Author: Desto22

Benjamin Ryan Tillman was elected governor of South Carolina. An outspoken white supremacist, Mr. Tillman created his identity as a politician based on white supremacy, a deep commitment to blocking any educational opportunity for Black people, and advocating for violence against Black voters. Concerning the education of Black people, Mr. Tillman argued, “when you educate a Negro, you educate a candidate for the penitentiary or spoil a good field hand.”

Mr. Tillman’s political career began after his involvement in the 1876 Hamburg Massacre, where white men rioted and killed nine people in a predominantly Black town in South Carolina. In his gubernatorial campaign, Mr. Tillman promised to keep the state’s Black population in a position of permanent inferiority. In his inaugural address and throughout his administration, he emphasized white supremacy and the necessity to revoke Black Americans’ rights.

Mr. Tillman served two terms as governor and played a critical role in the 1895 South Carolina Constitutional Convention. In order to vote under the revised constitution, a man had to own property, pay a poll tax, pass a literacy test, and meet certain educational standards. The 1895 constitution disenfranchised Black voters in intent and effect and served as a model for other Southern states.

After serving as governor, Mr. Tillman was elected U.S. senator from South Carolina in 1895 and served in this capacity for 24 years. Throughout his tenure, he staunchly opposed Black equality and women’s suffrage. Mr. Tillman’s philosophy helped shape the era of oppression and abuse of Black Americans throughout the South. A statue honoring Mr. Tillman still stands on the grounds of South Carolina’s State Capitol.

On Election Day, local white residents in Eufaula, Alabama, determined to regain political dominance in the county that they had lost during Reconstruction, used terror and intimidation to suppress Black votes, ultimately waging a violent, deadly massacre.

As the 1874 election neared, white employers openly fired any Black workers who intended to vote for Elias Keils, a white candidate who supported the aims of Reconstruction, for the position of city court judge. False rumors spread that Black residents planned to violently drive white voters from the polls, and white residents began stockpiling guns near Eufaula polling sites.

Judge Keils tried to notify state and federal officials of the danger, but Alabama’s attorney general rebuffed the warning, and federal troops stationed in Eufaula refused to intervene.

Despite the risk, hundreds of Black men marched to the downtown Eufaula polling site on November 3. Some Black voters were immediately arrested and jailed on fraud accusations. Around noon, several white men forced a Black man into an alley and threatened to arrest him if he did not vote against civil rights. As witnesses protested, a single gunshot was fired by an unknown individual, harming no one.

Soon afterward, a large mob of white men retrieved the stockpiled guns stored nearby and fired “indiscriminately” into the crowd of mostly unarmed Black voters. Within minutes, 400 shots had been fired, killing at least six Black people, and possibly many more based on some estimates; as many as 80 additional Black people were left injured. Many survivors fled, including an estimated 500 Black people who had not yet voted.

Later that day, a white mob attacked another county polling station in Spring Hill, Alabama, where Judge Keils was the election supervisor. The mob destroyed the ballot box, burned the ballots inside, and killed Judge Keils’s teenage son Willie.

Although the identities of many white perpetrators of the massacre were known, no white person was ever convicted. Instead, a Black man named Hilliard Miles was convicted and imprisoned for perjury after identifying members of the white mob. Decades later, Braxton Bragg Comer, whom Mr. Miles had named as a perpetrator of the massacre, was elected governor of Alabama.

The Eufaula Massacre and its aftermath showed Black residents that exercising their new legal rights—particularly by voting—made them targets for deadly attacks and that they could not depend on authorities for protection.

The result was mass voter suppression. While 1,200 Black Eufaula residents voted in the 1874 election, only 10 cast ballots in 1876.

On Election Day, white mobs in Ocoee, Florida, began a campaign of terror and violence designed to stop Black citizens in Ocoee from voting that resulted in the deaths of dozens of Black people and the destruction of the Black community.

With the election approaching, Black residents in Ocoee who owned land and businesses were eager to vote. Despite a terrorizing and threatening march by white citizens through the streets of Orlando three days earlier aimed at deterring Black people from participating in the election, Mose Norman and other Black Americans went to the polls to vote on November 2. Mr. Norman, however, was turned away, allegedly on the grounds that he had not paid his poll tax.

After seeking advice from an Orlando judge, John Cheney, Mr. Norman again attempted to vote. This time, armed white men stationed at the polls immediately assaulted him. He fled to the nearby home of his friend and business associate, Julius “July” Perry.

As word spread of Mr. Norman’s attempts to vote, a mob of white residents seeking to capture him and Mr. Perry surrounded and burned Mr. Perry’s home. Mr. Norman escaped, but the mob severely wounded Mr. Perry. He was arrested, taken to Orlando, and locked in the Orange County Jail.

The next morning, a lynch mob took Mr. Perry from police custody, brutally beat him, and hanged him within sight of Judge Cheney’s home. His lifeless body was shot repeatedly.

Over a two-day span, a mob of white Floridians killed dozens of Black people and burned 25 Black homes, two Black churches, and a masonic lodge in Ocoee. Estimates of the total number of Black Americans killed during the violence range from six to over 30. There is no adequate accounting of this violence because neither the government nor the newspapers at the time thought it was important to establish how many Black people were killed during the attack.

The Ocoee Election Day Massacre represents one of the bloodiest days in American political history. Black survivors fled the community, never to return. The entire Black community of Ocoee was driven out within a year, forced to abandon or sell land and homes they owned. No Black Americans resided in the City of Ocoee for the following 60 years.

The lynching of July Perry and countless others, and the destruction of the Black community with impunity, showed Black residents that exercising their legal right to vote made them targets for deadly attacks and that they could not depend on authorities for protection.

As part of the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Project, in June 2019, EJI staff joined hundreds of community members, including Mr. Perry’s descendants, in downtown Orlando to unveil a historical marker honoring July Perry and the victims of the Ocoee Election Day Massacre.

Over several decades in the 19th and 20th centuries, thousands of Native children were forced away from their families and sent to off-reservation boarding schools in misguided efforts to “civilize” them. After the U.S. Congress created the Civilization Fund and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, boarding schools for Native children were established and children were forcibly compelled to attend these schools, which were designed to eradicate Native youth’s tribal ties and assimilate them into white culture so that they would grow into adults supportive of the American economy. The consequences of this horrific abuse are still felt today.

The first such school to open was Carlisle Indian School, opened in Carlisle, Pennsylvania on November 1, 1879. The founder, Captain Richard Pratt, described his philosophy for educating Native children as: “All the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” The federal government used Carlisle as a model for other boarding schools designed to forcefully assimilate Native children into white culture. Young children were taken from their families to attend these schools, and parents who resisted were forced to flee, hide, or face imprisonment. Many parents sent their children because Native children were not permitted to attend local public schools with white students, making assimilation boarding schools the only available opportunity for formal education.

The federal government’s views on educating Native children were rooted in racism and prejudice. While the government believed a white youth’s “moral character and habits are already formed and well-defined” when they leave for school, a Native youth was thought to be “born a savage and raised in an atmosphere of superstition and ignorance” without the “advantages which are inherited by his white brother.” In the eyes of the government, “if [a Native American child] is to rise from his low estate the germs of a nobler existence must be implanted in him and cultivated. He must be taught to lay aside his savage customs like a garment and take upon himself the habits of civilized life.”

Reflecting these genocidal biases, Native children attending boarding schools were given English names, forced to cut their hair, and forbidden from speaking their Native languages. Students received vocational training but very little academic instruction, with the expectation that they would make their living as farmers or manual laborers. Conditions in many schools were poor, and students were often the victims of physical and sexual abuse.

These schools continued to exist for decades with funding and support from the federal government.

In the early morning, a white mob of more than 50 men tightened a noose around the neck of an 18-year-old Black man named Silas Esters, dragged him from the LaRue County Jail in Hodgenville, Kentucky, and lynched him.

According to newspaper reports at the time, Mr. Esters had been accused of “coercing” a 15-year-old white boy to commit a crime. However, newspapers reported that Mr. Esters’s alleged offense was “unpunishable by any statute.” Despite having committed no crime, Mr. Esters was arrested by local white police and placed in jail.

During this era of racial terror, law enforcement officers, tasked with protecting the people in their custody, often witnessed or directly participated in deadly mob violence. In this instance, when the white mob arrived at the LaRue County Jail intent on lynching Mr. Esters, the white police officers gave the mob the keys to the jail and made no effort to protect Mr. Esters as he was violently removed and lynched.

After being seized by the mob, newspapers reported that Mr. Esters slipped free and began to run away—but made it only 100 yards before the white mob riddled his body with bullets. The mob then placed a noose around his neck, dragged his lifeless body to the courthouse, and swung it from the top steps.

At the time, newspapers reported that Granville Ward and his father, Thomas Ward, were the leaders of this mob. Though the identities of at least two individuals who participated in Mr. Esters’s murder were known, no one was ever held accountable for his lynching. Mr. Esters was one of over 6,500 Black women, men, and children who were documented victims of racial terror lynching in the U.S. between 1865 and 1950.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy were arrested and forced to begin serving sentences in Birmingham jail because they led peaceful protests against unconstitutional bans on “race mixing” in Birmingham in 1963. In April 1963, a series of civil rights protests occurred in Birmingham, Alabama, to challenge segregation in Birmingham’s public accommodations. Pro-segregation white residents and local police, led by the city’s notorious public safety commissioner, Bull Connor, responded to the protests with violence and legal suppression.

On April 10, 1963, a state judge granted city officials an injunction banning all anti-segregation protest activity in the city of Birmingham. Dr. King and the Rev. Abernathy chose to lead a march in defiance of the injunction and were arrested on April 12, 1963. Dr. King spent eight days in jail before being released on bail, and during that time wrote his famed “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

Dr. King and the Rev. Abernathy were still prosecuted after posting bail, and on April 26, 1963, they were convicted of contempt of court. Dr. King and the Rev. Abernathy unsuccessfully appealed and, on October 30, 1967, returned to Birmingham to each serve five-day jail sentences. Dozens of supporters protested outside of Birmingham’s jail for the duration of their incarceration.

A white mob attacked and brutally whipped a 52-year-old Black man named Abram Colby because of his political advocacy. Abram Colby was born into slavery in Greene County, Georgia, in approximately 1817. The son of an enslaved Black woman and a white landowner, Mr. Colby was emancipated 15 years before the end of American slavery and worked tirelessly to organize newly free Black people following the Civil War. A Radical Republican who stood for racial equality, Mr. Colby was elected to serve in the Georgia House of Representatives during Reconstruction. His impassioned advocacy for Black civil rights earned him the attention of the local Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist organization founded in 1865 to resist Reconstruction and restore white supremacy through targeted violence against Black people and their white political allies.

Three years after being attacked by a mob of white Klansmen, when called to Washington, D.C., to testify about the assault before a Congressional committee investigating reports of racial violence in the South, Mr. Colby bravely identified his attackers as some of the “first class men in our town. One is a lawyer, one a doctor, and some are farmers.” Shortly before the attack, Mr. Colby explained, the men had tried to bribe him to change parties or give up his office. Mr. Colby refused to do either and days later they returned:

On October 29,1869, [the white mob] broke my door open, took me out of bed, took me to the woods and whipped me three hours or more and left me for dead. They said to me, “Do you think you will ever vote another damned Radical ticket?” I said, “If there was an election tomorrow, I would vote the Radical ticket.” They set in and whipped me a thousand licks more, with sticks and straps that had buckles on the ends of them.

Mr. Colby told the committee that the attack had “broken something inside of [him]” and that the Klan’s continued harassment and violent assaults had forced him to abandon his re-election campaign. Mr. Colby testified most emotionally about the attack’s impact on his daughter, who was home when the white mob seized him to be whipped: “My little daughter begged them not to carry me away. They drew up a gun and actually frightened her to death. She never got over it until she died. That was the part that grieves me the most.”

A bright, warm afternoon in late October 1958, in rural Monroe, North Carolina: two Black children, nine-year-old James Hanover Thompson and his eight-year-old friend David “Fuzzy” Simpson, were playing with a group of white boys and girls in the yard next to one of the white children’s homes. Jim Crow laws were rigidly enforced at the time, but it was not unusual for Black and white children to play together when their separate, segregated schools let out for the day. They knew each other. The mothers of the Black children cooked and cleaned for the mothers of the white children.

As afternoon gave way to evening that day, October 28, and some of the children left, a kissing game began. One of the white girls, seven-year-old Sissy Sutton, kissed first David on the cheek, and then James, before heading home. Retrieving their wagons, which held a stash of empty bottles they hoped to sell, the two friends walked toward the center of town. They had no way of knowing they’d done anything wrong, and that white Monroe was about to severely punish them, and their families—for a kiss.

Sissy Sutton mentioned the kiss to her parents when she got home. James’s mother had worked for Sissy’s mother; his grandmother had worked for Sissy’s grandmother. Reportedly in hysterics and threatening to kill James, Sissy’s mother notified police. Rumors raced through the white community. Sissy’s father grabbed his shotgun and, joined by a mob threatening a lynching, he crossed the railroad tracks that divided Monroe’s white and Black neighborhoods. The Thompsons’ house was dark. James’s mother, Evelyn Thompson, would tell a reporter months later that “some white people in Monroe” had warned her “that my family would be killed if I didn’t get out of town.”

James and David were pulling their wagons when police accosted them, with guns drawn. Shouting racial epithets and calling them “little rapists,” police handcuffed the boys and shoved them into a patrol car. “When we got down to the police station, we understood that they said we had raped a little white girl,” James Thompson would recall more than half a century later. “They took us down in the bottom of the police station to a cell … They started beating us, they were beating us to our body, you know? They didn’t beat us to the face where nobody could see it. They just punched us all in the stomach and back and legs. We was hollering and screaming. We thought they were going to kill us.”

For the next six days they were kept locked up and barred from seeing their parents. Police entered their cell on Halloween, pretending to be Klansmen. “These men came with sheets over their heads,” Mr. Thompson would recall later. “They said they were going to hang us, lynch us. I was crying. I was scared to death.”

So began the infamous “kissing case,” as it came to be called, a case that shined an international spotlight on the bigotry and racial injustice in the South. The lives of James Thompson and David Simpson and their families were shattered and the entire Black community was traumatized, but as the spotlight shifted, with the exception of a television interview with Oprah Winfrey in 1993 and a 2011 interview for StoryCorps and NPR, the kissing case all but disappeared from public view.

“It’s been swept under the rug,” James Thompson’s younger brother, Dwight “Dee“ Thompson, 62, said in a recent interview with EJI, revisiting the “kissing case” as the 65th anniversary approached. “It’s history—American history. It’s shameful history.”

The boys were charged with assault and molestation. A juvenile court judge, J. Hampton Price, prepared to hear the case—but first he contacted the Morrison Training School in Hoffman, North Carolina, to secure places for the boys. The reformatory was founded as the State Training School for Negro Boys and renamed for Cameron Morrison, a North Carolina governor who had been a leader of the white supremacist Red Shirts.

Judge Price held his first hearing with just Sissy Sutton and her parents, thus denying the boys their right to confront their accuser. Then he held what he called a “separate but equal” hearing, and without attorneys there to defend them, he ruled the boys were guilty. He would later cite the boys’ silence when confronted with the charges as an admission of their guilt. On November 3, the judge sentenced the boys to spend the rest of their childhoods at the Morrison school. They would be eligible for release when they turned 21.

Within days, Evelyn Thompson’s white landlord sent her an eviction notice. Mrs. Thompson and David Simpson’s widowed mother, Jennie Simpson, were fired from their $15 a week jobs as domestic workers.

At night, shots were fired at the Thompson home. “My mom and them, they would go out in the morning and sweep bullets off the porch,” James’s older sister, Brenda Lee Graham, recalled in the StoryCorps interview.

Evelyn Thompson didn’t sleep. “She would be up walking the floors and praying,” Ms. Graham said. She also remembered “that at night you could see them burning crosses … right down the front yard.”

“They ran our family out of town,” Dwight Thompson told EJI. The NAACP moved both families into public housing in Charlotte for their own safety. That’s where Dwight was born, in 1961. “After everything that happened,” he said, “my mother had the audacity to have another child.”

Kelly Alexander, of the Wadesboro, North Carolina, NAACP, comforts James and David following an unsuccessful habeas corpus hearing. (Jet Magazine)

None of Monroe’s three newspapers or any of the state’s white newspapers covered the hearing or, initially, any of the events surrounding the kissing case. James and David might have spent years at the Morrison school but for the involvement of Robert Williams, the president of Monroe’s NAACP, who took up their cause, and Ted Poston, a rarity in 1958, a Black reporter for a major white newspaper, the New York Post, who agreed to write about the case.

On November 10, Mr. Poston’s story—which included the detail that the two boys had been threatened with lynching—ran on the Post’s front page. A Black civil rights attorney from New York, Conrad Lynn, got in touch with Robert Williams, offering to represent the boys.

Mr. Williams had already drawn the ire of white residents in Monroe. Weeks before the kissing episode he had petitioned, unsuccessfully, for his children to attend the segregated public elementary school. The previous year, he’d tried, and failed, to get Monroe to integrate its public swimming pool for even one day a week. Black children had drowned in local swimming holes and creeks, but officials said desegregation would be too costly because they would have to drain and clean the pool after Black swimmers used it.

Thanks in part to Mr. Williams’s efforts, newspapers elsewhere began picking up the story of the kissing case. Joyce Egginton, a reporter for the London News-Chronicle, traveled to Monroe. Accompanied by the boys’ mothers, along with Robert Williams and Conrad Lynn, the London reporter, posing as a social worker and with a camera concealed under a fruit basket, visited James and David at the reformatory.

On December 18, her story and a photo of the boys with their mothers ran on the News-Chronicle’s front page. Papers across Europe picked up the story, sparking an international campaign aimed at winning the boys’ freedom. Thousands of schoolchildren in the Netherlands sent letters to North Carolina Governor Luther H. Hodges. Clergy on both sides of the Atlantic protested. So did union members and college students in the North.

The NAACP appealed the case in North Carolina courts. On January 12, 1959, state superior court judge Walter Johnston presided over a two-hour hearing at which both boys and their mothers were present, along with their lawyer, Conrad Lynn, who argued for their innocence. In his testimony, Judge Price twice referred to the boys with the “n-word,” according to the Winston-Salem Journal. David fell asleep, with his head on his friend James’s shoulder, waking up to hear Judge Johnston say he was sending both boys back to the reformatory. The judge said he had heard no evidence that the boys should not have been convicted. Newspapers reported that David and James both cried.

Embarrassed by worldwide attention to the case, Gov. Hodges, Judge Price, and other white officials went on the offensive. They enlisted the state’s white media to publicly blame the boys and their mothers, and in violation of the requirement to protect juveniles’ privacy, they freely offered details they said had been provided by social service workers, teachers, and police. The said they were acting to correct “misinformation” and “inaccuracies” in the national and international media.

Officials branded James and David as “incorrigible” and “wayward” delinquents with irresponsible mothers. They said the boys had been sent to the reformatory for their own good, claimed Mrs. Thompson “has a bad reputation” in her community, and charged that Mrs. Simpson’s children were often in trouble with police. Local and state news outlets repeated those officials’ words in articles that showed little concern about accuracy.

“This is my family’s history,” Dwight Thompson told EJI. The local and state mainstream media coverage, which he reviewed as part of his own research, did not portray the mother who had raised him. “My mother is my hero. I can’t imagine what she endured.”

Led by Black journalists, national media attention continued to spread and on February 13, 1959, bowing to public pressure, Gov. Hodges—who went on to become U.S. Secretary of Commerce—pardoned the boys. Released from the reformatory, they joined their families, who had been relocated by the NAACP to public housing in Charlotte.

James Hanover Thompson (left) and his brother Dwight Thompson in 2011. (StoryCorps)

A couple days later, an AP reporter interviewed both mothers in Charlotte. All the boys had been doing on that October afternoon, Mrs. Thompson said, were innocent things—“raking leaves for a white lady,” a game of “cowboys and Indians” with their friends, and “playful-like” kisses on the cheek. But that night a policeman came to the house and told her James had been arrested. “We haven’t had much peace since it happened,” she said.

The media spotlight quickly moved on, but the stigma remained for both boys.

David Simpson said a police sergeant from Monroe told Charlotte police to look for him whenever crimes occurred. “I was never able to get out of the system,” he told Oprah Winfrey in 1993.

James Thompson remembered the words of the state psychologist he was required to visit weekly in Charlotte after being released from the state reformatory. “He said, ‘What are you, some kind of maniac? We should sterilize you.’ ”

This was not a hollow threat. North Carolina sterilized more than 7,000 people between the 1920s and the 1970s. A recent study by scholars identified the Morrison Training School as one of the “feeder” institutions that sent children to be sterilized. Black people were sterilized in the 1960s at a much higher rate than white people, the study found.

After James returned home from Morrison, his sister, Brenda Lee Graham, recalled during the StoryCorps interview, “It was like seeing somebody different that you didn’t even know. He never talked about what he went through there. But ever since then, his mind just hadn’t been the same.”

Both boys were repeatedly arrested and incarcerated as they got older.

James said to his brother Dwight, who interviewed him for StoryCorps, “I always sit around and wonder if this hadn’t happened to me, you know, what could I have turned out to be? Could I have been a doctor? Could I have gone off to some college or some great school? It just destroyed our life.”

“I still feel the hurt and the pain from it,” James told his younger brother. “And nobody ever said, ‘Hey, look, I’m sorry what happened to y’all. It was wrong.’”

Still today, no one—no local or state officials or the media—has ever apologized to Mr. Thompson or Mr. Simpson or their families, or compensated them for violating their rights.

Sissy Sutton never spoke about the kiss publicly. In 1993, Oprah Winfrey asked Mr. Thompson and Mr. Simpson, “Do you blame her?”

Both men responded immediately that the little girl should not be held responsible. “I don’t blame her,” Mr. Thompson said. “We were kids, kids do innocent things.”

“It wasn’t her fault,” Mr. Simpson said. “Children [are] only taught what their parents feed them.”

President Ronald Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. The law created a significant disparity in the sentences imposed in federal courts for crimes involving powder cocaine versus those imposed for crimes involving crack cocaine, with mandatory minimum sentences set at a 100:1 ratio.

For instance, a drug crime involving five grams of crack cocaine resulted in a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in federal prison, while crimes involving up to 500 grams of powder cocaine received a lower sentencing recommendation.

This sentencing disparity was not based on credible scientific evidence about a differing biological impact between cocaine in powder form versus crack form, but it had clear racial results. In the years following the enactment of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, the number of Black people sent to federal prison ballooned from approximately 50 in 100,000 adults to nearly 250 in 100,000 adults. During the same period, there was almost no change in the number of white people incarcerated in federal prison. Disparities in sentence lengths also increased: in 1986, Black people received drug sentences 11% longer than sentences received by white defendants, on average, but that disparity increased to 49% in the years following the law’s enactment.

This law, along with the “War on Drugs” overall, significantly contributed to huge increases in the American prison and jail population, which grew from approximately 500,000 in 1980 to nearly 2.3 million in 2013.

Prior to the Civil War, many Southern states, including Texas, barred enslaved or free Black people from testifying against white people in court proceedings. Following the Confederacy’s defeat, those states were forced to comply with certain requirements in order to be readmitted to the Union, including altering their laws and state constitutions to respect Black Americans’ new status as citizens with civil rights.

On October 26, 1866, the Texas legislature passed a law redefining the circumstances in which Black people could testify in court. Rather than simply declare that Black people had full and equal rights to testify, the new law provided that “persons of color shall not testify” except in cases where “the prosecution is against a person who is a person of color; or where the offense is charged to have been committed against the person or property of a person of color.”

In civil cases between white parties, and in criminal prosecutions of white people not charged with offenses against a Black person, Black people remained second-class citizens with no right to testify in a court of law. In addition, even in the cases in which Black witnesses were permitted to speak, their testimony was often given little to no weight by white decisionmakers.