Human Rights, Human Stories

On March 30, 1961, the Sovereignty Commission, a Mississippi state agency, voted to continue funding pro-segregation campaigns organized by white citizens’ councils. Among the commission members were Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, Lt. Governor Paul B. Johnson, and the attorney general.

In the nine months leading up to the decision, the state commission invested the equivalent of over $600,000 today into pro-segregation campaigns broadcasted on national radio and television. The group helped finance over a dozen campaigns that aired in Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Mississippi.

One of the campaigns characterized life for Black Mississippians as superior: “Negroes receive better treatment and more consideration of their welfare in Mississippi than any other state in the nation,” the campaign stated.

In reality, racial terror violence and extreme opposition to equal rights for Black people were widespread in Mississippi. Mississippi was among the first Southern states to adopt a new state constitution in the 1890s designed to disenfranchise Black citizens, which succeeded in excluding Black Mississippians from political participation and power for decades.

Mississippi continued to symbolically resist racial equality throughout the 20th century; the state did not formally ratify the Thirteenth Amendment—which prohibited slavery except as punishment for crime—until 1995.

History Of Racial Injustice.

Around midnight on September 3, 1944, Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old Black, married mother, was walking with neighbors, headed home from a revival service at Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Before she made it home, a gang of white men kidnapped her, drove to a remote area in the woods, and r***d her at gunpoint. After six of the men took turns ra**ng her, they blindfolded her, drove her back to the road, and left her to walk home.

Mrs. Taylor soon contacted the police, and the sheriff identified one of the suspects based on her description of the car. Hugo Wilson, the owner of the car, identified the six white men who r***d Mrs. Taylor as: Herbert Lovett, Luther Lee, Joe Culpepper, Dillard York, Billy Howerton, and Robert Gamble. Yet none of the men were arrested.

When the NAACP branch office in Montgomery, Alabama, heard of Mrs. Taylor’s r**e and local officials’ failure to respond, the chapter president sent NAACP Secretary Rosa Parks to investigate. After gathering details, Mrs. Parks established the Committee for Equal Justice to demand prosecution of Mrs. Taylor’s attackers. Amid the publicity, Alabama Gov. Chauncey Sparks also launched an investigation.

In the course of the subsequent proceedings, Mrs. Taylor’s character became the main matter of dispute; four of the six accused attackers admitted to having in*******se with her but claimed she was a “prostitute” and “a willing participant.” The sheriff accused Mrs. Taylor of being “nothing but a whore” and alleged that she had been treated for venereal disease. Meanwhile, other white men in Abbeville described Mrs. Taylor as an “upstanding respectable woman who abided by the town’s racial and sexual mores.” And one of the accused attackers, Joe Culpepper, admitted that Mrs. Taylor had been gang-r***d at gunpoint and that he and his fellow attackers had been looking for a woman that night.

Despite this information and widespread national support for Mrs. Taylor’s cause, on February 14, 1945, an all-white, all-male grand jury failed to return an indictment against any of the men accused of ra**ng Mrs. Taylor. The men were never prosecuted.

In the months after Mrs. Taylor’s attack, she received constant death threats and her home was firebombed by white supremacists. The Recy Taylor case, though rarely cited, is credited as being a catalyst for the modern civil rights movement. In 2011, the Alabama Legislature apologized to Mrs. Taylor for the state’s failure to prosecute her attackers.

History Of Racial Injustice.

February 4, 1846
Alabama Begins Leasing Incarcerated People for Profit

The Alabama state legislature voted to construct the first state-run prison on January 26, 1839. In 1841, the Wetumpka State Penitentiary was built in Wetumpka, Alabama. The prison received its first person in 1842: a white man sentenced to 20 years for "harboring a runaway slave." In the antebellum penitentiary, 99% of incarcerated people were white, as free Black people were not legally permitted to live in the state, and enslaved Black people were instead subject to unregulated “plantation justice” at the hands of enslavers and overseers.

The penitentiary was supposed to be self-sufficient but soon proved costly as the prison industries of manufacturing wagons, buggies, saddles, harnesses, shoes, and rope failed to generate enough funds to maintain the facility. On February 4, 1846, the state legislature chose to lease the penitentiary to J.G. Graham, a private businessman, for a six-year term. Graham appointed himself warden and took control of the entire prison and the people incarcerated there, claiming all profits made from their labor and eliminating every other employment position except physician and inspector. Alabama continued to lease the prison to private businessmen until 1862, when warden/leaser Dr. Ambrose Burrows was murdered by an incarcerated person.

This initial leasing of the prison and the people incarcerated there marked the beginning of the convict leasing system in Alabama, and that system was soon renewed. In 1866, after the end of the Civil War, the government again authorized incarcerated people to be leased to work outside of the prison, and 374 people were leased to the firm Smith & McMillen to work rebuilding the Alabama & Chattanooga Railroad. In this post-emancipation society, Black people were no longer enslaved, and the convict population that was formerly almost all white was now 90% Black. The system of convict leasing became one that forced primarily Black people who were incarcerated—some convicted of minor or trumped-up charges—to work in hard, dangerous conditions for no pay. This practice continued until World War II.

History Of Racial Injustice.