Independent history writing about the parts of the American record that get skipped. Every claim here is sourced — check the citations and argue with them.
Racial Terror
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
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
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.
Racial Terror
In January 1923 a white mob burned every building in Rosewood Florida killed at least six Black residents and drove 150 survivors into the swamps. Florida paid reparations to nine survivors in 1994 — the only state ever to do so.
Racial Terror
On June 1 1921 a white mob deputized by Tulsa's city government burned 35 blocks of the Greenwood District — destroying 1256 homes 191 businesses and killing an estimated 100 to 300 people. No one was ever convicted.
Racial Terror
The Confederacy lost the Civil War and within months legislated a replacement system. Black Codes convict leasing the KKK lynching and sundown towns were not separate incidents — they were one coordinated project across six decades.
Racial Terror
Between April and November 1919 white mobs attacked Black communities in at least 26 US cities. The deadliest single event — the Elaine Massacre in Arkansas — killed an estimated 100 to 856 Black people. Nothing that caused it was resolved.
Racial Terror
Historian James Loewen documented more than 10000 sundown towns across the US — municipalities that excluded Black residents through law or violence. Illinois alone had 476. The FHA's redlining made their demographics permanent.
Racial Terror
Ida B. Wells built the evidentiary case against lynching when no government would. Her 1895 Red Record documented 728 lynchings using white Southern newspapers as sources — a method the NAACP used for the next fifty years.
Racial Terror
At least 4084 Black people were lynched in the American South between 1877 and 1950. Congress debated federal anti-lynching legislation for 140 years and passed nothing until 2022 when Biden signed the Emmett Till Act.
Racial Terror
Founded in 1865 by six Confederate officers the first KKK became America's largest domestic terror organization killing thousands of Black people and their white allies before federal prosecutions collapsed it by 1872.
Racial Terror
Black Codes were laws passed in 1865 to recreate slavery without the name. When Congress struck them down convict leasing replaced them — imprisoning Black people on manufactured charges and leasing their labor for profit until 1928.