Author: Desto22

The California State Legislature levied a burdensome tax on Chinese workers as part of a campaign to “protect free white labor” and discourage Chinese migration to the state.

Chinese people first came to California alongside tens of thousands of other migrants during the California Gold Rush that began in 1849. By 1860, roughly 10% of the state’s population was Chinese. Many white citizens, politicians, and labor organizations resented economic competition from Chinese workers and promoted myths about the racial inferiority of Asian people.

In his inaugural address in January of 1862, California Governor Leland Stanford, who later co-founded Stanford University, announced:

To my mind it is clear, that the settlement among us of an inferior race is to be discouraged by every legitimate means. Asia, with her numberless millions, sends to our shores the dregs of her population. … There can be no doubt but that the presence among us of numbers of degraded and distinct people must exercise a deleterious influence upon the superior race.

Three months after Gov. Leland’s speech, on April 26, the California legislature passed “An Act to Protect Free White Labor Against Competition with Chinese Coolie Labor, And to Discourage the Immigration of the Chinese into the State of California,” which created a monthly tax of $2.50 on Chinese workers in all but the least-desirable industries. The tax amounted to around 10% of the salary that Chinese laborers made at that time, and tax collectors were empowered to seize and sell the property of anyone who did not pay the tax.

Although this tax and several other measures targeting Chinese immigrants were later declared unconstitutional by the state supreme court, white Californian lawmakers persisted in efforts to dehumanize, subordinate, and exclude Chinese people. In 1879, the state approved a new constitution that declared Chinese people “dangerous to the well-being of the State,” banned corporations and local and state governments from hiring Chinese workers, and gave municipalities the authority to confine Chinese residents to one section of town or evict them from city limits altogether.

California’s decades-long campaign against Chinese people served as a precursor to anti-Chinese efforts on the federal level that culminated in 1882 with the U.S. Congress’s passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese laborers from immigrating to the U.S. and prohibited Chinese immigrants already living in the country from becoming American citizens.

A white mob in Mississippi killed a Black man named Mack Charles Parker. Mr. Parker had been accused of raping a white woman but emphatically denied the accusations. Statements from those in the community suggested that the woman fabricated the rape claims to hide her consensual affair with a white man in a nearby town, and police officers garnered no conclusive evidence implicating Mr. Parker. Nevertheless, local white men formed a mob intent on killing Mr. Parker before he could stand trial.

Days after Mr. Parker was transferred from the Hinds County Jail in Jackson to the Pearl River County Jail, a mob seized him from his cell, beat him, and dragged him outside. Bleeding profusely, Mr. Parker begged for his life, but the mob drove to the Bogalusa Bridge, pulled him from the car, and shot him. The mob then put chains around Mr. Parker’s body and threw him into the Pearl River; his body was found more than a week later.

Despite an FBI investigation that identified many members of the lynch mob, no one was ever indicted in Mr. Parker’s murder.

On orders from President Rutherford B. Hayes, federal troops withdrew from the state house in Louisiana—the last federally defended state house in the South—just 12 years after the end of the Civil War. This withdrawal marked the end of Reconstruction and paved the way for the unrestrained resurgence of white supremacist rule in the South, carrying with it the rapid deterioration of political rights for Black people.

After the Confederacy’s 1865 defeat in the Civil War, Reconstruction amendments to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery, established the citizenship of formerly enslaved Black people, and granted Black people civil rights—including granting Black men the right to vote. For the Reconstruction period, federal officials and troops remained in Southern states helping to enforce these new rights and administer educational and other programs for the formerly enslaved. As a result, Black people in the South, for the first time, constituted a community of voters and public officials, landowners, wage earners, and free American citizens.

The federal presence also addressed deadly violence Black people faced on a daily basis. Continued support for white supremacy and racial hierarchy meant that slavery in America did not end—it evolved. The identities of many white Americans, especially in the South, were grounded in the belief that they were inherently superior to African Americans. Many white people reacted violently to the requirement to treat their former “human property” as equals and pay for their labor. Plantation owners attacked Black people simply for claiming their freedom. In the first two years after the war, thousands of Black people were murdered for asserting freedom or basic rights, sometimes in attacks by white mobs in communities like Memphis and New Orleans.

Congressional efforts to provide federal protection to formerly enslaved Black people were undermined by the U.S. Supreme Court, which overturned laws that provided remedies to Black people facing violent intimidation. In the 1870s, Northern politicians began retreating from a commitment to protect Black rights and lives, culminating in the withdrawal of troops from all Southern state houses in 1877. In response, racial terror and violence directed at Black people intensified and legal systems quickly emerged to restore racial hierarchy: white Southerners barred Black people from voting; created an exploitative economic system of sharecropping and tenant farming that would keep African Americans indentured and poor for generations; and made racial segregation the law of the land.

William L. Moore was found dead on U.S. Highway 11 near Attalla, Alabama—only four days shy of his 36th birthday. Mr. Moore, a white man, was in the midst of a one-man civil rights march to Jackson, Mississippi, to implore Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett to support integration efforts. He wore signs that read: “End Segregation in America, Eat at Joe’s-Both Black and White” and “Equal Rights For All (Mississippi or Bust).”

Mr. Moore, a resident of Baltimore, Maryland, was a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and had staged other lone protests in the past. On his first protest, he walked to Annapolis, Maryland, from Baltimore. On his second march, he walked to the White House. For what proved to be his final march, Mr. Moore planned to walk from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Jackson.

About 70 miles into the march, a local radio station reporter named Charlie Hicks interviewed Mr. Moore after the radio station received an anonymous tip of his whereabouts. After the interview, Mr. Hicks offered to drive Moore to a hotel where he would be safe, but Mr. Moore continued on his march instead. Less than an hour later, a passing motorist found his body. Mr. Moore had been shot in the head with a .22-caliber rifle that was traced to Floyd Simpson, a white Alabamian. Mr. Simpson was arrested but never indicted for Mr. Moore’s murder.

When activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and CORE attempted to finish Mr. Moore’s march using the same route, they were beaten and arrested by Alabama state troopers.

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a Black man’s death penalty appeal grounded in claims of racial inequality and instead accepted proven racial sentencing disparities as “an inevitable part of our criminal justice system.”

In October 1978, a Black man named Warren McCleskey was convicted of killing a white police officer during a robbery and was sentenced to death. On appeal, Mr. McCleskey’s lawyers argued that Georgia’s capital punishment system was racially biased in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. In support of his argument, the lawyers presented statistical evidence that race significantly impacted the likelihood of a death sentence.

University of Iowa professor David Baldus had conducted a rigorous statistical analysis of more than 2,000 Georgia murder cases and found that prosecutors were more likely to seek the death penalty and juries were more likely to impose it in cases involving Black defendants and white victims. Even after controlling for crime-specific variables, the Baldus study concluded Black defendants accused of killing white victims faced the highest likelihood of receiving the death penalty.

In its 5-4 decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, the Court accepted the Baldus study’s findings as valid but held that the evidence was not enough to reverse the conviction and sentence because there was no proof that any individual had intentionally discriminated against Mr. McCleskey on the basis of race. In other words, without clear evidence that the discrimination was impactful and purposeful, the Court would not act. In dissent, Justice William Brennan wrote that the majority was motivated to deny relief by a “fear of too much justice.”

The Court’s ruling upheld the constitutionality of racially biased capital punishment in America and remains the law today. The U.S. has executed more than 1,200 people since 1987, including Warren McCleskey, who died in the electric chair on September 26, 1991.

Turner County High School students attended the school’s first racially integrated prom. Located in Ashburn, Georgia, a small, rural, peanut-farming town of 4,400 residents, the school’s racial demographics reflected those of the local community: 55% Black and 45% white. The prom theme, “Breakaway,” was chosen to signify a break from the tradition of privately-funded, separate “white” and “Black” proms sponsored by parent groups.

The school administration’s handbook provided for funding an official school-wide prom but stipulated that the senior class officers and student body had to express genuine support for an integrated event. During the 2006-2007 school year, the school’s four senior class officers—two white and two Black—approached the principal to discuss holding a school-wide prom. Regarding the segregated proms, senior class president James Hall said, “Everybody says that’s just how it’s always been. It’s just the way of this very small town. But it’s time for a change.”

Turner County High School’s class of 2007 also abandoned the “tradition” of electing both a white and a Black homecoming queen. White parents still held a private, white-only prom one week before the school-wide event and some parents refused to allow their children to attend the integrated prom. Principal Chad Stone, who is white, said he would not make efforts to end private proms for future classes but favored the integrated approach, “We already go to school together. Let’s start a tradition so that 20 years from now, this is no big deal at all.”

An all-white jury acquitted Lester Maddox of all charges after the white man threatened three young Black seminary students at gunpoint for attempting to enter his racially segregated Atlanta restaurant. The jury deliberated for only 47 minutes before returning its not guilty verdict.

On July 3, 1964, just one day after the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed to prohibit racial segregation in public accommodations like restaurants and hotels, three Atlanta University Center ministerial students named George Willis Jr., Woodrow Lewis, and Albert L. Dunn met for lunch at the Pickrick restaurant. Before they could enter, owner Lester Maddox began yelling at them: “You no good dirty devils! You dirty Communists!” He then pulled out his pistol and pointed it at them, telling them “Get the hell out of here or I’ll kill you.”

Rather than help the three unarmed customers being held at gunpoint, the white patrons eating at the restaurant responded by grabbing “pickrick drumsticks”—pick handles Mr. Maddox kept hanging on his restaurant wall to intimidate Black community members. Mr. Maddox and the group of white customers then chased the three Black men out of the restaurant and into the parking lot, threatening them with violence.

Mr. Maddox later claimed he had pulled out his pistol in self defense, but no reports or evidence indicated that the young Black students were anything other than customers lawfully attempting to eat at the Pickrick, or that they had threatened him in any way.

After Mr. Maddox was arrested and released on $1,000 bond, white Americans from all over the country rallied to his support, endorsing his open defiance of the Civil Rights Act and demonstrating that acceptance and enforcement of the new law would take much more than a presidential signature. People ran ads fundraising for his defense fund, and the restaurant saw an increase in white patrons. Mr. Maddox even began selling souvenir “pickrick drumsticks” complete with his autograph.

The Pickrick continued to refuse to serve Black community members, even as Mr. Maddox awaited trial. He vowed to close the restaurant before serving Black customers, and he did exactly that in February 1965, after a federal district judge ruled he was in civil contempt for continuing to violate the Civil Rights Act.

After his acquittal for threatening these Black men, Mr. Maddox capitalized on his increased notoriety and broad white support for his segregationist positions by mounting a campaign for governor of Georgia the following year. With the KKK’s endorsement, he won. During his term in office, Mr. Maddox promoted a racist, segregationist agenda, vigorously opposed integrating Georgia public schools, and refused to permit Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to lie in state after his April 1968 assassination.

As late as 2001, Mr. Maddox remained an advocate of racial segregation. “I want my race preserved,” he said in an interview, “and I hope most everybody else wants theirs preserved.”

Elected and supported by the majority of white Americans, segregationists like Lester 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.

A white woman was brutally raped and beaten in New York City’s Central Park. Police officers soon arrested a dozen young men and eventually charged five teenage boys ranging from 14-16 years of age.

Police subjected Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana Jr., Korey Wise, Yusef Salaam, and Antron McCray to hours of intense interrogation and ultimately extracted confessions. Each of them later recanted and insisted that he had been coerced into making false confessions despite having no involvement in the crime. Though there was no physical evidence to link them to the attack, all five boys were convicted of attempted murder and rape and sentenced to prison terms ranging from 5-13 years.

From the time of their arrest, many observers and commentators readily believed that this group of teenage boys—four who were Black and one who was Latino—had committed the attack and deserved the harshest possible punishment. Donald Trump, then a well-known businessman in New York City, took out multiple full-page newspaper ads denouncing the Central Park attack, praising the power of hate, and demanding officials “bring back the death penalty” as a defense against “roving bands of wild criminals.” Trump went on to win election to the White House in 2016.

The five teenagers convicted of the Central Park attack faced a presumption of guilt and dangerousness rooted in America’s history of slavery and lynching, which remains with us today and leaves minority communities particularly vulnerable to the unfair administration of criminal justice. At the time of the Central Park case, the idea of the young, non-white “super-predator” was gaining legitimacy among criminologists and policymakers. By stoking unsubstantiated fears of increasing violence and criminality among Black children, researchers built support for harsh proposals to abandon the juvenile system’s focus on rehabilitation and instead funnel younger and younger children into an adult system primarily focused on punishment.

In 2002, another man confessed to the rape and beating committed in Central Park 13 years before, and DNA evidence confirmed his guilt. That same year, New York Supreme Court Justice Charles J. Tejada granted the motions of defense attorneys and District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, vacating the convictions of the “Central Park Five.” Police detectives nevertheless continued to maintain that the defendants were accomplices in the assault and refused to admit misconduct for their handling of the case.

After their convictions were vacated, all five of the young men had completed their prison sentences but still faced the difficult journey of rebuilding their lives and recovering from spending years of their childhoods imprisoned for a crime they did not commit. They ultimately sued the city for malicious prosecution, racial discrimination, and emotional distress. “You all don’t really understand what we went through,” Kevin Richardson said. “People called us animals, a wolf pack…It still hurts me emotionally.” New York City refused to settle the suits for over a decade, but in June 2014 agreed to pay the men $40 million in damages.

In 2019, 30 years after the five teens’ arrests, a Netflix mini-series dramatically depicted their ordeal and continuing struggle to recover, sparking renewed interest in the case’s history and its connection to injustice and racial bias still plaguing our courts and prisons.

“I was shocked, because I had no idea that something like this could happen to anyone—especially people who were my age at the time,” Ethan Herisse, who played Yusef Salaam in the mini-series, said in an interview after completing production. “I’m at a different place now, where seeing that this thing happened and is still happening, even now—if I were going to be put anywhere near our system, I wouldn’t feel completely safe.”

New Jersey enacted a law which bound enslaved Black people to indefinite servitude as “apprentices for life” to work at the will of their white enslavers.

Under the new law, called “An Act to Abolish Slavery,” white enslavers continued to exploit and profit from the labor of Black people who were now referred to as “apprentices” instead of “slaves,” but who were still unable to obtain freedom without a written certificate of discharge from their “masters or mistresses.”

Though enacting the law allowed New Jersey to claim its state laws no longer permitted “slavery,” the act did not meaningfully change the plight of Black people living in bondage there. Many of the same oppressive provisions that defined enslavement in New Jersey and elsewhere remained in place under this new law. The act prohibited Black “apprentices” from leaving the State of New Jersey, for instance, and imposed criminal penalties on any person who hid or harbored an “apprentice” or helped them run away.

Decades earlier, in 1804, New Jersey had passed the “Gradual Abolition Act,” becoming the last Northern state to take any steps towards the process of ending enslavement within its borders. That law had also fallen far short of abolishing slavery, instead delaying abolition for decades and ensuring that Black children not yet born would spend their youth in bondage. The 1804 act provided that children of enslaved people born after July 4, 1804, would be freed only when they reached the age of 21 for women and the age of 15 for boys. Despite the passage of this 1804 act, there were still more than 2,000 Black people enslaved in New Jersey by 1830.

Like the 1804 law, the 1846 act also failed to abolish—or even attempt to abolish—enslavement in New Jersey. It took the Civil War and the 1865 ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment—which abolished slavery in the U.S. except as punishment for crime—to emancipate the remaining Black people still involuntarily bound as “apprentices” in the state.

In the early morning hours, a Black man named Caesar Sheffield was taken from jail and shot to death by a mob of white men near Lake Park, Georgia. Mr. Sheffield, a husband and father in his 40s, had been arrested and jailed for allegedly stealing meat from a smokehouse owned by a local white man. Before he could be tried for this alleged offense, white men formed a mob and seized him from the unprotected jail.

During this era of racial terror lynching, the deep racial hostility that permeated American society burdened Black people with a presumption of guilt that often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered, whether evidence supported that suspicion or not. This racial hostility and presumption of guilt frequently proved deadly, even for petty offenses like theft. Although the Constitution’s presumption of innocence is a bedrock principle of American criminal justice, Black Americans like Caesar Sheffield were often denied this protection or their right to a fair trial and instead were lynched by white mobs.

The mob had little difficulty abducting Mr. Sheffield from the jail, since the building had been completely abandoned and no law enforcement officials were present. As was often the case during this era, police and jail officials charged with protecting those in their custody abdicated that responsibility and left Black people like Mr. Sheffield vulnerable and unprotected from the known threat of lynching. Once they had Mr. Sheffield, the white men shot him to death in a nearby field; his body was found later that day, riddled with bullets.

No arrests were made following the lynching of Caesar Sheffield, and no one was ever held accountable for his death.