Racial Terror

The Rosewood Massacre: A Florida Town Wiped Off the Map

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

The Tulsa Race Massacre: How White Mobs Destroyed Black Wall Street

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

From Reconstruction to Jim Crow: How Terror Replaced Slavery

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

Red Summer: The 1919 Race War That Swept America

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

Sundown Towns: The Places Where Black People Couldn't Stay After Dark

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: The Woman Who Counted the Dead

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

Lynching in America: The Scope of 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

The First Ku Klux Klan: Terrorism in White Hoods

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 and Convict Leasing: Slavery by Another Name

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.

Native American Genocide

The Long War: Institutional Destruction of Native Peoples

After Wounded Knee the war moved into schools, clinics, and land bureaus. This series covers boarding schools, broken treaties, reservations, sterilization, and MMIW.

Native American Genocide

Native American Genocide in American History

The U.S. reduced the Native population from millions to 237,000 by 1900 through removal, massacres, boarding schools, and forced sterilization. Both series documented here.

Native American Genocide

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women: The Crisis With Historical Roots

Native women are murdered at 10 times the national average in some regions. The MMIW crisis traces directly to jurisdictional gaps the federal government deliberately created.