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The words were meant to be spoken, not sung. It was supposed to be a speech honoring Abraham Lincoln—born nine decades earlier, assassinated half a century later, yet still revered at Stanton Normal High School in Jacksonville, Florida, where the principal was a son of the city, James Weldon Johnson.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett had a special connection to Thomas Moss, and didn’t understand how he could have done what they said he had.

The question of slavery, and whether and when it should end, divided America from its inception, and eventually moved the nation toward Civil War. The dispute reached a peak on Dec. 20, 1860, when South Carolina passed the first Ordinance of Secession from the Union. South Carolina’s secession was followed by the secession of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas, and the threat of secession by Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina, according to the Library of Congress. Those 11 states formed the Confederate States of America.

Billie Holiday looks at the stage floor, then takes a deep breath. She gazes straight into the audience and begins to sing, “Southern trees bear a strange fruit./ Blood on the leaves. And blood at the root.”

In March 1904, three men — two Black, one white — gathered on a houseboat on the White River in Arkansas, a tributary to the Mississippi, for an evening of gambling. An argument left the white man injured, setting off a week of racial terror that included a roundup of dozens of Black residents and the lynching of 13.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. — It began with questions about why almost all the faces on the wall of honor in the journalism building at the University of Maryland’s flagship campus were of white men.

When 17-year-old Henry Smith left Paris, Texas, after being questioned in the rape and murder of a white toddler, a railroad company offered free transportation to anyone who wanted to take part in the manhunt for him.