1956-1960
Day 36
1956: Rape of 16-Year-Old Annette Butler
For a further analysis of the history of sexual exploitation of black women, please see comments.
On May 13, 1956, sixteen-year-old Annette Butler of Tylertown, Mississippi, was kidnapped and raped by four white men. Ms. Butler and her family reported the assault and the men were arrested, jailed, and tried for the crime – a rarity in Mississippi for white men charged with assaulting Black women.
Near dawn on May 13th (Mother’s Day), Ernest Dillon, his brother Ollie, and their cousins Olen and Durora Duncan set out looking for “colored women.” When they found the Butler home where Annette Butler was staying with her mother, Ernest claimed he was a police officer and told Annette Butler she was under arrest. Ernest then forced her into the car, while another of the four men kept a gun trained on her mother. The men then drove Annette Butler to the nearby Bogue Chitto Swamp and took turns raping her. When the men were finished, they left her alone and half-dressed in the woods. She sought help from a group of Black fishermen working nearby and they notified the police.
When the men were apprehended, the district attorney charged them with “forcible ravishment and kidnap.” Upon his arrest, Olen Duncan signed a statement admitting his guilt. Judge Thomas Pickens Brady, a known white supremacist, presided over the trials and appointed Mississippi’s best lawyers to represent the men. The defense attempted to reduce sympathy toward Annette Butler by accusing her of being a prostitute and presented white witnesses to testify she had a poor reputation.
At that time in Mississippi, the crime of rape was punishable by death or life imprisonment (remember previous days' posts where black men were executed for rape). Yet in this case, with a confession, Ernest Dillon was allowed to plead to a lesser charge of assault in exchange for a twenty-year sentence. At sentencing, Judge Brady, a staunch opponent of interracial sexual relations (whether consensual or forced), expressed no concern about the crime’s impact on young Annette Butler but castigated Mr. Dillon for committing a crime that “had brought bitter condemnation on the State of Mississippi.”
None of Annette Butler's other three attackers received prison time for raping her. Ollie Dillon was permitted to plead solely to a kidnapping charge; Olen Duncan pleaded not guilty despite his confession and was acquitted by an all-white jury; and charges against Durora Duncan, who pleaded not guilty, were thrown out after his trial resulted in a hung jury.
In contrast, hundreds of Black men were brutally lynched in Mississippi in the 19th and 20th centuries, without investigation or trial, following the slightest allegation of having sexual interest in a white woman.
Sources/Comments:
-“Between 1940 and 1965,” McGuire wrote, “only 10 white men were convicted of raping black women or girls in Mississippi despite the fact that it happened regularly.” It was rare for white men to be arrested for attacking black women, and even less likely for all-white grand juries to indict them. Convictions were even rarer.
“These are not just bad apples,” McGuire told me during a recent interview. “This is part of a systemic approach to dehumanizing black women and girls.” See HERE.
-In 1855, a 19-year-old enslaved Black woman named Celia killed the white man who owned her and was trying to rape her. Missouri law allowed a woman to use force when in “imminent danger of forced sexual intercourse,” but the judge ruled an enslaved woman had no right to refuse her “master.” Celia was convicted of murder, sentenced to death, and hanged on December 21, 1855.
The legal and social double standard that allowed white men to commit sexual violence against Black women with impunity, while the most baseless fear of sexual contact between a Black man and white woman resulted in deadly violence, continued after emancipation. Nearly one in four Black people lynched from 1877 to 1945 were accused of improper contact with a white woman.
Later, capital punishment for rape also was reserved for Black defendants with white victims. In Virginia, all 58 people executed for rape between 1908 and 1963 were Black men, although 1000 white men were convicted of rape in that period. In 1957, a Mississippi jury acquitted the white men who confessed to raping 16-year-old Annette Butler because they believed death was too harsh for raping a Black girl.
For generations of Black women, racial terror included the constant threat of sexual assault. Black women’s resistance to racialized sexual exploitation helped birth the activism that fueled the civil rights movement. A decade before the Montgomery bus boycott, Rosa Parks led a NAACP campaign to protest an all-white jury’s refusal to indict six white men who raped Recy Taylor in Abbeville, Alabama, in 1945. Click HERE for more on sexual exploitation of black women.
See HERE for more info on the original story.
Day 37
1957: Whites Riot in Response to Arrival of First African American Family in Levittown, PA
Justifiably so, the south is given a lot of attention for their horrible treatment of people of color. Their cruelty is rightfully well documented, and often northerners will look down at them as unenlightened and ignorant. Surely in the north, where we are more educated, we are better. In case you didn’t know, I am being sarcastic- the north thinks they are better in regards to race relations, but we are not. In one interview, I heard one black scholar describe it thus: “In the South, they hate the race but love the people. In the north, they love the race but hate the people. In the south, they’ll invite you over for dinner, but they’ll still wave the Confederate flag and pass laws to keep you down. In the north, you don’t get invited to dinner, but there isn’t a Confederate flag in sight, and the discriminatory laws are well hidden.”
That truth hurts.
So, today, here is a story of blatant racism in the north. While they did fight to free slaves, they also fought to stay segregated- at least when it came to blacks moving into their neighborhoods and playing with their kids.
William, an electrical engineer, and his wife Daisy, a teacher, decided to buy a house in the very purposely all-white suburb of Levittown, PA. As soon as they arrived, the persecutions began.
Upon driving up to their new home at 43 Deepgreen Lane, Daisy Myers was filled with doubt, recalling that she repeatedly asked herself, “what would be the extent of our ostracism? Would we be able to sleep comfortably?” as she studied the four law officers standing on the lawn of her address in the Dogwood Hollow Section of Levittown.
These questions regarding the neighborhood reaction to the arrival of a black family in what had been an intentionally all-white enclave, were unfortunately answered over the next two weeks. At dusk each evening, crowds of people gathered outside the Myer’s home, angrily shouting and jeering, singing the national Anthem, and throwing stones toward the Myer’s home, as apparently these “spacious skies,” they sang of were not meant to be enjoyed in an integrated setting.
Levittown police failed to enforce the court ordered protection for the Myers, prohibiting more than three people from assembling near the residence at once. Mobs consequently gathered in this fashion each night, only finally subsiding due to interference from the state police. After an agonizing fourteen days, the riots ended, but the Myers continued to suffer the anxiety of the consequences triggered by the introduction of integration to Levittown.
Harassment of the family persisted for almost three months, as Daisy Myers received threatening phone calls of those who “told [her] they threatened to shoot William down on sight,” the family’s deliveries of oil, bread, and milk stopped arriving, and the more than occasional unfriendly white stroller-by forced the Myers to have constant protection, or at the very least, sympathizing company. Anti-segregationist even obtained property immediately neighboring the Myers’ home, using the location to intimidate the family further, evident by their conspicuous display of the confederate flag.
The resistance seen in the August riots against the integration of Levittown, PA was not uncommon throughout suburban neighborhoods. Quite the contrary in fact, racial discrimination and the subsequent segregated communities were the norm in 1950s suburbia.
Yet despite this plaguing harassment, the Myers refused to leave their Levittown home, justifiably feeling entitled “to live where [they] chose,” as William put it. Remarking on the family’s incredible determination to outlast their opponents, Dianne Harris, historian and author of Second Suburb: Levittown, PA, stated, “the Myers endured an ordeal that few could have weathered with such dignity, courage, grace, and fortitude.”
In the end, other white people did stand up against this hate and tried to stop the haters. The Myers stayed grateful for these white supporters for their entire lives.
But, life in Levittown is still white today. The latest census shows that 98% of residents are white- something we see in towns and cities all over the country, including mine.
Sources/Comments:
Day 38
1958: Bethel Street Baptist Church Bombed
Early on the morning of Sunday, June 29, 1958, a bomb exploded outside Bethel Street Baptist Church on the north side of Birmingham, Alabama, in one of the segregated city's African American neighborhoods. The church's pastor, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, was a civil rights activist working to eliminate segregation in Birmingham.
Bethel Street Baptist had been bombed before, on Christmas Day 1956, and since then several volunteers had kept watch over the neighborhood every night. Around 1:30 a.m., Will Hall, who was on watch that night, was alerted to smoke coming from the church. He discovered a paint can containing dynamite near the church wall and carried it into the street before taking cover as it exploded.
Holding between fifteen and twenty sticks of dynamite, the paint can exploded, blowing a two-foot hole in the street and breaking windows of houses. The church's stained glass windows, still being repaired from an earlier bombing, were also damaged.
Police told church leaders there were few clues as to the culprit's identity or motive, but a passerby reported seeing a car full of white men in the area shortly before the bomb was discovered. Rev. Shuttlesworth praised Mr. Hall for his brave actions and quick intervention that surely saved the church from ruin -- but also condemned the attack. "This shows that America has a long way to go before it can try to be called democratic," Rev. Shuttlesworth said.
Today, 87% of Christian churches are still segregated. All I need to do is look around my congregation on Sunday to know this is true- I’m guessing the same it true for the vast majority of you as well. Martin Luther King once said, “11 AM Sunday is our most segregated hour.”
Sources/Comments:
Day 39
1959: 69 Black Boys Padlocked In Dorm At School and Dorm Set on Fire
If this doesn’t make you cry....
This post was written by Criss Smith. I will put the link in the comments.
March 5th, 1959, 69 African American boys, ages 13 to 17, were padlocked into their dormitory for the night at the Negro Boys Industrial School in Wrightsville. Around 4 a.m., a fire mysteriously ignited, forcing the boys to fight and claw their way out of the burning building. It's an event in history possibly forgotten or unknown by many, but it’s that moment that claimed the life of 21 boys.
“It was a carefully calculated murder that involved 21 boys but was designed to kill 69 that were housed inside of this dormitory,” said Frank Lawrence. He has made it his life's mission to uncover the truth surrounding what he calls Arkansas’ “secret holocaust,”.
When the smoke cleared that March morning in 1959, the boys' who burned to death were found piled on top of one another in the corner of the dormitory. The 48 who had survived managed to escape by prying off mesh metal screens from two windows.
The horrific event briefly made headlines that also brought attention to the squalor and deplorable conditions in which the boys lived.
"The conditions were to a point where when 69 boys all go to bed at night, in a space barely big enough for them to move around and they are one foot apart from one another and you had to get up at night and go to the bathroom, they had to defecate in buckets," said Lawrence. "The boys went around in rags. They had one 30-gallon water tank for them to take baths," said Stockley.
The boys in the school were committed for being orphaned, homeless or for committing offenses described as mischief and alleged petty crimes.
In an ironic twist, the land in which the school stood is now the Arkansas Department of Correction Facility Wrightsville Unit where you won’t find a plaque to indicate the boys ever lived or died there.
Sources/Comments:
Day 40
1960: Alabama Governor Demands Student Organizers Be Expelled For Anti-Segregation Protests
There were so many things to choose from for today. Martin Luther King arrested while peacefully protesting at a sit-in, whites attacked black swimmers with clubs and bullets who dared to go on the all-white portion of the beach (the blacks filed a lawsuit, and TWELVE YEARS later were allowed to go to the white beach), Ruby Bridges- a 6 year old girl- was attacked by grown men for going to a white school, the GA governor threatens to withhold funds from desegregated schools, and the Woolworth sit-in youth were severely beaten.
It was a daunting task to choose only one. I am linking to the other stories, all worthy of knowing, in the comments.
The reason I am choosing this one- the one where the governor expels student organizers- is because this was so unjust, and yet a federal court upheld the expulsions and deemed the expulsions, “justified, and, in fact, necessary.”
I chose this because it shows that in the face of gross injustice, throughout the history of our country and continuing until today, people of color have nowhere to turn to have their wrongs made right. The courts, the police, the judges, the education system (the governor was also the superintendent of schools in this case)- they are supposed to help us. But, for people of color, they have all been used against them in perverse ways. This is what “systematic racism” looks like- that the systems in place are built to keep the white man up and the black man down.
Here’s the story:
Students at Alabama State College, a traditionally African American institution in Montgomery, Alabama, staged an anti-segregation sit-in at a segregated lunch counter in the Montgomery County Courthouse on February 25, 1960. Four days later, on February 29, 1960, Alabama Governor John Patterson held a news conference to condemn the sit-in.
Patterson, who was also chairman of the State Board of Education, threatened to terminate Alabama State College's funding unless it expelled the student organizers and warned that "someone [was] likely to be killed" if the protests continued. The next day, more than 1,000 Alabama State College students marched on the state capitol. On March 2, 1960, the college expelled the nine student leaders of the courthouse sit-in.
More than 1,000 students immediately pledged a mass strike, threatened to withdraw from the school, and staged days of demonstrations; 37 students were arrested. Montgomery Police Commissioner L.B. Sullivan recommended closing the college, which he claimed produced only "graduates of hate and racial bitterness." Meanwhile, six of the nine expelled students sought reinstatement through a federal lawsuit. In August 1960, in Dixon v. Alabama, a federal court upheld the expulsions as "justified and, in fact, necessary" and barred the students' readmission to the school.
Sources/Comments:
-The story of Ruby Bridges- a 6 year old who braved rioters to go to school. However, every other person in her class transferred to another school. Only she and her teacher were in the classroom for the entire year because whites so desperately did not want their 6 year olds to be in the same class as Ruby. How disgusting is that (oh, but it still happens today. It’s called “white flight”- where white parents transfer their kids out of schools that have large numbers of people of color in the school)?!?!?!? Click HERE.
-Georgia threatens to withhold funds from schools that integrate. Click HERE.
-Martin Luther King arrested for peaceful sit-in. Click HERE.
-Biloxi Beach Riots. Click HERE
-Click HERE for more information on original story.
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