May 13, 1958 – Letter from Jackie Robinson to President Eisenhower Advocating for Civil Rights

Jackie Robinson famously broke the color barrier in major league baseball when, in 1947, he signed on to play with the Brooklyn Dodgers. The first African American to play in the major leagues in the 20th century, Robinson was the target of “torrents of abuse,” as Robinson described it in his autobiography. Nevertheless, Robinson, as a National Archives post observes, “answered the people he called “haters” with the perfect eloquence of a base hit. In 1949, his best year, Robinson was named the league’s Most Valuable Player, and in 1962 he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. He retired from the major leagues in 1956.”

After Robinson retired from playing, he continued to advocate for Black civil rights. From the Archives:

Every American President who held office between 1956 and 1972 received letters from Jackie Robinson expressing varying levels of rebuke for not going far enough to advance the cause of civil rights.”

Jackie Robinson and President Dwight Eisenhower in the Oval Office, 1957.
Photograph Courtesy of the Dwight Eisenhower Presidential Library

On this day in history, Robinson sent a letter to President Dwight Eisenhower, following a speech by Eisenhower to Black leaders in which he implored Blacks to have “patience.” Robinson’s excellent rejoinder, with sentiments later echoed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (written April 16, 1963) is worth quoting in full:

My dear Mr. President:


I was sitting in the audience at the Summit Meeting of Negro Leaders yesterday when you said we must have patience. On hearing you say this, I felt like standing up and saying, “Oh no! Not again.”



I respectfully remind you sir, that we have been the most patient of all people. When you said we must have self-respect, I wondered how we could have self-respect and remain patient considering the treatment accorded us through the years.



17 million Negroes cannot do as you suggest and wait for the hearts of men to change. We want to enjoy now the rights that we feel we are entitled to as Americans. This we cannot do unless we pursue aggressively goals which all other Americans achieved over 150 years ago.



As the chief of executive of our nation, I respectfully suggest that you unwittingly crush the spirit of freedom in Negroes by constantly urging forbearance and give hope to those prosegregation leaders like Governor Faubus who would take from us even those freedoms we now enjoy. Your own experience with Governor Faubus is proof enough that forbearance and not eventual integration is the goal the pro-segregation leaders seek.



In my view, an unequivocal statement backed up by action such as you demonstrated you could take last fall in dealing with Governor Faubus if it became necessary, would let it be known that America is determined to provide – in the near future – for Negroes – the freedoms we are entitled to under the constitution.



Respectfully yours,

Jackie Robinson

March 30, 1870 – 15th Amendment Adopted

Together, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments are referred to as the Reconstruction Amendments, as they were passed after the US Civil War during the Reconstruction Era that followed. The 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865, abolished slavery. The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, established, inter alia, that “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

On this day in history, March 30, 1870, the 15th Amendment to the US Constitution was adopted. It was meant to protect the freedoms outlined in the 13th and 14th Amendments. It granted Backs, now free from slavery, the right to vote, declaring that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It was passed by the House of Representatives on February 25, 1869, and the Senate on February 26, 1869. It was ratified on February 3, 1870.

Upon the adoption of the amendment on March 30, President Ulysses S. Grant thought the occasion momentous enough to merit special notice:

A measure which makes at once 4,000,000 people voters who were heretofore declared by the highest tribunal in the land not citizens of the United States, nor eligible to become so (with the assertion that ‘at the time of the Declaration of Independence the opinion was fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race, regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics, that black men had no rights which the white man was bound to respect’), is indeed a measure of grander importance than any other one act of the kind from the foundation of our free Government to the present day.”

President Ulysses S. Grant

However, the 14th and 15th amendments were only sporadically enforced until 1876 (the end of Reconstruction). Thereafter, they were only rarely enforced until the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision by the Supreme Court provided the legal foundation for the civil rights movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

In particular, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a law regarded, as the Brennan Center points out, “as the most effective piece of civil rights legislation in American history.”

In the 2000s, however, Republican legislatures around the country, aided by the US Supreme Court, have taken measures to erode the civil rights built up until then.

In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the most powerful provision in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In Shelby County v. Holder, a 5–4 conservative majority struck down the law’s Section 5, which required states with a history of racial discrimination in voting to get certification in advance, or “pre-clearance,” that any election change they wanted to make would not be discriminatory.

Within 24 hours of the Shelby ruling, the Brennan Center reports, states started implementing new laws in an attempt to disenfranchise voters (most specifically, voters who tend to vote for Democrats). Multiracial democracy in America, write Brennan Center staffers Wendy Weiser and Madiba Dennie, “is under siege”:

State lawmakers have released an unprecedented wave of antidemocratic legislation. And the Supreme Court broke the dam that would have restrained the flood, dramatically rolling back longstanding legal protections for voting rights and fair representation. The consequences of these developments are grim.”

After over 150 years, the 15th Amendment is under siege as well.

January 14, 1963 – Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel Speaks on “Religion and Race”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) was an American rabbi who was able to get out of Poland and move to New York City six weeks before the Nazis invaded; most of the rest of his family were killed in the Holocaust.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Heschel became one of the leading Jewish theologians of the 20th century and a leader in the civil rights movement. As the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University recounts:

Considered “one of the truly great men” of his day and a “great prophet” by Martin Luther King, Jr., Heschel articulated to many Jewish Americans and African Americans the notion that they had a responsibility for each other’s liberation and for the plight of all suffering fellow humans around the world (“Conversation with Martin Luther King,” Conservative Judaism 22, no. 3 (Spring 1968): 1-19, p. 2.)”

Heschel first met Martin Luther King, Jr. on this day in history, when they were both speaking at the National Conference on Religion and Race in Chicago. Heschel maintained that Americans had the chance to find redemption through their efforts to combat racism: “Seen in the light of our religious tradition, the Negro problem is God’s gift to America, the test of our integrity, a magnificent spiritual opportunity.”

He exhorted:

Let us dodge no issues. Let us yield no inch to bigotry, let us make no compromise with callousness.

Religion and race. How can the two be uttered together? To act in the spirit of religion is to unite what lies apart, to remember that humanity as a whole is God’s beloved child. To act in the spirit of race is to sunder, to slash, to dismember the flesh of living humanity. Is this the way to honor a father: to torture his child? How can we hear the word “race” and feel no self reproach?

Few of us seem to realize how insidious, how radical, how universal an evil racism is. Few of us realize that racism is man’s gravest threat to man, the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason, the maximum of cruelty for a minimum of thinking.

The redeeming quality of man lies in his ability to sense his kinship with all men. Yet there is a deadly poison that inflames the eye, making us see the generality of race but not the uniqueness of the human face. Pigmentation is what counts. The Negro is a stranger to many souls. There are people in our country whose moral sensitivity suffers a blackout when confronted with the black man’s predicament.

How many disasters do we have to go through in order to realize that all of humanity has a stake in the liberty of one person; whenever one person is offended, we are all hurt. What begins as inequality of some inevitably ends as inequality of all.”

The entire speech is worth reading. You can access it here.

Martin Luther King, Jr. (center) and Abraham Joshua Heschel (2nd from front right), march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, March 21, 1965

July 16, 1854 – Elizabeth Jennings Graham Challenged Racist Streetcar Policies in New York City

Elizabeth Jennings Graham was an African-American who was born free in 1827 in New York. Her father, also a free man, was a successful tailor and an influential member of New York’s black community. He has been identified as the earliest known Black person to hold a patent in the United States in his or her own name; in 1821, he was awarded a patent from the U.S. government for developing dry scouring, a new method to dry clean clothing. With the proceeds he received from his patented dry-cleaning process, Thomas Jennings bought his family’s freedom; his wife had been a slave and therefore their children were also considered to be slaves.

Elizabeth’s mother also become well-known in the Black community. She was a member of the Ladies Literary Society of New York, an organization founded by elite Black women to promote self-improvement.

Elizabeth became a schoolteacher for free Black and the organist at her church. By the 1850s, streetcars were common in New York City, but they were owned by private companies, which regularly barred access to their service on the basis of race.

Elizabeth Jennings Graham, circa 1895

On a Sunday on this day in history, Elizabeth was running late to the church, and boarded a streetcar of the Third Avenue Railroad Company. The conductor ordered her to get off. When she refused, the conductor tried to remove her by force. Eventually, with the aid of a police officer, Jennings was ejected from the streetcar. As the “New York Tribune” reported later: “The conductor got her down on the platform, jammed her bonnet, soiled her dress and injured her person.”

The incident resulted in an organized movement, led by Elizabeth’s father among others, to end racial discrimination on streetcars. Frederick Douglass publicized the case in his newspaper, garnering it national attention. Elizabeth’s father also filed a lawsuit on behalf of his daughter against the driver, the conductor, and the Third Avenue Railroad Company in Brooklyn, where the Third Avenue company was headquartered. She was represented by the law firm of Culver, Parker, and Arthur. Her case was handled by the firm’s 24-year-old junior partner Chester A. Arthur, future president of the United States.

Chester A. Arthur, c. 1859

In 1855, the Brooklyn Circuit Court ruled in her favor. In his charge to the jury, Judge William Rockwell declared: “Colored persons if sober, well-behaved and free from disease, had the same rights as others and could neither be excluded by any rules of the company, nor by force or violence.”

The jury awarded Jennings damages in the amount of $250 (equivalent to $8,261 in 2022) as well as $22.50 in costs. The next day, the Third Avenue Railroad Company ordered its cars desegregated.

Not all streetcar lines desegregated, however, and the fight by Black activists for equal access continued. A decade later in 1865, New York’s public transit services were finally fully desegregated. The last case was a challenge by a black woman named Ellen Anderson, a widow of a fallen United States Colored Troops soldier, a fact that won public support for her.

December 13, 1903 – Birth of Civil Rights Activist Ella Baker

Ella Baker was born on December 13, 1903, this day in history.  Growing up in North Carolina, she listened to her grandfather preach about working together and giving to others. He would always ask, “What do you hope to accomplish?” Her grandmother told Ella stories about life in slavery, and especially how she exerted her freedom by her mind, even though her body was not free. And Ella’s mother always said to her, “Lift as you climb.” Ella took all these teachings to heart.

The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, founded to build on Ella’s legacy to inspire and guide leaders who will fight injustice, relates:

After graduating in 1927 as class valedictorian, she moved to New York City and began joining social activist organizations. In 1930, she joined the Young Negroes Cooperative League, whose purpose was to develop black economic power through collective planning. She also involved herself with several women’s organizations. She was committed to economic justice for all people and once said, ‘People cannot be free until there is enough work in this land to give everybody a job.’”

Ella Baker

As did her grandfather, when she interacted with people, Ella would ask them, “What do you hope to accomplish?” Often she would hear by way of reply that they wanted justice, they wanted the vote, and they wanted to be treated like citizens.

Then she counseled them on how to go about achieving all this.

Ella began her involvement with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1940. She began as a field secretary and then served as director of branches from 1943 until 1946.

In 1957, she moved to Atlanta to help organize Martin Luther King’s new organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She also ran a voter registration campaign called the Crusade for Citizenship.

Perhaps the work she did with the most impact was helping students form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). As the Ella Baker Center recounts:

She wanted to assist the new student activists because she viewed young, emerging activists as a resource and an asset to the movement. Miss Baker organized a meeting at Shaw University for the student leaders of the sit-ins in April 1960. From that meeting, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — SNCC — was born.”

Under her guidance, SNCC became one of the foremost advocates for human rights in the country.

She explained:

We are not fighting for the freedom of the Negro alone, but for the freedom of the human spirit.”

She added:

The struggle for rights didn’t start yesterday and has to continue until it is won.”

She continued to be a respected and influential leader in the fight for human and civil rights until her death on December 13, 1986, on her 83rd birthday.

Like many women, Ella Baker worked largely behind the scenes, with men gaining recognition for much of the accomplishments she helped achieve. As observed in a review of the book, Ella Baker & The Black Freedom Movement by Professor Barbara Ransby:

Before we continue to heap a single praise or Hosanna to men like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Wyatt T. Walker, Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, Paul Robeson, Thurgood Marshall, W.E.B. Du Bois, or any of these other gentlemen we idolize as embodiments of masculine heroism, we should know about one woman, of many, who had more wisdom, courage, and vision then almost all of them: Ms. Ella Baker.”

November 20, 1910 – Birth of Pauli Murray, Activist for Civil Rights and Women’s Rights, Inter Alia

Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray as an American civil rights activist who became a lawyer, a women’s rights activist, Episcopal priest (the first African-American woman to be ordained), and author.

Murray was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on November 20, 1910, this day in history. Both sides of her family were of mixed racial origins, with ancestors including Black slaves, white slave owners, Native Americans, Irish, and free Black people. Murray’s parents died when she was a child, and she was raised mostly by her maternal grandparents in Durham, North Carolina. At the age of 16, she moved to New York City to attend Hunter College, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1933.

Yale University historian Elizabeth Gilmore, in her book on unsung activists, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights 1919–1950, explains that in 1938, Murray applied to graduate school at the University of North Carolina and was denied entry because of her race, even though her white great-great-grandfather had been a trustee of the university. Gilmore writes, “From that moment on, Pauli Murray was a one-woman civil rights movement.” 

Pauli Murray, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, From the collection of: National Trust for Historic Preservation

In 1941, Murray enrolled in Howard University law school. Murray was the only woman in her law school class, and she became aware of sexism at the school, which she labeled “Jane Crow” — alluding to Jim Crow, the system of racial discriminatory state laws oppressing African Americans. Murray graduated first in her class, but she was denied the chance to do post-graduate work at Harvard University because of her gender. She earned a master’s degree in law at University of California, Berkeley in 1945, and in 1965 she became the first African American to receive a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Yale Law School.

In 1942 Murray joined with George Houser, James Farmer and Bayard Rustin, to form the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). In 1943 Murray published two important essays on civil rights, Negroes Are Fed Up in “Common Sense” and an article about the Harlem race riot in the socialist newspaper, “New York Call.” Her most famous poem on race relations, “Dark Testament,” was also written in that year.

Notably, it was Murray’s idea that lead to the successful attack on Plessy v. Ferguson that resulted in Brown v. Board of Education. While at Howard, law students were discussing how best to bring an end to Jim Crow, according to a New Yorker article, “The Many Lives of Pauli Murray,” aptly subtitled: “She was an architect of the civil-rights struggle—and the women’s movement. Why haven’t you heard of her?” The author of that article, Kathryn Schultz, reports:

In the half century since Plessy v. Ferguson, lawyers had been chipping away at segregation by questioning the ‘equal’ part of the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine—arguing that, say, a specific black school was not truly equivalent to its white counterpart. Fed up with the limited and incremental results, one student in the class proposed a radical alternative: why not challenge the ‘separate’ part instead?”

Of course, that student was Pauli Murray. In her final law-school paper, Murray formalized that idea, arguing that segregation violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. Some years later, when her professor, Spottswood Robinson, joined with Thurgood Marshall and others to try to end Jim Crow, he remembered Murray’s paper, retrieved it from his files, and presented it to his colleagues — the team that, in 1954, successfully argued Brown v. Board of Education.

As a lawyer, Murray argued for civil rights and women’s rights. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall called Murray’s 1950 book, States’ Laws on Race and Color, the “bible” of the civil rights movement. The book was an exhaustive compilation of state laws and local ordinances in effect in 1950 that mandated racial segregation and of pre-Brown-era civil rights legislation.

Murray served on the 1961–1963 Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, having been appointed by John F. Kennedy. In 1966, she was a co-founder of the National Organization for Women. Ruth Bader Ginsburg named Murray as a coauthor of a brief on the 1971 case Reed v. Reed, in recognition of her pioneering work on gender discrimination. This case articulated the “failure of the courts to recognize sex discrimination for what it is and its common features with other types of arbitrary discrimination.” Murray held faculty or administrative positions at the Ghana School of Law, Benedict College, and Brandeis University.

In addition to her legal and advocacy work, Murray published two well-reviewed autobiographies and a volume of poetry. Her volume of poetry, “Dark Testament,” was republished in 2018.

Kathryn Schultz writes that Murray’s lifelong fate was to be both ahead of her time and behind the scenes:

Two decades before the civil-rights movement of the nineteen-sixties, Murray was arrested for refusing to move to the back of a bus in Richmond, Virginia; organized sit-ins that successfully desegregated restaurants in Washington, D.C.; and, anticipating the Freedom Summer, urged her Howard classmates to head south to fight for civil rights and wondered how to ‘attract young white graduates of the great universities to come down and join with us.’ And, four decades before another legal scholar, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, coined the term ‘intersectionality,’ Murray insisted on the indivisibility of her identity and experience as an African-American, a worker, and a woman.”

Despite all this, Schultz laments, Murray’s name is not well known today, especially among white Americans.

There are a number of links to more information about Pauli Murray on a National Organization for Women website, here.

Carolina Digital Library and Archives – Carolina Digital Library and Archives. “Murray, Pauli, 1910-1985.” July 2007. Online image. UNC University Library.

October 17, 1871 – President Ulysses Grant Declares Martial Law & Suspends Habeas Corpus Following KKK Violence Against Blacks in South Carolina

The Ku Klux Klan, formed in 1866 in Tennessee, spread quickly throughout the South. It was an organization of “night-riding white supremacists who terrorized Black families, and a good many white Republicans, as it sought to cripple the Republican party and its supporters, which included virtually all African-Americans.” (Ryan, Allan A., Amos Akerman: Grant’s Attorney General Who Broke the Back of the Ku Klux Klan (July 4, 2021). Available at SSRN here.

Lou Falkner Williams, in “The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, 1871-1872, an online dissertation for U. Of Florida, observed that “The Ku Klux Klan was the white solution to a Black population which refused to stay in its place and maintain a slavelike demeanor.”

As Eric Foner, a preeminent historian of Reconstruction, described the Klan, “It was a military force serving the interests of the Democratic party, the planter class, and all those who desired the restoration of white supremacy.” (Eric Foner, Reconstruction, America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, pp,. 425-26)

“All those” of course consisted of white males.

During the presidential campaign of 1868, the KKK emerged as a “paramilitary wing” of the Democratic Party. Robert J. Kaczorowski, in “Federal Enforcement of Civil Rights During the First Reconstruction,” 23 Fordham Urb. L.J. 155 (1995), reports that the KKK “embarked on a campaign of terror for the purpose of destroying the Republican Party in the Southern states and reducing Southern Blacks to the control of white supremacists.” After Grant was elected to the presidency, terrorist acts by the KKK increased. Thus, Kaczorowski notes, “Congress created the Department of Justice in 1870 in large part for the purpose of providing more effective protection against Klan terrorism.”

In April, 1871, President Grant signed the Ku Klux Klan Act, which made it a federal crime to deprive American citizens of their civil rights through racial terrorism. He then sent US Attorney General Amos T. Akerman along with Army Major Lewis Merrill to South Carolina to investigate reports of violence against newly freed Blacks. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, in York County alone they found evidence of eleven murders and more than 600 whippings and other assaults.

Amos T. Akerman

Lou Falkner Williams wrote that “Akerman left South Carolina convinced that ‘from the beginning of the world until now,’ no community ‘nominally civilized, has been so fully under the domination of systematic and organized depravity.’” (p. 94). He concluded the KKK activities “amount(ed) to war,” and recommended to President Grant that he use the full extent of his powers to suppress the KKK in South Carolina.

On October 12, 1871, President Grant warned nine South Carolina counties with prevalent KKK activity that martial law would be declared if the Klan did not disperse. The warning was ignored. On October 17, 1871 – this day in history – President Grant declared martial law and suspended the writ of habeas corpus in the same nine counties. Once he did so, federal forces were allowed to arrest and imprison KKK members and instigators of racial terrorism without bringing them before a judge or into court.

Many affluent Klan members fled the jurisdiction to avoid arrest but by December 1871 approximately 600 Klansmen were in jail. More than 200 arrestees were indicted, fifty-three pleaded guilty, and five were convicted at trial. Klan terrorism in South Carolina decreased significantly after the arrests and trials but racial violence targeting Black people continued throughout the South for decades.

You can read President Grant’s proclamation suspending habeas corpus here.

April 17, 1863 – African American Charlotte Brown Challenged Racial Segregation After Being Forced Off Streetcar

Charlotte Brown was born in Maryland in 1839 to parents living as free people of color in Baltimore. After 1850 her family moved to San Francisco and became part of the Black middle class. Charlotte’s father, James E. Brown, ran a livery stable, was a partner in a Black newspaper and was an antislavery crusader. As the San Francisco Chronicle pointed out, “San Francisco had the largest black population in the state. Yet African Americans in the city were prohibited from using the public library and were forced to attend segregated schools.”

On April 17, 1863 – this day in history – Charlotte took a seat on a horse-drawn streetcar, owned by the Omnibus Railroad Company, to visit her doctor. The streetcar conductor asked her to leave and she responded she had a right to ride and did not intend to leave.

Horse-drawn streetcar, San Francisco, 1860s, via Wikipedia

The conductor asked her several times to get off the streetcar, and each time she refused. Finally, when a white woman objected to her presence, the conductor grabbed her by the arm and escorted her off the car.

Her father hired attorney W. C. Burnett, and Charlotte Brown brought a lawsuit against the Omnibus Railroad Company for $200. Just that year, a law had been passed in the legislature allowing Blacks to testify in cases involving whites.

The Omnibus Railroad argued that its conductor’s action was justified because racial segregation protected white women and children who might be fearful or ‘repulsed’ by riding in the same car as African Americans. Brown won her case, but the judge only ordered her reimbursed 5 cents – the streetcar fare.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that within days of the judgment, another conductor forced Brown and her father from a streetcar, and Charlotte brought another lawsuit. In October 1864, Judge Orville Pratt of the 12th District Court ruled that San Francisco streetcar segregation was illegal. In his opinion he stated:

It has been already quite too long tolerated by the dominant race to see with indifference the Negro or mulatto treated as a brute, insulted, wronged, enslaved, made to wear a yoke, to tremble before white men, to serve him as a tool, to hold property and life at his will, to surrender to him his intellect and conscience, and to seal his lips and belie his thought through dread of the white man’s power.”

The jury awarded Brown $500.

Judge Orville C. Pratt

Nevertheless, streetcar drivers continued to refuse to stop for Blacks in the city, or forced them off if they boarded. The Chronicle writes:

It took several more lawsuits, including the one by Mary Ellen Pleasant, the fugitive slave who became known as the mother of civil rights in California, before the state Supreme Court ruled in 1868 that the streetcar company’s exclusion based on race was unlawful.”

In 1867, Charlotte Brown opened a school for young children in San Francisco, offering “all the branches of primary education” as well as music and embroidery. She married Henry Riker, a prominent African American activist in 1874. Little is known about Charlotte Brown Riker’s life after that time, not even the year she died.

February 8, 1968 – Orangeburg, South Carolina Massacre of Black Protestors

On this night, police opened fire on some 200 unarmed Black students from South Carolina State University who were protesting segregation at Orangeburg’s only bowling alley. When the shooting stopped, three students were dead and twenty-seven wounded. Many people today still know about the shooting of white student anti-war protestors only two years later at Kent State, which killed 4 students and wounded nine others, but hardly anyone could tell you about the greater massacre in Orangeburg.

The three young men who were murdered: Henry Smith and Samuel Hammond, both SCSU students, and Delano Middleton, a local student at Wilkinson High School.

As the History Channel website recounts, Harry Floyd, owner of All-Star Bowling Triangle bowling alley in Orangeburg, South Carolina, claimed his bowling alley was exempt from segregation laws since it was private property. He stated he did not want to “offend” his long-time white clientele.

Orangeburg was the site of two mostly Black universities: South Carolina State (SC State) and Claflin University. Many students became involved in the civil rights movement and wanted to work on upending the effects of racism within their own small town.

On February 5, 1968, a small group of students from both SC State and Claflin went to All-Star Bowling Lanes to protest its whites-only policy. Floyd refused them entry and they left peacefully, but word spread.

The next night a larger crowd returned to the bowling alley and were met by police who threatened to blast them with water from firehoses. The students fought back by taunting them and lighting matches. A plate glass window was broken, and the police began beating students with billy clubs.

By night’s end, fifteen students had been arrested and at least ten students and one police officer were treated for injuries.

South Carolina Governor Robert McNair insisted “Black Power” leaders [the common bugagoo before Black Lives Matter and “Antifa”] were inciting the student unrest and called in the National Guard to intimidate the students and repress the anticipated violence.

National Guardsmen with rifles and fixed bayonets in Orangeburg on February 8, 1968. Getty Images via Business Insider

The student protestors were joined by Cleveland Sellers, a native South Carolinian and civil rights activist. Sellers’s activism had put him on the government’s radar and earned him a reputation as a “Black militant” [obviously worse than being a “white” militant].

By February 8, Sellers and hundreds of students had gathered on SC State’s campus to protest racial segregation at the bowling alley and other privately-owned establishments.

The students started a large bonfire in front of the campus entrance. They taunted law enforcement and threw rocks and other objects at them. Eventually, the police chief ordered the fire be put out. As firefighters extinguished the fire, a police officer was struck with a heavy wooden banister.

Unsure of what was happening and claiming to have heard gunshots, some police raised their guns and opened fire in the darkness upon the protestors for several seconds. When it was over, twenty-eight students lay on State’s campus with multiple buckshot wounds; three others had been killed. Almost all were shot in the back or side.

As reported by the Zinn Project, the Governor and law enforcement officials on the scene claimed police had fired in self-defense:

The Associated Press’ initial account, carried in newspapers the morning after the shooting, misreported what happened as ‘an exchange of gunfire.’ The source, an AP photographer on the scene, subsequently revealed that he heard no gunfire from the campus.”

Cleveland Sellers was arrested for inciting a riot. He was tried and sentenced to one year of hard labor. He was finally pardoned 23 years after the incident.

The U.S. Justice Department charged the nine police officers who admitted shooting that night with abuse of power. However, neither of two South Carolina juries would uphold the charges.

Cleveland Sellers stands beside the historic marker on the S.C. State University campus at the 2000 Orangeburg memorial. By Cecil Williams.

September 24, 1964 – Over 7500 Whites Protest Racial Integration of New York City Schools

Ten years after the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v Board of Education ruled that schools must be racially integrated, the city had done little to advance integration in the schools. New York City Public Radio (WNYC) reports that, in 1964, schools that enrolled mostly black and Latino students tended to have inferior facilities, less experienced teachers and severe overcrowding. Some schools were so overcrowded that they operated on split shifts, with the school day lasting only four hours for students.

Civil rights activists staged a one-day school boycott on Feb. 3 1964, when approximately 460,000 students refused to go to school.

Source: Queens College Civil Rights Archives

WNYC’s online history contends that, even adjusting for the typical absentee rate at the time, the school boycott was the largest civil rights protest in U.S. history. Yet, little came of it, except perhaps galvanizing whites to organize themselves.

On September 24th, 1964, a crowd of at least 7,500 demonstrators, almost all of whom were white women, marched outside New York City Hall to protest any policies aimed at increasing racial integration by busing in the city’s public school system. The protest was organized by two groups formed by white parents; the Parents and Taxpayers Coordinating Council and the Joint Council for Better Education.

The protest was ostensibly against “busing.” As a New York Times history of desegregation in New York observed:

The organizers knew better than to adopt the rhetoric of the white segregationists down South. Instead, they used race-neutral language, saying they were fighting for their own civil rights: the right to keep their kids off buses and in neighborhood schools.”

But as the Times notes, the Republican strategist Lee Atwater, in an infamous 1981 interview, made the strategy plain: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights’ and all that stuff.”

Anti-busing demonstrators shouting at policemen at City Hall in New York, Sept. 24, 1964, as they protested a Board of Education busing program aimed at increasing racial balance in New York City schools.Credit…Harry Harris/Associated Press

As a 2020 study in Time Magazine noted, today, the battle is far from over. The New York City public-school system remains one of the most segregated public-school systems in the country:

Of the 1.1 million NYC public-school students, 15% are white. However, about 75% of Black and Hispanic students attend schools where fewer than 10% of students are white, and about 35% of white students attend schools where more than half of the student population is also white.”

Busing was just a manifestation of the larger problem. As the Times notes:

Busing became the literal vehicle of integration because in most places black and white people did not live in the same neighborhoods. This was not incidental. . . . in both the North and the South, a dragnet of federal, state, local and private policies and actions had protected white neighborhoods and penned black people into all-black areas, and that this made it impossible in most areas to create integrated schools by simply zoning nearby black and white children to the same buildings. To get integrated schools, courts had to overcome entrenched government-sanctioned residential segregation.”

This, of course, has still not happened.