On This Date

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To Prevent Interracial Marriage, California Requires That Marriage Licenses Indicate Race

On May 5, 1943, a new law went into effect in California, requiring that all marriage licenses indicate the race of the parties to be married. This law, passed unanimously by the all-white, all-male state legislature, was designed to help the state enforce its existing ban on interracial marriage. As California law declared at that time: “no license may be issued authorizing the marriage of a white person with a Negro, mulatto, Mongolian, or member of the Malay race.” Any interracial couple who defied the statute, or any clerk who provided a marriage license to an interracial couple, faced a fine of up to $10,000 or up to 10 years in prison.

“Anti-miscegenation laws,” or laws banning white people from marrying Black and other non-white partners, have a long history in this country—often pre-dating the creation of the U.S. altogether. Northern and southern states alike passed these laws during the colonial era and throughout the first decades of the nation’s existence; by the start of the Civil War in 1861, 28 states had interracial marriage bans—and seven more passed them before the war’s end in 1865.

Though many northern states repealed their anti-miscegenation laws before or soon after the Civil War, many southern and western states responded to the emancipation of millions of enslaved Black people by strengthening their bans. Fears of a weakened racial hierarchy were especially intense in the South, where the bulk of newly-freed Black Americans resided, and where white people had long feared that ending slavery would be "the first step to total social equality and unrestricted sex across racial lines." Similarly, many western states feared that the end of the Civil War would bring an influx of emancipated Black people, and lawmakers saw bans on interracial marriage as one way to reinforce the racial order.

California had banned interracial marriage between white and Black people since first achieving statehood in 1850. Under a law passed that year, “all marriages of whites with negroes or mulattoes are declared to be null and void.” California later expanded the law to also ban white people from marrying people defined as "mongolian" or “malay,” in response to a subsequent increase in immigration from Asia. The state’s white community widely supported the enactment of these policies and the officials who passed them.

The California Supreme Court struck down both the 1943 statute requiring race on marriage licenses and the state's much older ban on interracial marriage on October 1, 1948 in the case of Perez v. Sharp. Nearly 20 years later, on June 12, 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decided Loving v. Virginia, declaring bans on interracial marriage unconstitutional and striking down such laws in the 16 total states that still had them. This decision overturned the Court’s 1883 decision in Pace v. Alabama, which had upheld the constitutionality of laws banning interracial relations, enabling those laws to persist throughout the country for more than 80 additional years.

Even after the law changed, social and political support for interracial marriage bans lingered. In 2000, Alabama became the last state to repeal its interracial marriage ban when residents voted to remove an anti-miscegenation provision from the state constitution—more than 30 years after Loving made it unenforceable.

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Chinese Exclusion Act Signed into Law

On May 6, 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed into law the Chinese Exclusion Act. The first major law restricting voluntary immigration to the U.S., the act banned all immigrants from China for 10 years, prohibited Chinese immigrants from becoming American citizens, and restricted the entry and re-entry of Chinese nationals.

As Chinese people joined the flow of migrants to the West Coast of the U.S. after the Gold Rush of 1849, many white Americans resented economic competition from Chinese workers, denounced Chinese people as racially inferior, and blamed them for white unemployment and declining wages. The Exclusion Act kept many Chinese nationals from entering the U.S. and fueled mistreatment of Chinese people in America. Soon, anti-Chinese violence in states like Wyoming and Idaho left Chinese immigrants dead, wounded, and fleeing their homes in fear.

Though initially authorized to last 10 years, the Exclusion Act was extended and strengthened over the next 80. In 1892, Congress extended the act for another decade, and in 1902, lawmakers made the act permanent and added more discriminatory provisions. The legal ban on immigration from China was slightly loosened in 1943, but large-scale Chinese immigration was not restored until the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965.

Like Chinese immigrants did for generations, other hopeful immigrants to the U.S. continue to struggle against unjust laws and harmful abuse rooted in racial prejudice.

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Rev. George Lee, Voting Rights Activist, Killed in Mississippi

Reverend George Lee, co-founder of the Belzoni, Mississippi, NAACP and the first African American to register to vote in Humphreys County since Reconstruction, was shot and killed in Belzoni on May 7, 1955. He is considered one of the early martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement.

Rev. Lee first moved to Belzoni to preach, but began working to register other African Americans to vote after the local NAACP was founded in 1953. He later served as chapter president and successfully registered some 100 African American voters in Belzoni—an extraordinary feat considering the significant risk of violent retaliation facing Black voters in the Deep South at the time.

Belzoni was also home to a White Citizen's Council—a group of white residents actively working to suppress civil rights activism and maintain white supremacy through threats, economic intimidation, and violence. The council learned of Rev. Lee's voter registration efforts and targeted him with threats and intimidation, but he was undeterred.

While Rev. Lee was driving home on the night of May 7, gunshots were fired into the cab of his car, ripping off the lower half of his face. He later died at Humphreys County Medical Center. When NAACP field secretary for Mississippi Medgar Evers came to investigate the death, the county sheriff boldly denied that any homicide had taken place; instead, he claimed that Rev. Lee had died in a car accident and that the lead bullets found in his jaw were dental fillings.

An investigation revealed evidence against two members of the local White Citizen's Council, but when the local prosecutor resisted moving forward, the case stalled. The NAACP memorial service held in Rev. Lee's honor was attended by more than 1,000 mourners.

In April 2019, the Equal Justice Initiative dedicated a monument honoring Rev. George Lee and 23 other Black men, women, and children killed in acts of racial violence in the 1950s. Hundreds of community members gathered to support the act of remembrance, including family and community members connected to each of the named victims. Ms. Helen Sims, founder and operator of the Rev. George Lee Museum in Belzoni, was present to stand for the memory of Rev. Lee.

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Ku Klux Klan Burns Cross in Black Neighborhood in Alabama

On May 8, 2009, Steven Joshua Dinkle of the Ozark, Alabama, chapter of the International Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), burned a cross in a local Black neighborhood. Joined by a KKK recruit named Thomas Windell Smith, Dinkle targeted the neighborhood because of the race of its residents.

Confederate veterans founded the Ku Klux Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1865. From beneath white hoods, they terrorized formerly enslaved Black people and their political allies with threats, beatings, and murder. They strived to undermine Reconstruction and restore racial subordination in the South. Faced with federal opposition, the Klan dissolved by the 1870s, but reemerged early in the next century at the height of the era of racial terror. By the 21st century, several offshoot Klan organizations remained a small but persistent source of hate violence.

On the night of May 8, Dinkle and Smith built a wooden cross about six feet tall and drove it over to the entrance of the Black neighborhood around 8 pm. They dug a hole in the ground in view of several houses, then stood the cross upright in the hole and lit it on fire before driving away.

Both men were arrested and pled guilty to conspiracy to violate housing rights. At Dinkle’s plea hearing, he admitted that he burned the cross in order to scare the members of the African American community in Ozark, and that he was motivated to burn the cross because he did not like that African Americans were occupying homes in that area.

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John Lewis and Two Others Attacked at South Carolina Greyhound Bus Terminal

On May 9, 1961, 21-year-old John Lewis, a young Black civil rights activist, was severely beaten by a mob at the Rock Hill, South Carolina, Greyhound bus terminal. A few days earlier, Mr. Lewis and 12 Freedom Riders—seven Black and six white—had left Washington, D.C., on a Greyhound bus headed to New Orleans. They sat interracially on the bus, planning to test a Supreme Court ruling that made segregation in interstate transportation illegal.

The Freedom Riders rode safely through Virginia and North Carolina, but experienced violence when they stopped at the bus station in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and tried to enter the white waiting room together. John Lewis and two other Riders were brutally attacked before a white police officer, who had been present the entire time, finally intervened. The Freedom Riders responded with nonviolence and decided not to press charges, continuing their protest ride further south where they experienced continued violence from white mobs in Alabama.

Nearly 47 years later, Rock Hill Mayor Doug Echols apologized to John Lewis, by then a U.S. Congressman representing Georgia. In 2009, one of his attackers, former Klansman Elwin Wilson, also apologized. "I don't hold the town any more responsible than those men who beat us," Congressman Lewis has said about the community of Rock Hill, "and I saw those men as victims of the same system of segregation and hatred."

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South Carolina Passes Negro Act of 1740, Codifying White Supremacy

On May 10, 1740, the South Carolina Assembly enacted the “Bill for the better ordering and governing of Negroes and other slaves in this province,” also known as the Negro Act of 1740. The law prohibited enslaved African people from growing their own food, learning to read, moving freely, assembling in groups, or earning money. It also authorized white enslavers to whip and kill enslaved Africans for being "rebellious."

South Carolina implemented this act after the unsuccessful Stono Rebellion in 1739, in which approximately 50 enslaved Black people resisted bondage and waged an uprising that killed between 20 and 25 white people. In addition to establishing a racial caste and property system in the colony, the assembly sought to prevent any additional rebellions by including provisions that mandated a ratio of one white person for every 10 enslaved people on a plantation. The Negro Act treated enslaved Africans as human chattel and revoked all forms of civil rights.

The law served as a model for other states; Georgia authorized slavery within its borders in 1750 and enacted its own slave code five years later. In 1865, the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment legally abolished slavery in the U.S. except as punishment for crime, but discriminatory Black Codes and Jim Crow laws developed to maintain the oppression of Black people, ensuring that the legacy of the Negro Act of 1740 and similar laws remained present throughout the country for more than two centuries.

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Arizona Passes Unconstitutional Law Banning Ethnic Studies Programs from Public Schools

On May 11, 2010, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law HB 2281, a legislative act designed to end Ethnic Studies classes in the state. This law banned schools from engaging with certain books written by authors of color and temporarily eliminated the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson schools, preventing hundreds of students from engaging with their history and culture within a school setting for almost a decade.

The signing of HB 2281 came just weeks after Governor Brewer signed SB 1070, Arizona's controversial immigration law that was then among the nation's strictest, and which opponents criticized as encouraging racial profiling. Though less publicized, HB2281 also had far-reaching consequences for people of color in Arizona and any students interested in studying their history. The law banned all classes alleged to “promote the overthrow of the United States government” or “promote resentment toward a race or class of people” and classes “designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group” which “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” In January of 2012, after the state superintendent's office threatened to withhold 10% of the district’s annual funding, the Tucson School District voted to cut the Mexican American Studies program in compliance with the new law.

Beginning in the 1990s, Mexican-American educators in Tucson, Arizona came together to build a program to narrow the achievement gap between Latino students and white students by widening the scope of traditional curriculum, including introducing books written by authors of color. Students who engaged in the program, which was open to all, saw great success with reportedly increased test scores and higher graduation rates. Proponents of HB2281, however, accused Ethnic Studies courses of segregating students and impeding assimilation. Tom Horne, the state superintendent of public instruction, seemingly overlooking the nation’s long history of racially segregated public education, argued that the public school system has always “brought together students from different backgrounds and taught them to be Americans and to treat each other as individuals.” Referring to those who supported the Mexican American Studies program, Horne dismissively said, “They are the ‘Bull Connors.’ They are resegregating.” John Huppenthal, a state Senator who helped pass the law, claimed that these programs designed to increase representation within the classroom were similar to the Ku Klux Klan; in making that comparison, Huppenthal trivialized a long and deadly history of white supremacist racial violence in America. Huppenthal also fervently declared on social media that Spanish-English media should be shut down, and later referred to people receiving public assistance as "lazy pigs."

HB 2281 not only forced the Tucson School District to eliminate its Mexican American Studies course; the law also led the district to remove several books from its classrooms, including Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and The Tempest by William Shakespeare. In a meeting with Mexican American Studies teachers, administrators ultimately advised them to avoid any units that included “race, ethnicity, and oppression as central themes.”

After courts repeatedly refused to strike down the law for several years, a federal court held that HB 2281 was passed with the specific intention “to advance a political agenda by capitalizing on race-based fear.” HB 2281 was formally invalidated as unconstitutional in 2017, nearly a decade following its passage, and after the law had already denied hundreds of students the opportunity to study within a culturally diverse setting.