On December 24

On this day in ...
... 1906, judgment was issued following the only criminal trial ever conducted by the Supreme Court of the United States. In the case, United States v. Shipp, a sheriff and his deputy, plus 4 members of a lynch mob, were convicted of criminal contempt arising out of the killing of "an almost certainly innocent black man" in Chattanooga, Tennessee, hours after the town learned that the Court had stayed the man's scheduled execution following conviction for capital rape. Trial took place in the Court's former headquarters, the old Senate chamber above right. (photo credit) The tragic story was told in this recent ABA Journal article.

(Prior December 24 posts are here, here, and here.)

On July 16

On this day in ...
... 1862, in the middle of the Civil War and half a year before issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, Ida B. Wells was born to a couple held in slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Ida attended Freedmen's School Shaw University, but dropped out of school and started working as a teacher at age 16 in order to keep her siblings together after their parents and an infant brother died from yellow fever. Eventually she moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where her refusal to sit in the train car designated for blacks gave rise both to a high-profile court case and to her career as a crusading journalist. She became a co-owner and editor of a leading antisegregation newspaper and an investigative reporter who focused on the crime of lynching. She settled in Chicago, where she helped to organize an African-American boycott of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, married and raised a family, and worked to improve the lot of the city's ever-growing African-American population. Wells traveled as far as Europe to speak in favor of racial equality before her death in Chicago in 1931. She is an IntLawGrrls transnational foremother, thanks to guest/alumna Lynne Henderson. As posted at Legal History blog, Wells also is the subject of a new biography, Ida: A Sword Among Lions (2008) (above left), by Smith College Professor Paula J. Giddings.
... 1945, about 6 weeks after Nazi Germany's surrender, leaders of 3 victorious Allied states -- Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union -- convened at Potsdam "to decide the future of a defeated Germany." Their conference (right) concluded on August 2 with issuance at this city southwest of Berlin of the Potsdam Declaration. It contained not only provisions for the division of Germany into 4 occupied zones, but also a warning, issued on July 26, which warned Japan that if it did not surrender the Allies would resort to

'[t]he full application of our military power, backed by our resolve,' which 'mean[t] the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland.'

No surrender ensued, and atomic bombs were dropped on Japan on August 6 and 9. (photo credit)

(Prior July 16 posts are here and here.)

Guest Blogger: Lynne Henderson

It's IntLawGrrls' great fortune to feature Lynne Henderson (left) as today's guest blogger.

Professor of Law at the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada-Las Vegas, Lynne teaches in the areas of criminal law, constitutional law, feminist jurisprudence, and violence against women. She's an expert on victim’s rights, rape and feminist jurisprudence, all of which she's examined in her publications. She earned her bachelor's and law degrees from Stanford, where she was an associate editor of the Stanford Law Review. She's active in the the Society of American Law Teachers. Her work on a SALT committee dealing with human rights issues post-9/11 dovetails with the subject of her guest post below: accountability for interrogation and detention abuses. (It's a topic I broached a while back in this post.)

Lynne dedicates her contribution to Ida B. Wells (1862-1931). "Her courage in publishing, speaking out, and battling for civil rights for Black women and men was huge," Lynne writes of Wells. "In the face of threats, violence, fires, etc. she published as long as she could before having to flee Tennessee to Washington, D.C., but she never gave up educating and trying." Wells (left) campaigned tirelessly, but in vain, for a federal anti-lynching law. Author of an autobiography entitled Crusade for Justice (1928), Wells joins other IntLawGrrls transnational foremothers in the list just below our "visiting from ..." map at right.

Heartfelt welcome!

On June 15

On this day in ...
... 2000, 6 weeks after they arrived to quell violence, the major portion of British troops left civil-war-torn Sierra Leone. They had entered, according to the BBC, "because a peace deal between government and rebels had broken down and rebel forces were scoring successes against the Sierra Leone army and the UN peacekeeping force." With the British departure responsibility for security in the West African country was returned to the United Nations. (map credit)
... 1920, a mob of thousands took part in the lynching of 3 men in Duluth, Minnesota. The victims were among 6 circus workers who'd been jailed on charges that they had committed robbery and sexual assault, charges "for which little to no evidence was garnered." The rest of the story:

The Minnesota National Guard came the next day to restore order and protect the three surviving black prisoners, but irreparable damage had been done. Black residents of Duluth felt unsafe in their hometown. Over time, a significant number chose to leave the city for good. Newspapers all over the country were appalled that such a horrible thing had happened in a Northern state. Justice for the atrocity appeared nonexistent in the following weeks, as only three people involved in the lynching received any type of incarceration – and that for rioting, not murder. ...
The lights in this dark section of Minnesota’s history are twofold. First, a local Duluth
chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed in 1920 as a result of the ordeal. Second, after much work by the black community including Nellie Francis, a social activist from St. Paul, an anti-lynching bill was created and signed into Minnesota law in 1921.

Francis (above right), an African-American Republican, is among the 25 women profiled in The Privilege for Which We Struggled: Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in Minnesota (Heidi Bauer ed. 1999). In 2005, the U.S. Senate apologized for its failure to pass a federal anti-lynching bill.

Other Voices---The Memory of the Gainesville, Texas Hangings: Lost, Stolen, Strayed and Finally Remembered By Some But Not the SCV

The Great Hanging, Long Ignored, Now Immorialized, Bud Kennedy, Star-Telegram (Tarrant County and North Texas),Saturday, Oct 27, 2007.

They called it the Great Hanging.
And for 145 years, Gainesville has tried to forget the largest mass lynching in American history. Now, it is remembering those 14 deaths plus 28 other men executed amid the political tension of the Civil War.

A city park filled with 42 tiny crosses was dedicated Friday to remember the 1862 deaths. Most of the men were convicted and hanged as Union sympathizers. Fourteen were hunted down and lynched outright by a renegade mob angered by anti-war dissent.
"For the first time in nearly 150 years, we are remembering the sacrifice here," said Leon Russell, 78, of Keller, a Cooke County native opposing the "cult of secrecy" around the hangings.

The lynchings -- and, depending on your political point of view, the trials -- are considered among the most shameful abuses in the Confederate States. Yet they are rarely taught in local history lessons. "People have kept this a well-guarded secret," said Russell, a retired Dallas insurance executive, talking by phone from Gainesville's Morton Museum before the park dedication. "Some people here wanted it to stay secret." The Great Hanging has been no secret to historians. University of North Texas history professor Richard McCaslin wrote about it in a 1994 book, Tainted Breeze. McCaslin emphasized Friday that the memorial does not take either the Confederate or Union side, or blame anyone. Some local families are descendants of the 40 widows and 120 children left fatherless. One leader who lobbied for the memorial was the granddaughter of a juror.

The 14 lynchings alone make it the largest vigilante-style mass killing in American history. "The only message is that this event is worth remembering," McCaslin said. Then he said something that might apply today. "In wartime, when there is so much emphasis on national unity, the very idea of free speech can be seen as threatening and divisive," he said. "The reaction can have an impact on a nation and a region."

Cooke County and most of the counties north of Dallas and Fort Worth had voted against Texas joining the Confederacy. By 1862, Confederate leaders were criticized because wealthy landowners weren't getting drafted, and dissenters were organizing a Peace Party political faction. "Southerners did not agree on the war," McCaslin said. "In particular, North Texans did not agree on the war. ... All we want is for Gainesville to have a window on the past, to see that it's OK to discuss these issues even though we don't always agree." The Gainesville City Council approved the memorial Tuesday. The vote was unanimous.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans, a history and heritage organization, has a chapter in nearby Lindsay. The chapter is named in part for Confederate Col. James G. Bourland, who led the arrests of those convicted and hanged. Kenneth Blair, the local SCV commander, said his group did not know about the memorial proposal. The Sons meet monthly and discuss history, but nobody has ever discussed the hangings, he said. "The facts seem unclear," he said. "Were these lawful trials, or not? Were these people spies, or was this renegade Southerners going crazy? I don't know, and I've got dear friends whose ancestors were hanged. I don't necessarily condone what happened."

The idea of a memorial has been around since 1916, when a Massachusetts congressman proposed spending $100,000 for a federal monument. A Texas lawmaker opposed it, saying that some of the men were executed by a military tribunal. Russell, the man behind the memorial, said he never learned about the lynchings and hangings growing up in Woodbine, east of Gainesville. He didn't even know about the incident until a few years ago, when an acquaintance from New York asked.

Russell went home to Gainesville and started asking educators and leaders. "I know it's not something for Gainesville to be proud of," he said. "But it's not something they should hide." It's not hidden anymore.

CWL Reflects: It's difficult to dwell on violence that reflects badly on your region's heritage. In much of Pittsburgh's (the center of my Southwestern Pennsylvania) industrial heritage there is little talk of labor heritage and only a fraction of that is the public recognition of anti-labor violence. For a leader of a SCV chapter to say in so many words, "Well, I am generally confused about what happened" is an honest dodge, but regretable, especially with a fine scholarly work written in an accessible style, like McCaslin's, is available on the topic.