county courthouse—risking their livelihoods—and attempted to register to vote. The registrars intentionally slowed down the proceedings, limiting registration to only a few people every hour and ensuring that only a small handful of those waiting in line would be able to register. Sheriff Clark, his deputies, and supporters forbade Freedom Day participants from leaving the line to eat, drink, or use the restroom.

At 12:30 pm, a group of 40 state troopers arrived and assisted local law enforcement in intimidating the Freedom Day participants. Because those waiting to register to vote could not leave the line to eat or drink, at one point, a group of organizers attempted to bring food and water to the Black residents waiting in line. These organizers were beaten and shocked with cattle prods by the state and local officials. A reporter was also beaten by state troopers. Representatives of the FBI and the Department of Justice witnessed these unlawful attacks but did nothing to intervene.

Beth Humphrey, a white woman from Hammond, Louisiana, called Keith Bardwell, a white justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, to ask him to sign a license for her to marry Terence McKay, a Black man. Mr. Bardwell’s wife informed Ms. Humphrey that he would not sign a marriage license for an interracial couple.

Mr. Bardwell, a justice of the peace for over 30 years, later estimated he had denied marriage licenses to several interracial couples during the previous two and a half years. After his refusal was publicized and generated controversy, Mr. Bardwell defended his actions, insisting that he “does not believe in mixing races in that way.”

Ms. Humphrey expressed shock at Mr. Bardwell’s views: “That was one thing that made this so unbelievable. It’s not something you expect in this day and age.”

Throughout most of the 20th century, there were legal bans on interracial marriage. In 1967, in Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down such bans, holding that they violated the Equal Protection Clause. But resistance to enforcing this constitutional mandate was slow. The State of Alabama did not change the prohibition on interracial marriage in its constitution until 2000.

A white mob lynched four innocent Black men named Fulton Smith, Ray Field, Ben Givens, and Sam Duncan in Macclenny, Florida. According to news reports at the time, a prominent young white farmer named John Harvey was shot and killed at a turpentine camp near Macclenny on October 4. The suspected shooter, a young Black man named Jim Givens, fled immediately afterward, and mobs of armed white men formed to pursue him. Mr. Givens’s brother, Ben Givens, and two other Black men connected to him—Mr. Smith and Mr. Field—were questioned and jailed during the search. Though there was no evidence or accusation that they had been involved in Mr. Harvey’s killing, they were held simply for having a connection to the man the mob wanted.

At around 1 am on October 5, a mob of about 50 white men overtook the jail, seized the three men from their cells, and took them to the outskirts of town, where they tied them to trees and shot them to death. A fourth Black man, Sam Duncan, was found shot to death nearby later in the day. He also had no ties to the killing of John Harvey and was thought to have been killed by the mob simply for being a Black man who they encountered.

Three days later, the Chicago Defender, a Northern Black newspaper, reported that white mobs continued to search for Jim Givens while most of the Black community of Macclenny had fled the area in fear of further violent attacks.

Members of the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) voted to exclude Black players from competitions.

The ACBL was founded in 1937 and became the largest organization devoted to the card game in the U.S. White bridge organizations in this era strictly enforced racial segregation, forcing Black bridge players to create their own bridge association called the American Bridge Association (ABA). Racial exclusion was reinforced by laws in several states that officially banned card games between Black and white players.

In 1949, several Black bridge players applied for membership in the ACBL, challenging the organization’s “white only” policy. In response, the ACBL board of directors held a vote among its 28,000 members. Nearly 60% voted to reject allowing Black bridge players to be admitted.

The ACBL’s president said after the vote that his organization “is not a political organization but is primarily social in character. Social customs are based on public opinion and we do not seek either to perpetuate or to destroy them.”

It would be over a decade until the ACBL began allowing Black players to compete, at first only in select events. In 1962, a Black bridge player named Joseph L. Henry, a top player in the ABA who had coordinated the effort to integrate the ACBL, led a team to the ACBL national title. The ACBL did not formally open its membership to Black players in all of its events until 1967.

Long after laws banning interracial games and sporting events were declared unconstitutional, many social clubs and associations, especially those most popular among upper-income white people, maintained segregated membership. For example, some of the U.S.’s most prominent golf clubs—including Augusta National, the home of the Masters Tournament—did not begin allowing Black members until the 1990s.

Frank Wigfall, a Black man who had been threatened with mob violence at a Wyoming jail, was moved to the state penitentiary for “safe keeping” where he was soon lynched by 100 white prisoners.

Mr. Wigfall had been accused of assaulting a white woman and was taken to the Carbon County Jail. 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. Shortly after his detention at the jail, a white mob attempted to seize Mr. Wigfall to lynch him. In response, the local sheriff transferred him from the county jail to the state penitentiary for “safe keeping.” The next morning, 100 white prisoners attacked Mr. Wigfall while he was getting his breakfast, one of them producing a rope, and they proceeded to hang him from the balcony inside the state penitentiary.

The white inmates had been shouting their intentions to lynch Mr. Wigfall from their cells all morning. Notwithstanding their repeated threats, the prison provided no security, which allowed 100 white prisoners to abduct Mr. Wigfall before hanging him by a rope. No one was held accountable for Mr. Wigfall’s death although it was widely known which prison officials and prisoners were culpable.

Mr. Wigfall was one of at least four documented racial terror lynchings in Wyoming. 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.

White neighbors violently attacked a house in Greeley, Colorado, where six Black students who were enrolled at a teachers college lived with their house mother. The assailants threw bricks, fired gunshots at the building, and used iron bars to smash the windows and screens on the house, terrorizing the Black women inside. The attack took place at 2 am, and the women had been living in the house for less than a week.

Before the assault, an “indignation meeting” had been organized by white residents in the area who objected to these Black women living in the neighborhood. White residents said that these were the first Black residents to rent a house in the area and they objected to the college housing students in the neighborhood despite the college’s presence in the same area. After the attack, all seven Black women fled and relocated to another area. No one was ever charged for the racially motivated attack on these women inside their home.

This attack on seven Black women in Greeley is one of thousands of instances throughout American history where white Americans have terrorized Black people in their homes to maintain racial segregation. Throughout the Jim Crow era, white people used intimidation, physical force, and the threat of lethal violence to prevent integration in American neighborhoods and to stifle the political, social, and economic conditions of Black Americans. Learn more about how millions of white Americans joined a mass movement of abusive, unwavering, and often violent opposition to racial equality, integration, and civil rights.

Sampson County, North Carolina, Sheriff C.C. Tart arrested a young Black woman for helping Andrew Troublefield, a 21-year-old Black man, avoid being lynched. The previous day two white women accused Mr. Troublefield of sexual impropriety. Without verifying the women’s stories, Sheriff Tart led a mob of 500 white people in pursuit of Mr. Troublefield with the intention, as newspapers reported, to lynch him without trial if he was caught. A young Black woman who saw the mob on its way shouted after Mr. Troublefield as he fled, attempting to warn him. Sheriff Tart arrested and detained this woman for her efforts. He also arrested Mr. Troublefield’s younger brother, who encouraged him to flee from the mob.

Black people were often prosecuted or even lynched for complaining about white mob violence or assisting other Black people in avoiding lynch mobs. Mary Turner was lynched in Georgia in 1918 for complaining about the lynching of her husband. Jim Cross condemned a lynching in Letohatchee, Alabama, in 1900, and a white mob came to his house and lynched him, his wife, and both of his children. Criminal prosecution, threat, and violence were tactics used to insulate perpetrators of racial terror lynchings from accountability.

The Sampson County lynch mob grew to over 1,000 white people. They spent over a week in the woods searching for Mr. Troublefield, until police from neighboring Wayne County arrested him on October 8. Wayne County’s chief of police transferred Mr. Troublefield directly to North Carolina’s death row, despite him being convicted of no crime at the time. Mr. Troublefield remained on death row until his trial in February.

On February 15, 1940, Judge R. Parker sentenced Mr. Troublefield to 30 years in prison for attempted rape. The conviction rested entirely on the testimony of the two alleged victims. During the trial, white mobs stood on the courthouse lawn, demanding a more severe sentence and grumbling about “what ought to have been done” to Mr. Troublefield. Threats of violence continued as the highway patrol transported Mr. Troublefield back to Central Prison in Raleigh. Neither the Sheriff nor any of the mob leaders were ever held accountable for this attempted lynching.

Racial terror lynchings and near lynchings inflicted massive trauma on entire Black communities. White mobs acted with impunity, lynching entire families, conducting lynchings in public, and terrorizing Black people who tried to help their neighbors. Perpetrators of these lynchings hoped to keep Black people in a state of perpetual fear and subordination. EJI has documented more than 6,500 racial terror lynchings between 1865 and 1950, including two in Sampson County, North Carolina.