Author: Desto22

A white mob in Clinton, South Carolina, seized a 35-year-old Black man named Norris Dendy from a local jail cell, beat him, and hanged him. The mob then dumped Mr. Dendy’s brutalized body in a churchyard seven miles from Laurens County. Even though several Black people witnessed the mob seizing Mr. Dendy from the local jail, no one was ever held accountable.

On the afternoon of July 4, Mr. Dendy was picnicking at a lakeside resort with family and friends for a Fourth of July celebration. During the day, an altercation broke out between Mr. Dendy and a white man, and Mr. Dendy allegedly struck the white man. A crowd of white men began pursuing Mr. Dendy, and he fled the resort, terrified. The white men at Lake Murray alerted officers in the nearby town of Goldville to pursue and arrest Mr. Dendy. Soon after, officers arrested Mr. Dendy for “drunkenness” and “reckless driving.”

By the evening of July 4, Mr. Dendy remained in the custody of Clinton officials at the local jail, but despite the pursuit of the white mob earlier in the day, his cell remained unguarded and unprotected. During this era of racial terror lynchings, white lynch mobs regularly displayed complete disregard for the legal system, and it was not uncommon for lynch mobs to abduct Black people from courts, jails, and out of police custody. In some cases, police officials were even found to be complicit or active participants in lynchings. Law enforcement officials, charged with protecting those in their custody, often failed to intervene, or as was the case here, completely abdicated their responsibility.

Late in the evening, at least four white men arrived at the unguarded jail, where only a single Black janitor remained, and seized Mr. Dendy from his jail cell. Around the same time, Mr. Dendy’s wife, his five children, and his mother arrived at the jail—likely in an attempt to visit Mr. Dendy—and witnessed the mob break into his jail cell. When they tried to intervene, the lynch mob struck Mr. Dendy’s mother and fired a pistol at Mr. Dendy’s family. The mob then tied Mr. Dendy’s wrists and ankles with rope and kidnapped him, driving him away from the jail.

The mob beat Mr. Dendy’s head so many times that he suffered a fatal fracture at the base of his skull. Unsatisfied, the mob then hanged Mr. Dendy before dumping his body next to the Sardis Church, a churchyard seven miles from Laurens County on what is now Highway 72 east.

Despite accounts from multiple eyewitnesses who witnessed the mob’s action, a year later, a grand jury refused to indict the members of the mob. No one was ever held accountable for the lynching of Mr. Dendy.

Continuing violence raged in East St. Louis, Illinois, as white mobs attacked Black residents and destroyed their homes and other property. The primary outbreak of violence began on July 2, 1917, when white residents of East St. Louis and other nearby communities ambushed African American workers as they left factories during a shift change. The National Guard was called in to suppress the violence but they were ordered not to shoot at white rioters; some troops reportedly joined the mobs targeting the Black community.

In 1916 and 1917, thousands of African Americans moved from the rural South to East St. Louis in search of industrial work. White residents, along with the city’s political leaders, attempted to discourage Black migration and prohibited railroads from transporting Black people to the region. When these attempts failed, white residents used violence to intimidate, expel, and destroy the African American population.

From July 2 through July 5, 1917, at least 39—and some estimate as many as 200—African Americans were shot, hanged, beaten to death, or burned alive after being driven into burning buildings. The riots caused more than $400,000 in property damage and prompted 6,000 African Americans—more than half of East St. Louis’s African American population—to flee the city. While 105 people were indicted on charges related to the riot, only 20 members of the white mob received prison sentences for their roles in perpetrating the extreme violence and killings.

Denmark Vesey, a free Black carpenter, was executed in Charleston, South Carolina, for planning to emancipate enslaved people. Weeks before his execution, Mr. Vesey was accused of designing a rebellion to emancipate thousands of enslaved Black people from Charleston and the surrounding plantations. Even though no rebellion ever occurred and no white people were harmed in any way, Mr. Vesey and 34 other people allegedly involved were executed.

In 1781, a Carolina-based slave trader named Joseph Vesey “purchased” Mr. Vesey, who was in his mid-teens at the time. Mr. Vesey was enslaved in Charleston for many years until he won a street lottery in 1799 that allowed him to “buy” his freedom. However, the man who enslaved his wife refused to allow him to “purchase” her freedom, so she remained in bondage. He became a carpenter and was a well-respected community member in Charleston.

In 1818, Mr. Vesey co-founded an independent African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Charleston that quickly attracted a congregation of over 1,800 members, making it one of the largest Black churches in the country.

After Mr. Vesey was executed, white Charleston officials claimed the Black church had played a crucial role in the planning. They ordered the AME members to disperse and burned the church to the ground. Black churches were soon outlawed in Charleston; the AME church was the last Black church to exist there until after the Civil War. In 1865, under the leadership of Mr. Vesey’s son, Robert Vesey, the church was finally rebuilt. Nearly 200 years after Mr. Vesey’s execution, in 2015, a white 21-year-old attended bible study at the church—renamed the Emanuel AME Church—and opened fire on the other worshippers in attendance, all of whom were Black.

A white sheriff in Camden, Alabama, forced people to leave and then padlocked the doors of the Antioch Baptist Church—a Black church where leaders were discussing civil rights—even though he did not have the authority to do so.

Community members from the Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) group had been meeting at the church for several months, working to promote Black voter registration in Alabama and the rest of the South. According to the 1960 census, Black residents made up over 75% of the population of Wilcox County. However, because of established practices and laws passed with the intent of suppressing the Black vote—which were enforced in discriminatory ways—no Black people in Wilcox County were registered to vote during the 1964 election.

When people at the Antioch Baptist Church began registering Black voters, they were quickly targeted by the white community. Two days before Sheriff P.C. Jenkins evicted people from the church, a group of white men had broken into the building and beaten two Black teenagers, inflicting injuries so severe that they were both hospitalized. Rather than providing protection from this violence, on July 1, Sheriff Jenkins announced that the church had been the cause of “too much disturbance,” and gave people only a few hours to clear out their belongings before putting a padlock on the door.

Though Sheriff Jenkins claimed that at least one church leader had expressed opposition to having the church involved in civil rights activism, the following day the Chairman of the Board of Deacons denied that claim, and two weeks later the congregation and board of the church unanimously voted to support the church’s involvement in registering Black voters.

On June 30, 1829, officials in Cincinnati, Ohio, issued a notice requiring Black residents to adhere to laws passed in 1804 and 1807 aimed at preventing “fugitive slaves” and freed Black people from settling in Ohio, forcing hundreds of Black people to flee.

The 1804 law required every Black person in Ohio to obtain proof of freedom and to register with the clerk’s office in his or her county of residence. It also prohibited employers from hiring a Black person without proof of freedom, imposed a fine on those who hid “fugitive slaves,” and provided to any person asserting “a legal claim” to a Black person a procedure for “retaking and possessing his or her Black or mulatto servant.” The 1807 amendments to the law required Black people seeking residence in Cincinnati to post $500 bond guaranteed by two white men. In addition to increasing fines for employing a Black person without proof of freedom and assisting “fugitive slaves,” the 1807 amendments prohibited Black people from testifying in court against white people.

The 1804 law and 1807 amendment failed to stem the growth of Ohio’s Black population, and by 1829, Black residents represented at least 10% of Cincinnati’s population. In another attempt to discourage Black residence in Cincinnati, officials posted a notice informing the public that the 1807 law would be “rigidly enforced” and warning against helping any Black person in violation of the law. The notice effectively sanctioned mob violence against the Black community, stating, “The full cooperation of the public is expected in carrying these laws into full effect.”

Recognizing the notice as a threat, hundreds of Black people organized, requested, and were granted asylum in Canada.

Early in the morning on Sunday, June 29, 1958, a bomb exploded outside Bethel Street Baptist Church on the north side of Birmingham, Alabama, in one of the segregated city’s African American neighborhoods. The church’s pastor, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, was a civil rights activist working to eliminate segregation in Birmingham.

Bethel Street Baptist had been bombed before—on Christmas Day 1956—and since then several volunteers had kept watch over the neighborhood every night. Around 1:30 am, Will Hall, who was on watch that night, was alerted to smoke coming from the church. He discovered a paint can containing dynamite near the church wall, which he quickly carried into the street before taking cover.

The paint can had between 15 and 20 sticks of dynamite inside, and as it exploded it blew a two-foot hole in the street and broke the windows of several houses. The church’s stained glass windows, which were still being repaired from an earlier bombing, were also damaged.

Police told church leaders there were few clues as to the culprit’s identity or motive, but a passerby reported seeing a car full of white men in the area shortly before the bomb was discovered. The Rev. Shuttlesworth praised Mr. Hall for his brave actions and quick intervention, which surely saved the church from ruin, while also condemning the attack. “This shows that America has a long way to go before it can try to be called democratic,” the Rev. Shuttlesworth said.

On this day in 1962, a hotel in Atlanta refused to provide a room to Dr. Ralph Bunche because he was Black. Dr. Bunche was an under-secretary-general of the United Nations at the time and the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for mediating an armistice in the Middle East.

While the City of Atlanta no longer officially mandated segregated public accommodations, its policy was to let each business decide individually whether to integrate. Nearly all of the city’s hotels refused, including the Dinkler Plaza Hotel, where Dr. Bunche attempted to stay during the NAACP’s annual convention before his request was denied.

Atlanta hotels also refused accommodation to many of the other convention attendees in the leadup to the event. Dr. Bunche and others were forced instead to find lodging in private homes or the dormitories of local historically Black colleges.

In a speech at the convention, Dr. Bunche denounced the “arbitrarily imposed stigma of color” and stated that “No individual Negro can be free from the degradation of racial discrimination until every Negro is free from it.” He also urged the press to cover all instances of racial exclusion—not just ones in which Black people of prominence were involved.

In response to the Atlanta hotels’ refusal to host Black patrons, convention members launched a picketing campaign in front of segregated hotels and restaurants in the city. Additionally, the NAACP sued the Atlanta Cabana Hotel, arguing that the hotel’s segregation policy violated the Fourteenth Amendment. A federal judge ruled that the hotel’s refusal of Black customers was constitutional because it had been adopted voluntarily by a private business and not a state actor.

Voluntary racial segregation by private businesses was formally outlawed with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a law many white Georgians fiercely and violently opposed. The Act was upheld later that year after the Heart of Atlanta Motel sued the federal government to try to continue its policy of barring Black guests.

A Walton County mob of several hundred unmasked white men lynched two Black men named Tom Allen and Joe Watts after a local white judge—Charles H. Brand—refused to allow state guardsmen to be present to prevent mob action.

Judge Brand had been aware of the threat of mob violence for weeks. Mr. Allen, who had been accused of assaulting a white woman, had been held in Atlanta for safekeeping because of the threat. In early June, Mr. Allen was brought to Monroe for trial with the protection of state troops from the governor, but Judge Brand “resented” the presence of troops, postponed the trial because of the protection being offered, and sent Mr. Allen back to Atlanta. When Mr. Allen was ordered back to Monroe for trial on June 27, Judge Brand refused an offer of protection from the state troops. Consequently, Mr. Allen was protected only by two officers on the train.

Aware that Mr. Allen no longer had the protection of state troops, the white mob intercepted the train bound for Monroe and seized Mr. Allen from the two officers charged with protecting him. The mob tied Mr. Allen to a telegraph pole and shot him while the passengers of the train and hundreds in the mob looked on.

The mob then proceeded to march six miles to the town jail where another Black man named Joe Watts was being held. Some newspapers reported that Mr. Watts was an alleged accomplice of Mr. Allen, while others noted Mr. Watts had been arrested for having “acted suspiciously” outside of a white man’s home but had not been charged with a crime. The white mob stormed the jail without resistance from the jailers, removed Mr. Watts, and lynched him as well, hanging him from a tree and shooting him repeatedly. Both men had maintained that they were innocent, and contemporary newspapers reported that there was no evidence against them.

In most cases of racial terror lynching throughout this era, the criminal legal system failed to intervene or use force to repel lynch mobs, even when the threat of lynching was evident and underway. Despite their legal responsibility to equally protect anyone in their custody, law enforcement and judicial officials were often found to be complicit in the seizure or lynchings of Black men, women, and children by abdicating their responsibility to prevent mob abductions. In this case, Judge Brand refused to allow for the protection of the state troops that had successfully transported and protected Mr. Allen from being lynched just three weeks before, making it easier for the white mob to lynch these men. Three months earlier, in Judge Brand’s hometown of Lawrenceville in Gwinnett County, he had also refused the assistance of state troops to protect a Black man named Charles Hale, who, left without the protection of those troops, was taken by a white mob and lynched.

Despite his failure to protect these men, he continued to serve as a judge until 1917. In 1917, Judge Brand was elected to Congress to represent Georgia’s 8th Congressional District, where he served seven consecutive terms.

The legislative committee of the territory then known as “Oregon Country” passed the first of a series of “Black exclusion” laws. The law dictated that free African Americans were prohibited from moving into Oregon Country and those who violated the ban could be whipped “not less than twenty nor more than thirty-nine stripes.”

That December, the law was amended to substitute forced labor for whipping. It specified that African Americans who stayed within Oregon would be hired at public auction and that the “hirer” would be responsible for removing the “hiree” out of the territory after the prescribed period of forced service was rendered. This law was enforced even though slavery and involuntary servitude were illegal in Oregon Country.

The preamble to a later exclusion law, passed in 1849, explained legislators’ beliefs that “it would be highly dangerous to allow free Negroes and mulattoes to reside in the Territory, or to intermix with Indians, instilling … feelings of hostility toward the white race.”

The Oregon Constitution of 1857 included racial exclusion provisions against African Americans and Asian Americans. The document declared that African Americans outside of Oregon were not permitted to “come, reside, or be within” the state; prohibited African Americans from owning property or performing contracts; and prescribed punishment for those who employed, “harbor[ed],” or otherwise helped African Americans.

Between 1840 and 1860, in the midst of this exclusion and discrimination, African Americans never constituted more than 1% of the population in the American Pacific Northwest. Oregon, which joined the Union as a “free state” on February 14, 1859, stands as a clear illustration that racial discrimination and oppression against Black people was also widespread in jurisdictions where slavery was illegal. The 2020 U.S. Census reported that only 3.2% of Oregon residents were Black.

In a 5-4 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and effectively gutted one of the nation’s most important and successful civil rights laws.

Despite adoption in 1870 of the Fifteenth Amendment barring racial discrimination in voting, Southern states and others used poll taxes, literacy tests, and violence to deny Black Americans the right to vote for another century. Unchecked and systematic voter suppression targeted African American communities in the South for generations.

After decades of organized civil rights activism, the Voting Rights Act (VRA) finally became law on August 6, 1965. It outlawed discriminatory barriers to voting like poll taxes and literacy tests and also imposed strict oversight upon states and districts with histories of voter discrimination. The new law quickly proved extremely effective; Black registration rates soon rose throughout the South, and Black officials were elected at the highest rates since Reconstruction. In this way, the Act directly confronted and addressed a century of racist voting policies. Section 4 of the Act required jurisdictions with the worst records of discrimination to obtain “preclearance” from the federal government before changing voting laws.

However, in Shelby County v. Holder, Alabama officials argued that preclearance was no longer constitutional or necessary, and the Supreme Court agreed. Chief Justice Roberts reasoned for the majority that “things have changed dramatically” since 1965—voting tests are illegal, racial disparities in voter turnout and registration have diminished, and people of color hold elected office “in record numbers.”

Yet voting discrimination—and the need for the Voting Rights Act—continues in the present day, the dissenters pointed out. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in dissent that covered jurisdictions continue to propose voting law changes that are rejected under the VRA, “auguring that barriers to minority voting would quickly resurface were the preclearance remedy eliminated.”

The decision drastically reduced the VRA’s power to combat “second-generation barriers” to voting, like racial gerrymandering, which minimize the impact of minority votes. “The sad irony of today’s decision lies in its utter failure to grasp why the VRA has proven effective,” wrote Justice Ginsburg. “The Court appears to believe that the VRA’s success in eliminating the specific devices extant in 1965 means that preclearance is no longer needed. With that belief, and the argument derived from it, history repeats itself.”

The decision unleashed a surge in voter suppression measures—including strict voter ID laws, cutting voting times, restricting registration, and purging voter rolls—that are undermining voter participation by people of color today.