Selections from the Equal Justice Initiative History of Racial Injustice calendar. I’ve chosen historical items from after 1900.
From the month of August
Aug 1, 1944
In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 6,000 white transit employees strike after eight Black men begin training as motormen on street cars, a job that had been reserved for white men only.
Aug 4, 1964
Bodies of murdered civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman are discovered in a Mississippi dam, nearly two months after their disappearance.
Aug 5, 2014 (a mere 7 years ago!)
Black workers at Memphis, Tennesse cotton gin file discrimination lawsuit after White supervisor uses racial slurs and threatens to hang them for drinking from “White” water fountain.
Aug 10, 1988
More than 45 years after internment of Japanese Americans began, the U.S. government authorizes reparations payments to surviving detainees.
Aug 11, 2017
White nationalists protest removal of a Confederate statue in Charlottesville, Virginia; the next day, a protestor dries a car into counter-protestors, injuring 19 and killing one woman.
[The statue of Robert E. Lee was removed on July 10, 2021.]
Aug 14, 1908
After failed lynching attempt, mob of 5,000 white people storms Black neighborhoods, burns Black businesses and homes, and kills Black citizens in Springfield, Illinois riots.
Aug 22, 1905
White people riot in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after Charles Miller, a Black man, enters a public restaurant.
Aug 23, 1989
White mob in Bensonhurst, New York, murders Black teenager Yusef Hawkins for visiting a white girl.
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