Author: Desto22

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision upholding the Georgia Supreme Court’s decision to close a local public park in Macon, Georgia, rather than open it to Black residents.

In 1911, U.S. Senator Augustus O. Bacon executed his will, devising to the city of Macon “a park and pleasure ground” for white residents only. He explained that “in limiting the use and enjoyment of this property perpetually to white people, I am not influenced by any unkindness of feeling . . . I am, however, without hesitation in the opinion that in their social relations the two races . . . should be forever separate.”

A large and lush recreation space, Baconsfield Park opened in 1920. As a trustee of the park, Macon honored Senator Bacon’s wishes and for decades operated it as a “white only” facility. That changed in 1963 when the city determined that, as a public entity, it could no longer constitutionally enforce segregation. Disgruntled, Baconsfield’s Board of Managers sued to remove Macon as trustee and preserve the park as one for white residents only.

In May 1963, Black citizens intervened, filing a lawsuit challenging Baconsfield’s racial restriction as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. However, in February 1964, Macon resigned as trustee; several months later the court appointed three private individuals as new trustees, and the racial segregation policy continued.

Black residents appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In January 1966, the Court held in Evans v. Newton that Baconsfield could no longer be operated on a racially discriminatory basis: “the public character of this park requires that it be treated as a public institution subject to the command of the Fourteenth Amendment, regardless of who now has title under state law.” Rather than integrate, however, the Georgia Supreme Court responded by terminating the Baconsfield trust and closing the park to the public altogether.

Black residents of Macon again appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, contending that the state court’s action violated the Fourteenth Amendment. But on January 26, 1970, in Evans v. Abney, the Court upheld the Georgia Supreme Court’s order, writing: “When a city park is destroyed because the Constitution requires it to be integrated, there is reason for everyone to be disheartened.” Baconsfield Park remained closed and is now a strip mall. Georgia’s Bacon County remains named for Senator Bacon.

On January 25, 1900, the Virginia Senate unanimously passed a bill that required separate cars for white and Black passengers aboard trains. The legislation mandated that every compartment of a car be divided with “a good and substantial partition” and “bear in some conspicuous place appropriate words in plain letters indicating the race for which it is set apart.” The law also empowered railroad workers to remove passengers from the train who did not sit in the area assigned by the railroad official. It took effect on July 1 of that year.

This was Virginia’s first statewide segregation law. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld Louisiana’s 1890 Separate Car Act, gave legal sanction to racially segregated spaces.

Prior to this legislation, Black and white Virginians could travel together on most transit in the state. The passage of the bill was precipitated by an event on Christmas Eve, 1899, when a Black person allegedly took a seat next to a white woman on a train and refused to move. The Richmond Times publicized the incident and declared that “God Almighty drew the color line and it cannot be obliterated.” Early in the year, Virginia’s white governor J. Hoge Tyler, who went on to sign the separate-car bill, had personally voiced displeasure at having to share a sleeping car with several Black people on his trip by rail from Virginia to Georgia.

In subsequent years, Virginia formally segregated steamboats (1900), schools (1902), streetcars (1906), prisons (1918), and public halls (1926). Most transportation and public spaces in Virginia would remain legally segregated until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

A white mob in Clark County, Arkansas, lynched a Black man named Ben Daniels and his two sons. Earlier in the day, when Mr. Daniels tried to pay for something with a $50 bill, the white merchant assumed a Black man could only have that much money if he had stolen it. The merchant called the police to report Mr. Daniels as a suspect in a local theft that had recently occurred. A few days prior, a white farmer named R. M. Duff woke in the middle of the night to find his home and barn in flames. Mr. Duff later claimed that someone ran into the home and stole money as Mr. Duff evacuated with his wife, but he was not able to provide any description of this person and no one was reported burned in the blaze.

Without any evidence tying Mr. Daniels to this alleged theft, police responded to the merchant’s call by promptly arresting Mr. Daniels solely based on his possession of a $50 bill.

Police later claimed that, while in custody on the day of his arrest, Mr. Daniels confessed to stealing money from the Duff home and implicated his sons in the crime as well. 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 alleged 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.

The sheriff took Mr. Daniels’ sons into custody that same day as well. Later that night, before the Danielses could be tried, a mob of white men “overpowered” the sheriff who was supposed to be guarding them and lynched all three men. Some sources indicated that the two sons lynched with Mr. Daniels were the only ones arrested, while others reported that a third son was also arrested, not lynched, and remained in jail awaiting trial. News reports did not include the sons’ names.

During this era of racial terror lynchings, it was not uncommon for lynch mobs to seize their victims out of police hands. In some cases, police officials were even found to be complicit or active participants in lynchings. While law enforcement officials were obligated to defend anyone in their custody, in most instances, as here, law enforcement failed to extend any protection to Black citizens or to take any action to arrest and prosecute the perpetrators of lynchings.

After hanging the Daniels men from a tree, the white mob left their bodies on display as a way to further terrorize the Black community of Clark County, Arkansas. Between 1865 and 1950, more than 6,500 Black women, men, and children were killed in racial terror lynchings throughout the U.S., with at least 492 reported lynchings in Arkansas alone.

Over 150 Blackfeet—most of whom were women, children, the elderly, and those suffering from disease—were massacred by U.S. soldiers led by Major Eugene Baker near the Marias River (referred to as the Bear River by the Blackfeet) in the Montana Territory.

At dawn, Maj. Baker and his men came upon a Blackfeet camp led by a man named Heavy Runner. The majority of the Blackfeet men had gone out to hunt, while the rest of the band lay sleeping. Maj. Baker was told by a subordinate that the people in the camp were not engaged in a military conflict with the U.S. government. Heavy Runner, after being awoken, presented papers to the U.S. soldiers attesting to friendly relations with U.S. authorities.

In spite of this, Heavy Runner was promptly shot, and Baker ordered his soldiers to attack the rest of the camp. The U.S. soldiers shot indiscriminately into lodges. They also shot at the tops of dwellings so the structures would collapse upon the central fires and burn those inside.

According to a survivor, who was taken prisoner during the massacre, U.S. soldiers killed 90 women, 50 children, and 15 men in Heavy Runner’s band and destroyed 44 buildings. Other accounts put the number of Blackfeet murdered at over 200. A single member of the U.S. Army died. Neither Maj. Baker nor any of his men received disciplinary action for this atrocity.

Maj. Baker’s soldiers also stole over a hundred horses and burned clothing and provisions, making it difficult for the surviving Blackfeet to endure the -30°F temperature. Many subsequently froze to death.

The Marias River Massacre (also known as the Bear River Massacre or the Baker Massacre) was the largest massacre of Indigenous people in present-day Montana and one episode in the bloody campaign by the U.S. Army to dispossess the Blackfeet and other Indigenous groups of the territory. Whereas in the early 1800s the Blackfeet had a population of 20,000, by the end of the century, violence, disease, and starvation brought the number down to just 5,000.

The U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that restaurants in Washington, D.C., could continue refusing service to Black patrons.

Three years prior, 86-year-old civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell began a lawsuit against Thompson’s Restaurant, located a few blocks from the White House, which had denied service to her and several colleagues because they were Black. Mrs. Terrell invoked a set of laws outlawing racial discrimination in restaurants and other places of public accommodation that had been passed during Reconstruction following the Civil War by Washington, D.C.’s newly elected biracial city government.

When in the 1870s the federal government retreated from the promise of racial progress ushered in by the Reconstruction era, it did so not just in the former Confederate states but also in its own capital. Congress abolished the city’s locally elected biracial government and replaced it with a federally appointed commission. Segregation became deeply entrenched in the District, and these anti-discrimination laws—though never explicitly repealed—stopped being enforced.

During the Jim Crow era, white Americans across the country who were committed to racial hierarchy considered it important to uphold racial exclusion in the nation’s capital. After Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo in 1944 became chairman of the congressional committee responsible for overseeing the District, he told an audience, “I wanted this position so I could keep Washington a segregated city.”

In ruling against Mrs. Terrell on January 22, 1953, the U.S. Court of Appeals declared that the District’s Reconstruction government had lacked the authority to pass laws banning segregation, claiming only Congress had the power to do so. It also held that even if the Reconstruction government had held such authority, the laws could not be enforced because they had been disregarded for over 80 years.

However, Mrs. Terrell and her legal team appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, and five months later, on June 8, 1953, the Supreme Court decided unanimously in her favor, holding that the Reconstruction-era anti-discrimination laws were still valid and thus segregation in District restaurants was illegal. This ruling only applied to Washington, D.C.; it would take over a decade, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for segregation in public restaurants to be outlawed across the United States.

Senator James Eastland of Mississippi led a successful campaign to block an anti-lynching bill, which would have held members of lynch mobs and local law enforcement officers accountable for their role in racial terror lynchings. Before the Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing, Senator Eastland—an ardent segregationist and supporter of white supremacy—proclaimed that “time has cured” lynchings and refused to acknowledge the role that law enforcement had played for decades in the lynchings of thousands of Black Americans.

Senator Eastland, a wealthy plantation owner who served as U.S. senator from Mississippi from 1942 to 1978, built his political career on promoting white supremacy, defending racial segregation, and blocking civil rights bills. His campaign to block anti-lynching legislation in the Senate was supported by dozens of Southern white politicians who successfully filibustered every anti-lynching bill since the first one was introduced in 1918.

At the January 21 hearing, Senator Eastland launched unfounded attacks on the constitutionality of the bill, which would make lynching a federal crime, and disparaged the U.S. Supreme Court as “not judicially honest.” In contending there was no need for an anti-lynching bill, Senator Eastland incorrectly declared that “we don’t have any lynchings now.” Though the number of racial terror lynchings had declined by 1948, more than four dozen lynchings were recorded during the 1940s, including at least six in the senator’s home state.

Senator Eastland’s attempt to downplay the history and continuing threat of lynching was particularly blatant given that Mississippi is among the states with the highest number of documented racial terror lynchings from 1877 to 1950, and considering Senator Eastland’s own family ties to that violence. In 1904, the same year Eastland was born, his father, Woods Eastland, led a lynch mob that captured and brutally lynched a Black man named Luther Holbert and an unidentifiable Black woman without trial or due process of law. The two lynching victims were mutilated and burned alive before a crowd of 600 picnicking spectators, and no one was ever punished for their deaths. Mr. Holbert had been accused of killing the future senator’s plantation-owning uncle, for whom he was named.

As the federal government refused to protect Black Americans, racial terror lynchings remained an ongoing threat to Black communities for nearly a century. Victims of racial terror lynchings were hanged, shot, stabbed, drowned, and burned alive, killed by mobs who never faced prosecution for their actions. It was not uncommon for lynch mobs to seize their victims from jails, prisons, courtrooms, or police custody, and in many cases, law enforcement officials were complicit or active participants in lynchings.

The anti-lynching bill that came before the Senate in 1948 proposed to hold law enforcement accountable for lynchings of people who were in their custody. Due to the efforts of Southern white politicians like Senator Eastland, this bill failed. Out of more than 200 anti-lynching bills introduced in Congress, only three passed the House and none passed the Senate until 2018. It wasn’t until 2022 that the Emmett Till Antilynching Act was passed by both houses of Congress. It was signed by President Biden on March 29, 2022, making lynching a federal hate crime.

Hiram Rhodes Revels was elected to the U.S. Senate, becoming the first African American to serve in the U.S. Congress. Revels was elected in Mississippi to fill the vacancy left after the state’s secession from the Union prior to the Civil War.

After the Confederacy’s 1865 defeat in the Civil War, Reconstruction amendments to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery, established the citizenship of formerly enslaved Black people, and granted Black people civil rights—including granting Black men the right to vote. For the brief Reconstruction period, which lasted until 1877, federal officials and troops remained in Southern states and enforced these new rights. As a result, Black people in the South were for the first time voters, political candidates, and election winners. Mr. Revels was one of those winners.

However, immediately upon Mr. Revels’s arrival in Washington, Southern white politicians still committed to the ideas of white supremacy and racial hierarchy were determined to block his seating to the U.S. Congress. They declared his election null and void, asserting various dubious objections, including a claim that Mr. Revels was ineligible for the Senate because—like all Black Americans—he was not a U.S. citizen until the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Hiram Revels was eventually seated in the Senate on February 25, 1870, after a Senate vote of 48 to 8. However, the attempt to prevent Mr. Revels from taking his rightful place in office was an early illustration of the deeply rooted racial animus and belief in inequality that remained in the South and in the nation that would continue to terrorize and plague Black people for generations—especially after federal protection was withdrawn.

Mobs of up to 500 white people roamed Watsonville, California, and the surrounding towns and farms, attacking Filipino farmworkers and their property after Filipino men were seen dancing with white women at a newly opened local dance hall.

In the days and weeks before the rioting, politicians and community leaders had ramped up their anti-Filipino rhetoric, calling the farmworkers “a menace” and demanding that Filipino residents be deported so “white people who have inherited this country for themselves and their offspring could live.” A local judge stated, “The worst part of [the Filipino man] being here is his mixing with young white girls from 13 to 17. He gives them silk underwear and makes them pregnant and crowds whites out of jobs in the bargain.”

One Watsonville mob was initially turned away from the dance hall by security guards and the armed owners of the hall but returned in full force to beat dozens of Filipino farmworkers. The beatings continued elsewhere in the area, and on the night of January 22, a mob ransacked Filipino farmworkers’ homes and shot into the dwellings, killing Fermin Tobera. No one was ever charged with this murder. Seven men were later convicted of rioting but received either probation or 30 days in jail.

The anti-Filipino violence continued in California in the months after the Watsonville riots ended on January 23, with violence breaking out in Stockton, Salinas, San Francisco, and San Jose. In 1933, California enacted a law to prohibit marriages between Filipino and white residents. And in 1934, answering in part a long-standing request of California’s government, Congress reduced Filipino immigration to the U.S. to just 50 people per year. In September 2011, the California legislature officially expressed regret and apologized for these events and actions.

The North Carolina General Assembly approved the disbursement of public funds to enslavers as compensation for the executions of Black people they held in bondage. Nearly a dozen enslavers received money from the state, including a white man in Duplin County who was given 80 pounds—the equivalent of over $18,000 today—following the government-led execution of a man he enslaved by the name of George.

In nine of 13 colonies, laws provided economic support and compensation to white people after the execution of Black people they enslaved, with the earliest compensation law established in 1705 in Virginia. In a system that subsidized enslavers and permitted the continued trafficking of humans and their summary execution, the state could enact capital punishment without consequence or complaint from enslavers. For decades, if an enslaved person was executed by the state or if an enslaved person died from injuries induced during any other corporal punishment, enslavers could receive an uncapped sum of money and up to 80 pounds by the late 1700s in North Carolina.

Consequently, between 1734 and 1786, the North Carolina government authorized the execution of 86 enslaved people that involved compensation to enslavers. Critically, these executions were carried out without any formal legal process. North Carolina’s Slave Code of 1741 denied enslaved people their right to due process, founded in the belief that enslaved people were not suitable for the legal system. Enslaved people were tried before a tribunal composed of enslavers who were quick to deliver convictions and punishments, often on the same day. In 1793, this practice was re-codified in North Carolina as enslaved people were only entitled to a “trial” made up of a jury of “good and lawful men, owners of slaves.” Before imposing execution, the enslaver tribunal assigned a monetary amount that would be given to enslavers.

Half of the claims approved by the North Carolina General Assembly on January 18 came in the wake of executions of enslaved people who committed “felonies” which were loosely defined and took the form of petty crimes, arson, “witchcraft,” or attempts to escape bondage.

In the wake of these executions, on January 18, North Carolina dispersed nearly 1,000 pounds, or the equivalent of $230,000 today, to enslavers following the executions of 13 enslaved people.

The Alabama State Legislature passed Act 44 as part of a series of increasingly restrictive laws governing the behavior of free and enslaved Black people, which prohibited Black people from being freed within the state and authorized re-enslavement of any free Black person who entered the state.

In the immediate aftermath of the Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia, Alabama passed a statute in 1833 that made it unlawful for free Black people to settle in Alabama. That statute provided that freed Black people found in Alabama would be given 30 days to vacate the state. After 30 days, they could be subject to a penalty of 39 lashes and receive an additional 20-day period to leave the state. After that period had expired, the free person could be sold back into slavery with proceeds of the sale going to the state and those who participated in apprehending him or her.

In 1834, Act 44 expanded on this legislation by specifying a series of procedures that had to be followed for an enslaved Black person to be freed within the state. For one, the law required that the emancipation of an enslaved person could only take effect outside of Alabama’s borders. Further, if an emancipated Black person returned to Alabama after being freed, he or she could be lawfully captured and sold back into slavery. In fact, Act 44 required sheriffs and other law enforcement officers to actively attempt to apprehend freedmen and freedwomen who entered Alabama for any reason—rendering all free Black people within the state vulnerable to kidnapping and enslavement with no legal protection.