Author: Desto22

On the eve of a primary election in Wrightsville, Johnson County, Georgia, at least 300 white men and women belonging to the Ku Klux Klan held a parade in the town’s center. The gathering featured speeches inciting racial hatred and violence, and participants burned crosses on the lawn of the county courthouse. The event was organized to threaten and intimidate the county’s 400 registered Black voters into not voting in the primary the following day, and the terror tactics worked: fearing for their safety and knowing they had no expectation of protection from law enforcement, not a single Black citizen of Wrightsville cast a vote in the primary.

White voters and politicians in the U.S., and particularly in the South, have actively sought to suppress Black voter turnout and political representation since the establishment of Black voting rights. Following Emancipation, many states instituted laws and requirements, such as poll taxes, felony disenfranchisement policies, and literacy tests, to infringe on Black Americans’ right to participate in the political process. In addition to these legislative methods, white residents emboldened by the support of corrupt law enforcement used violent threats, intimidation, and racial terror lynching to terrorize and sometimes kill Black voters. Unchecked racialized violence and disenfranchisement of Black voters kept America’s racial hierarchy intact for generations after the abolition of American chattel slavery.

In 1940, 77% of Black Americans still lived in the South, where they made up 24% of the population but only 3.5% of registered voters. Because Southern districts included large numbers of Black residents, the disenfranchisement of Southern Black people translated into the super-enfranchisement of Southern white people: in a 50% Black Southern district where no Black people voted, each white vote carried twice the influence of a Northern vote cast in a fully enfranchised district. In this way, the disenfranchisement of Southern Black people empowered Southern white voters at the expense of almost everyone else.

In Johnson County, this history of intimidation and unjust laws meant that a community with more than 1,500 Black adult residents (according to the 1950 census) registered just 400 Black voters and held an election in which not one Black person cast a vote. This disenfranchisement was consequential in Johnson County in 1948, as the primary election helped choose the community’s county sheriff and the judge of the city court. Prior to the election, Judge W.C. Brinson—a white man—announced that any voter who showed up at the polls would be required to sign a “white supremacy pledge” and a commitment to racial segregation in Georgia. The plan was ultimately abandoned prior to the election, but Judge Brinson, chairman of one of the county’s political parties, was re-elected to the position of city court judge by the all-white electorate. Unconcerned by the disenfranchisement of all of his Black constituents, Judge Brinson later blamed local Black voters for their own mistreatment and low turnout, claiming they had not voted due to a lack of interest “in county affairs”—completely ignoring the Klan parade and threats of violence the local Black community had faced just days before Election Day.

In the 1960s, activists eventually achieved passage of landmark civil rights legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars racial discrimination in workplaces and public accommodations, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which finally created federal oversight to protect African American voting rights. The Voting Rights Act brought widespread enfranchisement to Black communities for the first time since Reconstruction. Just three years after the law passed, Black voter registration in the South had increased by 1.3 million people. The greatest changes were in the states most targeted by the new law. In Mississippi, 60% of eligible Black voters were registered in 1968, up from just 7% in 1965.

In 2010, Alabama’s Republican-controlled state government filed a lawsuit challenging the Voting Rights Act as “no longer necessary.” Three years later, in Shelby County v. Holder, a divided Supreme Court effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act by striking down the requirement that states like Alabama obtain “pre-clearance” from the federal government before changing their voting laws. In dissent, late Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that the Court was turning its back to history. “The sad irony of today’s decision lies in its utter failure to grasp why the [Voting Rights Act] has proven effective,” she wrote.

Idaho amended its anti-miscegenation law to include additional restrictions on interracial marriage. Idaho passed its first anti-miscegenation law in 1864, which banned marriage between a white person and “any person of African descent, Indian or Chinese.” The punishment for marrying in violation of the statute was imprisonment for up to two years. Idaho also passed a law banning interracial cohabitation in 1864, violation of which could result in a $100-$500 fine, six to 12 months in jail, or both. The anti-miscegenation law was amended in 1867 to increase the range of fines and the maximum possible prison time to 10 years.

The 1921 amendment to the law banned marriage between white people and “mongolians, negroes, or mulattoes,” although the state’s population at the time was less than .02% African American. The Idaho state legislature repealed the anti-miscegenation law in 1959.

Idaho was not unique in its attempts to obstruct marriage between the races. In the 1920s, Social Darwinism had captured the attention of the country’s elite, who became concerned with maintaining and promoting the eugenic racial purity of the white race by controlling procreation. Concerned that states were not adequately enforcing their anti-miscegenation laws, eugenicists pushed for stronger measures against racial mixing and stricter classifications to determine who qualified as white when seeking a marriage license. Like Idaho, many states added the racial category “mongolian” during this time in response to an influx of Japanese immigrants to the U.S.

Black families attempted to move into their new homes in Detroit, Michigan, but were met with violence and intimidation from white mobs and were ultimately denied entry to their homes.

Before and during World War II, the city of Detroit was a hub for economic activity that attracted a large influx of new residents. Many newcomers were African Americans fleeing racial violence and inequality in the rural South, in a wave known as the Great Migration. Those who resettled in Detroit felt the city offered new opportunities for economic mobility.

Housing scarcity was a major challenge for growing Detroit, as new construction did not keep pace with the increasing population, and residential segregation created dangerous slums. Black families were banned from most public housing, restricted to over-crowded neighborhoods, and often forced to pay higher rents to live in dilapidated homes without indoor plumbing. They also faced hostility from the local Ku Klux Klan, police, and groups of white workers.

In June 1941, Detroit policymakers approved plans to build the Sojourner Truth Homes, a public housing project for African Americans, located in a white neighborhood. Over protest from local white people, construction was completed that year and the city authorized Black families to move in starting February 28, 1942.

One day before, growing crowds of local white people marched through the housing project. On move-in day, only a few Black families braved the harassment and intimidation. Some were struck with rocks. Police responded by halting the moves and arresting more than 200 Black people and only three white individuals. The new residents were displaced until April, when six Black families moved in under the protection of 2,000 city and state officials.

Congress voted against seating John Willis Menard, the first Black man ever elected to the House of Representatives. James Garfield, then a member of Congress who later became the president, confirmed the decision, arguing that “it was too early to admit a Negro to the U.S. Congress, and that the seat [should] be declared vacant, and the salary of $5,000″ saved. By this vote, Mr. Menard was barred from ever being seated and his constituents denied their chosen representative and all representation until the following election.

Mr. Menard was a poet, newspaper publisher, and politician. He won at least 64% of the vote in a special election held in Louisiana’s 2nd congressional district—New Orleans—in November 1868 after the incumbent died. Despite an overwhelming victory, his election faced fierce opposition, led by the white man who lost the election, Caleb S. Hunt. The House Committee on Elections held a hearing to decide whether or not to seat Mr. Menard and the debate then moved to the entire House on February 27. During the debate, Mr. Menard became the first Black man to speak on the floor of the House of Representatives. Mr. Hunt’s claims of protest against the election’s validity were defeated convincingly by the House, as Mr. Hunt did not even show up to testify and presented no evidence supporting his claims. However, Congress refused to seat Mr. Menard by a vote of 130 to 57 because he was a Black man.

In the early years of Reconstruction after the Civil War, Black men were able to exercise their vote for the first time. By the time of Mr. Menard’s election in 1868, in 10 of the 11 former Confederate states, approximately 80% of eligible Black men were registered voters. Consequently, many Black officials, particularly in the South where Black populations were much larger, were elected into public office. These officials faced fierce opposition and backlash from white people desperate to maintain a racial hierarchy. Throughout the South, white Southerners turned to violence, mass lynchings, and lawlessness in order to suppress and intimidate Black voters who were seeking to express themselves lawfully at the ballot box. White officials in the North and West similarly rejected racial equality, codified racial discrimination, and occasionally embraced the same tactics of violent control seen in the South.

On the rainy evening of February 26, 2012, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a Black boy, was fatally shot in a gated residential community in Sanford, Florida, while walking home from a nearby convenience store. George Zimmerman, a local resident and neighborhood watch coordinator, saw Trayvon and decided the Black youth in a hooded sweatshirt was “suspicious.” Zimmerman called 911 to report Trayvon’s presence while following him at a close distance and, despite the dispatcher’s contrary instructions, confronted the teen and fatally shot him. The teen was carrying only iced tea and a bag of Skittles.

Police questioned Zimmerman and, based on Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which permits the use of deadly force even in avoidable confrontations, they released him with no charges. Trayvon’s unidentified body went to the morgue and his family learned his fate the next morning only after they reported him missing.

Outraged by the lack of police response, Trayvon’s parents worked with advocates to publicize their son’s murder. The story sparked national and international outrage, symbolizing for many the continuing danger of being a young Black male in America. On March 21, 2012, hundreds participated in a “Million Hoodie March” in New York City, calling for prosecutors to file criminal charges against Zimmerman. President Barack Obama called for a complete investigation and reflected, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.”

George Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder in April 2012 but later acquitted of all charges. The presumption of guilt and dangerousness assigned to African Americans has made minority communities particularly vulnerable to the unfair administration of criminal justice.

During the second half of the 19th century, an increase in mining activity and railroad construction led to a massive influx of Chinese immigrants into Washington Territory, which later became the State of Idaho. By 1870, Idaho was home to more than 4,000 Chinese residents, and they comprised nearly 30% of the population. “Chinatowns” existed in many Idaho cities, and the new immigrants formed thriving communities.

Chinese immigrants in Idaho faced severe hostility, which manifested in discriminatory statutes, disparate treatment in courts, and even violence. In 1866, the Idaho Territorial Legislature levied a tax of $5 per month on all Chinese residents. Chinese residents were not permitted to testify against white people in court, and acts of violence committed against Chinese citizens were rarely investigated or punished. Idaho public sentiment against Chinese people culminated in an anti-Chinese convention organized in Boise on February 25, 1886. At the convention, white residents of Idaho voted to expel Chinese citizens.

In the decades following, white Idaho residents undertook a campaign of violent removal of Idaho’s Chinese population. Mobs frequently destroyed Chinese homes and businesses, and in 1887, a white mob murdered 31 Chinese miners in the Hell’s Canyon Massacre.

During the 1890s and 1900s, a number of towns including Bonners Ferry, Clark Fork, Hoodoo, Moscow, and Twin Falls forcibly expelled their Chinese residents. By 1910, Idaho’s once-thriving Chinese population had nearly disappeared.

The Kentucky General Assembly refused to endorse the end of slavery in America when it voted against ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery except as punishment for crime.

As the Civil War began in 1861, Kentucky, a border state, remained in the Union, but the state’s legislature did not fully support President Abraham Lincoln or his Republican administration because lawmakers worried that Lincoln would abolish slavery. Throughout 1861, President Lincoln assured Kentuckians he had no intention of interfering with the state’s “domestic institutions.”

In March 1862, President Lincoln proposed a plan of gradual emancipation for the border states, offering to compensate enslavers who freed the Black people they enslaved. When the congressional delegations for the border states turned down that offer, President Lincoln issued a draft Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862 and signed the final version on January 1, 1863, which applied only to enslaved people in states that were in rebellion. Thus, it allowed for enslavement to continue in Kentucky, along with Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and Tennessee, as well as portions of Virginia and Louisiana that were occupied by the Union.

Kentucky legislators continued to oppose all efforts to abolish slavery in the coming years, and on February 24, 1865, the Kentucky General Assembly rejected the Thirteenth Amendment. Prominent politicians and other public figures harshly criticized President Lincoln and members of Congress, and the Kentucky legislature expressed their disapproval of the amendment’s adoption by politically siding with the former Confederacy throughout the post-Civil War era. Kentucky did not officially adopt the Thirteenth Amendment until 1976.

25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery was shot and killed by two white men while he was out jogging in Satilla Shores, Georgia, the suburban neighborhood he had been living in with his mother. After the shooting, Mr. Arbery’s killers (an ex-police officer and his son) were allowed to leave the scene and faced no consequences for months, as local officials refused to fully investigate, misrepresented the circumstances surrounding the shooting, and rejected efforts to hold the men accountable. It was not until video footage of the shooting surfaced and national attention focused that officials finally arrested the two white men.

Mr. Arbery, a high school football star, ran regularly in the neighborhood. That morning he jogged past Gregory McMichael, a 64-year-old former police officer and retired investigator for the Brunswick district attorney’s office who was standing in his front yard.

Mr. McMichael called out to his son, Travis McMichael, to tell him that Mr. Arbery “looked like” the suspect in a string of break-ins that had occurred in the neighborhood. The two men grabbed guns, got into their pick-up truck, and began chasing Mr. Arbery, shouting at him to stop running.

Once they caught up to Mr. Arbery, Travis McMichael jumped out of the truck with his shotgun, startling Mr. Arbery. After a struggle over the gun, Travis McMichael shot Mr. Arbery, who was unarmed, three times, killing him.

The Glynn County Police Department arrived on the scene to investigate, but rather than treat the McMichaels as suspects who had chased and killed an unarmed Black jogger, the officers let both men go home. A police investigator then called Mr. Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, and lied to her, saying her son had been involved in a burglary during which the homeowner killed him.

The prosecutor assigned to Mr. Arbery’s case concluded that the McMichaels were legally carrying their guns under Georgia’s open carry law and were within their rights to chase Mr. Arbery under the citizen’s arrest statute. He also suggested that the two armed white men were right to be suspicious and afraid of unarmed Mr. Arbery because he had an “aggressive nature,” underlining the presumption of dangerousness and guilt young Black men are forced to navigate on a daily basis. Evidence later revealed that Travis McMichael and William Bryan repeatedly used overtly racist language in text messages and social media posts before and after Mr. Arbery’s murder.

In early May 2020, nearly three months after Mr. Arbery was killed, a video of the shooting filmed by William Bryan, who had been following the McMichaels in a second vehicle, was released online. The video drew national attention to Mr. Arbery’s case and outrage over the fact that no one had been prosecuted for the killing.

Under national scrutiny, and only after the video of Mr. Arbery’s shooting was widely distributed across news outlets and social media, District Attorney Tom Durden announced a grand jury would decide whether charges would be brought.

Seventy-four days after killing Mr. Arbery, the McMichaels were arrested. A grand jury later indicted them, as well as William Bryan, on charges of malice murder, felony murder, and aggravated assault. In November 2021, a jury found the McMichaels and Mr. Bryan guilty of murder. Three months later, following a federal hate crimes trial, a second jury determined that the defendants had been motivated by racism and found them guilty of hate crimes. “As a mother I will never heal,” Ahmaud Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper-Jones, said following the verdict. “They gave us a small sense of victory, but we will never get victory because Ahmaud is dead.”

Frazier Baker, a 40-year-old Black man from Lake City, South Carolina, and his infant daughter, Julia, were murdered by a lynch mob on February 22, 1898. Mr. Baker was the first African American to be elected as U.S. postmaster for Lake City. Despite vehement opposition to his appointment from the white community, Mr. Baker held the position for six months. During that time, he was shot at twice and received many death threats.

The Bakers lived in a small building just outside Lake City. Their home was a former schoolhouse that had recently been converted into a residential dwelling and post office. Witnesses reported that a number of white men circled the Baker house at night, set the building on fire, and fired up to 100 bullets at the house while Mr. and Mrs. Baker and their six children were inside. Mr. Baker was shot to death while trying to escape the burning house. As Mrs. Baker fled the burning house carrying Julia, the baby was shot dead in her mother’s arms. Mrs. Baker and her other children managed to escape with their lives, but three of the children were wounded by gunshots and permanently maimed.

Mr. Frazier and Julia’s remains were burned beyond recognition—the local white newspaper insensitively reported that they had been “cremated in the flames.” The federal post office building and all of its equipment were consumed by the fire, and the citizens of Lake City were left without a post office.

Members of the Black community held a mass meeting at Pilgrim Baptist Church and drafted a public statement expressing outrage about the lynching. The murder prompted a national campaign of letter-writing, activism, and advocacy spearheaded by Ida B. Wells and others, which ultimately persuaded President McKinley to order a federal investigation that resulted in the prosecution of 11 white men implicated in the Baker lynching. Despite ample evidence, an all-white jury refused to convict any of the defendants.

Malcolm X, a religious and civil rights leader, was assassinated during a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. Malcolm X was just 39 years old and left behind his wife, Betty Shabazz, and six young daughters—including twins born after his death.

Born Malcolm Little and later known as el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, Malcolm X rose to the national stage as a leading Black voice in the 1950s and 1960s. After being appointed a minister and spokesman for the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X brought tens of thousands of new members to the religious organization in the mid-1900s. His powerful oration and innate charisma drew large crowds and supporters, but his criticism of white society and calls for a Black nationalist movement drew controversy and opponents. Fearing his power and influence as a Black leader, the FBI followed Malcolm X throughout his public life.

After a falling out with Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X left and started his own movement. As his popularity grew, so did the threats on his life. Just a week before Malcolm X spoke in Manhattan, he and his wife, along with their four daughters, were forced to abandon their home in the middle of the night after it was firebombed.

After Malcolm X’s assassination, thousands of people traveled to the Unity Funeral Home in Harlem to view his body and pay their respects.

Malcolm X was buried on February 27 during a funeral attended by family, friends, and civil rights leaders, including John Lewis, Bayard Rustin, and Andrew Young. Actor and activist Ossie Davis gave the eulogy.

Malcolm X’s legacy far outlasted his life. Through his bestselling autobiography and powerful speeches, his beliefs later inspired the Black Power movement and remain influential on activism in America and throughout the world today.