1966-1970
Day 46
1966: Samuel Younge Jr. Shot In Head For Asking To Use White Bathroom- Killers Walk Free
Twenty-one-year-old Tuskegee Institute student activist Samuel Younge Jr. spent January 3, 1966, registering Black voters in Macon County, Alabama. He stopped at a gas station to use the restroom. The white attendant, 68-year-old Marvin Segrest, directed him to the “colored” restroom out back. When Younge said he wanted to use the regular public restroom, Segrest threatened to shoot him.
Younge reported Segrest to the police, then returned to the gas station and told Segrest the police were coming. The two men argued and Segrest shot at Younge, who hid in a bus. When he exited the bus, Segrest shot him in the head, killing him.
The shooting exacerbated tensions in Tuskegee between African Americans and pro-segregation whites. The day after the shooting, Tuskegee students launched protests that lasted for weeks. On January 7, 1966, 250 Black students marched in downtown Tuskegee to protest the murder, ending with a rally on the steps of the local jail where Martin Segrest was being held.
Segrest was indicted for second degree murder and tried later that year. An all-white jury acquitted him on December 8, 1966.
Sources/Comments:
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Day 47
1967: Supreme Court Rules Cops Have Immunity and Cannot Be Charged With Excessive Force
This one definitely caused me to pause to consider how yesterday’s decisions greatly impact today.
In 1961,15 priests (12 white, 3 black) were in a coffee shop while having a long bus stop in their travels. They were arrested erroneously for “congregating in such a way to disturb the peace.” It was total BS, they were simply waiting for their bus to leave, but the fact remains they simply didn’t like having blacks and whites meeting together enjoying coffee. Nevertheless, they were arrested and sent to jail for 4 months and each given a $200 fine.
This breach on their liberty of sitting peacefully in a coffee shop caused them to sue the cops.
It took several years, but in 1967 the ruling came down from SCOTUS in Pierson v. Ray. Basically, the decision was this: No matter what cops do- no matter how inhumane, aggressive, lethal, or whatever- cops are immune from any and all damages.
WHAT?!?!?!?! How on earth does that make any sense???? Why does ANYBODY get immunity? I hope in my posts you have seen a trend that many, many cops are willing volunteers or at least complicit in the lynching, beating, and killing of blacks on a continual basis. This is our history- I have documented that fact for you well in the past 46 posts. I love, respect, and appreciate cops- do not change the subject! But, NOBODY should be immune when they abuse and murder people. By the way, this also means they can abuse white people and mentally ill people as well, and white people can’t sue, either. I did not know any of this before, but now I understand why the murder of George Floyd, the beating of Rodney King, and so many other injustices continue to happen with pretty much zero consequences for cops. It’s a problem that just gets bigger and bigger, all because of this SCOTUS decision in 1967. I so desperately want to believe in our justice and legal system, that SCOTUS is our moral compass. But, I am extremely disappointed in that regard as I learn more and more about decisions that were made that caused injustices years ago and are still harmful today.
Here are the ramifications of this decision:
Reuters investigative reporters examined over 500 cases to test whether Supreme Court precedent has effectively created, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it, “an absolute shield” against accountability for police officers accused of using excessive force.
Americans first got the right to sue police officers in 1871, when Congress passed a law allowing lawsuits against state and local authorities who refused to protect African Americans from—or even participated in—racial terror lynchings and other acts of racial violence by groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1967, the Supreme Court limited that right by announcing a legal doctrine called qualified immunity, ostensibly to protect government employees from frivolous lawsuits.
Instead, Reuters found that “qualified immunity, under the careful stewardship of the Supreme Court, is making it easier for officers to kill or injure civilians with impunity.”
What is qualified immunity?
The doctrine provides that a police officer can’t even be put on trial for using excessive force unless the person suing proves that:
the evidence shows or could convince a jury that the officer used excessive force; and the officers should have known they were violating “clearly established” law, because a prior court case had already deemed similar police actions to be illegal.
This two-part test means that even if a court finds that the officer used excessive force, it will grant immunity if the facts don’t match an earlier case finding the same conduct to be illegal.
The “clearly established” law requirement makes it hard to win against the police, Reuters found, because courts are increasingly requiring a nearly identical case to use as precedent—and a court can almost always find or make up a factual difference between the case it’s reviewing and an earlier case.
Since 2009, judges have been allowed to ignore altogether the question of whether an officer used excessive force. That way, they avoid setting a precedent for future cases, which allows the same conduct to repeatedly go unpunished, Reuters found.
An Absolute Shield
Reuters found that since 2005, the courts have shown an increasing tendency to grant immunity in excessive force cases. Reuters identified more than three dozen cases in which qualified immunity protected officers whose actions had been deemed unlawful:
Outside of Dallas, Texas, five officers fired 17 shots at a bicyclist who was 100 yards away, killing him, in a case of mistaken identity. In Heber City, Utah, an officer threw to the ground an unarmed man he had pulled over for a cracked windshield, leaving the man with brain damage. In Prince George’s County, Maryland, an officer shot a man in a mental health crisis who was stabbing himself and trying to slit his own throat.
The increasing frequency of these cases has led to growing criticism from a broad coalition of lawyers, legal scholars, civil rights groups, politicians, and judges that spans the political spectrum. They say qualified immunity lets police brutality go unpunished and denies victims their constitutional rights, Reuters reports.
Reuters found that the Supreme Court itself intervenes more often on behalf of police officers than civilians—an officer was 3.5 times more likely than a civilian to have a petition for review accepted by the Court. And in the cases it accepts, the analysis revealed, the Court nearly always decides in favor of police.
As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a 2018 dissent, this “one-sided approach to qualified immunity transforms the doctrine into an absolute shield for law enforcement officers, gutting the deterrent effect of the Fourth Amendment.”
There’s no federal count of the number of civilians killed or seriously injured by police, but Reuters estimates the number of deaths alone is about 1,000 each year.
“Why are there so many police shootings?” Dale Galipo, a prominent California civil rights attorney, told Reuters. “I would say one of the reasons is there’s no accountability, there’s no deterrent.”
Indeed, decisions like Kisela v. Hughes, in which the Court reversed a lower court’s denial of immunity to a Tucson, Arizona, officer who shot a mentally ill woman four times as she walked down her driveway while holding a large kitchen knife, send “an alarming signal to law enforcement officers and the public.”
“It tells officers that they can shoot first and think later,” Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, wrote in dissent, “and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished.”
Sources/Comments:
Day 48
1968: Black Athletes Kicked Off Olympic Team Because They Raised Their Arms During Anthem
This was a tough choice- this is the year Martin Luther King was murdered. I asked my husband which story I should do, and he said this one because it is less known. But, for a break down of Martin Luther King’s murder and years of previous violent persecution he faced, I linked an article in the comments. He truly was “the most hated man in America.”
Now back to our story: At the Olympic Games in Mexico, Tommie Smith won gold and John Carlos won bronze in the 200 meter race. Being just a few months after Martin Luther King’s murder, and being that there were many other issues of racism, in the lead-up to the Olympics, Smith and Carlos helped organize the Olympic Project for Human Rights, a group that reflected their black pride and social consciousness. The group saw the Olympic Games as an opportunity to advocate for better treatment of black athletes and black people around the world. Its demands included hiring more black coaches and rescinding Olympic invitations to Rhodesia and South Africa, both of which practiced apartheid. Though the project initially proposed a boycott of the Olympics altogether, Smith and Carlos decided to compete in the hopes they could use their achievements as a platform for broader change.
Then, just 10 days before the opening of the Summer Games, an unarmed group of protesters assembled in Mexico City’s Three Cultures Square to plan the next move of the growing Mexican students’ movement. The Mexican government sent in bulldozers to disperse the thousands gathered, and troops fired into the crowd, massacring between four (the government’s official count) and 3,000 students.
Carlos and Smith were deeply affected by these events and the plight of marginalized people around the world. “It was a cry for freedom and for human rights,” Smith told Smithsonian magazine in 2008. “We had to be seen because we couldn’t be heard.”
After winning, they went to the platform as usual, though they were missing their shoes to symbolize the poverty blacks faced. and they wore beads around their necks to symbolize the lynchings so many blacks suffered. Once the anthem started, they lifted their fists. As the American athletes raised their fists, the stadium hushed, then burst into racist sneers and angry insults. Smith and Carlos were rushed from the stadium, suspended by the U.S. team, and kicked out of the Olympic Village for turning their medal ceremony into a political statement. They went home to the United States, only to face serious backlash, including death threats. The FBI started a file and watched them closely for over a decade. (they were not stripped of their medals- I have read that in places, but while they were threatened of that, and the IOC said they stripped them of their medals to deter other people of color from speaking up, they were not). Note: In the 1936 Olympics, no Germans were reprimanded in any way for giving the Nazi salute during their national anthem, even though the president of the IOC was the same man.
I want to point out the white man- Peter Norman- as well. He did not raise a fist, but he was a very Christian man who was incredibly disturbed by the unfair treatment of people of color in his homeland of Australia, so he wore a patch for the Olympic Project for Human Rights and supported Carlos and Smith. He also faced swift and fierce persecution when he returned home. He was punished severely by the Australian sports establishment. Though he qualified for the Olympic team over and over again, posting the fastest times by far in Australia, he was snubbed by the team in 1972. Rather than allow Norman to compete, the Australians did not send a sprinter at all. Norman immediately retired from the sport after that incident and began to suffer from depression, alcoholism and a painkiller addiction.
The three remained friends. When Peter Norman died in 2006, Smith and Carlos were pallbearers (I get chills just thinking of that!).
Sometimes the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Sources/Comments:
Day 49
1969: Murder of Fred Hampton
Fred Hampton was an organizer with The Black Panthers. The FBI did not like that, so they had a “file” on him.
Tensions between the police and the Panthers had been growing. Two officers were shot by Panthers- Hampton was out of town and not involved.
Nevertheless, on December 4th, Hampton was hosting a dinner with many people at his house. An undercover cop was there and drugged his drink. Hampton never took drugs, and soon crashed in his room.
At 4 AM, a raid of cops attacked the house. Mark Clark was sitting by the front door. He was holding a gun, but as soon as he opened the door (or the cops burst through, that is unknown) he was shot and killed. One bullet did fire when he suffered a reflexive death-convulsion after being shot. This was the only shot fired by the Panthers.
Cops came into the sleeping, unguarded crowd shooting and seeking Fred Hampton. Once they found him (still drugged and sleeping heavily), they shot him once, carried him into the living room, and shot him twice more in the head. The cops are quoted as saying, “he’s good and dead now.”
Even though it was the cops who raided this house, the seven Panthers who survived the raid were indicted by a grand jury on charges of attempted murder, armed violence, and various other weapons charges.
At a press conference the next day, the police announced the arrest team had been attacked by the "violent" and "extremely vicious" Panthers and had defended themselves accordingly. In a second press conference on December 8, the police leadership praised the assault team for their "remarkable restraint", "bravery", and "professional discipline" in not killing all the Panthers present.
The police described their raid on Hampton's apartment as a "shootout". The Black Panthers countered Hanrahan's claim of a "shoot out" by describing it as a "shoot-in", because so many shots were fired by police- over 99 in total. An “internal investigation” miraculously (sarcasm) found the police did nothing wrong.
Also, there was a cover-up. An independent coroner found drugs in Hamptom’s system, but the police department coroner found none. Hmm….
I’m not sure how I feel about The Black Panthers. I need to research more. They do seem extreme and violent, but I want to learn more rather than making assumptions based on what white people have told me about them.
Regardless of my thoughts on The Black Panthers, of this I am sure: Drugging someone, raiding a house and shooting at unarmed and sleeping people, dragging someone unconscious out and shooting him twice in the head, and then claiming that it was the victims who were shooting and caused the mayhem, that the perpetrators who started the shooting did nothing wrong and then covering up the crimes, is wrong on every level. According to our Constitution, American citizens are innocent until proven guilty, and we are supposed to be given a fair trial by jury for our crimes- not to be killed by vigilante agencies. Fred Hampton should have been arrested and charged- not murdered, regardless of whether we agree with his affiliations or not.
So many thoughts as I think of how this still happens today. Even the verbiage of the cops showing “remarkable restraint” (nope) against the “extremely vicious” (sleeping, unarmed) black man is the same.
Sources/Comments:
Here’s my thoughts that I am still processing: I hope I have shown that blacks up to this point (1969) have been severely persecuted- and what I am presenting is the tip of the iceberg. There are thousands of more stories. In 1968, one year previous, the most peaceful protestor in America was murdered for speaking up peacefully, two men were kicked off the Olympic Team for using their success (a public success most black people don’t have) to speak out against injustices. Now, in 1969 an agitator is murdered. That’s three different types of protesting, all of them meeting horrible ends. Just how are blacks supposed to speak up for how crappy they are treated then? Is there nothing they can do that will get us to listen?
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Day 50 (for my thoughts on making it halfway through this project, see comments)
1970: The “Southern Strategy” (Appealing to Southern Racism To Obtain Voters) Works Wonderfully
This is about politics, but I promise I’m just trying to present the facts. I will leave my personal opinion out, and just present what happened according to history- with documentation of the men involved admitting to this strategy in the comments.
In 1964 when the Voter’s Rights Act was enacted (remember, the law that blacks were beaten and died for in order to get? The Freedom Riders? All about getting blacks the rights to vote), Lyndon Johnson said, “I think we just gave away the south for the rest of the century.” He was right.
Senator Barry Goldwater and presidential nominee Richard Nixon enacted what they called, “The southern strategy”- a plan to turn the heavily democratic south to republican voters by appealing to their racism. The (very) basic tenant is that “Republicans win when you focus on race”- when you blame blacks for all your problems, and then say Democrats are the party of blacks, whites flock to the Republican party. Nixon and Goldwater did exactly this- appeal to racism to obtain voters.
Although the phrase "Southern Strategy" is often attributed to Nixon's political strategist Kevin Phillips, he did not originate it but popularized it. In an interview included in a 1970 New York Times article, Phillips stated his analysis based on studies of ethnic voting:
“From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”
So, basically, the strategy is this: Yes, we will turn off black voters. But who cares? For every black voter you lose, you gain three white voters- hence you win.
Nixon's advisers recognized that they could not appeal directly to voters on issues of white supremacy or racism. White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman noted that Nixon "emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognized this while not appearing to". With the aid of Harry Dent and South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who had switched to the Republican Party in 1964, Nixon ran his 1968 campaign on states' rights and "law and order". Liberal Northern Democrats accused Nixon of pandering to Southern whites, especially with regard to his "states' rights" and "law and order" positions, which were widely understood by black leaders to symbolize Southern resistance to civil rights
The strategy worked: by appealing to southern white’s racist attitudes, the south switched from solidly democratic to solidly republican. And, well, we are seeing the continuance (and success) of this strategy today.
I’m 50 days, or half way, in. Here’s my thoughts on this experience thus far:
For me, this started with the video of George Floyd and asking myself, “how on earth did we get here?” I wanted to try and understand the experience of blacks- an experience of which I know nothing.
I have not been able to sleep for many nights as I have stewed over what I have read. I have been angry, heartbroken, confused, and horrified. For everything I write or share, there are 10 times that which I have read, listened to on podcasts, and researched to get to the story. It is a lot of HEAVY stuff. The pictures of lynching victims, bombed out churches, the racial slurs...it is so much. And yet, I have carried this for 50 days- people of color carry this every moment of their lives. It is an unbearable burden.
I have only scratched the surface. So far, though, as a result- I am considering going back to college to get a master’s degree in Social Justice. I joined my local chapter of the NAACP. I see people of color differently- in a good way. Instead of looking at the color of their skin, I am looking at their faces- wanting to see THEM, not their color. I don’t know if that makes sense, I hope it does.
It is painful to learn these things- and far more painful to see how all of these things play out today, to realize we really have not come very far. But, when I started I said I was willing to sit in uncomfortable and to have the hard conversations. And, it has been uncomfortable and it has been HARD. But, I believe I owe it to Samuel Younge, Emmett Till, the Groveland Four, Annette Butler, and all the others- to hear and share their stories so that we can all learn that racism is real, it exists today, and it is not OK.
And understanding the systems that continue to limit the power of people of color! Oh, that is so frustrating to see how corrupt SCOTUS is and has been, how laws are made to steal land from blacks, to keep the black voters silent...it hurts, to be honest.
This is a hurting world. The time has come for us, as whites, to reconcile this horrible past and make amends. I am not sure how that looks. But again, I’m willing to listen and to learn. Because the current system we have, where blacks are jailed at absurdly high levels and then given longer sentences than their white counterparts, where their votes are suppressed, where we feed off of white people’s hatred of blacks, where we steal their land from them by refusing to give them the same loans we give whites….it simply is not OK.
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