#corruptjudges

On this day - April 30, 1866

White Police, Mobs Kill and Terrorize Black Residents in Memphis, Tennessee

On April 30, 1866, white police officers in Memphis, Tennessee, assaulted Black soldiers, setting off a wave of horrific violence against Black community members. In total, white police and mobs killed nearly 50 Black people, raped at least five Black women, and burned down around 100 buildings in South Memphis, the part of the city where the majority of Black people in Memphis lived.

Following the Civil War, Memphis and other large southern cities were popular destinations for newly emancipated Black people seeking safety, resources, and opportunity. Memphis was a particularly sought-after location because it was the site of a Freedmen’s Bureau office and a place where federal troops were stationed, and the Black population in Memphis quickly surged.

On April 30, many Black Union soldiers stationed in Memphis completed their service but had to remain in the city for a few days to receive their pay. Black soldiers had become the target of violence by police officers and by other white members of the public who resented their presence. On the night of their discharge, three Black soldiers were confronted by four white policemen, who forced them off the sidewalk. This caused one of the soldiers to fall, and a policeman stumbled over him in the street. The policemen began attacking the soldiers, brandishing knives and striking the men with their pistols.

News of an altercation between the white policemen and Black soldiers quickly spread throughout the city, and white citizens of Memphis embellished the encounter and seized upon it as a pretext for organized violence. In the afternoon of May 1, angry white mobs set out to inflict terror upon South Memphis. City Recorder John C. Creighton called on the mobs to “kill every damned one” of the Black residents and to “burn up the cradle.”

For the next several days, white mobs indiscriminately beat, robbed, tortured, shot, raped, and killed Black women, men, and children. The mobs set fire to dozens of Black homes—many with residents still inside—and destroyed all of the city’s Black churches and schools.

Black survivors of the brutal violence later testified before a Congressional committee formed to investigate the massacre. One woman recalled that, when her 16-year-old daughter tried to save a neighbor from his burning home, a white mob surrounded the building and shot her to death when she exited. Another witness reported seeing a white mob fire weapons into the Freedmen’s Hospital, injuring multiple patients, including a small child with paralysis.

Black residents received little protection from local authorities during the attacks, as the city’s mayor was reportedly drunk during the massacre, and many law enforcement officials were members of the mob. “Instead of protecting the rights of persons and property as is their duty,” the Freedmen’s Bureau’s investigation later concluded, “[local police] were chiefly concerned as murderers, incendiaries, and robbers. At times they even protected the rest of the mob in their acts of violence.” Even Union troops stationed in the city claimed their forces were too small to take on the deadly white mobs. According to the Freedmen’s Bureau report, the mob only dispersed after several days “from want of material to work on” after most Black people had hidden or fled into the countryside.

Though many of the perpetrators were known, none of the white people who carried out the Memphis Massacre were arrested or tried for their actions. Even after the massacre’s toll of death and destruction was clearly revealed, Memphis’s white community refused to take responsibility, and the Freedmen’s Bureau investigation reported that most white people only regretted the violence’s financial costs.

On this day - June 09, 1963

Fannie Lou Hamer Arrested and Beaten in Winona, Mississippi

On June 9, 1963, Fannie Lou Hamer and other civil rights activists were arrested in Winona, Mississippi, while returning from a voter education workshop in South Carolina. Mrs. Hamer and the other activists had been traveling in the "white" section of a Greyhound bus despite threats from the driver that he planned to notify local police at the next stop. When the bus arrived at the Winona bus depot, some of the activists attempted to eat at Staley's Cafe but were refused service.

Mrs. Hamer, who had stayed on the bus, soon saw police officers arresting some of the activists. She got off the bus and was seized by a white police officer who began kicking her and arrested her. In August 1964, while testifying at the Democratic National Convention to urge party bosses to seat a group of Black Mississippi voters as delegates, Mrs. Hamer recalled the abuse she endured that night at the county jail.

"It wasn't too long before three white men came to my cell," she said. "One of these men was a state highway patrolman and he asked me where I was from. I told him Ruleville and he said, 'We are going to check this.' They left my cell and it wasn't too long before they came back. He said, 'You are from Ruleville all right,' and he used a curse word. And he said, 'We are going to make you wish you was dead.'"

The white officers then forced two African American prisoners to brutally beat Mrs. Hamer with loaded blackjacks; she was nearly killed. As Mrs. Hamer regained consciousness, she overheard one of the white officers propose, "We could put them SOBs in [the] Big Black [River] and nobody would ever find them."

On this day - April 29, 1992

All-White Jury Acquits Officers Who Beat Rodney King Despite Video Evidence 

Our judges and juries are FUCKED Up and Racist.

On April 29, 1992, an all-white jury in California chose to acquit three of the four Los Angeles Police Department officers who beat Rodney King during a violent arrest in March of 1991 and could not agree on a verdict for the fourth officer, despite video evidence establishing their culpability.

On March 3, 1991, Mr. King was driving in downtown Los Angeles when the LAPD pulled him over and began beating him after he allegedly resisted arrest. Four LAPD officers kicked Mr. King, who was on the ground, and beat him with batons for nearly 15 minutes while more than a dozen law enforcement officers stood by. Mr. King sustained life-threatening injuries, including skull fractures and permanent brain damage.

A man standing on his balcony witnessed the violent arrest and captured it on tape. Video of the unrelenting assault was played at trial and broadcasted into homes across the nation and around the world.

Just months before the officers were acquitted, a federal court had concluded that Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies continued to use racially motivated “terrorist-type tactics” to violate the civil rights of Black people. Still, none of the officers involved in Mr. King’s assault faced punishment at trial.

The legal system’s refusal to hold these officers accountable was not unique—the Los Angeles Black community had already endured decades of racial discrimination, violence, and police brutality—but many community members found the outcome inexplicable given that the officers’ conduct had been caught on camera. The same month that Rodney King was beaten, a Korean store owner in South Central Los Angeles shot and killed a 15-year-old Black girl named Latasha Harlins after accusing her of trying to steal a bottle of orange juice. Latasha was clutching money when she was killed, but the store owner received only probation and a $500 fine.

The verdict drew shock and anguish across the county, and members of the Black community in Los Angeles took to the streets in protests that lasted until May 4, 1992.

The protests echoed the unrest that broke out in Los Angeles’s Watts neighborhood in the summer of 1965, after police beat and arrested two young Black men following a traffic stop. A commission convened to investigate the so-called "Watts Riots" concluded that the unrest stemmed from Black residents’ dissatisfaction with policing, high rates of unemployment, and inadequate schools. Despite these conclusions, little changed in the decades that followed.

This is Charles & Willa Bruce. In 1912 they bought prime beachfront land in Manhattan Beach, LA County and built a Black resort community. In 1924 the county took it and refused to pay its value. In 2021, worth $72 million, it was returned to their descendents by Senate Bill 796.

On this day June 27, 1911

Two Black Men Lynched in Georgia After Judge Denies Them Protection

On June 27, 1911, a Walton County mob of several hundred unmasked white men lynched two Black men named Tom Allen and Joe Watts after a local white judge—Charles H. Brand—refused to allow state guardsmen to be present to prevent mob action.

Judge Brand had been aware of the threat of mob violence for weeks. Mr. Allen, who had been accused of sexual impropriety against a white woman, had been held in Atlanta for safekeeping because of the threat. In early June, Mr. Allen was brought to Monroe for trial with the protection of state troops from the governor, but Judge Brand “resented” the presence of troops, postponed the trial because of the protection being offered, and sent Mr. Allen back to Atlanta. When Mr. Allen was ordered back to Monroe for trial on June 27, Judge Brand refused an offer of protection from the state troops. Consequently, Mr. Allen was protected only by two officers on the train.

Aware that Mr. Allen no longer had the protection of state troops, the white mob intercepted the train bound for Monroe and seized Mr. Allen from the two officers charged with protecting him. The mob tied Mr. Allen to a telegraph pole and shot him while the passengers of the train and hundreds in the mob looked on. 

The mob then proceeded to march six miles to the town jail where another Black man named Joe Watts was being held. Some newspapers reported that Mr. Watts was an alleged accomplice of Mr. Allen, while others noted Mr. Watts had been arrested for having “acted suspiciously” outside of a white man’s home but had not been charged with a crime. The white mob stormed the jail without resistance from the jailers, removed Mr. Watts, and lynched him as well, hanging him from a tree and shooting him repeatedly. Both men had maintained that they were innocent, and contemporary newspapers reported that there was no evidence against them. 

In most cases of racial terror lynching throughout this era, the legal system failed to intervene or use force to repel lynch mobs, even when the threat of lynching was evident and underway. Despite their legal responsibility to equally protect anyone in their custody, law enforcement and judicial officials were often found to be complicit in the seizure or lynchings of Black men, women, and children by abdicating their responsibility to prevent mob abductions.

In this case, Judge Brand refused to allow for the protection of the state troops that had successfully transported and protected Mr. Allen from being lynched just three weeks before, making it easier for the white mob to lynch these men. Three months earlier, in Judge Brand’s hometown of Lawrenceville in Gwinnett County, he had also refused the assistance of state troops to protect a Black man named Charles Hale, who, left without the protection of those troops, was taken by a white mob and lynched. 

Despite his failure to protect these men, he continued to serve as a judge until 1917. In 1917, Judge Brand was elected to Congress to represent Georgia's 8th Congressional District, where he served seven consecutive terms. 

On this day - April 22, 1987

U.S. Supreme Court Rules Racial Bias "Inevitable" in Criminal Justice System

On April 22, 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a Black man's death penalty appeal grounded in claims of racial inequality and instead accepted proven racial sentencing disparities as "an inevitable part of our criminal justice system."

In October 1978, a Black man named Warren McCleskey was convicted of killing a white police officer during a robbery and was sentenced to death. On appeal, Mr. McCleskey's lawyers argued that Georgia's capital punishment system was racially biased in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. In support of his argument, the lawyers presented statistical evidence that race significantly impacted the likelihood of a death sentence.

University of Iowa professor David Baldus had conducted a rigorous statistical analysis of more than 2,000 Georgia murder cases and found that prosecutors were more likely to seek the death penalty and juries were more likely to impose it in cases involving Black defendants and white victims. Even after controlling for crime-specific variables, the Baldus study concluded Black defendants accused of killing white victims faced the highest likelihood of receiving the death penalty.

In its 5-4 decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, the Court accepted the Baldus study's findings as valid but held that the evidence was not enough to reverse the conviction and sentence because there was no proof that any individual had intentionally discriminated against Mr. McCleskey on the basis of race. In other words, without clear evidence that the discrimination was impactful and purposeful, the Court would not act. In dissent, Justice William Brennan wrote that the majority was motivated to deny relief by a "fear of too much justice."

On this day March 23, 1875

Tennessee Legalizes Racial Discrimination in Public Spaces After Civil Rights Act Passes

Has anything really changed in all the injustices and discrimination that people of colour face every day for over 200 years?

On March 23, 1875, the Tennessee legislature approved House Bill 527, which permitted hotels, inns, public transportation, and amusement parks to refuse admission and service to any person for any reason. Three weeks before, federal authorities had enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which guaranteed African Americans equal treatment in public accommodations and jury service. By enacting a state law that allowed for all kinds of discrimination, including on the basis of race, Tennessee officials had defiantly authorized the very discrimination the federal law prohibited.

In July 1866, after ratifying the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, Tennessee became the first Confederate state readmitted to the Union. However, many white residents in the state had not accepted the outcome of the recent Civil War and remained intent on maintaining their dominance over a political and social system that now included many free Black citizens.

In 1869, racialized political movements restored former Confederates to legislative power in Tennessee. Newly elected lawmakers quickly undertook efforts to "redeem" the South by restoring white supremacy and the exploitation of Black labor. Legislators quickly repealed a state statute passed in 1868 under the Reconstruction government that had outlawed racial discrimination in railroad travel. In 1870, Tennessee lawmakers went further, amending the state constitution to prohibit racial integration of Tennessee public schools.

Many other border states passed similar laws aimed at limiting Black Americans' new constitutional rights and protections. Congress's passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875 was an attempt to enforce Black Americans' rights and equality, and it set off a legal conflict between state and federal power.