Author: Desto22

The U.S. Supreme Court issued an opinion lifting a lower court’s desegregation decree and authorizing Oklahoma City schools to resegregate into de facto one-race schools.

In 1972, a federal court ordered the Board of Education of Oklahoma City Schools to adopt a busing program to desegregate the city’s public schools in compliance with the U.S. Supreme Court’s desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The school board complied for five years and then filed a motion to lift the order. The federal court found that integration had been achieved, granted the motion, and ended the busing program.

In 1984, the school board adopted a new student assignment plan that significantly reduced busing and resegregated Oklahoma City schools. Local parents of Black students initiated litigation challenging the new assignment plan and asking for reinstatement of the 1972 busing decree. In 1989, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit reinstituted the decree, and the school board appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

On January 15, 1991, the Court declared in a 5-3 decision written by Chief Justice William Rehnquist that federal desegregation injunctions were intended to be temporary. Despite troubling evidence that Oklahoma City schools were resegregating under the district’s new plan, the Court sent the case back to the lower federal court for assessment under a less stringent standard, which ultimately permitted the school board to proceed with the new plan.

Justice Thurgood Marshall—who argued and won the Brown case in 1954—wrote a dissent, joined by Justices Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens, arguing that a desegregation decree should not be lifted when doing so recreates segregated “conditions likely to inflict the stigmatic injury condemned in Brown.” Justice Marshall argued that by reaching its decision, “the majority today suggests that 13 years of desegregation was enough.”

After being overwhelmingly elected by white Alabama voters, George Wallace, the infamous segregationist and white supremacist, delivered his inaugural address as the governor of Alabama and called for “segregation now… segregation tomorrow… segregation forever!” Throughout his speech he condemned integration and criticized federal intervention in state affairs.

Running for office almost a decade after Brown v. Board of Education, Governor Wallace’s 1962 campaign used the slogan “Stand up for Alabama,” and he vowed to fight integration at the University of Alabama. Six months later, Governor Wallace launched himself into the national spotlight by physically blocking two Black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from enrolling at the University of Alabama. The dramatic “stand in the schoolhouse door” was broadcast on national television, and within a week, Wallace received over 100,000 telegrams from white people commending his actions.

The political legacy of four-time Alabama governor and four-time presidential candidate George Wallace is enduring and increasingly relevant today. Governor Wallace developed a political identity that combined racial demagoguery and fiery rhetoric to defend segregation under the veneer of “states’ rights.” By appealing to racial sentiments, Wallace gained the support of voters who felt threatened by increasing Black political power.

During the 1968 presidential election campaign, a year fraught with racial injustice after, among other things, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Governor Wallace ran as an independent candidate on the back of his racially charged message. At a campaign stop where he was asked about the year’s protests against racial injustice, Governor Wallace said: “We don’t have riots in Alabama! They start a riot down there, first one of ’em to pick up a brick gets a bullet in the brain, that’s all. And then you walk over to the next one and say, ‘All right, pick up a brick. We just want to see you pick up one of them bricks now!” Governor Wallace was overwhelmingly popular with Southern white people and became the most successful and popular independent candidate in modern presidential election history—receiving almost 10,000,000 votes during the general election and winning the electoral votes of five states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

Today, a portion of Interstate 10 in Alabama and community colleges in the cities of Dothan and Eufaula bear George Wallace’s name. He remains one of the most infamous and influential segregationist leaders of his era.

Segregationists like Governor Wallace, operating at the highest levels of government, represented and advanced the views of the majority of white citizens at the time.

A mob of white people lynched a Black man known as General Lee in Reevesville, South Carolina, for allegedly knocking on the door of a white woman’s house. The night before, a white woman reported that she had opened the door to her home after hearing a knock and saw a Black man running away from her house.

The next day, a group of white men from the town went to the local magistrate to seek a warrant for the arrest of Mr. Lee, whose foot they claimed could have made a track similar to the ones found outside the woman’s home. Authorities arrested Mr. Lee on the evening of January 13 and charged him with “criminally assaulting a white woman” for allegedly knocking on her door.

One mile outside of Reevesville, a mob of 50 white men seized Mr. Lee from police officers who were transferring him by buggy to a local jail. The police officers who abandoned Mr. Lee reported hearing gunshots as they fled the scene. Two days later, Mr. Lee was found tied to a tree and shot to death. Newspapers reported that the woman who reported the alleged “crime” knew Mr. Lee and never claimed she believed he was the man at her home that night.

No one was arrested in connection to the murder of General Lee. In a letter to the governor of South Carolina, the local sheriff in Reevesville justified the mob’s actions by suggesting that Mr. Lee was in “bad-standing” with the local community and that people were surprised Mr. Lee “had not been dealt with in like manner several years ago.”

During this era of racial terror, white allegations against Black people were rarely subject to scrutiny and often sparked violent reprisal even when, as here, there was no evidence tying the accused to any offense. Between 1877 and 1950, thousands of Black men were lynched in the U.S., and nearly 1 in 4 were targeted based on the allegation of raping a white woman. These men were subjected to mob murder without investigation or trial, at a time when the definition of Black-on-white “rape” in the South was incredibly broad and required no allegation of force because white institutions, laws, and most white people rejected the idea that a white woman could or would willingly consent to sex with a Black man. This meant that any action by a Black man that could be interpreted as seeking or desiring contact with a white woman might prove deadly. Throughout the lynching era, Black men were lynched for delivering a letter to a white woman, for entering a room where white women were sitting, or, as Mr. Lee was, for knocking on the door of a white woman’s home.

Mr. Lee was one of at least three documented Black lynching victims in Dorchester County and one of 193 in South Carolina between 1877 and 1950. Learn more about this era of racial terror and how over 6,500 Black women, men, and children were victims of racial terror lynching in the U.S. between 1865 and 1950.

A mob of 2,000 white men, women, and children seized a Black man named Raymond Gunn, placed him on the roof of the local white schoolhouse, and burned him alive in a public spectacle lynching meant to terrorize the entire Black community in Maryville, Missouri.

Days before, a white school teacher had been found murdered and suspicion fell on Mr. Gunn, who was arrested. Many Black people were lynched across the South under accusation of murder. During this era of racial terror, mere suggestions of Black-on-white violence could provoke mob violence and lynching before the judicial system could or would act. The deep racial hostility permeating Southern society often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered, whether or not there was evidence to support the suspicion, and accusations lodged against Black people were rarely subject to serious scrutiny.

Following Mr. Gunn’s arrest, police took Mr. Gunn to jail in a neighboring county due to threats of lynching. 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.

On the morning of Mr. Gunn’s arraignment, a mob of 2,000 white men, women, and children gathered outside the courthouse. Despite the previous attacks and threats of violence, the local sheriff did not request assistance from the National Guard. With little resistance from local law enforcement, and 60 members of the National Guard at ease in an armory one block from the courthouse, Mr. Gunn was seized by the white mob and marched four miles down the road to the white schoolhouse. The mob chained Mr. Gunn to the rooftop of the building, doused the building in gasoline, and celebrated as it burned Mr. Gunn alive.

Southern lynching was not only intended to impose “popular justice” or retaliation for a specific crime. Rather, lynchings like that of Mr. Gunn were meant to send a broader message of domination and to instill fear within the entire Black community. In the aftermath of the lynching, the majority of Black residents of Maryville, including Mr. Gunn’s family, fled the city.

On the night of January 11, 1896, a mob of 20 white men set fire to the home of Patrick and Charlotte “Lottie” Morris in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, killing them both. Mr. Morris, a white railroad hand, and Mrs. Morris, a Black woman, were targeted because of their interracial marriage, as well as their operation of a gathering place and hotel for Black people.

The white mob first attempted to burn down the Morrises’ home at 11 pm that night, but Mr. Morris discovered the fire and extinguished it. By midnight, the white mob had set a second fire that could not be controlled. When the couple attempted to escape the flames through the front door of their home, the mob attacked them with a barrage of gunfire. Mrs. Morris was shot and killed at the doorstep while Mr. Morris was maimed by a shot to his leg before being killed as well.

The Morrises’ 12-year-old son, Patrick Morris Jr., witnessed the events and escaped through the back door of the home. As the boy ran for safety, the mob shot into the darkness after him but missed. Patrick spent the night hiding underneath a nearby home in the neighborhood.

The next morning, community members found that much of the Morrises’ home had been destroyed by the fire. Mr. and Mrs. Morris’s charred remains were found inside the home, and a coroner’s examination revealed that one of the bodies had been decapitated; it was unclear whether this act was carried out before or after death. Despite eye-witness statements from their son, no one was ever held accountable for their deaths.

In the early morning hours, two carloads of armed Ku Klux Klan members drove onto the property of Vernon Dahmer and his family, 10 miles outside of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The white men set fire to the Dahmers’ grocery store and house and blasted the buildings with gunfire. Mrs. Dahmer and three of their children managed to escape, but Mr. Dahmer sustained fatal lung damage while holding off attackers as his family fled; he died later that day.

For years, Vernon Dahmer and his wife, Elli, had slept in shifts to keep watch over their home in anticipation of attacks from local white residents. As a successful Black businessman and NAACP leader active in the voting rights movement, Mr. Dahmer and his family were the targets of local white residents’ hostility and violent attacks.

Following Mr. Dahmer’s murder, a massive crowd of Black residents gathered at the local courthouse, and President Lyndon B. Johnson sent a wire expressing condolences. Mr. Dahmer’s funeral was well attended, and local residents raised money to restore the family’s house. Four of the Dahmers’ sons, who were serving in the U.S. military at the time, obtained leave to come home for their father’s funeral and to help their mother rebuild.

Fourteen klansmen were arrested and charged with murder, arson, and conspiracy in the attack on the Dahmer home. Four of the men were convicted and a fifth pleaded guilty, but none served more than four years. In 1998, prosecutors reopened the case against Sam Bowers, the klansman who ordered the attack. Mr. Bowers, at age 74, was convicted on August 21, 1998, and sentenced to life in prison; he died in 2006.

Thousands of white people violently rioted because Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes registered at the University of Georgia, becoming the university’s first Black students. Their enrollment came days after federal judge William Bootle ordered the university to admit them, ending a two-year administrative and legal fight to integrate the school.

When Ms. Hunter and Mr. Holmes arrived to register for classes, they were met by nearly 100 white students opposing their admission. The crowd grew in the coming hours and the opposition escalated into full-scale riots, involving nearly 2,000 white students, local residents, and Ku Klux Klan members. The rioters set fires outside Ms. Hunter’s dormitory, hurled rocks inside, and yelled racist epithets. At least one student in the dormitory was injured by a flying object. After several hours, campus officers, city police, and local firefighters quelled the riot.

In response to this violent white mob, composed of many white students from the university, officials forced Ms. Hunter and Mr. Holmes to withdraw from the university and Georgia state troopers escorted them home. White student leaders gloated at their victory, and one cited the University of Alabama’s violent reaction to the enrollment of Autherine Lucy in 1956 as inspiration for their own demonstration.

Days later, Judge Bootle ordered the university to readmit Ms. Hunter and Mr. Holmes. They both completed their studies in 1963, becoming the first Black undergraduate students to graduate from the University of Georgia.

On January 8, 1908, newly elected Governor Austin Crothers, a former judge, prosecutor, and state senator, declared it his administration’s “high and momentous obligation” to “eliminate the illiterate and irresponsible” Black voters from Maryland’s electorate.

Governor Crothers expressed his administration’s commitment to “secure and safeguard” the right to vote “in the hands of our white citizens, both native and naturalized.” He characterized the Fifteenth Amendment as an impediment to white supremacy and a constraint that his administration must evade in order to preserve an all-white electorate. “Let us execute unflinchingly the purpose of [our] pledge by all lawful and constitutional means to maintain the political supremacy of the white race in Maryland,” he declared.

Governor Crothers advocated for a racially targeted disenfranchisement plan. He sought to dispense with existing laws restricting the right to vote, such as literacy tests and strict rules for ballot-marking, because even though these provisions were designed to disenfranchise Black people, they unintentionally disenfranchised some white Marylanders as well. Governor Crothers explained that lawmakers enacted these provisions “to restrict the evils of a large body of unreflecting” Black voters but that, “unfortunately, [they have] entailed much inconvenience to many of our white voters.”

During his first month in office, Governor Crothers coordinated with white Maryland legislators to draft a constitutional amendment that categorically disenfranchised almost all Black people while preserving the right of all white citizens to vote. The proposed amendment imposed hereditary, property ownership, and education-based qualifications that would have disenfranchised the majority of Maryland’s Black population. The Colored Voters Suffrage League of Maryland formally opposed the legislation, asking the governor and legislature, “if the franchise is so essential to white men, who have at hand every conceivable social and economic opportunity,” why was it less essential to Black voters who have suffered “centuries of oppression?”

While Maryland’s electorate ultimately rejected the statewide amendment, individual municipalities—including Maryland’s capital, Annapolis—adopted legislation that mirrored the Crothers plan, restricting the right to vote to individuals owning over $500 in property, naturalized citizens, and descendants of white men authorized to vote prior to 1868. This resulted in the disenfranchisement of thousands of Black citizens of Maryland.

A U.S.-registered trafficking vessel delivered 88 kidnapped and enslaved African passengers into Charleston, South Carolina. The ship, named “Fair American,” originally kidnapped 101 Africans from Iles de Los, an island chain off the coast of contemporary Conakry, Guinea, in West Africa. However, nearly 15% of these forced passengers perished on the grueling journey across the Atlantic.

The port of Charleston imported more enslaved Africans during the Transatlantic slave trade than any other city in North America—more than one-third of all Africans trafficked in the Transatlantic slave trade into the U.S. were trafficked through Charleston. From its beginnings as a British proprietary colony in 1663, South Carolina entrenched the institution of chattel slavery. South Carolina’s proprietors incentivized enslavers to immigrate, offering 10-20 acres of free land for every enslaved Black person that a white migrant forcibly brought to the colony. By 1720, South Carolina was importing an average of 1,000 enslaved Africans annually. This figure rose to 3,000 by 1770. By the middle of the 18th century, enslaved people made up more than 70% of Charleston’s population.

The kidnapping, trafficking, and sale of Africans escalated dramatically in Charleston between 1803 and 1807. Anticipating a constitutional ban on the Transatlantic trade beginning in 1808, traffickers in Charleston imported more than 40,000 kidnapped Africans during these five years alone. The 88 kidnapped Africans trafficked into Charleston on this day in 1807 would be some of the first of more than 21,000 kidnapped Africans who would be brought through Charleston in 1807, accounting for 95% of the total Africans trafficked into the U.S. in 1807.

As mortality rates on the Fair American illustrate, the Middle Passage subjected kidnapped passengers to brutal, traumatic conditions, with many perishing before reaching North American shores. At least 13% of all kidnapped Africans destined for Charleston during the Transatlantic slave trade died during the Middle Passage. Africans trafficked to Charleston faced equally brutal conditions following disembarkation. Many spent weeks quarantined on Sullivan’s Island in Charleston Harbor or detained in the city’s warehouses, where thousands died awaiting sale at downtown markets.

Africans trafficked to South Carolina faced a lifetime of involuntary servitude on labor-intensive rice plantations. Rice required 10 times the labor to produce when compared to other colonial cash crops. Further, in South Carolina, enslavers had complete discretion over the sentencing and punishment of enslaved people accused of wrongdoing, resulting in brutal physical torture and summary executions. South Carolina’s rice plantations had alarming mortality rates among enslaved people—higher than anywhere else in the South. About one-third of enslaved Africans who landed in South Carolina died within a year.

Richard and Mildred Loving were convicted of interracial marriage, given a one-year suspended sentence, and banished from the state of Virginia by court order.

After marrying in Washington, D.C., in 1958, the Lovings returned to their native Caroline County, Virginia, to build a home and start a family. Their union was a criminal act in Virginia because Richard was white, Mildred was Black, and the state’s Racial Integrity Act, passed in 1924, criminalized interracial marriage.

Caroline County police arrested the Lovings in their home in an early morning raid and took them to jail. They were charged with marrying interracially out of state and then returning to reside in Virginia. “Miscegenation,” a felony, carried a penalty of up to five years in prison.

On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty to both charges. The judge agreed to impose a suspended one-year prison sentence, so long as the couple left the state of Virginia for 25 years. Before entering judgment, Judge Leon Bazile condemned the Lovings’ marriage and declared that God’s decision to place the races on different continents demonstrated a divine intent to avoid intermarriage.

After their conviction and release, the Lovings relocated to Washington, D.C., but remained unsettled by their criminalization and exile. They later fought the law that had branded their love a crime and, on June 12, 1967, won a U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down all bans on interracial marriage throughout the country.