Teachers Undoing Racism Now

“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired!”

Jun. 9, 1963 | Fannie Lou Hamer Arrested and Beaten in Winona, Mississippi Learn more about our history of racial injustice.

The inhumanity ingrained in white narcissism!

In 1932 the US Public Health Service recruited 600 Black men in Macon County Alabama for a study on untreated syphilis. They were never told what the study was actually about. Researchers told them they were being treated for “bad blood” — a local term for general illness. In exchange they received free meals, free medical exams and burial insurance. They received no treatment at all.
Here is the detail that should make every person of African descent permanently suspicious of Western medical institutions — the natural history of syphilis was already well known to medical science in 1932 when the study began. The complications of untreated syphilis were already documented. They did not need these men to find out what syphilis does to the human body. They wanted to know what it does specifically to Black bodies — because they believed Black people experienced disease differently from whites.
Then penicillin was discovered. A complete cure. Widely available. And the US government made a deliberate decision to keep it from every single man in that study.
By the time the study was finally exposed and shut down in 1972 — only 74 of the original participants were still alive. 28 had died directly from syphilis. Over 100 had died from related complications. At least 40 of their wives had been infected. 19 children had been born with congenital syphilis.
The government was not stopped by conscience. It was not stopped by its own doctors. It ran for 40 years — through multiple administrations, multiple surgeon generals, and multiple generations of public health officials who all knew and said nothing.
This is not ancient history. The last survivor of the Tuskegee experiment died in 2004.
And people wonder why Black communities distrust medical institutions. The distrust was not manufactured. It was earned. 🌍
What do you think — can that level of institutional betrayal ever truly be repaired?

Join us for Saturday Freedom School: Zones of Peace, a community dialogue centering Haitian Flag Day, Haitian popular sovereignty, and collective peace-building through education and reflection on Saturday, May 16 from 10:00 AM–12:00 PM at South Orange Middle School.All attendees must register.

Across U.S. history, Black communities faced repeated racial massacres, expulsions, and organized mob violence that many Americans were never taught about. This map shows only a portion of those documented events.”

Twenty-five pins on a map. That is how many locations fit on a single image when someone tries to document the places in this country where Black people were massacred.

Twenty-five pins, and the map is not complete. It is not close to complete.

Each pin is a city name and a year. Each pin is a body count that was never accurately recorded, a neighborhood that was burned, a population that fled and never returned.

The pins stretch from New York to Texas, from Louisiana to Illinois, from 1863 to 2015. One hundred and fifty-two years between the first pin and the last, which means there is no generation of Black Americans alive who does not have a pin on this map.

New Orleans, 1866. White mobs and police attacked Black men and white Republicans meeting at the Mechanics' Institute to discuss voting rights, killing thirty-four and wounding more than a hundred.

Memphis, 1866. Over three days in May, white mobs burned ninety homes, twelve schools, and four churches in the Black community of South Memphis and killed forty-six Black people.

Opelousas, Louisiana, 1868. White mobs killed an estimated 150 to 300 Black people over several weeks, dumping bodies in ditches and woods across St. Landry Parish.

Camilla, Georgia, 1868. Black citizens marching to a political rally were ambushed by white men with shotguns, and many more were hunted through the swamps in the days that followed.

St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, 1868. In the weeks before the presidential election, white paramilitary groups terrorized Black voters and killed an estimated 35 to over 100 people across the parish.

Colfax, Louisiana, 1873. On Easter Sunday, a white militia attacked Black men defending the Grant Parish courthouse and killed as many as 150, including dozens who had surrendered and were executed afterward.

Three white men were convicted under federal civil rights law. The Supreme Court overturned their convictions, gutting the enforcement power of the Fourteenth Amendment for nearly a century.

Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1874. White paramilitary groups attacked Black residents surrounding a disputed election, killing an estimated 29 to 50 and forcing the elected Black sheriff, Peter Crosby, to flee.

Clinton, Mississippi, 1875. A political rally attended by Black and white Republicans was ambushed, and in the days that followed, armed white men rode through the countryside killing an estimated 50 Black people.

Thibodaux, Louisiana, 1887. Black sugar cane workers went on strike for fair wages, and white militias responded by massacring between 35 and 300 workers and their family members over three days.

Wilmington, North Carolina, 1898. A white mob burned the only Black-owned newspaper in the city and posed for photographs in front of the ashes.

They overthrew the elected multiracial government at gunpoint, killed as many as 60 Black people, and forced more than 2,000 to flee. It was the only successful coup in American history, and newspapers called it a "race riot."

Atlanta, 1906. White newspapers ran fabricated stories of Black men assaulting white women, and mobs rampaged through Black neighborhoods for four days, killing at least 25 and destroying Black-owned businesses along Decatur Street.

Springfield, Illinois, 1908. In Abraham Lincoln's hometown, a white mob attacked the Black community after a white woman falsely accused a Black man of assault.

Two Black men were lynched, homes and businesses were destroyed, and more than 2,000 Black residents fled. The horror of Springfield directly inspired the founding of the NAACP the following year.

Slocum, Texas, 1910. Armed white men on horseback rode through this majority-Black community shooting every Black person they could find.

The sheriff told the New York Times that white men "were going about killing Negroes as fast as they could find them" and that the victims had done nothing wrong. The official count was eight dead, but Black residents said it was 200 or more.

Seven white men were indicted. None were ever tried.

East St. Louis, Illinois, 1917. White mobs lynched, shot, and burned Black residents, throwing bodies from a bridge into the river and leaving 6,000 people homeless.

Three weeks later, ten thousand Black people marched in silence down Fifth Avenue in New York City. Children dressed in white led the way, and the only sound was the beat of muffled drums.

One sign read: "Your Hands Are Full of Blood."

Chicago, 1919, during what was called Red Summer. A Black teenager named Eugene Williams was stoned and drowned after drifting into the white section of a Lake Michigan beach, and the violence that followed lasted a week.

Elaine, Arkansas, 1919. Black sharecroppers met at a church to discuss hiring a lawyer to get fair cotton prices.

By the time federal troops left Phillips County, an estimated 200 or more Black people had been killed. A grand jury charged 122 Black people with crimes and sentenced twelve to death, while not one white person was indicted.

Ocoee, Florida, 1920. A Black man named Mose Norman tried to vote on Election Day and was turned away.

That night, a mob attacked the home of July Perry, a Black businessman who had been paying poll taxes for voters who couldn't afford them. Perry was lynched and hung from a light pole, at least 50 Black people were killed, and the entire Black population of Ocoee was driven out of the city.

A man was killed for helping people vote. It was the largest election-related massacre in American history.

Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1921. Over two days, a white mob destroyed thirty-five blocks of the Greenwood District, a neighborhood so prosperous it was called Black Wall Street.

An estimated 300 people were killed and 10,000 were left homeless. Black families filed 1,400 insurance claims totaling more than four million dollars, and every single one was denied because the companies called it a "riot."

Rosewood, Florida, 1923. A white mob destroyed the entire Black town after a white woman falsely claimed a Black man had assaulted her, and the survivors fled into the swamps and never returned.

And the map keeps going. Detroit, 1943.

Philadelphia, 1985, where police dropped a bomb on a row house and let an entire city block burn.

Charleston, 2015, where a white man sat in Bible study at Mother Emanuel AME Church for an hour before killing nine Black people in prayer.

Twenty-five pins. Each one is a place where someone's grandmother lost everything she owned.

Each pin is a town that went from majority Black to almost no Black residents within a single generation. Each pin is a family that left in the middle of the night and never spoke about what happened.

The map does not show the children who were carried through swamps in the dark while gunshots echoed behind them. It does not show the insurance claims that were denied, the grand juries that refused to indict, or the textbooks that skipped the chapter.

It shows the pins. It shows the names and the years.

And even that, even just the names and the years, is more than most Americans were ever taught. Most people scrolling past this image will not recognize more than two or three of these places.

That is the map's argument. It is not saying look how much happened.

It is asking why you are only now seeing it.

I put a lot of effort into researching and sharing stories that matter. If you'd like to support the work, here's the link:
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Source: Multiple historical sources including the Equal Justice Initiative, BlackPast.org, the Zinn Education Project, the Smithsonian, the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Library of Congress, the Brookings Institution, the New York Historical Society, North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, the Texas State Historical Association, and the Orange County Regional History Center.

NOTE: This post is shared for historical and educational awareness about documented incidents of racial violence and massacres in the United States, not to glorify violence, hate, or harm.

Today, I led a workshop on Chinese Americans in the Jim Crow South, inspired by a scene from the movie “Sinners” in which MBJ enters a grocery store owned by a Chinese American family. I don’t know about you, but I found myself asking, “How the ‘F’ did Chinese Americans end up in the Jim Crow South, in a Black community, owning a grocery store?” That question became the foundation of this presentation. As Malcolm X said, “Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research.”