Author: Desto22

The Boston Red Sox reluctantly held a Major League tryout for Black ballplayers in the Negro Baseball League that many regarded as some of the best players in the world, but the team refused to sign any of them due to “an unwritten rule at that time against hiring Black players.”

Future Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson, along with Marvin Williams and Sam Jethroe, traveled thousands of miles to attend the tryouts. During the workout, which was attended only by Red Sox team management, players were taunted and endured shouts from the stands including “get those niggers off the field.” Red Sox managers abandoned all three Black ballplayers and sent them home without contracts or even the courtesy of a response from the team managers.

Wendell Smith, a Black sports writer, had arranged the tryouts. Prior to the event, Mr. Smith approached Isadore Muchnick, a politician who was running for re-election in a predominantly Black district in Boston, and encouraged him to use his political power to ensure these tryouts happened. It was only after Mr. Muchnick threatened to ban Boston baseball clubs from playing on Sundays that the Red Sox and Braves, another Boston team at the time, agreed to host tryouts for Black ballplayers. Both teams delayed the tryouts on numerous occasions, and the Braves ultimately cancelled theirs altogether. While the Red Sox technically held their try out, as Mr. Jethroe would later note, it was “a joke.”

Major League Baseball remained racially segregated until 1947, sustained by the tacit agreement among team managers that Black players were not to be signed by teams and should be restricted to playing in their own separate “Negro league.”

Two years after this tryout, Jackie Robinson formally broke the baseball “color line” when he played his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers in April of 1947. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962, and his uniform number, 42, was formally retired from Major League Baseball after his retirement to honor his achievements. In April 1950, Sam Jethroe, who many considered the fastest man in baseball, was finally signed to a major league contract with the Boston Braves and won the National League Rookie of the Year Award at the age of 33. Marvin Williams never received an MLB contract.

The Boston Red Sox remained segregated until 1959—14 years after Jackie Robinson’s original tryout and two seasons after Mr. Robinson retired. The team rostered its first Black player, Pumpsie Green, only after the NAACP charged them with racial discrimination and the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination forced them to integrate. They were the last team in MLB to accept Black players.

A mob of several thousand white people in Joplin, Missouri, battered down the wall of the city jail, forcibly removed a 20-year-old Black man named Thomas Gilyard, and lynched him in broad daylight. The mob hanged Mr. Gilyard from a telephone pole two blocks from the jail.

Mr. Gilyard had been accused of killing a white police officer. Many Black people were lynched during this era based on an 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. The deep racial hostility permeating 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. Here, though Mr. Gilyard maintained his innocence, he was offered no protection by local officials and was lynched before any trial could take place.

An immense crowd of white people assembled to participate in this lynching, with some climbing up trees and to the rooftops of nearby buildings to witness the event. Brutally lynching Mr. Gilyard did not mark the end of their violence. Unsatisfied by killing Mr. Gilyard, the mob was intent on destroying the lives of the hundreds of Black people who lived in Joplin.

First, the crowd demanded that a local white man, named “Hickory Bill,” who was in jail for attacking a Black person, be released, which city officials willingly accommodated.

The white mob then gathered on Main Street and drove all of the Black people from downtown into a segregated Black district north of Joplin. There, the white residents of Joplin launched a devastating terrorist attack on the Black community—they robbed and burnt down their homes, shot and stoned the Black people they came across, and forced every Black person from the district out of the city. They blocked the local fire department from extinguishing the flames on the burning homes, ensuring that the Black community would have nowhere to return.

Determined to force every Black person from Joplin, the mob then traveled to another Black district south of the town and found that all of the Black residents had already fled out of fear. The mob proceeded to burn their homes down too. It is unknown how many people were killed by the white mob’s ruthless violence.

During the era of racial terror lynching, white mobs regularly terrorized Black people with violence and murder to maintain racial hierarchy. These acts of lawlessness were committed with impunity by mobs who rarely faced arrest, prosecution, or even public shame for their actions. Racial terror violence in this era displaced entire Black communities, and hundreds of thousands of Black people fled as refugees from violent campaigns that used fear and intimidation to ensure white supremacy and racial hierarchy.

Thomas Gilyard was one of at least 60 Black people lynched in Missouri between 1865 and 1950.

Shortly before midnight, two innocent Black men named Horace Duncan and Fred Coker (also known as Jim Copeland) were abducted from the county jail by a white mob of several thousand participants and lynched in Springfield, Missouri. Two days following the public lynchings of Mr. Duncan and Mr. Coker, a newspaper reported that “now the great state of Missouri faces the probable disgrace of letting two innocent men be hanged by a mob.”

The day before the lynching, a white woman reported that she had been assaulted by two African American men. Despite having “no evidence against them,” Mr. Duncan and Mr. Coker were “arrested on suspicion” by local police. The men were taken to the county jail to await trial, even though their employer had also provided an alibi for them to confirm that they had not been involved in the alleged assault.

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. White people’s allegations against African Americans were rarely subject to scrutiny, and the mere accusation that a Black man had been sexually inappropriate with a white woman often aroused violent reprisal before the judicial system could or would act. In the case of Mr. Duncan and Mr. Coker, one newspaper reported the lynch mob “was bent on vengeance and in no mood to discriminate between guilt and innocence.”

When the mob arrived at the county jail, local law enforcement did little to stop the mob from seizing Mr. Duncan and Mr. Coker, though the officers were armed and responsible for protecting the men in their custody. When the mob dragged Mr. Duncan and Mr. Coker outside, the gathered crowd of nearly 3,000 angry white men, women, and children began shouting, “Hang them!” and “Burn them!” At the public square, the mob hanged both men from the railing of the Gottfried Tower, then set a fire underneath and watched as both corpses were reduced to ashes in the flames.

Continuing their rampage, the mob returned to the jail and proceeded to lynch another African American man—Will Allen. Local police had abandoned the prisoners, and it was only when the state militia arrived that the mob was dispersed and prevented from seizing anyone else from the jail.

Two days after the lynching of these three men, the woman who reported being assaulted issued a statement that she was “positive” that [Mr. Coker and Mr. Duncan] “were not her assailants, and that she could identify her assailants if they were brought before her.” But the lynch mob’s act of racial terror had made its mark, terrorizing the entire Black community. Many local Black residents had fled their jobs and homes to escape the mob attack.

Following the lynchings and mob violence, a grand jury was called to indict anyone who had participated in the mob. By April 19, four white men had been arrested and 25 warrants were issued. Only one white man was tried, however, and no one was ever convicted.

Horace Duncan, Fred Coker, and Will Allen were three of at least 60 African American victims of racial terror lynching in Missouri between 1877 and 1950.

On Easter Sunday—a mob of hundreds of white men killed an estimated 150 Black people while attacking the Grant Parish courthouse in Colfax, Louisiana. Many of the Black victims were murdered in cold blood after surrendering. Only three white men died.

The Colfax Massacre was precipitated by the hotly contested 1872 Louisiana gubernatorial election. During the Reconstruction era, as many newly emancipated Black Americans began mobilizing and participating in politics, white communities determined to reinforce white supremacy began terrorizing Black people through acts of brutal violence.

After the 1872 election, when a federal judge declared William Kellogg the winner, he began making appointments to fill local parish offices. Meanwhile, Gov. Kellogg’s white supremacist opponent John McEnery and his supporters declared Mr. McEnery the winner of the election. In the ensuing unrest, Black voters who supported Gov. Kellogg staged a peaceful occupation, surrounding the Grant Parish courthouse and other municipal buildings in Colfax to prevent Mr. McEnery’s supporters from taking them over.

In response, more than 300 armed white men attacked the courthouse building to forcefully remove Gov. Kellogg’s Black supporters. When the white mob aimed a cannon to fire on the courthouse, some of the 60 Black defenders fled; others surrendered then, and more surrendered after the courthouse was set on fire. Many surrendering, unarmed Black men were nevertheless shot and killed by the white mob—some while fleeing.

After the massacre, the federal government indicted over 100 members of the white mob under the Enforcement Act of 1870. The law was specifically enacted during Reconstruction to protect newly freed Black voters from the terrorist threats of the Ku Klux Klan and other disgruntled white Southerners. Only three members of the mob were convicted, and they appealed.

On March 27, 1876, in United States v. Cruikshank, the Supreme Court issued a ruling dismissing charges against the three white men. The Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment was only a protection against state actions and did not empower the federal government to punish the acts of one citizen towards another not clearly motivated by racial animus. In the eyes of the Court, racialized political violence did not qualify.

The Cruikshank decision severely limited the federal government’s authority to legally enforce Black civil rights and protect Black citizens from racial terror at the hands of mobs intent on restoring white racial dominance in the post-Civil War South. As a result of the decision, white terrorist groups continued to repress Black Americans’ rights through voter suppression and acts of terror and violence.

Up until 2021, a historical marker on the site of the Colfax Massacre referred to it as the “end of carpetbag misrule in the South.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and at least 55 others, almost all of whom were Black, were jailed for “parading without a permit” during a march against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama.

A crowd of over 1,000 activists joined Dr. King, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy on a non-violent march toward the downtown area as hundreds more people lined the streets to support them. The peaceful marchers, embarking from Sixth Avenue Zion Hill Church in a predominantly Black neighborhood and headed for City Hall, met a first police barricade and continued on in a different direction. When the marchers neared a second police barricade, Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor gave the officers clear orders: “Stop them… Don’t let them go any further!”

Connor was a notorious segregationist with close ties to the Ku Klux Klan. At his command, several motorcycle patrolmen surrounded the crowd of peaceful marchers and began violent mass arrests. Police officers arrested Dr. King and the Rev. Abernathy first, then continued grabbing and hitting the marchers. At least 54 more people were arrested that day, including the Rev. Shuttlesworth.

The arrested marchers were charged with violating an injunction barring “racial protests” in Birmingham. City officials had obtained the injunction from a circuit judge earlier that same week, after arguing that civil rights protests attracted violence—even though the protests were always explicitly non-violent, and the violence that did occur was regularly wielded by police targeting the demonstrating activists. Throughout activists’ 1963 Birmingham campaign to challenge racial segregation, the entire world witnessed the police’s brutal treatment of nonviolent activists through newspaper photographs and televised footage depicting demonstrators being bitten by dogs, beaten by officers, and slammed into walls by fire hoses.

Dr. King and others were held in the Birmingham Jail for several days after their arrest, while allies worked to raise money for bail. During this time, Dr. King drafted his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in response to a joint letter several white ministers had published in the local press that decried the march and civil rights activists’ methods.

“For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’” Dr. King wrote. “It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’”

We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’ We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. . . . [and] we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place.

Dr. King was released on bond on April 20, 1963, but continued his work as a civil rights leader until he was assassinated five years later.

Most white Americans, especially in the South, supported segregation and opposed the civil rights activism that Dr. King and many others waged against it. As civil rights advocates began to win important judicial and legislative victories, white Americans implemented a strategy of massive resistance, deploying a range of tactics and weapons to discourage activism and slow the tide of progress. Some of these methods, such as criminalizing, arresting, and imprisoning peaceful protestors, foreshadowed the modern mass incarceration era. Other methods, such as bombing and murdering civil rights activists, used lethal violence to maintain white supremacy just as white mobs had used lynching throughout the era of racial terror.

Recently inaugurated President Woodrow Wilson received Postmaster General Albert Burleson’s plan to segregate the Railway Mail Service. Burleson reported that he found it “intolerable” that white and Black employees had to work together and share drinking glasses and washrooms. This sentiment was shared by others in Wilson’s administration; William McAdoo, secretary of the treasury, argued that segregation was necessary “to remove the causes of complaint and irritation where white women have been forced unnecessarily to sit at desks with colored men.”

By the end of 1913, Black employees in several federal departments had been relegated to separate or screened-off work areas and segregated lavatories and lunchrooms. In addition to physical separation from white workers, Black employees were appointed to menial positions or reassigned to divisions slated for elimination. The government also began requiring photographs on civil service applications to better enable racial screening.

Although the plan was implemented by his subordinates, President Wilson defended racial segregation in his administration as in the best interest of Black workers. He maintained that harm was interjected into the issue only when Black people were told that segregation was humiliation. Meanwhile, segregation in federal employment was seen as a significant blow to Black Americans’ rights and seemed to signify official presidential approval of Jim Crow policies in the South.

Segregated lavatory signs were eventually removed after backlash that included organized protests by the NAACP—but discriminatory customs persisted, and there was little concrete evidence of actual policy reversal. The federal government continued to require photographs on civil service applications until 1940.

African American singer and pianist Nat King Cole was performing before an all-white audience of 4,000 at the Municipal Auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama, when he was attacked and knocked down by a group of white men. Before the attack, a drunk man near the front row jeered at Mr. Cole, “Negro, go home.”

Nat King Cole was born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1919 and moved with his family to Chicago as a child. Mr. Cole was a popular national entertainer when he performed in Birmingham in 1956 and, due to the city’s racial segregation laws, he was required to schedule separate shows for white and Black audiences.

The night before the attack, he performed before a segregated audience in Mobile, Alabama, and was booed by scattered members of the crowd.

Police were present at the Birmingham concert in case of trouble and apprehended Mr. Cole’s attackers quickly; four men were charged with inciting a riot while two others were held for questioning. Outside the arena, officers later found a car containing rifles, a blackjack, and brass knuckles.

After the attack during the segregated “white only” Birmingham show, Mr. Cole returned to the stage; the remaining audience gave him a 10-minute standing ovation, but he did not finish the concert. “I just came here to entertain you,” he told the white crowd. “That was what I thought you wanted. I was born in Alabama. Those folks hurt my back. I cannot continue, because I need to see a doctor.”

After being examined by a physician, Mr. Cole went on to perform at the show scheduled for a Black audience later that night.

After being denied the use of every indoor auditorium in Washington, D.C. because of her race, world-renowned Black opera singer Marian Anderson instead performed for an audience gathered outside the Lincoln Memorial.

Ms. Anderson, a contralto, had been invited to sing at the nation’s capital on this day as part of a concert series hosted by Howard University. Because Ms. Anderson was already well known at the time, having spent years touring in Europe and the U.S., the university tried to book Constitution Hall, a large indoor auditorium, for her performance. However, the Daughters of the American Revolution, which owned the auditorium and had a “white-artists-only” clause in all of their contracts, refused to let Ms. Anderson perform in the space. Eleanor Roosevelt, who was first lady at the time and a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, resigned over the organization’s decision, but the Daughters of the American Revolution still refused to allow Ms. Anderson to perform.

Ms. Anderson then asked to use one of the local white public school’s auditoriums, but the D.C. Board of Education denied her request as well.

Because no other indoor venues in the city could or would accommodate Ms. Anderson’s performance, Ms. Anderson’s manager and Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP, persuaded the Secretary of the Interior to allow her to perform on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial instead.

Despite the humiliation of being denied the same accommodations granted to white artists, Ms. Anderson performed on April 9, dressed in a winter coat to keep herself warm and standing atop a makeshift stage built over the Lincoln Memorial’s steps. A crowd of over 75,000 people attended the event, and millions more listened over the radio. Ms. Anderson opened her performance with “America (My Country, ‘Tis of Thee),” a patriotic song written in 1831.

Over a decade after this show, Ms. Anderson performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1955, becoming the first Black artist to do so. Throughout her career, Ms. Anderson continued to perform all over the world while also lending her talent to the struggle against racial injustice. The granddaughter of Black people once enslaved in Virginia, she sang at the March on Washington in 1963 and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom that same year.

The Banner Mine near Birmingham, Alabama, exploded, killing 128 mine workers. According to the official investigation report, “about 90 percent were negro convicts. The other men in the mine were white convicts and free negroes who were employed as shot firers and foremen.”

By 1910, the State of Alabama had become the sixth largest coal producer in the U.S. Between 1875 and 1900, Alabama’s coal production grew from 67,000 tons to 8.4 million tons. This growth was driven in large part by the expansion of convict leasing in the state; in Birmingham, the center of the state’s coal production, more than 25% of miners were leased convicts. In addition, more than 50% of all miners in the state had learned to mine while working as convicts.

State officials quickly learned how to use the convict leasing system to disproportionately exploit Black people. In an average year, 97% of Alabama’s county convicts were Black. When coal companies’ labor needs increased, local police swept small-town streets, targeting Black Alabamians for quick arrest on charges of vagrancy, gambling, drunkenness, or theft. These citizens were then tried and convicted, sentenced to 60- or 90-days hard labor plus court costs, and handed over to the mines. Employers frequently held and worked convicts well beyond their scheduled release dates since local officials had no incentive to intervene and prisoners lacked the resources and power to demand enforcement.

Conditions in the mines were deplorable. Imprisoned men were often chained together in ankle-deep water, working 12- to 16-hour shifts with no breaks and surviving on fistfuls of spoiled meat and cornbread stuffed into the rags they wore for uniforms. Describing the experience, a Black former convict laborer recalled that the prisoners had slept in their chains, covered with “filth and vermin,” and the powder cans used as slop jars frequently overflowed and ran over into their beds.

Prisoner safety was not a priority for the mines’ owners and operators. After the deadly explosion, local newspapers reported on the deaths as a humorous event rather than a tragedy of lost life. Coverage listed the victims’ names alongside their conviction offenses: vagrancy, weapons violations, bootlegging, and gambling. One rural newspaper reported, “Several negroes from this section… were caught in the Banner mine explosion. That is a pretty tight penalty to pay for selling booze.”

The Ku Klux Klan held a series of revival events at a white Presbyterian church in Evergreen, Conecuh County, Alabama. For weeks prior, newspapers advertised the recurring events planned to last two weeks and encouraged white community members—especially white women—to participate in celebrating white supremacy on the church’s grounds.

Beginning at 7 pm on April 7, white people from Evergreen and the surrounding area gathered at the Presbyterian church to participate in this KKK revival. The program’s events included lectures that melded scripture and the “teachings” of the KKK, titled “Daniel’s Vision of the Ku Klux Klan” and “Chalk Talks on Biblical Figures.” On the first night, 100 people registered to join as official members of the KKK. The series of events ended on April 17.

Throughout the nation’s history, white churches have played a critical role in supporting violent white supremacy in America. During the era of enslavement, while some Protestant churches initially supported abolition, white Christians, who were committed to holding Black people in bondage, embraced interpretations of the Bible that advanced white supremacy and justified enslavement. For decades, white churches across the country barred Black clergymen and advocated and upheld the institutionalization of Jim Crow segregation in the U.S. In many cases, congregation and clergy membership of churches included white people who openly advocated for and participated in Klan activities and violence.

After the Civil War, the rise of racial violence and organizations like the Ku Klux Klan came in direct response to emancipation and calls for Black equality. Functioning from its inception as a political paramilitary arm of white supremacist interests, the Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1865 by six Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee. The KKK launched a campaign of terror, violence, and murder targeting African Americans and white people who supported Black civil rights.

The KKK underwent a massive resurgence in the first few decades of the 20th century when white Americans sought to recommit themselves to white supremacy in the face of increasing Black migration out of the South and a growing movement for civil rights. By the 1920s, millions of white people were members of the Klan; in almost all cases, membership was exclusively reserved for white Christians.

Like those who attended this revival, most KKK members in the U.S. were white, middle-class Protestants. The KKK had more than 150,000 members in Alabama by the 1920s, including prominent political figures like Bibb Graves, Grand Cyclops of the Montgomery Klan chapter, who was elected Governor of Alabama in 1926, assumed office in 1927, and ultimately served two terms. Rather than marginalized extremists, KKK members during this era included respected professionals, community leaders, elected officials and even clergy who supported and often participated in the organization’s racist, violent tactics. As a direct result of this 10-day long revival, Conecuh County’s KKK chapter recorded a total membership of 600 people.