1926-1930
Day 6: James Clark Lynching
1926
The last known lynching in Brevard County happened in the summer of 1926. It was the third lynching of a black man in the area in two months. The victim’s name was James Clark, and a photograph of his lynching was made into a postcard. (Read: A photograph of his lynching was made into a postcard!)
“It is said that the negro had been arrested Sunday for an attempted attack on a white girl of Eau Gallie, and that he was on his way, about 7:00 o’clock that evening, with the chief of police to Titusville for safe keeping, when the officer was over-powered by masked men,” the article states. “The man was whisked away, the body being found the next morning.”
There was no attempt to find out who had murdered Clark before he could be tried for his alleged crime in a court of law. The article states only that it was determined that Clark was, in fact, dead.
“A coroner’s jury was empaneled Monday morning to view the remains of a negro man, who was found three miles north of Eau Gallie Monday morning,” the Cocoa Tribune printed. “The jury’s findings were that the man, James Clark, came to his death by being hanged from a tree and riddled with bullets.”
On January 15, 1989, the Orlando Sentinel revisited what was then a 63-year-old case. At that time, there were still people alive who had information about the lynching.
A.T. Rossetter was a municipal judge in Eau Gallie for 25 years before the town merged with Melbourne in 1969. He was 18 when the Clark lynching took place.
“Back in those days, the sheriff’s office and those people never cared much about it, the hanging,” Rossetter told the Sentinel. “They never investigated it. I didn’t believe anybody could be that cruel.”
On July 11, 1926, Clark was working as the chauffeur of a traveling salesman who was staying at a hotel in Eau Gallie. The 10-year-old daughter of the hotel owner was allegedly raped by Clark, who was arrested for the crime. A “black preacher” was said to have witnessed the attack on the girl.
Word quickly spread that a lynching was planned, so Clark was to be moved to Titusville to await trial. Rossetter was standing in front of the pool hall, across the street from the alley leading to the jail.
“I saw the chief of police come out of the alley in the car, and the colored man was in the car,” Rossetter said.
Ten men ran out of the pool hall and jumped into two cars, chasing the police car. Half an hour later, the sheriff returned to town without his prisoner.
“He said he was held up, and they took his gun away from him and they took the colored man away from him, so he just came on back to town,” said Rossetter. “Of course, the next day he had his gun back on.”
Former Brevard County Commissioner Joe Wickham was a teenager in 1926. “They were mean, some of those guys in those days,” Wickham told the Sentinel. “They just took the law into their own hands. It was sad. Very sad.”
Sources and Comments:
I chose the above image because until 1980, the street where James Clark and dozens of others were lynched was called “Lynching Tree Drive.” In 1980 it was changed to Legendary Lane, and the tree where the lynchings occurred is gone. Can you imagine being black and seeing a street named "Lynching Tree Drive?" How traumatizing that must have been! And it wasn't changed until 1980!
Day 7-1927
Supreme Court Upholds Forced Sterilization Law
Imagine going to the doctor for a relatively routine procedure like an appendectomy, and then waking up to discover that you had been sterilized- as in, no longer able to have children because you were neutered without your consent. This is what happened to thousands of women of color (and many others as well, though the overwhelmingly vast majority were black women).
In the 1920s, many states authorized forced sterilization of thousands of “undesirable citizens” – people with disabilities, prisoners, and racial minorities – on the theory that, as the U.S. Supreme Court put it in upholding Virginia’s forced sterilization law in 1927, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
American proponents of Eugenics, a scientific movement to “improve” the genetic composition of the human population, soon accelerated sterilization programs, which served as a model for Nazi programs implemented during the Holocaust.
American sterilization laws were also used as a tool of racialized population control. From the 1920s to 1970s, thousands of poor, Southern black women were sterilized without their knowledge or consent. Most states abandoned eugenics programs after World War II, but sterilization increased in Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, coinciding with growing black political power, mandatory integration, and the civil rights movement. Some states continued to sterilize into the 1970s.
Sources/Comments:
Image Credit: Screenshot taken from image on p. 219 of Steven Selden's "Transforming Better Babies Into Fitter Families" (2005, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 149(2)). Rights to image owned by American Philosophical Society.
Day 8
1928: Alabama Last State To Abolish Convict Leasing (but we will see this in different forms later on and even today- it's just called a different name)
After the Civil War, the abolition of slavery dealt a severe economic blow to Southern states whose agricultural economies had been built on the backs of black people held in bondage for generations. Soon, former Confederates regained control of their state legislatures and set about to restore white supremacy in social and economic relations.
Using a loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment, legislators created a new system to restore some of the monetary benefits of slavery: convict leasing. After creating discriminatory “Black Codes” to criminalize newly freed black people as vagrants and loiterers, states passed laws authorizing prisoners to be leased to private industries.
In 1888, the State of Alabama leased all state prisoners and half of all county prisoners to a Birmingham-based coal mining company. The prisoners, 90 percent of whom were black, mined for 13 to 16 hours for just 30 cents a day. Many did not survive long enough to pay off their fines. In 1911, an explosion at the company’s Banner Mine killed 128 men, including 125 black prisoners.
Alabama profited from convict leasing for decades. In 1912, prison labor profits earned the state $1 million, about a third of the state’s revenue. In 1928, Alabama became the last state in the country to abolish convict leasing.
Through convict leasing, Southern states and private companies derived enormous wealth from the labor of mostly black prisoners who earned little or no pay and faced inhumane and often deadly work conditions, generations after slavery was formally abolished.
Sources/Comments:
THIS is what convict leasing looks like today
A friend in Social Justice described the peonage system today:
"Several states currently require free labor from prisoners. I say free, but I mean the prisons get money while the imprisoned folx provide the work without pay. It can be grueling, dangerous, and is involuntary. Refusal to work results in disciplinary marks on their records, decreasing the chance they’ll get parole. They can also be put into solitary confinement.
HERE is the story of one man’s work experience."
Day 9
1929: Mob Drives 200 Blacks Out of Nebraska
“It was the understanding when they left that they were to stay away. The idea is to keep them out.”
On July 12, 1929, two white police officers responded to a domestic violence call at the North Platte home of a black man named Louis "Slim" Seeman. When Mr. Seeman allegedly shot and killed one of the officers, a mob of white men and police descended on his home and trapped him inside of a chicken coop on the property. The mob doused the coop with gasoline and set it ablaze with Mr. Seeman inside; when his body was pulled from the wreckage, it was clear he had died from a gunshot wound -- either by his own hand or fired by a member of the mob.
Even after the object of their rage was dead, the large gathering of white men remained enraged at the bold violation of racial hierarchy represented by a black man taking the life of a white man. Determined to punish the entire black community, 500 angry white citizens wielding sticks and ropes demanded that all local black people leave the city. Facing the threat of deadly violence, after seeing the terrible fate of Mr. Seeman, North Platte’s 200 black residents departed that night by foot, train, and automobile, leaving behind most of their possessions.
A county sheriff later commented, “It was the understanding when they left that they were to stay away. The idea is to keep them out.”
Sources/Comments:
Click HERE
Day 10
1930- Racial Integrity Laws Finalized In Virginia
In 1924 a process began to ensure the “suerpior” race could remain “superior” with the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which prohibited interracial marriage and defined as white a person "who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian"; the Public Assemblages Act of 1926, which required all public meeting spaces to be strictly segregated; and a third act, passed in 1930, that defined as black a person who has even a trace of African American ancestry.
These laws arrived at a time when a pseudo-science of white superiority called eugenics gained support by groups like the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, which argued that the mixing of whites, African Americans, and Virginia Indians could cause great societal harm, despite the fact that the races had been intermixed since European settlement. From his position as the state registrar of vital statistics, Walter A. Plecker micromanaged the racial classifications of Virginians, often worrying that blacks were attempting to pass as white.
The Racial Integrity Act remained on the books until 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, found its prohibition of interracial marriage to be unconstitutional. In 2001 (2001!!!!!), the General Assembly denounced the act, and eugenics, as racist.
Sources/Comments:
Click HERE
Comments
Post a Comment