Author: Desto22

After objections from white residents, the Lucas Theater, Weis Theater, and Savannah Theater in Savannah, Georgia, announced that they would be restoring segregation policies that barred Black people from attending film screenings on an equal basis with white customers.

Two of the three theaters completely banned Black people from attending movie showings, while the third restricted Black customers to balcony seats. In spring 1963, all three theaters announced plans to implement a policy of racial integration. On June 3, the theaters for the first time opened their doors to all patrons equally regardless of race. White community members committed to segregation protested the change by picketing at Savannah City Hall.

Less than 24 hours later, the three theaters quickly reversed themselves and announced plans to restore their segregation practices the next day. One of the theater owners explained that he was withdrawing from the integration agreement “until other businesses also feel that it’s time to integrate.”

Savannah Mayor Malcolm MacLean condoned the continued racist policies and issued a statement maintaining that the theaters were “free to do whatever they wanted on the segregation issue.” Throughout the segregation era, it was common for local elected officials and white residents to resist integration even if segregation violated the law. Intense commitment to racial hierarchy defined many communities throughout the American South.

A mob of 1,500 white people lynched a Black man named Sam Bush on the courthouse lawn in Decatur, Illinois. Following the lynching, members of the mob distributed pieces of the rope used to hang Mr. Bush to the crowd as “souvenirs”—among those in the crowd were doctors, lawyers, and at least one minister.

The prior day, after news spread that a Black man had allegedly sexually assaulted a white woman, Mr. Bush was targeted, arrested, and held in the Macon County jail. 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. Almost 25% of all lynchings involved allegations of inappropriate behavior between a Black man and a white woman that was characterized as “assault” or “sexual assault.” Allegations against Black people were rarely subject to scrutiny.

That evening, about 500 white people descended upon the jail, and 25 unmasked white men broke into the jail. Although multiple jailers were on duty and charged with protecting the men and women in their custody, they neglected to use any type of force to ward off the mob, who, for 20 minutes, sought to break down Mr. Bush’s jail cell door with hammers and chisels. During this era, it was not uncommon for lynch mobs to seize their victims out of police hands. In some cases, police officials were even found to be complicit or active participants in lynchings. Here, newspaper accounts reported that, despite the presence of dozens of law enforcement agents, “no one seemed to care much … [and] there was no talk of resistance” to disrupt the impending plans of the mob.

As the mob attempted to seize him from the jail, Mr. Bush proclaimed, “Gentlemen, you are killing an innocent man.” Undeterred, the mob dragged Mr. Bush from his jail cell.

By the time Mr. Bush was brought outside, 1,500 white people had gathered in front of a telegraph post directly in front of the courthouse lawn to lynch Mr. Bush. In the final moments of Mr. Bush’s life, he knelt to pray and, according to newspapers, called “on Jesus to come and take his soul and forgive the men who were murdering him.” The mob then stripped Mr. Bush of his clothes, forced him atop a car, and hanged him.

Though courts are supposed to be committed to equal justice under law, judges throughout the country have oftentimes been more committed to racial hierarchy than to the Constitution. On June 2, 1961, a Virginia judge upheld racial segregation in courtrooms, dismissing a lawsuit filed by three Black men who challenged the practice, describing as “totally without merit” their allegation that segregating courtrooms was degrading.

After being forced to sit separately from white community members in the municipal court in Petersburg, Virginia, George Wells, the Rev. R. G. Williams, and the Rev. Dr. Milton H. Reid sought an injunction to prevent Judge Herbert H. Gilliam, the chief judge of Petersburg’s municipal court, from continuing to subject Black community members to segregated seating. The lawsuit asserted that there was “no moral or legal justification for courtroom segregation,” calling the practice “degrading and shameful.”

Federal Judge Oren R. Lewis dismissed the lawsuit on June 2, 1961, describing the allegations of mistreatment as meritless since an equal number of seats were provided to each of the segregated sections for Black and white community members. He added that segregated seating in courtrooms was a “long established practice,” and that Judge Gilliam had kept Black and white people separate to “preserve order and decorum in his courtroom.”

The U.S. Supreme Court played a powerful role in protecting discriminatory Jim Crow laws for decades and shielding the South from challenges to its racial caste system. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court’s most well-known decision upholding segregation, the Court rejected Mr. Plessy’s argument that forced racial separation branded Black people as inferior and countered, “If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.”

The Black community of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was left in ruins following several days of violent attacks by white mobs outraged that Black residents had organized to protect a Black man from lynching.

Tulsa’s Greenwood District, known as “Negro Wall Street,” was considered one of the wealthiest Black communities in the nation in 1921. Many residents worked and did business in central Tulsa, coming into contact with white men and women—some of whom resented their prosperity.

On May 30, while working in a building in downtown Tulsa, 19-year-old Dick Rowland boarded an elevator operated by Sarah Page, a 17-year-old white girl. When a store clerk heard a scream, he ran to the elevator to find Ms. Page. The clerk assumed that the young Black man in the elevator had tried to attack Ms. Page and quickly called police to arrest Dick Rowland.

Ms. Page told police that Mr. Rowland had startled her by touching her arm but insisted she did not want to press charges. Rumors soon spread, however, and turned into a sensationalized allegation that Dick Rowland had attempted rape. Police arrested Mr. Rowland at his Greenwood home and jailed him at the courthouse. The next night, a mob of white men gathered at the jail seeking to lynch him, but 30 armed Black men from Greenwood were there to ensure that the sheriff and deputies were able to protect Dick Rowland from that fate.

Enraged, members of the mob returned with firearms, and several white people were killed or wounded in the ensuing gunfight. When the Black men returned to Greenwood, white rioters followed and attacked the community, burning 40 city blocks, killing hundreds of Black residents, and displacing many more.

“In all of my experience I have never witnessed such scenes as prevailed in this city when I arrived at the height of the rioting,” a military official recalled days later in a New York Times news article. “Twenty-five thousand whites, armed to the teeth, were raging the city in utter and ruthless defiance of every concept of law and righteousness. Motor cars, bristling with guns swept through your city, their occupants firing at will.” Some researchers estimate that as many as 300 Black people were killed in the violence.

None of the white rioters were convicted of any crime for their violent attack, and survivors of the violence received no compensation for lost property. In 2001, 80 years after the massacre, Oklahoma approved funds to redevelop the area and build a memorial.

Today, the Greenwood Cultural Center stands in the same community where the massacre took place, committed to preserving and sharing the proud and tragic history of “Black Wall Street.”

A mob of over 1,000 white men and boys as young as 12 stormed the Grady County jail in Chickasha, Oklahoma, and lynched a 19-year-old Black man named Henry Argo. The mob shot him in the head and stabbed him, despite the presence of the National Guard who were ordered to protect him.

Mr. Argo had been accused of assaulting a white woman. During this era, race—rather than guilt—made African Americans vulnerable to indiscriminate suspicion and false accusation after a reported crime, even when there was no evidence tying them to the alleged offense. Almost 25% of all lynchings involved allegations of inappropriate behavior between a Black man and a white woman that was characterized as “assault” or “sexual assault.” Any action by a Black man that could be interpreted as seeking or desiring contact with a white woman might prove deadly, and the mere accusation of sexual impropriety by a Black man with a white woman regularly aroused violent mobs and ended in lynching. Throughout the lynching era, Black men were lynched for delivering a letter to a white woman and for entering a room where white women were sitting. Allegations against Black people were rarely subject to scrutiny.

Here, the mob was led by a white man named George Skinner who had accused Mr. Argo of assaulting his wife. The white mob assembled late the night before, on May 30, after Mr. Argo had been arrested and taken into custody. They attempted to use sledgehammers and battering rams to break into the jail and kill Mr. Argo. The National Guard was then deployed to protect Mr. Argo, but they failed.

The mob shot at the Guardsmen and also attempted to set fire to the jail dozens of times. The National Guard deployed tear gas to diffuse the crowds, but the fumes were so strong that they also allegedly drove away members of the Guard who had sworn to protect Mr. Argo, granting the mob, which was apparently unfazed by the tear gas, access to the jail. Members of the mob broke into the jailhouse, and one of them then shot Mr. Argo in the head.

Mr. Argo survived this initial round of violence but was kept in the jail even after suffering a gunshot wound to the head. After order was restored from this initial attack, and despite the fact that the jail had succumbed to an attack in the first place, the jail soon began allowing in visitors again. Mr. Skinner, the leader of the mob, was among those allowed to visit Mr. Argo. Once at the jail, Mr. Skinner stabbed Mr. Argo, who was rushed to the hospital and died shortly thereafter. Mr. Skinner and three other men were arrested but were immediately released without bond.

At the peak of racial terror lynchings in this country, it was not uncommon for lynch mobs to seize their victims from jails, prisons, courtrooms, or out of the hands of guards like in this case. Though they were armed and charged with protecting the men and women in their custody, police and other officials almost never used force to resist white lynch mobs intent on killing Black people. In some cases, police officials were even found to be complicit or active participants in lynchings.

In Los Angeles, California, white soldiers targeted Latino youth in a series of violent attacks that became known as the Zoot Suit Riots.

World War II fueled a 1943 population influx into Los Angeles, California, that coincided with an increase in petty crime. White residents blamed Latino youth, who often wore distinctive, colorful garments known as “zoot suits.” Many members of the military stationed in Los Angeles were also hostile to wearers of zoot suits, which they viewed as an affront to wartime rationing policies.

On May 30, a group of white soldiers got into a scuffle with some Latino youth—that small conflict sparked a violent and widespread riot. White sailors and soldiers spread throughout Los Angeles attacking any Latino youth wearing zoot suits, beating them with belt buckles and ropes and stripping them of their clothes. Law enforcement did not intervene in support of the Latino victims and instead charged them with vagrancy, while Los Angeles newspapers encouraged the violence and portrayed Latino youth as deserving of brutal treatment.

Critical observers, including those in the Black press, rejected the crime-control justifications for the attacks and linked “zoot suit” violence to historical prejudice against people of color in the U.S. “Zoot Riots are Race Riots,” declared a July 1943 article in The Crisis, a magazine published by the NAACP.

Incidents similar to these riots later occurred in cities throughout the U.S., as white members of the military and white employees of military contractors targeted Black and Latino youth with violence. By one estimate, 242 instances of racial violence occurred in 47 American cities in 1943 alone.

The U.S. Department of War—which had invited the families of veterans killed during World War I to visit their graves in Europe—denied a petition by Black mothers and spouses to travel on the same ship as white families and instead forced them to travel on segregated boats.

With the support of the NAACP, a group of 55 Black mothers and widows, known as Gold Star women, from 21 different states petitioned President Hoover, asking him to allow all of the grieving women to travel together.

“When the call to arms came from our government in 1917,” they wrote, “mothers, sisters and wives, regardless of race, color or creed, were asked to give their loved ones to the end that the world might be saved for democracy. This call we answered freely and willingly. In the years which have passed since death took our loved ones our anguish and sorrow have been assuaged by the realization that our loved ones who rest in the soil of France gave their lives to the end that the world might be a better place in which to live for all men, of all races and all colors.”

“Twelve years after the Armistice, the high principles of 1918 seem to have been forgotten. We who gave and who are colored are insulted by the implication that we are not fit persons to travel with other bereaved ones. Instead of making up parties of Gold Star Mothers on the basis of geographical location we are set aside in a separate group, Jim Crowed, separated and insulted.”

The petition was referred from President Hoover to the War Department, which ultimately declined the Black families’ request on May 29, 1930.

Though Black veterans bravely fought for democracy and freedom during World War I, many returned home to find their own freedom denied. It was not uncommon for family members of veterans to also be mistreated and subjected to racism and abuse, as was the case here.

Rather than being honored for their service, Black veterans and their families were often the targets of horrible discrimination, mistreatment, and even murder, at the hands of white Americans determined to reinforce white supremacy and to prevent the veterans from fighting for racial equality at home.

President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which authorized the president to grant land west of the Mississippi River in exchange for the lands of the American Indian tribes living primarily in the southeastern U.S. President Jackson’s message to Congress stated a double goal of the Indian Removal Act: freeing more land in southern states like Alabama and Mississippi, while also separating Native American people from “immediate contact with settlements of whites” in the hopes that they will one day “cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community.”

Although the act referred specifically to those “tribes and nations of Indians as may choose to exchange the lands where they now reside” and President Jackson described the removal as a “happy consummation” of the government’s “benevolent policy” toward Indigenous people, the legislation led to the brutal forced migration of thousands of Muscogee (Creek), Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Cherokee people to present-day Oklahoma. The journey came to be known as the “Trail of Tears.”

Numerous reports described epidemic illness, devastating exposure to the elements, and high rates of death along the migration paths. One eyewitness account published in the Arkansas Gazette stated, “No portion of American history can furnish a parallel of the misery and suffering at present endured by the emigrating Creeks.”

While Black journalist Ida B. Wells was away visiting Philadelphia, a white mob attacked and destroyed her newspaper’s office in Memphis, Tennessee, and threatened her with bodily harm if she returned to the city.

Just months before, in March, three Black men had been lynched in Memphis. Ms. Wells, 29, was a local Black schoolteacher, editor, and co-owner of The Free Speech and Headlight newspaper, and a friend of the three men. Though Ms. Wells was already a popular journalist and advocate of Black causes, the lynchings of her friends inspired her to examine the frequency of racial terror lynching and the false charges often used to justify it. She used the newspaper as a forum to share information she gathered.

Looking into the dominant white narrative that lynching was white manhood’s appropriate response to the rape of white women by Black men, Ms. Wells found that most Black lynching victims were actually killed for minor offenses or non-criminal transgressions such as failing to pay debts, public drunkenness, engaging in consensual interracial romance, or—as in the case of her friends—challenging white economic dominance.

“Nobody in this section of the country,” she wrote, “believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women.” Immediately, Memphis’s white newspapers denounced Ms. Wells’s editorial, deriding her as a “Black scoundrel” and fanning local white outrage. Just days later, the white mob attacked her newspaper and warned that she would be killed if she returned to the city.

Ms. Wells eventually settled in Chicago, where she married, raised a family, and remained a racial justice activist and vocal opponent of lynching until her death in 1931. Her investigations, speeches, and written publications challenged racial terror during her lifetime and ensured that critical history would not be lost or forgotten for future generations. Her work is a major foundation for EJI’s report, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, as well as the contents of the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice. A grove on the Memorial site is named in her honor.

The U.S. government enacted the eugenics-inspired Immigration Act of 1924, which completely prohibited immigration from Asia. Designed to limit all immigration to the U.S., the act was particularly restrictive for Eastern and Southern Europeans and Asians. Upon signing the act into law, President Calvin Coolidge remarked, “America must remain American.”

In 1917, Congress had passed a highly restrictive immigration law that required immigrants over age 16 to pass literacy tests and excluded immigrants from the “Asiatic Barred Zone.” Immigrants from China had been barred since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and this law expanded that ban to include many other Asian countries. The Act of 1924 eliminated immigration from Japan, violating the so-called “Gentleman’s Agreement” that had previously protected Japanese immigration from legal restrictions.

The 1924 Act also tightened the national origins quota system. Under this system, the number of immigrants allowed to come to the U.S. from a particular country was limited to the percentage of immigrants from that country already living in the U.S. The previous quota was based on population data from the 1910 census, but the 1924 Act based the quota on the 1890 census, which effectively lowered the quota numbers for non-white countries. The 1924 system also considered the national origins of the entire American population, including natural-born citizens, which increased the number of visas available to people from the British Isles and Western Europe. Finally, the 1924 Act excluded any person ineligible for citizenship, formalizing the ban on immigration from Asia based on existing laws that prohibited Asian immigrants from becoming naturalized citizens.

The act was supported by federally funded eugenicists who argued that “social inadequates” were polluting the American gene pool and draining taxpayer resources. Its quotas remained in place until 1965.