Author: Desto22

Several white churches in Jackson, Mississippi, barred three Black men—including one minister—from attending Easter Sunday services, forcibly removing them from church or blocking their entrance. Two of the Black men and seven white clergymen who had accompanied them were arrested and jailed after the churches turned them away; their bonds were set at $1,000 each.

When Methodist Bishops Charles Golden, a Black man, and James Matthews, a white man, tried to enter the Galloway Memorial Church that morning, ushers on the church steps refused to let them enter, citing “church policies.” As ranking members of the Methodist denomination, the two bishops asked to speak to the church minister, but the ushers refused to let them. While the men stood outside the church deciding what to do next, a white crowd harassed them with taunts and jeers until the men left the church grounds. In an interview, Bishop Golden would later question the wisdom of “those who presume to speak and act for God in turning worshipers away from his house.”

Bishop Golden and Bishop Matthews were able to leave freely, but 10 blocks away, an interracial group of nine men were arrested when they attended Easter service at the Capitol Street Methodist Church. Ushers on the church steps tried to block them from entering, and when the group of men tried to go around the ushers, they were arrested and charged with trespassing and disturbing the peace. The group included two young Black men named Robert Talbert and Dave Walker and seven white men—clergy, theological teachers, and deans from several schools and colleges outside of Mississippi—who had accompanied them to the service. The men had carried with them a statement that read “To exclude some of those whom Christ would draw unto himself from church…on Easter…because of color is a violation of human dignity.”

The day after their arrests, a judge convicted all nine men of “disturbing public worship” and sentenced them each to six months in jail and a $500 fine.

Several weeks earlier, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had announced plans to lead anti-segregation protests in St. Augustine, Florida, over Easter, in response to recent violence against civil rights activists there. Dr. King urged Northern supporters of civil rights to travel South to join “pray-in” and “kneel-in” demonstrations at the city’s segregated churches, and that Florida effort likely helped to inspire the activism in Jackson. Like in Mississippi, several St. Augustine protesters were also arrested—and even beaten—for trying to integrate Easter services at all-white churches.

This racist treatment of individuals seeking to attend church illustrates how many white denominations—particularly those in the South—remained defiantly committed to racial segregation as an essential component of white supremacy and racial inequality, even a decade after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Three months later, in June 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the law outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin but could not immediately end white Americans’ massive resistance.

Several white churches in Jackson, Mississippi, barred three Black men—including one minister—from attending Easter Sunday services, forcibly removing them from church or blocking their entrance. Two of the Black men and seven white clergymen who had accompanied them were arrested and jailed after the churches turned them away; their bonds were set at $1,000 each.

When Methodist Bishops Charles Golden, a Black man, and James Matthews, a white man, tried to enter the Galloway Memorial Church that morning, ushers on the church steps refused to let them enter, citing “church policies.” As ranking members of the Methodist denomination, the two bishops asked to speak to the church minister, but the ushers refused to let them. While the men stood outside the church deciding what to do next, a white crowd harassed them with taunts and jeers until the men left the church grounds. In an interview, Bishop Golden would later question the wisdom of “those who presume to speak and act for God in turning worshipers away from his house.”

Bishop Golden and Bishop Matthews were able to leave freely, but 10 blocks away, an interracial group of nine men were arrested when they attended Easter service at the Capitol Street Methodist Church. Ushers on the church steps tried to block them from entering, and when the group of men tried to go around the ushers, they were arrested and charged with trespassing and disturbing the peace. The group included two young Black men named Robert Talbert and Dave Walker and seven white men—clergy, theological teachers, and deans from several schools and colleges outside of Mississippi—who had accompanied them to the service. The men had carried with them a statement that read “To exclude some of those whom Christ would draw unto himself from church…on Easter…because of color is a violation of human dignity.”

The day after their arrests, a judge convicted all nine men of “disturbing public worship” and sentenced them each to six months in jail and a $500 fine.

Several weeks earlier, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had announced plans to lead anti-segregation protests in St. Augustine, Florida, over Easter, in response to recent violence against civil rights activists there. Dr. King urged Northern supporters of civil rights to travel South to join “pray-in” and “kneel-in” demonstrations at the city’s segregated churches, and that Florida effort likely helped to inspire the activism in Jackson. Like in Mississippi, several St. Augustine protesters were also arrested—and even beaten—for trying to integrate Easter services at all-white churches.

This racist treatment of individuals seeking to attend church illustrates how many white denominations—particularly those in the South—remained defiantly committed to racial segregation as an essential component of white supremacy and racial inequality, even a decade after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Three months later, in June 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the law outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin but could not immediately end white Americans’ massive resistance.

A 22-year-old Black man named Jeremiah Reeves was executed by the State of Alabama after police tortured him until he gave a false confession as a 16-year-old child.

In July 1951, Jeremiah, who was a 16-year-old high school student at the time, and Mabel Ann Crowder, a white woman, were discovered having sex in her home. Ms. Crowder claimed she had been raped by Jeremiah, and he was immediately arrested and taken to Kilby Prison for “questioning.” Police strapped the frightened boy into the electric chair and told him that he would be electrocuted unless he admitted to having committed all of the rapes white women had reported that summer. Under this terrifying pressure, he falsely confessed to the charges in fear. Though he soon recanted and insisted he was innocent, Jeremiah was convicted and sentenced to death after a two-day trial during which the all-white jury deliberated for less than 30 minutes.

The local Black community believed—and in some cases, knew—that Jeremiah Reeves and Mabel Crowder had been involved in an ongoing, consensual affair. Concerned about the injustice of the young man’s conviction, the Montgomery NAACP became involved and helped attract the attention of national lawyer Thurgood Marshall. These advocates were able to win reversal of Jeremiah’s conviction on December 6, 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the trial judge had been wrong to prevent the jury from hearing evidence of the torture police used to get his confession.

Jeremiah’s case also became a flashpoint for Montgomery’s nascent civil rights movement. Claudette Colvin, who was arrested at 15 for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a Birmingham bus in March 1955, was inspired to take that protest action as a show of support for Jeremiah, her friend and schoolmate. Ms. Colvin later became one of four plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, the case that led the Supreme Court to order buses desegregated in 1956. Rosa Parks exchanged letters with Jeremiah while he was jailed and helped him to get his poetry published in the Birmingham World; she went on to repeat Ms. Colvin’s protest in December 1955, facing arrest for resisting bus segregation and sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

At a second trial in June 1955, Jeremiah was again convicted and sentenced to death. This time, all appeals were denied. Jeremiah had spent much of his time in prison writing poetry, and he willed his final poem to his mother. He remained on death row until 1958, when he reached what was considered the minimum age for execution.

On April 6, 1958, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at an Easter rally in Montgomery, Alabama. Standing on the marked spot on the Capitol steps where Jefferson Davis had been sworn in as president of the Confederacy in 1861, Dr. King decried Jeremiah Reeves’s wrongful conviction and execution, which had been carried out a little over a week before.

As mourners and activists gathered at the Capitol for the rally, they were confronted by Ku Klux Klansmen determined to disrupt the peaceful demonstration. Undeterred, Dr. King forcefully denounced the unequal treatment of white and Black defendants and victims in the courts. “Truth may be crucified and justice buried,” he declared, “but one day they will rise again. We must live and face death if necessary with that hope.”

Afterward, a group of 39 local white ministers released a statement decrying the activists’ “exaggerated emphasis on wrongs and grievances.”

Alabama Representative James Thomas Heflin shot Louis Lundy, a Black man, after he allegedly cursed in front of a white woman while riding on a Washington, D.C., streetcar. The congressman claimed that Mr. Lundy’s cursing was “raising a disturbance,” and he received an outpouring of support from the white public and his fellow representatives after shooting Mr. Lundy through his neck. He was never held accountable for shooting Mr. Lundy.

That afternoon, Rep. Heflin was reportedly on his way to deliver a message about “temperance” at a local church in Washington, D.C. As he boarded a streetcar on Sixth Street with a colleague, he focused his attention on Mr. Lundy, who was riding the streetcar with friends. Claiming that Mr. Lundy had used profanity in the presence of a white woman also on the streetcar, Rep. Heflin quickly became enraged and violent, striking Mr. Lundy with the butt of his pistol and pulling him off of the streetcar.

Congressman Heflin then re-boarded the streetcar and, unsatisfied to simply leave Mr. Lundy assaulted on the street, fired two gunshots at the Black man through the streetcar window. One bullet struck Mr. Lundy’s neck—wounding Mr. Lundy and confining him to a local hospital in critical condition.

Rep. Heflin was arrested on the spot but immediately received an outpouring of support from colleagues and local white residents of Washington, D.C. A newspaper reported that Rep. Heflin received a bouquet of roses from a local Baptist minister with an accompanying note stating that the clergyman “approved highly of his courageous chivalry.” After being released on bond the following day, Rep. Heflin returned to the legislative session and was greeted enthusiastically by his colleagues, who vowed to “do everything possible to aid” him. In response, the congressman publicly said of shooting Mr. Lundy: “I only did what any other gentleman would do.”

J. Thomas Heflin built a political career around maintaining white supremacy, demonstrated by his continued and persistent support for convict leasing and segregation, as well as his opposition to interracial marriage. A drafter of the Alabama Constitution in 1901, Heflin said, “God Almighty intended the negro to be the servant of the white man,” and often boasted that his father enslaved more people than anyone else in Randolph County. Just months before shooting Mr. Lundy, he had introduced a bill that advocated for segregated seating on streetcars in Washington, D.C., to prevent Black men from sitting next to white women, and he called interracial seating on streetcars “an offensive and irritating condition.” Although the bill did not pass, Rep. Heflin’s commitment to segregation and white supremacy made him popular among his colleagues and white constituents. The charges against Rep. Heflin for shooting Mr. Lundy in 1908 were dismissed, and he was never held accountable for that attack.

Rep. Heflin served as a representative of Alabama until 1920 and as a U.S. senator from Alabama from 1920 to 1931.

A group of white men brutally lynched the Rev. Isaac Simmons, a Black minister and farmer, so they could steal his land in Amite County, Mississippi. Members of his family, some of whom witnessed his murder, fled the state, fearing for their lives. The white men responsible for lynching him successfully stole the Simmons’s land and were never convicted for their crimes.

Before his death, the Rev. Simmons controlled more than 270 acres of debt-free Amite County land that his family had owned since 1887. This was very unusual among Black families in the South, where racism and poverty had posed obstacles to economic advancement for generations. The Rev. Simmons worked the land with his children and grandchildren, producing crops and selling the property’s lumber.

In 1941, a rumor spread that there was oil in Southwest Mississippi. A group of six white men decided they wanted the Simmons’s land and warned the Rev. Simmons to stop cutting lumber. The Rev. Simmons consulted a lawyer to work out the dispute and ensure his children would be the sole heirs to the property.

On Sunday, March 26, 1944, a group of white men arrived at the home of the Rev. Simmons’s eldest son, Eldridge, and told him to show them the property line. He agreed to do so, but while Eldridge Simmons rode with the men in their vehicle, they began to beat him and shouted that the Simmons family thought they were “smart niggers” for consulting a lawyer. The men then dragged the Rev. Simmons from his home about a mile away and began beating him, too. They drove both Simmons men further onto the property and ordered the Rev. Simmons out of the car, then killed him brutally–shooting him three times and cutting out his tongue. The men let Eldridge Simmons go but told him he and his relatives had 10 days to abandon the family property.

The white men who committed the lynching took possession of the land. The constable and sheriff concluded immediately that the Rev. Simmons had “met his death at the hands of parties unknown” even though his son, Eldridge, and his daughter, Laura, were present and able to identify by name at least four of the six men responsible. The family fled Amite County over the next two days, fearing for their lives, before their father’s funeral on March 29. Eldridge remained in Amite for his father’s funeral but was taken into police custody the next day supposedly for his own protection. Held in jail for more than a week despite being the victim, Eldridge was released from jail on April 8 and was urged to leave the county altogether.

Only one of the six white men responsible was ever prosecuted for the Rev. Simmons’s lynching. On November 1, 1944, more than seven months after their father was lynched, Eldridge and his sister, Laura, were arrested in New Orleans, LA, on charges that they had fled the state in order to avoid testifying as witnesses in the trial of the only white man prosecuted for murdering their father. During the trial on November 11, 1944, Eldridge and Laura refused to name the perpetrators in the testimony because they feared for their lives in the event of a conviction. The one white man was ultimately acquitted by an all-white jury because of “lack of evidence.”

During the era of racial terror, white mobs regularly terrorized Black people with violence and murder to maintain the racial hierarchy and exert economic control. These acts of lawlessness were committed with impunity, by mobs who rarely faced arrest, prosecution, or even public shame for their actions. Black people could expect little protection from law enforcement and knew that protesting their own abuse or a loved one’s lynching could result in even more violence and death.

Nine Black teenagers riding a freight train through Alabama and north toward Memphis, Tennessee, were arrested after being falsely accused of raping two white women. After nearly being lynched, they were brought to trial in Scottsboro, Alabama.

Despite evidence that exonerated the teens, including a retraction by one of their accusers, the state pursued the case. All-white juries delivered guilty verdicts, and all nine defendants, except the youngest, were sentenced to death. From 1931 to 1937, during a series of appeals and new trials, they languished in Alabama’s Kilby prison, where they were repeatedly brutalized by guards.

In 1932, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded in Powell v. Alabama that the Scottsboro defendants had been denied adequate counsel at trial. In 1935, in Norris v. Alabama, the Court again ruled in favor of the defendants, overturning their convictions because Alabama had systematically excluded Black people from jury service.

Finally, in 1937, four of the defendants were released and five were given sentences from 20 years to life; four of the defendants sentenced to prison time were released on parole between 1943 and 1950, while the fifth escaped prison in 1948 and fled to Michigan. One of the Scottsboro Boys, Clarence Norris, walked out of Kilby Prison in 1946 after being paroled; he moved North to make a life for himself and did not receive a full pardon until 30 years later.

The U.S. government began army-directed evictions and evacuations, forcing over 200 Japanese American residents on Bainbridge Island in Washington state to evacuate their homes within six days. Any person of Japanese ancestry found on the island after noon on March 30 was subjected to criminal penalties.

During the early 20th century, prejudice against Japanese Americans was rampant in the U.S. After Japanese military forces bombed American forces at the Pearl Harbor naval base in Hawaii in December 1941, the U.S. entered World War II. Anti-Japanese bigotry quickly worsened, and many political leaders and media outlets called for the internment of individuals of Japanese descent residing in the western portion of the country. Bainbridge Island was cited as a high-sensitivity area due to its proximity to the Puget Sound Navy Yard.

Just hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the FBI arrested and detained over a thousand Japanese religious and community leaders and searched the private homes of thousands of Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. By February, advisors to President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that “the Japanese race is the enemy race” and, on February 19, 1942, the president signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing military leaders to detain Japanese Americans in camps, en masse, without due process.

Although the Department of Justice and the FBI insisted that people of Japanese descent did not pose a security threat, the internment process began soon after this executive order was signed. On March 24, 1942, the U.S. military ordered all individuals of Japanese ancestry residing on Bainbridge Island in Washington to report to concentration camps within seven days. Individuals possessing “at least 1/16 Japanese blood” were required to leave their homes and dispose of their possessions and businesses and were given a paper identification tag. Couples who possessed different ancestry under these guidelines were separated. In the concentration camps, conditions were prison-like: armed guards and barbed wire surrounded the camps and housing areas were overcrowded and filthy.

Internment was politically popular and faced no serious opposition from elected officials or the courts. In 1944, the Supreme Court decided Korematsu v. United States, upholding the constitutionality of the internment order and authorizing the continued detention of Japanese Americans. Between 1942 and 1944, 120,000 individuals of Japanese descent were interned, 70,000 of whom were American citizens.

When the internment order was officially rescinded in January 1945, after the end of the war, individuals were released from internment but received no compensation for their lost property and mistreatment. More than four decades later, in 1988, the United States passed an act formally apologizing for internment and authorizing a $20,000 redress payment to each living internment survivor.

The Tennessee legislature approved House Bill 527, which permitted hotels, inns, public transportation, and amusement parks to refuse admission and service to any person for any reason. Three weeks before, federal authorities had enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which guaranteed African Americans equal treatment in public accommodations and jury service. By enacting a state law that allowed for all kinds of discrimination, including on the basis of race, Tennessee officials had defiantly authorized the very discrimination the federal law prohibited.

In July 1866, after ratifying the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, Tennessee became the first Confederate state readmitted to the Union. However, many white residents in the state had not accepted the outcome of the recent Civil War and remained intent on maintaining their dominance over a political and social system that now included many free Black citizens.

In 1869, racialized political movements restored former Confederates to legislative power in Tennessee. Newly elected lawmakers quickly undertook efforts to “redeem” the South by restoring white supremacy and the exploitation of Black labor. Legislators quickly repealed a state statute passed in 1868 under the Reconstruction government that had outlawed racial discrimination in railroad travel. In 1870, Tennessee lawmakers went further, amending the state constitution to prohibit racial integration of Tennessee public schools.

Many other border states passed similar laws aimed at limiting Black Americans’ new constitutional rights and protections. Congress’s passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875 was an attempt to enforce Black Americans’ rights and equality, and it set off a legal conflict between state and federal power.

The U.S. Supreme Court settled that conflict in 1883 when it found the Civil Rights Act to be an unconstitutional exercise of Thirteenth Amendment powers. The opinion, issued in Civil Rights Cases, empowered Tennessee and other states to retain and expand their discriminatory laws and cleared the way for several more generations of Jim Crow rule.

A white woman and a Black man were arrested in Atlanta, Georgia, and accused of walking and talking together on Whitehall Street. In a news article entitled, “Color Line Was Ignored,” The Atlanta Constitution newspaper reported that Mrs. James Charles, “a handsomely dressed white woman of prepossessing appearance,” and C.W. King, “a Negro cook,” were arrested after Officer J.T. Shepard reported having seen the two talk to each other and then “walk side by side for several minutes.”

After the Confederacy’s defeat in the Civil War, emancipation and the granting of civil rights to Black people threatened to overturn traditional Southern culture and social relations rooted in white supremacy and racial hierarchy. After Reconstruction ended and white politicians and lawmakers regained control and power in the South, many set out to restore that racial order through very strict laws that mandated segregation and made it illegal for Black and white people to interact as equals. Under these policies, interracial marriage or romance—particularly between Black men and white women—was strictly banned, as was integrated education and even interracial athletic events.

After her arrest for allegedly walking and talking with a Black man, Mrs. Charles gave a statement that did not challenge the law but instead fervently denied the accusation. She insisted she had exchanged no words with Mr. King and merely smiled as she passed him dancing on the street:

“As I paused to listen to the music I noticed a negro man, the one arrested with me, dancing on the sidewalk,” she said. “I smiled at his antics and was about to pass on when a policeman touched me on the arm and said he wanted to talk to me. I stopped and he asked why I talked to a negro. I denied having spoken to any negro. I told him I was a southern born woman, and his insinuations were an insult.”

Mr. King also denied having spoken to Mrs. Charles and said he never knew there was a white woman near him. No further reporting on the arrests was published, and it is not clear whether they were convicted and fined when tried the next afternoon.

The narrative of racial difference created to justify slavery—the myth that white people are superior to Black people—was not abolished by the Emancipation Proclamation or the Thirteenth Amendment, and it outlived slavery and Reconstruction. White Americans committed to the myth of Black inferiority used the law and violence to relegate Black Americans to second-class citizenship at the bottom of a racial caste system.

A 19-year-old Black man named Michael Donald was beaten, strangled, slashed at the throat, and hanged in Mobile, Alabama, by two members of the United Klans of America. Initially, local police wrongly attributed Mr. Donald’s death to drug violence, but his family insisted he had not been involved in drug activity and demanded a more thorough investigation. Tests also showed no trace of drugs in Mr. Donald’s body.

Authorities later charged Klansmen Henry Hays and James Knowles with Mr. Donald’s murder and charged Benjamin Cox Jr. as an accomplice. Evidence revealed that local Klan leaders had been monitoring the trial of Josephus Anderson, a Black man charged with killing a white police officer in Birmingham, Alabama. When that trial ended in mistrial on March 21 because the jury was unable to reach a verdict, members of the Klan in Mobile sought to make a violent response. “If a Black man can get away with killing a white man,” said Benny Hays, a high-ranking Klansman and the father of Henry Hays, “we ought to be able to get away with killing a Black man.” Michael Donald was killed that night.

All three white men charged with Michael Donald’s death were convicted; Mr. Knowles and Mr. Cox received life sentences and were later paroled, while Mr. Hays was sentenced to death and executed by the State of Alabama in 1997. In 1984, Michael Donald’s mother, Beulah Donald, sued the United Klans of America. She ultimately won a $7 million wrongful death suit, and though very little money was ever collected, the ruling did bankrupt the white supremacist organization.