Author: Desto22

A white mob in Manchester, Tennessee, lynched a 35-year-old Black man named Richard Wilkerson after he allegedly slapped a white man who assaulted a Black woman at an African American dance.

Mr. Wilkerson had been at a Black church festival with his wife when several white men who had been drinking entered the event. When the white men began accosting some of the Black women in attendance—including Mr. Wilkerson’s wife—Mr. Wilkerson intervened and allegedly slapped one of the men.

Soon after, the group of white men went to Mr. Wilkerson’s home and began destroying all of his belongings. The mob “tore up everything he had, tore it literally all to pieces,” the sheriff later told newspapers.

Unsatisfied, the white men then returned to the church dance where they found and grabbed Mr. Wilkerson, along with an unidentified young Black man. The mob drove the two men roughly 15 miles from town, where they shot Mr. Wilkerson several times before mutilating his body. The young Black man who was with Mr. Wilkerson was also shot but managed to escape.

Among the eight men who lynched Mr. Wilkerson was a 14-year-old teenager who later shared the names of the other members of the mob with officers. Several months later, the eight men were convicted of manslaughter. One newspaper noted it was the first case on record in Tennessee where white men had been convicted for lynching a Black person.

A white mob of more than 4,000 people in Wilmington, Delaware, burned a Black man named George White to death before he could stand trial. Mr. White was arrested and accused of killing a young white woman. He adamantly denied any involvement in the crime but was denied the opportunity to defend himself in court.

During the era of racial terror, many Black people were lynched after being accused of murder. The mere suggestion of Black-on-white violence could provoke mob violence and lynching. Here, despite Mr. White’s insistence that he was innocent, Wilmington residents were determined to lynch him without delay.

Within one week of Mr. White’s arrest, two lynch mobs attempted to abduct him from the workhouse where he was being held. White Wilmington residents talked openly about these lynching plans. In a sermon on June 21, local white pastor Robert Elwood urged white residents to exact swift public vengeance by lynching Mr. White. A lynch mob began forming the next day, and its members spent the next two days meticulously planning the public spectacle lynching that took place on June 23. Despite this public planning, in which mob members even shared their plans in advance with police officers, authorities charged with protecting Mr. White did not relocate him to a different jail or take any other measures to prevent the lynching.

In the early morning hours of June 23, the lynch mob had grown to thousands and included people who had traveled from out of town to participate. The mob stormed the workhouse where Mr. White was being held and threatened to destroy every cell to get him unless authorities turned him over. Officers ultimately chose to protect the property of the jail rather than the life of a man they had a legal duty to protect; after leading the mob to his cell, the officers turned Mr. White over and “stood by to await the inevitable.”

The mob removed Mr. White from the jail and led him, chained, through a crowd of thousands to the pyre built outside the jail, where he was bound with rope and forced into the open flames. As Mr. White burned to death, the crowd of white men, women, and children there to participate in the lynching threw rocks at him and cheered.

After Mr. White was dead, members of the mob continued to shoot at his charred body, and lynching participants took pieces of his remains as “souvenirs”; a local white physician reportedly took Mr. White’s skull and right foot to display in the window of a local saloon.

Though thousands of known residents were complicit in the lynching of George White, no one was ever held responsible. Mr. White is one of over 4,400 victims of racial terror lynching killed in the U.S., and more than 300 victims killed outside the states of the former Confederacy, between 1877 and 1950.

In 2019, the Delaware Social Justice Remembrance Coalition gathered with hundreds of community members to unveil a historical marker memorializing Mr. White.

A white mob lynched nine Black men in Sabine County, Texas, within a 24-hour period. The reign of racial terror began when a white farmer was shot to death in his home by an unknown assailant on the evening of June 21.

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.

In this instance, six Black men—Jerry Evans, William Johnson, William Manuel, Moses Spellman, Cleveland Williams, and Frank Williams—were already in jail, accused of being involved in a completely unrelated shooting of another local white man. Early on the morning of June 22, a mob of about 200 white men broke into the jail and seized them from police custody. Five of the men were hanged from a tree outside of the jail, and Mr. Williams, the sixth, was shot in the back as he tried to escape.

Later that night, marauding white men shot and killed a Black man named Bill McCoy near the white farmer’s home and shot and killed two unidentified Black men and threw their bodies into a creek. A Black church and school house in the town were also burned to the ground.

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. White lynch mobs regularly displayed complete disregard for the legal system, abducting Black people from courts, jails, and out of police custody. Law enforcement officials, charged with protecting those in their custody, often failed to intervene, as was the case here, and sometimes even participated in mob violence.

Racial terror sought to maintain white supremacy and dominance by instilling fear in the entire Black community through brutal violence that was often unpredictable and arbitrary. It was common during this era for a lynch mob’s focus to expand beyond a specific person accused of an offense and to target any and all Black people. In a system where lynchings regularly went unpunished and law enforcement did little to protect Black communities, white mobs acted as judge, jury, and executioner, killing Black women, men, and children with no expectation of punishment.

The Black people killed on June 22, 1908, were nine of at least 336 documented lynching victims between 1865 and 1950 in the state of Texas.

A 26-year-old Black man named Jesse Thornton referred to a passing police officer by his name: Doris Rhodes. When the officer, a white man, overheard Mr. Thornton and ordered him to clarify his statement, Mr. Thornton attempted to correct himself by referring to the officer as “Mr. Doris Rhodes.” Unsatisfied, the officer hurled a racial slur at Mr. Thornton while knocking him to the ground, then arrested him and took him into the city jail as a mob of white men formed just outside.

Mr. Thornton tried to escape and managed to flee a short distance while the mob quickly pursued, firing gunshots and pelting him with bricks, bats, and stones. When Mr. Thornton was wounded in the gunfire and eventually collapsed, the mob dumped him into a truck and drove to an isolated street where they dragged him into a nearby swamp and shot him again. A local fisherman found Mr. Thornton’s decomposing, vulture-ravaged body a week later in the Patsaliga River, near Tuskegee Institute.

Dr. Charles A.J. McPherson, a local leader in the Birmingham branch of the NAACP, wrote a detailed report on Mr. Thornton’s lynching. NAACP lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall provided the Department of Justice with the report and requested a federal investigation. The Department in turn instructed the FBI to determine whether law enforcement or other officials were complicit in the lynching, but there is no record that anyone was ever prosecuted for Mr. Thornton’s murder.

NAACP leader Elbert Williams was abducted from his home in Brownsville, Tennessee, by a group of white men led by the local sheriff and the night marshal. Three days later, Mr. Williams’s lifeless and brutalized body was found in the nearby Hatchie River. He was 31 years old.

Discrimination and violence had prevented African Americans from voting in Brownsville since 1884. By 1940, Black people made up 75% of the 19,000 people living in town, and they wanted their voices to be heard. In May 1940, members of the Brownsville chapter of the NAACP organized a voting rights drive. Elbert Williams was one of its leaders.

A few days before Mr. Williams’s lynching, fellow NAACP leader Elisha Davis was abducted from his home by the same group of white men. Mr. Davis survived the attack but was ordered to leave Brownsville or face death upon return. Soon after, when Mr. Williams refused to leave town or cease his voting rights work, he was killed.

In the months following the lynching of Elbert Williams, up to 40 more Black families were permanently driven from the community under threats of violence from the white mob. African Americans who remained in Brownsville were prohibited from meeting in groups, even for church services, and two African American men were beaten to death after being arrested by the same night marshal who had helped to abduct Mr. Williams and Mr. Davis.

Despite investigations launched by local authorities, the Department of Justice, and the FBI, charges were never lodged against the well-known men responsible. According to one contemporary observer, the perpetrators of the abuses and murders “can be seen in Brownsville each day going about their work as though they had killed only a rabbit.” As a result of the harassment, violence, and murder of its leaders, the Brownsville NAACP dissolved in 1940, and a new chapter was not formed until 1961.

After white Southerners had extended the enslavement of countless Black people by concealing the Civil War’s end for more than two months, Union troops arrived in Texas. For the first time, local Black residents learned that the Confederacy had lost the war and that they were free under the Emancipation Proclamation.

Although President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had theoretically freed enslaved Black people in Confederate territories when it was issued in 1863, that declaration was largely unenforceable in locations that remained under Confederate control. The Proclamation had almost no effect in Texas and other Confederate states that rejected the freedom of enslaved people—especially on plantations that had little contact with Union forces.

Despite the limits of the Proclamation’s reach during war time, the Confederate Army’s surrender on April 9, 1865, should have immediately freed enslaved Black people in all states and territories where the Proclamation applied. The Proclamation had exempted the so-called “border states” of Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri, so even Union victory did not affect slavery in those areas.

Where Confederate defeat did mean emancipation, white Southerners committed to white supremacy and the continued exploitation of enslaved Black people used violence, misinformation, and threats to keep Black people in bondage. Union troops’ arrival in Texas on June 19, 1865, brought news of freedom to Black men, women, and children who had waited far too long. That date came to be known as “Juneteenth” in the African American community and has for generations remained a day of remembrance, joyous celebration, and hope: remembrance of the hardships and pain of enslavement; joyous celebration of survival; and hope for the opportunity and peace that freedom ought to bring.

Juneteenth does not denote a struggle completed or a finish line reached. Black Americans faced many threats to their liberty and their lives in the years after the Civil War and face continued injustice still.

Slavery did not become illegal throughout the entire U.S. until ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment on December 6, 1865—though it’s important to note that the amendment’s language, still in force today, created an exception authorizing involuntary servitude “as punishment for crime.” Even after the Thirteenth Amendment became national law, many Southern states including Kentucky and Delaware resisted ratifying the provision for decades. Mississippi, the last state to do so, refused to pass ratification legislation until 1995 and didn’t formally file the passage until 2013.

Black Americans quickly learned that freedom’s potential, celebrated with such hope on Juneteenth, would take more than one law or one day to fulfill. Though the end of the Civil War brought the liberation of formerly enslaved people and drastically altered the political and social landscape of the nation, what followed emancipation would determine whether the U.S. would seize or waste this opportunity to lay a new foundational commitment to true liberty and equality while remedying the harmful and unjust legacies enslavement left behind. The Reconstruction period emerged to answer that question.

Though Reconstruction began with promise and marked achievements, the era proved to be short lived, dangerous, and deadly. As documented in EJI’s report, Reconstruction in America, at least 2,000 African Americans were victims of racial terror lynching during the 12-year period from 1865-1876. As Reconstruction-era policies enforced Black Americans’ new rights of citizenship and protections from enslavement, white Americans formed counter-movements that sought to restore white supremacy using racial violence and political discrimination. Intent on terrorizing Black communities into submission and fear, white mobs were determined to ensure that emancipation would not bring Black people political participation, social equality, or economic independence. Faced with defeat in the Civil War and upheaval of the oppressive racial hierarchy, white Southerners waged a campaign of violence targeting African Americans across the South that reached epidemic proportions in the summer of 1865 and continued largely unchecked throughout the first half of the 20th century.

In 1877, just 12 years after the abolition of American chattel slavery and as part of a political compromise, the U.S. government abandoned its promise to protect newly emancipated Black people and withdrew from defending all statehouses in the South. This decision marked the end of Reconstruction and the brief period of multiracial democracy it had represented. Instead, Black men, women, and children were left vulnerable to racial terror and disenfranchisement that would last for generations. From 1877 to 1950, at least 4,400 African Americans were victims of racial terror lynchings while the nation’s legal system ignored the violence, allowing white lynch mobs to kill with impunity.

Today, more than 150 years after the enactment of the 13th Amendment, very little has been done to address the legacy of slavery and its continued legacies visible in contemporary inequality and injustice. Though the enslavement of Black people created wealth, opportunity, and prosperity for millions of white Americans and gave birth to the American economy, its impact is largely obscured and ignored. Slavery in America traumatized and devastated millions of people and created false narratives of racial difference that still persist today. These narratives, including the ideology of white supremacy, lasted well beyond slavery and fueled decades of racial terror, segregation, mass incarceration, and inequality.

As an opportunity for national reflection, Juneteenth invites us all to confront the promises of liberty and justice that remain largely unfulfilled in this nation. Through this reflection, we can recognize and commit to addressing the legacies of racial injustice present in our lives today. Strengthening our understanding of racial history empowers us to create a healthier discourse about race in America and foster an era of truth and justice.

Sheriff’s deputies in Gadsden, Alabama, used electric cattle prods on and arrested over 450 Black protesters who were holding a sit-in to oppose segregation.

Beginning in the fall of 1962, small groups of young Black people in Gadsden began staging sit-ins and picketing to protest segregated public accommodations and Black voter suppression. These peaceful demonstrations continued growing and extended into the following year. In response, authorities in Gadsden issued an injunction against sit-in demonstrations.

On June 18, 1963, law enforcement arrested 200 protesters during a sit-in at a downtown store, and another 250 were arrested for lying down in front of the nearby county courthouse. The protesters offered no resistance as they were taken to the county jail in patrol wagons.

Nevertheless, as sheriff’s deputies took the activists to jail, they tortured many of them—including several children—with the electric tips of cattle prods.

Authorities in Gadsden administered shocks to protesters’ bare feet, necks, stomachs, and genitals, sometimes laughing while doing so. “In Alabama, there was a sadistic kind of joy in inflicting pain,” Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activist Prathia Hall later wrote about the incident.

This assault on protesters in Gadsden was the first time Southern police had used cattle prods on a large group of civil rights demonstrators. The weapon later became a symbol of white resistance to the civil rights movement in the South.

In the months following, Gadsden police repeatedly used cattle prods on activists who continued to oppose segregation in the city despite the threat of violence.

A 21-year-old white man named Dylann Roof entered the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and sat in on a Bible study session for about an hour before opening fire on the other participants, killing nine people. All of the worshippers were Black.

Roof kept a personal website where he posted images of himself alongside Confederate flags and icons and expressed racist views. Before the Charleston church massacre, he uploaded a manifesto to the site in which he praised George Zimmerman for shooting Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black 17-year-old. Prior to the attack, he allegedly told friends that he hoped to incite a “race war.”

The nine victims killed in the shooting were Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson, and Clementa C. Pinckney, the senior church pastor and a South Carolina state senator. Five people survived the shooting.

The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, known as “Mother Emanuel” to many, is one of the largest and most storied Black congregations in the South. Just six years after its founding in 1816, the church was burned down after it was discovered that Denmark Vesey, one of the church’s founders and ministers, was planning a large-scale rebellion. Black churches were outlawed in Charleston in 1834, but after the Civil War ended in 1865, the Emanuel Church reopened.

President Barack Obama delivered the eulogy at the funeral service for the Rev. Pinckney, and the church has continued to be a strong presence within the Black community in Charleston. The Rev. Anthony Thompson, whose wife Myra was killed in the shooting, said the racial attack “forced a reckoning with Charleston’s history, and demeanor.” He has devoted himself to communal truth-telling initiatives ever since, inviting community members to engage in a more honest conversation about Charleston’s history and legacy of racial violence.

George Stinney Jr., a 90-pound Black 14-year-old boy, was executed in the electric chair in Columbia, South Carolina. Three months earlier, on March 24, George and his sister were playing in their yard when two young white girls briefly approached and asked where they could find flowers. Hours later, the girls failed to return home, and a search party was organized to find them. George joined the search party and casually mentioned to a bystander that he had seen the girls earlier. The following morning, their dead bodies were found in a shallow ditch.

George was immediately arrested for the murders and subjected to hours of interrogation without his parents or an attorney. The sheriff later claimed that George confessed to the murders, though no written or signed statement was presented. George’s father was fired from his job, and his family was forced to flee amidst threats on their lives. On March 26, a mob attempted to lynch George, but he had already been moved to an out-of-town jail.

On April 24, George Stinney faced a sham trial virtually alone. No African Americans were allowed inside the courthouse, and his court-appointed attorney, a tax lawyer with political aspirations, failed to call a single witness. The prosecution presented the sheriff’s testimony regarding George’s alleged confession as the only evidence of his guilt. An all-white jury deliberated for 10 minutes before convicting George Stinney of murder, and the judge promptly sentenced the 14-year-old to death. Despite appeals from Black advocacy groups, Governor Olin Johnston refused to intervene. George Stinney remains the youngest person executed in the U.S. in the 20th century.

Seventy years later, a South Carolina judge held a two-day hearing, which included testimony from three of George’s surviving siblings, members of the search party, and several experts. The state argued at the hearing that—despite all the unfairness in this case—George’s conviction should stand. The trial court disagreed and vacated the conviction, finding that George Stinney was fundamentally deprived of due process throughout the proceedings against him, that the alleged confession “simply cannot be said to be known and voluntary,” that the court-appointed attorney “did little to nothing” to defend George, and that his representation was “the essence of being ineffective.” The judge concluded: “I can think of no greater injustice.”

On June 14, 1920, Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie, three Black men in their early 20s, were lynched by a mob of white residents in Duluth, Minnesota. The three men were in town working with a traveling circus when two white teenagers falsely claimed that they and three other Black circus workers had attacked them and raped a local white woman. Newspapers reported the alleged assault, and false rumors soon spread that the woman had died from her injuries. The six men were arrested and jailed, even though there was no evidence that an assault had occurred.

In 1920, the Black population of Duluth, Minnesota, numbered 495 out of 98,000 residents. Many had been recruited from the South to work at United States Steel’s local plant, while others worked as janitors, servers, porters, and assemblers. Despite their small numbers, Black Duluth residents endured significant discrimination; they received lower pay for their labor and were forced to live in substandard housing in segregated neighborhoods. As in other Northern cities during the era of Black migration, many white workers in Duluth resented the presence of Black workers, and racial tension was high.

In this environment, sensational reports of Black men raping a white woman set off a mob mentality among white people in Duluth. On the evening of June 15, a mob of 5,000 to 10,000 white people gathered at the jail and seized three of the arrested Black men: Isaac McGhie, Elmer Jackson, and Elias Clayton. The mob beat and lynched them all, hanging the men from a light pole in downtown Duluth. The Minnesota National Guard arrived the next morning to secure the area and guard the surviving prisoners, but no one was ever arrested or convicted for the lynchings.