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HEROES MUSEUM (PAGE 2)
We would love to take the time to honor our Heroes "That Walked Among Us". Remembering all of our heroes and giving them the full credit they deserve. Enjoy your time at our museum and let us know in the Virtual Village your thoughts. Thank You!
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The ‘Black Angels’ Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis
The exodus of white nurses began in spring 1929, months before the stock market crash. Without warning, they hung up their uniforms and walked out of Sea View Hospital, New York’s largest municipal sanatorium. Their reasons for leaving varied. Some blamed the 14-hour shifts and five-hour round-trip commute from Manhattan to Staten Island, where the hospital was located. Others blamed the emotional and mental toll the job demanded, caring for the city’s indigent consumptives who lay in its wards, dying of tuberculosis.
Nicknamed the “Pest House,” Sea View sat on an isolated hilltop 400 feet above sea level, overlooking New York’s lower bay where it spills into the North Atlantic. Sprawling across 300 acres, the complex boasted dozens of buildings, including two chapels, a synagogue, a morgue, a theater, a nurse’s residence and eight austere five-story pavilions that seemed to rear against the sky. Inside, almost a thousand patients lay in open wards, languishing as millions of microbes gnawed at their tissues, organs and bones. All day, patients struggled to breathe, as long-lasting coughing fits often cracked their ribs, causing them to choke and gag and send swarms of live germs into the air. The bacteria settled onto bedpans, nightstands, bed frames and nurse’s carts. It floated under beds and down hallways, sneaking into every corner of the ward.
For years, the white nurses had watched their colleagues grow ill. They saw their faces turn ashen and their eyes glisten from a fever that sent the mercury soaring, causing drenching sweats and wild hallucinations. Some recovered, but others died in the wards where they once worked. Wanting to avoid the same fate and knowing they had plenty of options for jobs that wouldn’t kill them — stenographers, secretaries, librarians, salesclerks — the nurses began quitting, abandoning Sea View, their patients and the disease that had dogged New York City for decades.
The Plague of New York City
Beginning in the early 1900s, tuberculosis spread throughout the city, finding willing hosts in the waves of European immigrants who arrived daily. Stepping off the ships with their suitcases and bundles, many headed to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where nearly 80,000 five-story tenement buildings collectively housed 2.3 million people, almost two-thirds of New York’s population. Sometimes, entire generations lived inside these buildings, which were described as “fever breeding structures” by photojournalist Jacob Riis. The families lived and worked in 300-square-foot apartments with scant fresh air and sunlight.
City officials like Dr. Hermann Biggs, the general medical officer for New York City, despised these buildings and the people who lived in them. For years, Biggs tried to control the spread of tuberculosis through a series of public health measures: disease maps, registration laws, tent colonies, mass mailings, posters and even a “health clown” who sang health ditties to children living in the slums. But nothing stopped the disease from spreading.
In the 1920s, Black nurses could only work in Black hospitals. America had approximately
260 Black hospitals compared to over 6,000 white ones.
Biggs grew desperate and turned to city officials, imploring them to build a hospital as a “necessary protection for those who don’t have TB but are exposed to it by the carelessness of others.” The city obliged and opened Sea View in 1913; within days, it reached its capacity of 800 patients. By 1920, the hospital had helped lower New York’s annual death rate from 10,000 to a little more than 5,000. But there it stalled, turning Sea View’s triumph into the city’s nightmare.
Tuberculosis was the third leading killer in New York and the fourth globally. If officials couldn’t restaff the wards, they would be forced to close them, releasing hundreds of highly contagious patients into the city. Infection rates would rise, and decades of progress would be reversed. New nurses had to be found — immediately.
Top row: Jane Shirley; Bessie, a charge nurse; Curlene Jennings. Bottom row: Phyllis Alfreda Hall, Salaria Kea, Virginia Lee Greene. (Credit: The Shirley family, Greene family, the Bennett family, the Allen family, and the Sea View archives, via The Emancipator)
Health officials and infectious disease experts scrambled to replace the white nurses, holding emergency meetings. Soon, an idea emerged. Labor recruiters had successfully enticed Black sharecroppers and farmers to come north and work in their slaughterhouses, steel mills, kitchens and factories. Despite the intensity of the labor, for many, it was a small price to pay for a steady, well-paying job and freedom from the constraints of Jim Crow. “I make $75 per month. I … don’t have to mister every little white boy that comes along,” wrote one migrant in a letter. Given the success in luring laborers and domestics, there was no reason a similar tactic wouldn’t work for professional Black women in nursing.
Across the South, hundreds of trained Black nurses remained unemployed because the same country that drew lines around water fountains, bus stations and waiting rooms also drew them around hospitals. At the time, Black nurses could only work in Black hospitals, and in the 1920s, America had approximately 260 Black hospitals compared to over 6,000 white ones. If a white hospital did hire Black nurses, the white supervisors often delighted in verbally and emotionally abusing them. In Alabama, the director of public health believed that Black nurses had “limited intellectual capacity,” making them “incapable of abstract thinking.” In Atlanta, the superintendent for Grady Hospital declared they had “no morals, and unless they are constantly watched, they will steal anything in sight.”
To lure the nurses north, the city would offer them a package deal: free schooling at Harlem Hospital School of Nursing, on‑the-job training, housing, a salary and, above all as they saw it, a “rare opportunity” to work at one of the city’s integrated municipal hospitals. Only four of New York’s 29 hospitals employed Black nurses at the time.
During the 1930s and 1940s, hundreds of nurses answered the call. Eager to live free from the daily constraints of segregation — the back doors, the “yes, sirs,” the colored fountains, the waiting areas — they packed up their lives and left southern cities and rural towns. Alongside the laborers, these often-overlooked professional women boarded Jim Crow trains and buses, their nurses’ whites tucked into suitcases atop Bibles and photographs, and settled in for the long trip north.
On one of those trains sat Missouria Louvinia Walker-Meadows, fresh from Howard University and determined to put down new roots and fight against inequality. Kate Gillespie also came, fleeing Alabama with her young son to spare him, her family said, “from seeing the strange fruit growing on trees,” as did nurses Nellie Mae Holmes and Leola Washington.
Then there was 28-year-old Edna Sutton from Savannah, Georgia. Born in 1900 on the floor of a tar-paper shack in one of Savannah’s shantytowns, Sutton dreamed of becoming a surgeon, an aspiration many believed was impossible for a Black woman. But her father, an enslaved man, had inspired his daughter after he walked off his plantation in Wilkes County, Georgia, in 1899 to arrive in Savannah, where he reinvented himself and became a preacher. He had taught her to dream big; so after high school, she enrolled in one of Savannah’s two Black training schools for nurses.
The Long Road to a “Wonder Drug”
The nurses also dealt with racism inside the institution, personified by their supervisor, Lorna Doone Mitchell, a Teutonic white woman and the daughter of a Confederate medic, who wielded her power in perverse ways. She lurked in hallways, hoping to catch the nurses doing something wrong, refused requests for transfers and prevented them from wearing masks on a regular basis. Masks, she said, made them “complacent.” Then there was the president of hospitals, a man who held the racist vision that Black nurses were expendable. At a meeting in 1933, he was asked why the city sent Black nurses to Sea View. “Because in 20 years,” he said, “we won’t have a colored problem in America because they’ll all be dead from TB.”
However, they didn’t die. Instead, the nurses relied on their professional status and know-how to band together, organize and fight for equality by creating petitions and policies that helped to desegregate the New York City hospital system. On a national level, they joined nurse leaders Estelle Massey Osborne and Mabel Keaton Staupers to advocate for integrating Black nurses into the American Nurses Association. They brought that same spirit home to Staten Island, fighting redlining by hiring lawyers and enlisting the NAACP to help them buy the homes they wanted on the streets they desired. They proceeded to build a middle-class community and represent Black America as career-driven homeowners.
But mostly, the Black nurses of Sea View uplifted the industry they were called to serve by broadening human rights and caring for a patient population who, like them, was seen as disposable. In doing so, they became experts at their jobs. In 1951, Dr. Edward Robitzek trusted Sea View’s nurses to oversee the first human trials of isoniazid to see if it could prevent the spread of tuberculosis bacteria, referred to by one journalist as “the most grandiose experiment ever undertaken in the history of medicine.” Their work on those trials led to the Feb. 20, 1952 announcement, where the New York Post prematurely broke the news about a cure with the banner headline, “Wonder Drug Fights TB.” In a single galvanizing moment, the course of history was altered. It was triumphant, and as Robitzek later said, “none of it would have been possible without the nurses.”
In a photograph taken that day, the once-incurable TB patients jitterbugged front and center. In the back stand the Black nurses, their faces staid and somber. Their experience tells a more complex story, one of the women who saw terrible things; who did the impossible by prevailing over one of humanity’s greatest scourges; who followed orders from physicians who themselves were at a loss; who worked through trial and error, sometimes prescribing unreliable medications that often made people sicker; who stood in surgical rooms watching operations turned to butchery.
They did it because it was their job; because they were professionals who had committed themselves to saving lives at the risk of their own. But, also, because they were Black women, subjects of Jim Crow labor laws that offered them two options: stay in the South and dream of becoming a professional, or rise and join the Great Migration and actually become one. These women, whom patients came to call the Black Angels, chose the latter.
No one can deny that after Covid-19, the next public health crisis will come. Once again, the most vulnerable, ambitious, and aspirational among us will be called and tasked with working tirelessly to keep Americans safe and their patchwork of a health care system from completely coming undone. And if we keep asking nurses like the Black Angels to bear this impossible burden — all while being undervalued and underpaid — then the next crisis just might be our last.
THOSE WHO REFUSED TO GIVE UP THEIR SEAT BEFORE ROSA PARKS
Sarah Keys (1952) - veteran | Claudette Colvin (1955) - 15yr old | Aurelia S. Browser | Mary Louise Smith- 18yr old
The Battle of A' asu' in 1787
While there were many rites and rituals and punishments to avoid, even the ifoga (forgiveness ceremony) was not always accepted when offered; however, if rejected the district claiming to be offended would proceed to publicly humiliate the prisoner and put him to death, in the same manner and with the same indifference as they might slaughter a sacrificial pig. The prisoner was forced to gather the fuel, including wood, rocks and bamboo, for the fire in the umu in which he would be burnt to death promptly.
If the offending side did not accept this harsh result as a final resolution, war would follow, with swift results. Villages and districts were always quick to line up neighboring villages and people to form protective alliances.
War was conducted according to well established routines. The first step in preparation was to protect the women and children by removing them to safety from their hiding places and relocating them to another district or neighboring village. Wives who were especially loyal to their husband or chief were permitted to follow alongside, tending to the wounded, and taking care of those recovering in temporary shelters along the warpath. A brave and loyal woman would always be behind her husband wherever he went, holding his war clubs and the other weapons and provisions he might need.
Many chiefs took bundles of fine mats to different villages and districts to encourage or entice the leadership there to join them in an alliance. Good relationships after the war were prized, since when hostilities ended, some soldiers might not return to their districts to resume family and village life. Loyalty was prized above all. When warriors were selected, all boys who were able to hold a weapon, even if only a stick, were included. Refusal to go to war with one’s village means his title would be stripped and he would be banished from the village forever.
There were districts and villages which used the highest and most honorific title ‘aumua. These warriors would lead the village soldiers into battle, going first, giving and taking the greatest violence and bloodshed. For this reason, twice as many of them died in wars than those who came later. In spite of their high casualties, they were intensely proud of their position as leaders in war, a distinction they would not readily give up. Their strength and bravery were praised and they became famous. When war subsided and some peace prevailed over the land, villagers would show their respect by giving them a proper meal to reward their bravery.
The line of command was strict and unwavering. During a war, the High Chiefs and Talking Chiefs made all the decisions; the decisions of the High Chiefs were invariably supported by the Talking Chiefs.
Weapons included war clubs, spears and slings. In time, metal became available, and the weapons they made included those with potential to inflict extreme damage to the enemy: these included the to’ifaufau (an axe or an adze) or a to’imulifao (an axe like a hammer) with handles as long as a walking stick. Later on, as the international community appears, they were able to procure arms from overseas, including the pelu (machete) , the fanagutuolo (the revolver) and other guns such as the fanamanu, and a spear to put in the mouth of the fana pulusila.
Strategy and tactics were quite predictable. The warriors would encircle a village where the enemy was encamped and build towers out of trees about 8 feet high, covering the spaces in between with the camouflage of other trees. Once ready, they waited about an hour before striking the unsuspecting enemy. It was rarely more than a mile or two between the towers and settlements, so in caution, they approached the enemy going to the far side of the encampment to encircle and outflank them. Fighting in the woods made identification difficult, so they created symbols to recognize one another using secret code, often drawing these on their cheeks with charcoal, or writing lines next to the symbol, which might be a dog or a bird or even a tree branch. Sometimes they would tie a piece of tapa around their neck, perhaps with fish tied to it.
Likewise they marked their boats with symbols to make recognition easier,
raising flags on their masts with the painted symbols on them.
The intention to go to war was never made secret. Instead, it was customary before all planned wars to set aside a day for entertainment and dancing to recognize and honor the warriors. But once the war began, they did not attack immediately. They preferred stealth. The aim was to surprise and seize the unsuspecting enemy when they were unprepared. In many wars, no more than 50 warriors might die from each side. All male prisoners were executed, and all the captured women were distributed among the stronger warriors of the winning side.
The brave warriors were usually very fast, like ‘asaeli (meaning “One with the Lord of the Lords” and most likely originating from the term “Israel”) in the Holy Bible. These warriors would jump in front of a gathering and throw their spears; they rarely missed. They were also able to stand firmly in place for hours with their war clubs protecting themselves by batting down the spears being thrown at them.
The wars were very bloodthirsty; the warriors took extreme pride in their skills, demonstrating their prowess by the number of heads they had cut off and thrown down in front of their chiefs and supporters. This demonstrative behavior, and frank glee in killing, was entirely unlike the European soldiers who, in contrast, more resembled those at a sporting event. The happiness and dignity of a Samoan warriors was expressed by this ritual enthusiasm for the number of heads he had taken. The public demonstration was most important. Villagers received the display with a sense of worship, dancing and laughing and they called out his name, the village name, and even the name of the victim, if they knew it. The heads were laid at the feet of his chief, who congratulated him and publicly showed respect and pride. The warrior in turn encircled the others, stomping his feet in a brief dance before leaving to resume his place in battle to bring even more heads from the fallen enemy.
When the battle was over, they would pile the heads in the open field (malae) of the village. Respectfully, the head of the chief, if taken, would be placed at the top of the pile. The families of the victims came to retrieve the remains, and those unclaimed would be buried together in a common pit.
While the heads of the victims were displayed, their bodies were left in the forest, and buried only when known. If unknown, they would be left for foraging wildlife to consume. On occasion, the dead bodies were circulated around the malae and showed extreme inhumanity. In a once recorded story, a missionary became overwhelmed as he watched in horror as a warrior ran into the malae with the chin of his victim between his teeth while dragging the cut up body behind in the dust.
Wars in Samoa always began with an elaborate ceremony; these were often different. They first asked the Gods for victory with a sacrificial offering; they might plant special plants and trees, or bury water wells under camouflage. The planning was elaborate and sophisticated. For a large war with many districts and villages, they would divide the warriors into three separate units, one for the road, one for the forest, and one for the ocean. Typically, thirty to forty canoes prepared to take three hundred or even four hundred warriors. Battles in the forest were equally dangerous as those on the open water, because they did not know where the enemy was hiding or lying in wait, and did not know the hour of attack. That would be revealed only moments before. Secret instructions were key to their success. They would gather, perhaps, in the middle of the night, encircle the village to be attacked, approaching it from the rear, before the village awakened, trapping it between two flanks. After this attack, they would retreat to their canoes waiting in the ocean to carry them off. This was all done hastily, since once alerted, the single young men of the village would be in pursuit of them. If the ambush was discovered promptly, many would be killed and much blood would be shed.
The palagi historians and missionaries record some vivid scenes and memories. In once instance, the gratuitous murder of an old man, found praying innocently, occurs when another thirteen are beheaded; in another a mother wraps herself around a child as is slashed from head to toe, a rare event since killing women was looked upon with great disfavor. She and the child both survived, since they did not find the child who was hiding safely in her arms.
The wide reputation for extreme inhumanity and brutality of the Samoan warriors is not necessarily unfounded. This reputation reached its highest point when the first papalagi encountered Samoans at Tutuila. In 1787 a French expedition, led by Jean Francois de Galaup la Perouse, approached Tutuila and entered the harbor at the village of A’asu. The officer, Paul Antoine Fleuriot de Langle landed on the beach and was greeted by the villagers. He returned to his ship with assurance that it would be safe to go ashore, which they did the next day. A scuffle broke out, and mutual suspicions arose. A rumor began among the palagi that a Samoan man had stolen something from the ship, so he was summarily shot and killed, whereupon his family and the villagers sought revenge. They expressed their anger by throwing rocks, killing everyone on board. Ever since that incident, the people in that village were labeled as wild and ferocious and Europeans were advised by one another never to visit there.
Despite that the Samoans buried all of the palagi who they had slaughtered, unsurprisingly their reputation for ferocity did not abate, and they became known in Europe and elsewhere as “heathens”, although the Samoans were firmly following their own principles of a “just war, “exactly as most other cultures everywhere do.
The Red Summer 1920
On September 27, 1919, a mob of at least 10,000 white people stormed the courthouse in Omaha, Nebraska, demanding the sheriff turn over Will Brown, a 40-year-old Black man. They raided the building, scaled walls and smashed windows. When the mob’s initial demands were refused, they set fire to the courthouse, turning it into a seething furnace. Omaha Mayor Ed Smith tried to intervene, but the mob tried to lynch him. Smith escaped badly injured.
From inside the courthouse, terrified white inmates threw down a note surrendering to the mob: “THE JUDGE SAYS HE WILL GIVE UP NEGRO. BROWN. HE IS IN THE DUNGEON. THERE ARE TEN WHITE PRISONERS ON THE ROOF. SAVE THEM.”
The frenzied horde finally broke into the jail and dragged Brown out. They tortured him, dismembered him, tied a rope around his neck and hoisted him up on a pole on the south side of the courthouse. As his body dangled in agony, they shot him more than 100 times. After they were sure he was dead, they sliced the rope and Brown’s body dropped to the pavement. Then the frenzied mob, which the local newspaper referred to as a “lynching committee,” cursed, kicked and spat on the body of the Black man.
Still, the mob of thousands of white men and women was not finished with the lynching. Someone found a new three-quarters-inch rope and tied Brown’s body to a car. Then they dragged his corpse slowly through the crowd, over glass and stones, through the streets to the edge of Omaha’s Black neighborhood, as a symbol of their rage. There, the “lynching committee” poured kerosene on Will Brown.
And lit his body with fire.
As they witnessed burning flesh, hundreds of the well-dressed men stood back and grinned.
They watched the contorted body of Brown, a 40-year-old innocent meatpacker, burn.
A newspaper photographer snapped a photo of the petrified corpse, capturing one of the most horrific photos of racial lynching in U.S. history.
That night, the horde “also murdered at least one other African American who was walking on the streets and caught by the throng,” according to North Omaha History. The rioters “wounded at least 20 policemen; and demolished at least 10 homes in the Near North Side neighborhood.”
That year, Omaha would become one of at least 26 cities across the country where barbaric white mobs attacked Black people and Black communities during a reign of racial terror that author James Weldon Johnson labeled “Red Summer.”
The massacres and lynchings that occurred during “Red Summer,” a term used to describe the blood that flowed in the streets of America, were sparked by disparate events, but the common denominator was racial hatred against a people who had recently risen out of enslavement and prospered.
In Omaha, Will Brown was falsely accused of assaulting a white woman as she walked with her boyfriend. In East St. Louis, it was Black men working factory jobs that white people wanted for themselves. In Longview, Texas, it was a Black man writing a newspaper story about a love affair between a Black man and a white woman. In Washington, D.C., it was an accusation that Black men tried to take a white woman’s umbrella. In Chicago, it was a Black teenager swimming in Lake Michigan and accidently floating over an invisible color line. In Elaine, Arkansas, it was Black sharecroppers trying to get better payment for their cotton crops. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, it was a Black teenager allegedly bumping into a white woman on an elevator.
During “Red Summer,” thousands of Black people were fatally shot, lynched and burned alive. Hundreds of Black-owned businesses and homes in Black communities were obliterated in fires fueled by racism and hatred. Millions of dollars of Black businesses and generational wealth were stolen.
Some historians claim that the racial terror connected with “Red Summer” began as early as 1917 during the bloody massacre that occurred in East St. Louis, Illinois, a barbaric pogrom that would eventually set the stage for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the worst episodes of post-Civil War racial violence ever committed against Black Americans. The Tulsa Massacre left as many as 300 Black people dead and destroyed more than 35 square blocks of Greenwood, an all-Black community so wealthy, the philosopher Booker T. Washington called it “Negro Wall Street.”
Survivors of the Tulsa Massacre witnessed white men and women descending on Greenwood, killing Black people indiscriminately in what appeared to be ethnic cleansing. Occupied houses of Black people were set on fire. When the occupants ran out, members of the white mob shot them. Elderly Black people were shot as they kneeled in prayer. Black women and children were killed in the streets. Black men, with their hands held up in surrender, were shot dead by whites.
Survivors reported that bodies of Black people were thrown into the Arkansas River, loaded on flatbeds of trucks and dumped into mass graves. In October 2019, the City of Tulsa re-opened an investigation into the search for mass graves. A year later, teams of archeologists and forensic anthropologists found a mass grave in the city-owned cemetery, which could be connected to the massacre. This spring, the City of Tulsa plans to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the massacre, as descendants of survivors demand reparations for what was lost, and protest against current oppression and racism.
results of Red Summer
Nearly a century after the Tulsa Race Massacre, the country would again see another white mob attack. On January 6, 2021, pro-Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. People watched in shock as insurrectionists scaled the Capitol building, encouraged by the 45th president of the United States. The insurgents—including military veterans, police officers and elected officials—broke through police barricades and poured into the Capitol rotunda. They walked through the labyrinth of the Capitol hunting for members of Congress and threatening to kill then-Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“It is just the beginning,” said Kevin Seefried, a white man from Wilmington, Delaware, carrying a Confederate flag into the Capitol.
Historians say that in order to understand the country’s racial divide and the attack on the Capitol, one must understand the racial tensions that led to “Red Summer.” “What we are facing within the racial tension that revealed itself in 2020, coupled with the pandemic, is sadly, ironically and tragically the result of what happened 100 years ago during ‘Red Summer,’ when there was a slew of race riots in American cities,” said Christopher Haley, a historian, writer, filmmaker and producer of the movie Unmarked: African American Cemeteries.
“Many of these riots erupted from tensions expressed between Blacks and whites over Black people’s growing economic and social status.”
Haley said there is a correlation between the Jan. 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol and the events that led to Red Summer. “I think the correlation is that the people rioting were white supremacists, Nazis or anti-Semitic. They carried Confederate flags. That certainly links itself to those persons during Red Summer who hated the progress of African Americans and politicians. It would be stretching it to say there is no correlation.”
The Chicago Race Riot of 1919
The racial violence in Chicago began on Sunday, July 27, 1919, one of the hottest days in that city’s history. Eugene Williams, a Black teenager, walked to South Side Beach. Eugene, who was 17 at the time, put his make-shift raft into Lake Michigan and began floating in the cool waters.
As he waded, Eugene’s raft mistakenly crossed an invisible color line drawn in the waters of Lake Michigan. Suddenly, a white man trying to protect that invisible color line, began to throw stones at the Black teenager.
The barrage of stones hit Eugene, knocking him off his raft. Eugene fell, sinking into the cold waters. The Black teenager drowned.
His murder would spark one of the worst episodes of racial violence in the city’s history, setting off seven days of clashes. White people climbed into cars and raced through the Black Belt of the city, shooting at Black people, burning and looting Black people’s homes.
“After seven days of shootings, arson and beatings, the Race Riot resulted in the deaths of 15 whites and 23 blacks with an additional 537 injured (195 white, 342 black),” according to the Chicago History Museum. “Since then, a century of African American activism has challenged the racism and social hypocrisy that allowed those responsible for Eugene Williams’s death to elude justice.”
The NAACP investigator Walter White concluded: “The Chicago riot taught me that there could be as much peril in a Northern city when the mob is loose as in a Southern town such as Estill Springs. I was constantly made aware in white areas, especially the Halsted Street area near the stockyards, that eternal alertness was the price of an uncracked skull. I naively believed that I was well enough known in Negro Chicago, despite my white skin, to wander about at will without danger. This fallacy nearly cost me my life.”
As bad as the riot was in Chicago, White would discover that a more violent massacre would occur only weeks later. It would erupt after Black sharecroppers planning to form a union to fight for better crop wages and escape a system of Southern peonage were killed in the muddy fields of rural Arkansas.
“The bloody summer of 1919 was climaxed by an explosion of violence in Phillips County, Arkansas, growing out of the sharecropping system of the South. The incident was fated to affect materially the legal rights of both Negro and white Americans,” White wrote. “Throughout the nation newspapers published alarming stories of Negroes plotting to massacre whites and take over the government of the state. The vicious conspiracy, so the stories ran, had been nipped in the bud, but it had been necessary to kill a number of ‘black revolutionists’ to restore law and order.”
The massacre in Elaine, Arkansas, began on the night of September 30, 1919, when white men fired on a church in Hoop Spur, Arkansas. Inside the church, Black men, women and children had gathered to discuss forming a union to address the peonage debt spiral created by white landowners, who continued to cheat Black farmers out of profits from growing cotton.
Inside the church, the Progressive Farmers and Household Union met. Black veterans inside the church returned fire, killing a white man.
And again, all hell broke loose. Rumors spread that the Black people were rising up in Hoop Spur. Thousands of white rioters from as far away as Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas and Louisiana descended on the rural Black community in Phillips County, hunting and killing hundreds of Black people.
“The press dispatches of October 1, 1919, heralded the news that another race riot had taken place the night before in Elaine, Ark., and that it was started by negroes who had killed some white officers in an altercation,” Ida B. Wells-Barnett wrote in her book The Arkansas Race Riot.
Some historians believe as many as 800 Black people may have been killed in Elaine.
“Later on, the country was told that the white people of Phillips County had risen against the Negroes who started this riot and had killed many of them,” wrote Wells-Barnett, “and that this orgy of bloodshed was not stopped until United States soldiers from Camp Pike had been sent to the scene of the trouble.”
More than 285 Black people were arrested in Elaine and surrounding areas.
The men were taken to court in Helena, Arkansas, chained and forbidden to meet with an attorney. At least 12 of the Black men arrested were tortured and beaten, according to records. The white jailers soaked rags with formaldehyde and pushed them into their noses. They also used electrical shocks against the Black men’s genitals to try to coerce confessions for starting the massacre. After a six-minute trial, 12 Black men were sentenced to die in the electric chair. Seventy-five Black people were sent to prison on sentences from 5 to 21 years.
The Chicago Defender published a letter by Wells-Barnett appealing to Black people across the country to raise money for the Black men condemned to death row in Arkansas.
One of the Black men in jail wrote to Wells-Barnett, thanking her for her help. “We are innercent [sic] men,” he wrote. “We was not handled with justice at all Phillips county Court. It is prejudice that the white people had agence we Negroes. So I thank God that thro you, our Negroes are looking into this trouble, and thank the city of Chicago for what it did to start things and hope to hear from you all soon.”
Moved by the letter, Wells-Barnett took the train to Arkansas, where she talked with some of the wives of the 12 condemned. Then Wells-Barnett, a fearless anti-lynching crusader and journalist, slipped into the jail and spent the day interviewing the Black men.
“They had been beaten many times and left for dead while there, given electric shocks, suffocated with drugs and suffered every cruelty and torment at the hands of their jailers to make them confess to a conspiracy to kill white people,” Wells wrote. “Besides this a mob from outside tried to lynch them.”
After the NAACP took the case, the fate of the men, who became known as the “Elaine Twelve,” made national news. NAACP attorney Scipio Jones took their case to the U.S. Supreme Court and ultimately won their release off of death row.
The Black Prince was the eldest of Queen Phillipa of Hainaut
*Philippa of Hainault was born on this date in 1310. She was the first African Queen of England.
Philippa was of Moorish ancestry, born in Valenciennes in the County of Hainaut in the Low Countries of northern France. Her parents were William I, Count of Hainaut, and Joan of Valois, Countess of Hainaut, granddaughter of Philip III of France. Philippa was one of eight children and the second of five daughters and became the wife of King Edward III. Her eldest sister Margaret married the German King Louis IV in 1324, and in 1345, she succeeded their brother William II, Count of Hainaut, upon his death in battle.
Philippa married Edward at York Minster on January 24, 1328, eleven months after he acceded to the English throne. Unlike many of her predecessors, Philippa did not alienate the English people by retaining her foreign entourage upon marriage or bringing many foreigners to the English court. As Isabella did not wish to relinquish her status, Philippa's coronation was postponed for two years. She eventually was crowned queen on March 4, 1330, at Westminster Abbey when she was almost six months pregnant, and she gave birth to her first son, Edward, the following June.
In October 1330, King Edward commenced his rule when he staged a coup and ordered the arrest of his mother and Mortimer. Shortly afterward, the latter was executed for treason, and Queen Dowager Isabella was sent to Castle Rising in Norfolk. She spent several years under house arrest, but her privileges and freedom of movement were later restored to her by her son. Of her children, Phillipa outlived nine of them. Three of her children died of the Black Death in 1348. Edward, the Black Prince, was the eldest of her fourteen children, who became a renowned military leader.
A medieval writer, Joshua Barnes, said, "Queen Philippa was a very good and charming person who exceeded most ladies for the sweetness of nature and virtuous disposition." Chronicler Jean Froissart described her as "The most gentle Queen, most liberal, and most courteous that ever was Queen in her days." Philippa accompanied Edward on his expeditions to Scotland and the European continent in his early campaigns of the Hundred Years War. She won acclaim for her gentle nature and compassion. She served as England's regent during her spouse's absence in 1346. Facing a Scottish invasion, she gathered the English army and met the Scots in a successful battle near Neville's Cross: she rallied the English soldiers on a horse before them before the battle, which resulted in an English victory and the Scottish king being taken prisoner. She influenced the king to take an interest in the nation's commercial expansion.
She is best remembered as the kind woman who 1347 persuaded her husband to spare the lives of the Burghers of Calais, whom he had planned to execute as an example to the townspeople following his successful siege of that city. This popularity helped maintain peace in England throughout Edward's long reign. Philippa was a patron of the chronicler Jean Froissart, and she owned several illuminated manuscripts; one is currently housed in the National Library in Paris. William's counties of Zealand and Holland and the seigniory of Frieze were devolved to Margaret after an agreement between Philippa and her sister Margaret. In the name of his wife Philippa, Edward III of England demanded the return of Hainaut and other inheritances given to the Dukes of Bavaria–Straubing in 1364–65; he was unsuccessful.
Philippa died of an illness similar to edema on August 15, 1369, in Windsor Castle. She was given a state funeral on January 9, 1370, and was interred at Westminster Abbey. Her tomb is on the northeast side of the Chapel of Edward the Confessor and the opposite side of Edward I and Eleanor of Castile and great-grandfather Henry III. Sculptor Jean de Liège executed her alabaster effigy. Eight years later, Edward III died and was buried next to her. The Queen's College, Oxford, was founded
1963–1973: High-Dose Radiation Tests on Prisoners’ Testicles to Find Sterility Dose
In 1963, prior to flights into space, scientists were concerned about the effect of space radiation on astronauts’ testicles. They also were concerned about radiated gonads of workers at America’s atomic energy plants. So, they conducted experiments designed to test the effects of massive radiation on prisoners’ testicles without any regard for the consequences for the test human subjects.
In an ugly exercise of rudimentary science that is only now coming to a close, a captive group of human guinea pigs — inmates of Washington and Oregon prisons — were lured into a literal balls-out effort to answer those questions. Enticed with cash and suggestions that participating could help win them parole, and lulled by official assurances that the tests were safe, dozens of prisoners between 1963 and 1973 lined up, stripped down and offered their genitalia to what science called “reproductive radiation tests. . . Dozens of prisoners had their testicles bombarded with radiation in the name of science back in the ’60s and ’70s. (Anderson. Balls of Fire, Mother Jones, 2000)
Until 1973, Dr. C. Alvin Paulsen (University of Washington) who was under a private contract with the AEC, conducted “Reproductive Radiation Tests” on 63 prison inmates at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. He used X-rays on the testicles of 64 prisoners — later reports indicated the number of prisoners was 131 — to find the dose that would make them sterile (KD Steele. Radiation Experiments Raise Ethical Questions, 1994).
His former mentor, Dr. Carl Heller, simultaneously conducted similar experiments on 67 inmates at the Oregon State Penitentiary sponsored by the Pacific Northwest Research Foundation of Seattle. These experiments were also funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
The inmates agreed to participate in the experiments having been lured with cash and the suggestion of parole — $5 a month and $100 when they receive a vasectomy at the end of the trial. Most of the subjects were exposed to over 400 rads of radiation (the equivalent of 2,400 chest x-rays) in 10 minute intervals. The risks of radiation had not been disclosed to the incarcerated subjects. Mother Jones (2000) reported that declassified government documents show that NASA officials and some unnamed astronauts sat in on Heller’s meetings.
The Hidden Horrors Of Ghana’s Cape Coast Slave Castles
Have you ever wondered about the dark history behind Ghana’s Cape Coast?
The Cape Coast Slave Castles hold chilling stories of the transatlantic slave trade. These castles, built by European traders, served as holding sites for enslaved Africans before their forced journey to the Americas. Walking through the dungeons, you can almost feel the despair and hear the echoes of those who suffered. The Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle are stark reminders of a painful past. Visiting these sites offers a chance to reflect on history and honor the resilience of those who endured unimaginable hardships.
The Dark History of Cape Coast Castle
Cape Coast Castle, located in Ghana, stands as a grim reminder of the transatlantic slave trade. This fortress, once a bustling hub for trading enslaved Africans, now serves as a historical site where visitors can learn about the atrocities committed within its walls. Here are some of the most haunting places inside Cape Coast Castle.
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The Male Slave Dungeon
The male slave dungeon is a dark, cramped space where hundreds of men were held captive. With little ventilation and no sanitation, the conditions were horrific. Many perished before even leaving the castle.
2. The Female Slave Dungeon
Similar to the male dungeon, the female slave dungeon held women in equally appalling conditions. Women faced additional horrors, including sexual abuse by the soldiers and traders.
3. The Door of No Return
This infamous door marks the final exit point for enslaved Africans before being loaded onto ships bound for the Americas. Stepping through this door meant leaving behind everything familiar, with little hope of ever returning.
The Role of Elmina Castle
Elmina Castle, another significant site in Ghana, played a crucial role in the slave trade. Built by the Portuguese in 1482, it became one of the first European slave-trading posts in sub-Saharan Africa. Here are some of the key areas within Elmina Castle.
4. The Governor's Quarters
The governor's quarters, located at the top of the castle, offered a stark contrast to the dungeons below. Lavishly furnished, these rooms were where the governor lived and conducted business, often overlooking the suffering of those imprisoned below.
5. The Condemned Cell
This tiny, airless cell was reserved for those who resisted or tried to escape. Prisoners placed here faced certain death, either from starvation or suffocation.
6. The Chapel
Ironically, a chapel was built within the castle, where European traders would pray. The juxtaposition of worship and the inhumane treatment of enslaved Africans highlights the moral contradictions of the time.
The Impact on Modern Ghana
The legacy of these castles extends beyond their walls, affecting modern Ghanaian society. Understanding these sites helps in comprehending the broader impact of the slave trade on the region
7. The Memorial Wall
Located near Cape Coast Castle, the memorial wall honors those who suffered and perished during the slave trade. It serves as a place for reflection and remembrance.
8. The Museum
Both Cape Coast and Elmina Castles house museums that provide educational exhibits about the slave trade. These museums play a vital role in preserving history and educating future generations.
9. The Annual Emancipation Day
Ghana commemorates Emancipation Day every year, celebrating the end of slavery and honoring the resilience of those who endured it. Events include ceremonies, reenactments, and educational programs.
The Emotional Toll on Visitors
The legacy of these castles extends beyond their walls, affecting modern Ghanaian society. Understanding these sites helps in comprehending the broader impact of the slave trade on the region
10. The Guided Tours
Guided tours offer detailed accounts of the history and significance of each area within the castles. Knowledgeable guides help visitors understand the full scope of the atrocities committed.
11. The Personal Stories
Hearing personal stories of those who were enslaved adds a human element to the historical facts. These narratives bring the past to life, making the experience more poignant.
12. The Reflection Areas
Designated areas within the castles allow visitors to sit and reflect on what they have seen and learned. These spaces provide a moment of quiet contemplation amidst the heavy history.
Cape Coast Slave Castles in Ghana hold deep historical significance. These structures remind us of the brutal realities of the transatlantic slave trade. Walking through the dark dungeons and narrow passageways, one can almost feel the pain and suffering endured by countless individuals.
These castles are not just historical sites; they are powerful symbols of resilience and the human spirit. Visiting them offers a chance to learn, reflect, and honor those who suffered. It’s a sobering experience that leaves a lasting impact, urging us to remember the past and strive for a better future.
If you ever find yourself in Ghana, take the time to visit Cape Coast Slave Castles. The lessons learned and the emotions felt will stay with you long after you leave.
The BLACK VIKING
Landnámabók (The Book of Settlements) describes Geirmund as “the noblest of all settlers.” According to my Google search the definition of noble means “belonging to a hereditary class with high social or political standing, aristocratic.” It also means “having or showing fine personal qualities, or high moral principles or ideals.” His lineage fits this category but was he a righteous, honourable, good, virtuous, upright human being? You decide.
Landnámabók (The Book of Settlements) describes Geirmund as “the noblest of all settlers.” According to my Google search the definition of noble means “belonging to a hereditary class with high social or political standing, aristocratic.” It also means “having or showing fine personal qualities, or high moral principles or ideals.” His lineage fits this category but was he a righteous, honourable, good, virtuous, upright human being? You decide.
After years of roaming as a Viking, he went to Dublin to meet up with his brother Hamand and his father’s other allies. This famous longphort [2] was a Viking stronghold known for its thriving slave market as well as for other things. At that time the conversation there was all about the need to find another place to hunt the walrus. Ivory was still king and in the regular hunting grounds in northern Russia, the walrus colonies were nearing extinction. Iceland was now on everybody’s mind as the next place to find this “white gold.” Is this what gave him the motivation to sail northward to this small island? Yes, it was. Since there was a great need to find more colonies and since Iceland was where others were thinking of going, he decided to get there first and claim it all.
With him, on his journey northward, Geirmund Heljarskinns brought astonishing wealth, along with armies of men and slaves. First, they sailed around the country to determine where he would find this valuable commodity, this marine species known as the walrus. They soon found huge colonies scattered along the rugged coastline in the Hornstrandir region, but the land was not suitable for human habitation. Once these mammals were discovered he searched for and found a picturesque fjord with land he desired south of the walrus colonies. He set up his estate in Breiðafjörður. As for the walrus, he was quite familiar with hunting them. He had honed his skills during his time in northern Siberia, in Bjarmaland. With his time spent there, he realized great profits, just as his father had before him. From the walrus skins leather rope was made. They extracted its oil, sold the meat, or ate it themselves. The main profit came from their teeth, their incisors known as tusks. African ivory did not arrive in these northern countries until the 14th century, therefore, the walrus tusks remained in great demand for some time. The only ones who could afford such a product were kings or the church. Once his enormous estate was built, he established his routes with stopover points to the hoards of walrus living along the northern coastlines. He had so many men that he could afford to station small armies of slaves in the West Fjords and the Dalir Regions. He would travel with another army of men, easily eighty men at a time, across the land to access this very important commodity. Not even King Harald travelled during peaceful times with more than sixty men. No one in Iceland challenged Geirmund Heljarskinns or even dared to. He controlled a quarter of its land and lived like a king in this country with his huge army ready to protect or kill for him.
Landnámabók (The Book of Settlements) describes Geirmund as “the noblest of all settlers.” According to my Google search the definition of noble means “belonging to a hereditary class with high social or political standing, aristocratic.” It also means “having or showing fine personal qualities, or high moral principles or ideals.” His lineage fits this category but was he a righteous, honourable, good, virtuous, upright human being? You decide.
What do we know about this man? Geirmund was born about 846CE in Avaldsnes, Rogaland, Norway along with his twin brother Hamand. Sons of and Ljufvina Bjarmasdottir, they were said to be ugly with dark skin and Mongolian features. Hence the nickname Heljarskinns, which literally translates as “skin like hell.
Landnámabók (The Book of Settlements) describes Geirmund as “the noblest of all settlers.” According to my Google search the definition of noble means “belonging to a hereditary class with high social or political standing, aristocratic.” It also means “having or showing fine personal qualities, or high moral principles or ideals.” His lineage fits this category but was he a righteous, honourable, good, virtuous, upright human being? You decide.
What do we know about this man? Geirmund was born about 846CE in Avaldsnes, Rogaland, Norway along with his twin brother Hamand. Sons of and Ljufvina Bjarmasdottir, they were said to be ugly with dark skin and Mongolian features. Hence the nickname Heljarskinns, which literally translates as “skin like hell. Their mother, who also had dark skin, was the daughter of the chief or king of Bjarmaland. A cold isolated land in northern Siberia which at the time was teeming with walrus colonies. She is thought to have belonged to an ancient tribe of indigenous people called the Sihirtians. Their legend tells us of a people known to be great hunters and fishermen and thought to have mastered blacksmithing. A people of small stature who had fair hair, light blue eyes, fair skin and lived below the ground. They only came out at night to hunt and fish. They were also thought to have had supernatural powers. Over the centuries though this tribe of peoples was conquered and absorbed into another group of peoples called the Nenets. Eventually, the population of the Sihirtians disappeared as they were integrated into this other group. Their skin became darker and they began to take on the features of this other indigenous group, the Nenets.
King Hjör took Ljufvina to Norway as his wife after negotiating an agreement with her father giving him full access to the trade for their valuable walrus. When the twins were born the father was not present. Disappointed that they did not look like their father, Ljufvina quickly exchanged the twins for a slave boy who was also born at the same time. A fair-haired, blue-eyed child, named Leif who looked more like King Hjör. She thought this would make him happy. A few years later the king expressed disappointment. This boy did not exhibit the strength or intelligence he expected of his own child. Maybe he suspected all along that Leif was not his child, or was it because the poet Brage the old revealed the truth to him and reunited him with his sons? How he found out is immaterial, Ljufvina was left with no choice but to admit to what she had done and to beg for his forgiveness. He could see that she was telling the truth as they had her dark skin and features. It was not long before he realized that both sons had his traits and he accepted them wholeheartedly. They were intelligent, crafty, fierce little warriors. Growing up now with their real father they learned many warrior skills.
Later as a young man Geirmund went Viking and soon established his reputation as a great warrior. With his increasing fame he was headhunted to become part of the Great Heathen Army that invaded England. Through this, he built an even greater legacy and became even more prosperous. In return for his fighting skills, he was gifted land and goods from Guthrum, one of the army’s leaders.
Siberia would not have been an unknown country to him. Between his father and mother, many stories would have been told to both boys. When he was in Siberia is not clear. Was his brother there with him? That too is unknown. But he did apparently spend much time in Bjarmaland where he learned the craft of walrus hunting from his kinsmen and prospered from this commodity adding to his growing affluence and wealth. Unfortunately, at that time the walrus was beginning to be overhunted and the numbers were dwindling. Since the mature female only produced a calf about every three years, the colony's growth rate is slow. And although their life span can be very long, overhunting would certainly have affected the numbers.
At this point, he returned with many slaves and kinsmen from Siberia to Norway only to find his father had lost his land to King Harald. No longer a king of his own land and knowing it was senseless to fight for it against such strength, he left to join up with his brother Hamand and other allies of his father’s living in Dublin. Since Dublin was the centre for the slave trade it was likely that en route to this thriving port, Geirmund would have picked up more slaves in The Northern Isles, Scotland and Ireland and sold them on arrival. After all, business is business. Once there he connected with his brother and his father’s allies. As mentioned previously, the talk was all about the continued demand for the walrus tusk and about locating more hunting grounds. Iceland was becoming the main topic of conversation; it was continually mentioned as a good place to search for these marine mammals. He decided then and there that he would be the one to go to this land before others beat him to this venture. With him, he took the men he already had, a number of slaves, his kinsmen, as well as men from Dublin.
According to Icelandic Roots, he had two women in his life, one from Bjarmaland and the other from Norway. Each one gave birth to a daughter in Iceland. Therefore, at some point, he must have brought them to this country. Whether these two women were with him when he first arrived is unknown, but who did sail with him was a huge group of men who quickly dominated the walrus hunts. He soon controlled a good portion of the land. There is no written account of anyone living there who may have challenged him. Likely he would have been feared by all with such an army of men behind him. He may have lived like a king with great opulence; however, it would have taken a great deal of wealth to maintain that lifestyle, plus feed and cloth such great numbers of people. Also, he would have needed ships, another great expense, to transport this profitable commodity to Dublin. There his brother and their allies would have been the middlemen who sold the ivory to either craftsmen who produced remarkable items for kings and the church, or they would have sold directly to kings, church officials, or merchants from abroad. Those valuable tusks would enhance any treasury or entice any foreign ambassador. Great wealth was amassed by all. With these same ships they would return, possibly bringing his women to him, but it would have brought goods not available in Iceland as well as luxurious items only wealth like his could afford. But was he able to maintain it? According to the website historium.com, when he died in 907CE his friends and family gave him a send-off fit for a king including a ship burial.
It seemed that his lifestyle had not yet been compromised but his family, his kingdom, and his legacy would soon disintegrate. Why? Because sometime during the 900s this mammal disappeared from Iceland. Therefore, his family would have lost their valuable and only commodity: the walrus. Without it how could they possibly maintain their lifestyle as before?
There are questions: Did this great fleet of men decimate those numbers along the Icelandic coastline? Or did this species disappear naturally? Iceland is obviously not a friendly land, their northern shoreline is within the Arctic Circle, harsh and uninviting to both man and beast. Could the volcanic activity it has repeatedly displayed have been responsible? Eruptions have been known to have decimated parts of the land, its people as well as animals repeatedly, but that far north is questionable. The walrus colonies had long since acclimatized themselves to this harsh landscape. No one knows the answer for sure... but the timing fits for man’s intervention. It is very feasible that humans, such as these Northmen, had a hand in making a marine species extinct through overhunting and greed. Geirmund Heljarskinns brought the manpower to Iceland, greedy men who were capable of overhunting just to amass wealth from harvesting their tusks. Never allowing these slow-growing colonies to recuperate to regenerate their numbers. Do his actions indicate “having or showing fine personal qualities, or high moral principles or ideals”? What do you think now, is Landnámabók correct? Was he the “noblest of all settlers”?
Check out this original settler, Geirmund Heljarskinns Halfsson (I566169) in the Icelandic Roots Database. Not only is there a lot of interesting information on his page, but you may find out that you are also related to him. He is 28 times my great-grandfather.
A point of interest: Geirmund’s profile includes a note that quotes the Icelandic author Bergsveinn Bergisson: “...some people have been found in Iceland with mitochondrial DNA of Haplogroup Z1a. Haplogroup Z1a is most often associated with Mongolian and other Asian peoples.” [5] The note continues, "To support his theory, Bergsveinn cites Agnar Helgason's research of the Icelandic gene pool at deCODE and the discovery of a special mutation in the haplogroup Z1a by Dr. Peter Forster at Cambridge University, which confirms the nation's part Mongolian origins. This is still apparent in some Icelanders today, Bergsveinn points out, such as in Björk, who has an Asian look in spite of being ethnically Icelandic." [6]
Civil War, 1861-1865
Jonathan Karp, Harvard University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, PhD Candidate, American Studies
The story of the Civil War is often told as a triumph of freedom over slavery, using little more than a timeline of battles and a thin pile of legislation as plot points. Among those acts and skirmishes, addresses and battles, the Emancipation Proclamation is key: with a stroke of Abraham Lincoln’s pen, the story goes, slaves were freed and the goodness of the United States was confirmed. This narrative implies a kind of clarity that is not present in the historical record. What did emancipation actually mean? What did freedom mean? How would ideas of citizenship accommodate Black subjects? The everyday impact of these words—the way they might be lived in everyday life—were the subject of intense debates and investigations, which marshalled emerging scientific discourses and a rapidly expanding bureaucratic state. All the while, Black people kept emancipating themselves, showing by their very actions how freedom might be lived.
Self-Emancipation
The Emancipation Proclamation, in 1863, and the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, abolished slavery in the secessionist Confederate states and the United States, respectively, but it is important to remember that enslaved people were liberating themselves through all manners of fugitivity for as long as slavery has existed in the Americas. Notices from enslavers seeking self-emancipated Black people were common in newspapers throughout the Americas, as seen in this 1854 copy of the Baltimore Sun.
The question of how formerly enslaved people would be regarded by and assimilated into the state as subjects was most obviously worked out through the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was meant to support newly freed people across the South. Two years before the Bureau was established, however, there was the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission. Authorized by the Secretary of War in March 1863, the Inquiry Commission was called in part as a response to the ever-increasing number of refugees—who were still referred to at the time as “contraband”—appearing at Union camps. The three appointed commissioners—Samuel Gridley Howe, James McKaye, and Robert Dale Owen—were charged with investigating the condition and capacity of freedpeople.
Historians are still working to understand the scale of refugees’ movements during the Civil War. Abigail Cooper estimates that by 1865 there were around 600,000 freedpeople in 250 refugee camps. Many of the camps were overseen by the Union, while others were established and run by freedpeople themselves. Conditions in the camps could be brutal. In 1863, the Inquiry Commission heard that 3,000 freedmen had fortified the fort in Nashville for fifteen months without pay. Rations were slim. In spite of these conditions, the camps were also sites where Black people profoundly restructured the South by their very movement and relationships.
Port Royal Experiment
During the Civil War, the U.S. government began an experiment in the Sea Islands of South Carolina. Plantation owning enslavers had abandoned their lands, leaving behind over 10,000 formerly enslaved Black people. With the help of abolitionist charities from the North, these Black farmers cultivated cotton for wages in the same places they had formerly been held in bondage. Their work was so successful that it inspired international calls for support, like this letter published in Manchester, England. The short-lived success of this experiment was largely ended at the government's hands, when the lands were returned to White ownership.
The Inquiry Commission, a large portion of whose records are held at Harvard, focused many of their efforts on the camps. It was not clear how, exactly, they should go about their work. The Commission was established before the field of sociology emerged with its institutionalized tools for the supposedly scientific study of populations. A federal body had never before been responsible studying people who were or had been enslaved. The commissioners travelled across the American South and Canada, observing and interviewing freedmen. They sent elaborate surveys to military leaders, clergy, and other White people who interfaced with large numbers of people who had escaped slavery. Through this work, the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission made Black people into subjects of the United States’ scientific gaze. Their records are an invaluable record of life under slavery; they also reinscribed underlying racial logics.
The Inquiry Commission, a large portion of whose records are held at Harvard, focused many of their efforts on the camps. It was not clear how, exactly, they should go about their work. The Commission was established before the field of sociology emerged with its institutionalized tools for the supposedly scientific study of populations. A federal body had never before been responsible studying people who were or had been enslaved. The commissioners travelled across the American South and Canada, observing and interviewing freedmen. They sent elaborate surveys to military leaders, clergy, and other White people who interfaced with large numbers of people who had escaped slavery.
Through this work, the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission made Black people into subjects of the United States’ scientific gaze. Their records are an invaluable record of life under slavery; they also reinscribed underlying racial logics.
Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom has a collection of 189 objects related to the Commission’s inquiry. The vast majority of them are responses to their survey, written by White people the Commission identified as having special knowledge of freedmen. The view of slavery from this vantage point is limited. Most if not all of the respondents recount conversations with people who were or had been enslaved, but these accounts are all mediated by their authors and the Commissioners. There’s no telling what the quoted enslaved people would or wouldn’t have shared with these people, or why. If some shape of life under slavery emerges from reading these survey responses, it is a necessarily distorted one. The American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission is emblematic of a style of scientific discourse that set its sights on Black people and the cultural meanings of race without concern for the views of Black people. In this field, Whiteness was necessary for expertise.
The surveys are most revealing as records of how these agents of the federal government conceived of the question of freedom—what they called, “one of the gravest social problems ever presented a government.” What kinds of questions did they ask? The forms had forty-two questions. Some asked for geographic and population data. Others asked for information about life before emancipation: did freedmen carry signs of previous abuse (they did) and did their masters have an effect on enslaved peoples’ families (they invariably did)? The vast majority of the questions, however, asked for the respondent’s opinions and general observations of the formerly enslaved refugees. The Commission wanted to know about these peoples’ strength, endurance, intellectual capacity, attachments to place, as well as their religious devotion, their general disposition, work ethic, and ways of domestic life. The list ended with the most important question, which the previous ones had apparently prepared the respondent to answer to the best of their abilities: “In your judgement are the freedmen in your department considered as a whole fit to take their place in society with a fair prospect of self-support and progress or do they need preparatory training and guardianship? If so of what nature and to what extent?”
the internet developed
by Philip Emeagwali
Philip Emeagwali (born August 23, 1954) is a Nigerian American computer scientist. He achieved computing breakthroughs that helped lead to the development of the internet. His work with simultaneous calculations on connected microprocessors earned him a Gordon Bell Prize, considered the Nobel Prize of computing.
early life in africa
Born in Akure, a village in Nigeria, Philip Emeagwali was the oldest in a family of nine children. His family and neighbors considered him a prodigy because of his skills as a math student. His father spent a significant amount of time nurturing his son's education. By the time Emeagwali reached high school, his facility with numbers had earned him the nickname "Calculus."
Fifteen months after Emeagwali's high school education began, the Nigerian Civil War erupted, and his family, part of the Nigerian Igbo tribe, fled to the eastern part of the country. He found himself drafted into the army of the seceding state of Biafra. Emeagwali's family lived in a refugee camp until the war ended in 1970. More than half a million Biafrans died of starvation during the Nigerian Civil War.
After the war ended, Emeagwali doggedly continued to pursue his education. He attended school in Onitsha, Nigeria, and walked two hours to and from school each day. Unfortunately, he had to drop out due to financial problems. After continuing to study, he passed a high school equivalency exam administered by the University of London in 1973. The education efforts paid off when Emeagwali earned a scholarship to attend college in the U.S.
Emeagwali traveled to the U.S. in 1974 to attend Oregon State University. Upon arrival, in the course of one week, he used a telephone, visited a library, and saw a computer for the first time. He earned his degree in mathematics in 1977. Later, he attended George Washington University to earn a Master of Ocean and Marine Engineering. He also holds a second master's degree from the University of Maryland in applied mathematics.
While attending the University of Michigan on a doctoral fellowship in the 1980s, Emeagwali began work on a project to use computers to help identify untapped underground oil reservoirs. He grew up in Nigeria, an oil-rich country, and he understood computers and how to drill for oil. Conflict over control of oil production was one of the critical causes of the Nigerian Civil War.
computing achievements
Initially, Emeagwali worked on the oil discovery problem using a supercomputer. However, he decided it was more efficient to use thousands of widely distributed microprocessors to do his calculations instead of tying up eight expensive supercomputers. He discovered an unused computer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory formerly used to simulate nuclear explosions. It was dubbed the Connection Machine.
Emeagwali began hooking up over 60,000 microprocessors. Ultimately, the Connection Machine, programmed remotely from Emeagwali's apartment in Ann Arbor, Michigan, ran more than 3.1 billion calculations per second and correctly identified the amount of oil in a simulated reservoir. The computing speed was faster than that achieved by a Cray supercomputer.
Describing his inspiration for the breakthrough, Emeagwali said that he remembered observing bees in nature. He saw that their way of working together and communicating with each other was inherently more efficient than trying to accomplish tasks separately. He wanted to make computers emulate the construction and operation of a beehive's honeycomb.
Emeagwali's primary achievement wasn't about oil. He demonstrated a practical and inexpensive way to allow computers to speak with each other and collaborate all around the world. The key to his achievement was programming each microprocessor to talk with six neighboring microprocessors simultaneously. The discovery helped lead to the development of the internet.
Emeagwali's work earned him the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers' Gordon Bell Prize in 1989, considered the "Nobel Prize" of computing. He continues to work on computing problems, including models to describe and predict the weather, and he has earned more than 100 honors for his breakthrough achievements. Emeagwali is one of the most prominent inventors of the 20th century.
Jesse Eugene Russell: The Visionary Behind the Cellular Revolution
Jesse Eugene Russell is a name that should echo through the halls of technological history. An African American engineer and inventor, Russell’s revolutionary work transformed the way we communicate, laying the groundwork for the wireless world we inhabit today. His contributions have earned him a rightful place as a pioneer of digital connectivity.
early life and Education
Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Russell displayed an insatiable curiosity and aptitude for engineering from a young age. He went on to earn his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Tennessee State University, a historically Black university. His academic excellence led him to Stanford University, where he achieved his Master of Science in Electrical Engineering.
Russell’s career truly began to take flight when he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories. It was here that his groundbreaking ideas began to take shape. In an era dominated by landline phones, Russell envisioned a world where communication was untethered, where people could connect on the move.
His relentless pursuit of this vision led him to develop the architecture for modern cellular communication. Russell’s innovations in digital signal processing, radio technology, and network design were fundamental to creating the foundation upon which wireless networks now operate.
While Russell’s technical brilliance is undeniable, his philosophy towards digital connectivity was equally transformative. He firmly believed that the benefits of wireless technology shouldn’t be confined to the privileged few, but should be accessible to people from all walks of life.
This sense of inclusivity was central to Russell’s work. He championed the idea that cellular technology could bridge divides, empower communities, and bring vital information to those who needed it most, regardless of socioeconomic background.
The impact of Jesse Eugene Russell’s work cannot be overstated. Billions of people around the planet rely on the cellular networks his innovation made possible. The smartphone revolution, the rise of telemedicine, and the vast potential of 5G and beyond — all trace their roots back to Russell’s vision.
In recognition of his contributions, Russell has been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and the National Academy of Engineering. He has received numerous awards, including the prestigious National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
Who Was Daniel Hale Williams?
Daniel Hale Williams pursued a pioneering career in medicine. An African American doctor, in 1891, Williams opened Provident Hospital, the first medical facility to have an interracial staff. He was also one of the first physicians to successfully complete pericardial surgery on a patient. Williams later became chief surgeon of the Freedmen’s Hospital.
early life
Daniel Hale Williams III was born on January 18, 1856, in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, to Sarah Price Williams and Daniel Hale Williams II. The couple had several children, with the elder Daniel H. Williams inheriting a barber business. He also worked with the Equal Rights League, a Black civil rights organization active during the Reconstruction era.
More From BiographyThe Rise and Fall of Oppenheimer
After the elder Williams died, a 10-year-old Daniel was sent to live in Baltimore, Maryland, with family friends. He became a shoemaker’s apprentice but disliked the work and decided to return to his family, who had moved to Illinois. Like his father, he took up barbering, but ultimately decided he wanted to pursue his education. He worked as an apprentice with Dr. Henry Palmer, a highly accomplished surgeon, and then completed further training at Chicago Medical College.
Williams set up his own practice in Chicago’s South Side and taught anatomy at his alma mater, also becoming the first African American physician to work for the city’s street railway system. Williams — who was called Dr. Dan by patients — adopted sterilization procedures for his office informed by the recent findings on germ transmission and prevention from Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister.
Due to the discrimination of the day, African American citizens were still barred from being admitted to hospitals and Black doctors were refused staff positions. Firmly believing this needed to change, in May 1891, Williams opened Provident Hospital and Training School for Nurses, the nation’s first hospital with a nursing and intern program that had a racially integrated staff. The facility, where Williams worked as a surgeon, was publicly championed by famed abolitionist and writer Frederick Douglass.
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Completes Open-Heart Surgery
In 1893, Williams continued to make history when he operated on James Cornish, a man with a severe stab wound to his chest who was brought to Provident. Without the benefits of a blood transfusion or modern surgical procedures, Williams successfully sutured Cornish’s pericardium, the membranous sac enclosing the heart, thus becoming one of the first people to perform open-heart surgery. (Physicians Francisco Romero and Henry Dalton had previously performed pericardial operations.) Cornish lived for many years after the operation.
In 1894, Williams moved to Washington, D.C., where he was appointed the chief surgeon of the Freedmen’s Hospital, which provided care for formerly enslaved African Americans. The facility had fallen into neglect and had a high mortality rate. Williams worked diligently on revitalization, improving surgical procedures, increasing specialization, launching ambulance services and continuing to provide opportunities for Black medical professionals, among other feats. In 1895, he co-founded the National Medical Association, a professional organization for Black medical practitioners, as an alternative to the American Medical Association, which didn’t allow African-American membership.
Williams left Freedmen’s Hospital in 1898. He married Alice Johnson, and the newlyweds moved to Chicago, where Williams returned to his work at Provident. Soon after the turn of the century, he worked at Cook County Hospital and later at St. Luke’s, a large medical institution with ample resources.
Beginning in 1899, Williams also made annual trips to Nashville, Tennessee, where he was a voluntary visiting clinical professor at Meharry Medical College for more than two decades. He became a charter member of the American College of Surgeons in 1913.
Williams experienced a debilitating stroke in 1926 and died five years later, on August 4, 1931, in Idlewild, Michigan.
Today, Williams's work as a pioneering physician and advocate for an African-American presence in medicine continues to be honored by institutions worldwide.
African American History Timeline
African American history is a rich and complex tapestry woven through centuries of struggle, resilience, and triumph.
From the early days of slavery to the modern fight for civil rights and equality, African Americans have played a pivotal role in shaping the United States. This timeline provides a detailed look at significant events that have impacted African American communities and the nation as a whole.
Each milestone, whether a hard-fought legal victory, a cultural renaissance, or a powerful act of protest, reflects the enduring spirit and influence of African Americans in American history.
Through this exploration, we gain a deeper understanding of the challenges faced, the progress achieved, and the ongoing journey toward justice and equality.
1619 The first Africans arrive in Jamestown, Virginia, as indentured servants
In 1619, a ship carrying around 20 Africans arrived at the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia. These individuals were initially treated as indentured servants, similar to many poor Europeans who worked for a set number of years in exchange for passage to the New World.
However, this event marked the beginning of a long and tragic history of slavery in what would become the United States. Over time, the system evolved into hereditary, race-based slavery, which would shape the nation’s economy, culture, and politics for centuries.
1641 Massachusetts becomes the first colony to legalize slavery
Massachusetts became the first American colony to legally recognize slavery in 1641 with the Massachusetts Body of Liberties.
This legal code provided a framework for the enslavement of Africans and allowed slavery under certain conditions. It set a precedent that other colonies would follow, gradually embedding slavery into the legal and social fabric of colonial America.
1775-1783 African Americans, both enslaved and free, fight in the American Revolutionary War
During the American Revolutionary War, African Americans played a significant role on both sides of the conflict. Enslaved individuals were often promised freedom in exchange for their service, with thousands fighting for the British and the Continental Army.
Notable figures like Crispus Attucks, who died in the Boston Massacre, symbolized African American contributions to the cause of American independence.
1787 The U.S. Constitution is adopted, including the “Three-Fifths Compromise” and protections for the slave trade
The U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1787, included provisions that would influence African Americans for generations.
The “Three-Fifths Compromise” counted enslaved individuals as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation and taxation. Additionally, the Constitution protected the transatlantic slave trade until 1808, further entrenching slavery within the nation’s legal framework.
1793 The Fugitive Slave Act is passed, making it easier for slave owners to recapture escaped slaves
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 allowed slaveholders to capture escaped slaves even in states where slavery was illegal. It provided legal mechanisms to reclaim escaped slaves and imposed penalties on those who aided fugitives. This law increased tensions between Northern and Southern states and led to widespread abuses, including the kidnapping of free African Americans.
1800 Gabriel Prosser organizes a failed slave revolt in Richmond, Virginia
Gabriel Prosser, an enslaved blacksmith, planned a large-scale revolt in Richmond, Virginia, in 1800. His goal was to lead a march on the city, seize arms, and demand freedom for enslaved people. However, heavy rains and betrayal by informants thwarted the rebellion. Prosser and many of his followers were captured and executed. Despite its failure, the planned revolt highlighted growing resistance to slavery.
1808 The United States bans the importation of slaves
In 1808, the United States officially banned the importation of slaves, fulfilling a provision in the Constitution that allowed the international slave trade to continue for 20 years.
While this law ended the legal transatlantic trade, domestic slavery continued, and a thriving internal trade developed. The illegal smuggling of Africans into the U.S. also persisted, highlighting the deep entrenchment of slavery in American society.
1820 The Missouri Compromise maintains the balance of free and slave states
The Missouri Compromise, enacted in 1820, aimed to maintain the balance of power between free and slave states. It allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state while prohibiting slavery in the Louisiana Territory north of the 36°30′ parallel. This compromise temporarily eased tensions between the North and South but set the stage for future conflicts over slavery’s expansion.
1831 Nat Turner’s Rebellion in Virginia; abolitionist newspaper “The Liberator” is published by William Lloyd Garrison
Nat Turner, an enslaved preacher, led a rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831. The uprising resulted in the deaths of around 60 white people and led to brutal reprisals, including the execution of Turner and many of his followers.
The same year, William Lloyd Garrison began publishing “The Liberator,” an abolitionist newspaper that called for the immediate end of slavery. Turner’s rebellion and Garrison’s advocacy intensified the national debate over slavery.
1849 Harriet Tubman escapes slavery and begins working with the Underground Railroad
In 1849, Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery in Maryland. She became one of the most famous “conductors” on the Underground Railroad, a secret network that helped enslaved individuals flee to freedom. Tubman made multiple dangerous trips back to the South, leading dozens to safety and earning the nickname “Moses” for her role in guiding her people to freedom.
1857 The Dred Scott decision by the U.S. Supreme Court declares that African Americans are not citizens
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford declared that African Americans, whether free or enslaved, were not U.S. citizens and therefore could not sue in federal court. The decision also stated that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery in the territories. This ruling emboldened pro-slavery forces and pushed the nation closer to civil war.
1861-1865 African Americans serve in the Union Army during the Civil War
During the American Civil War, approximately 180,000 African Americans served in the Union Army, with another 20,000 in the Navy. Many of these soldiers were formerly enslaved, fighting for their freedom and the end of slavery.
African American regiments, such as the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, demonstrated extraordinary bravery, and their contributions were pivotal to the Union’s victory. The service of African American soldiers challenged prevailing prejudices and laid the groundwork for future civil rights advancements.
1863 President Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all slaves in Confederate states free
On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that all enslaved people in Confederate-controlled territories were free.
While the proclamation did not immediately free all enslaved individuals, it transformed the Civil War into a fight against slavery and allowed African Americans to enlist in the Union Army. The proclamation also strengthened the Union’s moral cause and garnered support for the war effort both domestically and internationally.
1865 The 13th Amendment is ratified, officially abolishing slavery in the United States
The 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified on December 6, 1865, and it officially abolished slavery throughout the United States. This landmark legislation marked a historic victory for abolitionists and formally ended the institution of slavery.
However, while the amendment ended legal slavery, many African Americans continued to face severe discrimination, violence, and systemic inequalities during the Reconstruction era and beyond.
1866 The Civil Rights Act of 1866 grants citizenship and equal rights to African Americans
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was the first federal law to affirm that all citizens are equally protected by the law. It declared that all individuals born in the United States were citizens regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
The Act aimed to counteract the Black Codes, which Southern states had enacted to restrict the freedoms of African Americans. Although initially vetoed by President Andrew Johnson, Congress overrode his veto, marking a significant step forward for civil rights.
1868 The 14th Amendment grants citizenship to all born or naturalized in the U.S.
The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States, including formerly enslaved individuals. It also guaranteed equal protection under the law, aiming to provide African Americans with full civil rights. This amendment became a critical foundation for future legal battles against racial discrimination and has been a cornerstone of civil rights legislation.
1877 The end of Reconstruction leads to the rise of Jim Crow laws enforcing racial segregation
The end of Reconstruction in 1877 marked a significant setback for African American rights. Federal troops withdrew from the South, and Southern states quickly enacted “Jim Crow” laws that enforced racial segregation and institutionalized discrimination.
These laws governed all aspects of life, from schools and public transportation to housing and employment, effectively relegating African Americans to second-class citizenship. The era of Jim Crow would not officially end until the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s.
1909 The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is founded
The NAACP was founded in 1909 by a group of activists, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Mary White Ovington. The organization aimed to fight against racial discrimination, lynching, and segregation through legal challenges, advocacy, and public education.
The NAACP played a crucial role in landmark civil rights victories, including the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ended legal segregation in public schools.
1919 The “Red Summer” sees race riots in numerous cities, including Chicago and Washington, D.C.
The summer of 1919, known as the “Red Summer,” was marked by widespread racial violence and riots across the United States. Tensions between black and white communities, exacerbated by economic competition, the return of African American veterans from World War I, and white supremacist ideologies, erupted into deadly clashes. The most violent riots occurred in Chicago and Washington, D.C., highlighting the deep racial divides in America and the urgent need for civil rights reforms.
1920s The Harlem Renaissance flourishes, celebrating African American culture through art, music, and literature
The Harlem Renaissance was a vibrant cultural movement that emerged in Harlem, New York, during the 1920s. This era saw an explosion of creativity in African American literature, art, music, and performance.
Figures such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, and Bessie Smith became prominent voices of the movement. The Harlem Renaissance not only celebrated black culture and heritage but also challenged stereotypes and advocated for civil rights and equality through artistic expression.
1941-1945 African Americans serve in World War II; the “Double V” campaign fights for victory abroad and equality at home
During World War II, over a million African Americans served in the U.S. military, fighting for democracy abroad while facing segregation and discrimination at home. The “Double V” campaign, launched by the Pittsburgh Courier newspaper, advocated for victory against both foreign enemies and racial injustice in the United States. The experiences of black soldiers during the war, combined with the need for labor during wartime production, helped lay the groundwork for the post-war civil rights movement.
1947 Jackie Robinson breaks the color barrier in Major League Baseball
In 1947, Jackie Robinson became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball in the modern era when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. Robinson’s talent, resilience, and grace under pressure challenged racial barriers in sports and beyond. His success paved the way for the integration of other professional sports and made him an enduring symbol of the struggle for racial equality.
stereotypes and advocated for civil rights and equality through artistic expression.
1954 The Supreme Court’s “Brown v. Board of Education” decision declares school segregation unconstitutional
The landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka declared that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. The Court ruled that “separate but equal” facilities were inherently unequal, overturning the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896.
This ruling was a major victory for the civil rights movement and led to widespread efforts to desegregate schools, although the process would take many years and face significant resistance.
1955 Rosa Parks’ arrest sparks the Montgomery Bus Boycott
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a black seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, as required by local segregation laws.
Her arrest sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a mass protest led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that lasted over a year. The boycott ended with a Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses was unconstitutional, marking a critical early success for the civil rights movement.
1957 The Little Rock Nine integrate Central High School in Arkansas under federal protection
In 1957, nine African American students, known as the “Little Rock Nine,” enrolled at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Their attempt to integrate the school was met with violent opposition, prompting President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send federal troops to enforce integration and protect the students. The event highlighted the challenges of implementing the Brown v. Board of Education ruling and demonstrated the federal government’s willingness to intervene in civil rights issues.
1963 The March on Washington; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech
On August 28, 1963, more than 250,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C., for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The event featured speeches, performances, and a call for civil and economic rights for African Americans.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, envisioning a future where all people would be judged by their character, not their skin color. The march played a significant role in the passage of civil rights legislation.
1964 The Civil Rights Act is passed, prohibiting discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a landmark legislation that outlawed discrimination in public places, provided for the integration of schools and other public facilities, and made employment discrimination illegal. It was one of the most significant legislative achievements of the civil rights movement, helping to dismantle segregation and pave the way for further progress toward racial equality.
1965 The Voting Rights Act is signed into law, prohibiting racial discrimination in voting
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was enacted to overcome legal barriers at the state and local levels that prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote under the 15th Amendment.
It prohibited discriminatory practices such as literacy tests and provided for federal oversight of voter registration in areas with a history of discriminatory practices. This Act significantly increased African American voter registration and participation, transforming the political landscape.
1968 Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee
On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, while supporting a sanitation workers’ strike. His death sparked riots and mourning across the country.
King’s legacy as a leader of the civil rights movement and a proponent of nonviolent resistance remains profound. His assassination also marked a turning point, leading to increased momentum for civil rights legislation, including the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
1972 Shirley Chisholm becomes the first African American to run for president from a major political party
In 1972, Shirley Chisholm, a Congresswoman from New York, became the first African American and the first woman to seek the presidential nomination from a major political party, running as a Democrat.
Her candidacy was a bold step forward for both racial and gender equality, and her campaign slogan, “Unbought and Unbossed,” underscored her independence and commitment to justice. Although she did not win the nomination, Chisholm’s campaign inspired future generations of leaders.
1980 The African American Civil Rights Museum is established in Atlanta, Georgia
The establishment of the African American Civil Rights Museum in Atlanta in 1980 provided a dedicated space to preserve and celebrate the history and contributions of African Americans. The museum documents the struggles and triumphs of the civil rights movement and serves as an educational resource to promote understanding and awareness of African American history and culture.
1984 Jesse Jackson runs for the Democratic presidential nomination
In 1984, Reverend Jesse Jackson became the first African American to make a serious bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. His “Rainbow Coalition” campaign advocated for civil rights, economic justice, and social equality.
Jackson’s charismatic leadership and strong showing in the primaries helped bring African American and minority issues into the national political discourse. He ran again in 1988, securing even more delegates and proving that African American candidates could be serious contenders for the highest office.
1992 Los Angeles riots follow the acquittal of police officers in the beating of Rodney King
In 1992, riots erupted in Los Angeles after four white police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King, an African American motorist. The violent, widely publicized incident had been caught on video, showing the officers repeatedly striking King with batons.
The acquittal led to widespread outrage, highlighting issues of police brutality, racial inequality, and systemic injustice. The riots resulted in over 60 deaths, thousands of injuries, and significant property damage, marking a pivotal moment in the national conversation about race relations.
2008 Barack Obama is elected as the first African American president of the United States
On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States, becoming the first African American to hold the office. His historic election was seen as a major milestone in American history, symbolizing progress toward racial equality.
Obama’s presidency, which lasted two terms, included significant achievements such as the Affordable Care Act, the legalization of same-sex marriage, and efforts to address systemic inequality and promote social justice.
2013 The Black Lives Matter movement is founded following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement began in 2013 as a hashtag and quickly grew into a global movement advocating against violence and systemic racism toward African Americans. It was founded by activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi following the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. BLM became a powerful voice for justice and accountability, organizing protests and promoting awareness of police brutality and racial inequality.
2020 George Floyd’s death in police custody sparks global protests for racial justice
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, an African American man, died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for over nine minutes during an arrest. The incident, captured on video, led to widespread outrage and ignited global protests under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement. The protests called for an end to police brutality, racial injustice, and systemic inequalities. Floyd’s death led to significant discussions on reforming policing practices and addressing institutional racism.
2021 Kamala Harris becomes the first female, first Black, and first South Asian Vice President of the United States
On January 20, 2021, Kamala Harris was inaugurated as Vice President of the United States, making history as the first woman, the first Black person, and the first South Asian to hold the office. Harris, a former U.S. Senator from California and state Attorney General, brought a diverse perspective to the White House. Her achievement represented a significant step forward in representation and diversity in American politics, inspiring future generations of leaders.
Ohio's "black laws"
the start of the
story unfolds
Ohio had barely entered statehood in 1803 when thousands of Black Americans began arriving there from the South. Many were escaping to this “free” state from enslavers in Virginia and Kentucky, just across the Ohio River. Some people even swam across the mile-wide river, or walked across its ice in winter, believing that freedom and opportunity awaited them on the other side. Abolitionism had many supporters in Ohio. Cincinnati, along the river, had a growing Black community. Ohio’s Black population quintupled between 1800 and 1810, from a little over 300 people to nearly 1,900.
But most of the white men who wrote the state’s 1802 constitution and its earliest laws came from Virginia and other “slave” states. Many had been enslavers before moving to the Ohio Territory, where slavery was outlawed. The document they drafted did not change that, but it took away a right Black men had had in the Ohio Territory before statehood—the right to vote. And that was only the beginning.
To stop Black people from moving to the state, the all-white state legislature approved “An Act to Regulate Black and Mulatto Persons” in 1804, and amended it three years later, stripping Black residents of their rights in the courts. Starting April 1, 1807, Black people in Ohio were barred from testifying in any case, civil or criminal, in which one of the parties was white. Ohio’s “Black Laws,” as the measures became known, gave white supremacy priority over justice.
A System of Targeted Laws
Ohio’s discriminatory laws restricted all aspects of daily life for Black residents in the state.
Black residents had to register with the county clerk within two years of arriving in Ohio, pay a fee of 12 1/2 cents, and obtain a court order attesting to their being free. They had to be able to produce this proof of freedom at any time.
White employers who hired unregistered Black workers faced fines of $50 per employee.
If the employee turned out to be a fugitive from slavery, the employer was fined 50 cents for each day of employment—paid to the enslaver. Anyone who harbored alleged “fugitives” or hindered their capture could be fined from $10 to $50.
Ohio’s new system of tax-supported “common” schools—public schools—was for white children only. That part of the law would be reinterpreted several times over the next few decades but never allowed Black children to attend tax-supported schools with white children.
Though Ohio was a “free” state, the law all but made its courts, constables, and sheriffs tools of Southern enslavers. Enslavers or their agents needed little evidence to get Ohio judges or local justices of the peace to order people who were alleged to have escaped from slavery arrested. The law required sheriffs and constables to execute those orders—and enslavers paid them for their efforts.
The law offered Ohioans a cash incentive to inform on their neighbors by alerting local authorities whenever a white employer hired Black workers who had not registered or did not have proof of freedom. Half the fines imposed on employers for each such hiring would be paid to the “informer.”
The 1807 amendments not only closed the courts to Black Ohioans—they made it harder than ever for
Black people to scrape together a living. The fines on white employers for hiring unregistered Black workers were tripled to $150—or about $4,000 today—per employee. (That meant more money for informers, too.) Many employers minimized the risk by refusing to hire Black workers altogether.
The amendments also required newly arriving Black citizens to persuade two white Ohio landowners to put up a $500 “good behavior” bond, agreeing to pay authorities that amount if the Black person got in legal trouble. Abolitionists pointed out that few white Ohioans could afford that—$500 in 1807 would be worth more than $13,000 today. And the law set the bar impossibly high: a Black person needed to recruit those well-off white sponsors within 20 days of arriving in Ohio.
The testimony law barring Black people from testifying against white people meant white criminals could, and did, rob and assault Black people with impunity. It meant unscrupulous white merchants could, and did, defraud Black customers with no fear of being successfully sued for their frauds. Black residents who got swindled out of land could not turn to the courts.
Codifying Racism
The harsher requirements added to the “Black Laws” in 1807 may have been prompted in part by a Virginia law, enacted in 1806, that gave newly emancipated people 12 months to leave that state or else be re-enslaved.
But one thing was certain: the “Black Laws” codified white supremacy in Ohio. So did laws and court rulings that followed—barring Black men from the militia, barring Black adults from juries, barring Black children from learning alongside white children in public schools, and barring racial intermarriage.
Cases in which Black people were scammed, robbed, or even killed evaporated in court because of the testimony law. The Ohio Anti-Slavery Society’s 1835 report told of a Black family whose home had been broken into and looted the year before. The evidence was clear—one perpetrator even confessed—but defense lawyers said the law invalidated the family’s sworn claims to the stolen items, “and the robbers were cleared.” Another judge barred testimony from eight Black men who had witnessed a white man “murdering a colored man…[and] the murderer escaped unpunished.”
Excluded from steady jobs, many Black Ohioans resorted to piece work, which in turn made them vulnerable to more crimes; profiteering kidnappers snatched free Black people off Northern streets and sold them to Southern enslavers. The New York Colored American reported that some offers of short-term work for Black men—moving livestock to or from Kentucky, for example—were ruses that ended with kidnappings.
John Malvin, a free Black carpenter who came to the state from Virginia in 1827, later wrote: “I thought upon coming to a free state like Ohio, that I would find every door thrown open to receive me, but from the treatment I received by the people generally, I found it little better than in Virginia…I found every door closed against the colored man in a free state, excepting the jails and penitentiaries.”
Like many other Black citizens, Mr. Malvin was not just trying to make a living. He was also trying to buy freedom for a loved one—his father-in-law, enslaved in Kentucky. The antislavery group’s reports told of Black families in similar straits, such as a girl about 10 years old, working to help purchase her father’s freedom, and a husband who’d negotiated a price of $420 for his enslaved wife, saved up that amount, and headed south to buy her freedom only to learn that her enslaver had raised the price to $450 because she was “in a family way.”
Since Ohio’s public schools were only open to white children, abolitionists started their own schools for Black children—and periodically faced attacks by white citizens. A “vigilance committee” in one town threatened to tar and feather a white Oberlin College senior “and ride her on a rail” if she kept teaching the town’s Black children.
Historians note that in some years, the bond and registration requirements of the “Black Laws” went largely unenforced. In other years they were applied with a vengeance—to entire Black communities.
the floating school
banned education for blacks!
John Berry Meachum created the Floating School in response to the 1825 city had passed an ordinance that banned the education of free blacks. Those in violation of the law could be whipped with 20 lashes, fined, or imprisoned. In 1847, the school was closed down by the police, who arrested Meachum and a white teacher from England. The slave state of Missouri banned all education for black people, one of several restrictions on the lives of both enslaved blacks and free people of color. It also prohibited them from having independent black religious services without a white law enforcement officer present, or from holding any meetings for education or religion.
In response, Meachum moved his classes to a steamboat in the middle of the Mississippi River, which was subject to federal law and outside of Missouri's jurisdiction. He supplied the riverboat with a library, desks, and chairs, and called it the "Floating Freedom School". This allowed Meachum to resume his educational practices to people of color, free and enslaved, eluding limitations of the then established Southern state laws.
Mary Bowser, a formerly enslaved woman who posed as Davis's servant, worked to bring down the political fixtures of the South from the inside out. Jefferson Davis was wary of a mole in his house, but had no idea how to stop the flow of information. Little did he know, a Union spy found her way into deepest parts of the Confederate White House as part of an abolitionist woman’s spy ring.
Mary Bowser: The Former Slave Who Helped Bring Down The Confederacy
Oftentimes, the outcome of a war is determined not out on the open battlefields, but in the shadows. Espionage has played an important role in virtually every great military conflict in history and the American Civil War was no exception. As the Union forces desperately fought to give their forces an edge, they found help in some of the unlikeliest of places.
Mary Bowser was born a slave in Virginia and worked on the Richmond plantation of a hardware merchant named John Van Lew. As is the case with many slaves, not very much else is known about her early life
.
What we do know is that when Van Lew died, his daughter Elizabeth (who was a Quaker and staunch opponent to slavery) freed all of the slaves she had inherited and, in a further act of generosity, used her entire cash inheritance to purchase and free the other family members of her father’s former slaves.
Bowser remained a servant in her former mistress’ household and when Van Lew realized how intelligent she was, she sent Bowser to be educated at the Quaker School for Negroes in Philadelphia.
Van Lew herself had been educated by Quakers in the North and although she was a member of Richmond’s elite, she harbored fiercely abolitionist views. When the Civil War broke out, she began to think about how she could use her unique position to help the cause she so fervently believed in.
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Van Lew started small, volunteering as a nurse at prison camps for Union soldiers and smuggling in food, books, and medicine with the help of her mother. This did not endear her to her fellow Southerners; as an article in The Richmond Enquirer disgustedly reported,
“Two ladies, a mother and a daughter, living on Church Hill, have lately attracted public notice by their assiduous attentions to the Yankee prisoners… these two women have been expending their opulent means in aiding and giving comfort to the miscreants who have invaded our sacred soil.”
Two soldiers who escaped the prison with Van Lew’s help eventually told a Union general about her and he was so impressed that he recruited her as a spy. Protected by her family’s position (although the wealthy of Richmond had long looked upon her abolitionist views with distaste), she managed to set up a spy ring right in the heart of the Virginia capital, aided and abetted by her former servant, Mary Bowser.
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The harsher requirements added to the “Black Laws” in 1807 may have been prompted in part by a Virginia law, enacted in 1806, that gave newly emancipated people 12 months to leave that state or else be re-enslaved.
But one thing was certain: the “Black Laws” codified white supremacy in Ohio. So did laws and court rulings that followed—barring Black men from the militia, barring Black adults from juries, barring Black children from learning alongside white children in public schools, and barring racial intermarriage.
Cases in which Black people were scammed, robbed, or even killed evaporated in court because of the testimony law. The Ohio Anti-Slavery Society’s 1835 report told of a Black family whose home had been broken into and looted the year before. The evidence was clear—one perpetrator even confessed—but defense lawyers said the law invalidated the family’s sworn claims to the stolen items, “and the robbers were cleared.” Another judge barred testimony from eight Black men who had witnessed a white man “murdering a colored man…[and] the murderer escaped unpunished.”
Excluded from steady jobs, many Black Ohioans resorted to piece work, which in turn made them vulnerable to more crimes; profiteering kidnappers snatched free Black people off Northern streets and sold them to Southern enslavers. The New York Colored American reported that some offers of short-term work for Black men—moving livestock to or from Kentucky, for example—were ruses that ended with kidnappings.
General Ulysses S. Grant later told Van Lew, “You have sent me the most valuable information received from Richmond during the war.”
The intelligence Bowser provided from the heart of the Confederacy had reportedly directly contributed to a Northern victory (even though little is known about precisely what information Bowser relayed). Finally, in 1995, the U.S. government posthumously inducted Mary Bowser into the Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame.
Van Lew and Bower had been able to hide in plain sight by playing up their roles as a sheltered society woman and an ignorant servant — and they fooled everyone for a long time.
After Van Lew’s role as a spy did become public knowledge, she was largely shunned by her fellow Virginians, who viewed her as a traitor. As for Mary Bowser, committed to the tremendous value of a good education, she went on to open a school for former slaves and teach them all herself.
The Little-Known History of the Black Men Who Became America’s First Paramedics
To stop Black people from moving to the state, the all-white state legislature approved “An Act to Regulate Black and Mulatto Persons” in 1804, and amended it three years later, stripping Black residents of their rights in the courts. Starting April 1, 1807, Black people in Ohio were barred from testifying in any case, civil or criminal, in which one of the parties was white. Ohio’s “Black Laws,” as the measures became known, gave white supremacy priority over justice.
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Paramedics are lifelines in U.S communities, responding to all kinds of medical emergencies. And yet, the history of the emergency medical services (EMS) is little-known.
In American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America’s First Paramedics, author Kevin Hazzard, a former paramedic, spotlights the Black men in Pittsburgh who pioneered the profession and formed a model for emergency medical services that other cities copied.
In 1966, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) published a white paper that was a damning indictment of the nation’s emergency response system. “Essentially, paramedics weren’t plentiful enough to be there when you needed them and then weren’t well trained enough to be of much use when they were there,” Hazzard says.
Ambulances were, in some cases, hearses that were driven by undertakers from the funeral home that would later plan the patient’s funeral. In other situations, the sick and injured might be tended to by police officers or volunteer firefighters who were not trained to provide emergency care. Americans were more likely to survive a gunshot wound in the Vietnam War than on the homefront, according to the NAS report, because at least injured soldiers are accompanied by trained medics. “In 1965, 52 million accidental injuries killed 107,000, temporarily disabled over 10 million and permanently impaired 400,000 American citizens at a cost of approximately $18 billion,” the report said. “It is the leading cause of death in the first half of life’s span.”
This lack of emergency care hit home for Peter Safar, an Austrian-born anesthesiologist at the University of Pittsburgh and a pioneer of CPR who helped to develop the modern hospital Intensive Care Unit (ICU). He lost his daughter in 1966 to an asthma attack because she didn’t get the right help between her house and the hospital. So he coped with the loss by designing the modern ambulance—including the equipment inside, plus its paint scheme. Perhaps most crucially, he also designed the world’s first comprehensive course to train paramedics.
The first people to take the course in 1967 were a group of Black men who were in Freedom House, an organization that originally provided jobs delivering vegetables to needy Black Americans. At first the idea was to switch the delivery service from delivering food to driving people to medical appointments. But, within eight months, the drivers were trained to handle emergencies including heart attacks, seizures, childbirth, and choking. Their first calls took place during the uprising following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968.
And data showed that the training worked. One 1972 study of 1,400 patients transported to area hospitals by Freedom House over two months found the paramedics delivered the correct care to critical patients 89% of the time. By contrast, the study found police and volunteer ambulance services delivered the right care only 38% and 13% of the time, respectively. One Freedom House member, Nancy Caroline, wrote a textbook on EMS training that became the national standard.
Despite the success of Freedom House, the city nixed the program in 1975. Pittsburgh Mayor Peter Flaherty thought he could create a better system and replaced Freedom House with an all-white paramedic corps. Hazzard tells TIME that he believes racism was at play. As he puts it, “What other reason could he have for not wanting this organization, which was so successful and was a model around the country and around the world, other than the fact that they were an almost entirely Black organization.”
The real story “doesn’t make the city look good,” Hazzard says, so that’s why he thinks the story of the nation’s first paramedics is not better known. But Hazzard believes there are lessons in this story that are useful for all professions, not just paramedics. Many of the Freedom House participants went on to get master’s degrees, Ph.D.s, or medical degrees—or pursued careers in politics or the upper echelons of police, EMS, and fire departments.
“These were really successful people who came from nowhere and where it all began was an opportunity in 1967,” Hazzard says. “All it took for a group of young men that the world had written off was one opportunity, and they never looked back from that point. Anyone can reach great heights. They just simply need a single opportunity.”
White Men Attack Nat King Cole During Performance in Birmingham, Alabama
On April 10, 1956, African American singer and pianist Nat King Cole was performing before an all-white audience of 4,000 at the Municipal Auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama, when he was attacked and knocked down by a group of white men. Before the attack, a drunk man near the front row jeered at Mr. Cole, "Negro, go home."
After the attack during the segregated "white only" Birmingham show, Mr. Cole returned to the stage; the remaining audience gave him a 10-minute standing ovation, but he did not finish the concert. "I just came here to entertain you," he told the white crowd. "That was what I thought you wanted. I was born in Alabama. Those folks hurt my back. I cannot continue, because I need to see a doctor."
After being examined by a physician, Mr. Cole went on to perform at the show scheduled for a Black audience later that night.
Death in Prison Sentences
Death in Prison Sentences
The U.S. is the only country in the world where kids as young as 13 have been sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
Before the Supreme Court banned the death penalty for juveniles in 2005, 366 people were executed for juvenile offenses.1 That ban allowed EJI to focus on some 3000 people who were sentenced to life imprisonment without parole for offenses committed when they were 17 or younger. Children as young as 13 were among those condemned to die in prison.
Most of these sentences were mandatory—the sentencing judge was not allowed to consider the child’s age or life history. Some children were sentenced for crimes where no one was killed or even injured, and many were convicted even though older teens or adults were primarily responsible for the crime. Seventy percent of those 14 or younger who were sentenced to die in prison were children of color.
EJI launched a litigation campaign in 2006 to challenge death-in-prison sentences imposed on children. Three years later, we argued in the Supreme Court that the Constitution forbids sentencing children to die in prison. On May 17, 2010, the Court in Graham v. Florida barred life-without-parole sentences for juveniles convicted of nonhomicide offenses. The Court recognized that the ways in which children are different from adults have to be considered in sentencing. Since 2010, we have successfully represented children across the country to obtain new sentences.
We went back to the Supreme Court after Graham to argue that sentencing kids to die in prison is unconstitutional regardless of the offense. In 2012, the Court in Miller v. Alabama struck down mandatory life-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger. The ruling affected thousands of people whose sentencers did not consider their age, the details of the offense, or any other mitigating factors. The Court did not ban all juvenile life-without-parole sentences, but held that requiring sentencers to consider “children’s diminished culpability, and heightened capacity for change” should make such sentences “uncommon.”
Some states refused to apply Miller to older cases. On January 25, 2016, the Supreme Court held in Montgomery v. Louisiana that Miller applies retroactively and requires new sentencing hearings for everyone serving a mandatory life-without-parole sentence for an offense when they were under 18. Montgomery reaffirmed that life-without-parole sentences are unconstitutional for all but the rare juvenile for whom rehabilitation is impossible.
Over a thousand people who were automatically condemned to die in prison for juvenile offenses have been resentenced because of Miller, and hundreds have been released.
The extremely low recidivism rate among those released after they were originally sentenced to die in prison underscores children’s capacity for rehabilitation. One 2020 study found that only 1.14% of people released after being sentenced to life without parole as children in Philadelphia were re-convicted of any offense.2 And only one out of 142 people released in Michigan after Miller had been rearrested as of 2021.3
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Van Lew started small, volunteering as a nurse at prison camps for Union soldiers and smuggling in food, books, and medicine with the help of her mother. This did not endear her to her fellow Southerners; as an article in The Richmond Enquirer disgustedly reported,
“Two ladies, a mother and a daughter, living on Church Hill, have lately attracted public notice by their assiduous attentions to the Yankee prisoners… these two women have been expending their opulent means in aiding and giving comfort to the miscreants who have invaded our sacred soil.”
Two soldiers who escaped the prison with Van Lew’s help eventually told a Union general about her and he was so impressed that he recruited her as a spy. Protected by her family’s position (although the wealthy of Richmond had long looked upon her abolitionist views with distaste), she managed to set up a spy ring right in the heart of the Virginia capital, aided and abetted by her former servant, Mary Bowser.
children in
adult prisons
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Some states strictly prohibit placing children in adult jails or prisons, but a majority still allow children to be incarcerated in adult prisons and jails, where they are at the highest risk of being sexually assaulted. Thousands of young people have been assaulted, raped, and traumatized as a result.
Some statutes require “sight and sound” separation of children in adult facilities to shield them from physical and sexual violence. But in practice, this often means kids are put in solitary confinement, where they’re at risk of significant psychological trauma from isolation.
Death in Prison Sentences
The law protects children younger than 14 because their brains are still developing—they have less judgment, maturity, and knowledge than adults, and kids under 14 are even less responsible and more vulnerable than older teens. But when a young child is accused of a crime, these legal protections vanish, allowing kids under 14 to be prosecuted in adult court and sentenced to adult prison, even for life.
Kids’ low social status compared to adult interrogators, beliefs about the need to obey authority, greater dependence on adults, and vulnerability to intimidation makes them uniquely susceptible to coercive psychological interrogation techniques designed for adults, leading to false confessions and undermining the reliability of the fact-finding process. Young children clearly can’t defend themselves in adult court, but the rules created to shield adults who aren’t “competent” to stand trial don’t take kids’ unique characteristics into account. Their diminished understanding of rights, confusion about trial processes, limited language skills, and inadequate decision-making abilities puts them at great risk in the adult criminal justice system.
Eleven states have no minimum age for trying children as adults: Alaska, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Some states allow children to be prosecuted as adults at 10, 12, or 13 years old. Children as young as eight have been prosecuted as adults.
Each year, judges transfer dozens of children under 14 to adult court. Prosecutors charge other young kids directly in adult court. More than half of the children under 14 transferred to adult court each year are African American or Latino.10
the unsung heroes
They stood up against racism and inequality – some risking their own lives – to launch the fight for many of the rights and freedoms we enjoy today and some we continue to fight for.
They dared to break racial barriers in roles never held by Black Americans.
Florynce “Flo” Kennedy’s vibrant personality and signature cowboy hat hardly went unnoticed, but what made her truly memorable was her fervent activism.
As a lawyer and political activist who spent decades drawing attention to injustices of all kinds, her work left a long-lasting mark in the battle for abortion rights.
Born in 1916 in Kansas City, Missouri, Kennedy credited her father for instilling in her a willingness to speak out against injustice. In her autobiography “Color Me Flo: My Hard Life and Good Times,” she recounted how he stood up to members of the Ku Klux Klan who had threatened the family after they bought a home in a predominantly White neighborhood.
Kennedy moved to New York in 1942 after her mother’s death and applied to Columbia Law School, but was initially rejected. She was later admitted after threatening to sue the school when she discovered that her admission had been rejected for being a woman. Kennedy was one of eight women and the only Black student in her class.
In the years since graduating in 1951, Kennedy represented civil rights leaders and became a leading voice in several movements, including the fight for women’s rights.
“She was in Black power, she was in independent Black feminist organizations, she was in media, she was part of the women's liberation movement. She was everywhere,” said Sheri M. Randolph, an associate professor of history at the Georgia Institute of Technology and author of “Florynce ‘Flo’ Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical.”
Kennedy was one of four lawyers who in 1969 challenged the constitutionality of New York’s ban on abortion in federal court, a case that made women the subject of abortion litigation instead of doctors for the first time. Some experts say the case helped decriminalize abortion in the state the following year.
Thompson said that Kennedy fought for abortion rights on the streets and in the court, an approach that would later be used in the lead-up to Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 opinion that legalized abortion nationwide prior to viability, which usually happens between 24 and 28 weeks after conception.
“She saw the decriminalization of abortion fight as a many-headed Hydra that happens not only through the courtroom and class action suits that she was a part of, but in bringing women's voices to protest in marches,” Thompson told CNN.
Kennedy eventually stepped away from the courtroom and turned solely to political activism. She traveled across the country lecturing on women’s rights and civil rights issues at college campuses for about two decades, oftentimes with her friend and fellow activist, Gloria Steinem.
She founded the Feminist Party and was a co-founder of the National Organization for Women and the National Black Feminist Organization.
Kennedy died in 2000 at the age of 84.
“If you found a cause for the downtrodden of somebody being abused someplace, by God, Flo Kennedy would be there,” former New York City Mayor David N. Dinkins told The New York Times at the time of her passing.
Audley Moore, affectionately known as Queen Mother Moore, accomplished a lot in her 98 years.
She was a civil rights leader, a key player in the campaign for reparations for slavery and a fierce advocate for Pan-Africanism, the effort to build solidarity between Indigenous African people around the world.
Moore dedicated her life to improving the lives of Africans and African Americans, and spent decades fighting for Black empowerment.
“I am not a part-time struggler,” she once said. “I'm in the movement for the liberation of African people full-time, seven days a week, 24 hours per day, for life.”
Moore witnessed tragedy and racism at a young age. Born in New Iberia, Louisiana, on July 27, 1898, she was orphaned by the fourth grade after both her parents died, forcing her to drop out of school and become a hairdresser. One of her grandfathers was lynched.
Among her first roles as a civil rights activist was volunteering as a nurse in Alabama, where she helped get support for Black soldiers shunned by the Red Cross during World War I.
A speech by Black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey at a 1920 event in New Orleans sparked her interest in Black power. Garvey was the founder of the Harlem-based Universal Negro Improvement Association, and Moore became an active member.
She moved to New York City, where she frequently took to the streets in demonstrations and boycotts to demand equal rights. She later founded the Harriet Tubman Association to improve the conditions of Black women, and used the organization to demand higher wages, lower food prices and better education for Black people.
She once described a scene where police tried to stop Garvey from speaking in New Orleans, prompting his supporters to wave guns in the air and chant, "Speak, Garvey, speak!"
"I had two guns -- one in my bosom and one in my pocketbook,” she said, according to an article by Keisha Blain, professor of Africana studies and history at Brown University. “Everybody knew they had to come armed. We wanted that freedom."
Moore documented racial disparities and used her findings to demand economic reparations for descendants of victims of slavery. In 1957, she presented a petition to the United Nations seeking land for Black Americans and billions of dollars in reparations.
She later launched a reparations committee for descendants of slaves, and spent decades lobbying for the cause.
"Ever since 1950, I've been on the trail fighting for reparations," she once said. "They owe us more than they could ever pay. They stole our language; they stole us from our mothers and fathers and took our names from us. They worked us free of charge 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, under the lash for centuries."
In 1962, she met with President John F. Kennedy to discuss economic reparations. Ron Daniels, the convener of the National African American Reparations Commission, described Moore as one of his mentors.
"Queen Mother Audley Moore was the formidable, relentless guiding spirit of the modern cross-generational reparations movement," Daniels told CNN. "Long before the majority of African Americans embraced the idea of reparations or believed reparatory justice as possible, Queen Mother Moore was the master teacher, defining and educating Black people about the nature and necessity of reparations to repair the damage to our people done by the holocaust of enslavement and its legacies."
Moore's list of influential friends included Garvey, Nelson Mandela and Rosa Parks, some of whom shaped her ideas and teachings on civil rights.
Her influence transcended borders. During one of her many travels to Africa, an Ashanti tribe in Ghana bestowed her with the honorary title of "Queen Mother."
Moore's last public appearance was at the Million Man March in Washington in 1995, alongside Jesse Jackson.
"Queen Mother Moore's contributions have had a substantial impact on the lives of Africans and African Americans," Charles Rangel, a former US congressman from New York, said in a tribute to Moore following her death in 1997. "She has served as an inspiration to many and will be greatly missed."
Decades later, Pan-Africanists still use Moore's teachings to advocate for equality for Africans and Black Americans.
"I think she is dancing in the heavens with the ancestors,” Daniels said, “proud of the way in which the reparations movement has mushroomed but exhorting us to finish the task.”
ron oden - 1950 to present times
Ron Oden just wanted to serve his local community, but his election as mayor of Palm Springs, California, made headlines.
A native of Detroit, Michigan, Oden become the first Black person in 1995 to be appointed to the Palm Spring City Council. In 2003, Oden made history again, becoming the first openly gay Black man elected mayor of an American city after running on a campaign slogan, “Time for Change.”
“It meant more to people than ever I would have imagined,” Oden told CNN in a phone interview reflecting on the attention his election received. “The reason that I ran was to serve my community.”
His historic ascent broke a glass ceiling for gay Black Americans and signaled a shift in the politics of the somewhat conservative community experiencing an increasing gay population and tourism.
Oden said that personally, the election “meant that I had an opportunity to serve and to show the community the level of competence and expertise that a person of color, a Black man, can provide for the city.”
He would not have run for office or won without the support of the minority Black population of Palm Springs, he said, and added that during his time in office he faced opposition because of his political views and his race.
“When you have this paint job, there’s always opposition and because so many subtle nuances of racism that are there,” Oden said. “You will be surprised how much your race comes in when people don’t see you as being cooperative or a puppet.”
Oden served years as pastor of a Seventh-day Adventist Church in several cities but left the ministry in 1988. After a divorce, he moved to Palm Springs where he taught sociology at the College of the Desert. He said he was “well prepared” to transition from pastoring to politics, telling CNN that, “There is nothing more political than church.”
Oden’s political ascent paved the way for the election of an all-LGBTQ Palm Springs City Council in 2017.
Since leaving office, he has continued to push for equality and in 2007 was recognized with a Golden Palm Star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars. In February 2020, Oden received a community service award from The City of Palm Springs Human Rights Commission.
Now 72 years old, Oden has returned to teaching at the College of the Desert and is spending time with his grandchildren.
He believes LGBTQ rights and other rights are in jeopardy in the US and that there is “a concerted effort to tell people who they can love,” but there has also been a lot of progress, he said.
He said he was fortunate to have the support of his family when he told them he was gay, also encourages younger people, particularly those who are Black, to not be nervous to open up about their sexuality.
“What a great time to be alive because, in my generation, we didn’t have anybody to go to ... there are so many outlets that let them know that one day, you can marry the person that you love,” he said. “The world knows now that they can be who they want to be … you can be you better than anybody else on the planet, so no need in trying to be like somebody else.”
Esteban Hotesse spent years training to fight overseas, but his toughest battle, against discrimination and racism, was in America.
Hotesse enlisted in the US Army Air Corps in 1942 and was a member of the 477th Bombardment Group M, which in 1944 was tasked with training what would become known as the Tuskegee Airmen, a combat fighter unit of primarily Black aviators whose heroism during World War II become legendary. In 1945, the Dominican-born officer and his unit were transferred to Freeman Field, a US Army Air Forces base near Seymour, Indiana.
At Freeman Field, Col. Robert Selway, a White officer and the first commanding officer of the Tuskegee Airmen's 477th Bombardment Group M, segregated officers’ clubs, in violation of Air Force regulations. Selway had designated the officers' club for "instructors" only, who were White, and classified members of the Tuskegee Airmen as “trainees,” thus barring them from the officers' club.
In protest, Hotesse and dozens of other Black officers walked into the White-only officers' club peacefully in violation of base regulations and were arrested but later released.
Their protest, known as the "Freeman Field Mutiny,” paved the way for historic changes in the military. Edward De Jesus, a senior researcher at the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute who has studied Hotesse’s life extensively, said the events at the base prompted President Harry Truman to ban segregation in the military with the signing of an executive order, and that protest became a model for the civil rights movements in the 1950s and 1960s.
Hotesse was never deployed overseas and died in July 1945 during a training exercise. He was 26 years old.
Iris Rivera, one of Hotesse’s grandchildren, said she feels incredibly proud of him as a relative and a service member. She served in the Army for 22 years before retiring and her brother Angel has served for almost 30 years.
“I was already proud to be a service member but learning about my grandfather makes me even prouder. We are so tied to the military that it must be in our blood,” Rivera said.
Annie Lee Cooper did the unthinkable — she fought back — an act of resistance that turned her into an icon in the voting rights movement.
On January 25, 1965, Cooper was standing in line to register to vote when, according to historical records, Dallas County, Alabama, Sheriff James Clark ordered her to go home and hit her in the back of the neck with a baton. Cooper, a 224-pound woman, turned around and punched Clark in the face, knocking him to the ground.
At the time, Black Americans were mobilizing across the South for equal voting rights. Voter registration procedures such as poll taxes, literacy tests, limited office hours and long lines in states such as Alabama had made it nearly impossible for Black people to register to vote.
Cooper was arrested and charged with assault and attempted murder for punching the sheriff, according to the Selma Times Journal. She was released from jail just after 11 hours for fear that Clark would try to hurt her, newspapers reported.
A photo of deputies restraining Cooper to the ground was published by The New York Times and news of the incident quickly spread through the civil rights community which celebrated her as a hero.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledged Cooper during a historic speech while she was jailed.
“This is what happened today: Mrs. Cooper was down in that line, and they haven’t told the press the truth about it,” King said, according to the Selma Times Journal. “Mrs. Cooper wouldn’t have turned around and hit Sheriff Clark just to be hitting. And of course, as you know, we teach a philosophy of not retaliating and not hitting back, but the truth of the situation is that Mrs. Cooper, if she did anything, was provoked by Sheriff Clark. At that moment, he was engaging in some very ugly business-as-usual action. This is what brought about that scene there.”
Cooper died in 2010 at the age of 100, and in 2014, Oprah Winfrey played her in the Oscar-nominated film, Selma.
Her legacy is still alive, Selma leaders say.
Yusuf Salaam, a former Selma councilman and state representative, said he met Cooper in the 1990s when he represented her neighborhood on the city council. The two worked together on a committee to improve the relationship between residents and city leadership. Salaam described Cooper as affable, sharp and intelligent. He recalled visiting her house on many occasions when she would cook collard greens and sweet potato pies.
Salaam told CNN he believes Cooper galvanized the voting rights movement because she stood up against a White sheriff -- something many Black Americans were afraid to do in the Jim Crow South.
“It was risky, it was down-right life-threatening and dangerous,” Salaam said. “But she gave the formula for success. If the people had maintained that fear they would have been paralyzed.”
An earlier headline on this story had the wrong year of birth for Annie Lee Cooper. It was 1910.
Early Life of Garrett Morgan
The son of a formerly enslaved man and woman, Garrett Augustus Morgan was born in Claysville, Kentucky, on March 4, 1877. His mother was of Native American, Black, and white descent (her father was a minister named Rev. Garrett Reed), and his father, was half-Black and half-white, the son of the Confederate Colonel John Hunt Morgan, who led Morgan's Raiders in the Civil War. Garrett was the seventh of 11 children, and his early childhood was spent attending school and working on the family farm with his brothers and sisters. While still a teenager, he left Kentucky and moved north to Cincinnati, Ohio, in search of opportunities.
Although Morgan's formal education never took him beyond elementary school, he worked to give himself an education, hiring a tutor while living in Cincinnati and continuing his studies in English grammar. In 1895, Morgan moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he went to work as a sewing machine repairman for a clothing manufacturer, teaching himself as much as he could about sewing machinery and experimenting with the process. Word of his experiments and his proficiency for fixing things traveled fast, and he worked for numerous manufacturing firms in the Cleveland area.
In 1907, the inventor opened his sewing equipment and repair shop. It was the first of several businesses he would establish. In 1909, he expanded the enterprise to include a tailoring shop that employed 32 people. The new company turned out coats, suits, and dresses, all sewn with equipment that Morgan himself had made.
Morgan married twice, first to Madge Nelson in 1896; they were divorced in 1898. In 1908 he married Mary Anna Hasek, a seamstress from Bohemia: It was one of the earliest interracial marriages in Cleveland. They had three children, John P., Garrett A., Jr., and Cosmo H. Morgan.
In 1914, Morgan was awarded two patents for the invention of an early gas mask, the Safety Hood and Smoke Protector. He manufactured the mask and sold it nationally and internationally through the National Safety Device Company, or Nadsco, using a marketing strategy to avoid Jim Crow discrimination—what historian Lisa Cook calls "anonymity by dissociation." At the time, entrepreneurs sold their inventions by conducting live demonstrations. Morgan appeared in these events to the general public, with municipal fire departments, and city officials representing himself as his assistant—a Native American man called "Big Chief Mason." In the South, Morgan hired whites, sometimes public safety professionals, to stage demonstrations for him. His newspaper advertisements featured smartly dressed white male models.
The gas mask proved very popular: New York City quickly adopted the mask, and, eventually, 500 cities followed suit. In 1916, a refined model of Morgan's gas mask was awarded a gold medal at the International Exposition of Sanitation and Safety and another gold medal from the International Association of Fire Chiefs.
On July 25, 1916, Morgan made national news for using his gas mask to rescue men trapped during an explosion in an underground tunnel located 250 feet beneath Lake Erie. No one had been able to reach the men: Eleven of them had died as had ten others attempting to rescue them. Called in the middle of the night six hours after the incident, Morgan and a team of volunteers donned the new "gas masks," brought two workers out alive, and recovered the bodies of 17 others. He personally gave artificial respiration to one of the men he rescued.
Afterward, Morgan's company received many additional requests from fire departments around the country that wished to purchase the new masks. However, the national news contained photographs of him, and officials in many southern cities canceled their existing orders when they discovered he was Black.
In 1917, the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission reviewed the reports of heroism displayed during the disaster. Based on news reports that downplayed Morgan's role, the Carnegie board decided to give the prestigious "Hero" award to a minor figure in the rescue effort who was white, rather than to Morgan. Morgan protested, but the Carnegie Institution said he hadn't risked as much as the other person had because he had safety equipment.
Some reports say the Morgan gas mask was modified and used in World War I after the Germans unleashed chemical warfare at Ypres on April 22, 1915, although there's no strong evidence for it. Despite Morgan's popularity in the United States, there were dozens of other masks on the market by then, and most used in WWI were of English or French manufacture.
In 1914, Morgan was awarded two patents for the invention of an early gas mask, the Safety Hood and Smoke Protector. He manufactured the mask and sold it nationally and internationally through the National Safety Device Company, or Nadsco, using a marketing strategy to avoid Jim Crow discrimination—what historian Lisa Cook calls "anonymity by dissociation." At the time, entrepreneurs sold their inventions by conducting live demonstrations. Morgan appeared in these events to the general public, with municipal fire departments, and city officials representing himself as his assistant—a Native American man called "Big Chief Mason." In the South, Morgan hired whites, sometimes public safety professionals, to stage demonstrations for him. His newspaper advertisements featured smartly dressed white male models.
The Transatlantic
Slave Trade
Between 1501 and 1867, nearly 13 million African people were kidnapped, forced onto European and American ships, and trafficked across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas, including the British, French, and Spanish colonies that would later comprise the United States.
Two million people died during the barbaric Middle Passage.
Between 1501 and 1867, nearly 13 million African people were kidnapped, forced onto European and American ships, and trafficked across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas, including the British, French, and Spanish colonies that would later comprise the United States.
Two million people died during the barbaric Middle Passage.
The global trafficking that separated millions of women, men, and children from their homes, families, and cultures destabilized African countries and left them vulnerable to conquest, colonization, and violence for centuries.
And in the Americas, a caste system based on race and color emerged in tandem with legal and political systems to codify white supremacy and enshrine enslavement as a permanent and hereditary status. That racial hierarchy continues to haunt our nation today.
Coastal communities across the U.S. were permanently shaped by the trafficking of African people. Local economies in New England, Boston, New York City, the Mid-Atlantic, Virginia, Richmond, the Carolinas, Charleston, Savannah, the Deep South, and New Orleans were built around the enslavement of Black people.
Kidnapping, trafficking, abusing, and dehumanizing African people and their descendants created generational wealth for Europeans and white Americans across occupations and industries, from early European colonists to priests and popes, shipbuilders to rum and textile producers, bankers to insurers.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade generated the capital that was used to build some of America’s greatest cities and most successful companies. Many families, businesses, and institutions continue to benefit today from the enormous wealth produced by enslavement, but few have acknowledged or honestly confronted this history
Beginning in the 17th century, millions of African people were kidnapped, enslaved, and shipped across the Atlantic to the Americas under horrific conditions. Nearly two million people died at sea during the agonizing journey.
For the next two centuries, the enslavement of Black people in the United States created wealth, opportunity, and prosperity for millions of Americans. As American slavery evolved, an elaborate and enduring mythology about the inferiority of Black people was created to legitimate, perpetuate, and defend slavery. This mythology survived slavery’s formal abolition following the Civil War
In the South, where the enslavement of Black people was widely embraced, resistance to ending slavery persisted for another century after the 13th Amendment passed in 1865. Today, 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, very little has been done to address the legacy of slavery and its meaning in contemporary life.
In many communities like Montgomery, Alabama—which by 1860 was the capital of the domestic slave trade in Alabama—there is little understanding of the slave trade, slavery, or the longstanding effort to sustain the racial hierarchy that slavery created. In fact, an alternative narrative has emerged in many Southern communities that celebrates the slavery era, honors slavery’s principal proponents and defenders, and refuses to acknowledge or address the problems created by the legacy of slavery.
Between 1501 and 1867, nearly 13 million African people were kidnapped, forced onto European and American ships, and trafficked across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas, including the British, French, and Spanish colonies that would later comprise the United States.
Two million people died during the barbaric Middle Passage.
The global trafficking that separated millions of women, men, and children from their homes, families, and cultures destabilized African countries and left them vulnerable to conquest, colonization, and violence for centuries.
And in the Americas, a caste system based on race and color emerged in tandem with legal and political systems to codify white supremacy and enshrine enslavement as a permanent and hereditary status. That racial hierarchy continues to haunt our nation today.
During Reconstruction, the 12-year period following the Civil War, lawlessness and violence perpetrated by white leaders created an American future of racial hierarchy, white supremacy, and Jim Crow laws—an era from which our nation has yet to recover.
EJI has documented nearly 2,000 more confirmed racial terror lynchings of Black people by white mobs between 1865 and 1876. Thousands more were attacked, sexually assaulted, and terrorized by white mobs and individuals who were shielded from arrest and prosecution.
White perpetrators of lawless violence against formerly enslaved people were almost never held accountable—instead, they were often celebrated. Emboldened Confederate veterans and former enslavers organized a reign of terror that effectively nullified constitutional amendments designed to provide Black people with equal protection and the right to vote.
In a series of devastating opinions, the Supreme Court blocked Congressional efforts to protect formerly enslaved people. The Court ceded control to the same white Southerners who used terror and violence to stop Black political participation, upholding laws and practices that codified racial hierarchy and embracing a new constitutional order defined by “states’ rights.”
Within a decade after the Civil War, Congress began to abandon the promise of assistance to millions of formerly enslaved Black people. Violence, mass lynchings, and lawlessness enabled white Southerners to create a regime of white supremacy and Black disenfranchisement alongside a new economic order that continued to exploit Black labor.
White officials in the North and West similarly rejected racial equality, codified racial discrimination, and occasionally embraced the same tactics of violent control seen in the South.
Racial Terror Lynching
Lynching emerged as a vicious tool of racial control in the South after the Civil War. Lynchings were violent and public events designed to terrorize all Black people in order to re-establish white supremacy and suppress Black civil rights.
This was not “frontier justice” carried out by a few vigilantes or extremists. Instead, many African Americans were tortured to death in front of picnicking spectators for things like bumping into a white person, wearing their military uniforms, or not using the appropriate title when addressing a white person.
Lynch mobs included elected officials and prominent citizens. White people were celebrated—not arrested—for torturing and killing Black people. Spectators bought body parts as souvenirs and posed with hanging corpses for picture postcards to mail to their loved ones.
EJI has documented 4,084 racial terror lynchings in 12 Southern states between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950, which is at least 800 more lynchings in these states than previously reported. EJI has also documented more than 300 racial terror lynchings in other states during this time period. In addition, for all the documented lynchings covered in newspaper reports, many racial terror lynchings went unreported and their victims remain unknown.
Lynching shaped the geographic, political, social, and economic conditions that African Americans experience today. Critically, racial terror lynching reinforced the belief that Black people are inherently guilty and dangerous. That belief underlies the racial inequality in our criminal justice system today. Mass incarceration, racially biased capital punishment, excessive and disproportionate sentencing of racial minorities, and police abuse of people of color reveal problems in American society that were shaped by the terror era.
We believe it is critically important to confront America’s history of racial terror lynching.
The story of the American civil rights movement is incomplete. We appropriately honor the activists who bravely challenged segregation, but we don’t talk about the widespread and violent opposition to racial equality.
Opposition to civil rights and racial equality was a mass movement. Most white Americans, especially in the South, supported segregation. Millions of white parents voted to close and defund public schools, transferred their children to private, white-only schools, and harassed and violently attacked Black students while their own children watched or participated.
Over the last 50 years, our political, social, and cultural institutions embraced elected officials, journalists, and white leaders who espoused racist ideas and supported white supremacy. White segregationists were not banished—they were elected and re-elected to prominent offices for decades after the civil rights movement.
Today more than ever, we need to acknowledge that most white Americans supported segregation—only a small minority of white Americans actively dissented from this widespread opposition to civil rights.
EJI’s online experience and our Legacy Museum use video footage from the segregation era to show how millions of white Americans arrested, beat, bombed, and terrorized civil rights demonstrators, including children. We profile the senators, governors, judges, writers, and ministers who led the movement to maintain segregation. And we expose the use of Confederate iconography to rally the opposition to racial equality with an interactive map showing thousands of Confederate monuments that were erected to maintain white supremacy long after the Civil War.
At the University of Cape Town Libraries, the vast and valuable Special Collections Africana, rare books, government publications, manuscript and audio-visual archives were housed in the historic Jagger Library until 18 April 2021, when the building was razed by a runaway wildfire. With the reading room and galleries gutted by flames, and the basements flooded, the losses to the collection were extensive, representing a tragic and irreparable loss to South African research and historiography. While salvage and recovery efforts are ongoing, this article outlines what was lost by fire. It provides a snapshot of what was in the reading room at the time of the fire, and details the losses as far as possible – these include the prized published collections housed in the reading room and galleries, as well as the miscellany of archival materials situated on the tables and reserve shelving in the building at the time of the fire.
The wildfire that devastated parts of the University of Cape Town on Sunday 18 April 2021 took several days to extinguish. Students and staff were evacuated from the site, and the academic project was paused for a week. The fire was responsible for massive personal losses to many individuals and departments at the university, especially those whose residences or offices were destroyed by fire. On the upper campus, the Jagger Library, HW Pearson Building, Fuller residence and Smuts residence were badly damaged by the fire. On the lower campus, Cadbol House and La Grotta were destroyed. The damage extended beyond these buildings – the historic Rhodes Memorial restaurant and Mostert’s Mill were burnt, alongside great swathes of mountainside. The full extent of damage to the university is beyond our scope, and full recovery will take years of commitment and investment. The Jagger Library was entirely gutted, and everything above ground was entirely destroyed. It was only on Tuesday 21 April, after the site had been ‘deemed safe by structural engineers to enter’ that we could establish the extent of destruction to the building and assets therein (Crowster Reference Crowster2021: 29). The salvage and recovery project of the surviving Special Collections was soon formalized according to disaster management protocols. It took a few weeks of intense salvage operations to clear the basements of surviving stock. UCT Libraries is committed to their recovery, with plans to rebuild and recover. A Conservation Unit has been established, and the Libraries’ Special Collections department, including both the archive and library teams, has been fully engaged in various processes and projects towards reconciling surviving stock in order to make it available to users
the jagger library
The loss of the Reading Room garnered universal attention, and within days the Jagger Library was added to the Wikipedia ‘List of Destroyed Libraries’.Footnote2 The Special Collections Managers, Mandy Noble and Michal Singer, had the unenviable, heart-breaking task of surveying the burnt-out building with technical staff to assess what was lost and what had possibly survived. We had found hope in the not-knowing; until we knew for certain, the possibility remained that something had survived. Walking through the burnt-out Reading Room was indescribable – a visual spectre. We walked up the staircase, over the surviving mosaics restored in 2012, past the burnt-out paintings so carefully selected, and through the double-door entrance into the Jagger Reading Room. The space had been gutted; the Information Desk in the middle of the room was a carcass, surrounded by dunes of black ash and debris. We saw the markings of the fire, ghoulishly etched into the walls and surfaces that remained. What had once been a haven for scholars was now a construction site, with rubble made up of burnt and fused remnants of the African Studies Collection, which scattered in the wind that day across the southern suburbs of Cape Town (Figure 2a and Figure 2b).
The Jagger Library served as the main library building for the University of Cape Town when it moved to the Groote Schuur Campus – the upper campus. The library was built in 1930, and formally opened in 1931. Its construction and development was established almost entirely through one benefactor, businessman and cabinet minister, J. W. Jagger, who also served as chair of the university’s finance committee (Phillips Reference Phillips1993: 159). He passed away in 1930, but his widow formally opened the library the following year. The Jagger Library later served as a short loan library, and from 2000 it became the new home of the African Studies Library. It was eventually restored in 2012.
It was put back to the way it had been when it was first built as a reading room in the 1930s …. It got its polished corkwood floors back, and the walls went back to the original paint, painstakingly identified, under layers of institutional gloss … every year, we’d take students and parents through the modern, cutting-edge library, with its glass and electronics, and the clinical efficiency of a bank, until at last they reached this reading room. And I would watch them thinking, pretty much universally, ‘Ah. Now this is what I was expecting from a university library’ (D’Angelo Reference D’Angelo2021) (Figure 3).
losing the reading room
working out the losses
In the days immediately following the fire, the Special Collections team outlined a report on what was in the Reading Room and where it was – what survived, and what did not. Under a section of the report entitled ‘Destroyed by Fire – What We Know’ the losses were first formally outlined:
[T]he vast majority of the African Studies Published Print Collection, the entire African Studies Film Collection, all the UCT University Calendars, some of the most important and heavily used Government Publications documents from South Africa and across the continent, and Manuscripts kept in the Reading Room for processing or digitization, were utterly destroyed. The Special Collections Archives Office, situated on the University Avenue side of the building, was engulfed and destroyed, and therein we have lost all the administrative records related to the archives – as well as the institutional records containing the history of UCT Libraries. The fire door system in the Libraries worked well when deployed – and so the damage extends up untilthe Glass Stacks and the shelving in that area. This includes the vast collection of African Studies Published Collections kept there, as well as Government Publications and unprocessed donations of manuscript collections (UCT Special Collections 2021) (Figure 4).
Once we were able to access the building we found areas that had not been touched by the fire but had suffered water damage to a greater or lesser extent. Subsequently, small sections of the collections were found to have survived, but these were negligible in comparison with the losses, and we had no idea how far the collections in the basements were damaged. The Libraries Executive Director urged staff not to engage in speculation or conjecture about the losses. We also felt compelled to protect and respect the interests of those affected by the losses directly, including creators and copyright holders, as well as depositors and their descendants, by ensuring that what we reported was verified, and so this report includes only what we know to be destroyed. Wherever possible donors or stakeholders impacted by losses to the published or unpublished collections have been personally informed with detailed letters outlining the status of their specific collection. This could not be finalized in all cases owing to the loss during the fire of administrative records describing the contents and contact details of donors, the fact that some are deceased, or that structures and office-bearers of organizations that created institutional records have changed. In some cases, determining losses to unprocessed materials was something of a forensic exercise, involving reference to correspondence, electronic acquisition spreadsheets, and even digital copies of box labels which had captured such information as donor names and contact details, collection names, and the physical extent and sequence of collections stored on shelves. We were also able to reach out to retired department heads and former staff members to try to identify missing information.
losing institutional memory
The archive was made up of several thousand discrete collections donated over a period of seven decades, starting when the Manuscripts and Archives Department was first established in 1953, following the initial collection development efforts of Dr R. F. M. Immelman, who served as the University Librarian at UCT from 1940 to 1970. New deposits to the archive were entered into accession registers, in the form of two large minute books, to record their provenance and assign collection numbers.Footnote3 These registers were still in use at the time of the fire, kept in the Reading Room, and their destruction represents a significant loss of institutional memory for archival collections in Special Collections. These administrative records were maintained for each archival collection, including deeds of gift and related correspondence and information. They were vital to documenting the provenance of each individual archival collection. These were kept in filing cabinets in the Archives Office, which mostly protected them from the fire. Out of approximately 1600 collections, the folders for 516 collections were lost (Figure 5).
We also lost our historical chronological donation registers of books and archives donated to UCT Libraries. These were beautiful, red-bound volumes, transferred to Special Collections for safekeeping, and kept in the Reading Room. They contained detailed, itemized lists of donations of both published and primary source materials to UCT Libraries, recorded in forty-five chronological volumes. This compounds the loss of the administrative records; the donation registers would have provided an alternative source on the provenance of archival collections, and also the source for recording the provenance of book donations to Special Collections, including Rare and Antiquarian Book Collections. Special Collections’ internal archives, including institutional records of the African Studies Library, Manuscripts and Archives Department, the Rare and Antiquarian Book Department, and other related records, were lost. As the logical space for internal record keeping, over the years many institutional records of the Libraries had been deposited in Manuscripts and Archives. These included the papers of Dr Immelman, subsequent university librarians and archivists. These were being sorted and arranged at the time of the fire.
Seventy-two card index cabinet drawers were destroyed in the Reading Room. The indices for the All Things UCT Collection, the MacMillan Photograph Collection and individual UCT-related published articles were destroyed. This interrupted the ongoing efforts of archivists to digitalize the card catalogues, posing a significant challenge to accessing those collections. The university’s annual handbooks – also referred to as calendars, yearbooks or prospectuses – served as a snapshot of the functioning of the institution over time. There was a full set in the Reading Room which was destroyed. This included one hundred volumes relating to the University of Cape Town between 1918 and 2018 and about twenty volumes relating to its predecessor, the South African College, from 1829 to 1918. It included details of staff by faculty and department, syllabi for all courses offered at a given time, as well as requirements for admission, rules, and fees. A process is currently underway to consolidate and digitize the duplicate copies for certain years that were in storage in Special Collections and the university’s Administrative Archives.
losing the african
studies collection
The Jagger Reading Room was home to the African Studies Collection – a significant collection of published materials relating to South Africa and Southern Africa. The scope of the collection was recently expanded to include materials from West and East Africa including French- and Portuguese-speaking countries. The collection was especially rich in history, languages, literature, politics, arts, architecture, social studies, economics, education, religion and development studies. As it was a valuable research collection, it contained both historical and contemporary materials giving researchers access to the continent’s past and current conditions. In addition to the monographs and books, the collection included the African Film Collection comprising 3500 films on VHS tapes and DVDs sourced from across the continent and featuring the work of independent filmmakers. The entire African Film Collection on DVD was destroyed, but thankfully the films on VHS were salvaged and those that did not suffer from water damage are in the process of being digitized.
The African Studies Book Collection had approximately 73,500 books at the time of the fire. It is estimated that more than half of the collection was destroyed – everything that was shelved in the Reading Room and the two upper galleries. This included books in the social sciences, including anthropology, media studies, economics, development studies, political studies, gender studies, education, languages and linguistics, law, religious studies and philosophy. Tragically, it included many of the 2000 titles that had been specifically sourced from French- and Portuguese-speaking Africa in the preceding decade. Under the leadership of Ms Joan Rapp, Executive Director of the Libraries, Dr Colin Darch was tasked with travelling to African countries specifically to purchase materials from these countries. Between 2001 and 2009, Dr Darch, an academic and researcher employed by the Libraries, travelled to Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Kenya, Cameroon and Senegal to purchase books that would otherwise have been impossible to source through traditional collection development methods – these were ‘things you can’t order by post’ (Darch Reference Darch2007). Dr Darch was in a unique position to undertake these trips as he was fluent in Portuguese, French and Swahili. He also had local contacts in the countries visited. UCT Libraries, specifically the African Studies Collection, was in many instances the only library in Africa to own these titles. As a result, researchers from across the continent visited Special Collections to make use of these resources (Figure 6).
Lost while servicing research requests
The Reading Room was a large space with many tables, ideal to accommodate the requisite social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic to enable staff members to service research requests. One of the greatest singular losses to the archive was the destruction of 90 per cent of the Black and Fagg Architectural Collection, a set of original architectural drawings of well-known Cape-based structures produced by the prominent architectural company Black and Fagg. The collection had been laid out on the tables only a week before the fire to service a research request. Most drawings dated between 1895 and 1907, but there were drawings as recent as the 1930s. Out of ten large oversize portfolios containing an estimated total of 1000 drawings, only the last portfolio, containing about 100 drawings, survived. These contents relate to numerous Standard Bank branches. Black and Fagg were awarded the first of the CPIA/Argus Bronze Medals in 1929 for the Standard Bank building situated between Adderley and St George’s Streets in Cape Town. Another, more recent, architectural collection was also adversely impacted – the Roelof Uytenbogaardt Papers, containing records of certain of the architectural projects of this prolific and influential South African architect and UCT academic. The records of several projects, comprising seven archival boxes, had been used shortly before the fire and were thus destroyed. Another collection lost under similar circumstances was a wooden trunk containing the photographic record of Dr Alex du Toit’s geological research, forming part of the Alex du Toit Papers. As an internationally renowned geologist associated with UCT, du Toit’s work mapping the Karoo region of South Africa through the complete stratigraphy directly contributed to the advancement of continental drift theory and by extension indirectly to plate tectonic theory (Chetty Reference Chetty2021: 151). While his textual collection has been widely used, the trunk of photographs was a later addition by a great-nephew, containing landscape images taken throughout Southern Africa, South America, and other parts of the world. They have been consulted for various purposes including plant ecology and vegetation change over time through time-lapse photography comparison. The loss of this collection had a direct impact on research about Alex du Toit and his work.
Shortly before lockdown, several museum objects had been retrieved from the Special Collections off-site strong room at the request of a course convenor of the Michaelis School of Fine Arts’ Curating the Archive Object Ecologies course. Students had visited to view the objects to make selections for their student projects. As the strong room was inaccessible over lockdown, the objects remained in a secure area of the Reading Room and were destroyed by fire. This included some unique items, namely a nineteenth-century travelling brass microscope in a wooden box and a 300-centimetre-long roll of an echo-sounding chart from the maiden voyage of Swedish trans-Atlantic line vessel Kanangoora, passing over Aliwal Shoal near Umkomaas, South Africa, 1939. It also included a silver-plated hand mirror engraved from ‘Sweet Workers Union, C.T. 1940’ and a hairbrush from ‘E.C.W.U. Paarl, 7.10.53’ that belonged to renowned South African trade unionist Ray Alexander Simons.
Several objects destroyed related directly to the history of the university. These had been on display in honour of the installation of the new Chancellor in March 2020, until the event was postponed owing to the lockdown. Sadly this included the engraved ceremonial key used for the official opening of the Jagger Library on 1 October 1931 by the widow of J. W. Jagger. It also included a fountain pen used by Queen Elizabeth, consort of George VI, to sign the visitors’ book in the Librarian’s office in the Jagger Library when an honorary Doctorate in Laws was conferred on her in 1947. Two silver trowels were also on display – they commemorated the laying of the foundation stone of the Bolus Herbarium on 26 January 1938 by Vice-Chancellor Sir J. Carruthers Beattie. Another miniature trowel engraved with the university motto, Spes Bona, and the date, 1 May 1925, was believed to have been used by the Prince of Wales, in his capacity as Chancellor, who laid the foundation stone of the Men’s Residence, the first building to be constructed on UCT’s new Groote Schuur Campus (Figure 7).
"Inspection Roll of Negroes" Book No. 1
The Historical Significance of Doulas and Midwives
In 2019, 98.6% of women in the United States gave birth to children in hospitals according to the CDC. We may overlook the benefits of having a prepared maternity ward staffed with licensed doctors and nurses today, but these vital tools and personnel were not (and in many remote rural locations still aren’t) available to everyone. Before the 1930’s women typically gave birth at home surrounded by relatives, female friends, and midwives.
These attendants were responsible not only for supporting the mother emotionally through the pain of labor, but also for preparing necessary tools and supplies, ensuring general hygiene, administering medicine, and monitoring both the woman and child long before and after birth. In more recent instances, midwives can also be accompanied by Doulas, who focused on the needs of the mother by offering mental, physical, and emotional support. These birth workers traditionally occupied a prominent position in African American communities, serving as healers and spiritual leaders, and maintaining extensive social networks.
This Black History Month, the National Museum of African American History and Culture recognizes the importance of Black Health and Wellness. In this blog, we celebrate the unsung work of birth workers like midwives and doulas by exploring their historical and cultural legacy. In our follow-up blog, we’ll explore the challenges faced today by contemporary Doulas and Midwives.
Today, Midwives are trained healthcare providers who operate both at birthing centers, hospitals, and private residences to care for and support healthy mothers and newborns before, after, and during childbirth. However, midwifery has existed for centuries prior to its earliest recorded practice in the United States. Experienced midwives were among the many enslaved individuals who survived the middle passage and continued to practice and train others as the primary source of birth care throughout the country.
Early African American midwives were important members of their community, even among enslaved individuals. Slave owners used these medical practitioners to ensure the health of their reproducing enslaved women and their newborn infants to expand their labor force. It was also common for midwives to attend to the slave master’s wives during birth as well. A good midwife might receive pay for their labor and be allowed to journey long distances to work, granting them a level of mobility that was rare for most enslaved individuals. As a result, these medical practitioners could maintain community connections and ancestry records even when households disbanded and members of the family were sold off.
After Emancipation, African-American midwives, often known as “Granny Midwives,” continued to work with both black and white women in rural and remote parts of the South. Often hospitals were rarely accessible and there were few willing or trained doctors available to serve these populations, making midwives the only viable option for expectant mothers. However, the role of the midwife would change in the latter half of the twentieth century as the practice of delivering babies became a medical specialty.
Traditionally, midwifery operated as a female-dominated family profession or an apprenticeship, with knowledge passed down from generation to generation. Obstetrics, the medical science that deals with pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period, was initially shunned by predominantly male medical practitioners. Culturally, it was considered taboo for a man to be present at a birth.
However, as privatized medicine grew in popularity in the United States, out-of-hospital births fell from nearly 100% to 44% by 1940. Unfortunately, this change was mostly fueled by general medical practitioners whose inadequate obstetric education, general lack of hygiene, and unsafe delivery practices created high maternal mortality rates. The rise in mostly preventable deaths compelled the government to intervene, subjecting midwives and physicians alike to state health regulations.
Many midwives adapted to this change, embracing the opportunity to care for their patients with the benefit of formalized training programs. This was the case with Amanda Carey Carter, a fourth-generation midwife who delivered both black and white babies in the rural Piedmont region of Virginia from the 1950s to the 1980s. To obtain a midwifery permit in Virginia, Carter was required to register with the local registrar, attend classes in safety and hygiene, provide one or more letters of recommendation from local physicians, report all births, and adhere to safety rules outlined in the Midwife Manual provided by the Department of Health. In a speech delivered at Longwood University in the early 1980s, Carter remarked proudly at maintaining the license she acquired in 1952.
Midwives often faced competition and exclusion from their practice by physicians who sought to exclude them from the profession. However, many midwives like Mary Francis Hill Coley, a midwife in Albany, Georgia, who had delivered over 3,000 babies, utilized the tools and training of the mostly white medical establishment to care for her most at-risk patients. In the 1953 documentary, “All My Babies,” Coley demonstrated how a well-trained lay midwife could deliver healthy babies even in the poorest conditions while acting as an intermediary between patients, nurses, physicians, and members of the local community.
modern birth workers
Increased regulation and medical advances (including the use of antibiotics, oxytocin, and safe blood transfusions) helped decrease the maternal mortality rate by 71% from 1939-1948. However, the move to hospital births also accompanied a shifting perspective from a natural, if risky, event to an illness. Medical professionals began to rely heavily on intervention methods (including cesarean deliveries, induction, epidural, artificially rupturing membranes, and the episiotomy), that may not have been medically necessary in otherwise low-risk pregnancies.
In response to fears stoked by the home birth movement of the 1970s and the need for dedicated emotional support, many expectant mothers turned to Doulas, leading to their popularization in the 1980s. Women began to invite dedicated female friends, their childbirth instructors, or obstetrical nurses to help them during labor. In 1992, the non-profit organization Doulas of North America (later renamed DONA International) was founded and became the first organization to train and certify doulas.
A doula is not considered a healthcare professional and cannot provide medical care or advice, but acts mainly as a coach and companion. In contrast to medically trained birthing staff, who may by necessity split their attention between multiple patients, Doulas provide constant communication and encouragement during labor. This focused attention can often empower expectant mothers to increase their self-efficacy and result in more satisfying experiences during labor, birth, and postpartum. According to the CDC, Doula-assisted mothers were four times less likely to have a low birth weight baby, two times less likely to experience a birth complication involving themselves or their baby, and significantly more likely to initiate breastfeeding.
Today the landscape of medicine for expectant mothers is very different from decades past. Increased access to medical care in the last century has made it easier to have a hospital birth surrounded by medical professionals, which could reduce the necessity of a Midwife or Doula. According to the CDC, in 2019, 9.8% of births in the United States were performed with the help of a Certified Nurse Midwife. However, many women still continue to seek out the help of a registered Midwife or Doula regardless of the location of their planned birth.
In the United States, Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than White women. These disparities are often due to variation in quality healthcare, underlying chronic conditions, structural racism, and implicit bias. Such was the case with professional tennis player, Serena Williams, who nearly died the day after giving birth to her daughter when hospital staff dismissed her concerns that she was suffering from a pulmonary embolism.
Inspection Roll of Negroes Book No. 2
“The Book of Negroes” is a series of documents listing persons of African ancestry who were evacuated from the United States at the end of the American Revolution. One copy is held with the Guy Carlton Papers in The National Archives of Great Britain in London, England. The second copy, titled “Inspection Roll of Negroes New York, New York City Book No. 1 April 23-September 13, 1783,” is held in the United States National Archives in Washington, D.C. These rolls were compiled over a six month period by a group of British and American representatives who convened each Wednesday from April to September, 1783 at the Queens Head Tavern owned by Samuel Fraunces, a free black resident of New York who was born in St. Catherine’s, Jamaica.
The Book of Negroes was completed prior to November 25, 1783, which was designated as the date the British Army and Loyalists (pro-British residents of New York and other colonies) would depart for Canada. American slaveholders wanted to take possession of their human property who had fled to the British and whom they believed were promised to be repatriated by the Paris Peace Treaty of November 1782, which recognized American independence and officially ended the fighting between British and American forces. Sir Guy Carlton, the British commander in charge of the negotiations, however vowed that he would not surrender human property stating it was “A dishonorable violation of public faith.” Carlton proposed instead to compensate slave owners for their loss of property but no known compensation was made by Great Britain.
Samuel Jones, who later became comptroller for New York State, signed the documents on behalf of the United States. Signing for Loyalists were W.L. Smith, a future Chief Justice of the Canadian Supreme Court, along with Lt. Colonel Richard Armstrong of the Queen’s Rangers and Lt. Alexander McMillin of DeLancy’s 1st battalion. Armstrong and McMillan settled in New Brunswick along with many black Loyalists.
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The Book of Negroes, a document of over 200 pages, consisted of a ledger of individuals and where possible, short accounts of individual lives which included country of origin, free or enslaved status, dates, indentures, owners, status of owners (whether they were Loyalists or Patriots), descriptions of appearance, parents, race, and age. The informants included slave owners wanting compensation for runaways, military officers in command of black Loyalist regiments, civilian Loyalists, and those with freedom papers.
It is estimated that about 3,500 free black Loyalists left New York City with the total group of 35,000 bound for New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. There were also approximately 1,500 enslaved individuals who belonged to slaveholding Loyalists. Thus persons of African ancestry comprised nearly 15 percent of the Loyalist exodus to Canada.
White Mob Lynches Lint Shaw in Georgia Eight Hours Before Trial
On April 28, 1936, a mob of 40 white men in Colbert, Georgia, shot a Black farmer named Lint Shaw to death just eight hours before he was scheduled to stand trial on allegations of attempting to assault two white women.
During the era of racial terror, accusations of “attempted assault” lodged against Black men were often based on merely looking at or accidentally bumping into a white woman, smiling, winking, getting too close, or being alone with a white woman in the wrong place. The deep racial hostility permeating Southern society meant that accusations lodged against Black people—especially against Black men by white women or girls—were rarely subject to serious scrutiny by the police, press, or lynch mobs.
Following his arrest, Mr. Shaw was at constant risk of lynching and was moved multiple times to avoid mob attack. During a transfer to the jail at Danielsville, Georgia, Mr. Shaw was shot twice and rushed to Atlanta for protection and medical attention. Mr. Shaw survived those injuries and was then returned to Danielsville to await trial, but a threatening mob again led him to be transferred. While Mr. Shaw was being transported back to the jail on April 28, a group of angry men seized him. The mob riddled Mr. Shaw's body with bullets and tied his corpse to a pine tree near a creek in Colbert, Georgia.
Lint Shaw was one of at least six African American victims of racial terror lynching killed in Madison County, Georgia. No one was ever prosecuted for his murder.
"He was perhaps targeted because he was accomplished, because he had accumulated some property and was hard-working," said Burnham.
It takes months to gather the facts -- legal documents, death certificates, photographs, interviewing survivors of victims and perpetrators. So far students have investigated more than 500 cases.
"We restore a measure of justice," said Burnham. "Restoring justice includes restoring information about what happened."
By the time Billie Holiday sang her lynching protest song "Strange Fruit" in 1939, racially motivated murders were at their peak. The Equal Justice Initiative reports more than 4,300 African Americans were lynched by 1950.
"This is not just my family history, this is American history," said Lewis. "Through the work of this project, it's become abundantly clear to me that he is more than this photo. Lent's life and his legacy is greater than his lynching."
It's a painful but crucial lesson: Before the whole story can ever be told, it first must be discovered.
Black man found dead against tree with rope around his neck in NC: 'Not a lynching,' sheriff says
HENDERSON, N.C. (WTVD) -- The investigation into a Chicago man's death in North Carolina continues as questions and rumors surrounding it grow, especially on social media.
Javion Magee, a 21-year-old truck driver from the Chicago area, was found dead in a rural area off Vanco Mill Road on Wednesday. Investigators said he was not far from his truck, leaning with his back up against a tree and a rope around his neck. Magee was in Henderson making a delivery to the Walmart distribution center.
Magee's family, who lives in Chicago, is upset and demanding answers. They are calling for transparency and more answers from the Vance County Sheriff's Office about what happened.
On Friday, Sheriff Curtis R. Brame told ABC11 his office was conducting a death investigation.
Brame told ABC11 that there were no signs of foul play in Magee's death. He said Magee went to a nearby Walmart shortly before he died. That is where he is believed to have bought the rope found around his neck. When ABC11 asked more about that, Brame declined to elaborate. In response to social media rumors, the sheriff continued to reiterate that Magee's death was not a lynching.
"I understand there's over 1,000 hits on TikTok (accusing) the sheriff's office of not being transparent, not providing information to the family and that is not true," Brame said. "There's been information put out there that there's a lynching in Vance County. There is not a lynching in Vance County. The young man was not dangling from a tree. He was not swinging from a tree. The rope was wrapped around his neck. It was not a noose. There was not a knot in the rope, so therefore, it was not a lynching here in Vance County."
Nearly a thousand miles away, Magee's family wasn't convinced.
"A lot of this stuff does not pass the smell test and that's a problem. The entire family is completely mortified and they are hurt, they are. They have a lot of questions and they just want to know what happened to their loved one." said family spokesperson Candice Matthews.
Khalil Gay, who lives in Henderson, said, "I mean, honestly, I think we have to acknowledge that, No. 1, we do live in the South, and there's a deep history of racism and racist acts. And so people are obviously concerned about that."
Magee's body has been sent to the medical examiner for an autopsy to officially determine the cause of death.
Preliminary Autopsy Results
Late Friday, Brame shared new information about Magee's preliminary autopsy. He said the results have been shared with the family. The preliminary results showed no concrete determination of the cause of Magee's death. There were no obvious signs of defensive wounds or scars on his limbs including arms and legs. The autopsy showed there were signs of hemorrhaging detected around the soft part of Magee's neck.
Brame said his office is waiting for the toxicology report to come back, which could take a little longer.
"We're going down every avenue, every aspect of all the information. We are tracking the company to try and get his GPS reading," Brame said.
Editor's note: The two investigating agencies in this case are the Vance County Sheriff's Office and SBI.
Every Opportunity
A Timeline of Racial Progress in the U.S., and the Lack of It, Through the Years
It seems like it takes something truly horrible, like the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, George Floyd , Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, to remind Americans how persistent and pervasive racism is in America.
It shouldn't be a surprise. Slavery and racism are woven into the history of our country. Even the U.S. Constitution, perhaps the most profound and foresighted political document in human history, required an awkward workaround to deal with slavery—agreeing to count slaves as 3/5ths of a human. It's impossible to look at that compromise with modern eyes and not be revulsed. It took the bloodiest war in American history to defeat the Confederacy and end slavery. And a century and a half later we're still arguing about whether to take down the Confederate battle flag.
Here are some, not all, of the seminal events in America's journey toward racial fairness. It shows progress that has been frustratingly slow and painfully hard-won. For example, the signing into law of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King occured in the same week. It seems as if it's a case of two steps forward, then one back, or perhaps even a step and a half forward, then one back.
After the Civil War and Reconstruction came the nightmare of Jim Crow, with segregation, lynchings and race riots of white men attacking African-American communities. There was tremendous progress from World War II through the sixties, followed by a backlash during the seventies and eighties. The election of Barack Obama created optimism that we'd become a post-racial society. But as with so many times before, recent events show we're not there yet. With retirement of the Mississippi flag, the Stars and Bars no longer flies over a statehouse. Although as always, there's work left to do—six state flags with Confederacy symbology still fly.
While Black Americans are mindful of the role of racism in America, most would also agree that meaningful change has occurred. The 13th , 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, Brown v. Board of Education, The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the War on Poverty, and other acts, signify that Americans have tried to ameliorate some of the awful and wretched things that African-Americans have confronted.
Moreover, despite the serious flaws inherent in the American project, it is also the case that we believe America can do better. Otherwise, why push toward freedom and justice?
Here are some of some of the important events—good and bad—on the long march for racial justice in America.
the story of mansa musa, timbuktu, islam, and
the mali empire
Mūsā I of Mali (died 1332/37?) was the mansa (emperor) of the West African empire of Mali from 1307 (or 1312). Mansa Mūsā left a realm notable for its extent and riches—he built the Great Mosque at Timbuktu—but he is best remembered in the Middle East and Europe for the splendour of his pilgrimage to Mecca (1324).
Mansa Mūsā, either the grandson or the grandnephew of Sundiata, the founder of his dynasty, came to the throne in 1307. In the 17th year of his reign (1324), he set out on his famous pilgrimage to Mecca. It was this pilgrimage that awakened the world to the stupendous wealth of Mali. Cairo and Mecca received this royal personage, whose glittering procession, in the superlatives employed by Arab chroniclers, almost put Africa’s sun to shame. Traveling from his capital of Niani on the upper Niger River to Walata (Oualâta, Mauritania) and on to Tuat (now in Algeria) before making his way to Cairo, Mansa Mūsā was accompanied by an impressive caravan consisting of 60,000 men including a personal retinue of 12,000 enslaved persons, all clad in brocade and Persian silk. The emperor himself rode on horseback and was directly preceded by 500 enslaved persons, each carrying a gold-adorned staff. In addition, Mansa Mūsā had a baggage train of 80 camels, each carrying 300 pounds of gold.
Mansa Mūsā’s prodigious generosity and piety, as well as the fine clothes and exemplary behaviour of his followers, did not fail to create a most-favourable impression. The Cairo that Mansa Mūsā visited was ruled by one of the greatest of the Mamlūk sultans, Al-Malik al-Nāṣir. The Black emperor’s great civility notwithstanding, the meeting between the two rulers might have ended in a serious diplomatic incident, for so absorbed was Mansa Mūsā in his religious observances that he was only with difficulty persuaded to pay a formal visit to the sultan. The historian al-ʿUmarī, who visited Cairo 12 years after the emperor’s visit, found the inhabitants of this city, with a population estimated at one million, still singing the praises of Mansa Mūsā. So lavish was the emperor in his spending that he flooded the Cairo market with gold, thereby causing such a decline in its value that the market some 12 years later had still not fully
Rulers of West African states had made pilgrimages to Mecca before Mansa Mūsā, but the effect of his flamboyant journey was to advertise both Mali and Mansa Mūsā well beyond the African continent and to stimulate a desire among the Muslim kingdoms of North Africa, and among many of European nations as well, to reach the source of this incredible wealth.
Mansa Mūsā, whose empire was one of the largest in the world at that time, is reported to have observed that it would take a year to travel from one end of his empire to the other. While this was probably an exaggeration, it is known that during his pilgrimage to Mecca one of his generals, Sagmandia (Sagaman-dir), extended the empire by capturing the Songhai capital of Gao. The Songhai kingdom measured several hundreds of miles across, so that the conquest meant the acquisition of a vast territory. The 14th-century traveller Ibn Baṭṭūṭah noted that it took about four months to travel from the northern borders of the Mali empire to Niani in the south.
The emperor was so overjoyed by the new acquisition that he decided to delay his return to Niani and to visit Gao instead, there to receive the personal submission of the Songhai king and take the king’s two sons as hostages. At both Gao and Timbuktu, a Songhai city almost rivalling Gao in importance, Mansa Mūsā commissioned Abū Isḥāq al-Sāḥilī, a Granada poet and architect who had travelled with him from Mecca, to build mosques. The Gao mosque was built of burnt bricks, which had not, until then, been used as a material for building in West Africa.
Under Mansa Mūsā, Timbuktu grew to be a very important commercial city having caravan connections with Egypt and with all other important trade centres in North Africa. Side by side with the encouragement of trade and commerce, learning and the arts received royal patronage. Scholars who were mainly interested in history, Qurʾānic theology, and law were to make the mosque of Sankore in Timbuktu a teaching centre and to lay the foundations of the University of Sankore. Mansa Mūsā probably died in 1332.
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Mali, trading empire that flourished in western Africa from the 13th to the 16th century. The Mali empire developed from the state of Kangaba, on the upper Niger River east of the Fouta Djallon, and is said to have been founded before 1000 ce. The Malinke inhabitants of Kangaba acted as middlemen in the gold trade during the later period of ancient Ghana. Their dislike of the Susu chief Sumanguru’s harsh but ineffective rule provoked the Malinke to revolt, and in 1230 Sundiata, the brother of Kangaba’s fugitive ruler, won a decisive victory against the Susu chief. (The name Mali absorbed the name Kangaba at about this time.)
In extending Mali’s rule beyond Kangaba’s narrow confines, Sundiata set a precedent for successive emperors. Imperial armies secured the gold-bearing lands of Bondu and Bambuk to the south, subdued the Diara in the northwest, and pushed along the Niger as far north as Lac Débo. Under Mansa Mūsā (1307–32?), Mali rose to the apogee of its power. He controlled the lands of the middle Niger, absorbed into his empire the trading cities of Timbuktu and Gao, and imposed his rule on such south Saharan cities as Walata and on the Taghaza region of salt deposits to the north. He extended the eastern boundaries of his empire as far as the Hausa people, and to the west he invaded Takrur and the lands of the Fulani and Tukulor peoples. In Morocco, Egypt, and elsewhere he sent ambassadors and imperial agents and on his return from a pilgrimage to Mecca (1324) established Egyptian scholars in both Timbuktu and Gao.
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By the 14th century the Dyula, or Wangara, as the Muslim traders of Mali came to be called, were active throughout western Africa. The tide that had carried Mali to success, however, impelled it ineluctably to decline. The empire outgrew its political and military strength: Gao rebelled (c. 1400); the Tuareg seized Walata and Timbuktu (1431); the peoples of Takrur and their neighbours (notably the Wolof) threw off their subjection; and the Mossi (in what is now Burkina Faso) began to harass their Mali overlord. By about 1550 Mali had ceased to be important as a political entity.
Sally Hemings
Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States (1801-1809), was born on a large Virginia estate run on slave labor. His marriage to the wealthy young widow Martha Wayles Skelton in 1772 more than doubled his property in land and enslaved workers.
In his public life, Jefferson made statements describing Black people as biologically inferior and claiming that a biracial American society was impossible. Despite those public comments, strong evidence has led historians to conclude that Jefferson had a longstanding relationship with an enslaved woman named Sally Hemings, and the two had as many as six children together.
Sally Hemings (her given name was probably Sarah) was born in 1773; she was the daughter of Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings, and her father was allegedly John Wayles, Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law. She came into Jefferson’s household as part of his inheritance from the Wayles estate in 1774, and as a child probably served as a nurse to Jefferson’s younger daughter, Mary (Maria). In 1787, Jefferson was serving as American minister to France when he sent for his daughter to join him, and 14-year-old Sally accompanied eight-year-old Mary to Paris, where she attended both Mary and Mary’s elder sister, Martha (Patsy). Sally returned with the family to their Virginia home, Monticello, in 1789, and seems to have performed the duties of a household servant and lady’s maid.
After being granted his freedom in Jefferson's will, Madison Hemings moved to southern Ohio in 1836, where he worked as carpenter and joiner and had a farm. His brother Eston also moved to Ohio in the 1830s and became well known as a professional musician before moving to Wisconsin around 1852. There, he changed his last name to Jefferson, and began identifying himself as a white man.
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The only surviving descriptions of Sally Hemings emphasized her light skin, long straight hair and good looks. She had four children (according to Jefferson’s records)—Beverly, Harriet, Madison and Eston—several of them were so light-skinned that they later passed for white. Jefferson never officially freed Hemings, but his daughter Martha Randolph probably gave her a kind of unofficial freedom that would allow her to remain in Virginia (at the time, laws required formerly enslaved workers to leave the state within a year). According to her son Madison Hemings, Sally lived with him and his brother Eston in Charlottesville until her death in 1835.
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Rumors of a relationship between the widowed Jefferson (his wife Martha died in 1782, after a difficult delivery of the couple’s third daughter) and one of his enslaved workers circulated in Virginia society for years: Sally’s several children looked to be fathered by a white man, and some had features resembling Jefferson’s. In 1802, a less-than-reputable journalist named James Callender published an accusation of the affair in the Richmond Recorder. Jefferson had hired Callendar to libel John Adams in the 1800 presidential election, and Callender had expected a political appointment in the bargain; when he didn’t get it, he struck back at Jefferson in print, hoping to cause a scandal and hurt Jefferson’s chances for reelection (he was unsuccessful).
The supposed “Tom and Sally” liaison hovered in the background for much of the 19th century, threatening Jefferson’s heralded reputation as one of the most idealistic of the founding fathers. In 1873, Sally’s son Madison (born in 1805) gave an interview to an Ohio newspaper claiming that Jefferson was his father as well as the father of the rest of Sally’s children. Israel Jefferson, a formerly enslaved man from Monticello, verified this claim. In 1894, James Parton’s biography of Jefferson repeated a long-running story within the Jefferson and Randolph families (Jefferson’s mother was a Randolph) that Jefferson’s nephew Peter Carr had admitted that he himself was the father of all or most of Sally Hemings’ children.
In the second half of the 20th century, the historian Winthrop Jordan added new fuel to the fire, arguing in a 1968 book that Sally Hemings became pregnant only when Jefferson was in residence at Monticello. This fact was significant, as he was away fully two-thirds of the time. Jordan’s work sparked a new, more critical phase of Jefferson scholarship in which sought to reconcile Jefferson’s reputation as a principled lover of democracy with his admitted racism and the negative views he expressed about African Americans (common to wealthy Virginia planters of the time).
In November 1998, new biological evidence surfaced, in the form of a DNA analysis of samples from Field Jefferson, a living descendant of Jefferson’s paternal uncle, and from Eston Hemings (born in 1808). The analysis showed a perfect match between Y-chromosomes—a match with less than one in a thousand chance of being random coincidence. The same study compared DNA between the Hemings line and descendants of Peter Carr’s family, revealing no match. Though the study established probability and not certainty (though several of Jefferson’s male relatives certainly shared that male Y-chromosome, none of them were present at Monticello nine months before each time Sally gave birth), it lent new legitimacy to Madison Hemings’ long-ago claims that Jefferson fathered Madison and his siblings.
Evidence and Consensus
In January 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation accepted the conclusion, supported by DNA evidence, that Jefferson and Sally Hemings had at least one and probably six offspring between 1790 and 1808. Though most historians now agree that Jefferson and Hemings had a sexual relationship, debate continues over the duration of that relationship and, especially, over its nature. Admirers of Jefferson are inclined to see his relationship with Hemings as a love affair, despite his public statements about race. Others view Jefferson's relationship with Hemings—who was enslaved by the Founding Father—as predatory and hypocritical, given Jefferson's writings on freedom and equality.
25 history facts you probably never knew
There are many unknown black history facts that are not taught in schools and are sometimes purposely overlooked to white wash American History. In this blog post, we will be discussing 25 things that you probably never knew about African Americans and there contributions to the country but also the trials and tribulations they faced. These black history facts range from historical events to cultural aspects that have shaped the black community over time. We hope that after reading this post, you will have a better understanding and appreciation for the rich history of African Americans.
tulsa oklahoma
Tulsa Oklahoma was home to a thriving African American community in the early 1900s. This area was known as the Greenwood District, and it was commonly referred to as “Black Wall Street.” In June of 1921, a white mob attempted to lynch an African American teenager who was accused of trying to rape a white woman. This started the Tulsa Race Riots, which devastated much of Tulsa’s Greenwood District and left between 30 to 300 people dead, mostly African Americans. Previously this massacre was a one of the many unknown black history facts in US history but in the last 10 years the tragic events of what happened in Tulsa have finally started to come to light.
California
beach seized
Bruce’s Beach was a California beach in Los Angeles that was owned and operated by an African American couple, Willa and Charles Bruce. The beach was a popular spot for black locals and tourists alike. However, in 1924, which comes to our very poignant set of black history facts, the state of California seized the beach through eminent domain and evicted the Bruce’s from their property. The state claimed that they needed the land for a public park.
there is a new "negro motorist green book"
The “Negro Motorist Green Book” was a travel guide published from 1936 to 1966 that provided African American motorists with information on safe places to stay and eat while traveling. The book was created by Victor H. Green, and it helped African American travelers avoid areas (sundown towns) where they would experience discrimination or violence.
Now, there is a new platform, created by Lawrence Phillips to help African American travelers do something similar but on global scale and it is called Green Book Global. The website includes a directory of rated cities and countries around the world from black travelers. Learn about a destination’s nightlife, affordability, history, relaxation, and most importantly what it is like traveling while black to get a good idea of what to expect when you visit. There are already over 5000 crowd-sourced reviews on the platform from black travelers from all over the world. The even offer an ability to earn cash-back for travel as well!
Original Black Travel Influencer
Gerri Major was a middle-class African American woman who built a journalism career that lasted decades, from the 20s to the 70s. She was a jack of all trades with vocations including a journalist, editor, newscaster, publicist, public health official, author, and influencer to the African American community.
Central Park Used to Be an African American Town
In the 1840s, half of the African Americans who lived in Seneca Village, New York City owned property. By 1857, the city was torn down to construct Central Park, leaving only a commemorative plaque. Many people do not know about this important fact relating to black history when they take their leisurely strolls and ride their bikes through Central Park.
Black Cyclist: The Fastest Man in the World
In 1899, Marshall “Major” Taylor was a professional cyclist and the first African American man to hold a world cycling title. He was nicknamed the “Fastest Man on Wheels” and broke several world records. Despite all his success, Taylor battled racism throughout his career, which was one of the main reasons why he retired at 32 in 1910. He was later forced into poverty and passed away in 1932.
Unserved Warrant for the Abduction of Emmett Till
In August of 1955, a 14-year-old African American boy named Emmett Till was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in Mississippi after being accused of flirting with Carolyn Bryant, a 21-year-old white woman. The two men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, who killed him were acquitted by an all-white jury, but the woman who allegedly kidnapped him, Carolyn Bryant, had an unserved arrest warrant. The Leflore County sheriff said he didn’t want to “bother” with the arrest since she had two small children to care for.