On September 7, 1889, a white mob broke into the Boone County Jail in Columbia, Missouri, seized a Black teenager named George Bush and hanged him from a second-story window of the county courthouse. Bush was just 17 or...
In December 1922, the small town of Perry, Florida, became the scene of a wave of racial violence after the murder of a white schoolteacher. Over the following two weeks, white mobs killed several Black men, burned Black homes...
In the summer of 1955, Emmett Louis Till was a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago who was looking forward to spending part of his school vacation with relatives in Mississippi. He was born on July 25, 1941, and had grown...
George W. Lee was a Baptist minister, businessman, and civil rights leader who became one of Mississippi’s leading advocates for Black voting rights. His efforts to help African Americans register to vote challenged the foundations of Jim Crow, and...
In 1958, the United States witnessed what is widely regarded as the most absurd “rape case” in its legal history. Known as the Kissing Case, the incident involved two African American children, nine-year-old James Hanover Thompson and seven-year-old David...
The lynching of Jesse Washington on May 15, 1916, remains one of the most horrific and Well Documented Lynchings in American history. It took place in Waco, Texas, a city that at the time prided itself on being progressive,...
In September 1921, in the small town of Pittsboro in Chatham County, North Carolina, sixteen-year-old Eugene Daniel became the victim of one of the most brutal acts of racial violence of the Jim Crow era. What began as a...
Vernon Ferdinand Dahmer Sr. was not a national celebrity of the Civil Rights Movement, but his work struck at the very heart of white supremacy in Mississippi. At a time when Black political participation was met with terror, Dahmer...
On December 26, 1921, while much of white America was still in the afterglow of Christmas, Bill McAllister lay dead in Florence County, South Carolina, his body riddled with bullets. His crime was not proven murder, not theft, not...
During the Jim Crow era, segregation depended on strict racial categories: a person was either Black or white, inferior or superior, barred or welcomed. Rev. Jesse Routte exposed the idiocy of that system in a remarkable way, not through...
