April 10

Following a series of fires and a rumored slave conspiracy in 1741, New York colonial authorities passed sweeping laws restricting the movement and assembly of enslaved Africans. Thirteen Black men were burned at the stake, seventeen hanged. The episode established a pattern of preemptive collective punishment for Black assembly that would echo through Reconstruction-era Black Codes and 20th-century anti-loitering laws.

After three of her friends are lynched in Memphis — businessmen targeted because their grocery store competed with a white-owned store — Wells begins the investigative journalism campaign that will expose the racial terror campaign disguised as "law and order."

Filed in Clarendon County, South Carolina — where Black students outnumbered white students 3:1 but received 1/10th the educational funding. The case documented structural school inequity with data that would anchor the Supreme Court's 1954 ruling.

President Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act prohibiting racial discrimination in housing sales, rentals, and financing. It had stalled in Congress for two years. King's assassination created the political pressure to pass it — the final bill was weaker than advocates wanted and enforcement remained structurally inadequate for decades.

After years of Great Migration-era tensions over housing and jobs, a 17-year-old Black swimmer was stoned to death for crossing an informal beach boundary. Five days of street violence followed, with white mobs attacking Black neighborhoods on the South Side — the same neighborhoods that HOLC would redline 14 years later.

Hamer's televised testimony — describing being beaten in a Mississippi jail for attempting to register to vote — was so powerful that President Johnson called an emergency press conference to preempt it. The footage was broadcast later that night and watched by millions. LBJ was furious. The testimony directly accelerated the Voting Rights Act.