Author: Desto22

The Washington Star newspaper in Washington, D.C., published an article exposing details of an ongoing syphilis experiment that withheld diagnosis information and treatment from Black men in Alabama in order to study the effects of the disease. The article incited public outrage over the unethical treatment of participants, leading to the experiment’s termination later that year.

Forty years earlier, in 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) partnered with the Tuskegee Institute on a study to examine the effects of untreated syphilis in African American men in Macon County, Alabama. PHS workers persuaded 600 African American men—399 with syphilis, and 201 without the disease—to participate in the experiment. They were not given full details about the scope of the study and were just told they would be receiving treatment for “bad blood”—a vague term with many meanings in the rural, Southern community.

Nearly all of the men studied were poorly educated, impoverished sharecroppers. The study took advantage of their poverty, promising that their participation would be compensated with burial stipends, hot meals, and free medical exams. Those with syphilis were not told they were infected and did not receive treatment, even after Penicillin was discovered to be an effective cure for the disease in the 1940s. Their access to treatment outside of the study was also thwarted, as local health workers not affiliated with the project were prevented from caring for syphilis-infected individuals participating in the experiment.

Over the study’s 40-year span, 128 participants died of syphilis or syphilis-related complications. One year after the Washington Star broke the story, the NAACP represented survivors in a class action lawsuit. In 1974, the federal government settled for $10 million and agreed to provide survivors and their infected family members with free medical services. It would take another 23 years, however, for the government to issue a formal apology for its actions.

Governor Frank M. Dixon of Alabama refused to sign a contract that would help produce 1.7 million yards of cloth to assist the U.S. in World War II efforts, fearing that the nondiscrimination clause in the contract could require integration and choosing instead to uphold segregated workforces as a “basic necessity.”

The U.S.’s 1941 involvement in World War II spurred a reliance on government agencies to help finance and increase production of defense supplies. The Defense Supplies Corporation was established to help finance critical wartime supplies. When a non-discrimination clause was introduced into a contract with the Defense Supplies Corporation mandating that “the seller, in performing the work required by this contract, shall not discriminate against any worker because of race, creed, color or national origin,” white politicians throughout the South launched a massive campaign to resist the erosion of segregated working conditions—even if it meant hindering U.S. defense efforts.

Relying primarily on the labor of incarcerated people at Alabama cotton mills, the Defense Supplies Corporation’s contract with Alabama was meant to produce 1.7 million yards of cloth. However, on July 23, 1942, in a letter to the New York agent of the corporation, Governor Dixon explained his refusal to sign this contract, arguing that “demand[s] that Negroes be put in positions of responsibility” at cotton mills in Alabama were unacceptable.

Instead, Governor Dixon praised Jim Crow practices throughout the state of Alabama “under which the white and Negro races have lived in peace together in the South since Reconstruction.” In aligning himself with other Southern white politicians, Governor Dixon attested that the “the present emergency [World War II] should not be used as a pretext to bring about the abolition of the color lines in the South.” So fearful of the “intermingling” of Black and white workers, Governor Dixon explicitly praised “white supremacy,” and stated that “he will not permit the employees of the state to be placed in a position where they must abandon the principle of segregation.”

Governor Dixon was not alone in his decision to maintain segregation over assisting the U.S. in defense production. Earlier that week, an attorney named Horace Wilkerson in Birmingham made a public speech calling upon white people in Alabama to join in resisting integration under any circumstance. In stating that “a herculean effort is being made to break down and destroy segregation,” Wilkerson advocated for the establishment of a “league to maintain white supremacy.” Throughout the summer and fall of 1942, thousands of white businessmen and workers supported the governor’s decision to uphold segregation instead of signing the contract that would assist World War II efforts. Forty-two newspaper editorials were published in support of Governor Dixon’s decision. Though pressure for a skilled labor force eventually compelled Governor Dixon to rescind his refusal and permit the training and employment of Black people in defense industries in Alabama by the fall of 1942, he did so only with the understanding and agreement that Black workers must be segregated from white workers.

Two years later, when an executive order ended segregation at Maxwell Field in Montgomery, Alabama, former Governor Dixon wrote to the current governor, Chauncey Sparks: “It is heartbreaking thing for those of us in the South who realize what the destruction of segregation would mean … to have all our plans wrecked by the type of very dangerous thinking which produced this order.” Urging Governor Sparks to continue to stand against integration for “our people,” Dixon remained committed to maintaining white supremacy even after his term as governor.

On the morning of July 22, 1899, a white mob abducted Frank Embree from officers transporting him to stand trial and lynched him in front of a crowd of over 1,000 onlookers in Fayette, Missouri.

About one month earlier, Frank Embree had been arrested and accused of assaulting a white girl. Though his trial was scheduled for July 22, the town’s residents grew impatient and, rather than allow Mr. Embree to stand trial, took matters into their own hands by lynching Mr. Embree.

According to newspaper accounts, the mob attacked officers transporting Mr. Embree, seized him, loaded him into a wagon, and drove him to the site of the alleged assault. Once there, Mr. Embree’s captors immediately tried to extract a confession by stripping him naked and whipping him in front of the assembled crowd, but he steadfastly maintained his innocence despite this abuse. After withstanding more than 100 lashes to his body, Mr. Embree began screaming and told the men that he would confess. Rather than plead for his life, Mr. Embree begged his attackers to stop the torture and kill him swiftly. Covered in blood from the whipping, with no courtroom or legal system in sight, Mr. Embree offered a confession to the waiting lynch mob and was immediately hanged from a tree.

Black people accused of crimes during this era were regularly subjected to beatings, torture, and threats of lynching in efforts to obtain a confession, and the results of those coercive attacks were later used to “justify” the lynchings that followed. In fact, without fair investigation or trial, the confession of a lynching victim was more reliable evidence of fear than guilt.

Though published photographs of Mr. Embree’s lynching clearly depict the faces of many of his assailants, no one was ever arrested or tried for his death.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.