Jim Crow

1877 to 1954

The troops went home. The South wrote us out of the law, and the Supreme Court signed it.

In 1890, Mississippi wrote a constitution to take our vote, and never let the people vote on it. Afterward, its rolls held 70,000 white voters and 9,000 Black. In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court made separate but equal the law of the land. And across twelve Southern states, the Equal Justice Initiative has documented 4,075 racial terror lynchings of Black people in this era.

When we built something, it was burned. In 1923, white mobs burned the Black town of Rosewood, Florida. In 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service began watching Black men in Alabama go untreated for syphilis.

Tap Next to read each record. Every fact in them carries a small [Source] mark. Tap it to see where the fact comes from.

We don't need to raise our voice. The truth, told exactly, is enough.

1879 to 1880 Proven

The Exodusters

When the South took back our freedom, we packed up and left.

After Reconstruction failed, the freedoms the freed people had won in the South, to own land, to go to school, to vote, were taken away again. The Klan and the White League used terror to keep us from voting, or from settling where we chose. ^[Source 1]

Sharecropping and crooked lending tied many to the landowners. The historian Carter G. Woodson called it "slavery in a modified form." ^[Source 1]

So they left. Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, who called himself the "Moses of the Colored Exodus," had led about 300 people to Kansas in 1873. In the spring of 1879 alone, more than 6,000 arrived. ^[Source 1]

In the 1870s, 40,000 to 60,000 Black people left the South for the West. By 1880, about 41,000 lived in Kansas. That year the Senate investigated why we were leaving. The answer was all around them. ^[Source 1]

1883 Proven

The Civil Rights Cases

Eight years after the promise, the Court took it back.

In 1883, in the Civil Rights Cases, the Supreme Court struck it down. It ruled that the 14th Amendment let Congress govern what states did, not what private people did. The door to Jim Crow was open. ^[Source 1]

1890 Proven

Mississippi Writes Us Out

We were the majority in Mississippi. So they rewrote the constitution to silence us.

In 1890, about 57 of every 100 people in Mississippi were Black. ^[Source 1]

That year a convention wrote a new state constitution. It imposed "a uniform poll tax of two dollars." A man had to pay it two years running, well before the election, and keep the receipt. ^{[Source 2] [Source 1]}

And he had to "be able to read any section of the constitution of this State; or he shall be able to understand the same when read to him." That clause was a door left open for white men who could not read. ^{[Source 2] [Source 1]}

The constitution was never put to the voters. After the new registration, the rolls held seventy thousand white voters and only nine thousand Black. ^[Source 1]

1892 Proven

The People's Grocery and Ida B. Wells

Three Black men opened a store and did well. That was their crime.

Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell and Will Stewart ran the People's Grocery in Memphis, Tennessee. Their store drew customers away from a white-owned grocery nearby. ^[Source 1]

After false charges and a gunfight with an armed white mob at the store, the three were jailed. Three days later, on 9 March 1892, a mob stormed the jail, took them to the rail yards, and shot them. ^[Source 1]

Moss was asked for his last words. "Tell my people to go west. There is no justice for them here." ^[Source 1]

Ida B. Wells called them "three of the best specimens of young since-the-war Afro-American manhood." She wrote down the reason the white men gave: "The Negroes are getting too independent." ^{[Source 2] [Source 3]}

She edited the Memphis Free Speech. For writing the truth, she wrote, the paper "was run away that the colored people might be more easily controlled," and she was warned she would be harmed if she came back. ^[Source 4]

She did not stop. That October she answered with a pamphlet: Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. ^[Source 4]

1895 Proven

Robert Smalls, Lawmaker

The man who stole a Confederate ship spent his life making the laws. In 1895 he stood up to save our vote.

After the war, Robert Smalls, who had sailed the Planter to freedom in 1862, went into politics. ^{[Source 1] [Source 2]}

He sat in the South Carolina House from 1868 to 1870, and in the state Senate from 1870 to 1874. ^{[Source 1] [Source 3]}

He served in the U.S. House of Representatives three times: from 1875 to 1879, from 1882 to 1883, and from 1884 to 1887. ^[Source 1]

In 1895, South Carolina met to write a new constitution. He was one of only six Black members of the convention. ^[Source 3]

He told them the truth to their faces: "Mr. President, this Convention has been called for no other purpose than the disfranchisement of the Negro." ^[Source 4]

He reminded them of the convention of 1868, "which gave to you the best Constitution of any one of the Southern States." And he asked only this of any test for the vote: "that they be fair and honest and honorable." ^{[Source 5] [Source 6]}

They wrote us out anyway. ^[Source 7]

1896 Proven

Plessy v. Ferguson

Separate was real. Equal never was.

In 1890, Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act. It required "equal but separate accommodations" for white and Black passengers on its railways. ^[Source 1]

On 7 June 1892, Homer Plessy sat in a white car on the East Louisiana Railway. When the conductor challenged him, he was arrested. ^[Source 1]

On 18 May 1896, the Supreme Court upheld the law, seven to one. Separate but equal was now the law of the land. ^[Source 1]

The one justice who dissented, John Marshall Harlan, wrote: "Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." ^[Source 1]

1898 to 1899 Proven

The Wilmington Coup

An elected American government, overthrown by force. Here, not in some faraway country.

Wilmington, North Carolina, had an elected Republican city government. ^[Source 1]

On 10 November 1898, a white mob destroyed the offices of the city's Black-owned newspaper and killed as many as sixty people, all of them Black. ^{[Source 1] [Source 2]}

White supremacists threw out the elected government. Mayor Silas P. Wright was forced to resign, and Alfred Moore Waddell took his place. Many officials from across the state took part in it or stood behind it. ^{[Source 2] [Source 1]}

It is called the only successful coup d'état on American soil. The next year, North Carolina's "suffrage amendment" took the vote from its Black citizens. They did by law what they had just done by gun. ^[Source 1]

1906 Proven

The Atlanta Massacre

Lies in the newspaper. Then a mob in the streets of Atlanta.

In 1906, Hoke Smith ran for governor of Georgia saying that Black men must lose the vote to be kept "in their place." Atlanta's newspapers fed white fear with wild stories of attacks on white women. ^[Source 1]

On Saturday, 22 September 1906, the papers "chronicled four assaults by Negroes on white women." The reporter Ray Stannard Baker looked into them. Two, he found, were nothing more than fright. Not one was ever proven. ^{[Source 2] [Source 1]}

That night, thousands of white men and boys gathered downtown. The mob attacked "every man, woman, or boy it saw who had a black face." ^{[Source 3] [Source 1]}

On 24 September, police raided a Black gathering in Brownsville. After a shootout in which an officer died, the militia arrested more than 250 Black men. ^[Source 1]

A white committee counted ten Black dead. Others put the number at 25 to 40. The coroner issued only ten death certificates for them. Even our dead were not counted. ^{[Source 3] [Source 1]}

1908 Proven

Forty Years of the Lease

Slavery by another name, run by the state, did not end until 1908.

Railroads came first, then coal mines, brickyards and quarries. Joseph E. Brown bid "$20.00 per head, per annum" for prisoners for his Dade Coal Mine. His company was known as "Penitentiary Company No. 1." Black prisoners far outnumbered all others. ^{[Source 1] [Source 2]}

They were whipped, flogged, shut in sweatboxes and starved, and many died. One brickworks was called a "death camp." ^[Source 2]

Governor Hoke Smith and the General Assembly did not abolish the lease until 1908. Forty years. ^[Source 3]

1908 to 1910 Proven

The NAACP and The Crisis

A mob in Lincoln's own hometown. The answer was an organization that still stands.

In August 1908, a white mob rioted for two days in Springfield, Illinois. Scores of Black homes and businesses were destroyed, two Black men were lynched, and hundreds fled the city. ^[Source 1]

On 12 February 1909, the hundredth anniversary of Lincoln's birth, a "Call" went out for a national conference to renew "the struggle for civil and political liberty." It was drafted by Oswald Villard, a grandson of William Lloyd Garrison. ^[Source 1]

The Call led to the founding of what became the NAACP. ^[Source 1]

In November 1910, W. E. B. Du Bois, one of its founders, put out the first issue of its magazine, The Crisis, to "set forth those facts and arguments which show the danger of race prejudice." ^[Source 2]

1917 Proven

East St. Louis and the Silent Parade

They killed us in Illinois. We answered in New York, without a word.

In 1917, a factory in East St. Louis, Illinois, working on government contracts, hired Black workers. ^[Source 1]

From 1 to 3 July 1917, white mobs turned on the city's Black people. The official count was 39 Black people and nine white people killed. Many believe more than 100 of us died. ^[Source 2]

Some 6,000 people were driven from their homes. ^[Source 1]

On 28 July 1917, the NAACP led a silent march down Fifth Avenue in New York City. About 10,000 people walked in silence. ^{[Source 1] [Source 3]}

1918 Proven

Mary Turner

Her husband was lynched. She said so out loud. That was enough for them to kill her.

On 16 May 1918, in south Georgia, a white planter was killed by a Black man who worked for him. ^[Source 1]

In the days of lynching that followed, at least eleven Black people were killed. Mary Turner's husband was one of them. ^[Source 1]

Mary Turner was thirty-three years old, and eight months pregnant. She spoke out publicly against her husband's lynching. On 19 May 1918, a mob burned, mutilated and shot her to death. ^[Source 1]

No charges were ever brought against anyone known or suspected to have taken part. ^[Source 1]

Say her name. Mary Turner.

1919 Proven

The Elaine Massacre

They organized for a fair price for their cotton. The answer was a massacre, and then death sentences for the survivors.

In 1919, Black sharecroppers in Phillips County, Arkansas, most of them working white-owned land, joined the Progressive Farmers and Household Union to win better pay for their cotton. ^[Source 1]

On the night of 30 September 1919, they met at a church at Hoop Spur. In the Supreme Court's later words, the meeting was "to employ counsel for protection against extortions practiced upon them by the landowners." Shots were fired outside. A white railroad officer was killed and a deputy wounded. ^{[Source 2] [Source 1]}

What followed was a massacre. The number of Black people killed is not known. Estimates range into the hundreds. Five white people died. More than 500 U.S. troops were sent in, and a reporter wrote that "Many Negroes are reported killed by the soldiers." ^[Source 1]

Then came the trials. One lasted about three-quarters of an hour, and "in less than five minutes the jury brought in a verdict." By 5 November, the first twelve Black men tried had been sentenced to die in the electric chair. ^{[Source 3] [Source 1]}

1921 Proven

Greenwood

We built it ourselves. In eighteen hours, they burned it to the ground.

Most of Tulsa's roughly ten thousand Black residents lived in the Greenwood District, a thriving neighborhood of our own. ^[Source 1]

On 30 May 1921, something happened in the Drexel Building between Dick Rowland, a young Black shoe shiner, and Sarah Page, a white elevator operator. What it was is still not known. ^[Source 1]

Over eighteen hours on 31 May and 1 June 1921, white Tulsans destroyed Greenwood. Homes credibly estimated at 1,256 were destroyed, and virtually every other building in the district, from churches and schools to a hospital and a library. The dead likely numbered between one and three hundred. ^[Source 2] Most of Tulsa's Black people were left homeless, and thousands spent the next winter in tents. ^[Source 1]

An all-white grand jury blamed Black Tulsans. No white person ever went to prison for the murders and the burning. ^[Source 1]

That is what generational wealth looked like for us, and that is what happened to it.

1923 Proven

Rosewood

A whole Black town, erased in a week.

Rosewood, in Levy County, Florida, was a mostly Black town with its own school, churches and Masonic lodge. ^[Source 1]

On 1 January 1923, a white woman from nearby Sumner accused a Black man of assaulting her. For a week, white men terrorized and killed the people of Rosewood, set the town on fire, and stole their livestock and property. ^[Source 1]

Five Black residents were killed: Sam Carter, Sarah Carrier, Lexie Gordon, James Carrier and Mingo Williams. Two white attackers died. The survivors hid in the woods, some sheltered by white neighbors, and never came back to claim their land. ^[Source 1]

So it can be done. A state looked at what it allowed, and it paid.

1923 Proven

The Court Calls It a Mask

Four years after Elaine, the highest court looked at those trials and saw what they were.

On 19 February 1923, in Moore v. Dempsey, the Supreme Court took up the case of the Black men condemned after Elaine. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: "if the case is that the whole proceeding is a mask—that counsel, jury and judge were swept to the fatal end" by a mob, the federal courts must step in. ^[Source 1]

The Court sent their case back to be heard. A trial run by a mob was no trial at all.

1927 Proven

Marcus Garvey

He told us to be proud of Africa, and to own our own. The government went after him for it.

Marcus Garvey was born on 17 August 1887, in Saint Ann's Bay, Jamaica. ^[Source 1]

In July 1914 he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Jamaica, to lift up Black people by celebrating African history and culture. ^[Source 1]

He created the Black Star Line, a Black-owned line of ships to carry people to and from Africa. ^[Source 1]

In 1922 he was charged with mail fraud over one of its ships. J. Edgar Hoover's investigations helped paint him as a swindler. He was convicted and sent to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. In 1927, after protests from Black Americans, his sentence was cut short and he was deported to Jamaica. ^[Source 1]

1931 Proven

The Scottsboro Boys

Nine boys, a lie, and an all-white jury.

On 25 March 1931, a posse stopped a train at Paint Rock, Alabama, and arrested nine young Black men. Two white women, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, accused them of rape. The youngest was twelve. ^{[Source 1] [Source 2]}

The Supreme Court later described them as "young, ignorant, illiterate, surrounded by hostile sentiment." ^[Source 3]

Doctors who examined the women testified that no rape had happened. In trials in April 1931, all-white juries convicted them, and eight were sentenced to death. "Each of the three trials was completed within a single day." ^{[Source 2] [Source 1] [Source 4]}

1932 Proven

The Court Orders a Real Defense

The highest court looked at Scottsboro and saw no defense at all.

On 7 November 1932, in Powell v. Alabama, the Supreme Court reviewed the Scottsboro trials. It called the accused "young, ignorant, illiterate, surrounded by hostile sentiment." ^[Source 1]

It threw out the convictions. "The failure of the trial court to make an effective appointment of counsel was likewise a denial of due process." ^[Source 2]

A trial with no real defense is no trial at all.

1935 Proven

Social Security Leaves Most of Us Out

The safety net for old age was built in 1935. Most of us were left outside it.

The Social Security Act of 1935 covered workers in commerce and industry. Its own words left the rest out: "(1) Agricultural labor; (2) Domestic service in a private home." ^{[Source 1] [Source 2]}

In 1930, about 65 percent of working Black Americans worked on farms or in households. Twenty-seven percent of white workers were left out too. ^[Source 2]

The Social Security Administration's own historian argues the reason was the difficulty of collecting the tax, not race. Others have argued it was race. Either way, most Black workers were shut out. ^[Source 2]

1939 Proven

Redlining

The government drew a red line around us, and called us a hazard.

In the 1930s, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, a federal agency, gave the neighborhoods of American cities "security" grades. The grades tied the value of land to the race of the people who lived there. ^[Source 1]

Its own maps survive in the National Archives. The riskiest neighborhoods were graded "Fourth Grade" or "Hazardous," and Black neighborhoods were the ones most often given that grade. ^{[Source 2] [Source 1]}

Redlining helped keep Black Americans in segregated neighborhoods with lower property values. ^[Source 1]

A home is how most American families build wealth and pass it down. This is where the door was shut on ours.

1941 Proven

Randolph's March

A porters' union leader made the President move, without ever marching.

A. Philip Randolph was president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. ^[Source 1]

In 1941, he and other Black leaders threatened to bring "ten, twenty, fifty thousand Negroes on the White House lawn" if their demands were not met. ^[Source 1]

On 25 June 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802. It barred discrimination by "race, creed, color, or national origin" in the defense industries and in government, and created a committee to look into complaints. ^[Source 1]

Randolph called off the march. He had won without it. ^[Source 1]

1945 Proven

The Tuskegee Airmen

They kept them apart on the ground. In the air, they flew 1,578 combat missions.

In 1941, the all-Black 99th Pursuit Squadron was formed, to be trained at the segregated field at Tuskegee, Alabama. ^{[Source 1] [Source 2]}

By 1945, 992 pilots had trained at Tuskegee. ^[Source 2]

The 99th went to war in North Africa in 1943. With three more squadrons, it formed the 332nd Fighter Group, which fought in Europe. ^{[Source 1] [Source 2]}

They flew 1,578 combat missions, destroyed 261 enemy aircraft, and earned 96 Distinguished Flying Crosses, for a country that kept them apart. ^{[Source 1] [Source 2]}

1946 Proven

Isaac Woodard

He survived the war. He did not survive the ride home with his eyes.

On 12 February 1946, Sergeant Isaac Woodard, a Black veteran of the Second World War, was riding a Greyhound bus home to his wife. He had left the service only hours before, and was still in uniform. ^[Source 1]

When he asked to use the restroom, the driver cursed him. Woodard answered: "I am a man just like you." ^[Source 1]

At Batesburg, South Carolina, the driver called the police chief, Lynwood Shull, who pulled Woodard off the bus and beat him with a blackjack. He was jailed overnight and fined the next morning. The beating, and the delay in treating him, left him blind for life. ^[Source 1]

President Harry Truman ordered federal charges. On 26 September 1946, the Justice Department announced them against "Lynwood Lanier Shull, chief of police for Batesburg, South Carolina." ^{[Source 2] [Source 1]}

At the trial, the all-white jury deliberated for less than twenty minutes, and acquitted Shull. ^[Source 1]

1947 Proven

The GI Bill

Our veterans came home to a promise. Most of them were shut out of it.

On 22 June 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the GI Bill. It gave veterans of the Second World War money for college, unemployment pay, and help to buy homes and businesses. ^[Source 1]

More than a million Black Americans had served in that war, in segregated ranks. ^[Source 2]

Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi, an open racist who helped write the bill, made sure the states, not the federal government, ran it. ^[Source 3]

In 1947, Ebony magazine surveyed thirteen Mississippi cities. Of the 3,229 home loans the VA had backed there, two went to Black veterans. Two. ^[Source 3]

The National Archives puts it plainly: "Black vets were often unable to get bank loans for mortgages in Black neighborhoods." ^[Source 4]

They fought the same war. They came home to a different country.

1948 Proven

Truman Ends Segregation in the Military

Two years after Isaac Woodard was blinded, the President used his own pen.

In February 1948, President Harry Truman asked Congress for civil rights laws. Southern senators threatened to block them with a filibuster. ^[Source 1]

So Truman used his own power. On 26 July 1948, he signed Executive Order 9981. ^[Source 1]

It declared "equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services," without regard to race, color, religion or national origin. ^[Source 1]

By the end of the Korean War, almost all of the military was integrated. Now, at last, they would serve side by side. ^[Source 1]

1950 Proven

The Count of the Lynched

Every one of these numbers was somebody's mother, father, son or daughter.

The Equal Justice Initiative documented 4,075 racial terror lynchings of Black people in twelve Southern states between 1877 and 1950. Across the nation, the count is more than 4,400. ^[Source 1]

Lynching was terrorism, used to keep Black people down and the races apart. Many of the dead had never been accused of any crime. ^[Source 1]

Each one left a family behind. What was taken did not stop at one life.

1954 to 1955 Proven

Brown v. Board of Education

Our parents took the states to court, for their children, and won.

Black families in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware took their states to court over segregated schools. ^[Source 1]

On 17 May 1954, the Supreme Court decided their cases together. Chief Justice Earl Warren read the unanimous opinion: "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." ^[Source 1]

Fifty-eight years after Plessy v. Ferguson, separate but equal was struck down in the schools. Justice Harlan's lone dissent had become the law. ^{[Source 1] [Source 2]}

On 31 May 1955, the Court told the states to desegregate "with all deliberate speed." Many took the deliberate, and forgot the speed. ^[Source 1]