whitesinhistory

[whitesinhistory]

The post Man Wearing Nazi T-Shirt Gets a Beatdown from Fans at Punk Rock Bowling Fest appeared first on Consequence.

Over the weekend, a man attended the Punk Rock Bowling & Music Festival in Las Vegas while brazenly wearing a t-shirt displaying the SS logo adopted by Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

[whitesinhistory]

In the late 19th century, in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Japanese immigrants began arriving in California in search of opportunity, enticed by the promise of employment with mining companies, agricultural producers, and railroads. The number of Japanese immigrants increased at the beginning of the 20th century and thousands found work as migrant laborers for white farmers. Some came from the newly annexed U.S. territory of Hawaii, where they had been indentured servants on huge sugar cane plantations owned by white landowners. Over time, many of these new Asian residents of California had saved enough money to lease, rent, and even buy hard-to-cultivate land that no one else seemed to want. Working from sunup to sundown, they transformed swampland and deserts into vineyards and fields of strawberries, celery, beets, tomatoes, and other vegetables.

Japanese farmers and their family members in Palos Verdes Estates, California. (Palos Verdes Library District Local History Center Collection)

For Japanese people, as for immigrants from other nations, land was a foothold on the American dream. Eager to assimilate, Japanese farmers took pains to learn English. They sent their children to American schools, joined Christian churches, and flew the American flag on the Fourth of July. But as the fruits and vegetables they produced on a small percentage of the state’s total acreage met a growing consumer demand in Los Angeles and other cities, Japanese farmers came to be viewed by white landowners as an economic threat. Their immigrant success became a tool for white politicians, newspaper publishers, and labor unions intent on whipping up anti-Asian fervor—and ending Japanese immigration. “The Japanese have invaded the central valleys of California,” California Senator James D. Phelan, who would later campaign for reelection with the slogan “Keep California White,” wrote in 1912 to Democratic presidential candidate Woodrow Wilson. “The white man is thus driven off the land…The Japanese are a blight on our civilization.” In 1913, Japanese residents made up just 2% of California’s 2.5 million people. On May 3, 1913, California enacted the Alien Land Law, designed to deny Japanese families their foothold in America by denying them the right to own land. The law was tightened in 1920 and 1927 to bar Asian immigrants, their American-born children, and even corporations run by Asian immigrants from leasing and owning land. The penalty for conspiring to evade the law was up to two years in prison. The law was supported by the California press, the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League, and the Anti-Jap Laundry League. Those two groups, founded by labor unions, claimed tens of thousands of members.

A white woman points to an anti-Japanese sign above her house, circa 1920. (Fotosearch/Getty Images)

The Alien Land Law targeted people like Jukichi Harada, who named his “All American” restaurant for his hero, George Washington, and Haruye Masaoka, a widow who had five sons who served in a decorated regiment of Japanese American volunteers in World War II, with one dying in the line of duty. The law also targeted the Oyamas, whose American-born son Fred had wanted to enlist and “defend [his] country”—until the state tried to seize the family’s land.

The Alien Land Law didn’t specify Japanese immigrants; it barred “aliens ineligible for citizenship” from owning land or leasing it for more than three years. But thanks to previous immigration laws, “aliens ineligible for citizenship” in that era meant Asian immigrants. After the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Law ended immigration from China, the Alien Land Law targeted nearly 40,000 Japanese people living in California. It empowered prosecutors to file escheat actions against Japanese residents, asking courts to turn their land over to the state.

While the law’s proponents argued it was concerned with economics, not race, one of its authors, California State Attorney General Ulysses Webb, acknowledged the real motive in a 1913 speech before the San Francisco Commonwealth Club: “The fundamental basis of all legislation upon this subject, state and federal, has been, and is, race undesirability.” The 1913 law, he said, “seeks to limit their presence by curtailing their privileges which they may enjoy here; for they will not come in larger numbers and long abide with us if they may not acquire land.”

A flier made by the Japanese Exclusion League of California urging white residents to vote in favor of the amended 1920 Alien Land Law. (National Museum of American History)

President Wilson reassured Japan of his commitment to maintaining cordial relations, but he did not interfere with California’s anti-Japanese legislation. Under pressure from Sen. Phelan, Mr. Wilson had, during his campaign, issued an anti-Asian position statement drafted by the senator: “In the matter of Chinese and Japanese Coolie immigration, I stand for the National policy of exclusion (or restricted immigration). We cannot make a homogenous population out of people who do not blend with the Caucasian race…Their lower standard of living as laborers will crowd out the white agriculturist…Oriental coolies will give us another race problem to solve and surely we have had our lesson.” Decades later, a Supreme Court justice pointed out that the law’s actual enforcement belied its defenders’ claim that it did not target any racial group: of 79 escheat cases filed under the law, 73 were against people of Japanese ancestry. The law, Justice Frank Murphy wrote, was an “attempt to legalize racism.”

One of Many Anti-Asian Laws

The Alien Land Law was part of a long line of anti-Asian, anti-immigrant measures imposed by American judges and lawmakers since 1790, when Congress decreed that only white people could become naturalized U.S. citizens. In 1854, California barred people of Asian ancestry from testifying against white people and, in 1880, from marrying white people. In 1882, the federal Chinese Exclusion Act barred Chinese people from immigrating to the U.S. In 1906, San Francisco schools forced Japanese students—there were only 93 of them in the entire system—to attend a separate school with Korean students out of fear that they would come in contact with white students. “Brown Men an Evil in the Public Schools” one newspaper headline warned. In 1917, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1917, also known as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act. Intended to prevent “undesirables” from immigrating to the U.S., the act primarily targeted individuals migrating from Asia.

Chinese children in Chicago, Illinois, each hold an American and Chinese flag. (Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection/Chicago History Museum/Getty Images)

The Alien Land Law hinged on Japanese immigrants being ineligible for citizenship. Its proponents were elated when the Supreme Court, in 1922, denied citizenship to Takao Ozawa, who had immigrated from Japan 28 years earlier. After graduating from high school in San Francisco and attending college, Mr. Ozawa had moved to Hawaii, where he worked for an American sugar company, married a U.S.-born woman of Japanese ancestry, and sent his five children to American schools. But Mr. Ozawa could not become a citizen because he was “clearly of a race which is not Caucasian,” Justice George Sutherland—a British immigrant—wrote in the court’s opinion. He insisted the decision did “not imply any suggestion of…racial inferiority.” State after state copied California’s Alien Land Law. Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Arizona, Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Delaware enacted similar anti-Asian legislation. Magazine publisher Miller Freeman led the campaign in Washington State, saying of Japanese immigrants, “You knew you were not welcome.” The federal Immigration Act of 1924 barred immigration by virtually all “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” effectively ending Japanese immigration. V.S. McClatchy, publisher of the Sacramento Bee and leader of California’s Anti-Japanese League, testified before Congress on the issue: “Of all races ineligible to citizenship, the Japanese are the least assimilable and the most dangerous to his country.”

Few Cases—Until the War

At first, California’s Alien Land Law was not widely enforced. Judge Rolfe Thompson of Sonoma County Superior Court turned down one Japanese family’s plea to put its land in the names of its young children, even though they were American citizens, having been born in the U.S. In his decision, the judge asserted the law rightly targeted “the invading horde of brown men.” He cited, approvingly, a racist novel, The Pride of Palomar, in which the white hero warns of the “yellow peril” and thinks Japanese train passengers should be put in “a Jim Crow car.” In 1915, Jukichi Harada, seeking better living conditions for his family after his young son died of diphtheria in an overcrowded boarding house, bought a wooden frame home on Lemon Street in Riverside, California. He notified all parties that he was putting the title in the names of his three American-born children, the oldest of whom was nine. The Haradas were the first Japanese family on the block. A committee of white neighbors mounted a campaign to force them out before they had even moved in.

The Harada family. (Harada House Foundation)

Neighbors’ complaints about the Haradas reached Attorney General Webb, who saw an opportunity to test the Alien Land Law—and seize Mr. Harada’s house. The state argued in court that while Mr. Harada had deeded the land to his children, he had purchased it for his own benefit. In 1918, a San Bernardino Superior Court judge ruled in favor of the Haradas. The children, having been born in the U.S., were protected under the Fourteenth Amendment. “They are American citizens, of somewhat humble station, it may be, but still entitled to equal protection of the laws of our land,” the judge said. His ruling, however, did not overturn the Alien Land Law, and an amended version of the law in 1920 was aimed at closing what proponents saw as the loophole of deeding property to immigrants’ U.S.-born children. California voters approved that version by a 3-1 margin, after an anti-Asian campaign that included an American Legion-produced movie full of racial falsehoods—including images of Japanese men trying to kidnap two white girls until Legionnaires intervened. Shadows of the West was shown across the state. Decades after the Haradas’ legal victory, the family was forced to leave their home on Lemon Street, and they were sent to a World War II internment camp. They were among some 120,000 Japanese and Japanese American residents forced into such camps. Jukichi Harada and his wife Ken were in their 60s when they died in a camp in Utah. Mr. Harada had been denied his dream of becoming a U.S. citizen. “My heart is American,” he told a Los Angeles Times reporter in 1916. “I think American, but the law will not let me become an American.”

A “Surge” of Wartime Prosecutions

Despite the barriers imposed by the Alien Land Law, Japanese farmers were vital to California’s agricultural economy. By 1941, Japanese farmers produced more than 90% of the state’s strawberries, 73% of snap beans, 75% of celery, 60% of cauliflower, and 45% of tomatoes, according to a federal report. “A surge” in Alien Land Law prosecutions followed Pearl Harbor and continued during and after World War II, according to a 1946 study. All the cases were “directed against persons of Japanese ancestry” and targeted people who had been sent to internment camps.

Shigeo Nagaishi and his wife Chiseko, along with their two children, return from a Japanese internment camp to their home in Seattle to find it vandalized, May 10, 1945. (AP Photo)

Fred Oyama, born in the U.S., was six when his father put the family’s Chula Vista vegetable farm in his name. In 1944, with the Oyamas living in an internment camp in Utah, California prosecutors tried to seize the family’s land. Even after his family was forced into a camp, Mr. Oyama would recall later, he remained intent on proving his loyalty to the U.S. and “looked forward to joining the service.” That is—until the property was escheated. “I could never be hostile to the U.S.A.,” wrote Mr. Oyama, who had become a middle school math teacher, “but I was bitterly disappointed and felt like a man without a country.” Mr. Oyama and his lawyers lost in California courts but took their case to the U.S. Supreme Court—which ruled in his favor in 1948. The 6-3 decision gutted the Alien Land Law, and eight years later it was repealed. Haruye Masaoka tried to buy a small piece of land in Pasadena after she returned from Manzanar, the camp where her family had been interned. She planned to put the deed in her children's names, but the sellers tried to back out of the agreement when it became clear she was Japanese. She sued and won; The California Supreme Court ruled in 1950 that the Alien Land Law violated her Fourteenth Amendment rights.

An Apology

On August 10, 2023, California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, issued a statement saying his office had used the Alien Land Law against dozens of families while they were “locked away” in internment camps. He said the office “publicly acknowledges and apologizes to Americans of Japanese ancestry for the Office’s role in the unjust deprivation of Japanese Americans’ civil rights and civil liberties during World War II.”

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On May 2, 1963, more than 1,000 Black children peacefully protested racial segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, as part of the Children's Crusade, beginning a movement that sparked widely publicized police brutality that shocked the nation and spurred major civil rights advances.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had launched the Children's Crusade as part of the Birmingham anti-segregation campaign. As part of that effort, more than 1,000 African American children trained in nonviolent protest tactics walked out of their classes on May 2 and assembled at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to march to downtown Birmingham. Though hundreds were assaulted, arrested, and transported to jail in school buses and paddy wagons, the children refused to relent their peaceful demonstration.

The next day, when hundreds more children began to march, Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene "Bull" Connor directed local police and firemen to attack the children with high-pressure fire hoses, batons, and police dogs. Images of children being brutally assaulted by police and snarling canines appeared on television and in newspapers throughout the nation and world, provoking global outrage. The U.S. Department of Justice soon intervened.

The campaign to desegregate Birmingham ended on May 10 when city officials agreed to desegregate the city's downtown stores and release jailed demonstrators in exchange for an end to SCLC's protests. The following evening, disgruntled proponents of segregation responded to the agreement with a series of local bombings.

In the wake of the Children's Crusade, the Birmingham Board of Education announced that all children who participated in the march would be suspended or expelled from school. A federal district court upheld the ruling, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ultimately reversed the decision and ordered the students re-admitted to school.

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On Christmas Eve 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, Confederate President Jefferson Davis issued orders to the Confederate Army "that all negro slaves captured in arms be at once delivered over to the executive authorities of the respective States to which they belong, to be dealt with according to the law of said States."

Several months later, on May 1, 1863, a joint resolution adopted by the Confederate Congress and signed by Davis adjusted this policy and declared that all "negroes or mulattoes, slave or free, taken in arms should be turned over to the authorities in the state in which they were captured and that their officers would be tried by Confederate military tribunals for inciting insurrection and be subject, at the discretion of the court and the president, to the death penalty."

As the Confederacy fought a war against the U.S. government to secede from the Union and form a separate nation rooted in the continued enslavement of Black people, its forces and leaders were especially angered by the Union's enlistment of Black troops. When those troops were captured or defeated in battle, their treatment at Confederate hands was sometimes deadly and brutal—evidenced by well-documented atrocities, such as the massacre of surrendering Black troops at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, in April 1864.

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On April 30, 1866, white police officers in Memphis, Tennessee, assaulted Black soldiers, setting off a wave of horrific violence against Black community members. In total, white police and mobs killed nearly 50 Black people, raped at least five Black women, and burned down around 100 buildings in South Memphis, the part of the city where the majority of Black people in Memphis lived.

Following the Civil War, Memphis and other large southern cities were popular destinations for newly emancipated Black people seeking safety, resources, and opportunity. Memphis was a particularly sought-after location because it was the site of a Freedmen’s Bureau office and a place where federal troops were stationed, and the Black population in Memphis quickly surged.

On April 30, many Black Union soldiers stationed in Memphis completed their service but had to remain in the city for a few days to receive their pay. Black soldiers had become the target of violence by police officers and by other white members of the public who resented their presence. On the night of their discharge, three Black soldiers were confronted by four white policemen, who forced them off the sidewalk. This caused one of the soldiers to fall, and a policeman stumbled over him in the street. The policemen began attacking the soldiers, brandishing knives and striking the men with their pistols.

News of an altercation between the white policemen and Black soldiers quickly spread throughout the city, and white citizens of Memphis embellished the encounter and seized upon it as a pretext for organized violence. In the afternoon of May 1, angry white mobs set out to inflict terror upon South Memphis. City Recorder John C. Creighton called on the mobs to “kill every damned one” of the Black residents and to “burn up the cradle.”

For the next several days, white mobs indiscriminately beat, robbed, tortured, shot, raped, and killed Black women, men, and children. The mobs set fire to dozens of Black homes—many with residents still inside—and destroyed all of the city’s Black churches and schools.

Black survivors of the brutal violence later testified before a Congressional committee formed to investigate the massacre. One woman recalled that, when her 16-year-old daughter tried to save a neighbor from his burning home, a white mob surrounded the building and shot her to death when she exited. Another witness reported seeing a white mob fire weapons into the Freedmen’s Hospital, injuring multiple patients, including a small child with paralysis.

Black residents received little protection from local authorities during the attacks, as the city’s mayor was reportedly drunk during the massacre, and many law enforcement officials were members of the mob. “Instead of protecting the rights of persons and property as is their duty,” the Freedmen’s Bureau’s investigation later concluded, “[local police] were chiefly concerned as murderers, incendiaries, and robbers. At times they even protected the rest of the mob in their acts of violence.” Even Union troops stationed in the city claimed their forces were too small to take on the deadly white mobs. According to the Freedmen’s Bureau report, the mob only dispersed after several days “from want of material to work on” after most Black people had hidden or fled into the countryside.

Though many of the perpetrators were known, none of the white people who carried out the Memphis Massacre were arrested or tried for their actions. Even after the massacre’s toll of death and destruction was clearly revealed, Memphis’s white community refused to take responsibility, and the Freedmen’s Bureau investigation reported that most white people only regretted the violence’s financial costs.

In the wake of the massacre, one quarter of the Black population of Memphis permanently fled the city.

Read more about the history of racial violence during Reconstruction in EJI’s report, Reconstruction in America.

[whitesinhistory]

On April 29, 1992, an all-white jury in California chose to acquit three of the four Los Angeles Police Department officers who beat Rodney King during a violent arrest in March of 1991 and could not agree on a verdict for the fourth officer, despite video evidence establishing their culpability.

On March 3, 1991, Mr. King was driving in downtown Los Angeles when the LAPD pulled him over and began beating him after he allegedly resisted arrest. Four LAPD officers kicked Mr. King, who was on the ground, and beat him with batons for nearly 15 minutes while more than a dozen law enforcement officers stood by. Mr. King sustained life-threatening injuries, including skull fractures and permanent brain damage.

A man standing on his balcony witnessed the violent arrest and captured it on tape. Video of the unrelenting assault was played at trial and broadcasted into homes across the nation and around the world.

Just months before the officers were acquitted, a federal court had concluded that Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies continued to use racially motivated “terrorist-type tactics” to violate the civil rights of Black people. Still, none of the officers involved in Mr. King’s assault faced punishment at trial.

The legal system’s refusal to hold these officers accountable was not unique—the Los Angeles Black community had already endured decades of racial discrimination, violence, and police brutality—but many community members found the outcome inexplicable given that the officers’ conduct had been caught on camera. The same month that Rodney King was beaten, a Korean store owner in South Central Los Angeles shot and killed a 15-year-old Black girl named Latasha Harlins after accusing her of trying to steal a bottle of orange juice. Latasha was clutching money when she was killed, but the store owner received only probation and a $500 fine.

The verdict drew shock and anguish across the county, and members of the Black community in Los Angeles took to the streets in protests that lasted until May 4, 1992.

The protests echoed the unrest that broke out in Los Angeles’s Watts neighborhood in the summer of 1965, after police beat and arrested two young Black men following a traffic stop. A commission convened to investigate the so-called "Watts Riots" concluded that the unrest stemmed from Black residents’ dissatisfaction with policing, high rates of unemployment, and inadequate schools. Despite these conclusions, little changed in the decades that followed.

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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.

To learn more about the legacy of racial terror lynchings, read EJI's report Lynching in America.

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On April 27, 1899, a white mob in Lee County, Georgia, lynched a Black man named Mitchell Daniel for “talking too much” about the brutal lynching of Sam Hose, another Black man, that had taken place days earlier.

Mr. Hose had been employed in Newnan, Georgia, by a wealthy white man named Alfred Cranford. Mr. Cranford owed Mr. Hose money but refused to pay him, and as arguments escalated between the two men, Mr. Cranford bought a gun and threatened Mr. Hose. When Mr. Cranford was killed soon after, Mr. Hose was accused of killing the white man and assaulting his wife. Soon an angry mob formed and set off to catch and lynch Mr. Hose.

A $500 reward was posted for Mr. Hose’s capture, and hundreds of white residents launched what was described as the “largest manhunt in the state’s history.” Local newspapers published sensationalized accounts of the allegations against Mr. Hose, dehumanizing him and reinforcing dangerous racial stereotypes of Black men as predators.

Many Black people were lynched across the South under accusations of murder or assault. During this era of racial terror, mere suggestions of Black-on-white violence could provoke mob violence and lynching. Though these communities had developed and functioning judicial systems, white defendants were more likely to face trial while Black people regularly suffered death at the hands of a violent mob, without trial or any opportunity to present evidence of innocence or self-defense.

On April 23, 1899, after Mr. Hose was turned into authorities, a white mob in Newnan seized him from the jail and staged a brutal public spectacle lynching before a crowd of thousands of white people. The mob chained Mr. Hose to a tree, dismembered and mutilated his body as he screamed in agony, then set him on fire while he was still alive. Afterward, residents fought over Mr. Hose’s remains, and some spectators reportedly claimed pieces of his bones and organs as “souvenirs” of the lynching. Black sociologist and activist W. E. B. Du Bois later disgustedly reported seeing Mr. Hose’s severed knuckles on display in an Atlanta store window one day after the lynching.

This horrific spectacle of murder went well beyond an attempt to punish any alleged crime; instead, Mr. Hose’s lynching was meant to terrorize all Black people living in the town of Newnan, in the state of Georgia, and throughout the U.S., where it soon became national news. Terroristic violence targeting the Black community was common during this period, when white mobs used widespread, unchecked racial violence to instill fear and discourage organized opposition to pervasive Jim Crow laws and other forms of racial oppression.

News of Mr. Hose’s brutal lynching spread quickly and far. A Black man named Mitchell Daniel heard the news within days, despite living 150 miles away from Newnan, and reacted with more outrage than fear. As a Black community leader, Mr. Daniel reportedly spoke out against the injustice of lynching and denounced Mr. Hose’s fate. This soon made him a target.

Just four days after Mr. Hose’s lynching, Mitchell Daniel’s dead body was discovered on the side of a Lee County, Georgia, road—riddled with bullets. Sparse local news reports attributed the lynching to Mr. Daniel’s white neighbors, but no one was ever held accountable for his death.

To learn more about how racial terror lynching claimed the lives of more than 6,500 Black women, men, and children in the U.S. between 1865 and 1950, explore EJI’s reports Lynching in America and Reconstruction in America.

[whitesinhistory]

On April 26, 1862, the California State Legislature levied a burdensome tax on Chinese workers as part of a campaign to “protect free white labor” and discourage Chinese migration to the state.

Chinese people first came to California alongside tens of thousands of other migrants during the California Gold Rush that began in 1849. By 1860, roughly 10% of the state’s population was Chinese. Many white citizens, politicians, and labor organizations resented economic competition from Chinese workers and promoted myths about the racial inferiority of Asian people.

In his inaugural address in January of 1862, California Governor Leland Stanford, who later co-founded Stanford University, announced:

To my mind it is clear, that the settlement among us of an inferior race is to be discouraged by every legitimate means. Asia, with her numberless millions, sends to our shores the dregs of her population. … There can be no doubt but that the presence among us of numbers of degraded and distinct people must exercise a deleterious influence upon the superior race.

Three months after Gov. Leland’s speech, on April 26, the California legislature passed “An Act to Protect Free White Labor Against Competition with Chinese Coolie Labor, And to Discourage the Immigration of the Chinese into the State of California,” which created a monthly tax of $2.50 on Chinese workers in all but the least-desirable industries. The tax amounted to around 10% of the salary that Chinese laborers made at that time, and tax collectors were empowered to seize and sell the property of anyone who did not pay the tax.

Although this tax and several other measures targeting Chinese immigrants were later declared unconstitutional by the state supreme court, white Californian lawmakers persisted in efforts to dehumanize, subordinate, and exclude Chinese people. In 1879, the state approved a new constitution that declared Chinese people “dangerous to the well-being of the State,” banned corporations and local and state governments from hiring Chinese workers, and gave municipalities the authority to confine Chinese residents to one section of town or evict them from city limits altogether.

California’s decades-long campaign against Chinese people served as a precursor to anti-Chinese efforts on the federal level that culminated in 1882 with the U.S. Congress’s passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese laborers from immigrating to the U.S. and prohibited Chinese immigrants already living in the country from becoming American citizens.

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On April 25, 1959, a white mob in Mississippi killed a Black man named Mack Charles Parker. Mr. Parker had been accused of raping a white woman but emphatically denied the accusations. Statements from those in the community suggested that the woman fabricated the rape claims to hide her consensual affair with a white man in a nearby town, and police officers garnered no conclusive evidence implicating Mr. Parker. Nevertheless, local white men formed a mob intent on killing Mr. Parker before he could stand trial.

Days after Mr. Parker was transferred from the Hinds County Jail in Jackson to the Pearl River County Jail, a mob seized him from his cell, beat him, and dragged him outside. Bleeding profusely, Mr. Parker begged for his life, but the mob drove to the Bogalusa Bridge, pulled him from the car, and shot him. The mob then put chains around Mr. Parker's body and threw him into the Pearl River; his body was found more than a week later.

Despite an FBI investigation that identified many members of the lynch mob, no one was ever indicted in Mr. Parker's murder.

[whitesinhistory]

On April 24, 1877, on orders from President Rutherford B. Hayes, federal troops withdrew from the state house in Louisiana—the last federally defended state house in the South—just 12 years after the end of the Civil War. This withdrawal marked the end of Reconstruction and paved the way for the unrestrained resurgence of white supremacist rule in the South, carrying with it the rapid deterioration of political rights for Black people.

After the Confederacy's 1865 defeat in the Civil War, Reconstruction amendments to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery, established the citizenship of formerly enslaved Black people, and granted Black people civil rights—including granting Black men the right to vote. For the Reconstruction period, federal officials and troops remained in Southern states helping to enforce these new rights and administer educational and other programs for the formerly enslaved. As a result, Black people in the South, for the first time, constituted a community of voters and public officials, landowners, wage earners, and free American citizens.

The federal presence also addressed deadly violence Black people faced on a daily basis. Continued support for white supremacy and racial hierarchy meant that slavery in America did not end—it evolved. The identities of many white Americans, especially in the South, were grounded in the belief that they were inherently superior to African Americans. Many white people reacted violently to the requirement to treat their former “human property” as equals and pay for their labor. Plantation owners attacked Black people simply for claiming their freedom. In the first 12 years after the war, thousands of Black people were murdered for asserting freedom or basic rights, sometimes in attacks by white mobs in communities like Memphis and New Orleans.

Congressional efforts to provide federal protection to formerly enslaved Black people were undermined by the U.S. Supreme Court, which overturned laws that provided remedies to Black people facing violent intimidation. In the 1870s, Northern politicians began retreating from a commitment to protect Black rights and lives, culminating in the withdrawal of troops from all Southern state houses in 1877. In response, racial terror and violence directed at Black people intensified and legal systems quickly emerged to restore racial hierarchy: white Southerners barred Black people from voting; created an exploitative economic system of sharecropping and tenant farming that would keep African Americans indentured and poor for generations; and made racial segregation the law of the land.

Read EJI's report Reconstruction in America to learn more.

[whitesinhistory]

On April 23, 1963, William L. Moore was found dead on U.S. Highway 11 near Attalla, Alabama—only four days shy of his 36th birthday. Mr. Moore, a white man, was in the midst of a one-man civil rights march to Jackson, Mississippi, to implore Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett to support integration efforts. He wore signs that read: “End Segregation in America, Eat at Joe's-Both Black and White” and “Equal Rights For All (Mississippi or Bust).”

Mr. Moore, a resident of Baltimore, Maryland, was a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and had staged other lone protests in the past. On his first protest, he walked to Annapolis, Maryland, from Baltimore. On his second march, he walked to the White House. For what proved to be his final march, Mr. Moore planned to walk from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Jackson.

About 70 miles into the march, a local radio station reporter named Charlie Hicks interviewed Mr. Moore after the radio station received an anonymous tip of his whereabouts. After the interview, Mr. Hicks offered to drive Moore to a hotel where he would be safe, but Mr. Moore continued on his march instead. Less than an hour later, a passing motorist found his body. Mr. Moore had been shot in the head with a .22-caliber rifle that was traced to Floyd Simpson, a white Alabamian. Mr. Simpson was arrested but never indicted for Mr. Moore's murder.

When activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and CORE attempted to finish Mr. Moore’s march using the same route, they were beaten and arrested by Alabama state troopers.

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On April 22, 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a Black man's death penalty appeal grounded in claims of racial inequality and instead accepted proven racial sentencing disparities as "an inevitable part of our criminal justice system."

In October 1978, a Black man named Warren McCleskey was convicted of killing a white police officer during a robbery and was sentenced to death. On appeal, Mr. McCleskey's lawyers argued that Georgia's capital punishment system was racially biased in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. In support of his argument, the lawyers presented statistical evidence that race significantly impacted the likelihood of a death sentence.

University of Iowa professor David Baldus had conducted a rigorous statistical analysis of more than 2,000 Georgia murder cases and found that prosecutors were more likely to seek the death penalty and juries were more likely to impose it in cases involving Black defendants and white victims. Even after controlling for crime-specific variables, the Baldus study concluded Black defendants accused of killing white victims faced the highest likelihood of receiving the death penalty.

In its 5-4 decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, the Court accepted the Baldus study's findings as valid but held that the evidence was not enough to reverse the conviction and sentence because there was no proof that any individual had intentionally discriminated against Mr. McCleskey on the basis of race. In other words, without clear evidence that the discrimination was impactful and purposeful, the Court would not act. In dissent, Justice William Brennan wrote that the majority was motivated to deny relief by a "fear of too much justice."

The Court's ruling upheld the constitutionality of racially biased capital punishment in America and remains the law today. The U.S. has executed more than 1,200 people since 1987, including Warren McCleskey, who died in the electric chair on September 26, 1991.

[whitesinhistory]

On April 21, 2007, Turner County High School students attended the school's first racially integrated prom. Located in Ashburn, Georgia, a small, rural, peanut-farming town of 4,400 residents, the school's racial demographics reflected those of the local community: 55% Black and 45% white. The prom theme, "Breakaway," was chosen to signify a break from the tradition of privately funded, separate "white" and "Black" proms sponsored by parent groups.

The school administration's handbook provided for funding an official school-wide prom but stipulated that the senior class officers and student body had to express genuine support for an integrated event. During the 2006-2007 school year, the school's four senior class officers—two white and two Black—approached the principal to discuss holding a school-wide prom. Regarding the segregated proms, senior class president James Hall said, "Everybody says that's just how it's always been. It's just the way of this very small town. But it's time for a change."

Turner County High School's class of 2007 also abandoned the "tradition" of electing both a white and a Black homecoming queen. White parents still held a private, white-only prom one week before the school-wide event, and some parents refused to allow their children to attend the integrated prom. Principal Chad Stone, who is white, said he would not make efforts to end private proms for future classes but favored the integrated approach, "We already go to school together. Let's start a tradition so that 20 years from now, this is no big deal at all."

[whitesinhistory]

On April 20, 1965, an all-white jury acquitted Lester Maddox of all charges after the white man threatened three young Black seminary students at gunpoint for attempting to enter his racially segregated Atlanta restaurant. The jury deliberated for only 47 minutes before returning its not guilty verdict.

On July 3, 1964, just one day after the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed to prohibit racial segregation in public accommodations like restaurants and hotels, three Atlanta University Center ministerial students named George Willis Jr., Woodrow Lewis, and Albert L. Dunn met for lunch at the Pickrick restaurant. Before they could enter, owner Lester Maddox began yelling at them: “You no good dirty devils! You dirty Communists!” He then pulled out his pistol and pointed it at them, telling them “Get the hell out of here or I’ll kill you.”

Rather than help the three unarmed customers being held at gunpoint, the white patrons eating at the restaurant responded by grabbing “pickrick drumsticks”—pick handles Mr. Maddox kept hanging on his restaurant wall to intimidate Black community members. Mr. Maddox and the group of white customers then chased the three Black men out of the restaurant and into the parking lot, threatening them with violence.

Mr. Maddox later claimed he had pulled out his pistol in self-defense, but no reports or evidence indicated that the young Black students were anything other than customers lawfully attempting to eat at the Pickrick, or that they had threatened him in any way.

After Mr. Maddox was arrested and released on $1,000 bond, white Americans from all over the country rallied to his support, endorsing his open defiance of the Civil Rights Act and demonstrating that acceptance and enforcement of the new law would take much more than a presidential signature. People ran ads fundraising for his defense fund, and the restaurant saw an increase in white patrons. Mr. Maddox even began selling souvenir “pickrick drumsticks” complete with his autograph.

The Pickrick continued to refuse to serve Black community members, even as Mr. Maddox awaited trial. He vowed to close the restaurant before serving Black customers, and he did exactly that in February 1965, after a federal district judge ruled he was in civil contempt for continuing to violate the Civil Rights Act.

After his acquittal for threatening these Black men, Mr. Maddox capitalized on his increased notoriety and broad white support for his segregationist positions by mounting a campaign for governor of Georgia the following year. With the KKK’s endorsement, he won. During his term in office, Mr. Maddox promoted a racist, segregationist agenda, vigorously opposed integrating Georgia public schools, and refused to permit Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to lie in state after his April 1968 assassination.

As late as 2001, Mr. Maddox remained an advocate of racial segregation. “I want my race preserved,” he said in an interview, “and I hope most everybody else wants theirs preserved."

Elected and supported by the majority of white Americans, segregationists like Lester Maddox operated as private citizens and at the highest levels of government, wielding violence and criminalization to oppose the civil rights movement and target the courageous activists who fueled it. Read EJI’s report on Segregation in America to learn more.

Lester Maddox autographs one of his signature "pickrick drumsticks."

[whitesinhistory]

On April 19, 1989, a white woman was brutally raped and beaten in New York City's Central Park. Police officers soon arrested a dozen young men and eventually charged five teenage boys ranging from 14-16 years of age.

Police subjected Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana Jr., Korey Wise, Yusef Salaam, and Antron McCray to hours of intense interrogation and ultimately extracted confessions. Each of them later recanted and insisted that he had been coerced into making false confessions despite having no involvement in the crime. Though there was no physical evidence to link them to the attack, all five boys were convicted of attempted murder and rape and sentenced to prison terms ranging from 5-13 years.

From the time of their arrest, many observers and commentators readily believed that this group of teenage boys—four who were Black and one who was Latino—had committed the attack and deserved the harshest possible punishment. Donald Trump, then a well-known businessman in New York City, took out multiple full-page newspaper ads denouncing the Central Park attack, praising the power of hate, and demanding officials “bring back the death penalty” as a defense against “roving bands of wild criminals.” Trump went on to win election to the White House in 2016.

The five teenagers convicted of the Central Park attack faced a presumption of guilt and dangerousness rooted in America’s history of slavery and lynching, which remains with us today and leaves minority communities particularly vulnerable to the unfair administration of criminal justice. At the time of the Central Park case, the idea of the young, non-white “super-predator” was gaining legitimacy among criminologists and policymakers. By stoking unsubstantiated fears of increasing violence and criminality among Black children, researchers built support for harsh proposals to abandon the juvenile system’s focus on rehabilitation and instead funnel younger and younger children into an adult system primarily focused on punishment.

In 2002, another man confessed to the rape and beating committed in Central Park 13 years before, and DNA evidence confirmed his guilt. That same year, New York Supreme Court Justice Charles J. Tejada granted the motions of defense attorneys and District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, vacating the convictions of the “Central Park Five.” Police detectives nevertheless continued to maintain that the defendants were accomplices in the assault and refused to admit misconduct for their handling of the case.

After their convictions were vacated, all five of the young men had completed their prison sentences but still faced the difficult journey of rebuilding their lives and recovering from spending years of their childhoods imprisoned for a crime they did not commit. They ultimately sued the city for malicious prosecution, racial discrimination, and emotional distress. “You all don't really understand what we went through,” Kevin Richardson said. “People called us animals, a wolf pack...It still hurts me emotionally.” New York City refused to settle the suits for over a decade, but in June 2014 agreed to pay the men $40 million in damages.

In 2019, 30 years after the five teens’ arrests, a Netflix mini-series dramatically depicted their ordeal and continuing struggle to recover, sparking renewed interest in the case’s history and its connection to injustice and racial bias still plaguing our courts and prisons.

“I was shocked, because I had no idea that something like this could happen to anyone—especially people who were my age at the time,” Ethan Herisse, who played Yusef Salaam in the mini-series, said in an interview after completing production. “I’m at a different place now, where seeing that this thing happened and is still happening, even now—if I were going to be put anywhere near our system, I wouldn’t feel completely safe.”

To learn more about the wrongful arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment of Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana Jr., Korey Wise, Yusef Salaam, and Antron McCray, watch Ava DuVernay's mini-series When They See Us.

[whitesinhistory]

Why do corporations keep raising prices? Because they can. Corporations aren’t afraid consumers will stop buying their products because they’ve monopolized entire industries. The underlying problem isn’t just inflation. It’s the monopolization of America.