Author: Desto22

Harry Laughlin, a leader in the eugenics movement, drafted a Model Eugenical Sterilization Law that Virginia adopted and enacted on March 20, 1924. The law, which allowed for the forced sterilization of people confined to state institutions as a “benefit both to themselves and society,” was passed on the same day that the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 became law. The Racial Integrity Act required the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics to record a racial description of every newborn baby and outlawed marriages between “white” and “non-white” partners. Together, the laws sought to “purify the white race.”

Eugenics, named for the Greek word meaning “well-born,” is a selective breeding philosophy that seeks to eliminate “undesirable” traits by preventing certain kinds of people from reproducing. Sir Francis Galton developed the term in 1883 and described eugenics as “the study of the agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally.” As eugenics gained widespread support throughout the U.S. at the beginning of the 20th century, states began to authorize doctors to forcibly sterilize their patients.

When the Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s Eugenical Sterilization Act in Buck v. Bell in 1927, Virginia’s law became a model for the rest of the country and facilitated the forced sterilization of more than 60,000 men and women nationwide. Children as young as 10 years old were targeted for sterilization. Later, Virginia’s law was co-opted by Nazi Germany and relied upon as precedent for the Nazis’ race purity programs. Though eugenical theory was criticized after World War II, forced sterilization persisted long after in the U.S.

Just months after he prevailed in a lawsuit to force the University of Missouri to accept him to its all-white law school, a young Black man named Lloyd Gaines went missing and was never seen again.

After graduating from the historically Black Lincoln University in 1935, Lloyd Gaines applied for admission to the segregated University of Missouri School of Law—the only law school in the state. In March of 1936, the school notified Mr. Gaines that his application had been rejected and instead offered to subsidize his tuition elsewhere (at a historically Black law school or a non-segregated law school in another state).

With the NAACP’s support, Mr. Gaines rejected the offer and sued the University of Missouri to challenge its policy that barred him from attending law school in his home state merely because of his race. Mr. Gaines lost in state courts and appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he won the case in December 1938. As a result, the University of Missouri was ordered to accept Mr. Gaines to its law school or create an in-state law school for African Americans.

The Missouri legislature responded by hastily establishing a separate, unequal law school for African Americans that the NAACP insisted did not comply with the Court’s decision. However, when the NAACP was preparing to file another legal challenge, it learned that Mr. Gaines was missing. A housekeeper at his residence in Chicago reported last seeing him on March 19, 1939. Without a plaintiff, the desegregation lawsuit against the University of Missouri was dismissed; it would be another decade before the school would admit its first African American student.

Family members suspected that Mr. Gaines was abducted and murdered for his activism, while state officials claimed he fled and assumed another identity in response to threats against him and his loved ones. To this day, Mr. Gaines’s fate is unknown.

Beginning in 1827, the State of Georgia enacted legislation that nullified Cherokee laws and appropriated Cherokee lands. In response to Georgia’s extension of its law over the Cherokee Nation, the Cherokee filed suit in the U.S. Supreme Court, challenging the legislation and citing treaties the nation had previously entered into with the U.S. government. The Cherokee argued that those treaties established the Cherokee Nation as a sovereign and independent state.

On March 18, 1831, the Supreme Court issued an opinion in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, sidestepping the issue of whether Georgia could extend its law over the Cherokee tribes and instead ruling that the Cherokee Nation was not a “foreign nation”—so the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction to hear its claims.

The Court observed that while Native Americans had an “unquestioned right to the lands they occupy, until that right shall be extinguished by a voluntary cession to our government; it may well be doubted whether those tribes which reside within the acknowledged boundaries of the United States can, with strict accuracy, be denominated foreign nations.” The Court emphasized that Native Americans were “domestic dependent nations” with a “relation to the United States [that] resembles that of a ward to his guardian” and concluded that Indigenous communities could not bring suit in an American court.

The Court refused to enforce the treaties that would have protected the Cherokee from state and federal interference, instead leaving them vulnerable to the Indian Removal Act—which resulted in the Cherokee’s forcible removal later that year.

23 Black people were killed when a white mob stormed the courthouse in Carroll County, Mississippi, and opened fire on local Black residents. Black residents were in court following accusations against a white man for the assault of two brothers, Ed and Charley Brown.

The brothers, who were Black, had accused local attorney James Monroe Liddell, who was white, of assaulting them during an altercation in February 1886. That Black residents would use the legal system to try to hold a white person accountable for a crime infuriated white residents of the county. On March 17, the day of the trial, a group of 50 to 100 white men rode into town and ran into the courthouse, opening fire and killing 23 of the Black residents in attendance. None of the white people in attendance were hit by bullets.

Though the killings sparked outrage nationwide, no action was taken by the county or the state of Mississippi. No one was ever tried for the murders. The governor of Mississippi, Robert Lowry, commented that “the riot was provoked and perpetrated by the outrage and conduct of the Negroes.”

In Washington, D.C., Black politicians met with President Grover Cleveland and introduced legislation in Congress calling for an investigation into the massacre, but the federal government also refused to respond.

Bullet holes remained in the courthouse walls until the building was renovated in the 1990s.

After failing for 130 years to ratify the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery except as punishment for crime, the state of Mississippi finally ratified the Thirteenth Amendment on March 16, 1995.

Soon after the Confederacy’s defeat in the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment was designed to abolish slavery nationwide. The text of the amendment reads, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

After Congress passed the amendment on January 31, 1865, three-fourths of the states (27 of 36) needed to ratify it before it could become part of the Constitution. Mississippi’s economy was built on slavery and the state had the largest enslaved population in the country at the start of the Civil War. On December 5, 1865, the state legislature voted against ratification, becoming one of several Southern states that refused to endorse the Thirteenth Amendment. Ultimately, the amendment received enough votes from other states so that it was ratified the following day despite Mississippi’s opposition to the end of enslavement.

Almost 130 years later, in 1994, a clerk in the Texas Legislature named Gregory Watson discovered that Mississippi still had not ratified the Thirteenth Amendment. He notified each of the Black members of the Mississippi legislature and sent them a draft of a resolution that Mississippi could adopt in order to rectify the situation. On March 16th of the next year, the Mississippi legislature reached a largely symbolic vote to unanimously ratify the abolition of slavery in the U.S.—becoming the last of the eligible states to do so.

After the vote, however, Mississippi state officials failed to send the necessary documentation to the federal register, so the ratification was not formally filed as required. Nearly 20 years later, in late 2012, two Mississippi residents discovered that the ratification was not yet official and notified the secretary of state. Several weeks later, the required paperwork was filed, and Mississippi’s ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment was legally recorded on February 7, 2013.

A white mob in Rome, Tennessee, lynched a Black woman named Ballie Crutchfield. Ms. Crutchfield was not accused of any crime. She was targeted simply because the mob had earlier that night failed in its attempt to lynch her brother.

A week earlier, a white man in Rome had reportedly lost a wallet containing $120. As word spread that a young Black boy had found the wallet and given it to a young Black man named William Crutchfield, white residents accused William of stealing the wallet.

During this era, the deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society burdened Black people with a presumption of guilt that often served to focus suspicion on Black communities who were accused of crimes that may or may not have been committed. Though there was no evidence supporting the claim that William Crutchfield had stolen the wallet, he was promptly arrested and taken to the local jail. That night, a white mob stormed the jail and abducted Mr. Crutchfield from police custody, but as they prepared to lynch him, he escaped.

The lynch mob searched but failed to find Mr. Crutchfield; determined to take out their vengeance on someone, they instead seized his sister, Ballie Crutchfield, from her home. Though she was not even alleged to be in any way involved with the lost wallet, the mob took Ms. Crutchfield—whose first name was also reported as “Sallie”—to a bridge a short distance from the town, tied her hands behind her back, shot her in the head, and threw her body into the creek below.

Lynching was a tool of racial terror used to maintain white supremacy and dominance by instilling fear in the entire Black community. This brutal violence was often unpredictable and arbitrary. As was the case for Ms. Crutchfield, it was extremely common during this era for a lynch mob’s focus to expand beyond a specific person accused of an offense. Lynch mobs frequently targeted members of a suspect’s family, neighbors, or any and all Black people unfortunate enough to be in the mob’s path. Countless Black people were victims of racial terror lynchings not because they were accused of any crime, but simply because they were Black and present when the lynch mob could not locate its intended victim.

Ms. Crutchfield’s body was recovered from the creek the morning after she was killed, and the coroner’s jury quickly concluded that she had met her death “at the hands of parties unknown.” No one was held accountable for her lynching.

The Missouri General Assembly passed a law that required free Black people to apply for a license to remain in the state. Black people who failed to do so faced fines up to $100, incarceration, and expulsion from Missouri. Fearful of a growing Black population, white legislators enacted the law in an attempt to force Black people out of the state and empowered authorities to seize any free Black person that they suspected lacked a license.

Missouri’s law imposed onerous requirements on applicants. Free Black residents had to establish continuous residency for at least a decade and “produce satisfactory evidence… that [the applicant] is of good character and behavior, and capable of supporting [themselves] by lawful employment.” The law also obligated Black people to obtain a new license each time they moved to a different county.

In 1837, the Missouri Supreme Court upheld the license law in the case of a free Black man arrested and jailed by the mayor of St. Louis. In challenging his confinement, the man argued that the U.S. Constitution entitled him to the protections of birthright citizenship and that the license law violated his constitutional rights. The court rejected the Black man’s appeal and upheld the power of local authorities to arrest free Black people without a license.

Very few protections existed under state laws for free Black people during the era of enslavement, and their actions were strictly regulated. Between 1822 and 1854, courts in 11 other states, including Pennsylvania and California, ruled that free Black people were not citizens. For example, in 1805, Maryland enacted a law requiring all free Black people to petition the court for a “Certificate of Freedom” as a condition of residency. In 1811, Delaware passed a law providing that any free Black person who left the state for six months or more forfeited state residency. In 1822, South Carolina passed a law prohibiting free Black people from moving to or from the state.

In other states, it was a crime to be free and Black. In 1806, Virginia passed a law mandating that all free Black people leave the state within one year or face re-enslavement. In 1830, North Carolina passed a law providing that enslaved people could only be granted freedom on the condition that they left the state within 90 days and “never returned.” In 1833, the Alabama legislature banned all free Black people from entering the state, and under Alabama law the color of a Black person’s skin gave rise to a presumption that he or she was enslaved. The following year, the Alabama legislature expanded on this law, making it illegal to emancipate an enslaved Black person within Alabama’s borders.

Louisville police officers shot and killed Breonna Taylor during a nighttime no-knock raid of her apartment. Ms. Taylor, who was 26, worked as an emergency room technician and dreamed of becoming a nurse.

Shortly after midnight on March 13, Ms. Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, awoke to the sound of loud banging on their apartment door. Mr. Walker believed someone was trying to break into their home, and when several men forced their way inside the apartment using a battering ram, he fired his licensed firearm in self-defense. Mr. Walker struck one officer in the leg, and the officers fired back—hitting Ms. Taylor at least five times.

According to Mr. Walker, Ms. Taylor struggled to breathe for at least five minutes after she was shot and received no medical attention for over 20 minutes. Mr. Walker was taken into custody and charged with attempted murder of a police officer, though the charges were dismissed in May of 2020.

The officers—who wore plain clothes during the raid—had been executing a no-knock warrant, which allows police to forcibly enter people’s homes without warning. Louisville officials have since banned no-knock warrants.

The warrant had been issued as part of an investigation into two men believed to be selling drugs from a location more than 10 miles from Ms. Taylor’s home. Police asserted that one of the men used Ms. Taylor’s apartment to receive packages, but no drugs were found in the apartment—and attorneys for Mr. Walker and Ms. Taylor’s family later reported that the police had already located the main suspect in the case before they broke into Ms. Taylor’s home.

In August 2020, nearly five months after Ms. Taylor’s killing and following national protests, the U.S. Department of Justice charged four officers involved in Ms. Taylor’s death with federal civil rights violations. One former detective pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and admitted that she had falsified a search warrant application for Ms. Taylor’s apartment. Brett Hankison, an officer who fired 10 bullets into Ms. Taylor’s apartment on the night of the raid, was acquitted of charges of wanton endangerment.

In March 2023, a Justice Department investigation into the Louisville Metro Police Department detailed serious misconduct and widespread discrimination against Black residents—including unlawful car stops, uses of excessive force, and harassment. “Breonna Taylor was a symptom of problems that we have had for years,” one unnamed police leader told the DOJ shortly after the investigation began.

Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia convinced 101 of the 128 congressmen representing the 11 states of the old Confederacy to sign “The Southern Manifesto on Integration.” In total, 19 Senators and 82 Representatives—almost one-fifth of Congress—signed their name and declared their opposition to integration. The document claimed that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared racially segregated public education unconstitutional, constituted an abuse of power in violation of federal law.

The manifesto accused the Court of jeopardizing the social justice of white people and “their habits, traditions, and way of life” and also claimed that the Brown ruling would “[destroy] the amicable relations between the white and Negro races that have been created through 90 years of patient effort by the good people of both races.” The time period they referenced was in fact an era characterized by racial terror and a Jim Crow legal caste system that had targeted Black Americans for violence and inequality since the end of Reconstruction.

Eight southern states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia—enacted their own versions of the Southern Manifesto. Called “interposition resolutions,” these statements tried to elevate the state’s legal interpretation over that of the Supreme Court. These states also used legislative acts and voter referenda to enact tuition grant statutes that authorized state governments to fund privately run schools in order to preserve racially segregated education.

In early March 1965, a peaceful crowd of 600 people began a protest march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to show their support for Black voting rights. Police armed with batons, pepper spray, and guns attacked the marchers on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge in a violent assault that came to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”

After the attack, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other organizers remained determined to complete the march. Dr. King urged clergy to come to Selma and join the march to Montgomery. Hundreds of clergy from across the country heeded the call and traveled to Selma; one of them was the Reverend James Reeb, a 38-year-old white Unitarian minister from Boston.

On March 9th, Dr. King led 2,500 marchers onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge for a short prayer session. That evening, three white ministers–Orloff Miller, Clark Olsen, and James Reeb–were attacked and beaten by a group of white men opposed to their civil rights work. The Rev. Reeb was struck in the head with a club and suffered a severe skull fracture and brain damage.

Fearing that he would not be treated at the “white only” Selma Hospital, doctors at Selma’s Black Burwell Infirmary ordered the Rev. Reeb rushed to the Birmingham hospital. After a series of unfortunate events, including car trouble and confrontations with local police, the Rev. Reeb reached the hospital in Birmingham in critical condition. He died on March 11, 1965, leaving behind his wife and four children. Three white men later indicted for the Rev. Reeb’s murder were ultimately acquitted by an all-white jury.

More widely reported than the death of local Black activist Jimmie Lee Jackson a few weeks earlier, the Rev. Reeb’s death brought national attention to the voting rights struggle. The death also moved President Lyndon B. Johnson to call a special session of Congress, where he urged legislators to pass the Voting Rights Act. Congress did so, and President Johnson signed the act into law in August 1965.