Renewed Legacy

A white police officer named Donald Foster shot and killed Bernard Whitehurst Jr., a 32-year-old Black man, after mistaking him for a crime suspect. Rather than acknowledge the mistake, Foster and other officers planted a gun near Mr. Whitehurst’s body as part of an elaborate cover-up of tragic police violence. There was no autopsy report, and Mr. Whitehurst’s family was not even notified that he had been killed; they found out about his death shortly after when one family member heard about it on the radio.

Six months after Mr. Whitehurst’s killing, an investigation urged by the Whitehurst family revealed that the gun officers claimed had been found near his body had actually been picked up during a drug raid a year earlier. Mr. Whitehurst’s body was exhumed soon after, and an autopsy confirmed that he had been shot in the back—and not in the chest as the officers who had been chasing him initially claimed.

In 1976, three police officers who had helped plant the gun near Mr. Whitehurst after he was shot were indicted on charges of perjury but only one case went to trial. It resulted in a hung jury. Soon after, the state attorney general, William Baxley, made a deal with police and government officials that if the officers involved in the alleged cover-up could all pass polygraph tests confirming their innocence, charges against them would be dropped. Rather than take the tests, the city’s mayor, the public safety director, and eight police officers resigned or were fired. Mr. Whitehurst’s mother filed a civil suit against the police department but a federal judge ruled that any conspiracy to violate Mr. Whitehurst’s civil rights had ended with his death, and the jury ultimately returned a verdict in favor of the former police chief, his top aide, and Officer Foster. To this day, no one has been held accountable for Mr. Whitehurst’s death.

Montgomery, Alabama, police arrested seamstress and activist Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated city bus. Her stand helped spark the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which remains one of the most well-known campaigns of the civil rights movement. However, Mrs. Parks’s work for racial justice long preceded this courageous act. She was very active in the local chapter of the NAACP since joining as the chapter’s only woman member in 1943 and had served as both the youth leader and secretary. Mrs. Parks frequently traveled throughout Alabama to interview Black people who had suffered racial terror, violence, or other injustices. In 1944, she investigated the Abbeville, Alabama, gang-rape of a young Black woman named Recy Taylor and joined with other civil rights activists to organize a national campaign demanding prosecution of the white men responsible.

On the evening of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks began her bus ride home from work sitting in the “colored section.” Montgomery’s segregated bus service designated separate seating areas for Black and white passengers; during peak operating hours, if the white seating area became full, the bus driver could expand its boundaries and request that African Americans stand to relinquish their seats to white people. While Black riders were not legally obligated to comply, city bus drivers were notorious for their hostile treatment of Black riders, and their requests were rarely refused.

As more white passengers boarded, the bus driver asked Mrs. Parks and three other Black passengers who were seated to give up their seats to white riders. When Mrs. Parks was the only one to refuse, the driver summoned police and she was arrested. Mrs. Parks later recalled that she had refused to stand, not because she was physically tired, but because she was tired of giving in. That same night, Jo Ann Robinson and other local activists began organizing what would become the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

A statue of Mrs. Parks was dedicated in Montgomery on December 1, 2019, near the location where she boarded the bus on the day of her arrest. On February 14, 2024, the Equal Justice Initiative unveiled a sculpture honoring Mrs. Parks at Legacy Plaza, across from the Legacy Museum in downtown Montgomery.

A mob of white men in Ballinger, Texas, seized Robert Murtore, a 15-year-old Black boy, from the custody of law enforcement and, in broad daylight, shot him to death.

After a 9-year-old white girl alleged that she had been assaulted by an unknown Black boy, suspicion immediately fell on Robert, who worked in the same hotel as the white girl’s mother. He was arrested and held in the Ballinger jail, but word soon spread. On the morning of November 30, a white mob formed outside of the jail in an attempt to lynch Robert. Local law enforcement removed Robert from his cell for transport away from Ballinger; it is unclear whether this was to facilitate or block the lynching.

As the sheriff and Robert drove away from town, an armed mob of white men blocked the road and demanded that the sheriff turn Robert over to them. Though he was armed and charged with protecting Robert while he was in his custody, the sheriff willingly turned the Black teenager over to the mob without a fight.

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. In this case, instead of pursuing the mob to try to stop the lynching or identify the mob members, the sheriff left the mob to its murderous task and rode back to the station at Ballinger to report Robert’s fate.

Unchallenged, the lawless mob seized Robert, drove him to a nearby grove, tied him to a post, and riddled his body with 50 bullets. A Texas newspaper described the mob as “orderly,” leaving “peacefully” after violently taking the young boy’s life.

American troops murdered more than 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho people who were living peacefully along Sand Creek in eastern Colorado. Days before the massacre, white officials had assured chiefs of the village that their community would not be harmed.

At dawn on November 29, hundreds of U.S. soldiers led by Colonel John Chivington surrounded the village. Residents responded by waving white flags and pleading for mercy; one of the chiefs even raised the American flag in an attempt to demonstrate that he, too, was American. Ignoring these symbols of surrender and peace, the white troops opened fire with carbines and cannons, slaughtering more than 200 Native American people. Most of the victims of the massacre were women, children, and the elderly and infirm. After the massacre, the troops burned the village, mutilated the bodies of the deceased, and removed body parts to keep as trophies. Some scalps of the dead became props in plays that the troops later performed to celebrate, as one soldier boasted, “almost an annihilation of the entire tribe.”

Violence against Indigenous people in the U.S. had been overlooked and ignored for decades. Many white settlers in America cultivated a view that Native people were less human and worthy of dignity and respect than white people. This was evident in the horrific violence and slaughter on display at Sand Creek. Officers tried to justify the massacre by asserting a false narrative that described Indigenous people as less than human and dangerous and claimed that the soldiers who committed the massacre had acted in self-defense. This fabricated account was disputed by other American soldiers who witnessed the massacre and felt compelled to tell the truth. “Hundreds of women and children were coming towards us, and getting on their knees begging for mercy,” described U.S. Captain Silas Soule in an 1865 letter to Congress, “[only to be shot] and have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized.”

A mob of 7,000 white men, women, and children seized an 18-year-old Black man named Lloyd Warner from the jail in St. Joseph, Missouri, hanged him, and burned his body in a brutal public spectacle lynching.

Just hours before, news spread that a Black man had allegedly assaulted a white girl. Mr. Warner was quickly accused of being the perpetrator, arrested, and placed in jail. As was typical of the era, the mere accusation of sexual impropriety between a Black man and a white woman aroused a violent white mob that gathered outside the jail armed with ice picks, firearms, and knives. Mr. Warner professed his innocence to a court-appointed lawyer who remained at the jail with him, but the threat of lynching grew.

Outside, the crowd swelled to 1,000 people, and the state governor deployed National Guardsmen, allegedly to quell the mob. For at least three hours, in a standoff with local law enforcement and national troops, mob members demanded the sheriff turn over Mr. Warner. Neither the National Guardsmen nor local law enforcement took actions to defend the jail or dispel the mob, even as mob members smashed jail windows and attempted to knock down the jail door.

Instead, around 11 pm that evening, the sheriff announced that officials would turn Mr. Warner over if the mob would cease the attack on the jail and leave other incarcerated people unharmed. To prevent “further property damage” to the jail, the sheriff abandoned his duty to protect Mr. Warner from lynching.

Once the mob was permitted to enter the jail, several white men descended upon Mr. Warner, beating, choking and stabbing him. One member of the mob halted the assault on Mr. Warner, stating that he wished to “make this Black boy suffer” before he died. At this request, the mob dragged Mr. Warner down the street, attracting larger crowds that included women and children.

The mob hanged Mr. Warner near the courthouse, then drenched his body with gasoline and set him on fire. Newspapers reported that three children had climbed the tree to fasten the rope that hanged Mr. Warner and, in jumping from the tree, hoisted Mr. Warner’s body in the air. Before Mr. Warner’s body was burned, members of the crowd cut pieces of his leather belt and pants as “souvenirs.” For two hours, the mob that had by then grown to 7,000 people watched Mr. Warner burn; some witnesses even said that he may have been alive when he was set on fire.

In the wake of Lloyd Warner’s lynching, the white girl he had allegedly attacked reportedly told several newspapers, “they might have gotten the wrong one.”

No one was ever held accountable for the lynching of Mr. Warner. He is one of over 6,500 Black women, men, and children killed in racial terror lynchings in the U.S. between 1865 and1950.

The Weekly Standard published an article by Princeton University political science professor John Dilulio. Entitled “The Coming of the Super-Predators,” the article predicted the U.S. would be home to 270,000 violent youth by 2010. According to Professor Dilulio, growing rates of “moral poverty” were causing aggressive behavior among poor and minority youth and were building toward a crisis.

Professor Dilulio’s “super-predator” language came to be commonly used in conjunction with dire predictions that a vast increase in violent juvenile crime was looming. Theorists suggested that the nation would soon see “elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches” and who “have absolutely no respect for human life.” Much of the frightening imagery was racially coded. For example, in “My Black Crime Problem, and Ours,” Professor Dilulio warned of “270,000 more young predators on the streets than in 1990, coming at us in waves over the next two decades … as many as half of these juvenile super-predators could be young Black males.”

Panic over the impending crime wave expected from these “radically impulsive, brutally remorseless” children led nearly every state to enact legislation mandating automatic adult prosecution for children, permitting sentences of life without parole or death for children, and/or allowing children to be housed with adult prisoners. But the predictions proved wildly inaccurate. Lower rates of juvenile crime from 1994 to 2000 despite simultaneous increases in the juvenile population led academics who had originally supported the “super-predator” theory to back away from their predictions, including Professor Dilulio himself. In 2001, the U.S. surgeon general labeled the “super-predator” theory a myth.

Efforts to reverse the policies that grew from the “super-predator” myth have seen some success in the Supreme Court, which in 2005 decided in Roper v. Simmons that the death penalty is unconstitutional for juveniles. In 2010, the Court in Graham v. Florida prohibited life imprisonment without parole sentences for children convicted of non-homicide crimes. And in 2012, the Court’s decision in Miller v. Alabama invalidated mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles convicted of homicide. Meaningful implementation of these decisions, as well as further reform, remains an ongoing effort and challenge. But tens of thousands of children prosecuted as adults as a result of this misguided, racially biased rhetoric still remain in American jails and prisons today.

During a special legislative session called to pass segregation laws, the Texas legislature voted overwhelmingly (115-26) to pass a bill giving Governor Price Daniel the power to immediately close any school where federal troops might be sent to enforce integration.

The Texas legislature passed the bill just a few months after President Dwight Eisenhower deployed federal troops to Arkansas and commanded the Arkansas National Guard to escort nine Black students, known as the Little Rock Nine, to their first day of school at Central High School amid violent threats from white community members. In passing this bill, the state legislators made clear that they would rather everyone at a school be denied education than allow Black students to attend previously all-white schools.

During the same session another bill was passed that provided school districts with legal aid should integration suits be brought against them.

Bills like these, and the broader massive resistance to integration by white officials and community members, were 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 Black children attended school with white students, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina that number remained substantially below 1%. In 1967, 13 years after Brown v. Bd. of Education, a report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights observed that white violence and intimidation against Black people “continues to be a deterrent to school desegregation.”

For decades, the University of North Carolina had a program whereby the university “leased” hundreds of enslaved Black people to students for a fee. On November 25, 1829, after a Black man escaped the university grounds and sought his freedom, rewards were issued to effectuate his recapture and re-enslavement on UNC grounds.

Through this program, UNC engaged in the active trafficking of enslaved Black people, by collecting fees from students to “lease” enslaved Black people back to them. Students paid a yearly fee in their tuition directly to the university for the labor of enslaved Black people. The university maintained contract agreements with plantations and local enslavers in Orange and Chatham County, as well as the university’s employees, trustees, and presidents, who “leased” Black people they enslaved to the university. Consequently, through this trafficking program, UNC not only increased its revenue, but also enriched local enslavers.

Until 1845, students from families who enslaved Black people were permitted to bring enslaved people with them to campus. After 1845, the university prohibited students from bringing enslaved people to campus, but still authorized students to pay the university to “lease” enslaved Black people on campus.

On November 25, 1829, as part of this trafficking scheme, a graduate of UNC issued rewards for the capture of a Black man named James who had been trafficked to work at the university for the prior four years. James had sought his freedom from enslavement and ran away from campus. The ad was placed in several local newspapers and encouraged people with information about James’s whereabouts to direct their correspondence to UNC to effectuate his recapture.

In addition to the leasing program which trafficked enslaved Black people onto the grounds of the university, UNC participated in and profited from the sale of Black people. In its founding charter in 1789, the university was given the right to sell enslaved Black people who had been enslaved by local white people who died without heirs. Under this agreement, white enslavers’ “property,” including enslaved Black people, was escheated to the university’s Board of Trustees. In the 1840s, 10 years after the reward for James was announced, following the death of a local enslaver, the university sold the Black people that person had enslaved, earning $2,800, which amounts to approximately $83,000 dollars today.

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decided Shuttlesworth vs. Birmingham Board of Education, rejecting a challenge to Alabama’s School Placement Law. The law, designed to defy the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and maintain school segregation, allowed Alabama school boards to assign individual students to particular schools at their own discretion with little transparency or oversight.

Alabama’s School Placement Law, which claimed to allow school boards to designate placement of students based on ability, availability of transportation, and academic background, was modeled after the Pupil Placement Act in North Carolina—enacted on March 30, 1955, in response to the Brown decision. Virginia passed the second placement law on September 29, 1956. In 1957, after the North Carolina law was upheld by a higher court, legislatures in other Southern states passed similar pupil placement laws; by 1960, such laws were on the books in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and the city of Atlanta, Georgia.

After the Alabama law’s passage, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth sued on behalf of four African American students in Birmingham who had been denied admission to white schools that were closer to their homes. In its unanimous decision, the Supreme Court wrote, “The School Placement Law furnishes the legal machinery for an orderly administration of the public schools in a constitutional manner by the admission of qualified pupils upon a basis of individual merit without regard to their race or color. We must presume that it will be so administered.”

Between the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 and 1958, a total of 376,000 African American children were enrolled in integrated schools in the South. This growth slowed significantly as states passed obstructive legislation like these pupil placement laws; the figure rose by just 500 students between 1958 and 1959, and by October 1960, only 6% of African American children in the South were attending integrated schools. Crucially, in the five Deep South states, including Alabama, every single one of 1.4 million Black schoolchildren attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960.

Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Black boy, died from injuries inflicted when he was shot by a white police officer the day before. Tamir was playing in a park near his Cleveland, Ohio, home when a police car approached him; within seconds, before Tamir could be questioned or warned, Officer Timothy Loehmann shot Tamir in the stomach.

The officers were responding to a 911 dispatch in which a caller had reported that someone in the park was playing with a gun. The caller also explained to the dispatcher that the person was “probably a juvenile” and the gun was “probably fake.” Tamir was, in fact, playing with a toy gun in the park—as countless children have—and was immediately shot to death by police despite posing no threat to anyone.

Immediately after the shooting, police tackled Tamir’s 14-year-old sister as she rushed to his side, handcuffed her, and held her in the back of their squad car unable to comfort her injured brother. Tamir’s mother was also prevented from going to her son and threatened with arrest if she did not “calm down.” Neither Officer Loehmann nor his partner, Frank Garmback, attempted to administer critical lifesaving procedures to Tamir as he lay bleeding immediately after the shooting.

After the December autopsy was released, Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner Thomas Gilson reaffirmed his initial ruling that the shooting was a homicide, and in June 2015, the Cleveland Municipal Court found probable cause for prosecutors to proceed with charges of murder and other offenses against Officer Loehmann. County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty instead declared that he would wait to follow a grand jury’s recommendation. A grand jury ultimately refused to indict Officer Loehmann on any charges.