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
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.
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.