He boarded the northbound train in Baltimore dressed as a sailor. He carried questionable identification documents, and some travel money given him by the woman he soon would marry.
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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.”
By Jack Rasiel, Rachel Logan, Nick McMillan, Kara Newhouse, Sahana Jayaraman, Trisha Ahmed, Molly Castle Work, Adam Marton and Sean Mussenden The Howard Center for Investigative Journalism | Dec. 20,...
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On July 27, 1935, The Chicago Defender, the nation’s most influential Black weekly newspaper, published a front-page photograph of Bert Moore and Dooley Morton’s bodies hanging from an oak tree near Columbus, Mississippi.
During the late 19th and early 20th century, thousands of photographs and postcards of Black Americans killed by white mobs in racist terror lynchings were collected, traded and sent through the U.S. postal service.
On the night of July 25, 1946, outside of Monroe, Georgia, a mob of white men linked to the Ku Klux Klan murdered Black sharecroppers George Dorsey, Mae Murray Dorsey, Roger Malcom and Dorothy Dorsey Malcom at the Moore’s Ford Bridge near the Walton County line.
As with other Southern states, the history of Arkansas is replete with examples of lynching. Author Guy Lancaster recorded 365 lynching incidents in the state from 1836 to 1936, a century of racial terror. But without proper acknowledgment, many of these events fade away and become forgotten history.
