Author: Desto22

After a white mob attempted to lynch a Black man and failed in their efforts, armed white residents engaged in widespread racial terrorism that forced Black residents to flee Whitesboro, Texas.

Lynching was a tool of racial terror used to maintain white supremacy and dominance by instilling fear in the entire Black community. It was common during this era of racial terrorism for a white mob’s focus to expand beyond a specific person accused of an offense. Lynch mobs frequently targeted members of a suspect’s family, neighbors, or any and all Black people unfortunate enough to be in the mob’s path, and it was not uncommon for Black people in the vicinity of white mobs to be beaten or killed as collateral violence.

Earlier in the day, a Black man, known as “Brown,” had been arrested after a local white woman reported that she had been criminally assaulted by a Black man. He was taken from jail by a mob of at least 100 white men and boys and hanged from a tree as the mob attempted to violently coerce a confession from him. As he was on the verge of becoming unconscious, a sheriff’s posse cut Mr. Brown down, determined he was still alive, and took him back into custody.

As news spread that they had failed in their attempt to lynch this Black man, the white mob unleashed a reign of terror on the entire Black community in Whitesboro. The mob went from house to house in the town’s Black neighborhood, destroying the homes, beating the Black people inside, and ordering all of them to leave Whitesboro. Black people fled by train that night, with contemporary news sources reporting that “outgoing trains on all roads were filled” with Black people. Hundreds of shots were reportedly fired by the armed mob, but the death toll of the terror remains unknown. Local authorities made no attempt to protect the town’s Black residents.

A few days later, armed white men rounded up the few remaining Black people in town, reported as just 17 people. The mob tied these 17 individuals to trees and whipped them mercilessly, ordering them again to leave town. Contemporary reports noted that after the conclusion of this violence, not a single Black person remained in Whitesboro.

More than 200 members of white supremacist, alt-right, neo-Nazi, and pro-Confederate groups from throughout the country converged on the University of Virginia in Charlottesville for a torch-lit march through central campus shouting slogans like “Blood and soil!” “You will not replace us!” “Jews will not replace us!” and “White lives matter!” The procession was the precursor to a planned “Unite the Right” rally scheduled to take place the next day to protest the Charlottesville City Council’s recent vote to remove a Confederate monument dedicated to Robert E. Lee. As the marchers paraded through the University’s campus, counter-protests quickly emerged and tensions escalated.

The next day, the rally began to form in recently renamed Emancipation Park, where the Lee statue stood. White nationalist rally-goers, many heavily armed, filed into the park amid the outcry of a diverse gathering of counter-protesters. Those opposing the white nationalists included members of anti-fascist groups, Black Lives Matter supporters, local residents, church congregations, and civil rights leaders. In the absence of police intervention, clashes between rally-goers and counter-protesters became more volatile and eventually led law enforcement to declare the rally an unlawful assembly.

As rally-goers and counter-protesters dispersed, sporadic clashes continued. Approximately two hours after the City of Charlottesville declared a local state of emergency, a neo-Nazi named James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car directly into a crowd of counter-protesters, wounding at least 18 people and killing a 32-year-old white woman named Heather Heyer.

The events in Charlottesville, Virginia, sparked national press coverage and debate regarding race, white supremacy, and Confederate iconography.

A white mob seized four Black people from a jail in Clarendon, Arkansas, and lynched them before they could stand trial.

A few weeks prior, a white woman named Erneze Orr allegedly hired Will Sanders, Rilla Weaver, Dennis Ricord, and Manse Castle to kill her husband, John T. Orr. After Mr. Sanders, Ms. Weaver, Mr. Ricord, and Mr. Castle were arrested for this alleged offense, a mob of white community members quickly formed—and on three separate occasions, the mob convened at the jail intent on lynching them. Despite these repeated threats, officers refused to move the group to a safer location as they awaited trial.

On August 10, the white mob stormed the jail a final time. Rather than protecting the people in his custody, the sheriff turned the jail keys over to the mob. Newspapers reported that he had been persuaded to open the jail doors and let the mob enter “by their earnestness.”

Mrs. Orr, the white woman who allegedly orchestrated her husband’s murder, was also being held at the jail. She reportedly poisoned herself shortly before the mob’s arrival. Though contemporary reports note that she was still alive when the mob stormed the jail, the mob left her and took only the four Black people from the jail.

The mob hung Mr. Sanders, Ms. Weaver, Mr. Ricord, and Mr. Castle from the tramway of a nearby sawmill with signs affixed to them that read “This is the penalty for murder and rape.” Their bodies were then left on display for hours to terrorize the entire Black community.

During this era of racial terror, mere suggestions of Black-on-white violence could provoke mob violence and lynching before the judicial system could or would act. The deep racial hostility permeating Southern society often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered, whether or not there was evidence to support the suspicion, and, even in situations like this case, where a white person was believed to be the orchestrator of the violence, accusations lodged against Black people were rarely subject to serious scrutiny. White lynch mobs regularly displayed complete disregard for the legal system, abducting Black people from courts, jails, and out of police custody. Law enforcement officials, charged with protecting those in their custody, often failed to intervene, as was the case here.

Mr. Sanders, Ms. Weaver, Mr. Ricord, and Mr. Castle were four of at least 493 documented lynching victims between 1877 and 1950 in the state of Arkansas.

A white police officer named Darren Wilson shot an unarmed Black teenager named Michael Brown to death in Ferguson, Missouri. According to reports, Officer Wilson stopped Michael on the street in the afternoon to ask him about a robbery at a nearby convenience store. Although the precise details of what happened next remain unclear, many eyewitness accounts suggest that Michael ran from the officer with his hands raised in the air. Officer Wilson then shot Michael six times and claimed that he had feared for his life. Michael’s body was found approximately 150 feet from the officer’s police vehicle. He had graduated from high school just eight days before and was scheduled to begin a vocational training program two days later.

There is a presumption of guilt and dangerousness that has unfairly made people of color, particularly young Black men, targets of police aggression and violence. The shooting and its aftermath sparked weeks of protests in Ferguson and beyond. Demonstrators chanting “hands up, don’t shoot” as a rallying cry against police brutality gathered in the streets, facing officers armed with military-grade equipment. Law enforcement’s heavy-handed response to the protests prompted national discussions about the militarization of inner-city police forces and the ways in which police officers used violence to repress dissent and maintain racially biased social conditions.

Despite nationwide pleas for accountability, no one was punished for Michael Brown’s death. A grand jury ultimately declined to bring criminal charges against Officer Wilson, and the Department of Justice also refused to file federal civil rights charges.

Ahmed Mohamed and his family filed a lawsuit against the city of Irving, Texas, and its school district for an ordeal that had begun nearly a year before. In September 2015, 14-year-old Ahmed, a Sudanese American boy, was arrested at school for showing his teacher a clock he had made at home.

Instead of receiving praise and encouragement, Ahmed was severely punished for his engineering project. The teacher, along with other school officials, later claimed they thought the clock was a bomb, but no one ordered an evacuation of the school or contacted a bomb squad. Instead, standard police officers were called to the school; they arrested Ahmed, took him to the police station for fingerprinting and a mug shot, and subjected him to two hours of interrogation without his parents’ permission. In the end, police arrested him on charges of bringing a hoax bomb to school. Even after those charges were subsequently dropped, school officials suspended Ahmed for three days.

When the incident was reported in the local and national press, Ahmed received an outpouring of support and the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed soon went viral on social media. President Barack Obama, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and thousands of others sent expressions of encouragement, and he was even invited to the White House.

In the meantime, local officials refused to admit that they had handled the situation improperly or that Ahmed’s identity as a brown, Muslim boy caused him to be profiled and criminalized. In November 2015, Ahmed and his family requested damages and a public apology from the City of Irving and its school district for civil rights violations and physical and mental anguish. The city refused to meet those demands. In late 2015—due to ongoing threats and harassment from conspiracy theorists who claimed Ahmed truly was a dangerous terrorist—the Mohamed family moved to Qatar for Ahmed to accept a government-offered educational scholarship.

A federal district court later dismissed the Mohamed family’s lawsuit against the Irving, Texas, School District on the basis of qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that limits remedies for victims of police violence and misconduct.

A white mob used crowbars and hammers to break into the Grant County jail in Marion, Indiana, to lynch three young Black men who had been arrested earlier that afternoon after being accused of murdering a white man and assaulting a white woman. Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, both 19, were severely beaten and lynched, and 16-year-old James Cameron was badly beaten but survived.

That afternoon, word of the charges against these young Black men spread, and a growing mob of angry white residents gathered outside the Grant County jail. Around 9:30 pm, the mob attempted to rush the jail and was repelled by tear gas. An hour later, members of the mob successfully barreled past the sheriff and three deputies, grabbed Mr. Shipp and Mr. Smith from their cells as they prayed, and dragged them into the street. By then, the crowd totaled between 5,000 and 10,000 people. While spectators watched and cheered, the mob beat, tortured, and hanged both men from trees in the courthouse yard, brutally murdering them without the benefit of trial or legal proof of guilt.

As the bodies of Mr. Shipp and Mr. Smith remained suspended above the crowd, members of the mob re-entered the jail and grabbed 16-year-old James Cameron, another Black youth accused of being involved in the crime. The mob beat the teenager severely and was preparing to hang him alongside the others, but when a member of the crowd intervened and said he was innocent, James was released.

The brutalized bodies of Mr. Shipp and Mr. Smith were hanged from trees in the courthouse yard and kept there for hours as a crowd of white men, women, and children grew by the thousands. Public spectacle lynchings, in which large crowds of white people, often numbering in the thousands, gathered to witness and participate in pre-planned heinous killings that featured prolonged torture, mutilation, dismemberment and/or burning of the victim, were common during this time. When the sheriff eventually cut the ropes off the corpses, the crowd rushed forward to take parts of the men’s bodies as “souvenirs” before finally dispersing.

Enraged by the lynching, the NAACP traveled to Marion to investigate and later provided the U.S. attorney general with the names of 27 people believed to have participated. Though the lynching was photographed and spectators were clearly visible, local residents claimed not to recognize anyone pictured. Charges were finally brought against the leaders of the mob, but all-white juries acquitted them despite this overwhelming evidence. In contrast, James Cameron, the Black teenager who survived, was tried for murder, convicted of being an accessory, and served four years in prison. The alleged assault victim, Mary Ball, later testified that she had not been raped.

After his release, James Cameron founded four NAACP chapters in Indiana, authored hundreds of essays on civil rights and a 1982 memoir, and on Juneteenth 1988 opened America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to document the African American Struggle. “I can forgive but I can never forget,” he was quoted as saying. “That’s why I started this museum.” Mr. Cameron was pardoned by the state of Indiana in 1993 and died in 2006.

A photograph of Mr. Shipp’s and Mr. Smith’s battered corpses hanging lifeless from a tree, with white spectators proudly standing below, remains one of the most iconic and infamous photographs of an American lynching. In 1937, an encounter with the photo inspired New York schoolteacher Abel Meeropol to write “Strange Fruit,” a haunting poem about lynching that later became a famous song recorded by Billie Holiday.

Southern Railway, an interstate railroad company based in Washington, D.C., adopted a policy effectively denying dining service to Black passengers on its rail cars.

For years, the Southern Railway policy mandated that trains serve white passengers and Black passengers meals at different times, which often resulted in the denial of meals to Black passengers. In 1942, Southern Railway further entrenched its commitment to segregation and to denying its Black customers service by adopting a policy which reserved 10 of the train’s 11 dining tables exclusively for white passengers at all times. The one remaining table in the dining car that was theoretically open to Black passengers was also available for use by white passengers and was to be given to white passengers upon request. If Black passengers requested service while white passengers were dining, “they should be advised that they will be served just as soon as those compartments are vacated.”

In 1942, Elmer W. Henderson, a Black attorney, civil rights leader, member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practices Commission, and one of the first Black graduates of Georgetown University Law Center, boarded a Southern Railway train, traveling first-class from Washington, D.C., to Atlanta, Georgia. The train’s dining car remained occupied with white passengers for the duration of his journey, and railroad employees denied Mr. Henderson a dining table based on his race. At 9 pm, the train reached Greensboro, North Carolina, and the dining car ceased serving passengers. Neither Mr. Henderson nor any other Black passengers ever had a chance to eat dinner.

Mr. Henderson subsequently filed a complaint with the federal Interstate Commerce Commission, alleging that the railroad’s policy violated the Interstate Commerce Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The ICC denied relief, finding that Mr. Henderson “had sustained no compensable damage as a result of the disadvantage caused him” by Southern Railway. It would take five years for the Supreme Court to reexamine Mr. Henderson’s case. While ruling in Henderson v. United States that Southern Railway’s policies violated the Interstate Commerce Act, the Court avoided declaring racial segregation unconstitutional, paving the way for that practice to continue for years.

A white man named Wade Michael Page opened fire on worshippers at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing six people and seriously injuring several others before taking his own life. Between 30 and 35 people, including several children, were inside the temple that morning as community members prepared for their usual Sunday services.

Though police investigating the attack initially declined to categorize the shooting as a hate crime, Mr. Page had openly expressed white supremacist beliefs in the years leading up to the attack. The investigation later revealed images of Mr. Page wearing a “white power” shirt and posing in front of Nazi flags, which he had posted to public social media pages.

The six people killed in the attack were Sita Singh, Ranjit Singh, Satwant Singh Kaleka, Prakash Singh, Suveg Singh Khattra, and Paramjit Kaur Saini. Baba Punjab Singh, a priest at the temple, initially survived a gunshot wound to the head that left him paralyzed; he died from his injuries in 2020.

After 9/11, crimes against South Asian, Muslim, and Arab Americans became more common. Sikh men in particular, who often wear turbans, increasingly became victims of racial profiling and racialized attacks. In the year leading up to the Oak Creek shooting, two Sikh men in a Sacramento suburb were killed in a hate attack; a Sikh temple in Michigan was vandalized; and a New York hate crime left one Sikh man severely beaten.

A month after the August 5 shooting, Harpreet Singh Saini, whose mother Paramjit Kaur Saini was killed in the attack, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee to urge the Department of Justice to begin federally tracking hate crimes against Sikh, Arab, and Hindu people.

“I came here today to ask the government to give my mother the dignity of being a statistic,” Mr. Saini said. “The FBI does not track hate crimes against Sikhs. My mother and those shot that day will not even count on a federal form. We cannot solve a problem we refuse to recognize.”

The FBI began formally tracking hate crimes against Sikh, Arab, and Hindu Americans in 2015.

Following several weeks of national news coverage and an intensive search by federal authorities, the bodies of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman were found in Longdale, Mississippi. The three men, who went missing after being released from a local Mississippi jail, had been shot to death and buried in a shallow grave.

Earlier that year, Michael Schwerner had traveled to Mississippi to organize Black citizens to vote. A white New Yorker working with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Mr. Schwerner worked extensively with a Black CORE member from Meridian, Mississippi, named James Chaney. The activist pair led an effort to register Black voters and helped Mt. Zion Methodist Church, a Black church in Longdale, create an organizing center. These developments angered local members of the Ku Klux Klan; on June 16, while Mr. Schwerner and Mr. Chaney were away, Klansmen torched the church and assaulted its members.

On June 21, Mr. Schwerner, Mr. Chaney, and a new white CORE member named Andrew Goodman investigated the church burning and then headed for Meridian, Mississippi. Knowing that they were in constant danger of attack, Schwerner told colleagues in Meridian to search for them if they did not arrive by 4 pm. While passing through the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, the three men were stopped by Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price.

A member of the Ku Klux Klan, Mr. Price had been monitoring the activities of the civil rights workers. He arrested the men on traffic charges and held them in jail for about seven hours before releasing them on bail. Mr. Price escorted Mr. Schwerner, Mr. Chaney, and Mr. Goodman out of town but soon re-arrested the men and held them until other Klansmen could join. They were not seen alive again.

When the three activists did not arrive in Meridian, they were reported missing and soon became the subjects of a highly publicized FBI search and investigation. As the days turned into weeks, some Mississippi officials and white segregationists accused civil rights leaders of fabricating the workers’ disappearance to gain support for their cause. Once the three men’s bodies were discovered on August 4, however, no one could deny their fates.

While their disappearance resulted in national news stories, Michael Schwerner’s wife and fellow CORE worker, Rita Schwerner, admonished reporters in 1964: “The slaying of a Negro in Mississippi is not news. It is only because my husband and Andrew Goodman were white that the national alarm has been sounded.” Indeed, investigators searching Mississippi’s woods, swamps, and rivers that summer found the remains of at least two more Black men: Henry Dee and Charles Moore, college students who were kidnapped, beaten and murdered in May 1964.

Several days of racial violence targeting Black communities in Chicago, Illinois, came to an end after intervention by the National Guard. After five days of gunfire, beatings, and burnings, 23 African Americans and 15 white people had been killed, 537 people injured, and 1,000 African American families left homeless.

During the Great Migration, Chicago was a popular destination for many Black people leaving the South in search of economic opportunity and a refuge from racial terror lynching. From 1910 to 1920, the city’s Black population swelled from 44,000 to 109,000 people. The new arrivals joined thousands of white immigrants also relocating to Chicago in search of work. Many Black newcomers settled on Chicago’s South Side, in neighborhoods adjacent to communities of European immigrants, close to plentiful industrial jobs.

Although African American people had fled the Southern brand of racial violence, once in Chicago they still faced racial animosity and discrimination that created challenging living conditions like overcrowded housing, inequality at work, police brutality, and segregation by custom rather than law.

In the second decade of the 20th century, segregation in Chicago was not as legally regulated as in Southern cities, but unwritten rules restricted Black people from many neighborhoods, workplaces, and “public” areas—including beaches. On July 27, 1919, a Black youth named Eugene Williams drowned at a Chicago beach after a white man struck him with a rock for drifting to the “white” side of Lake Michigan. When police refused to arrest the man who had thrown the rock, Black witnesses protested; white mobs responded with widespread violence that lasted five days.

Over that terrifying period, white mobs attacked Black people on sight, set fire to more than 30 properties on Chicago’s South Side, and even attempted to attack Provident Hospital—which served mostly Black patients. Six thousand National Guard troops were called in to quell the unrest, and many Black people left Chicago after the terrifying experience.

Though state officials announced a plan to investigate and punish all parties responsible for violence and destruction of property during the unrest, many more Black people were arrested than white. The subsequent grand jury proceedings resulted in the indictment of primarily Black defendants. Later testifying before a commission investigating the roots of the Chicago violence, the Cook County district attorney admitted this was due to bias in his department of white officers.

“There is no doubt that a great many police officers were grossly unfair in making arrests,” he said in 1922. “They shut their eyes to offenses committed by white men while they were very vigorous in getting all the colored men they could get.”