On This Date

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Louisiana Disenfranchises Black Voters and Jurors

On May 12, 1898, the state of Louisiana adopted a new constitution with numerous restrictive provisions intended to exclude African American men from civic participation. At this time in the U.S., women of all races remained barred from voting, while Black men had recently gained the right to vote under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The new Louisiana Constitution, however, created a poll tax, literacy and property-ownership requirements, and a complex voter registration form all designed and enforced to disproportionately disenfranchise Black male voters.

The year 1865 included the Confederacy's defeat in the Civil War, widespread emancipation, and the abolition of slavery. All of these developments threatened to overturn Southern culture and social relations, which were based in white supremacy and racial hierarchy. After Reconstruction ended in 1877 and white politicians and lawmakers regained control and power in the South, many efforts were made to restore that racial order through very strict laws that stripped Black people of many of their new civil rights—including the right to vote. In Louisiana, framers explicitly expressed their goal to “purify the electorate.”

When the restrictive voting provisions were first proposed for the 1898 Louisiana constitution, some white officials expressed concern that the property and literacy requirements would also disenfranchise an estimated 25% of the white male population of voting age. In response, lawmakers drafted a “Grandfather Clause” which created an exception for those whose ancestors were registered to vote before 1867. This clause enabled many illiterate and poor white men to get around the literacy and property requirements. Black people remained blocked because Louisiana laws before 1867 disenfranchised nearly all Black men—especially those who were enslaved.

The 1898 Louisiana constitution also eliminated the requirement of unanimous jury verdicts, allowing as much as a 9-3 split to still stand as a conviction. Because the U.S. Constitution now prevented states from wholly barring Black people from jury service, this provision was enacted to render small numbers of Black jurors inconsequential. Thomas Semmes, a former Confederate senator and head of the convention’s judiciary committee, praised the provision for success in its goal “to establish the supremacy of the white race in this State to the extent to which it could be legally and constitutionally done.”

The 1898 Louisiana Constitution eliminated federally-enforced voting rules that had enfranchised Black men in Louisiana during Reconstruction. As a result, in a state with 650,804 Black residents, the number of Black registered voters dropped from 130,000 before the new constitution to just 5,000 by 1900. By 1904, the number dropped to just 1,000.

Throughout the Southern states, disenfranchisement laws targeted Black communities for generations. Louisiana’s 1898 constitution was revised slightly in 1913, but most of its restrictive language remained until 1972. The non-unanimous jury rule remained in effect for more than a century, until Louisiana voters approved a constitutional amendment to abolish it in November 2018.

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South Carolina Passes Bill to Maintain School Segregation Six Years After Brown v. Board Decision Struck it Down

On May 13, 1960, six years after Brown v. Board of Education, South Carolina’s legislature passed a bill to preserve school segregation and stall Black citizens’ attempts to integrate public schools using the authority of federal courts.

On the last day of the 1960 legislative session, South Carolina lawmakers voted for a bill that, on its face, repealed language that declared the state would provide funding to “racially segregated schools only.” However, as local media accurately reported, the legislation was a “maneuver to thwart integration by the fiction of seeming to give in a little to it.” The bill did nothing to change another state law that mandated the closure of any school for white students that admitted a Black student. The bill also left in place provisions requiring racial segregation on school buses and in cafeterias.

In 1951, state lawmakers established the South Carolina School Committee, the first of its kind in the country. Despite its seemingly neutral name, the committee was composed of state legislators and members appointed by the governor, and conducted “enormous research” during the 1950s and 1960s to identify ways to circumvent the Constitution and keep schools segregated. The press regularly referred to the group as a “segregation committee,” seemingly reflecting knowledge of its true purpose. During the 1956-1957 legislative sessions, the committee's work led South Carolina lawmakers to pass the law restricting state funding to “racially segregated schools,” and to also design a school-choice policy that allowed the state to continue operating all-white schools.

Committee members also designed this 1960 repeal bill as a way to “fight integration suits while in no way relaxing restrictions on the mixing of the races.” Legislators and other members of the Committee feared that keeping laws that included explicit language that mandated segregation would enable aggrieved Black students to successfully challenge South Carolina’s racist policies in federal court. By removing the plain language of segregation, the Committee aimed to keep Black plaintiffs “languishing for years” in state court by depriving them of the strong evidence of discriminatory intent, while still achieving the same result: segregated schools. Representative Joe Rogers of Clarendon County, South Carolina, a member of the Committee, publicly endorsed the new legislation and assured ardent segregationists that South Carolina was “as resolute as ever” in maintaining racial apartheid.

South Carolina Governor Ernest Hollings also applauded the legislation repealing the explicit segregation language, declaring it a move to “bolster, rather than to weaken, the state’s rigid stand against mixing the races in public schools.” However, lawmakers and the Governor delayed signing the bill into law, since federal intervention was not yet actively enforcing desegregation in the state. In August 1960, the Committee reported that public schools remained “orderly” and segregated, and Governor Hollings let the bill quietly die. In 1961, as South Carolina faced the loss of federal education funding due to its insistence on maintaining racial segregation, the Committee revived the bill and Governor Hollings signed it into law in July 1961. School desegregation did not begin in the state for another two years.

The massive resistance campaign that white communities waged against efforts to desegregate public schools in the U.S. was largely successful in delaying implementation of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in the South. Until the fall of 1960, every single one of the 1.4 million Black school children in the five states of the Deep South attended segregated schools. By the start of the 1964-65 school year, less than 3% of the South’s Black children attended school with white students, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina, that number remained substantially below 1%. In 1967, 13 years after Brown was decided, a report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights observed that white violence and intimidation against Black people “continue[d] to be a deterrent to school desegregation.”

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White Mob Attacks Freedom Riders in Anniston, Alabama

In 1961, a group of civil rights activists known as the Freedom Riders began a desegregation campaign. The interracial group rode together on interstate buses headed south from Washington, D.C., and patronized the bus stations along the way, to test the enforcement of Supreme Court decisions that prohibited discrimination in interstate passenger travel. Their efforts were unpopular with white Southerners who supported segregation. The group encountered early violence in South Carolina but continued their trip toward the planned destination of New Orleans.

On Mother's Day, May 14, 1961, a Greyhound bus carrying Freedom Riders arrived at the Anniston, Alabama, bus station shortly after 1 pm to find the building locked shut. Led by Ku Klux Klan leader William Chapel, a mob of 50 men armed with pipes, chains, and bats smashed windows, slashed tires, and dented the sides of the Riders' bus. Though warned hours earlier that a mob had gathered at the station, local police did not arrive until after the assault had begun.

Once the attack subsided, police pretended to escort the crippled bus to safety, but instead abandoned it at the Anniston city limits. Soon after the police departed, another armed white mob surrounded the bus and began breaking windows. The Freedom Riders refused to exit the vehicle but received no aid from two watching highway patrolmen. When a member of the mob tossed a firebomb through a broken bus window, others in the mob attempted to trap the passengers inside the burning vehicle by barricading the door. They fled when the fuel tank began to explode. The Riders were able to escape the ensuing flames and smoke through the bus windows and main door, only to be attacked and beaten by the mob outside.

After police finally dispersed their attackers, the Freedom Riders received limited medical care. They were soon evacuated from Anniston in a convoy organized by Birmingham Civil Rights leader Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth.

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Supreme Court Bans School Segregation, Sparking Massive White Resistance

On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that segregation in public education was unconstitutional, overturning the "separate but equal" doctrine in place since 1896, and sparking massive resistance among white Americans committed to racial inequality.

The Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education grew out of several cases challenging racial segregation in school districts across America, filed as part of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's strategy to bar the practice nationwide. In the named case, a Black man named Oliver Brown sued the Topeka, Kansas, Board of Education for refusing to allow his daughter, Linda, to attend the elementary school nearest her house solely due to her race.

When the case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall argued that segregated schools were harmful and saddled Black children with feelings of inferiority. Writing the majority opinion, Chief Justice Earl Warren endorsed this argument and declared that "in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal."

The decision outraged white segregationists as much as it energized civil rights activists. Throughout the South, where state constitutions and state law mandated segregated schools, white people decried the decision as a tyrannical exercise of federal power. Many Southern white leaders and their constituents implemented a strategy of "massive resistance" to delay desegregation. These groups, made up of elected officials, business leaders, community residents, and parents, deployed a range of tactics and weapons against the growing movement for civil rights—including bombing and murdering civil rights activists, criminalizing peaceful protest, and wielding economic intimidation and threats to chill Black participation in civil rights activities.

These tactics worked: By 1960, only 98 of Arkansas’s 104,000 Black students attended desegregated schools, as did 34 of 302,000 in North Carolina, 169 of 146,000 in Tennessee, and 103 of 203,000 in Virginia. In the five Deep South states, every single one of 1.4 million Black schoolchildren attended segregated schools until the fall of 1960. By the start of the 1964-65 school year, less than 3% of the South’s African American children attended school with white students, and in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina that number remained substantially below 1%.

The Brown decision signaled the start of a massive cultural shift in racial dynamics in the U.S., and also launched an organized mass movement of opposition. Most white Americans, especially in the South, supported segregation.

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Supreme Court Establishes “Separate But Equal” Doctrine as Law in Plessy v. Ferguson

On May 18, 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court released a 7-1 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, a case challenging racial segregation laws in Louisiana, holding that state-mandated segregation in intrastate travel was constitutional as long as the separate accommodations were equal.

The Court had heard arguments a month earlier on April 13. Homer Plessy, a Black man who had been arrested for boarding a "white only" passenger car, argued that the state segregation law violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, which abolished slavery and established equal protection of the laws.

In 1890, Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act, requiring railroad companies to provide separate passenger cars for Black and white travelers. The Comite des Citoyens (“Committee of Citizens”), a New Orleans group of free Black men who employed civil disobedience to challenge segregation laws, wanted to challenge the law's constitutionality. When Mr. Plessy—a Black man—was arrested for boarding a “white only” passenger car, the committee helped him to appeal and the case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

On May 18, Justice Henry Brown wrote the majority opinion, which held that the Louisiana law did not violate the Thirteenth or Fourteenth Amendments because it did not interfere with an individual’s personal freedom or liberties. He claimed the Court could uphold the notion that all people are equal before the law in political and civil rights but could not override social inferiority based upon the distinction of race.

Justice John Marshall Harlan dissented, writing that the Louisiana law was in direct violation of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments' promise of protection of all civil rights related to freedom and citizenship. Justice Harlan specified that the law was a blatant attempt to infringe upon the civil rights of African Americans and that the Court inappropriately yielded to public sentiment at the expense of constitutional safeguards. He predicted the Court’s decision would lead to racial confrontation.

Plessy v. Ferguson legally sanctioned racial segregation by establishing the “separate but equal” doctrine as national law. Public services and accommodations were segregated for decades, until the Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 overruled the application of “separate but equal” in public education, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited it in public accommodations.

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Mary Turner, Pregnant, Lynched in Georgia for Publicly Criticizing Husband's Lynching

On May 19, 1918, a white mob from Brooks County, Georgia, lynched Mary Turner, a Black woman who was eight months pregnant, at Folsom’s Bridge 16 miles north of Valdosta for speaking publicly against the lynching of her husband the day before. The mob bound her feet, hanged her from a tree with her head facing down, threw gasoline on her, and burned the clothes off her body. Mrs. Turner was still alive when the mob took a large butcher’s knife to her abdomen, cutting the unborn baby from her body. When the baby fell from Mary Turner, a member of the mob crushed the crying baby’s head with his foot. The mob then riddled Mrs. Turner’s body with hundreds of bullets, killing her.

Mary Turner’s husband, Hayes Turner, had been lynched the day before. Hayes Turner was accused of being an accomplice in the killing of a notorious white farmer, Hampton Smith, who was well known for his abuse of Black farm workers. Mr. Smith would bail Black people accused of petty crimes out of jail and then require them to work off the fine at his farm. Sidney Johnson, a Black man working to pay a legal fee for “rolling dice,” confessed to killing Mr. Smith during a quarrel about being overworked. Police officers killed Mr. Johnson in a shootout. When news reached the white community, Mr. Turner and other Black farm workers who had previously been abused by Mr. Smith were targeted and accused of conspiracy.

Many Black people during this time were lynched based on mere accusations of murder against white people. The same was true here, as at least seven confirmed Black individuals were lynched by the white mob in response to Hampton Smith’s death, inflicting community-wide racial terror violence.

Mrs. Turner was grieving and spoke out against her husband’s death, promising to take legal action. Enraged by this, the white mob made an example out of Mrs. Turner, despite having no reason to fear actual legal repercussions from her promise as Black people at the time were not afforded judicial process. The white mob lynched Mary Turner and her unborn child to maintain white supremacy, silence her, and communicate to the Black community that no dissent from the racial order would be tolerated. No member of the mob was ever held accountable for the lynching of Mary Turner and her unborn baby.

The grotesque slaughter of a Black woman eight months pregnant reveals a great deal about the way in which Black women were dehumanized with impunity. EJI has documented 594 racial terror lynchings between 1877 and 1950 in the state of Georgia. Brooks County had the third highest number of documented racial terror lynchings.

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Extensive piece by Julie Buckner Armstrong who wrote the definitive book on the horrific and under-publicized atrocity: https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2...d/ideas/essay/

Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching ~ https://www.amazon.com/Turner-Memory.../dp/0820337668