Today In White History
6.22 1908 After a white farmer is killed in Sabine County, TX, white mobs terrorize the Black community, lynching nine Black men in a 24-hour period.
6.21 1940 Jesse Thornton, Black man, is lynched in Luverne, AL, for referring to a white police officer by his name without using “Mr.”
6.20 1940 After NAACP members try to register to vote in Brownsville, TN, a mob of white men retaliates by lynching local NAACP secretary Elbert Wiliams
6.19 1865 Months after the Emancipation Proclamation is signed. Enslaved Black people in TX finally learn about it when Union Troops arrive and tell them the Confederacy lost the Civil War
6.18 1963 Sheriff's deputies in Gadsden, AL torture over 450 Black civil rights protesters with electric cattle prods and arrest them for holding a peaceful sit-in to oppose segregation.
6.17 2015 A white teenager seeking to start a race war fatally shoots nine Black people attending Bible Study at A.M.E. Zion Church in Charleston, SC.
6.16 1944 SC electrocutes George Stinney Jr. a 90 pound Black 14-year-old after he is falsely accused of rape and murder; he is the youngest person executed in the U.S. in the 20th century.
6.15 1920 Three Black circus workers, Isaac McGhie, Elmer Jackson, and Eliaas Clayton, are accused of rapping a white woman and lynched by a mob of 10,000 in Duluth, MN.
6.14 1910 Louisiana broadens its ban on interracial relationships by barring Black and white people from living together under any circumstances.
6.13 1904 A Kentucky judge orders a Black woman to publicly whip her teenaged son in front of hundreds of white spectators to punish him for fighting with a white boy
6.12 1945 Niecey Brown, a 74-year-old Black woman, dies after George Booker, an off-duty white police officer, forcibly enters her house in Selma and beats her.
6.11 1967 A white police officer fatally shoots unarmed Black teenager Martn Chambers in the back, setting off three days of rioting in Tampa
6.10 1954 Southern Governors meeting in Richmond, vow to defy the Supreeme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education outlawing racial segregation in public schools
6.09 1963 Civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer and other civil rights activists are arrested on false charges in Winona, MS. and beaten while in jail
6.08 1963 A city manager in St. Petersburg, FL orders the public swimming pool closed after David Isom, a 19-year-old Black man, swims in it for 30 minutes.
6.07 1920 William Simmons, head of the Ku Klux Klan, hires publicists to grow the group's membership; nearly 100,000 people join the terror group in the next 16 months.
6.06 1966 Civil Rights activist James Meerideth is ambushed and shot several times during his one-man Walk Against Fear through Mississippi; he survives the shooting.
6.05 1910 White mobs terrorize Black residents of Orange, TX and lynch two Black men after a grand jury fails to reach a sentencing verdict in the trial of a Black man.
6.04 1963 After white patrons protest, three movie theaters in Savannah GA, cancel integration plans.
6.03 1893 A mob of 1,500 white people lynches Sam Bush on the courthouse lawn in Decatur, IL; some in the crowd take pieces of the rope as souvenirs
6.02 1965 Oneal Moore is killed when he and his partner the first Black deputy sheriff in Washington Parish, LA are ambushed by the KKK
6.01 1921 White people attack a prosperous Black community in Tulsa, OK, and burn it to the ground during two days of rioting that leaves up to 300 people dead
5.30 1943 A series of violent conflicts between white sailors and Latino youth in CA during WWII, called the Zoot Suit Riots breaks out in Los Angeles.
5.29 1930 Black families of fallen World War I veterans are forced to travel separately from white mourners on a State Department trip to visit their loved ones' graves
5.28 1830 President Andrew Jackson signs the Indian Removal Act, which requires tribes to exchange land East of the Mississippi River for territory in the West and leads to the forcible removal of those who resist.
5.27 1892 A white mob angered by Ida B. Wells’ anti-lynching editorials in The Free Speech and Headlight, destroys her Memphis newspaper office; she relocates to Chicago
5.26 1824 In response to eugenicist fears that some immigrants would “pollute” the American gene pool, Congress passes the Immigration Act of 1924, which bars all immigration from Asia
5.25 2020 A white Minneapolis police officer kills George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by pinning his neck to the ground and choking him, sparking global protests against police brutality
5.24 1911 A white mob abducts and lynches Laura Nelson and her young son, L.D. hanging them from a bridge in Oklahoma County, OK
5.23 1836 U.S. Senate ratifies the Treaty of New Echota, which authorizes the forcible removal of members of the Cherokee Nation
5.22 1917 At the place and time advertised in the newspaper, thousands of white people, gather in Memphis and lynch Eli Parsons, a Black man falsely accused of murder, and take pieces of his body as souvenirs.
5.21 1961 National Guard troops are ordered to disperse several thousand white people threatening to set fire to First Baptist Church in Montgomery with Martin Luther King and Freedom Riders inside.
5.20 1961 Police in Montgomery allow a white mob to attack Freedom Riders and several people are severely beaten. including an envoy from the DOJ
5.19 1918 Mary Turner, a pregnant Black woman, is lynched in GA for publicly decrying the recent lynching of her husband
5.18 The Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson announces the doctrine of separate but equal and upholds state-mandated racial segregation as long as accommodations are equal
5.17 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools violates the Constitution, sparking massive white resistance and violence.
5.16 1956 White residence I Delray Beach, FL. Burna cross nd stockpile weapons to maintain racial segregation of a public beach
5.15 1970 Police shot and killed two unarmed Black student protestors at Jackson State College in Jackson, MS.
5.14 1961 A white mob sets fire to a bus carrying Freedom Riders, an interracial group challenging segregated transportation, and attacks riders with clubs, bricks, iron pipes, and knives near Anniston, AL.
5.13 1960 Six years after Brown v. Board of Education, SC legislature passes a bill maintaining school segregation
5.12 1898 Louisiana adopts a state constitution designed to purify the electorate by using poll taxes, literacy tests, and landowning requirements to block Black people from voting
5.11 1926 A mob of 200 white people tortures and lynches Henry Patterson in LaBelle Fl. Because a white woman ran screaming from her house when he approached to ask her for a drink of water
5.10 1740 SC enacts the Negro Act of 1740, which allows enslavers to whip and kill enslaved people who violate the law by growing their own food, learning to read, assembling in groups, or earning money
5.09 1961 Future GA Congressman, John Lewis and two other Freedom Riders are assaulted for trying to enter the white waiting room at the Greyhound bus station in Rock Hill SC
5.08 2009 Members of the Ku Kux Klan burn a cross to intimidate residence of a Black neighborhood in Ozark, AL.
5.07 1955 In Belzoni, MS, the Reverend George Lee, a member of the NAACP is fatally shot after he angered white people by trying to register to vote
5.06 1882 President Author signs the Chinese Exclusion Act, banning immigration from China for 10 years and prohibiting Chinese immigrants from becoming U.S. citizens
5.05 1943 A new law requiring that all marriage licenses indicate the race of the parties to be married takes effect in CA to help enforce the state’s existing ban on interracial marriage
5.04 1921 Chicago Real Estate Board unanimously votes to expel members who sell homes in white neighborhoods to Black buyers
5.03 1913 CA Legislature passes the Alien Land Law, which bars Asian immigrants from owning land
5.02 1963 More than 700 Black children protesting racial segregation in Birmingham are arrested, blasted with fire hoses, clubbed by police, and attacked by police dogs.
5.01 1863 During the Civil War, the Confederate Congress declares Black Union soldiers as criminals and authorizes their enslavement or execution
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The enemy sometimes comes with a rope, a badge, a suit, or a lie. But the story stays the same. Today, it’s not just Black skin—it’s a turban, a hijab, a name, or a language that sounds foreign.
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