Author: Desto22

The legislature of Missouri passed an act that prohibited “Negroes and mulattoes” from learning to read and write and assembling freely for worship services. The act also forbade the migration of free Black people to the state. The penalty for anyone violating any of the law’s provisions was a fine not to exceed $5,000 (the equivalent of $180,000 today), a jail term not to exceed six months, or a combination of fine and jail sentence.

The 1847 law supplemented a Missouri law passed in 1825 that imposed various restrictions on free Black people. The 1825 law defined a Black person as anyone having at least one Black grandparent. The 1825 law also prohibited free Black people from keeping or carrying weapons without a special permit and settling in Missouri without a certificate of citizenship from Missouri or another state. Free Black people who migrated to or through Missouri without citizenship documents faced arrest, a court order to leave the state within 30 days, and a punishment of 10 lashes. Under the 1825 law, white ship captains and labor bosses were permitted to bring free Black people into the state as workers, though for no longer than six months at a time.

In 1840, nearly 13% of Missouri’s population was composed of enslaved Black people, while free Black people made up less than 1% of the state’s residents. The 1847 law was enacted to place further limitations on the Black population and maintain white supremacy.

New Jersey passed a law providing for the “gradual emancipation of slaves” and in doing so became the last Northern state to begin the process of ending enslavement within its borders. Using the language of bondage, the 1804 act provided that children of enslaved people born after July 4, 1804, would be freed when they reached the age of 21 for women and the age of 25 for men.

To address the protests of enslavers who claimed to be concerned that they would have to support children of enslaved people who eventually would become free, the statute authorized enslavers to break apart families and abandon children of enslaved people to the state once they were more than 12 months old. These children were then bound out to work as “apprentices”—often to the same enslaver who abandoned them—while the state paid for the maintenance of the child.

The New Jersey Supreme Court held as late as 1827 that New Jersey’s law continued to permit the sale of Black children as so-called “apprentices.” In Ogden v. Price, the New Jersey Supreme Court upheld the sale of a 13-year-old Black girl despite language in the 1804 law providing that an apprentice was subject to assignment but not sale.

Around midnight on September 3, 1944, Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old Black, married mother, was walking with neighbors, headed home from a revival service at Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Before she made it home, a gang of white men kidnapped her, drove to a remote area in the woods, and raped her at gunpoint. After six of the men took turns raping her, they blindfolded her, drove her back to the road, and left her to walk home.

Mrs. Taylor soon contacted the police, and the sheriff identified one of the suspects based on her description of the car. Hugo Wilson, the owner of the car, identified the six white men who raped Mrs. Taylor as: Herbert Lovett, Luther Lee, Joe Culpepper, Dillard York, Billy Howerton, and Robert Gamble. Yet none of the men were arrested.

When the NAACP branch office in Montgomery, Alabama, heard of Mrs. Taylor’s rape and local officials’ failure to respond, the chapter president sent NAACP Secretary Rosa Parks to investigate. After gathering details, Mrs. Parks established the Committee for Equal Justice to demand prosecution of Mrs. Taylor’s attackers. Amid the publicity, Alabama Governor Chauncey Sparks also launched an investigation.

In the course of the subsequent proceedings, Mrs. Taylor’s character became the main matter of dispute; four of the six accused attackers admitted to having intercourse with her but claimed she was a “prostitute” and “a willing participant.” The sheriff accused Mrs. Taylor of being “nothing but a whore” and alleged that she had been treated for venereal disease. Meanwhile, other white men in Abbeville described Mrs. Taylor as an “upstanding respectable woman who abided by the town’s racial and sexual mores.” And one of the accused attackers, Joe Culpepper, admitted that Mrs. Taylor had been gang-raped at gunpoint and that he and his fellow attackers had been looking for a woman that night.

Despite this information and widespread national support for Mrs. Taylor’s cause, on February 14, 1945, an all-white, all-male grand jury failed to return an indictment against any of the men accused of raping Mrs. Taylor. The men were never prosecuted.

In the months after Mrs. Taylor’s attack, she received constant death threats and her home was firebombed by white supremacists. The Recy Taylor case, though rarely cited, is credited as being a catalyst for the modern civil rights movement. In 2011, the Alabama Legislature apologized to Mrs. Taylor for the state’s failure to prosecute her attackers.

In February 1960, hundreds of volunteers—primarily Black college students—huddled into the basement of First Baptist Church in Nashville, Tennessee, for what became the first mass meeting of the sit-in movement. The students planned a series of sit-ins designed to challenge racial segregation at lunch counters.

On February 13, 1960, 500 students from Nashville’s four Black colleges—Fisk University, Tennessee State, Meharry Medical, and the Baptist Seminary—filed into the downtown stores to request service at segregated establishments. White merchants refused to serve the Black students and petitioned the police to arrest them for “trespassing” and “disorderly conduct.” On February 26, the chief of police warned student demonstrators that their “grace period” was over and threatened legal retaliation. The demonstrators were not dissuaded.

The next morning, scores of students marched downtown silently to stage sit-ins at their designated stores. As they passed, white teenagers gathered to scream racial epithets and hurl rocks and lit cigarettes at them. Instead of intervening to prevent the assaults and harassment, police arrested 77 African American student demonstrators and five white students who had joined their protest.

The 82 arrested activists were tried and convicted in a consolidated one-day trial on February 29. Afterward, they were given a “choice” between jail time and a monetary fine. A 22-year-old Fisk University student named Diane Nash informed the judge that 14 of the convicted demonstrators had chosen jail. Standing in open court, she explained that paying the fine “would be contributing to and supporting the injustice and immoral practices that have been performed in the arrest and conviction of the defendants.” Ms. Nash’s speech persuaded more than 60 of the convicted demonstrators to change their minds and also serve jail time rather than pay the fine.

The sight of dozens of Black college students being carted off to jail convinced the mayor of Nashville to release the students and appoint a biracial committee to make recommendations for desegregating downtown stores. The success of the Nashville sit-ins quickly made them a model for other segregated Southern communities to emulate. By the end of February, sit-in campaigns were underway in 31 Southern cities across eight states.

As a result of her persistence and bravery, Diane Nash emerged as a civil rights leader. She joined the Freedom Rides in 1961 and helped achieve the desegregation of interstate buses and facilities.

On February 12, 1946, Sergeant Isaac Woodard, a Black World War II veteran, boarded a Greyhound bus in Georgia heading home to his wife in North Carolina. He had been honorably discharged from service just hours earlier.

When the bus stopped outside of Augusta, South Carolina, Sgt. Woodard, who was still in uniform, asked the driver if there was time to use the restroom. The driver cursed at him and resumed driving. “Talk to me like I am talking to you,” Sgt. Woodard told him in response, adding: “I am a man just like you.”

After a brief argument, Sgt. Woodard returned to his seat. At the next stop in Batesburg, South Carolina, the bus driver exited and called Lynwood Shull, the local police chief, who arrived soon after. Officer Shull removed Sgt. Woodard from the bus and began brutally beating him with a blackjack. Sgt. Woodard, who was unconscious and badly injured, was then left in the Batesburg jail overnight. The next morning the city court fined him for disorderly conduct.

When Sgt. Woodard was finally transferred to a VA hospital in Columbia, South Carolina, doctors determined that the beating and delay in medical treatment had permanently blinded him.

In October 1946, President Harry S. Truman ordered his attorney general to bring federal charges against Chief Shull. The trial began a month later and was presided over by Judge J. Waties Waring, whose father was a Confederate soldier. After deliberating for less than 20 minutes, the all-white jury in the trial acquitted Officer Shull.

A white man named Alfred Moore of Hertford, North Carolina, offered a $20 reward to any white person who captured “Joe,” an enslaved Black man, and returned him or “secured [him] in the jail so that I can get to him.” Mr. Moore, an enslaver, did not believe that Joe intended to flee bondage; he wrote in the reward poster that the Black man was “probably lurking” in Pasquotank County, where his wife was enslaved.

The institution of slavery sought to reduce enslaved Black men, women, and children to commodities, denying their humanity and familial status as children, siblings, spouses, or even parents. Black families were regularly separated at the whim of an enslaver or auctioneer, never to see each other again. This was one of the most traumatizing features of enslavement. Most enslaved people were sold without a single other family member; it is estimated that more than half of all enslaved people held in the Upper South were separated from a parent or child through sale, and a third of all marriages between enslaved people were destroyed by human trafficking. Press accounts have documented the heartbreaking stories of enslaved mothers who jumped from buildings and enslaved fathers who slit their throats rather than be separated from their families.

Enslaved people frequently suffered extreme physical violence as punishment for or warning against transgressions like running away, visiting a spouse, or trying to prevent the sale of their relatives. These basic human instincts resulted in torturous whippings or extreme punishments. White men and women justified this cruelty by claiming Black people did not have emotional ties to each other. However, for years after the 1865 passage of the Thirteenth Amendment ended chattel slavery in the U.S., Black people throughout the country placed ads in church bulletins and local newspapers seeking help reconnecting with parents, children, spouses, and friends from whom they’d been separated by sale during enslavement—some of whom they had not seen in decades.

The historical record does not reveal whether this Black man, identified only as “Joe” in the reward poster, was ever captured and returned to Alfred Moore, reunited with his wife, or able to reach freedom. Nearly 40 years before the end of the Civil War, he was one of countless Black people enslaved in the U.S. who dared to love and to seek freedom, in a time when the laws of this nation denied Black people even those basic rights of humanity.

A mob of over 2,000 white people lynched a Black man named Eli Pigot in Brookhaven, Mississippi. Mr. Pigot was accused of sexual impropriety with a white woman and was brutally killed before he could be tried in a court of law. During this era, allegations against Black people were rarely subject to scrutiny and often sparked violent reprisals before the judicial system could or would act.

On the morning of February 10, according to news reports, police deputies and armed military guards transported Mr. Pigot from Jackson to Brookhaven to stand trial. Upon arrival in Brookhaven, the lynch mob scuffled briefly with the military guards before seizing Mr. Pigot, kicking and beating him, and then hanging him from a telephone pole less than 100 yards from the Lincoln County Courthouse. The mob then riddled Mr. Pigot’s corpse with bullets as it swung from the pole.

The racial hostility that permeated American society during this era burdened Black people with a presumption of guilt that frequently proved deadly. In particular, widespread stereotypes depicting Black men as dangerous, violent, and uncontrollable sexual aggressors led to a racialized state of hyper-vigilance, in which any action by a Black man that could be interpreted as seeking or desiring contact with a white woman could result in mob violence. At the peak of racial terror lynchings in this country, it was not uncommon for lynch mobs to seize their victims from jails, prisons, courtrooms, or out of the hands of guards, like in this case. Though they were armed and charged with protecting the men and women in their custody, police and other officials almost never used force to resist white lynch mobs intent on killing Black people. In some cases, police officials were even found to be complicit or active participants in lynchings.

After the lynching, press reports focused on the minor injuries sustained by military officials who, despite failing to protect Mr. Pigot from mob murder, were lauded for their “courage and effort.” The state governor denounced the mob’s actions, but nothing was done to bring the perpetrators to justice. Though the lynching took place in broad daylight with officers of the court present—the judge who was scheduled to preside over Mr. Pigot’s trial witnessed his brutal death and some white men scheduled to serve on the jury reportedly participated in the lynching—no one was ever held accountable for the murder of Eli Pigot.

On this day in 1960, four weeks before the Little Rock Central High School graduation, a bomb exploded at the home of Carlotta Walls. She was the youngest of the nine Black students–known as the Little Rock Nine–who integrated the school in 1957.

In September 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School by barring nine newly admitted Black students from entering the school building. In order to compel the school’s integration, President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the National Guard and ordered troops to escort the students into the school, but the students were still confronted by angry white crowds of students and adults. That group of Black students came to be known as the Little Rock Nine, and 14-year-old Carlotta Walls was the youngest among them.

In response to the admission of the Little Rock Nine, hundreds of white people attacked Black residents and reporters, causing nationally publicized “chaos, bedlam, and turmoil” that led a federal court to halt desegregation. The Supreme Court overturned that decision and ordered immediate integration, but in a move voters later approved in a referendum, Governor Faubus closed all public high schools in Little Rock for the 1958-1959 school year.

Carlotta Walls later described the integration experience as “painful” and recalled that Central High’s white students fell into three groups: those who tormented her and the other Black students, those who sympathized with them, and those who silently ignored the way they were treated.

Despite the open hostility that she encountered, young Carlotta Walls remained at Central High throughout her high school years. On February 9, 1960, four weeks before graduation, a bomb exploded at her home. Carlotta, her mother, and her sister were at home, but no one was injured by the blast. Police arrested and beat Carlotta Walls’ father in unsuccessful efforts to coerce a confession. Police then arrested two young Black men, Herbert Monts, a family friend, and Maceo Binns, Jr. Carlotta Walls never believed either man was responsible, but both were convicted and sentenced to five years in prison.

In 2010, Ms. Walls described the bombing and its aftermath as the worst part of the integration experience and firmly asserted that “the segregationists were behind all of it—the bombing and the arrests of Herbert and Maceo.”

The massive resistance by the white community, like the violence Carlotta Walls faced, was largely successful in preventing integration of schools in the South. In the five Deep South states, every single one of 1.4 million Black schoolchildren attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960. By the start of the 1964-65 school year, less than 3% of the South’s African American children attended school with white students, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina that number remained substantially below 1%. In 1967, 13 years after Brown v. Board of Education, a report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights observed that white violence and intimidation against Black people “continues to be a deterrent to school desegregation.”

White state troopers fired into a mostly African American crowd on the campus of South Carolina State College, a historically Black college in Orangeburg, South Carolina. In what became known as the “Orangeburg Massacre,” the troopers shot and wounded 28 people and killed three Black male students: Samuel Hammond, 18, a freshman from Florida; Henry Smith, 18, a sophomore from Marion, South Carolina; and Delano Middleton, 17, an Orangeburg high school student.

Two days before the shooting, SCSC students had attempted to desegregate a local “whites only” bowling alley. When the owner refused to serve the students, violence ensued, leaving nine students and one officer wounded. On the day of the shooting, students again protested the segregated bowling alley, this time building a bonfire in the street. Escorted by police armed with carbines, pistols, and riot guns, the fire department arrived to extinguish the fire. Police then fired into the crowd as students fled for safety. Police later claimed they were attacked first.

South Carolina Governor Robert McNair blamed “Black power advocates” for the violence and insisted officers had fired in self-defense while under attack from campus snipers. Witness accounts from reporters, firemen, and students contradicted this story; they reported that officers had fired on the crowd without warning. No evidence was ever presented that the protesters were armed.

None of the nine officers charged for their roles in the shooting were convicted of any wrongdoing, but Cleveland Sellers, a young Black man and program director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was convicted of rioting for his role in leading the protest. He served seven months in jail and was not pardoned until 1993.

As hundreds of white people watched and cheered, a Black man named Luther Holbert and an unidentified woman were tortured and killed in Doddsville, Mississippi, a Sunflower County town in the Mississippi Delta. Mr. Holbert was accused of shooting and killing James Eastland, a white landowner from a prominent, wealthy local family that owned a plantation where many of the area’s Black laborers worked. After his shooting, Mr. Eastland’s two brothers led the posse that captured Mr. Holbert and a Black woman. Some news reports identified the woman as Mr. Holbert’s wife, but later research suggested she was not; her identity remains unknown.

Reports of the events precipitating the shooting varied; some newspapers claimed that Mr. Holbert argued with Mr. Eastland when the white man ordered him to leave the plantation, while others stated Mr. Eastland had attacked Mr. Holbert for encouraging other indebted Black workers to flee the slavery-like conditions of bonded labor. Whatever the circumstances of Mr. Eastland’s death, the gruesome nature of the fate that befell Mr. Holbert and his woman companion were undisputed.

According to an eyewitness account published in the Vicksburg, Mississippi, Evening Post, Mr. Holbert and the unnamed Black woman were tied to trees while their funeral pyres were prepared. They were then forced to hold out their hands and watch as their fingers were chopped off, one at a time, and distributed as “souvenirs.” Next, the same was done to their ears. Mr. Holbert was then beaten so badly that his skull was fractured and one of his eyes hung by a shred from the socket. The lynch mob next used a large corkscrew to bore into the arms, legs, and bodies of the two victims, pulling out large pieces of raw flesh. The victims reportedly did not cry out, and they were finally thrown on the fire and allowed to burn to death. The event was described as a festive atmosphere, in which the audience of 600 spectators enjoyed deviled eggs, lemonade, and whiskey.

Soon after, one of James Eastland’s brothers who led the lynch mob had a son and named him James; that James Eastland later became Mississippi’s longest-serving U.S. Senator and spent his career championing white supremacy and opposing the civil rights movement.