“America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.” [Frederick Douglass, 1852]
January 23, 1957 · Montgomery, Alabama Willie Edwards Jr., a truck driver, was on his way to work when he was stopped by four Klansmen. The men mistook Edwards for another man who they believed was dating a white woman. They forced Edwards at gunpoint to jump off a bridge into the Alabama River. Edwards’ body was found three months later.
“Don’t be afraid.” That’s what Ruby Bridges’s mother told her on November 4, 1960. Little Ruby listened carefully to the advice. Soon, four United States federal court marshals, or officers, arrived at the Bridges family home in New Orleans, La., to drive the first grader to William Frantz Public School. A screaming mob was waiting. People stood near the building shouting. Ruby held her head high. With the marshals surrounding her, the 6-year-old walked into the school and into history
Jonathan Daniels, a minister who answered Dr. King’s call to come to Selma, Alabama to support the Selma to Montgomery March. He was one of the few who stayed back after the march was over and was shot point blank in the chest by a deputized segregationist while trying to buy his fellow black protesters a Coca Cola.
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.
Negro Motorist Green Book was a publication released in 1936 that served as a guide for African-American travelers. Because of the racist conditions that existed from segregation, blacks needed a reference manual to guide them to integrated or black-friendly establishments
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.
EAST ST LOUIS RIOTS–On July 2, 1917, Angry white mobs stopped trolleys and streetcars, pulling black passengers out and beating them on the streets and sidewalks. They set fire to the homes of black residents who had to choose between burning alive in their homes, or run out of the burning houses, only to be met by gunfire. In other parts of the city, African Americans were lynched against the backdrop of burning buildings.
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
PA Men Dress Up As KKK Lynching President Obama at “Hillbilly Haven” This is why America is so divided..pure hate!!! This racial hate infiltrates the main artery of our nation. We need to stop the bleeding.
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.
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.
Omaha, Neb, Sept. 28, 1919 William Brown was accused of assaulting a white woman. When police arrested him a mob quickly formed which ignored orders from authorities that they disperse. The rampaging mob set the courthouse prison on fire and seized Brown. He was hung from a lamppost, mutilated, and his body riddled with bullets, then burned. Four other people were killed and fifty wounded before troops were able to restore order.
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
In 1841, 4 black menM Henderson, A Warrick, J Seward, and C Brown were put on trial; convicted and sentenced to death. They were hanged on July 9, 1841. Tickets for a steamboat excursion to watch the executions on Duncan’s Island, sold for $1.50 to about 20,000 people, or 75 percent of St. Louis’s population at the time. *With rising tension of race/ slavery it ended with the severed heads of the four hung in the front window of Corse’s Drug Store to deter Black resistance
Famous image of African American flood victims lined up to get food & clothing fr. Red Cross relief station in front of billboard ironically extolling WORLD’S HIGHEST STANDARD OF LIVING/ THERE’S NO WAY LIKE THE AMERICAN WAY. Louisville, KY, 1937
“Two months ago I had a nice apartment in Chicago. I had a good job. I had a son. When something happened to the Negroes in the South I said, ‘That’s their business, not mine.’ Now I know how wrong I was. The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all!!!”-Mamie Till, Emett Till’s mother
First Massive African American Protest in American History – July 28, 1917 – Children in New York City Participating in the Silent Protest Parade against the East St. Louis Riots. The riots in East St. Louis began when whites, angry because African Americans were employed by a factory holding government contracts, went on a rampage. Over 400,000$ worth of property was destroyed. At least 40 African Americans were killed. Men, women and children were beaten, stabbed, hanged and burned.
“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.”
Mob of over 100 people who came to see the scarborough boys lynched
Annelle Ponder. “The SNCC office in Greenwood is like a front company headquarters during war-time … I was greeted by Annelle Ponder … Annelle has been in Greenwood this past year handling SCLC’s part of the voter registration project. She has been beaten by police in Winona, Mississippi. When friends went to the jail one day, they found her sitting there, her face swollen and marked, barely able to speak. She looked up at them, and just managed to whisper one word: ‘Freedom.'” —Howard Zinn
The Opelousas Massacre of Louisiana (1868), The Seymour Knights (a white supremacist group) led by Judge James Dickenson killed over between 150 to 300 African-American residents of St. Landry Parish, Louisiana for trying to join the democratic party and exercise their voting rights. Among them were twelve leaders of the Black Republicans were seized and lynched.
The Harlem Riot of 1964 (New York City Race Riot) was a racial confrontation between residents in several city boroughs and the New York City Police after an African American teenager was shot dead by an off-duty police officer on the Upper East Side of Manhattan
Seventeen-year-old Jesse Washington was accused of the crime, and shortly after a jury found him guilty, he was seized by a mob, chained and dragged to City Hall. Author Patricia Bernstein believes Washington was still alive in this photo
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.
April 25, 1959 · Poplarville, Mississippi Mack Charles Parker, 23, was accused of raping a white woman. Three days before his case was set for trial, a masked mob took him from his jail cell, beat him, shot him and threw him in the Pearl River.
Jame’s Baldwin’s Take This Hammer Documentary On Black Poverty In San Fransico
