Author: Desto22

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.

A mob of at least 80 white men broke into the jail in Charles City, Virginia, removed a Black man named Isaac Brandon from his cell and, ignoring the pleas of his young son, lynched him on the courthouse lawn.

A few days prior, several white women alleged that a Black man had broken into their home and tried to assault them. When news of this event spread, suspicion quickly turned to Mr. Brandon. The deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society during this time period often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered or alleged, whether evidence supported that suspicion or not. Almost 25% of all lynchings involved allegations of inappropriate behavior between a Black man and a white woman that was characterized as “assault” or “sexual assault.” The mere accusation of sexual impropriety regularly aroused violent mobs and ended in lynching. Allegations against Black people were rarely subject to scrutiny.

Mr. Brandon was promptly arrested and brought to the jail. Although no evidence linked him or his young son—whose name is not recorded in contemporary newspapers—to the alleged crime, both of them were arrested and held for several days in the jail. On the evening of April 6, a mob of at least 80 white men arrived at the home of the sheriff and shared their plan to lynch Mr. Brandon. Although he was armed and charged with protecting those in his custody, the sheriff failed to protect Mr. Brandon or his son from the mob’s actions and the mob successfully broke through the jailhouse door without incident.

As Mr. Brandon and his son pleaded with the mob not to carry out the lynching, Mr. Brandon maintained his innocence, claiming: “You are going to hang an innocent man.” Mr. Brandon’s young son clung to him as the mob bound Mr. Brandon’s hands. Soon after, the mob forced Mr. Brandon’s son back into the jail cell, carried Mr. Brandon away, and hanged him from a tree on the courthouse lawn.

Mr. Brandon’s body was left hanging outside the courthouse until the next morning, and contemporary accounts noted that members of the Black community were forced to bear witness to his body in the town square. As was characteristic of racial terror violence, white mobs often committed lynchings in prominent community locations to dehumanize their victims and to send a message of terror and intimidation to the entire Black community.

Mr. Brandon was one of at least 84 Black people who were victims of racial terror lynching in Virginia between 1877 and 1950.

In the early hours of the morning on April 5, 1880, Cadet Johnson Whittaker, one of the first Black students in the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, was brutally beaten by white cadets while sleeping in his barracks. Three white cadets ambushed Cadet Whittaker, slashed his head and ears, burned his Bible, threatened his life, and then left him in his underwear, tied to the bed and bleeding profusely.

Born enslaved in South Carolina in 1858, Cadet Whittaker received a congressional appointment to the U.S. Military Academy in 1876. For most of his time at West Point, Cadet Whittaker was the only Black cadet at the institution; he endured social exclusion and racial terrorism perpetrated at the hands of white cadets and faculty alike. Twenty-three Black cadets attended West Point between 1870 and 1890, but due to the violent discrimination that they faced, only three graduated. Cadet Whittaker would later testify that he had “read and heard about the treatment that [Black] cadets received there, and expected to be ostracized.”

After Cadet Whittaker reported to West Point administrators that he had been attacked, the institution opened an investigation into him and declined to hold his white attackers accountable. Administrators instead claimed that Cadet Whittaker had staged the attack to get out of his final exams, and in May, a West Point court of inquiry found Cadet Whittaker guilty of that charge. He was forced to take his final exams while incarcerated and withstand court-martial proceedings in New York City where the army prosecutor repeatedly referred to Black people as an “inferior race” known to “feign and sham.”

In January 1881, Brigadier General N.A. Miles affirmed Cadet Whittaker’s conviction and authorized him to be expelled from West Point, dishonorably discharged from the military, and held for continued imprisonment. Cadet Whittaker’s case was ultimately forwarded to President Chester A. Arthur for approval, and, a year later, President Arthur issued an executive order overturning the conviction based on a finding that military prosecutors had relied on improperly admitted evidence. By the time of President Arthur’s intervention, Cadet Whittaker had been incarcerated for nearly two years; even after his conviction was overturned, West Point reinstated Cadet Whittaker’s expulsion, claiming he had failed an exam.

Johnson Whittaker went on to work in several professional fields and raise a family, including several generations of descendants who served in the U.S. military. In 1995, more than 60 years after his death, Mr. Whittaker’s heirs accepted the commission he would have received upon graduating West Point. At the ceremony, President Bill Clinton remarked: “We cannot undo history. But today, finally, we can pay tribute to a great American and we can acknowledge a great injustice.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed while standing on a hotel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. Dr. King was in the city to speak on his growing Poor People’s Campaign and to support an economic protest by Black sanitation workers.

About two months earlier, 1,300 African American Memphis sanitation workers began a strike to protest low pay and poor treatment. When city leaders largely ignored the strike and refused to negotiate, the workers sought assistance from civil rights leaders, including Dr. King. He enthusiastically agreed to help and, on March 18, visited the city to speak to a crowd of more than 15,000 people.

Dr. King also planned a march of support. When the first attempt was violently suppressed by police, leaving one protestor dead, Dr. King resolved to stage another peaceful march on April 8. He returned to Memphis by plane on April 3, braving a bomb threat on his scheduled flight. Once in Memphis, he stayed at the Lorraine Motel and gave a short speech reflecting on his own mortality.

The next evening, April 4, Dr. King was shot as he stepped out onto the motel balcony. He was rushed to nearby St. Joseph’s Hospital and pronounced dead at 7:05 pm, leaving a nation in shock and sparking mournful uprisings in more than 100 cities across the country. Just 39 years old, Dr. King left behind a wife, Coretta Scott King, and four young children. James Earl Ray, a white man, was later convicted of his assassination.

President William Howard Taft directed the U.S. Army to expel the Ninth Cavalry, an all-Black unit, from San Antonio, Texas. Earlier that day, the president had met with San Antonio’s U.S. Congressman, John Garner, who urged President Taft to expel the Black cavalrymen from the entire State of Texas because their protest of segregated seating on city streetcars threatened local “law and order.” Immediately afterward, President Taft issued a memorandum to General Leonard Wood, the Army’s chief of staff, directing the nation’s highest-ranking army official to remove the Ninth Cavalry from San Antonio.

Two days later, the Black soldiers were relocated to Rio Grande City, Texas, a city near the Mexican border. Local white residents protested the arrival of the Black cavalry soldiers, claiming that Black men who volunteered to serve their country were “continually looking for an opportunity to exercise brutality.” Facing mounting hostility from this white opposition, President Taft ultimately rescinded the order and had the Black troops returned to San Antonio. White Rio Grande City residents adopted a resolution commending the decision, while white San Antonio residents were outraged. In July 1911, the Black soldiers of the Ninth Cavalry were again removed from San Antonio, this time relocated to Fort Russell, Wyoming.

On the same day that Rep. Garner lobbied for the removal of Black soldiers from San Antonio, he announced plans for legislation that would repeal the Army Organization Act of 1866. That Reconstruction-era law had required the War Department to establish and maintain two Black cavalry units and four Black infantry units in the U.S. Army to enable Black men to serve in the otherwise all-white, segregated U.S. military. In 1911, the nation’s army remained segregated, and Black soldiers were barred from serving in all but these six units. Rep. Garner’s proposal repealing the 1866 Act would have given the War Department discretion to abolish the all-Black units—and thus prevent any Black citizens from serving in the military. Rep. Garner in fact intended for his proposed legislation to exclude Black soldiers entirely, as he believed that no high-ranking official in the military would permit Black Americans to serve if federal law did not require it.

Though the bill did not pass, its proposal—and the punitive treatment of Black soldiers simply fighting for civil rights— reflects the extreme levels of white resistance to Black military service that characterized the highest offices of government and military institutions.

Georgia ceded its western territory—the land that would become Alabama and Mississippi—under the condition that slavery would be legal there.

The Northwest Ordinance, passed by Congress in 1787, had laid out the procedures for adding new states to the U.S. that were located in the Northwest Territory (lands above the Ohio River between Pennsylvania and the Mississippi River). The law stipulated that slavery would be banned in these lands.

However, when the State of Georgia agreed to relinquish claims to its western territory (lands below Tennessee between the Chattahoochee River and the Mississippi River), it chose, with the federal government’s agreement, to deviate from the Northwest ordinance in one major respect: Georgia’s act of cession stated that the Northwest Ordinance “shall, in all its parts, extend to the territory contained in the present act of cession, that article only excepted which forbids slavery.”

Georgia’s cession of its western territory was part of a strategy by the “slave states” to shore up their power. At the time, there were eight “slave states” and eight free states. By creating new states in which slavery was legal, the U.S. Senate would add senators who supported slavery. In 1790, North Carolina had similarly ceded its western territories to create the “slave states” of Tennessee and Kentucky. As long as the Southern states held enough power in the Senate, they could block federal legislation pertaining to the issue of slavery in Congress.

Because of the slavery clause in Georgia’s act of cession, hundreds of thousands of Black people would become enslaved in Alabama and Mississippi. The enslaved population of Alabama grew from under 40,000 when the cession occurred to over 435,000 in 1860. In Mississippi, the enslaved population grew from under 33,000 to over 435,000 in 1860 as well.

Ohio began legally prohibiting Black people from testifying in cases involving white people as parties. As a result, for the next four decades, white people could act with impunity in filing baseless civil suits against Black people barred from testifying to defend themselves and committing crimes against Black people with no fear that the victim or any Black witnesses would be permitted to give evidence against them. This law made Black people vulnerable to exploitation and abuse and ensured that they could not rely on the courts for protection or justice.

Between 1800 and 1810, the Black population of Ohio increased by more than 550%. When Ohio became a state in 1803, the Ohio legislature launched a coordinated campaign to prevent “fugitive slaves” and freed Black people from settling in the state. Enacted between 1804 and 1807, Ohio’s “Black Laws” sought to restrict the movement and freedom of Black people already living in the state, deny all Black people the right to public education, and require Black people to register with local authorities and “prove” their freedom on demand. Other laws restricted Black people from competing economically with white Ohioans; an 1807 law fined any white person for hiring a Black person who did not possess proof of freedom. Within 20 days of arriving in Ohio, Black people seeking residence there were required to post a $500 bond guaranteed by two white men.

The “testimony law,” which went into effect on April 1, 1807, built on these racial restrictions. The law prohibited any Black person from “be[ing] sworn or giv[ing] evidence in any court of record where either party is a white person, or in any prosecution … against any white person.” This meant that Black people could not testify against white people who committed crimes against them or others. In civil cases, white plaintiffs could easily win lawsuits against Black people, who were unable to protect themselves from even clearly frivolous lawsuits. This dramatically undermined the reliability of the legal system and furthered the racial injustice and inequality facing Black people living in Ohio.

During this period, the Colored American, a Black newspaper in Cincinnati, reported numerous examples of white people swindling money from Black people and also highlighted cases in which authorities failed to prosecute white-on-Black violence after this law kept Black eyewitnesses from testifying. In 1841, after two white men murdered a Black man named Charles Scott in his Hamilton County home, a white judge relied on the 1807 testimony law to prohibit Mr. Scott’s widow—an eyewitness to the murder—from testifying at the white men’s trial. Although the men were convicted after the judge admitted the testimony of a different eyewitness—whom the judge deemed “white enough” under a broad interpretation of the law—Mrs. Scott was barred from helping to prosecute the men who killed her husband. The testimony law, which prioritized white supremacy over justice, was on the books for 42 years and not repealed until 1849.

A white lynch mob in Wagoner County, Oklahoma, seized a 17-year-old Black girl named Marie Scott from the local jail, dragged her screaming from her cell, and hanged her from a nearby telephone pole. Days before, a young white man named Lemuel Pierce was stabbed to death while he and several other white men were in the city’s “colored section”; Marie was accused of being involved.

The Associated Press wire report and accounts published by Northern papers explained that the group of white men had ventured into the Black residential area to sexually assault Black women and attempted to rape Marie Scott. According to some of these accounts, Marie stabbed Pierce in self-defense; in others, Marie’s brother killed Pierce in an effort to defend her, and Marie was only arrested and lynched because her brother escaped. Local press reports, on the other hand, did not say anything about why the white youth were in the Black neighborhood or what they did while there and simply claimed that Marie Scott stabbed Pierce unprovoked and in cold blood.

For generations of Black women, racial terror included the constant threat of sexual assault and a complete lack of legal protection. The same communities that lynched and legally executed Black men for the scarcest allegations of sexual contact with white women regularly tolerated and excused white men’s sexual attacks against Black women and girls.

Given this history, Marie Scott may have been among the many Black women targeted for sexual violence during this era by white men who knew that they would face no judgment or consequences for rampaging her community. Whether she acted in her own defense or was protected by her brother, Marie Scott died at the hands of a mob, the victim of a society that devalued her life and body; deprived her of the chance to defend herself at trial; and denied her the right to be free from rape, terrorism, and racial violence.

The Sovereignty Commission, a Mississippi state agency, voted to continue funding pro-segregation campaigns organized by white citizens’ councils. Among the commission members were Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, Lt. Governor Paul B. Johnson, and the attorney general.

In the nine months leading up to the decision, the state commission invested the equivalent of over $600,000 today into pro-segregation campaigns broadcasted on national radio and television. The group helped finance over a dozen campaigns that aired in Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Mississippi.

One of the campaigns characterized life for Black Mississippians as superior: “Negroes receive better treatment and more consideration of their welfare in Mississippi than any other state in the nation,” the campaign stated.

In reality, racial terror violence and extreme opposition to equal rights for Black people were widespread in Mississippi. Mississippi was among the first Southern states to adopt a new state constitution in the 1890s designed to disenfranchise Black citizens, which succeeded in excluding Black Mississippians from political participation and power for decades.

Mississippi continued to symbolically resist racial equality throughout the 20th century; the state did not formally ratify the Thirteenth Amendment—which prohibited slavery except as punishment for crime—until 1995.

Several white churches in Jackson, Mississippi, barred three Black men—including one minister—from attending Easter Sunday services, forcibly removing them from church or blocking their entrance. Two of the Black men and seven white clergymen who had accompanied them were arrested and jailed after the churches turned them away; their bonds were set at $1,000 each.

When Methodist Bishops Charles Golden, a Black man, and James Matthews, a white man, tried to enter the Galloway Memorial Church that morning, ushers on the church steps refused to let them enter, citing “church policies.” As ranking members of the Methodist denomination, the two bishops asked to speak to the church minister, but the ushers refused to let them. While the men stood outside the church deciding what to do next, a white crowd harassed them with taunts and jeers until the men left the church grounds. In an interview, Bishop Golden would later question the wisdom of “those who presume to speak and act for God in turning worshipers away from his house.”

Bishop Golden and Bishop Matthews were able to leave freely, but 10 blocks away, an interracial group of nine men were arrested when they attended Easter service at the Capitol Street Methodist Church. Ushers on the church steps tried to block them from entering, and when the group of men tried to go around the ushers, they were arrested and charged with trespassing and disturbing the peace. The group included two young Black men named Robert Talbert and Dave Walker and seven white men—clergy, theological teachers, and deans from several schools and colleges outside of Mississippi—who had accompanied them to the service. The men had carried with them a statement that read “To exclude some of those whom Christ would draw unto himself from church…on Easter…because of color is a violation of human dignity.”

The day after their arrests, a judge convicted all nine men of “disturbing public worship” and sentenced them each to six months in jail and a $500 fine.

Several weeks earlier, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had announced plans to lead anti-segregation protests in St. Augustine, Florida, over Easter, in response to recent violence against civil rights activists there. Dr. King urged Northern supporters of civil rights to travel South to join “pray-in” and “kneel-in” demonstrations at the city’s segregated churches, and that Florida effort likely helped to inspire the activism in Jackson. Like in Mississippi, several St. Augustine protesters were also arrested—and even beaten—for trying to integrate Easter services at all-white churches.

This racist treatment of individuals seeking to attend church illustrates how many white denominations—particularly those in the South—remained defiantly committed to racial segregation as an essential component of white supremacy and racial inequality, even a decade after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Three months later, in June 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the law outlawed discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin but could not immediately end white Americans’ massive resistance.