Racial Terror
The Assassination of Malcolm X
Malcolm X was shot at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on February 21 1965. Two of the three men convicted of his murder spent decades in prison for a crime they did not commit.
NayNay
Racial Terror
The Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. was shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4 1968. He was 39 and supporting striking sanitation workers earning poverty wages.
Racial Terror
Selma and Bloody Sunday: The Bridge That Changed America
On March 7 1965 state troopers beat 600 voting rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma Alabama. The footage broadcast on TV forced the Voting Rights Act.
Racial Terror
Freedom Rider Attacks: When Buses Became Battlegrounds
On Mother's Day 1961 a Freedom Rider bus was firebombed outside Anniston Alabama while police watched. The federal government asked the riders to stop.
Racial Terror
Medgar Evers: Assassinated in His Own Driveway
Medgar Evers was shot in his driveway in Jackson Mississippi on June 12 1963. His killer Byron De La Beckwith remained free for 30 years and boasted about it.
Racial Terror
The 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing: Four Girls on a Sunday Morning
On September 15 1963 KKK members bombed a Birmingham church killing four girls — Addie Mae Collins Cynthia Wesley Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair.
Racial Terror
Emmett Till: The Murder That Ignited a Movement
Emmett Till was 14 when he was abducted and killed in Mississippi in 1955. His mother's open casket decision turned a murder into a movement.
Racial Terror
American Race Massacres: A History of Organized Slaughter
From Colfax in 1873 to Tulsa in 1921 every American race massacre shared three features: Black economic success as the trigger state complicity during the killing and complete impunity for the perpetrators. This series covers six of them.
Racial Terror
The East St. Louis Riots: When a City Tried to Purge Its Black Population
On July 2 1917 white mobs killed 39 to 150 Black residents in East St. Louis Illinois burned 200 buildings and drove 6000 people from the city. Police and National Guard participated. No federal action followed.
Racial Terror
The Colfax Massacre: Reconstruction's Bloodiest Day
On Easter Sunday 1873 a white paramilitary force killed 62 to 153 Black men defending a Louisiana courthouse. The killers were convicted by a federal jury then freed by the Supreme Court — a ruling that gutted civil rights enforcement for a century.
Racial Terror
The Wilmington Coup of 1898: America's Only Successful Coup d'Etat
On November 10 1898 a white supremacist mob in Wilmington NC overthrew the elected city government at gunpoint killed up to 60 Black residents and expelled Republican officials. The coup's leaders became governor and US senator.
Racial Terror
The Elaine Massacre: Arkansas's Forgotten Bloodbath
In October 1919 federal soldiers and white posses killed an estimated 100 to 856 Black sharecroppers in Elaine Arkansas. Their crime was forming a union. Twelve survivors were sentenced to death after trials lasting under an hour.