Author: Desto22

Four federal marshals escorted six-year-old Ruby Bridges to her first day of first grade as the first Black student to attend previously all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana. A riotous white mob organized by the local White Citizens’ Council gathered to protest her arrival, screaming hateful slurs, threats, and insults.

In August 1955, African American parents in New Orleans, Louisiana, sued the Orleans Parish School Board for failing to desegregate local schools in compliance with the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The following February, a federal court ordered the school board to desegregate the city’s schools. For the next four years, the school board and state lawmakers defied the federal court’s order and resisted school desegregation.

On May 16, 1960, Judge J. Skelly Wright issued a federal order demanding the gradual desegregation of New Orleans public schools, beginning with the first grade—but the Orleans Parish School Board convinced Judge Wright to accept an even more limited desegregation plan, requiring African American students to apply for transfer into all-white schools. Only five of the 137 African American first graders who applied for a transfer were accepted; four agreed to attend, including six-year-old Ruby Bridges, who was the sole Black student assigned to William Frantz Elementary.

After getting past the angry white crowd to enter the school, Ruby arrived in her assigned classroom to find that she and the teacher were the only two people present; it would remain that way for the rest of the school year. Within a week, nearly all of the white students assigned to the newly integrated elementary schools in New Orleans had withdrawn.

Despite threats and retaliation against her family, including her grandparents’ eviction from the Mississippi farm where they worked as sharecroppers, Ruby remained at Frantz Elementary. The next year, Ruby advanced to the second grade, and the school’s incoming first grade class had eight Black students.

Longview, Texas, Police Chief Roy Stone threatened four top-ranking NAACP officers—the Reverend S.Y. Nixon, I.S. White, E.C. Hawkins, and Rance James—phoning each of the men at home and stating he would jail them if they did not produce NAACP membership records immediately. Chief Stone acted under the authority of a new Longview city ordinance that gave the city manager the power to demand membership lists from any organization operating within the city’s limits and to impose criminal fines for non-compliance. Within 24 hours, Chief Stone made good on his threat, arresting Mr. Nixon, Mr. White, Mr. Hawkins, and Mr. James and detaining them in the city jail. Longview City Judge Henry Atkinson set bail at $200.

On October 9, the Texas NAACP announced plans to host the organization’s annual state conference in Longview. During planning meetings, local white officials refused to allow the Texas NAACP to convene in Longview unless they produced membership lists. During one meeting on October 23, white Longview journalist Carl Estes physically assaulted Field Secretary Edwin Washington and forced Black organizers out of his office after the NAACP declined to disclose confidential information about its members.

The following day, the Longview City Commission passed the mandatory disclosure ordinance targeting the Texas NAACP. Every city commissioner endorsed enforcement of the ordinance, knowing that requiring the NAACP to disclose its membership lists could have disastrous and deadly consequences for its members. On October 27, NAACP Field Secretary Washington announced plans to move the Texas annual conference to Dallas, considering “the pressures, threats, ugliness, and distress” that Black civil rights leaders faced in Longview.

Membership in the NAACP or participation in civil rights work often meant that Black people would be fired from their jobs, harassed by the police, and become targets of vigilante violence and hate crimes. African Americans joined despite the threats because of their commitment to end racial inequality, but the risks were real.

The passage of this ordinance in Longview led to the passage of a new state law, enacted in December 1957, modeled on the Longview ordinance, which authorized county judges to demand confidential records from civil rights organizations. In 1958, in NAACP v. Alabama ex rel Patterson, the U.S. Supreme Court declared these mandatory disclosure laws unconstitutional, as violative of the First Amendment right to freedom of association.

A mob of at least 700 white men, women, and children killed two teenage Black boys—15-year-old Ernest Collins and 16-year-old Benny Mitchell—in Colorado County, Texas, in a public spectacle lynching. Afterward, officials called the lynching “justice,” and no one in the mob was punished.

In October 1935, a young white woman’s body was found in a creek near her family’s farm in Columbus, Texas. When local officials concluded she had been murdered, suspicion soon focused on Ernest Collins and Benny Mitchell: two Black teens who had been seen picking pecans near the same creek. 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 after a crime was discovered, whether evidence supported that suspicion or not.

Law enforcement officers arrested Ernest and Benny and, soon after, reported that the young men had confessed to the crime. Black suspects in the South during this time were regularly subjected to beatings, torture, and threats of lynching during police interrogations. News reports eagerly reported Ernest’s and Benny’s alleged confessions as truthful justifications for the brutal lynchings that followed, but without fair investigation or trial, their supposed confessions serve as more reliable evidence of fear than guilt.

The boys were held in Houston after arrest until they had to return to Columbus for a trial on November 12. While the sheriff was transporting Benny and Ernest to the Colorado County courthouse, several cars filled with armed white men stopped them on a bridge crossing and demanded to lynch the two boys. The sheriff handed them over.

Immediately, the white mob brought Ernest and Benny to a live oak tree about a mile from the young white girl’s home and prepared to kill them. A crowd of at least 700 people gathered to watch and repeatedly “burst into jeering screams” as Ernest and Benny, who had been chained together by their necks, were led to the tree. Several members of the mob placed ropes around the boys’ necks and hanged them until dead.

The next day, the white community proudly boasted and praised the lynchings. The county attorney publicly said the lynching was “an expression of the will of the people,” and a local judge called the lynchings “justice.” Several newspapers reporting on the lynchings printed an image of two local sheriff officials posing with one of the lynching ropes, and both ropes were exhibited in a local drug store. Local press was silent about the lynching’s impact on the local Black community. Though the mob members and spectators were widely known, no one was immediately arrested or charged for their actions.

Since the end of Reconstruction in 1877, racial terror lynchings targeting Black communities had killed thousands of men, women, and children throughout the U.S., but repeated calls for a federal anti-lynching law had failed due to obstruction by Southern white lawmakers. In 1935, the same year that Benny Mitchell and Ernest Collins were lynched, the Costigan-Wagner anti-lynching bill was introduced in the U.S. Senate. Texas’s own Sen. Tom Connally opposed the bill and claimed that states were capable of stopping lynching without “federal interference.” Within weeks of the lynchings of Benny and Ernest, the NAACP protested the lack of any state or local investigation and insisted it clearly showed that many states could not—or would not—act to stop the lynching of Black people. The bill ultimately failed, and the U.S. Congress never passed anti-lynching legislation during the 20th century.

After a rushed trial and conviction, an enslaved Black man named Nat Turner was hanged in Jerusalem, Virginia, after being convicted of leading a revolt against his enslavers.

On August 21, 1831, Mr. Turner led a group of Black people in a revolt against slavery. Other enslaved Black people joined the uprising, and Mr. Turner’s troops grew to 60 to 70 people who fought white enslavers before being defeated by a militia. Many of Mr. Turner’s followers were killed or captured immediately, but Mr. Turner escaped and evaded searchers for weeks before being captured on October 30, 1831.

Enslavers and defenders of slavery throughout Virginia wanted Nat Turner and all who participated in the revolt harshly punished as an example to others who might be inspired by his efforts. At least 18 Black participants in the uprising were executed along with Nat Turner.

However, in the months after the rebellion, angry white mobs began to torture and murder hundreds of Black people who had not participated in the revolt, terrorizing enslaved and free Black people. Conditions of enslavement worsened for thousands of enslaved Black people as more cruel, barbaric, and traumatizing forms of control were implemented.

In response to Mr. Turner’s revolt, at least nine states—Virginia, Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee—passed laws targeting enslaved and free Black people and limiting their mobility. These laws prohibited Black people from assembling freely, conducting independent religious services, or preaching to a crowd of more than five people. Some states passed laws criminalizing the education of Black people, prohibiting Black people from learning to read or write. Some states also passed laws barring free Black people from living in the state.

Rather than retreat from the horrors of slavery as was happening in Central and South America, southern states in America committed to a new era of harsher conditions, dehumanizing control, and brutal punishment of enslaved people.

In the late 1890s, Wilmington, North Carolina, a port city between the Atlantic’s barrier islands and the banks of the Cape Fear River, became an island of hope for a new America.

Residents of the city’s thriving Black community made themselves a political force, exercising the rights of citizenship guaranteed to them after the Civil War by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Across the South, such activity had triggered deadly white violence against Black voters, organizers, and officeholders in the decades since the war. But in Wilmington, a city of 20,000, the votes of 8,000 Black men helped a rare biracial “Fusion” alliance elect candidates of both races.

Three of the 10 aldermen were Black. The city had Black health inspectors, postmasters, magistrates, and policemen, albeit under orders not to arrest anyone white. The county coroner, jailer, and treasurer were Black, as was the register of deeds. Black business people pooled their money in three Black-owned banks. Families a generation removed from enslavement owned their homes and read a local Black newspaper.

As modern-day Wilmingtonian Tim Pinnick, a genealogist, put it, “Things functioned the way they were meant to function as a result of Emancipation.”

But if Wilmington looked to some Americans like a model for the South, powerful white leaders, including the president of Wilmington Cotton Mills Company, the editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, and the chairman of the state Democratic party, could not abide it. They set out to topple what the newspaper editor labeled “Negro rule.”

The plotters had set the stage by creating what they called the “White Supremacy Campaign.” They printed falsehoods about Black men preying on white women and stockpiling guns. They targeted the Fusion officeholders and the Black newspaper, summoned militias and white vigilantes known as Red Shirts, and terrorized Black voters at the polls.

“If you see the negro out voting tomorrow, tell him stop,” one of the leaders, former Confederate Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell, told a gun-waving white audience on the eve of Wilmington’s 1898 election. “If he doesn’t, shoot him down. Shoot him down in his tracks.” Mr. Waddell vowed to “choke the current of the Cape Fear River” with Black bodies if he had to.

On November 10, Red Shirts, militiamen, and white mobs surged through Wilmington’s streets and massacred 60 or more Black people. “They gave their lives to vote,” said Hesketh “Nate” Brown, a retired New York City transit manager whose great-great-grandfather, Joshua Halsey, tried to flee the militiamen.

The Red Shirts torched the Black newspaper’s office, posed for pictures in front of its smoking ruins, installed Mr. Waddell as mayor, and sent hundreds of Black residents fleeing into the woods. Some ran west toward the river; others, east to the Black cemetery. Athalia Howe was 12 when her family and others took refuge in Pine Forest, a cemetery that dated back to the period before Emancipation. It was said that families sheltered next to graves of their loved ones.

For years no one in Ms. Howe’s family said much about those events, as her great-granddaughter, Cynthia Brown, told The Washington Post. But one day, when she was about eight years old, a distant look filled her great-grandmother’s eyes and she grabbed Ms. Brown’s wrist.

So did Mr. Pinnick, the Black schoolteacher from Illinois who learned of the coup in recent years when he retired to Wilmington. And Nate Brown, the retired transit manager who found his great-great-grandfather’s name in an 1898 newspaper clipping about the “Race War.” (The article blamed Black “aggressors.”) And Sonya Patrick-AmenRa, who counts among her ancestors four soldiers of the United States Colored Troops who helped win the Civil War.

Now, Mr. Brown, Ms. Brown (they are not related), Mr. Pinnick, Ms. AmenRa, and other Wilmingtonians, along with ministers, activists, authors, educators, and a documentary filmmaker whose ancestor aided the plotters, are helping change the historical narrative.

Over the last two decades a school and park named after leaders who directed the murder of dozens of Black people have been renamed. Community activists have set out to learn the names of everyone who was killed and every Black Wilmingtonian who survived the 1898 massacre. They are marking the coup’s 125th anniversary, November 10, with a week of events that include “racial-equity and trauma training,” documentary film showings, and descendants’ stories.

“There is a need to focus on that horrible day to understand it,” Mr. Pinnick said. “And yet, it’s a testimony to surviving that the story should be told.”

For nearly a century the story was told falsely—in textbooks, clippings, and memoirs that cast the horrific violence as a spontaneous “riot” and the plotters as heroes who restored racial order to Wilmington.

In 2006, a state-commissioned report debunked the longstanding false narratives about Wilmington’s history.

Even so, Deborah Dicks Maxwell, president of the county’s NAACP chapter, said many local residents still don’t know about it. “This is Wilmington,” she told USAToday last year. “There’s a distance to progress.”

That was evident in the unguarded words of three white Wilmington police officers in 2020, weeks after George Floyd’s killing. A routine audit of patrol car videotapes revealed the longtime officers discussing killing “f—ing n—s.”

A civil war was coming, Officer Michael Piner said. “We are just gonna go out and start slaughtering them f—ing n—s.” The officers told investigators they had been “venting” and blamed the “stress of today’s climate in law enforcement.”

Wilmington’s first Black police chief fired them in his first week on the job.

Their words were “painful, hurtful,” Chief Donny Williams, a Wilmington officer for nearly three decades, told NPR. “Being from this community, and then working alongside these people for so long, so just hurt—and not just me.”

Estimates of the number of Black people killed range from dozens to hundreds. The state’s 2006 study described the coup in detail and blamed all levels of government for not intervening; it said Black merchants and workers “suffered losses after 1898 in terms of job status, income, and access to capital.” Black businesses moved or closed. Some 2,100 Black residents fled. Black literacy rates plunged.

By the turn of the century, Southern states were using poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses to deny Black men the right to vote, which the Fifteenth Amendment had guaranteed them since 1870. Between 1896 and 1902, the number of Black voters registered in North Carolina fell from 126,000 to 6,100. Wilmington did not elect another Black candidate until 1972.

The violence in Wilmington was not unique. Historians and EJI researchers have documented at least 34 instances of mass violence during Reconstruction where scores of Black people were murdered by white mobs intent on reestablishing white supremacy and resisting Black political participation. It is a history that is not well known but is critically relevant for understanding the continuing struggle for racial justice and the many obstacles that still remain.

Hesketh Brown has tracked down the deed for the home that his great-great-grandfather, Joshua Halsey, who was born before Emancipation, owned at 812 North Sixth Street in Wilmington. David Zucchino’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2020 book, “Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy”, described what happened there on November 10, 1898: A rumor of gunfire from a Black dance hall caused white militiamen to hunt for Mr. Halsey, searching house to house until someone gave them his address.

One of Joshua and Sallie Halsey’s four daughters—Mary, Susan, Satira, and Bessie—saw the militiamen marching toward the house and begged her father, who was said to be deaf, to flee.

He “ran out the back door in frantic terror to be shot like a dog by armed soldiers ostensibly sent to preserve the peace,” a white neighbor wrote in her diary.

Jars of sandy soil from the spot where Mr. Halsey died were collected in 2021 as part of EJI’s Community Remembrance Project. One jar has a place of honor 500 miles away, in the library of Mr. Brown’s home in Queens.

Another jar was part of a ceremonial burial for Mr. Halsey in 2021. After attending the event on that bitterly cold November day, Mr. Brown visited the Cape Fear River. “I just pictured myself being one of those people many years ago—stuck between that river and armed racists and needing to choose,” he said. “It was the first time I felt anger.”

He and Tim Pinnick want to tell the story of 1898. “I want my legacy here to be that I reconnected people, or connected them to their legacy—their great-grandfather lived next door to Joshua Halsey, or around the corner, or a newspaper account connects them, or a marriage document,” Mr. Pinnick said.

He knows how long the truth of what happened went unwritten. Not anymore.

“Someone’s going to write your history,” Mr. Pinnick said. “You can let someone else write it, or you can write it.”

A Texas law entitled “An Act to provide for the employment of Convicts for petty offenses” was approved, authorizing county authorities to employ jailed men and women in public works and/or lease them out to private employers. These jailed workers were to receive a “wage” of $1 per day, applied toward unpaid fines or costs owed to the county. Just days later, the legislature passed another law, authorizing the leasing of people incarcerated in state prisons.

The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, was then and is still today celebrated as the legislative act that ended American slavery. However, the amendment’s text includes an exception: “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.”

In Southern states that had long relied on enslaved Black people to perform the agricultural work so critical to the region’s economy, emancipation upended the social, economic, and political systems. The abolition amendment’s exception permitting the continued enslavement of people with criminal convictions, however, enabled the South to continue exploiting the labor of Black people, and many states seized that opportunity.

In addition to passing Black Codes that criminalized acts like unemployment and public assembly when committed by freedmen, many Southern states also passed laws authorizing the leasing of the larger, predominately Black convict populations these statutes created. Rather than create a financial burden for the state, increased prison populations could create profit. In Texas and throughout the South, these arrangements would prove profitable for the state and deadly for the workers, nearly all Black, who were forced to work in dangerous, inhumane conditions.

A white mob took 18-year-old Orion “Owen” Anderson from the jail in Leesburg, Virginia, and lynched him. Mr. Anderson, a young Black man, allegedly wore a sack on his head and frightened the daughter of a prominent white man in Loudoun County on her walk to school. Though there were no witnesses and the girl could not identify who had scared her, Mr. Anderson was arrested after a sack was found near him. He was jailed, and later reports claimed he confessed to attempting to frighten her.

During the era of racial terror, Black suspects were often subjected to beatings, torture, and threats of lynching during police interrogations. While news reports often reported these confessions as justifications for the brutal terror lynchings that followed, the confession of a lynching victim was always more reliable evidence of fear than guilt.

In the early morning on November 8, a group of 40 white men rode into Leesburg on horseback. Three of the men gained entry to the jail by pretending that they had a prisoner who needed to be admitted. Once inside, they took Mr. Anderson from his cell, carried him to the freight depot of the Richmond & Danville Railroad, hanged him, and shot his body full of bullets. The members of the mob were seen riding through town on horseback afterward, but no one tried to apprehend them or claimed to recognize them. Owen Anderson was buried in the town’s pauper’s cemetery.

Leesburg’s newspaper, the Mirror, reported the lynching on November 14, calling it “a terrible warning” and stating, “The fate of the self-confessed author of the outrage should serve as a terrible admonition to the violators of the law for the protection of female virtue.” Owen Anderson is one of over 6,500 Black women, men, and children who were victims of racial terror lynching in the U.S. between 1865-1950.

Dean Juliette Derricotte of Fisk University in Nashville was driving three students to her parents’ home in Atlanta when an older white man driving a Model T car suddenly swerved and struck Dean Derricotte’s car, overturning it into a ditch. The white driver stopped to yell at Dean Derricotte and her passengers for damaging his own vehicle, then left the scene without rendering any aid. Others tried to get care for the injured Black passengers, but the nearby Hamilton Memorial Hospital in Dalton, Georgia—a segregated facility—refused to admit African American patients. Instead, Dean Derricotte and the three students were treated by a white doctor at his office in Dalton. Though Dean Derricotte and one of the students, Nina Johnson, were critically injured, following their treatment they were left to recuperate in the home of a local African American woman.

Six hours after the accident, one of the other students who sustained less serious injuries was able to reach a Chattanooga hospital by phone, and arrangements were made to transport Dean Derricotte and Ms. Johnson to that facility, which was 35 miles away. However, the delay proved fatal: Dean Derricotte died on her way to the hospital, at age 34, and Ms. Johnson died the next day.

The Committee on Interracial Cooperation opened an investigation into the incident, and Walter White, secretary of the New York-based NAACP, traveled south in December 1931 to learn more. He later concluded, “The barbarity of race segregation in the South is shown in all its brutal ugliness by the willingness to let cultured, respected, and leading colored women die for lack of hospital facilities which are available to any white person no matter how low in social scale.”

Six white police officers shot an unarmed 25-year-old Black military veteran named Roland T. Price outside of a bar in Rochester, New York. The shooting was deemed “justified” even though evidence showed that Mr. Price did not resist the officers’ demands.

Mr. Price was the recipient of the Purple Heart medal, awarded in the name of the president to those wounded or killed while serving, which he was wearing when he entered the bar in his military uniform that evening. After buying a drink, Mr. Price and the white bartender got into an argument over whether Mr. Price had been given the correct amount of change. In response, the bartender then drew a gun on Mr. Price and one of the waitresses called the police.

Patrolman William Hamill entered the restaurant with his gun drawn and ordered Mr. Price at gunpoint to step outside. Mr. Price complied with this order, exiting the bar to find five police officers waiting for him.

Despite seeing no weapon on Mr. Price, police confronted the veteran, who was in uniform, and ultimately opened fire on Mr. Price, shooting him multiple times, including twice in the chest and once in the head. After his death, a search of his body confirmed that he was unarmed. None of the police officers involved were indicted for Mr. Price’s death, and the shooting was deemed “justified.”

The repeated shootings of unarmed Black men by police and widespread racial discrimination against Black people have traumatized communities of color for decades. The legacy of this violence and a lack of response continues to haunt the U.S.

A five-man territorial commission representing the U.S. government sentenced 303 Dakota men to death for their participation in the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.

In the early 1800s, white settlers increasingly encroached upon the land of the Dakota people in Minnesota. To maintain peace, the Dakota agreed to a series of treaties, the first of which was signed in 1805, exchanging their land for the promise of financial payments and goods.

After the American Civil War began in 1861, the U.S. government failed to pay the money promised to the Dakota. This monetary deficit, coupled with further settler encroachment onto Dakota hunting and farming lands, pushed the Dakota to the brink of starvation, prompting Dakota men to begin making incursions into white settlements for food in the summer of 1862.

In response, the U.S. organized a military force composed of federal troops and local militia, and the conflict escalated. Outnumbered, the Dakota forces surrendered in September of 1862. Over 2,000 Dakota were taken into custody.

On November 5, 1862, a territorial commission composed of five military officers sentenced the captured Dakota men accused of participating in the war. Of the nearly 500 Dakota tried, 303 were sentenced to be executed. These men had no access to lawyers, and some of the trials lasted fewer than five minutes. After ordering a review of the trial records, President Abraham Lincoln commuted all but 39 of the death sentences; the execution of the condemned Dakota men on December 26, 1862, remains the largest single mass execution in American history.