The Random stories of Black History thread!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Sonic Boom of the South]

On this day
May 24, 1911


White Mob in Oklahoma Abducts and Lynches Laura Nelson and Her Young Son

On May 24, 1911, shortly before midnight, a mob of dozens of armed white men broke into the Okfuskee County jail in Okemah, Oklahoma, and abducted Laura Nelson and her young son, L.D. The mob took the Black woman and boy six miles away and hanged them from a bridge over the Canadian River, close to the town's Black neighborhood. According to some reports, members of the mob also raped Mrs. Nelson, who was about 28 years old according to census records, before lynching her alongside her son. Their bodies were found the next morning.

A few weeks before, local police had reportedly come to the Nelsons’ cabin and accused Mr. Nelson of stealing meat. When a white deputy sheriff was shot and killed while searching the cabin, Mrs. Nelson and L.D.—who was reported as 14-16 years old in news reports, but was more likely just 12 years old according to census records—were accused of killing him. The entire Nelson family was arrested and jailed after the deputy’s shooting, and some reports indicate that a 2-year-old daughter—listed as Carry Nelson in the 1910 census—was also with Mrs. Nelson in jail.

The prosecution’s presentation at the preliminary hearing raised doubts about whether the State had sufficient evidence for a conviction. Many Black people were lynched across the U.S. under accusations of murder or assault. During this era of racial terror, mere suggestions of Black-on-white violence could provoke mob violence and lynching. Though these communities had developed and functioning judicial systems, white defendants were more likely to face trial while Black people regularly suffered death at the hands of a violent mob, without trial or any opportunity to present evidence of innocence or self-defense. In this case, after Laura and L.D. Nelson were lynched, it was revealed that they claimed to have shot the deputy as he reached for his gun and seemed about to shoot Mr. Nelson, unprovoked.

Before any trial could take place, however, newspaper accounts sensationalized the case, misreporting the mother’s and son’s ages and presuming their guilt. Press reports described Laura Nelson as "very small of stature, very black, about thirty-five years old and vicious," while L.D. was described as "slender and tall, yellow and ignorant" and “raged.”

By the night of the lynching, Mrs. Nelson’s husband and L.D.’s father—whose first name is reported as Oscar or Austin in surviving records—had already been convicted of a lesser offense, sentenced to a prison term, and sent to the penitentiary; he was not present to defend his family against the mob. Unconfirmed reports vary regarding the fate of the Nelsons’ young daughter; some claim she was found drowned in the river, while others claim she was found alive and taken in to be raised by a local Black family.


After a Black boy reportedly found Laura Nelson’s and L.D. Nelson’s hanging corpses at the bridge the next morning, hundreds of white people from Okemah came to view the bodies. Some even posed on the bridge to have their photos taken with the bodies of the dead Black woman and boy. Those photographs were later reprinted as postcards and sold at novelty stores.

The mob’s choice to deprive the Nelsons of their basic rights to due process and hang them on a bridge frequented by Black people and near where many local Black residents lived was meant to maintain white supremacy by sending a message of terror and intimidation to the entire Black community. “While the general sentiment is adverse to the method,” the Okemah Ledger wrote a day after the lynchings, “it is generally thought that the negroes got what would have been due them.” When a special grand jury was called to investigate the lynching, the district judge instructed the white jurors to be mindful of their duty as members “of a superior race and greater intelligence to protect this weaker race.” No one was indicted, prosecuted, or held legally accountable for lynching Laura and L.D. Nelson.

Mrs. Nelson and her son were two of at least 75 documented victims of racial terror lynching that took place in Oklahoma between 1877 and 1950, and they are among more than 6,500 victims of racial terror lynching that EJI has documented between 1865 and 1950.

 

[Sonic Boom of the South]

One of the last surviving members of the legendary Six Triple Eight battalion has passed away at 101. (June 1, 2025)


At just 19, Robertson joined the all-Black women’s unit during WWII, defying racism and sexism to complete a mission no one else could: sorting 17 million pieces of mail in three months to reconnect U.S. troops with their loved ones.⁠
⁠
She lived to see her unit awarded the Congressional Gold Medal this year, and she leaves behind a legacy of courage, service, and sisterhood that helped shape the story of Black women in America.⁠
⁠May her memory be a blessing, and may her name never be forgotten.

 

[Sonic Boom of the South]

On this day
June 07, 1920

Ku Klux Klan Mounts Publicity Campaign to Attract Members

On June 7, 1920, a white Ku Klux Klan leader named William Simmons hired publicists to grow membership for the white supremacist organization.

Confederate veterans founded the Ku Klux Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1865. From beneath white hoods, they terrorized formerly enslaved Black people and their political allies with threats, beatings, and murder. The KKK strived to undermine Reconstruction and restore racial subordination in the South. Faced with federal opposition, the Klan dissolved by the 1870s but reemerged early in the next century.

In 1915, William Simmons revived the Klan atop Georgia’s Stone Mountain. That same year, the film The Birth of a Nation debuted, presenting Klansmen as saviors of what people at the time referred to as white man’s civilization and white women’s chastity. President Woodrow Wilson screened the film at the White House.


Beginning in June 1920, the Klan launched a new public relations campaign that exploited the anxieties of white people following the First World War. The “100 Percent Americanism” campaign promoted the Klan as defenders of what they characterized as the white American nation from defilement by Black people, Catholics, Jewish people, foreigners, and “moral offenders.” This “neat package of hatred” caught attention quickly, and within 16 months, nearly 100,000 new members had joined.

In 1921, public pressure prompted Congress to put on the appearance of investigating Klan violence and undue influence in local and state governments—but Congress quickly ended its inquiry when Klan officials denied the allegations. Immediately thereafter, new Klan membership applications jumped to 5,000 per day. By 1924, there were three million active members nationwide, including 35,000 in Detroit, 55,000 in Chicago, 200,000 in Ohio, 240,000 in Indiana, and 260,000 in Pennsylvania.

 

[Sonic Boom of the South]

https://www.thecoli.com/threads/in-1898-wilmington-cacs-were-so-jealous-of-black-folks-they-overthrew-the-government.373000/#post-55908635

 

[Sonic Boom of the South]

White Police Officer Beats Elderly Black Woman to Death


On June 12, 1945, Niecey Brown, a 74-year-old Black woman, died from injuries after an off-duty white police officer named George Booker forcibly entered her house and beat her with a bottle in Selma, Alabama.

During the early morning on June 10, Officer Booker arrived at Mrs. Brown’s home unannounced. According to reports, when Mrs. Brown answered the door, Officer Booker demanded entry so he could speak with one of her family members. When Mrs. Brown refused him entry and asked him to leave, Officer Booker kicked in the door and began beating her with a bottle, fracturing her skull.

Lige Brown, Mrs. Brown’s husband, came to his wife’s aid and shot the officer in the shoulder in self-defense. The Browns’ two grandchildren were also home and witnessed the brutal attack on their grandmother. Two days later, Mrs. Brown, whose skull was crushed, died from her injuries, having never regained consciousness.

Officer Booker was arrested and charged with murder. During his trial in September 1945, his lawyer cautioned the all-white jury, “f we convict this brave man who is upholding the banner of white supremacy by his actions, then we may as well give all our guns to the ******s and let them run the Black Belt.” The jury heeded this advice, ignoring eyewitness testimony and deliberating for only a few minutes before acquitting Officer Booker of all charges.

After the Civil War, the system of policing evolved as a way to maintain racial hierarchy. Though officers were meant to protect and serve their communities, in most cases police departments were restricted to white officers, many of whom used their power to subject Black people to indiscriminate violence. Officers who terrorized and brutalized Black people were rarely held accountable and were often instead exalted as defenders and upholders of racial hierarchy.

 

[Sonic Boom of the South]

Black Man Lynched in Alabama for Failing to Call a White Man “Mr.”

On June 21, 1940, a 26-year-old Black man named Jesse Thornton referred to a passing police officer by his name: Doris Rhodes. When the officer, a white man, overheard Mr. Thornton and ordered him to clarify his statement, Mr. Thornton attempted to correct himself by referring to the officer as “Mr. Doris Rhodes.” Unsatisfied, the officer hurled a racial slur at Mr. Thornton while knocking him to the ground, then arrested him and took him into the city jail as a mob of white men formed just outside.

Mr. Thornton tried to escape and managed to flee a short distance while the mob quickly pursued, firing gunshots and pelting him with bricks, bats, and stones. When Mr. Thornton was wounded in the gunfire and eventually collapsed, the mob dumped him into a truck and drove to an isolated street where they dragged him into a nearby swamp and shot him again. A local fisherman found Mr. Thornton’s decomposing, vulture-ravaged body a week later in the Patsaliga River, near Tuskegee Institute.

Dr. Charles A.J. McPherson, a local leader in the Birmingham branch of the NAACP, wrote a detailed report on Mr. Thornton’s lynching. NAACP lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall provided the Department of Justice with the report and requested a federal investigation. The Department in turn instructed the FBI to determine whether law enforcement or other officials were complicit in the lynching, but there is no record that anyone was ever prosecuted for Mr. Thornton’s murder.

Mr. Thornton's death certificate (Alabama Center for Health Statistics)

 

[Sonic Boom of the South]

White Mob Lynches Nine Black Men in Sabine County, Texas

On June 22, 1908, a white mob lynched nine Black men in Sabine County, Texas, within a 24-hour period. The reign of racial terror began when a white farmer was shot to death in his home by an unknown assailant on the evening of June 21.

The deep racial hostility permeating Southern society often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered, whether or not there was evidence to support the suspicion, and accusations lodged against Black people were rarely subject to serious scrutiny.


In this instance, six Black men—Jerry Evans, William Johnson, William Manuel, Moses Spellman, Cleveland Williams, and Frank Williams—were already in jail, accused of being involved in a completely unrelated shooting of another local white man. Early on the morning of June 22, a mob of about 200 white men broke into the jail and seized them from police custody. Five of the men were hanged from a tree outside of the jail, and Mr. Williams, the sixth, was shot in the back as he tried to escape.

Later that night, marauding white men shot and killed a Black man named Bill McCoy near the white farmer's home and shot and killed two unidentified Black men and threw their bodies into a creek. A Black church and school house in the town were also burned to the ground.

Many Black people were lynched across the South under accusation of murder. During this era of racial terror, mere suggestions of Black-on-white violence could provoke mob violence and lynching before the judicial system could or would act. White lynch mobs regularly displayed complete disregard for the legal system, abducting Black people from courts, jails, and out of police custody. Law enforcement officials, charged with protecting those in their custody, often failed to intervene, as was the case here, and sometimes even participated in mob violence.

Racial terror sought to maintain white supremacy and dominance by instilling fear in the entire Black community through brutal violence that was often unpredictable and arbitrary. It was common during this era for a lynch mob’s focus to expand beyond a specific person accused of an offense and to target any and all Black people. In a system where lynchings regularly went unpunished and law enforcement did little to protect Black communities, white mobs acted as judge, jury, and executioner, killing Black women, men, and children with no expectation of punishment.

The Black people killed on June 22, 1908, were nine of at least 644 documented lynching victims between 1865 and 1950 in the state of Texas.

 

[Sonic Boom of the South]

Thousands Burn Black Man to Death in Wilmington, Delaware

On June 23, 1903, a white mob of more than 4,000 people in Wilmington, Delaware, burned a Black man named George White to death before he could stand trial. Mr. White was arrested and accused of killing a young white woman. He adamantly denied any involvement in the crime but was denied the opportunity to defend himself in court.


During the era of racial terror, many Black people were lynched after being accused of murder. The mere suggestion of Black-on-white violence could provoke mob violence and lynching. Here, despite Mr. White’s insistence that he was innocent, Wilmington residents were determined to lynch him without delay.

Within one week of Mr. White’s arrest, two lynch mobs attempted to abduct him from the workhouse where he was being held. White Wilmington residents talked openly about these lynching plans. In a sermon on June 21, local white pastor Robert Elwood urged white residents to exact swift public vengeance by lynching Mr. White. A lynch mob began forming the next day, and its members spent the next two days meticulously planning the public spectacle lynching that took place on June 23. Despite this public planning, in which mob members even shared their plans in advance with police officers, authorities charged with protecting Mr. White did not relocate him to a different jail or take any other measures to prevent the lynching.


In the early morning hours of June 23, the lynch mob had grown to thousands and included people who had traveled from out of town to participate. The mob stormed the workhouse where Mr. White was being held and threatened to destroy every cell unless authorities turned him over. Officers ultimately chose to protect the property of the jail rather than the life of a man they had a legal duty to protect; after leading the mob to his cell, the officers turned Mr. White over and “stood by to await the inevitable.”


The mob removed Mr. White from the jail and led him, chained, through a crowd of thousands to the pyre built outside the jail, where he was bound with rope and forced into the open flames. As Mr. White burned to death, the crowd of white men, women, and children there to participate in the lynching threw rocks at him and cheered.


After Mr. White was dead, members of the mob continued to shoot at his charred body, and lynching participants took pieces of his remains as “souvenirs”; a local white physician reportedly took Mr. White’s skull and right foot to display in the window of a local saloon.

Though thousands of known residents were complicit in the lynching of George White, no one was ever held responsible. Mr. White is one of over 6,500 victims of racial terror lynching killed in the U.S., and more than 300 victims killed outside the states of the former Confederacy, between 1865 and 1950.

In 2019, the Delaware Social Justice Remembrance Coalition gathered with hundreds of community members to unveil a historical marker memorializing Mr. White.

 

[Sonic Boom of the South]

On this day
July 01, 1965

Alabama Sheriff Padlocks Black Church to Prevent Discussion of Civil Rights

On July 1, 1965, a white sheriff in Camden, Alabama, forced people to leave and then padlocked the doors of the Antioch Baptist Church—a Black church where leaders were discussing civil rights—even though he did not have the authority to do so.


Community members from the Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) group had been meeting at the church for several months, working to promote Black voter registration in Alabama and the rest of the South. According to the 1960 census, Black residents made up over 75% of the population of Wilcox County. However, because of established practices and laws passed with the intent of suppressing the Black vote—which were enforced in discriminatory ways—no Black people in Wilcox County were registered to vote during the 1964 election.

When people at the Antioch Baptist Church began registering Black voters, they were quickly targeted by the white community. Two days before Sheriff P.C. Jenkins evicted people from the church, a group of white men had broken into the building and beaten two Black teenagers, inflicting injuries so severe that they were both hospitalized. Rather than providing protection from this violence, on July 1, Sheriff Jenkins announced that the church had been the cause of “too much disturbance,” and gave people only a few hours to clear out their belongings before putting a padlock on the door.


Though Sheriff Jenkins claimed that at least one church leader had expressed opposition to having the church involved in civil rights activism, the following day the chairman of the Board of Deacons denied that claim, and two weeks later the congregation and board of the church unanimously voted to support the church’s involvement in registering Black voters.

 

[Sonic Boom of the South]

Abolitionist David Ruggles opened the first African American bookstore in America in New York, 1834.

Ruggles might have been the most hated activist of his day. One slave catcher screamed that he would give "a thousand dollars if I had …Ruggles in my hands as he is the leader." And Ruggles was just that—a leader against slavery. He came to New York around 1827 from Connecticut, where he was born free. When he arrived he was 17 years old—and fearless, determined, and educated.

The year 1827 was a time of parades celebrating the end of slavery in New York. More and more runaways were arriving from the South every day. But right behind them were the slave catchers. Called "blackbirders," they roamed the streets looking to reclaim some of the runaways and even to kidnap free blacks. No black person was safe. Ruggles saw how dangerous the city was and decided to do something about it.

In 1835, he and several other young black activists founded the New York Committee of Vigilance. Ruggles and the rest of the Committee protected runaways and confronted the slave catchers. He made the city government grant jury trials to slaves who were recaptured, and he obtained lawyers for them. He personally helped as many as 600 fugitives, including the now-famous Frederick Douglass. He also ran an antislavery bookstore, the first of its kind, until it was destroyed by a mob. In addition, he wrote hundreds of articles. He bought a printing press and published his own pamphlets and a magazine called Mirror of Liberty. It was the first periodical published by a black American. But after 20 years of activism, Ruggles was nearly blind and seriously ill. Many, including Frederick Douglass, came to his aid. Ruggles died in Massachusetts in 1849.

 

[Sonic Boom of the South]

Ship Carrying Enslaved Africans Arrives in Alabama Despite Trafficking Ban

On July 8, 1860, more than 50 years after Congress banned the trafficking of enslaved Africans into the U.S., the ship Clotilda arrived in Mobile, Alabama, carrying more than 100 enslaved people from West Africa. Captain William Foster commanded the boat and was later said to be working for Timothy Meaher, a white Mobile shipyard owner who built the Clotilda.

Captain Foster evaded capture by federal authorities by transferring the enslaved Africans to a riverboat and burning and then sinking the Clotilda. The smuggled Africans were subsequently distributed as enslaved property amongst the group of white men who had financed the voyage. Mr. Meaher kept more than 30 of the Africans on Magazine Point, his property north of Mobile. One of those Africans was a man who came to be known as Cudjo Lewis.

In 1861, Mr. Meaher and his partners were prosecuted for illegally trafficking the Africans into the country, but a federal court dismissed the case as the Civil War began. No investigation or remedy ever involved the actual African men and women central to the case. While the federal case was pending, the Africans Mr. Meaher had claimed remained on his property left to fend for themselves and were offered no means of returning to Ghana.

In 1865, after the Civil War ended and slavery was widely abolished, the Clotilda survivors once enslaved by Mr. Meaher were free—but still trapped in a foreign land far from their home. They settled along the outskirts of Mr. Meaher’s property, at a site that came to be known as “Africatown,” and developed a community modeled after the traditions and government they had been forced to leave behind. Unlike the vast majority of newly freed Black people in the country, who had either been born in the U.S. or seized from Africa many decades before, the people of Africatown had a direct, recent connection to their African roots and vivid memories of their culture, language, and customs. Well into the 1950s, descendants of the Clotilda passengers living in Africatown maintained a distinct language and unique community of survival.

Cudjo Lewis lived to be the last surviving Clotilda passenger in Africatown. In 1927, Black anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Alabama to interview Mr. Lewis about his life and produced a manuscript documenting his story. The book was not published in her lifetime, but in 2018, the story was released as Barrac00n: The Story of the Last Black Cargo. Today, many descendants of the Africans trafficked on the Clotilda continue to live in northern Mobile, and in December 2012, the National Park Service added the Africatown Historic District to the National Register of Historic Places.

 

[Jaylen Tatum]

In 1878 clarence jackson returned home from a night out in the big apple disappointed he aint get no bytches. He started thinking of ways to stand out from other men and while thinking he was rubbing a knife used to cut up apples across his head. He was startled by the sound of a horse buggy overturning causing his hand to slip and create a crisp lineup.

 

[Sonic Boom of the South]

In 1878 clarence jackson returned home from a night out in the big apple disappointed he aint get no bytches. He started thinking of ways to stand out from other men and while thinking he was rubbing a knife used to cut up apples across his head. He was startled by the sound of a horse buggy overturning causing his hand to slip and create a crisp lineup.

Neg with this corny ass cracka humor.

 

[Jaylen Tatum]

Neg with this corny ass cracka humor.

It's a real story you military sissie

 

[Sonic Boom of the South]

It's a real story you military sissie

fukk ya mother you trolling ass bytch ass honky.