The 2020 census won’t ask you about how many people in your family are “idiots” or “insane,” but in 1840 that was a question census workers had to answer for every household. The Census Bureau added the question at a time when reformers were interested in creating institutions to ...read more
William Fitzjohn and his driver raced up Route 40 through Maryland, hoping to find a hot meal before the African diplomat’s meeting at the White House. It was April 1961, and segregation was the status quo in large swaths of the United States. Fitzjohn, the charge d’affaires for ...read more
On February 8, 1915, D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, a landmark film in the history of cinema, premieres at Clune’s Auditorium in Los Angeles. The silent film was America’s first feature-length motion picture and a box-office smash, and during its unprecedented three hours ...read more
In 1924, a group of ten children and hundreds of spectators gathered for a mass baptism. This was no mere religious rite. As the children and their parents moved toward the clergyman, they were enveloped by 50 men in white robes. They were the children of the Ku Klux Klan, and ...read more
The Democratic National Convention was a tense scene in July of 1972. The gathering in Miami came just one month after burglars had broken into the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate. The candidate who won the presidential nomination would be the one to take on President ...read more
A striking portrait hung on the wall of the campaign headquarters for George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential run. It wasn’t a slick painting of the vice-president, who hoped to become the next Republican in the White House. Rather, it was a mug shot, a grainy photo of a black man ...read more
The Rosewood Massacre was an attack on the predominantly African-American town of Rosewood, Florida, in 1923 by large groups of whites. The town was entirely destroyed by the end of the violence, and the residents were driven out permanently. The story was mostly forgotten until ...read more
Every night in November 1968, National Guardsmen circled the streets in Wilmington, Delaware, armed with loaded rifles and ready to put down racial violence in the city’s most impoverished neighborhoods. Every so often, they’d stop to hassle black residents, using racial slurs to ...read more
In March 2018, the Commerce Department controversially announced that it would include a question on citizenship in the 2020 census—the first such question to be asked of all U.S. households since 1950, and one that at least 12 states say they would sue over. The census, a ...read more
During the Tulsa Race Massacre (also known as the Tulsa Race Riot), which occurred over 18 hours on May 31-June 1, 1921, a white mob attacked residents, homes and businesses in the predominantly black Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The event remains one of the worst ...read more
The Scottsboro Boys were nine black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women aboard a train near Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. The trials and repeated retrials of the Scottsboro Boys sparked an international uproar and produced two landmark U.S. Supreme Court ...read more
When Peter Burnett took the podium in Sacramento in 1849, he faced a group of men like him—pioneers determined to take California from an upstart territory to a full-fledged state. He had been elected California’s first governor just a day before, and as he addressed his fellow ...read more
The Past in Color features the work of colorist Marina Amaral, bringing to life black and white photos with color applied digitally. LAPD officer. Bit-part Hollywood star. Nixon supporter. Trailblazer for racial integration. Kenny Washington had an eventful–and in some ways ...read more
Loving v. Virginia was a Supreme Court case that struck down state laws banning interracial marriage in the United States. The plaintiffs in the case were Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and black woman whose marriage was deemed illegal according to Virginia state law. ...read more
The Watts Riots, also known as the Watts Rebellion, was a large series of riots that broke out August 11, 1965, in the predominantly black neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles. The Watts Riots lasted for six days, resulting in 34 deaths, 1,032 injuries and 4,000 arrests, ...read more
The Zoot Suit Riots were a series of violent clashes during which mobs of U.S. servicemen, off-duty police officers and civilians brawled with young Latinos and other minorities in Los Angeles. The June 1943 riots took their name from the baggy suits worn by many minority youths ...read more
The 1967 Detroit Riots were among the most violent and destructive riots in U.S. history. By the time the bloodshed, burning and looting ended after five days, 43 people were dead, 342 injured, nearly 1,400 buildings had been burned and some 7,000 National Guard and U.S. Army ...read more
In 1935, Nazi Germany passed two radically discriminatory pieces of legislation: the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. Together, these were known as the Nuremberg Laws, and they laid the legal groundwork for the persecution of ...read more
Baltimore has dropped at least 41 drug-related charges in the past few weeks after two body camera videos revealed cops planting drugs as evidence. The released footage quickly went viral, sparking internet outrage. A similar situation also occurred in May of this year when a ...read more
At 1 p.m. on Saturday, July 28, 1917, a group of between 8,000 and 10,000 African American men, women and children began marching through the streets of midtown Manhattan in what became one of the first civil rights protests in American history—nearly 50 years before the March on ...read more
“What are you doing in bed with this woman?,” Sheriff R Garnett Brooks asked as he shone his flashlight on a couple in bed. It was 2 a.m. on July 11, 1958, and the couple in question, Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter, had been married for five weeks. “I’m his wife,” Mildred ...read more
The Zoot Suit Riots were a series of violent clashes during which mobs of U.S. servicemen, off-duty police officers and civilians brawled with young Latinos and other minorities in Los Angeles. The June 1943 riots took their name from the baggy suits worn by many minority youths ...read more
The term “Jim Crow” typically refers to repressive laws and customs once used to restrict black rights, but the origin of the name itself actually dates back to before the Civil War. In the early 1830s, the white actor Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice was propelled to stardom for ...read more
On this day in 2012, Trayvon Martin, an African-American teen walking home from a trip to a convenience store, is fatally shot by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer patrolling the townhouse community of the Retreat at Twin Lakes in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman later ...read more
