Jerry Mitchell

#OnThisDay in 1965, Willie Brewster died after being attacked three days earlier. He was heading home after working at a pipe foundry near Anniston, Alabama, when three white men shot him, the bullets striking his spine. Back home, his two children and his wife, Lestine, now…

Prosecutors fighting the release of death row inmate Jimmie Duncan after a judge found him “factually innocent” of raping and murdering 23-month-old Haley Oliveaux are “not speaking for Haley’s family,” her mother says. Speaking publicly for the first time, Allison Layton…

#OnThisDay in 1939, Jane Bolin became the first Black female judge in the United States when she was sworn in as a family judge in New York City. Her career adviser discouraged her from applying to Yale Law School, but she graduated in the top 20 in her class, becoming the…

#OnThisDay in 1963, when a National Guardsman poked his bayonet at Gloria Richardson in Cambridge, Maryland, she pushed it away, refusing to back down during protests against racism and inequality. The image of Richardson, head of the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee,…

#OnThisDay in 1950, African-American troops of the U.S. Army’s 24th Infantry Regiment began the 16-hour offensive that enabled them to recapture Yechon, South Korea. For the U.S. forces, it marked the first South Korean city restored to friendly hands. Formed in 1869, the…

#OnThisDay in 1948, Dockum Drug Store in downtown Wichita, Kansas, refused to serve Black patrons at its lunch counter. “It was degrading, dehumanizing,” recalled then-teenager Galyn Vesey. “You felt like something was wrong, but you learned to cope with it.” But something…

#OnThisDay in 1862, Congress passed the Second Confiscation and Militia Act, which declared that all of those enslaved who had escaped through enemy lines to Union territory “shall be forever free.” The First Confiscation Act came after the Union defeat at the First Battle of…

#OnThisDay in 1947, Irene Morgan, a 27-year-old Black mother of two, was arrested for refusing to move to the back of an interstate bus in Virginia for a white couple. When a deputy handed her the warrant for her arrest, Morgan tore up the document and tossed it out the window.…

Is Mississippi's "brain drain" the state's greatest threat? mississippitoday.org/2025/07/15/bra…

#onthisday in 1867, Maggie Lena Walker, the first African-American and first known female bank president to charter a bank in the United States, was born in Richmond, Virginia. She championed help for the impoverished and gave loans to Black Americans starting businesses. “Let…

#OnThisDay in 1948, the Democratic National Convention adopted a platform that called for a federal anti-lynching law, the abolition of poll taxes and the desegregation of armed forces. The vote came to the floor as a minority report of the Platform Committee, the spokesman for…

#OnThisDay in 1863, the Civil War Draft Riots began in Manhattan — one of the bloodiest insurrections in the nation’s history. What started as a riot by white working-class residents, upset by the government’s draft, turned into an attack on Black Americans. The mob of thousands…

#OnThisDay in 1976, U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordan, who first came to the forefront in the Watergate hearings, became the first African-American woman to deliver the keynote address to the Democratic National Convention. In high school, she heard a career day speech by Edith Sampson,…

#OnThisDay in 1964, Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn, an assistant superintendent for Washington, D.C., public schools, was driving home with two fellow officers from the U.S. Army Reserves training when he was shot and killed by three Klansmen in a passing car in Colbert, Georgia. Penn had…

For nearly two years, the embattled sheriff of Rankin County, Mississippi, has tried to distance himself from brutality in his department, saying he was unaware of assaults like those carried out by deputies who called themselves the Goon Squad. But department records and…

#OnThisDay in 1964, a group of Black men in Jonesboro, Louisiana, led by Earnest “Chilly Willy” Thomas and Frederick Douglas Kirkpatrick, founded The Deacons for Defense and Justice to protect civil rights activists. The deacons, most of them veterans of the Korean War, World…

#OnThisDay in 1948, Satchel Paige became the first Black pitcher in American League history. His debut had been long anticipated, because he was already making headlines as a Negro Leagues pitcher, and sportswriters loved to quote him. Major League Baseball wrote of him, “Paige…

#OnThisDay in 1876, the Hamburg Massacre took place in South Carolina after Black members of a militia marched on the Fourth of July. Two white farmers, temporarily obstructed from traveling through town, brought a formal complaint, demanding the disbandment of the militia.…