2015/05/26 – May 26, 1857: Dred Scott won his freedom from slavery two months after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that he had no right to sue because he was property, not a person. The sons of Scott’s first owner, Peter Blow, purchased his emancipation, setting off celebrations up North.

May 26, 1956: Bus boycott began in Tallahassee, Fla., after Florida A&M students Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson refused to give up their seats to white passengers. The next night, a cross was burned outside the home of Jakes and Patterson. On Jan. 3, 1957, a federal judge ruled bus segregation laws unconstitutional. Four days later, Tallahassee’s city commission repealed its segregation clause.

May 26, 1956: Alabama authorities tried to shut down the NAACP, obtaining an order from Circuit Judge Walter B. Jones that prohibited the organization from operating in the state. After the NAACP refused to turn over membership lists, Jones found the organization in contempt and fined it $100,000. He had suggested to Alabama Attorney General John Patterson that the state prosecute the NAACP for failing to register as an out-of-state corporation. The U.S. Supreme Court later threw out the fine and ruled in the NAACP’s favor.

May 27, 1954: Tom Brady delivered a defiant speech called “Black Monday” in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, inspiring many white leaders to join the white Citizens’ Council. The racist diatribe was printed in books and distributed to white schoolchildren across Mississippi.

May 27, 1958: Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock Nine, became the first African American to graduate from newly integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. Forty years later, the campus became part of the National Park Service.

May 27, 1968: In Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rejected the “freedom of choice” desegregation plan adopted by a Virginia school.

May 28, 1963: Black and white civil rights activists were attacked as they took part in a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi. One of them, John Salter, said, “I was attacked with fists, brass knuckles and the broken portions of glass sugar containers, and was burned with cigarettes. I’m covered with blood, and we were all covered by salt, sugar, mustard, and various other things.” The protest came eight days after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state enforcement of restaurant segregation is a violation of the 14th Amendment. M.J. O’Brien’s book, We Shall Not Be Moved: The Jackson Woolworth’s Sit-In and the Movement It Inspired, describes that event.

May 29, 1961: Attorney General Robert Kennedy, citing the 1955 landmark ICC ruling in Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company and the Supreme Court’s 1960 decision in Boynton v. Virginia, petitioned the ICC to enforce desegregation in interstate travel.

May 29, 1967: In a 5-4 decision in Reitman v. Mulkey, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that a California state constitutional amendment allowing racial discrimination by property owners violated the 14th Amendment.

May 29, 1980: Vernon Jordan (president of the National Urban League who later became an adviser to President Bill Clinton) survived an assassination attempt in Fort Wayne, Ind., by racist serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin. Frankin, who killed more than 20 people, was acquitted of the assault — only to confess his guilt in the crime years later.

May 30, 1910: A year after the National Negro Committee first met, it chose “National Association for the Advancement of Colored People” as its organization name.

May 30, 1965: Vivian Malone became the first African-American graduate of the University of Alabama. Gov. George Wallace had blocked her entry two years earlier. She graduated with a degree in business management and joined the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice. In 1996, she retired as director of civil rights and urban affairs and directional of environmental justice for the Environmental Protection Agency. In 2000, her alma mater gave her an honorary doctorate. Five years later, she died.

May 31, 1955: In a unanimous decision known as Brown II, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered school desegregation implemented “with all deliberate speed.” Although the decision required lower federal courts to enforce this desegregation, no deadline was given for compliance. The decision reiterated “the fundamental principle that racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional.”

June 1, 1895: W.E.B. DuBois became the first African American to receive a PhD from Harvard University.

June 1, 1921: One of America’s worst race riots, which began the day before over the threat of a lynching, culminated in the torching of an African-American neighborhood in Tulsa, Okla., leaving nearly 10,000 homeless. The neighborhood was known as Greenwood, named after the town in the Mississippi Delta they had fled from. Part of the neighborhood was so prosperous it became known as the “Negro Wall Street.” Estimates put deaths between several dozen and several hundred.

June 1, 1942: Alfred Masters was sworn in as the first African American in the U.S. Marine Corps at 12:01 a.m. His wife, Isabell Masters, went on to become a U.S. presidential candidate in five elections, the most of any woman in American history.

June 1, 1964: The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned Alabama’s ban on the NAACP, allowing the NAACP to operate in the state for the first time since 1956.

Source: The Clarion-Ledger 

Jerry Mitchell