Author: Desto22

White residents of Delray Beach, Florida, burned a cross to terrorize Black residents and prevent them from using the city’s “public” beach that had been open to only white visitors for decades.

The day before this racial violence, U.S. District Judge Emmett C. Choate had dismissed a federal civil rights lawsuit in which nine Black Delray residents had sued for access to Delray’s municipal beach. Though Black citizens had been barred by terrorism and de facto segregation for decades, the Delray Beach City Commission tried to avoid federal intervention by informing the court that the city had no written policy denying Black residents access to the beach. In dismissing the lawsuit on this basis, Judge Choate expressly recognized that the city was legally authorized to continue practicing segregation and recommended that the commission segregate portions of the beach by race.

Concerned that the commission’s statement denying a formal segregation policy threatened to weaken years of rigidly enforced, race-based exclusion, white citizens decided to take violent action to let Black residents know they were still unwelcome. After white residents burned a cross to send that message, local law enforcement declined to investigate or to hold white citizens accountable. On May 20, a group of Black residents attempted to gain access to the beach, only to be forced out by an angry gathering of 70 white people demanding they leave. Over the next several days, white citizens began stockpiling weapons from stores in Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, anticipating the return of Black beachgoers and preparing to respond with lethal violence.

On May 23, the city commission enacted a formal segregation ordinance that codified years of de facto segregation and barred Black residents from using the Delray municipal beach or pool. Within three weeks of the city’s enactment, three neighboring beachfront towns—Riviera Beach, Lake Worth, and Daytona Beach—had adopted identical segregation ordinances.

Over the next month, the Delray Beach City Commission attempted to get Black leaders in the Delray Civic League to “cooperate” in keeping their fellow Black residents off the municipal beach. The city initially proposed the construction of a separate and unequal beach for Black residents on a 100-foot strip of rocky land. Black leaders rejected this proposal, demanding access to city facilities on equal terms with white citizens. The Civic League requested a 500-foot section of beach and the immediate construction of a pool for Black residents.

In July, the city finally agreed to construct a swimming pool for Black residents, but conditioned the pool’s construction on continued exclusion of Black residents from the municipal beach. The city repealed the segregation ordinance, returning to its decades-long policy of de facto segregation, and subsequently abandoned all plans to construct a beach for Black residents.

Eleven days after National Guard troops fired into a crowd of unarmed anti-war protesters at Kent State University in Ohio, local and state police in Mississippi opened fire on a group of students at Jackson State College in Jackson. In a 30-second barrage of gunfire, police fired 150 rounds into the crowd, killing two Black students and injuring dozens more.

On the evening of May 14, students were gathered on Lynch Street, a road connecting the predominately Black college campus to the more affluent white neighborhood in Jackson. Police reports allege that the students had been throwing rocks and bottles at passing white motorists; students and white motorists had a tense relationship because the white motorists would yell racial slurs and taunt the students as they passed. Later that evening, a person not believed to be a student set fire to a dump truck. Firemen arriving to respond to the blaze called police, claiming to need protection from the gathering students.

When one glass bottle was allegedly thrown into the crowd of police shortly after midnight, officers responded by indiscriminately opening fire on the crowd of students and riddling a women’s dorm with bullets. Phillip Gibbs, 21, and James Green, 17, were killed. Officers later claimed a sniper in the women’s dorm had shot at them first. The President’s Commission on Campus Unrest later called the shootings an “unreasonable, unjustified overreaction,” but ultimately no one was charged. A local grand jury blamed the students, arguing that people who engage in civil disobedience must accept the risk of injury or death by law enforcement.

In 1974, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the officers had overreacted but they could not be held liable for the two deaths that resulted. In 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

In 1961, a group of civil rights activists known as the Freedom Riders began a desegregation campaign. The interracial group rode together on interstate buses headed south from Washington, D.C., and patronized the bus stations along the way, to test the enforcement of Supreme Court decisions that prohibited discrimination in interstate passenger travel. Their efforts were unpopular with white Southerners who supported segregation. The group encountered early violence in South Carolina but continued their trip toward the planned destination of New Orleans.

On Mother’s Day, a Greyhound bus carrying Freedom Riders arrived at the Anniston, Alabama, bus station shortly after 1 pm to find the building locked shut. Led by Ku Klux Klan leader William Chapel, a mob of 50 men armed with pipes, chains, and bats smashed windows, slashed tires, and dented the sides of the Riders’ bus. Though warned hours earlier that a mob had gathered at the station, local police did not arrive until after the assault had begun.

Once the attack subsided, police pretended to escort the damaged bus to safety but instead abandoned it at the Anniston city limits. Soon after the police departed, another armed white mob surrounded the bus and began breaking windows. The Freedom Riders refused to exit the vehicle but received no aid from two watching highway patrolmen. When a member of the mob tossed a firebomb through a broken bus window, others in the mob attempted to trap the passengers inside the burning vehicle by barricading the door. They fled when the fuel tank began to explode. The Riders were able to escape the ensuing flames and smoke through the bus windows and main door, only to be attacked and beaten by the mob outside.

After police finally dispersed their attackers, the Freedom Riders received limited medical care. They were soon evacuated from Anniston in a convoy organized by Birmingham Civil Rights leader the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth.

Six years after Brown v. Board of Education, South Carolina’s legislature passed a bill to preserve school segregation and stall Black citizens’ attempts to integrate public schools using the authority of federal courts.

On the last day of the 1960 legislative session, South Carolina lawmakers voted for a bill that, on its face, repealed language that declared the state would provide funding to “racially segregated schools only.” However, as local media accurately reported, the legislation was a “maneuver to thwart integration by the fiction of seeming to give in a little to it.” The bill did nothing to change another state law that mandated the closure of any school for white students that admitted a Black student. The bill also left in place provisions requiring racial segregation on school buses and in cafeterias.

In 1951, state lawmakers established the South Carolina School Committee, the first of its kind in the country. Despite its seemingly neutral name, the committee was composed of state legislators and members appointed by the governor and conducted “enormous research” during the 1950s and 1960s to identify ways to circumvent the Constitution and keep schools segregated. The press regularly referred to the group as a “segregation committee,” seemingly reflecting knowledge of its true purpose. During the 1956-1957 legislative sessions, the committee’s work led South Carolina lawmakers to pass the law restricting state funding to “racially segregated schools” and to also design a school-choice policy that allowed the state to continue operating all-white schools.

Committee members also designed this 1960 repeal bill as a way to “fight integration suits while in no way relaxing restrictions on the mixing of the races.” Legislators and other members of the Committee feared that keeping laws that included explicit language that mandated segregation would enable aggrieved Black students to successfully challenge South Carolina’s racist policies in federal court. By removing the plain language of segregation, the Committee aimed to keep Black plaintiffs “languishing for years” in state court by depriving them of the strong evidence of discriminatory intent, while still achieving the same result: segregated schools. Representative Joe Rogers of Clarendon County, South Carolina, a member of the Committee, publicly endorsed the new legislation and assured ardent segregationists that South Carolina was “as resolute as ever” in maintaining racial apartheid.

South Carolina Governor Ernest Hollings also applauded the legislation repealing the explicit segregation language, declaring it a move to “bolster, rather than to weaken, the state’s rigid stand against mixing the races in public schools.” However, lawmakers and the governor delayed signing the bill into law, since federal intervention was not yet actively enforcing desegregation in the state. In August 1960, the Committee reported that public schools remained “orderly” and segregated, and Governor Hollings let the bill quietly die. In 1961, as South Carolina faced the loss of federal education funding due to its insistence on maintaining racial segregation, the Committee revived the bill and Governor Hollings signed it into law in July 1961. School desegregation did not begin in the state for another two years.

The massive resistance campaign that white communities waged against efforts to desegregate public schools in the U.S. was largely successful in delaying implementation of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in the South. Until the fall of 1960, every single one of the 1.4 million Black school children in the five states of the Deep South attended segregated schools. 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 was decided, a report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights observed that white violence and intimidation against Black people “continue[d] to be a deterrent to school desegregation.”

The State of Louisiana adopted a new constitution with numerous restrictive provisions intended to exclude African American men from civic participation. At this time in the U.S., women of all races remained barred from voting, while Black men had recently gained the right to vote under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The new Louisiana Constitution, however, created a poll tax, literacy and property-ownership requirements, and a complex voter registration form all designed and enforced to disproportionately disenfranchise Black male voters.

The year 1865 included the Confederacy’s defeat in the Civil War, widespread emancipation, and the abolition of slavery. All of these developments threatened to overturn Southern culture and social relations, which were based on white supremacy and racial hierarchy. After Reconstruction ended in 1877 and white politicians and lawmakers regained control and power in the South, many efforts were made to restore that racial order through very strict laws that stripped Black people of many of their new civil rights—including the right to vote. In Louisiana, framers explicitly expressed their goal to “purify the electorate.”

When the restrictive voting provisions were first proposed for the 1898 Louisiana Constitution, some white officials expressed concern that the property and literacy requirements would also disenfranchise an estimated 25% of the white male population of voting age. In response, lawmakers drafted a “Grandfather Clause” which created an exception for those whose ancestors were registered to vote before 1867. This clause enabled many illiterate and poor white men to get around the literacy and property requirements. Black people remained blocked because Louisiana laws before 1867 disenfranchised nearly all Black men—especially those who were enslaved.

The 1898 Louisiana Constitution also eliminated the requirement of unanimous jury verdicts, allowing as much as a 9-3 split to still stand as a conviction. Because the U.S. Constitution now prevented states from wholly barring Black people from jury service, this provision was enacted to render small numbers of Black jurors inconsequential. Thomas Semmes, a former Confederate senator and head of the convention’s judiciary committee, praised the provision for success in its goal “to establish the supremacy of the white race in this State to the extent to which it could be legally and Constitutionally done.”

The 1898 Louisiana Constitution eliminated federally enforced voting rules that had enfranchised Black men in Louisiana during Reconstruction. As a result, in a state with 650,804 Black residents, the number of Black registered voters dropped from 130,000 before the new Constitution to just 5,000 by 1900. By 1904, the number dropped to just 1,000.

Throughout the Southern states, disenfranchisement laws targeted Black communities for generations. Louisiana’s 1898 Constitution was revised slightly in 1913, but most of its restrictive language remained until 1972. The non-unanimous jury rule remained in effect for more than a century, until Louisiana voters approved a Constitutional amendment to abolish it in November 2018.

A white mob tortured and lynched a young Black man named Henry Patterson in LaBelle, Florida, for attempting to ask for a drink of water.

Mr. Patterson had been working on a road construction project in LaBelle when he stopped at a nearby house to ask for a drink of water. A white woman who lived in the home saw Mr. Patterson walking towards the house and, frightened by the sight of a Black man approaching, ran screaming into the street.

Mr. Patterson fled the area in fear, but neighbors quickly assumed that the woman had been assaulted and began forming a search party to chase Mr. Patterson down. A mob of about 200 people—which included several local officials and prominent citizens—chased Mr. Patterson through the town, shooting at him several times and wounding him.

For their own amusement, the mob briefly allowed Mr. Patterson to outrun them. Mr. Patterson desperately searched for a place to hide, but as he attempted to jump a wire fence, the mob shot at him again and hit him. Mr. Patterson continued to bleed out as the mob placed him on a running board and paraded him down LaBelle’s main streets. He was still alive as members of the mob kicked him, stomped on his face, and cut off pieces of his flesh to wave at onlookers.

As the mob approached LaBelle’s courthouse, they hanged Mr. Patterson’s mutilated body from a nearby tree.

Though a local judge personally identified 17 white men he had seen in the mob—including a tax assessor, a town marshal, a school board member, a mail carrier, and the son of a county commissioner—a grand jury later failed to indict a single person involved in Mr. Patterson’s killing.

The South Carolina General Assembly enacted the “Bill for the better ordering and governing of Negroes and other slaves in this province,” also known as the Negro Act of 1740. The law prohibited enslaved African people from growing their own food, learning to read, moving freely, assembling in groups, and earning money. It also authorized white enslavers to whip and kill enslaved Africans for being “rebellious.”

South Carolina implemented this act after the unsuccessful Stono Rebellion in 1739, in which approximately 50 enslaved Black people resisted bondage and waged an uprising that killed between 20 and 25 white people. In addition to establishing a racial caste and property system in the colony, the assembly sought to prevent any additional rebellions by including provisions that mandated a ratio of one white person for every 10 enslaved people on a plantation. The Negro Act treated enslaved Africans as human chattel and revoked all forms of civil rights.

The law served as a model for other states; Georgia authorized slavery within its borders in 1750 and enacted its own “slave code” five years later. In 1865, the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment legally abolished slavery in the U.S. except as punishment for crime, but discriminatory Black Codes and Jim Crow laws developed to maintain the oppression of Black people, ensuring that the legacy of the Negro Act of 1740 and similar laws remained present throughout the country for more than two centuries.

21-year-old John Lewis, a young Black civil rights activist, was severely beaten by a mob at the Rock Hill, South Carolina, Greyhound bus terminal. A few days earlier, Mr. Lewis and 12 other Freedom Riders had left Washington, D.C., on a Greyhound bus headed to New Orleans. The Freedom Riders—seven of whom were Black and six of whom were white—sat interracially on the bus, planning to test a Supreme Court ruling that made segregation in interstate transportation illegal.

The Freedom Riders rode safely through Virginia and North Carolina but experienced violence when they stopped at the bus station in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and tried to enter the white waiting room together. John Lewis and two other Riders were brutally attacked before a white police officer, who had been present the entire time, finally intervened. The Freedom Riders responded with nonviolence and decided not to press charges, continuing their protest ride further south where they experienced continued violence from white mobs in Alabama.

Nearly 47 years later, Rock Hill Mayor Doug Echols apologized to John Lewis, by then a U.S. Congressman representing Georgia. In 2009, one of his attackers, former Klansman Elwin Wilson, also apologized. “I don’t hold the town any more responsible than those men who beat us,” Congressman Lewis has said about the community of Rock Hill, “and I saw those men as victims of the same system of segregation and hatred.”

Steven Joshua Dinkle of the Ozark, Alabama, chapter of the International Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), burned a cross in a local Black neighborhood. Joined by a KKK recruit named Thomas Windell Smith, Mr. Dinkle targeted the neighborhood because of the race of its residents.

Confederate veterans founded the Ku Klux Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1865. From beneath white hoods, they terrorized formerly enslaved Black people and their political allies with threats, beatings, and murder. They strived to undermine Reconstruction and restore racial subordination in the South. Faced with federal opposition, the Klan dissolved by the 1870s but reemerged early in the next century at the height of the era of racial terror. By the 21st century, several offshoot Klan organizations remained a small but persistent source of hate violence.

On the night of May 8, Mr. Dinkle and Mr. Smith built a wooden cross about six feet tall and drove it over to the entrance of the Black neighborhood around 8 pm. They dug a hole in the ground in view of several houses, then stood the cross upright in the hole and lit it on fire before driving away.

Both men were arrested and pled guilty to conspiracy to violate housing rights. At Mr. Dinkle’s plea hearing, he admitted that he burned the cross in order to scare the members of the African American community in Ozark and that he was motivated to burn the cross because he did not like that African Americans were occupying homes in that area.

The Reverend George Lee, co-founder of the Belzoni, Mississippi, NAACP and the first African American to register to vote in Humphreys County since Reconstruction, was shot and killed in Belzoni. He is considered one of the early martyrs of the civil rights movement.

The Rev. Lee first moved to Belzoni to preach but began working to register other African Americans to vote after the local NAACP was founded in 1953. He later served as chapter president and successfully registered some 100 African American voters in Belzoni—an extraordinary feat considering the significant risk of violent retaliation facing Black voters in the Deep South at the time.

Belzoni was also home to a White Citizen’s Council—a group of white residents actively working to suppress civil rights activism and maintain white supremacy through threats, economic intimidation, and violence. The council learned of the Rev. Lee’s voter registration efforts and targeted him with threats and intimidation, but he was undeterred.

While the Rev. Lee was driving home on the night of May 7, gunshots were fired into the cab of his car, ripping off the lower half of his face. He later died at Humphreys County Medical Center. When NAACP field secretary for Mississippi Medgar Evers came to investigate the death, the county sheriff boldly denied that any homicide had taken place; instead, he claimed that the Rev. Lee had died in a car accident and that the lead bullets found in his jaw were dental fillings.

An investigation revealed evidence against two members of the local White Citizen’s Council, but when the local prosecutor resisted moving forward, the case stalled. The NAACP memorial service held in the Rev. Lee’s honor was attended by more than 1,000 mourners.

In April 2019, the Equal Justice Initiative dedicated a monument honoring the Rev. George Lee and 23 other Black men, women, and children killed in acts of racial violence in the 1950s. Hundreds of community members gathered to support the act of remembrance, including family and community members connected to each of the named victims. Ms. Helen Sims, founder and operator of the Rev. George Lee Museum in Belzoni, was present to stand for the memory of the Rev. Lee.