On This Date

[Kasept]

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

[Kasept]

White Mob Attacks Freedom Riders in Montgomery, Alabama

On May 20, 1961, Freedom Riders traveling by bus through the South to challenge segregation laws were brutally attacked by a white mob at the Greyhound Station in downtown Montgomery, Alabama.

Several days before, on May 16, the Riders faced mob violence in Birmingham so serious that it threatened to prematurely end their campaign. The Freedom Riders were initially organized by the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), but after the Birmingham attacks, an interracial group of 22 Tennessee college students, known as the Nashville Student Movement, volunteered to take over and continue the ride through Alabama and Mississippi to New Orleans.

These new Freedom Riders reached Birmingham on May 17, but were immediately arrested and returned to Tennessee by Birmingham police. Undeterred, the Riders and additional reinforcements from Tennessee returned to Birmingham on May 18. Under pressure from the federal government, Alabama Governor John Patterson agreed to authorize state and city police to protect the Riders during their journey from Birmingham to Montgomery.

At Montgomery city limits, state police abandoned the Riders' bus; the Riders continued to the bus station unescorted and found no police protection waiting when they arrived. Montgomery Public Safety Commissioner L.B. Sullivan had promised the Ku Klux Klan several minutes to attack the Riders without police interference and, upon arrival, the Riders were met by a mob of several hundred angry white people armed with baseball bats, hammers, and pipes.

Montgomery police watched as the mob first attacked reporters and then turned on the Riders. Several were seriously injured, including a white college student named Jim Zwerg and future U.S. Congressman John Lewis. John Seigenthaler, an aide to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was knocked unconscious. Ignored by ambulances, two injured Riders were saved by good samaritans who transported them to nearby hospitals.

[Kasept]

White Mob Terrorizes 1,000 Black Residents Inside Montgomery, AL, Church

On the evening of May 21, 1961, more than 1,000 Black residents and civil rights leaders including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth attended a service at Montgomery's First Baptist Church. The service, organized by Rev. Ralph Abernathy, was planned to support an interracial group of civil rights activists known as the Freedom Riders. As the service took place, a white mob surrounded the church and vandalized parked cars.

The Freedom Riders began riding interstate buses in 1961 to test Supreme Court decisions that prohibited discrimination in interstate passenger travel. Their efforts were unpopular with white Southerners who supported continued segregation, and they faced violent attacks in several places along their journey. The day before the Montgomery church service, the Riders had arrived in Montgomery and faced a brutal attack at the hands of hundreds of white people armed with bats, hammers, and pipes. The May 21 service was planned by the local Black community to express support and solidarity.

As the surrounding mob grew larger and more violent, Dr. King called U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy from the church's basement and requested help. Kennedy sent U.S. Marshals to dispel the riot; the growing mob pelted them with bricks and bottles and the marshals responded with tear gas.

When police arrived to assist the marshals, the mob broke into smaller groups and overturned cars, attacked Black homes with bullets and firebombs, and assaulted Black people in the streets. Alabama Governor John Patterson declared martial law in Montgomery and ordered National Guard troops to restore order. Authorities arrested 17 white rioters and, by midnight, the streets were calm enough for those in the church to leave.

Three days later, troops escorted the Freedom Riders as they departed to Jackson, Mississippi, where they would face further resistance.

[Kasept]

Congress Restores Confederates' Office-Holding Rights with the Amnesty Act of 1872

Passed by Congress and signed by President Ulysses Grant on May 22, 1872, the Amnesty Act of 1872 ended office-holding disqualifications against most of the Confederate leaders and other former civil and military officials who had rebelled against the Union in the Civil War. Afterwards, only a few hundred Confederate leaders remained under office-holding restrictions.

Even while the Civil War was in progress, the Union offered amnesty to Confederates in an attempt to encourage loyalty to the Union and begin the process of reconstruction. The Confiscation Act of 1862 authorized the U.S. President to pardon anyone involved in the rebellion. The Amnesty Proclamation of December 1863 offered pardons to those who had not held a Confederate civil office, had not mistreated Union prisoners, and would sign an oath of allegiance. Another limited amnesty that targeted Southern civilians went into effect in May 1864.

In May 1865, President Andrew Johnson provided for amnesty and the return of property to those who would take an oath of allegiance. Former high-ranking Confederate government and military officials, and people owning more than $20,000 worth of property, had to apply for individual pardons.

As a result of the 1872 Amnesty and the many that preceded it, the vast majority of white former Confederates in the South were free to own land, vote, hold office, and make laws in the Southern states, less than two decades after the war's end. When Reconstruction ended in 1877 and federal troops left the region, these people who had so recently fought to maintain white supremacy and retain slavery were well-positioned to seize control of their state governments and orchestrate laws and policies to suppress the new civil rights of Black people.

[Kasept]

President George Washington Offers Reward for Capture of Black Woman Fleeing Enslavement

On May 23, 1796, a newspaper ad was placed seeking the return of Ona “Oney” Judge, an enslaved Black woman who had “absconded from the household of the President of the United States,” George Washington. Ms. Judge had successfully escaped enslavement two days earlier, fleeing Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and settling in freedom in New Hampshire.

Known to the Washingtons as “Oney,” Ms. Judge was "given" to Martha Washington by her father and had been held enslaved as part of the Washington estate since she was 10 years old. As George Washington gained political clout, Ms. Judge traveled with the family to states with varying laws regarding slavery—including lengthy residence in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Act of 1780 declared that Black people enslaved by non-residents of the state were legally freed after living in Pennsylvania for six continuous months. To avoid enforcement of the law and prevent the men and women they enslaved from being legally freed, the Washingtons regularly sent Ms. Judge and others in the household out of state for brief periods, to restart the six-month residency requirement.

When her eldest granddaughter, Eliza Custis, married, Martha Washington promised to leave Ms. Judge to the new couple as a "gift" in her will. Distressed that she would be doomed to enslavement even after Martha Washington died, Ms. Judge resolved to run in 1796. On the night of May 21, while the Washingtons were packing to return to Mt. Vernon, Ms. Judge made her escape from Philadelphia on a ship destined for Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She had befriended many enslaved people in Philadelphia and they helped her to send her belongings to New Hampshire before her escape.

The Washingtons tried several times to apprehend Ms. Judge, hiring head-hunters and issuing runaway advertisements like the one submitted on May 23. In the ad, she is described as “a light mulatto girl, much freckled, with very Black eyes and bushy Black hair. She is of middle stature, slender, and delicately formed, about 20 years of age.” The Washingtons offered a $10 reward for Ms. Judge's return to bondage—but she evaded capture, married, had several children, and lived for more than 50 years as a free woman in New Hampshire. She died there, still free, on February 25, 1848.

[Kasept]

White Mob in Oklahoma Abducts and Lynches Laura Nelson and Her Young Son

On May 24, 1911, shortly before midnight, a mob of dozens of armed white men broke into the Okfuskee County jail in Okemah, Oklahoma, and abducted Laura Nelson and her young son, L.D. The mob took the Black woman and boy six miles away and hanged them from a bridge over the Canadian River, close to the Black part of town; according to some reports, members of the mob also raped Mrs. Nelson, who was about 28 years old according to census records, before lynching her alongside her son. Their bodies were found the next morning.

A few weeks before, local police had reportedly come to the Nelsons’ cabin and accused Mr. Nelson of stealing meat. When a white deputy sheriff was shot and killed while searching the cabin, Mrs. Nelson and L.D.—who was reported as 14-16 years old in news reports, but was more likely just 12 years old according to census records—were accused of killing him. The entire Nelson family was arrested and jailed after the deputy’s shooting, and some reports indicate that a 2-year-old daughter—listed as Carry Nelson in the 1910 census—was also with Mrs. Nelson in jail.

The prosecution’s presentation at the preliminary hearing raised doubts about whether the State had sufficient evidence for a conviction. Many Black people were lynched across the U.S. 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. In this case, after Laura and L.D. Nelson were lynched, it was revealed that they claimed to have shot the deputy as he reached for his gun and seemed about to shoot Mr. Nelson, unprovoked.

Before any trial could take place, however, newspaper accounts sensationalized the case, misreporting the mother’s and son’s ages and presuming their guilt. Press reports described Laura Nelson as "very small of stature, very black, about thirty-five years old and vicious," while L.D. was described as "slender and tall, yellow and ignorant" and “raged.”

By the night of the lynching, Mrs. Nelson’s husband and L.D.’s father—whose first name is reported as Oscar or Austin in surviving records—had already been convicted of a lesser offense, sentenced to a prison term, and sent to the penitentiary; he was not present to defend his family against the mob. Unconfirmed reports vary regarding the fate of the Nelsons’ young daughter; some claim she was found drowned in the river, while others claim she was found alive and taken in to be raised by a local Black family.

After a Black boy reportedly found Laura Nelson’s and L.D. Nelson’s hanging corpses at the bridge the next morning, hundreds of white people from Okemah came to view the bodies. Some even posed on the bridge to have their photos taken with the bodies of the dead Black woman and boy. Those photographs were later reprinted as postcards and sold at novelty stores.

The mob’s choice to deprive the Nelsons of their basic rights to due process, and hang them on a bridge frequented by Black people and near where many local Black residents lived, was meant to maintain white supremacy by sending a message of terror and intimidation to the entire Black community. “While the general sentiment is adverse to the method,” the Okemah Ledger wrote a day after the lynchings, “it is generally thought that the negroes got what would have been due them.” Even proceedings supposedly held to investigate the Nelsons’ deaths were steeped in racism; when a special grand jury was called to investigate the lynching, the district judge instructed the white jurors to be mindful of their duty as members “of a superior race and greater intelligence to protect this weaker race.” No one was indicted, prosecuted, or held legally accountable for lynching Laura and L.D. Nelson.

Mrs. Nelson and her son were two of at least 75 documented victims of racial terror lynching that took place in Oklahoma between 1877 and 1950, and they are among more than 6,500 victims of racial terror lynching that EJI has documented between 1865 and 1950.

LYNCHING IN AMERICA: CONFRONTING THE LEGACY OF RACIAL TERROR ~ https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/

[Kasept]

Four Black Girls Killed in Church Bombing in Birmingham, Alabama

https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/sep/15

On the morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, a white man was seen placing a box under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Shortly afterward, the explosives inside detonated, devastating the church building and the 400 congregants inside. Parents rushed to the Sunday school classroom to check on their children and soon discovered that four young girls had been killed in the blast: Denise McNair (11), Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Robertson (14), and Cynthia Wesley (14). More than 20 others were injured.

In 1963, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was the largest Black church in Birmingham, Alabama, and served as a meeting place for civil rights activities. As demonstrations to desegregate public spaces and secure Black voting rights became more frequent and visible, meeting places like the church became targets for white segregationists looking to terrorize Black activists and their supporters.

Immediately after the bombing, violence surged throughout the city as police clashed with enraged members of the Black community. Before the day ended, at least two other African American children had been slain: 16-year-old Johnny Robinson was shot by police as he fled down an alley, and 13-year-old Virgil Ware was shot and killed by white youths while riding his bicycle.

More than a decade later, in 1977, Ku Klux Klan leader Robert Chambliss was convicted of murder for participating in the church bombing and later died in prison. Several decades later, in the early 2000s, Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton were also convicted of murder for their roles in the bombing; both men were sentenced to life imprisonment.