Selections from the Equal Justice Initiative History of Racial Injustice calendar. I’ve chosen historical items from after 1900.
Sep 3, 1901
Alabama makes racial segregation mandatory.
As of 2017, the segregationist language was still in the Alabama state constitution.
Sep 6, 1913
Eight Black men suffocated in a prison cell, punished for not picking cotton fast enough (Richmond, Texas).
Sep 7, 1963
Louisiana Parish denies service to all military personnel to protest integration.
Sep 9, 1957
White residents in Nashville use religion to justify segregation; Elementary school bombed
Sep 15, 1963
Four Black girls killed in bombing of Birmingham, Alabama church.
One of the bombers was convicted in 2001, after eluding justice for 38 years.
Sep 16, 1928
Hundreds of Black victims of hurricane denied proper burial in West Palm Beach, Florida.
[This hurricane likely inspired some scenes and plot in Zora Neale Hurston’s book Their Eyes Were Watching God.]
Sep 26, 1963
Alabama Supreme Court approves White prosecutor’s insult of Black woman held in contempt
[This incident involved no violence, but for me it is quite poignant. It would have been so simple to just address the witness with the honorific. The case was appealed to the US Supreme Court. “In March 1964, with three of nine justices dissenting, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Ms. Hamilton's contempt citation.”]
Sep 30, 1919
Hundreds of Black people killed in Elaine, Arkansas massacre. Black sharecropper farmers seeking to receive a fair wage were instead massacred by White people.
From the article: “little about the carnage in Elaine was unique during the summer of 1919. It was part of a period of vicious reprisals against African-American veterans returning home from World War I.”
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