Author: Desto22

A New York committee organizing a fashion show for the American National Exhibition in Moscow, Russia, announced it would be removing three scenes that featured Black and white models together after dozens of fashion editors protested the representation of racial integration.

The fashion show, which was sponsored by the U.S. State Department and meant to illustrate daily American life, was to be exhibited in Moscow 10 days later. Before the exhibition opening, the organizing committee for the show hosted previews in New York, which dozens of American fashion editors were invited to attend.

Immediately after the previews, over 40 of the fashion editors in attendance signed and circulated a petition demanding that the committee remove three staged wedding scenes that showed racially integrated groups interacting with one another, claiming the scenes were not “representative of the American way of life.”

Within a day, on July 14, the fashion show’s organizing committee announced that it would be removing each of the racially integrated scenes, effectively eliminating the Black models from the show. A spokesman for the show added that the organizers had not yet decided what, if any, future role would exist for the Black models—who were only 3 of 47 total models involved in the show.

During this era, many white Americans throughout the U.S., including in Northern states like New York, openly supported and fought for racial segregation. As this event helps to illustrate, many white people considered even socializing between races to be fundamentally incompatible with American life.

A white mob drove more than 200 Black residents out of North Platte, Nebraska. The mob targeted the entire Black community with violence after a Black man was accused of killing a local white police officer.

The day before, two white police officers responded to a call at the North Platte home of a Black man named Louis “Slim” Seeman. When Mr. Seeman allegedly shot and killed one of the officers, a mob of white men and police descended on his home and trapped him inside of a chicken coop on the property. The mob then doused the coop with gasoline and set it ablaze with Mr. Seeman inside; when his body was pulled from the wreckage, it was clear he had died from a gunshot wound—either by his own hand or fired by a member of the mob.

Even after Mr. Seeman had been killed, the large gathering of white men remained enraged at the bold violation of racial hierarchy represented by a Black man taking the life of a white man. Determined to punish the entire Black community, 500 angry white citizens wielding sticks and ropes demanded that all local Black people leave the city. Facing the threat of deadly violence, and terrified after seeing Mr. Seeman’s fate, North Platte’s 200 Black residents departed that night by foot, train, and automobile, leaving behind most of their possessions.

A county sheriff later commented, “It was the understanding when they left that they were to stay away. The idea is to keep them out.”

An unmasked white mob abducted and lynched a Black man named John Henry James in a public spectacle lynching in Albemarle County, Virginia, near Charlottesville. Although 150 unmasked white men were involved in the lynching—and the police chief and county sheriff were present when Mr. James was lynched—no one was ever held accountable for Mr. James’s killing. Mr. James’s lynching was later celebrated by several hundred more white people who gathered to see his body as it was left hanging for hours.

Mr. James was arrested and falsely accused of assaulting a white woman on July 11. When mobs of white people gathered outside of the jail and open threats of lynching were made, Mr. James was quickly transported to a neighboring city. 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.

The next morning, on July 12, Mr. James was aboard a train returning to Charlottesville when a mob of armed white men intercepted the train at Wood’s Crossing in Albemarle County and seized him. The mob—at least 150 strong—broke into the train car and put a rope around Mr. James’s neck. When news of the attack spread, a group of Black men attempted to stop the lynching, but they were outnumbered by the mob. The mob then dragged Mr. James from the train to a locust tree 40 yards away and hanged him before firing dozens of bullets into his body. Before he was hanged, Mr. James protested his innocence to the crowd. The crowd dispersed, leaving Mr. James’s body hanging for hours.

Those who lynched Mr. James made no effort to conceal their faces. As in the case of Mr. James’s lynching, celebratory atmospheres during or following a lynching were not atypical, and it was not uncommon for lynchers to leave the bodies of their victims hanging in plain sight. Newspapers reported that hundreds of white people visited the scene to view Mr. James’s body and cut off pieces of his clothing, his body, and the locust tree as “souvenirs.” These acts of violence not only victimized the individual, but traumatized and terrorized the wider Black community near and around Charlottesville; Mr. James’s proximity to the railroad tracks meant that hundreds more viewed his body from the passing train cars.

As part of EJI’s Community Remembrance Project, on July 12, 2019, Charlottesville community members and officials gathered in memory of Mr. James and unveiled a historical marker which recognized the lynching of Mr. James.

White residents of Indianola, Mississippi, formed the first White Citizens’ Council to organize and carry out massive resistance to racial integration of public schools.

After the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, mandating an end to racial segregation in public schools, a Mississippi Circuit judge named Tom Pickens Brady gave a speech criticizing the decision and urging white citizens of the state to oppose the ruling. Later a justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court, Judge Brady declared integration a threat to the “Southern Way of life,” and his speech was published as a pamphlet titled “Black Monday” (referencing the day of the week the Brown decision was released).

Robert B. “Tut” Patterson, who owned a 1,500-acre plantation near Indianola, Mississippi, was inspired by Brady’s words and soon called for a meeting of concerned white people to try to oppose integration. On July 11, a large group of local white men and women gathered at the Indianola town hall and formed the first White Citizens’ Council. One year later, 250 White Citizens’ Councils had been launched throughout the South, boasting a total of 60,000 members; by 1956, active Councils were operating in 30 states, and by 1957, membership reached 250,000.

“Integration represents darkness, regimentation, totalitarianism, communism and destruction,” Robert Patterson wrote in 1956. “Segregation represents the freedom to choose one’s associates, Americanism, State sovereignty and the survival of the white race. These two ideologies are now engaged in mortal conflict and only one can survive.”

The Councils’ membership of business, religious, and civic leaders defended white supremacy and used social pressure and economic retaliation to intimidate and coerce Black and white people who supported integration. In South Carolina, where 55 Council chapters were active by July 1956, 17 Black parents were fired or evicted from their farms within two weeks of signing a pro-integration petition in the small town of Elloree. In Yazoo County, Mississippi, when 53 Black residents signed an NAACP petition for integration, the local Council published their names in a newspaper ad, leading to harassment, firing, and credit cancellation. In the end, all signers removed their names from the petition and the Yazoo County NAACP disbanded.

The White Citizens’ Councils claimed to not endorse or engage in explicit violence and in that way tried to differentiate themselves from groups like the Ku Klux Klan. The Councils, dubbed the “Uptown KKK,” did largely avoid the Klan’s stigma but shared many goals—and in some cases, members.

The massive resistance by the white community was largely successful in preventing the integration of schools in the South. In the five Deep South states, every single one of 1.4 million Black schoolchildren attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960. By the start of the 1964-65 school year, less than 3% of the South’s Black children attended school with white students, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina that number remained substantially below 1%. In 1967, 13 years after Brown, a report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights observed that white violence and intimidation against Black people “continues to be a deterrent to school desegregation.”

Georgia Governor Lester Maddox rebuffed demands by the Justice Department to immediately integrate the state’s public schools. In a televised address, Gov. Maddox asserted that he would prefer to close all public schools in the state for several years rather than provide equal educational opportunities to Black students. “It would be better to do that and have free children than have slave children,” he added.

The previous day, the Justice Department had ordered the Georgia State Board of Education to present an integration plan for the state’s public school system within 15 days or face “remedies from the United States District Court.”

“So far as I’m concerned, they can take their ultimatum and ram it in their satchels,” Gov. Maddox answered in his televised response, adding that he would be willing to give up the $75 million annual federal aid for education if it meant that Georgia schools would be allowed to continue operating on a segregated basis.

Gov. Maddox spent the rest of the year calling on other elected officials to join his campaign for “freedom of choice” schools and demand that the president return federal control of education to states.

Governor Maddox remained violently opposed to integration throughout the duration of his term in office and advocated for racial segregation until his death. “I want my race preserved,” he said in a 2001 interview, “and I hope most everybody else wants theirs preserved.”

Elected and supported by the majority of white Americans, segregationists like Gov. Maddox operated as private citizens and at the highest levels of government, wielding violence and criminalization to oppose the civil rights movement and target the courageous activists who fueled it.

Weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools are unconstitutional, the Alabama State Board of Education voted unanimously to continue enforcing segregation within the Alabama public school system.

Alabama Governor Seth Gordon Persons introduced the segregation resolution, which extended racial segregation in Alabama public schools throughout the next school term and “until the state educational system is directly involved in a racial suit.” Days after the Alabama board’s decision, the Montgomery Advertiser aptly noted that Gov. Persons and the rest of the board had proceeded after the Brown decision “as though nothing had happened.”

As was the case in many Southern states after Brown, elected leaders in Alabama were determined to preserve racial segregation at all costs, choosing to defy the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling rather than admit Black children into public schools with white children.

Opposition to racial equality was not limited to elected officials; most white Americans, especially in the South, supported segregation. Following Brown, white Americans implemented a strategy of “massive resistance” to desegregation, using intimidation and even lethal attacks to maintain white supremacy. This campaign of resistance in Alabama, which began with Gov. Persons and the school board, and in the South more broadly, was largely successful. In the five Deep South states, every single one of 1.4 million Black school children attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960. By the start of the 1964-65 school year, less than 3% of the South’s Black children attended school with white students, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina that number remained substantially below 1%.

Many of those who fought violently to uphold segregation were not held accountable—including dozens of elected leaders who to this day are valorized through monuments, memorials, streets, and buildings bearing their names. Despite Gov. Persons’s efforts to prevent Black citizens from attending integrated public schools, since 1989 the Alabama State Department of Education has operated out of the Gordon Persons Building, a 60,000-square-foot office building in Montgomery named after the governor by the Alabama Legislature in 1988.

More than 50 years after Congress banned the trafficking of enslaved Africans into the U.S., the slave ship Clotilde arrived in Mobile, Alabama, carrying more than 100 enslaved people from West Africa. Captain William Foster commanded the boat and was later said to be working for Timothy Meaher, a white Mobile shipyard owner who built the Clotilde.

Captain Foster evaded capture by federal authorities by transferring the enslaved Africans to a riverboat and burning and then sinking the Clotilde. The smuggled Africans were subsequently distributed as enslaved property amongst the group of white men who had financed the voyage. Mr. Meaher kept more than 30 of the Africans on Magazine Point, his property north of Mobile. One of those Africans was a man who came to be known as Cudjo Lewis.

In 1861, Mr. Meaher and his partners were prosecuted for illegally trafficking the Africans into the country, but a federal court dismissed the case as the Civil War began. No investigation or remedy ever involved the actual African men and women central to the case; while the federal case was pending, the Africans Mr. Meaher had claimed remained on his property left to fend for themselves and were offered no means of returning to Ghana.

In 1865, after the Civil War ended and slavery was widely abolished, the Clotilde survivors once held by Mr. Meaher were free—but still trapped in a foreign land far from their home. They settled along the outskirts of Mr. Meaher’s property, at a site that came to be known as “Africatown,” and developed a community modeled after the traditions and government they had been forced to leave behind. Unlike the vast majority of newly freed Black people in the country, who had either been born in the U.S. or seized from Africa many decades before, the people of Africatown had a direct, recent connection to their African roots and vivid memories of their culture, language, and customs. Well into the 1950s, descendants of the Clotilde passengers living in Africatown maintained a distinct language and unique community of survival.

Cudjo Lewis lived to be the last surviving Clotilde passenger in Africatown. In 1927, Black anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Alabama to interview Mr. Lewis about his life and produced a manuscript documenting his story. The book was not published in her lifetime, but in 2018, the story was released as Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo. Today, many descendants of the Africans trafficked on the Clotilde continue to live in northern Mobile, and in December 2012, the National Park Service added the Africatown Historic District to the National Register of Historic Places.

A crowd of over 5,000 white people lynched a Black man named Seay J. Miller in Bardwell, Kentucky, for allegedly killing two young white girls, despite ample evidence of his innocence.

Many Black people were lynched across the South under accusation of murder. 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 accusations lodged against Black people were rarely subject to serious scrutiny. Here, suspicion immediately fell on Mr. Miller and led to his death despite available evidence pointing to a different culprit.

Statements from Mr. Miller’s wife and from law enforcement witnesses indicated that Mr. Miller was not even in Kentucky on the date the girls were killed, and multiple eyewitnesses identified the girls’ killer as a white man. Even the girls’ father was unconvinced of Mr. Miller’s guilt. Only one person implicated Mr. Miller, but he originally told police that the person he saw was a white man—as did other witnesses. The witness who implicated Mr. Miller changed his statement only after the county sheriff threatened to charge him as an accomplice if he did not do so. This same sheriff handed Mr. Miller over to a crowd of thousands of white citizens to be lynched. Though charged with protecting the people in their custody, law enforcement almost never used their authority to resist white crowds intent on killing Black people and were instead often complicit in lynchings. In a system where law enforcement did little to protect Black communities, white crowds acted as judge, jury, and executioner.

The mob was determined to ensure Mr. Miller’s death was brutal. Reasoning that immediate lynching by rope would be “too humane,” the white mob fastened a chain weighing over 100 pounds around Mr. Miller’s neck and forced him to walk through town until he fainted from exhaustion.

“I am standing here an innocent man among excited men who do not propose to let the law take its course. I have committed no crime to be deprived of my liberty or life. I am not guilty,” Mr. Miller reportedly said as he was led to his death. “Burning and torture here last but a little while, but if I die with a lie on my soul, I shall be tortured forever. I am innocent.” These were his last recorded words.

Around 3 pm, the heavily armed mob hanged Mr. Miller from a telephone pole, shot hundreds of bullets into his body, then left his corpse hanging from the pole for hours. Afterward, white people cut off his fingers, toes, and ears as “souvenirs” and then burned Mr. Miller’s body in a public fire.

White people used racial terror lynching as a tool to instill fear in the broader Black community. Lynchings were not merely retaliation for a specific crime. Rather, lynchings were meant to send a broader message to the entire Black community of how quickly and easily they could be killed with no protection from the authorities. Following Mr. Miller’s brutal lynching, armed white residents began organizing to force Black residents to leave the area; law enforcement arrested no one for participating in Mr. Miller’s lynching and made no effort to investigate a white suspect in the girls’ killings, but continued to indiscriminately arrest local Black people on unfounded charges.

Within days, famed journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells traveled to Kentucky to investigate Mr. Miller’s lynching. Her account later published in the Chicago Inter Ocean newspaper detailed the cruel brutality of the lynching, the heartbreak of Mr. Miller’s widow, and the racism that allowed lynching in America to continue.

Thus perished another of the many victims of lynch law, but it is the honest, sober belief of many who witnessed the scene, that an innocent man has been barbarously and shockingly put to death in the glare of the nineteenth century civilization, by those who profess to believe in Christianity, law, and order. These and similar deeds of violence are committed under the protection of the American flag and mostly upon the descendants of the negro race. Had Miller been ever so guilty under the laws, he was entitled to a fair trial. But there is absolutely no proof of his guilt. His widow says he left his home in Springfield July 1 to hunt work. She had a letter from him July 5, mailed at Cairo; when next she heard from him he had been murdered. The poor woman seems to have lost her mind since her trouble, and during her first frenzy destroyed this letter, the only clue by which her husband could be traced. She seems incapable of answering questions intelligently and lives in a state of nervous excitement.

How long shall it be said of free America that a man shall not be given time nor opportunity to prove his innocence of crimes charged against him?

On July 6, 2016, 32-year-old Philando Castile was shot and killed by Jeronimo Yanez, a St. Anthony police officer, during a traffic stop for a broken taillight in St. Paul, Minnesota. Mr. Castile, who had a legally registered gun and a lawful permit to carry the weapon, was shot multiple times from close range while inside the car with his fiancée, Diamond Reynolds, and her four-year-old daughter. Officer Yanez’s reckless and deadly actions soon became yet another rallying cry among ongoing outrage and protests regarding police brutality against the African American community.

Later investigation revealed that Officer Yanez initiated the traffic stop that day as a pretext to check Mr. Castile’s and Ms. Reynolds’s identifications. In police dispatch audio recordings, he can be heard saying, “The two occupants just look like people that were involved in a robbery. The driver looks more like one of our suspects, just because of the wide-set nose. I couldn’t get a good look at the passenger.”

At the start of the stop, Officer Yanez asked Mr. Castile if he had a weapon. Mr. Castile responded that he did have a gun and a valid permit, located in his wallet. When Mr. Castile moved to retrieve the items, Officer Yanez ordered him to keep his hands on the wheel; as Mr. Castile complied and moved his hands back up to place them on the steering wheel, Officer Yanez fired at least four shots into the open car window, striking Mr. Castile in the chest and endangering Ms. Reynolds and her young child.

Ms. Reynolds used her cell phone to broadcast a live stream of the aftermath on social media. In the tragic footage, Mr. Castile sits wounded and slumped over in the driver’s seat as Officer Yanez barks orders at him and a little girl tries to console her shocked mother from the back seat.

Police who arrived at the scene following the shooting rendered no medical aid to Mr. Castile as he bled to death, instead comforting the crying police officer who had killed him. Mr. Castile died at the hospital 20 minutes after the shooting and Officer Yanez was placed on medical leave pending an investigation.

Philando Castile was shot and killed less than 24 hours after the videotaped fatal police shooting of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His death added to national protests and also generated local demonstrations, in which community members joined to mourn his death and praise his contributions as a kind and inspirational elementary school employee.

In the years before his death at the hands of police, Mr. Castile had been stopped for minor traffic violations at least 52 times—approximately every four months. These stops resulted in 86 issued violations, most of which were dismissed, and cost Mr. Castile over $6,500 in fees and fines.

In June 2017, Officer Yanez was tried and acquitted of all charges related to Philando Castile’s death. “He didn’t deserve to die the way he did,” Philando Castile’s tearful sister told reporters after the verdict. “I will never have faith in the system.” Weeks later, Officer Yanez was fired from the St. Anthony, Minnesota, police force.

Two white police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, responded to reports that an armed man with a red shirt was selling CDs outside of a local convenience store. The officers arrived and confronted Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old Black man; they proceeded to tase him and pin him to the ground. While Mr. Sterling was down and restrained, someone exclaimed, “He’s going for a gun!” and an officer shot him multiple times in the chest and back.

Abdullah Muflahi, the convenience store owner and eyewitness, later stated that Alton Sterling never threatened the officers or wielded the gun. Mr. Muflahi also stated that Mr. Sterling had started carrying a gun only days prior to the event, because other vendors had recently been robbed.

Though officials later stated that both officers’ body cameras had become dislodged during the incident, multiple bystanders recorded video of the shooting using their cell phone cameras. That footage, and surveillance video from the convenience store, was quickly distributed to news media outlets and uploaded on social media, allowing millions of people to watch Mr. Sterling’s death at the hands of police. The videos consistently show that his arms and hands were fully restrained when he was shot, and he made no movement suggesting a move to grab a weapon.

Alton Sterling’s death, and the discrepancies between police accounts and the video footage, sparked protests all across the country demanding an end to police brutality and the arrest of officers responsible. Within days, the U.S. Justice Department announced that it would launch a civil rights investigation into Mr. Sterling’s death—and in May 2017 reported that the officers would face no federal charges. In March 2018, Louisiana officials announced that no state charges would be filed either. To date, no one has ever been prosecuted for the death of Alton Sterling.