#OnThisDay in 1963, William Lewis Moore, a postal worker from Baltimore, decided to march from Chattanooga to Mississippi’s capital during his one-person march against segregation, wearing a sandwich board that read, “Equal Rights for All” and “Mississippi Or Bust.”
Instead, a

#OnThisDay in 1892, fiery civil rights pioneer Vernon Johns was born in Darlington Heights, Virginia, in Prince Edward County. He taught himself German and other languages so well that when the dean of Oberlin College handed him a book of German scripture, Johns easily passed,

#OnThisDay in 1966, Milton Olive III became the first Black soldier awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in the Vietnam War.

Olive had known tragedy in his life, his mother dying when he was only four hours old. He spent his early youth on Chicago’s South Side and then

#OnThisDay in 1939, legendary jazz singer Billie Holiday stepped into a 5th Avenue studio and recorded “Strange Fruit,” a song written by Jewish civil rights activist Abel Meeropol, a high school English teacher upset about the lynchings of Black Americans — more than 6,400

#OnThisDay in 1977, Alex Haley was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize for “Roots,” which was also adapted for television.

Network executives worried that the depiction of the brutality of the slave experience might scare away viewers. Instead, 130 Americans watched the epic

#OnThisDay in 1959, about 26,000 students took part in the Youth March for Integrated Schools in Washington, D.C. They heard speeches by Martin Luther King Jr., A. Phillip Randolph and NAACP leader Roy Wilkins.

In advance of the march, false accusations were made that

Leo Schofield was granted parole. He will be leaving prison on April 30th.

#OnThisDay in 1863, a young Black woman named Charlotte Brown walked a block from her home on Filbert Street in San Francisco and took a seat on the “whites-only” horse-drawn streetcar.

She and her family had moved to California from Maryland, a part of the city’s burgeoning

#OnThisDay in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” on scraps of paper and in the margins of newspapers. “I am in Birmingham because injustice is here,” he wrote.

Jail trusties passed his words to his lawyers, who transformed the handwriting into

#OnThisDay in 1947, Jackie Robinson broke through the color barrier in Major League Baseball, becoming the first Black player in the 20th century.

Born in Cairo, Georgia, Robinson lettered in four sports at UCLA – football, basketball, baseball and track. After time in the

#OnThisDay in 1952, Ralph Ellison’s only novel, “Invisible Man,” confronted many issues facing Black Americans and became the first by a Black author to win the National Book Award.

Ellison told The Paris Review that Black history “is the most intimate part of American history.

#OnThisDay in 1873, after Reconstruction Republicans won the Louisiana governor’s race, a group of white Democrats vowed to “take back” the Grant Parish Courthouse from Republican leaders.

A group of more than 150 white men, including members of the Ku Klux Klan and the White

#OnThisDay in 1864, the Fort Pillow Massacre took place when 2,500 members of a Confederate cavalry attacked the fort held by less than 700 Union soldiers.

Confederate Gen. Nathaniel Bedford Forrest led the attack on the fort, about 40 miles north of Memphis, Tennessee, but the

Jerry Mitchell, co-founder of the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting, is winner of the 2024 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence. Congratulations Jerry Mitchell and thank you for exposing corruption and abuse of power! Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting nieman.harvard.edu/news/2024/04/j…

Has anyone else experienced this? I tried to cancel a $20 subscription I didn't realize I had.

First, the publication's website wouldn't allow me to cancel online. Instead, I had to call a phone number. When I called, I was put on hold.

After waiting a while, I was finally

#OnThisDay in 1967, Fannie Lou Hamer, Unita Blackwell and others testified about the immense poverty in the Mississippi Delta as U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy and others listened at a Senate subcommittee hearing in Jackson.

The next day, Kennedy and Sen. Joseph Clark from

A Mississippi trial judge has rejected the request of a mother of four for a new trial, despite the state’s pathologist reversing his original ruling and saying the death was more likely a suicide.

“Nothing in Mississippi statutory and case law requires that the Forensic

#OnThisDay in 1962, Cpl. Roman Ducksworth Jr., a 27-year-old Black military police officer stationed at Fort Ritchie, Maryland, was traveling home by bus to Mississippi. His wife, Melva, was expecting their sixth child and was now in the hospital because of complications.

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