1863 - The
Union raises the first regiments of the USCT (US Colored Troops), recruited
predominately from freed slaves; in response the Confederacy threatens to
execute any black man caught in a Northern uniform. This year saw the infamous
New York Draft Riots, clashes between the Irish and black elements of the city's
population that were concluded when soldiers fired on the mob. At least 11
blacks were killed, several hundred were injured, and a black orphanage was
burned to the ground.
1864 - The year of the 'Fort Pillow Massacre' in
which Confederate general Nathan B. Forrest may have ordered his troops to fire
upon surrended Union soldiers, many of them black. Supposedly he was heard to
say "kill the niggers" at the start of slaughter, and some of the black soldiers
were tortured; a few buried alive.
1865 - The Civil War ends, and in
December the 13th Amendment formally goes into effect.
1866 - The Ku Klux
Klan, comprised predominately of Confederate veterans, is founded at Pulaski,
Tennessee. A series of anti-black riots in Memphis results in about 40
deaths.
1868 - At Camilla, Georgia, white vigilantes attack a crowd of
blacks who were marching in a Republican demonstration - 12 are killed and
nearly 50 wounded.
1870 - The 15th Amendment guarantees all adult male
citizens of the United States the freedom to vote, regardless of their race or
"previous condition of servitude". From this point onwards, the KKK and similar
groups would use terrorism to force blacks to vote for candidates of the
former's choice. In this year Hiram R. Revels becomes the first black Senator in
American history, replacing Jefferson Davis in the Mississippi
legislature.
1872 - P. B. S. Pinchback, a black Louisianan, becomes
governor of his state, and the first black governor in American
history.
1873 - Around a hundred blacks are murdered by the White League,
a white terrorist organization, in Colfax, Louisiana. Most of those killed were
members of a local black militia; some were murdered after surrendering to the
terrorists.
1876 - The Supreme rules that the 15th Amendment in fact does
not guarantee all citizens the right to vote.
1877 - President Rutherford
B. Hayes recalls the last Federal troops from the Southern states, ending the
'Reconstruction Era'. Violence against blacks escalated after this
point.
1881 - Tennessee creates a new law that forces all railroad
companies in the state to provide separate cars for their black passengers. By
the end of the 1880s most or all Southern states had followed this example. This
year saw Booker T. Washington found the Normal School for Colored Teachers, in
Tuskegee, Alabama.
1895 - Ida B. Wells-Barnet publishes A Red
Record, a statistical report on lynching - by now a deeply entrenched
phenomenon in the South.
1898 - Louisiana adopts a 'Grandfather Clause'
in an attempt to keep blacks from voting - several other states follow in this
example in the following years. In this year a race riot in Wilmington, North
Carolina, results in the deaths of over a dozen blacks.
1899 - Sam Hose,
a black farmer residing in Georgia, was seized by a white mob and burned alive.
Pieces of his charred corpse were taken home as souvenirs by his executioners,
who justified their actions by claiming he had murdered a white man.
1900
- A shoot-out in the streets of New Orleans concludes with a black man injuring
two white policemen. The result is a bloody riot in which several blacks are
killed.
1901 - President Theodore Roosevelt has his famous meeting with
Booker T. Washingon. Caving under the vicious Southern outcry, Roosevelt never
invited Washington back to the White House even though both men had enjoyed
their meeting. One Southern newspaper called this incident the 'most damnable
outrage that has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the Unites
States'.
1905 - Nashville, Tennessess segregates its streetcars, which
are in turn boycotted by the city's black population.
1906 - Race riots
in Atlanta, Georgia, leave 25 blacks dead, most murdered in cold
blood.
1908 - Springfield, Illinois is home to a bloody confrontation
between its black and white populations. Eight blacks are killed, 70 are
injured, and more than 2000 flee the area.
1909 - The National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People is founded by W.E.B. Du Bois,
Mary White Ovington, Henry Moscowitz, Oswald Garrison Villiard, William English
Walling, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. The next year it fights its first legal case,
representing a black man who had shot a white policeman in
self-defense.
1913 - President Woodrow Wilson segregates federal
government departments.
1915 - The Supreme Court declares the
'Grandfather Clause' unconstitutional.
1917 - Black soldiers are allowed
to become officers, largely through the efforts of the NAACP. Close to 400,000
black men fight for America during the First World War, and earned the respect
and affection of their French comrades. One black regiment, the 369th Infantry,
informally fought in the French Army during the War because the American
officers present refused to lead it. The 1917-1920 period is known as the 'Great
Migration' because of the huge number of black people that moved North, seeking
a respite from Jim Crow and the accompanying racist violence.
1919 - This
year bore witness to the 'Red Summer'. Race riots broke out in many northern and
midwest cities, including Washington DC, Knoxville, Omaha, and most gruesomely
Chicago. The Chicago riot was sparked when several little boys - some black and
some white - got in a scuffle, and one of the black boys was mistakenly drowned.
The city's blacks rose up in revolt, but were quashed by white mobs. The
butcher's bill was 23 black dead, 15 white dead, and hundreds of wounded people
of both colors. A large part of the city's black population suffered the burning
or vandalizing of their homes. This year also saw several race riots in the
South, the most bloody at Elaine, Arkansas. The incident at Elaine was sparked
when a mob of white racists interrupted a black church service - the result was
more than 200 dead blacks. Some had been hunted down and shot like
animals.
1921 - Tulsa, Oklahoma is witness to a racially-charged mass
shooting. The circumstances are not clear, nor are the number of casualties -
estimates for the dead range from as few as 36 to as many as 300. Most of those
killed were black.
1922 - The Senate filibusters an anti-lynching
law.
1923 - The infamous race riot at Rosewood, Florida, is sparked when
a white woman claimed that she had been raped by a black man. Rosewood's
population was predominately black, and it came under assault by white gangs
from nearby communities. Most of Rosewood was burned to the ground, and an
unknown number of its residents were hunted down and murdered.
1925 - No
less than 40,000 Klansmen participate in a mass rally through the streets of
Washington DC.
1930 - The Nation of Islam is founded by Wallace D. Fard
in Detriot, Michigan.
1931 - Nine young black men are falsely accused of
raping two white prostitutes in Scottsboro, Alabama, and eight of them are
sentenced to death. The result was a lengthy legal battle in which, after seven
years, the 'Scottsboro Boys' are finally declared innocent and
freed.
1933 - At San Jose, California, blacks Thomas Thurmond and Jack
Holmes were accused of murdering a white man. They were imprisoned, but at night
the prison was assaulted by a white mob using a battering ram. The prisoners
were beaten viciously before being lynched, while policemen stood idly by,
watching.
1935 - Rumors that white policement beat a Latino boy spark a
riot amongst Harlem's primarily black population, who target white businesses.
The result was 3 blacks dead, 200 injured, and 125 in jail. In Florida, black
farmer Rubin Stacy was seized by several white men, handcuffed, and lynched.
Several white children were brought to the location to witness his death - one
is visible, crying, in the photograph depicting Stacy's newly lifeless corpse
hanging from a tree.
1936 - The Olympics are held in Nazi Berlin, where
Hitler was planning to demonostrate the superiority of the white race.
African-American Jesse Owens won no less than four gold medals, humiliating the
German dictator.
1939 - Abel Meeropol's song Strange Fruit, about
Southern lynching, is made known throughout the country by the jazz singer
Billie Holiday.
1942 - No less than 20 black newspapers across the
country are threatened with charges of sedition because they criticized the
segregation polices of the US Army. James Farmer, leader of a non-violence black
civil rights group, stages a sit-in protest at a Chicago coffee shop, in a
precursor of Martin Luther King's tactics. Two fouteen year-old boys are lynched
at Quitman, Mississippi.
1943 - Race riots in Detriot break out in an
amusement park, resulting in the deaths of 25 blacks and 9 whites. Similar
events in Harlem result in 6 dead blacks and 185 injured, most of these losses
being inflicted by the heavy-handed police force.
1945 - In the year WWII
ends, blacks are finally permitted to join the US Army Nurse Corps.
1946
- Maceo Snipes, a black soldier freshly returned from Europe, becomes the first
person to vote in Taylor County Georgia since the 1870s. This earned him the
status of a local celebrity, and it also earned him a fatal bullet. The local
mortician refused to prepare his body for burial, and dumped it in a hole behind
his shop. Two young black couples in Monroe, Georgia, are tied up and shot
execution-style by a white mob.
Edited by Salah ad-Din - 20-Oct-2012 at 23:59
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