A brief history of how Black voting rights in America developed from the first Constitutional Congress in 1776 through the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Tag: <span>civil rights</span>
A profile of the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black teens who were falsely accused and convicted of rape resulting in Supreme Court rulings that set precedence for future civil rights cases.
In the June 2020 edition of Noire News I’ll be discussing June’s protests, some good news, and memorializing a few Black people who passed away this month.
A profile of the Reconstruction Era which began a few years before the end of the American Civil War and extended about a decade after its end. From 1863 to 1877 the federal government intervened in the South to clarify and defend the rights of the newly freed as well as to set guidelines for readmitting Confederate states to the Union and their establishment of new governments. With the federal government under the control of Radical Republicans (aka Radical Reconstructionists) new amendments and progressive changes were made to clarify citizenship and expand civil rights.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is located about a 15-minute walk away from the Legacy Museum. It’s really pretty from the outside with beautifully landscaped plant beds and a brown wood fence surrounding the Memorial. I’d read about lynchings before in books about Ida B. Wells and At the Hands of Persons Unknown. But it was something different to walk through the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and crane your neck to look at all of these blocks knowing that each one of them represented the loss of at least one person’s life. It’s important to note that this isn’t a memorial to lynching but rather a memorial to those who lost their lives to lynching. So the focus is on those who lost their lives rather than those who participated in lynchings.