Orangeburg Massacre Essay

During the late Nineteenth Century, The Free Speech was one of the only journals in the country that spoke directly to African-Americans. As an author for this journal, Wells-Barnett sought to enlighten the public with information that was rarely published in other newspapers. In the event that knowledge of these lynchings were made public, they rarely contained accurate information. This journal was without a doubt a nuisance to the southern white press, who sought to discredit African-Americans in order to keep them out of political matters. The Free Speech went too far in a publication written for the May 21st, 1892 paper. The article describes the lynching of eight men since the previous publication. The deaths and crimes are described and doubt is expressed that most of the individuals were actually guilty. The spark that led to Wells-Barnett’s attempted lynching is found at the end of the article. “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern white men are not careful, they will overreach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction, a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.” With the publishing of this article, local whites became enraged and took this as a direct threat to their “authority” over African-Americans. Local newspapers such as The Daily Commercial wrote follow up articles testifying to the

      Michael Schwerner joined forces with SNCC along with his chief aid, James Chaney, a black Mississippi native. They both had hopes that the federal government would be pushed by their numbers to increase FBI and federal protection for the students. The third man on their team was Andrew Goodman. He was a reasonably wealthy, white, 20 year old from Manhattan. Idealistic and eager to work, Andrew had no clue that his first day in Mississippi would also be his last. On the night of June 21st in Neshoba County the three young men disappeared after being stopped on a bogus traffic violation. After discovering their burned out car on the second day of the search, most everyone knew the three had been murdered. The press followed the search and brought the case to the nation’s attention. Many bodies of murdered civil rights workers and black citizens were recovered from the backwaters and swamps as federal agents and Navy seamen scoured Neshoba County. The killers in Neshoba County had made a very grave mistake. They hadn’t just murdered three local “colored boys” this time. The parents of Schwerner and Goodman had money; they had ties. So much so, that they were given an audience with

Pennsylvania. Washington’s men murdered the gathering in what came to be recognized as The Battle of Jumonville Glen. France and England initially pursued the French and Indian War mainly for power of the area known as the Ohio River Valley. The Ohio River Valley was a property filled with fur-bearing animals and profuse resources. Both English and French colonists wanted to settle it to make fortunes in the fur trade. The Ohio River formed by the union of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers at the time Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania ran through the valley. As French settlers arrived upon the area from Canada, and English settlers came from Virginia, territory clashes were unavoidable. Neither side was willing to negotiation, as each assumed they

The Boston Massacre occurred in the evening of The Boston Massacre began with a few colonists throwing snowballs at a soldier outside the Custom House in Boston, Massachusetts. (Text, 155) The argument began to escalate as more colonists gathered. Captain Thomas Preston arrived with a number of soldiers to maintain order. (Text, 155) Captain Preston tried to get the crowd to disperse; however, the crowd continued to throw snowballs, stones, and sticks at the British soldiers. Then one of the soldiers fired into the crowd and soon after, a number of other soldiers fired into the crowd as well. Four colonists died immediately. March 5, 1770 when British soldiers opened fire on a group of American colonists. (Text, 155) One cause of the

Lalita Tademy is an interesting case of a writer, as she has a large amount of potential source material at her disposal due to her family history, the Colfax Massacre is one of those source materials. Lalita has a rich family history that puts her distant relatives in the middle of one of the most overlooked and important moments in United States history. These relatives setup and attempted to protect the courthouse in Colfax 1873, but abruptly ended with the deaths of all the men in the building in a truly one sided battle. Lalita stated in an interview with NPR, “My aunt Ellen had told me at one point that our people were mixed up in the courthouse incident, and some got out and some didn’t.” This moment with her aunt could have been

The Battle of Fredericksburg falls in a long list of failures of the Army of the Potomac during the first year of the American Civil War. Following the Battle of Antietam the Northern Army had the opportunity to defeat Lee’s army. However, Northerners, were shocked by Lee’s escape following this battle on 17 September 1862, and were further upset by Major General George B. McClellan’s procrastination in pursuing Lee and allowing General J.E.B. Stuarts daring cavalry raid into Pennsylvania around Gettysburg (10-12 October 1862). McClellan’s failure to pursue Lee’s Army is mainly due to his own lack of confidence, believing that he doesn’t have enough men or material in order to defeat the Army of Virginia. President Lincoln had finally

Civil rights groups are not a new thing in the United States, but after the disputed case of Trayvon Martin who was killed by George Zimmerman, the movement has been growing tumultuously. After Martin’s death, hundreds of high school teens began protesting, demanding both Zimmerman and chief police be fired. With the help of social media, Umi Selah and other activists were able to organize a forty-mile march from Daytona Beach to the headquarters of Sanford Police Department (the department that dealt with Martin and Zimmerman’s case.) The march lasted four days and ended in a five-hour blockade of the Sanford Police Department’s door. This organized protest was just the beginning of what quickly became the Black Lives Matter movement (McClain 2016).

The Boston Massacre is considered by many historians to be the first battle of the Revolutionary War. The fatal incident happened on March 5 of 1770. The massacre resulted in the death of five colonists. British troops in the Massachusetts Bay Colony were there to stop demonstrations against the Townshend Acts and keep order, but instead they provoked outrage. The British soldiers and citizens brawled in streets and fought in bars. “The citizens viewed the British soldiers as potential oppressors, competitors for jobs, and a treat to social mores'; (Mahin 1). A defiant anti-British fever was lingering among the townspeople.     

Wounded Knee was a terrible event in US history. It showed how the US government didn't understand the Native Americans and treated them badly and unfairly.

Although ruled unconstitutional, segregation continued in the Deep South while the government ignored it. The Freedom Rides then set out to challenge these states who ignored the ruling of segregated public buses and continued to enforce the Jim Crow laws. The Freedom Rides rode buses with mixed racial groups into the states. Often white mobs awaited their arrival to beat them down. The people on the bus never responded with violence and took massive beatings. The local police often knew about these mobbing’s, but ceased to do anything about it. Freedom Rides continued to send buses down despite getting beat up and killed. The more often this occurred the more national attention it got. This showed everyone how these states were disregarding

The Boston Massacre was and is still a debatable Massacre. The event occurred on March 5, 1776. It involved the rope workers of the colonial Boston and two British regiments, the twenty-ninth and the fourteenth regiments. Eleven people were shot in the incident; five people were killed and the other six were merely wounded. The soldiers and the captain, Thomas Preston, were all put on trial. All were acquitted of charges of murder, however the two soldiers who fired first, Private Mathew Killroy, and Private William Montgomery, the two soldiers were guilty of manslaughter. The causes were numerous for this event. There had been a nation wide long-term dislike towards the British, and a growing hatred towards them by the people of Boston.

In the year 1898 in the town of Wilmington, North Carolina a riot occurred between the African American inhabitants and the white minority of the city. Several historians accuse the origin of the riot on racism and white supremacy. Although these two beliefs have been around for countless years, and African Americans received the right to vote almost thirty years’ prior, no demonstration nor aggressive threats, to the point in which was seen in 1898, had occurred in Wilmington until that year. The Wilmington Race Riot was the reaction of the “sociopolitical conditions” that were being applied by the Democratic Party to win the election through a sequence of diabolical campaign tactics just like creating partial accusations about the “negroes” of the town thus, creating unconstitutional practices, and threatening their existence.

This small issue turned into locker room fights, and then lynching brings us to think how Civil War never technically ended but only channelized the aggression of the southern white men; they now started accusing the minorities of small faults to punish them. This clearly depicts that they still considered the African American communities as slaves and had a sense of ownership over them. Its consequences are “The Civil Rights Movement” a century later and “The Black Lives Matter” in the 21st century.

The worst mass murder suicide was the Jonestown Massacre which happened on November 18th, 1978. Have you ever head the saying “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid?” this originates for the Jonestown Massacre, which killed over 900 members of the Peoples Temple. James Jones made a concoction of a powered drink, like Kool-Aid mixed laced with cyanide and prescription drugs. James Jones used psychological manipulation instead of physical force with the members of Peoples Temple.

The public was able to witness for the first time the violence and police brutality used against many civil rights activist. The majority of the civil rights demonstrators in Alabama that day were high school students. The pictures of these children being attacked by dogs and sprayed with water from high-powered fire hoses were very disturbing and shocking to most viewers. It gave a more accurate and sympathetic account; one that the public hadn’t seen before,