Jerry Mitchell

A week after Pentagon leaders announced their intention to possibly rename the USNS Medgar Evers, christened for the World War II veteran and civil rights leader, his family is urging the Department of Defense and the Navy to reverse their position. This could be the second https://t.co/L3ldyHyViu

#OnThisDay in 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered his first civil rights speech. Hours earlier, he had seen Alabama Gov. George Wallace try to block the enrollment of two Black students at the University of Alabama, and now he felt compelled to speak out. His senior https://t.co/IBt5tnTRMy

#OnThisDay in 1966, Ben Chester White was shot to death by Klansmen near Natchez, Mississippi. White worked most of his life as a caretaker on a plantation and had no involvement in the civil rights movement. Klansmen told White that they needed help finding a lost dog. They https://t.co/EVVdxVij7o

America lost a gentle giant in journalism when Stanley Nelson, who investigated some of the nation’s most notorious racially motivated slayings in Mississippi and Louisiana, died unexpectedly last week. He was 69. CBC reporter David Ridgen, an award-winning documentary filmmaker

#OnThisDay in 1963, returning from a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee training session in South Carolina, Fannie Lou Hamer and nine other civil rights movement activists dared to ride in the “white” section of a Greyhound bus and sit at the “whites-only” lunch counter https://t.co/Bvqh0vV26P

#OnThisDay in 1953, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation in restaurants in Washington, D.C., was unlawful. Civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell had led that fight. Such discrimination had not always existed in the nation’s capital. In fact, Congress had passed https://t.co/RrKSKumWCb

#OnThisDay in 1966, James Meredith was shot a day after he began his one-man, 220-mile March Against Fear from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi. Meredith survived, and the sniper was arrested. Meredith did the march to encourage Black Mississippians to vote in the wake of the https://t.co/NXzutRMstS

Hate to share such sad news, but my journalism colleague and fellow author, Stanley Nelson, who devoted his late career to undercovering unpunished cold cases from the Civil Rights Era, has died. We are all in shock. https://t.co/8PRmWHrBDf

#OnThisDay in 1963, Cleve McDowell became the first Black American to attend the University of Mississippi School of Law. He and James Meredith roomed together on campus. But university officials expelled him after they caught him with a pistol for self-protection. He began https://t.co/7FKR6lq7SY

#OnThisDay in 1899, the Rev. D.A. Graham stepped to his A.M.E. pulpit in Indianapolis. He often read from the Gospels or spoke about the love of Jesus, but on this day, he decried the mistreatment of Black Americans. Over the past seven years, there had been more than 1,200 https://t.co/VxhT2t6RAa

#OnThisDay in 1863, Harriet Tubman, along with Black soldiers, took part in a daring Union raid of Combahee Ferry near Beaufort, South Carolina. She became the first American woman to lead a major military operation when she and at least 150 Black soldiers helped to rescue more https://t.co/CRUtyLuN8T

#OnThisDay in 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned Alabama’s ban on the NAACP, allowing the NAACP to operate in the state for the first time in eight years. NAACP leader Ruby Hurley set up the office in Birmingham in 1951, only to be forced to flee the state five https://t.co/BDvqlf8Eba

#OnThisDay in 1921, the Tulsa race massacre began after a white mob gathered at a jail where a Black teen had been arrested on false charges of “attacking” a white girl in an elevator. In reality, he may have tripped or bumped into her. Although authorities exonerated him, that https://t.co/LqvBtgMsMi

#OnThisDay in 1965, Vivian Malone became the first Black graduate of the University of Alabama in its 134 years of existence. Gov. George Wallace had blocked her entry two years earlier. The night after her 1963 admission, she awoke to learn Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar https://t.co/XsNXPu9khJ

Looking forward to being in Oxford on June 7 (Saturday) to speak about the courageous families featured in at "Race Against Time." If you're in the area, come by if you like. https://t.co/5vTUoSPGBx

#OnThisDay in 1980, Vernon Jordan, who once worked alongside Medgar Evers as a field secretary for the NAACP and later advised Bill Clinton, survived an assassination attempt in Fort Wayne, Indiana, by racist serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin (who also wounded Hustler publisher https://t.co/0MEXZ9ald8

#OnThisDay in 1963, the nation’s most violent reaction to a sit-in protest took place when a mob attacked Black and white activists at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi. One of them, Tougaloo College professor John Salter, said, “I was attacked with fists, https://t.co/AET963laSV