During the Tulsa Race Massacre, a white mob attacked residents, homes and businesses in the predominantly Black Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma over 18 hours on May 31-June 1, 1921. The...

Research shows that many more Native Americans were lynched than previously believed

The Ocoee Massacre, which occurred in the town of Ocoee, Florida on November 2-3, 1920, was the largest election-related massacre in the 20th Century. Approximately 50 Blacks and two whites died in...

The FBI tried to smear her name.

The lynching of Henry Smith, who was burned alive before a large Texas crowd in 1893, shocked many but did nothing to end the scourge of lynching.

When dozens of brutal race riots erupted across the U.S. in the wake of World War I and the Great Migration, black veterans stepped up to defend their communities against white violence.

In the late afternoon of May 1, 1866, long broiling tensions between the residents of southern Memphis, Tennessee erupted into a three day riot known as the Memphis Riot of 1866.  The riot began when...

The Wilmington, North Carolina massacre decimated Black political and economic power in the city for nearly 100 years.

By Victor Trammell Photo credits: San Diego Evening Tribune An angry white lynch mob in Wagoner County, Oklahoma, kidnapped a 17-year-old Black adolescent girl named Marie Scott on March 31, 1914....

Death looms so large over Georgia’s Lake Lanier that people say it’s haunted. Since it was filled in 1956, it’s estimated that nearly 700 people have lost their lives in its waters or at its …

On March 2, 1892, in Memphis, Tennessee, a racially charged mob grew out of a fight between a black and a white youth near People’s Grocery.

Igbo Landing is a historic site at Dunbar Creek on St. Simons Island, Glynn County, Georgia. In 1803 one of the largest mass suicides of enslaved people took place when Igbo captives from what is now...

The Detroit Eight Mile Wall was constructed in 1941. It was built with a simple purpose: separate homes planned for middle-class whites from blacks who had already built small houses or owned land...

In the video, Aldean performs in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee -- the site of the 1946 Columbia race riot and the 1927 mob lynching of an 18-year-old Black teenager...

A judge in Norfolk, Virginia, sentenced a white woman, Margaret Douglass, to one month in jail for teaching free Black children to read.

Late one summer’s night in Tennessee, in 1868, Samuel Bierfield sat in the back of a dry goods store with his black clerk Lawrence Bowman and another black man, Henry Morton. Fists pounded on the...

Many of the bones are misshapen in the same way, indicating the repetitive stress of hard labor.

The Thibodaux Massacre took place in Thibodaux, Louisiana on November 23, 1887. Black sugar cane workers, determined to unionize for a living wage, chose to combine their minimal power during the...

Jim Crow was the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid

Following Nat Turner's rebellion of 1831, legislation to limit Black people's access to education intensified. But enslaved people found ways to learn.

Nathan 'Nearest' Green, who taught Jack Daniel the art of whiskey distillation, went unacknowledged for more than 150 years.

The Fort Pillow Massacre in Tennessee on April 12, 1864, in which some 300 African-American soldiers were killed, was one of the most controversial events of the American Civil War. Though most of...

On this day, South Carolina passed the Negro Act of 1740, codifying white supremacy.

On Thursday, March 3, 1910, a Dallas, Texas mob lynched Allen Brooks, a fifty-seven-year-old African American man. His murder was one of a number of lynchings in major Texas cities. Little is known...

By Victor Trammell Photo credits: Everett Historic Collection An angry white mob in Rome, Tennessee, massacred a Black woman named Ballie Crutchfield on March 15, 1901. Ms. Crutchfield was never...

From shipyards to factories to government administrative offices, Black women worked to battle authoritarianism abroad and racism at home.

By the 1920s lynchings of African Americans had become a standard practice across the nation.  The multiple lynchings in Duluth, Minnesota, however, represent the farthest north this practice...

This article supplements Episode 3 of the History of American Slavery, our inaugural Slate Academy. Please join Slate's Jamelle Bouie and Rebecca Onion...

The Emancipation Proclamation may have signified the formal end of slavery. But almost immediately afterward, Southern states enacted Black Codes that effectively re-enslaved thousands of newly freed...