October 5, 1920

A white mob lynched four innocent Black men named Fulton Smith, Ray Field, Ben Givens, and Sam Duncan in Macclenny, Florida. According to news reports at the time, a prominent young white farmer named John Harvey was shot and killed at a turpentine camp near Macclenny on October 4. The suspected shooter, a young Black man named Jim Givens, fled immediately afterward, and mobs of armed white men formed to pursue him. Mr. Givens’s brother, Ben Givens, and two other Black men connected to him—Mr. Smith and Mr. Field—were questioned and jailed during the search. Though there was no evidence or accusation that they had been involved in Mr. Harvey’s killing, they were held simply for having a connection to the man the mob wanted.

At around 1 am on October 5, a mob of about 50 white men overtook the jail, seized the three men from their cells, and took them to the outskirts of town, where they tied them to trees and shot them to death. A fourth Black man, Sam Duncan, was found shot to death nearby later in the day. He also had no ties to the killing of John Harvey and was thought to have been killed by the mob simply for being a Black man who they encountered.

Three days later, the Chicago Defender, a Northern Black newspaper, reported that white mobs continued to search for Jim Givens while most of the Black community of Macclenny had fled the area in fear of further violent attacks.

October 4, 1949

Members of the American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) voted to exclude Black players from competitions.

The ACBL was founded in 1937 and became the largest organization devoted to the card game in the U.S. White bridge organizations in this era strictly enforced racial segregation, forcing Black bridge players to create their own bridge association called the American Bridge Association (ABA). Racial exclusion was reinforced by laws in several states that officially banned card games between Black and white players.

In 1949, several Black bridge players applied for membership in the ACBL, challenging the organization’s “white only” policy. In response, the ACBL board of directors held a vote among its 28,000 members. Nearly 60% voted to reject allowing Black bridge players to be admitted.

The ACBL’s president said after the vote that his organization “is not a political organization but is primarily social in character. Social customs are based on public opinion and we do not seek either to perpetuate or to destroy them.”

It would be over a decade until the ACBL began allowing Black players to compete, at first only in select events. In 1962, a Black bridge player named Joseph L. Henry, a top player in the ABA who had coordinated the effort to integrate the ACBL, led a team to the ACBL national title. The ACBL did not formally open its membership to Black players in all of its events until 1967.

Long after laws banning interracial games and sporting events were declared unconstitutional, many social clubs and associations, especially those most popular among upper-income white people, maintained segregated membership. For example, some of the U.S.’s most prominent golf clubs—including Augusta National, the home of the Masters Tournament—did not begin allowing Black members until the 1990s.

October 3, 1912

Frank Wigfall, a Black man who had been threatened with mob violence at a Wyoming jail, was moved to the state penitentiary for “safe keeping” where he was soon lynched by 100 white prisoners.

Mr. Wigfall had been accused of assaulting a white woman and was taken to the Carbon County Jail. During the era of racial terror lynchings, charges of sexual assault against Black men, even when made with unsubstantiated evidence, regularly aroused violent white mobs. Shortly after his detention at the jail, a white mob attempted to seize Mr. Wigfall to lynch him. In response, the local sheriff transferred him from the county jail to the state penitentiary for “safe keeping.” The next morning, 100 white prisoners attacked Mr. Wigfall while he was getting his breakfast, one of them producing a rope, and they proceeded to hang him from the balcony inside the state penitentiary.

The white inmates had been shouting their intentions to lynch Mr. Wigfall from their cells all morning. Notwithstanding their repeated threats, the prison provided no security, which allowed 100 white prisoners to abduct Mr. Wigfall before hanging him by a rope. No one was held accountable for Mr. Wigfall’s death although it was widely known which prison officials and prisoners were culpable.

Mr. Wigfall was one of at least four documented racial terror lynchings in Wyoming. Learn more about how over 6,500 Black women, men, and children were victims of racial terror lynching in the U.S. between 1865-1950.

October 2, 1930

White neighbors violently attacked a house in Greeley, Colorado, where six Black students who were enrolled at a teachers college lived with their house mother. The assailants threw bricks, fired gunshots at the building, and used iron bars to smash the windows and screens on the house, terrorizing the Black women inside. The attack took place at 2 am, and the women had been living in the house for less than a week.

Before the assault, an “indignation meeting” had been organized by white residents in the area who objected to these Black women living in the neighborhood. White residents said that these were the first Black residents to rent a house in the area and they objected to the college housing students in the neighborhood despite the college’s presence in the same area. After the attack, all seven Black women fled and relocated to another area. No one was ever charged for the racially motivated attack on these women inside their home.

This attack on seven Black women in Greeley is one of thousands of instances throughout American history where white Americans have terrorized Black people in their homes to maintain racial segregation. Throughout the Jim Crow era, white people used intimidation, physical force, and the threat of lethal violence to prevent integration in American neighborhoods and to stifle the political, social, and economic conditions of Black Americans. Learn more about how millions of white Americans joined a mass movement of abusive, unwavering, and often violent opposition to racial equality, integration, and civil rights.

October 1, 1939

Sampson County, North Carolina, Sheriff C.C. Tart arrested a young Black woman for helping Andrew Troublefield, a 21-year-old Black man, avoid being lynched. The previous day two white women accused Mr. Troublefield of sexual impropriety. Without verifying the women’s stories, Sheriff Tart led a mob of 500 white people in pursuit of Mr. Troublefield with the intention, as newspapers reported, to lynch him without trial if he was caught. A young Black woman who saw the mob on its way shouted after Mr. Troublefield as he fled, attempting to warn him. Sheriff Tart arrested and detained this woman for her efforts. He also arrested Mr. Troublefield’s younger brother, who encouraged him to flee from the mob.

Black people were often prosecuted or even lynched for complaining about white mob violence or assisting other Black people in avoiding lynch mobs. Mary Turner was lynched in Georgia in 1918 for complaining about the lynching of her husband. Jim Cross condemned a lynching in Letohatchee, Alabama, in 1900, and a white mob came to his house and lynched him, his wife, and both of his children. Criminal prosecution, threat, and violence were tactics used to insulate perpetrators of racial terror lynchings from accountability.

The Sampson County lynch mob grew to over 1,000 white people. They spent over a week in the woods searching for Mr. Troublefield, until police from neighboring Wayne County arrested him on October 8. Wayne County’s chief of police transferred Mr. Troublefield directly to North Carolina’s death row, despite him being convicted of no crime at the time. Mr. Troublefield remained on death row until his trial in February.

On February 15, 1940, Judge R. Parker sentenced Mr. Troublefield to 30 years in prison for attempted rape. The conviction rested entirely on the testimony of the two alleged victims. During the trial, white mobs stood on the courthouse lawn, demanding a more severe sentence and grumbling about “what ought to have been done” to Mr. Troublefield. Threats of violence continued as the highway patrol transported Mr. Troublefield back to Central Prison in Raleigh. Neither the Sheriff nor any of the mob leaders were ever held accountable for this attempted lynching.

Racial terror lynchings and near lynchings inflicted massive trauma on entire Black communities. White mobs acted with impunity, lynching entire families, conducting lynchings in public, and terrorizing Black people who tried to help their neighbors. Perpetrators of these lynchings hoped to keep Black people in a state of perpetual fear and subordination. EJI has documented more than 6,500 racial terror lynchings between 1865 and 1950, including two in Sampson County, North Carolina.

September 30, 1919

Approximately 100 Black farmers attended a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America at a church in Phillips County, Arkansas. Many of the farmers were sharecroppers on white-owned plantations in the area, and the meeting was held to discuss ways they could organize to demand fairer payments for their crops.

Black labor unions such as the Progressive Farmers were deeply resented among white landowners throughout the country because unions threatened to weaken white aristocratic power. The union also made efforts to subvert racial divisions in labor relations and had hired a white attorney to negotiate with land owners for better cotton prices.

Knowing that Black union organizing often attracted opposition, Black men stood as armed guards around the church while the Phillips County meeting took place. When a group of white people from the Missouri-Pacific Railroad attempted to intrude and spy on the meeting, the guards held them back and a shootout erupted. At least two white men were killed, and enraged white mobs quickly formed.

The mobs descended on the nearby Black town of Elaine, Arkansas, destroying homes and businesses and attacking any Black people in their path over the coming days. Terrified Black residents, including women, children, and the elderly, fled their homes and hid for their lives in nearby woods and fields. A responding federal troop regiment claimed only two Black people were killed, but many reports challenged the white soldiers’ credibility and accused them of participating in the massacre. Today, historians estimate hundreds of Black people were killed in the massacre.

When the violence was quelled, 67 Black people were arrested and charged with inciting violence, while dozens more faced other charges. No white attackers were prosecuted, but 12 Black union members convicted of riot-related charges were sentenced to death. The NAACP, along with local African American lawyer Scipio Africanus Jones, represented the men on appeal and successfully obtained reversals of all of their death sentences.

September 29, 1915

The Alabama legislature passed a law forbidding “white female nurses” from working “in wards or rooms in hospitals, either public or private in which negro men are placed for treatment, or to be nursed.”

The Jim Crow racial segregation laws enacted and enforced in the American South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries enforced the strict boundaries of a legalized racial caste system and worked to restore and maintain white supremacy in the region. Even after the Civil War and Reconstruction amendments had ended slavery and declared Black people to be citizens with civil rights and the power to vote, many Southern state and local lawmakers passed laws forbidding Black and white people from playing checkers or pool together, entering a circus through the same entrance, or being buried in the same cemetery.

In some instances, these laws interfered with the provision of very important services, including education and health care. The statute mandated segregated nursing and threatened violators with a fine of $10-$200 and up to six months incarceration or hard labor. Learn more about these laws here.

Today, historians acknowledge that Black patients of the Jim Crow era were often relegated to overcrowded, under-resourced basement wards in segregated hospitals—and sometimes denied care altogether. In the neighboring state of Georgia in 1931, two Black women injured in a car accident died from their injuries after the local hospital refused them care due to their race. At a time when many institutional barriers limited the number of Black people able to become doctors and nurses in Alabama and restricted them from practicing in most state hospitals and other medical facilities, laws like this one inflicted further harm on Black people in need of care.

September 28, 1868

Racialized political violence erupted in Opelousas, Louisiana, when white residents resentful of African Americans’ new voting rights attacked and killed hundreds of people.

When Louisiana voters took to the polls in April 1868, most voted to accept the new Reconstruction constitution and supported Union-loyalist Republic politicians in local elections. St. Landry Parish was an anomaly; voters there rejected the constitution and supported white supremacist, former Confederate Democratic candidates—but the narrow margins showed the community’s white voters that they shared the ballot box with a large, politically powerful Black electorate.

After half-hearted efforts to sway Black voters to the white-controlled Democratic party failed, many white voters in St. Landry resorted to violent intimidation tactics. In response, Republicans like Emerson Bentley, a white journalist who published the radical St. Landry Progress newspaper, organized and encouraged Black people to become politically active. Racial and political tensions continued to escalate as the 1868 presidential election neared.

On September 28, a group of local white men threatened and then physically attacked Mr. Bentley in Opelousas, the parish seat, while he was teaching at a local school he had helped to establish for Black children. The students fled, shouting, and in the confusion, many Black people in the streets wrongly believed Mr. Bentley had been killed. Fearing they were next, Black men in the community armed themselves for protection, and 27 were soon arrested by white mobs.

The next night, the white mob marched these 27 Black men from jail and shot them dead, with the sheriff’s full cooperation. For the next two weeks, murderous violence swept the parish as white mobs terrorized the Black community. The fear was so great that Black people stayed off the streets and tied red strings around their arms to signify to white patrols that they had surrendered and sought white protection. When the attacks subsided, at least six white people had been killed, three Republican and three Democrat, while an estimated 200 Black people were dead.

As a means of political and racial intimidation, the Opelousas Massacre was very effective, terrorizing Black voters into silence. St. Landry was one of the few Louisiana parishes not politically controlled by Republicans by late 1868. Mr. Bentley and other white Radical Republicans fled the area, leaving a solidly Democratic white electorate, while Black voters had learned the consequences of opposing white political will. In the November 1868 presidential election, held just weeks after the massacre and just a few months after St. Landry’s Black voters had solidly supported Republican candidates in state and local races, Republican candidate Ulysses S. Grant did not receive a single vote.

September 27, 1958

Following violent resistance and a legal campaign by the white community against attempts to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, city residents voted to close local public schools rather than comply with federal desegregation orders.

After the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, school boards across the country were ordered to draft desegregation plans. The school board in Little Rock, Arkansas, drafted a plan for small numbers of Black students to begin attending previously all-white schools during the 1957-1958 school year. But when nine Black students, known as the Little Rock Nine, made their way to Central High School for the first day of classes in September 1957, they were met by angry crowds and the Arkansas National Guard blocked their entry. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus encouraged the protestors and did everything in his power to hinder integration. Eventually, President Dwight Eisenhower deployed federal troops to Arkansas and commanded the Arkansas National Guard to escort the students to school.

Still committed to resisting integration, Governor Faubus devised another plan. After the academic year ended in spring 1958, the Little Rock School Board petitioned the federal court for a delay in the implementation of its desegregation plan and was granted a waiver until 1961. The NAACP promptly appealed, and the case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In September 1958, the Court overturned the granted delay and ordered Little Rock to integrate immediately.

In anticipation of such a development, the Arkansas Legislature had recently passed a law allowing Governor Faubus to close public schools as an emergency measure and later hold a special election to determine public support. Immediately after the Supreme Court released its decision, the governor put the new law to use, ordering four public high schools closed. Shortly after, in a vote on September 27, an overwhelming majority of voters (19,470 to 7,561) supported continuing the school closure rather than integrating. The schools would remain closed for the entire 1958-1959 academic term, known as “the lost year.” Following the schools’ closures, voters continued to support Governor Faubus; he was re-elected four times and served as governor until 1967.

The massive resistance by the white community 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, 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.”

September 26, 1963

The Alabama Supreme Court upheld the contempt conviction of Mary Hamilton, a Black woman who was demeaned in court by a white prosecutor. The prosecutor refused to use the word “Miss” when addressing Ms. Hamilton and insisted on calling her by her first name, a practice that was widely used in the American South to demean and disrespect Black people.

In June 1963, Mary Hamilton was a field secretary for the Congress of Racial Equality in Alabama and one of hundreds of activists arrested during civil rights protests in the city of Gadsden. At a court hearing to determine the legitimacy of those arrests, Ms. Hamilton took the witness stand for questioning. When Etowah County Solicitor William Rayburn addressed her by her first name only, after addressing earlier white witnesses as “Miss,” Ms. Hamilton refused to answer and Judge A.B. Cunningham held her in contempt.

‘Q What is your name, please?
‘A Miss Mary Hamilton.
‘Q Mary, I believe—you were arrested—who were you arrested by?
‘A My name is Miss Hamilton. Please address me correctly.
‘Q Who were you arrested by, Mary?
‘A I will not answer a question——
‘BY ATTORNEY AMAKER: The witness’s name is Miss Hamilton.
‘A —your question until I am addressed correctly.
‘THE COURT: Answer the question.
‘THE WITNESS: I will not answer them unless I am addressed correctly.
‘THE COURT: You are in contempt of court——
‘ATTORNEY CONLEY: Your Honor—your Honor——
‘THE COURT: You are in contempt of this court, and you are sentenced to five days in jail and a fifty dollar fine.’

Ms. Hamilton served the jail time but refused to pay the fine and was allowed out on bond to appeal the conviction. The Alabama Supreme Court—a panel of all-white justices—upheld the conviction unanimously.

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court and urged the nation’s highest court to take action. “Petitioner’s reaction to being called ‘Mary’ in a court room where, if white, she would be called ‘Miss Hamilton,’ was not thin-skinned sensitivity,” LDF lawyers argued in their written filings. “She was responding to one of the most distinct indicia of the racial caste system. This is the refusal of whites to address Negroes with titles of respect.”

In March 1964, with three of nine justices dissenting, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Ms. Hamilton’s contempt citation.