“America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.” [Frederick Douglass, 1852]
1966 January 3, 1966 · Tuskegee, Alabama Samuel Leamon Younge Jr., a student civil rights activist, was fatally shot by a white gas station owner following an argument over segregated restrooms.
List of Businesses Destroyed during the Destruction of Black Wall Street in Greenwood, Ok (suburb of Tulsa) May 31 – June 1, 1921. Tragically STILL one of the bloodiest and most horrendous race riots (and acts of terrorism) that the United States has ever experienced. This was the type of community that African Americans are still, today, attempting to reclaim and rebuild
Organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in May 1961, two buses with black and white passengers set out on a “FREEDOM RIDE” TO CHALLENGE SEGREGATION IN INTERSTATE TRAVEL AND TRAVEL FACILITIES IN THE SOUTH.
The Scottsboro Boys were nine Black teenage boys (the youngest was 13 and the oldest was 19) accused of rape in Alabama in 1931. The landmark set of legal cases from this incident dealt with racism and the right to a fair trial. The case included a frameup, an all-White jury, rushed trials, an attempted lynching, an angry mob, and is an example of an overall miscarriage of justice
July 25, 1972, US Government officials ADMITTED that African American’s were used in a clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama by the U.S. Public Health Service to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis in poor, rural black men (THIS WAS KNOWN AS THE TUSKEGEE SYPHILIS EXPERIMENT). These men were told they were receiving free health care from the U.S. government.
“An Ordinary Hero is the story of Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, a little known Civil Rights worker who did the extraordinary. As a 19 year old college student in 1961, Joan had already participated in nearly three dozen protests and sit-ins when she was arrested for participating in the Freedom Rides. After spending two months at the infamous Parchman Penitentiary on death row she went on to attend Tougaloo College and was one of the first whites to pledge Delta Sigma Theta.”
First Massive African American Protest in American History – July 28, 1917 – Children in New York City Participating in the Silent Protest Parade against the East St. Louis Riots. The riots in East St. Louis began when whites, angry because African Americans were employed by a factory holding government contracts, went on a rampage. Over 400,000$ worth of property was destroyed. At least 40 African Americans were killed. Men, women and children were beaten, stabbed, hanged and burned.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., African American integration leader, in bed at New Yorkís Harlem Hospital on Sept. 21, 1958 following operation to remove steel letter opener from his chest. Rev. King was in critical condition immediately after his assailant, an African American woman undergoing mental observation at Bellevue Hospital, plunged the letter opener into King
On May 2, 1964 Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee were kidnapped and murdered by the KKK in Meadville, MS. Their bodies were found in July of that year during a search for civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney but no legal action was taken at that time. In 2004 Canadian filmmaker David Ridgen discovered a film clip of the bodies being recovered which led to the arrest and conviction of the murderer.
On May 15, 1916 Jesse Washington was lynched in Waco TX. Over 10,000 spectators, including city officials and police, gathered to watch the attack. Many children used their lunch hour to attend. NAACP journalist W. E. B. Du Bois published an in-depth report featuring photographs of Washington’s charred body in The Crisis, and the publicity it received helped curb public support for the practice, which became viewed as barbarism rather than an acceptable form of justice.
