IInstitutional racism, also known as systemic racism, is a form of racism that is embedded in
the laws and regulations of a society or an organization. It manifests as discrimination in
areas such as criminal justice, employment, housing, health care, education, and political
representation.
The term institutional racism was first coined in 1967 by Stokely Carmichael and
Charles V. Hamilton in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation.
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1932
The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro
Male (informally referred to as the Tuskegee Experiment or
Tuskegee Syphilis Study) was a study conducted between
1932 and 1972 by the United States Public Health Service
(PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) on a group of nearly 400 African Americans with
syphilis. The purpose of the study was to observe the effects
of the disease when untreated, though by the end of the
study medical advancements meant it was entirely treatable.
The men were not informed of the nature of the experiment,
and more than 100 died as a result.
1955
Emmett Louis Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was a
14-year-old African American boy who was abducted,
tortured and lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being
accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery
store. The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers
were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent
persecution of African Americans in the United States.
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October
24, 2005) was an American activist in the civil rights
movement best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery
bus boycott. The United States Congress has honored her as
"the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom
movement".
On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks
rejected bus driver James F. Blake's order to vacate a row of
four seats in the "colored" section in favor of a white
passenger, once the "white" section was filled. Parks was not
the first person to resist bus segregation, but the National
Association for the Advancement of (NAACP) believed that
she was the best candidate for seeing through a court
challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience in violating
Alabama segregation laws, and she helped inspire the black
community to boycott the Montgomery buses for over a year.
The case became bogged down in the state courts, but the
federal Montgomery bus lawsuit Browder v. Gayle resulted in
a November 1956 decision that bus segregation is
unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the
14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
1960
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC,
often pronounced SNIK was the principal channel of student
commitment in the United States to the civil rights
movement during the 1960s. Emerging in 1960 from the
student-led sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in
Greensboro, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee, the
Committee sought to coordinate and assist direct-action
challenges to the civic segregation and political exclusion of
African Americans.
1963
The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was a white
supremacist terrorist bombing of the 16th Street Baptist
Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on Sunday, September 15,
1963. Four members of a local Ku Klux Klan chapter planted
19 sticks of dynamite attached to a timing device beneath
the steps located on the east side of the church.
1965
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a landmark piece of
federal legislation in the United States that prohibits
racial discrimination in voting. It was signed into
law by President Lyndon B. Johnson during the
height of the civil rights movement on August 6,
1965, and Congress later amended the Act five
times to expand its protections. Designed to enforce
the voting rights guaranteed by the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments to the United States
Constitution, the Act sought to secure the right to
vote for racial minorities throughout the country,
especially in the South.
1966
The Black Panther Party (BPP), originally the Black
Panther Party for Self-Defense, was a Marxist-Leninist black
power political organization founded by college students
Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in October 1966 in Oakland,
California. The party was active in the United States
between 1966 and 1982, with chapters in many major cities
and international chapters in Britain and Algeria. Upon its
inception the Black Panther Party's core practice was its
open carry armed citizens' patrols ("copwatching") to monitor
the behavior of officers of the Oakland Police Department
and challenge police brutality in the city.
1972
Shirley Anita Chisholm (/ˈtʃɪzəm/ CHIZ-əm; née St. Hill;
November 30, 1924 – January 1, 2005) was an American
politician, educator, and author. In 1968, she became the
first black woman elected to the United States Congress.
Chisholm represented New York's 12th congressional district,
a district centered on Bedford–Stuyvesant, for seven terms
from 1969 to 1983. In 1972, she became the first black
candidate for a major-party nomination for President of the
United States, and the first woman to run for the Democratic
Party's nomination.
1974
Race-integration busing in the United States (also known as
simply busing or by its critics as forced busing) was the
practice of assigning and transporting students to schools
within or outside their local school districts in an effort to
diversify the racial make-up of schools. While the 1954 U.S.
Supreme Court landmark decision in Brown v. Board of
Education declared racial segregation in public schools
unconstitutional, many American schools continue to remain
largely uni-racial due to housing inequality. In an effort to
address the ongoing de facto segregation in schools, the 1971
Supreme Court decision, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg
Board of Education, ruled that the federal courts could use
busing as a further integration tool to achieve racial balance.
1984
Jesse Louis Jackson (né Burns; born October 8, 1941) is an
American political activist, Baptist minister, and politician.
He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential
nomination in 1984 and 1988 and served as a shadow
U.S. senator for the District of Columbia from 1991
to 1997.
1985
MOVE is particularly known for two major conflicts with the
Philadelphia Police Department (PPD). In 1978, a standoff
resulted in the death of one police officer and injuries to 16
officers and firefighters, as well as members of the MOVE
organization. Nine members were convicted of killing the
officer and each received prison sentences of 30 to 100
years. In 1985, another firefight ended when a police
helicopter dropped two bombs onto the roof of the MOVE
compound, a townhouse located at 6221 Osage Avenue. The
resulting fire killed six MOVE members and five of their
children, and destroyed 65 houses in the neighborhood.
The police bombing was strongly condemned. The MOVE
survivors later filed a civil suit against the City of
Philadelphia and the PPD and were awarded $1.5 million in a
1996 settlement. Other residents displaced by the
destruction of the bombing filed a civil suit against the city
and in 2005 were awarded $12.83 million in damages in a
jury trial. Institutional Racism was evolved.
2008
The presidential transition of Barack Obama began when
Barack Obama won the United States presidential election on
November 4, 2008, and became the president-elect. First
Black American President.
2012
A stand-your-ground law (sometimes called "line in the
sand" or "no duty to retreat" law) provides that people may
use deadly force when they reasonably believe it to be
necessary to defend against deadly force, great bodily harm,
kidnapping, rape, or (in some jurisdictions) robbery or some
other serious crimes (right of self-defense). Under such a law,
people have no duty to retreat before using deadly force in
self-defense, so long as they are in a place where they are
lawfully present. In 2012, in response to the Trayvon Martin
case, the Tampa Bay Times compiled a report on the
application of stand your ground, and also created a
database of cases where defendants sought to invoke the
law. Trayvon Benjamin Martin (February 5, 1995 – February
26, 2012) was a 17-year-old African-American boy from
Miami Gardens, Florida, who was fatally shot in Sanford,
Florida by George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old Hispanic
American, who was conducting a neighborhood patrol..
2020
George Perry Floyd Jr. (October 14, 1973 – May 25, 2020)
was an African-American man who was murdered by a police
officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an arrest after a
store clerk suspected Floyd may have used a counterfeit
twenty-dollar bill, on May 25, 2020. Derek Chauvin, one of
four police officers who arrived on the scene, knelt on
Floyd's neck and back for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. After his
murder, protests against police brutality, especially towards
black people, quickly spread across the United States and
globally. His dying words, "I can't breathe," became a rallying
cry.
2021
Male murdered for the crime of “Black Male running
in a White Neighborhood”
2022
Policeman while checking a mismatch of a car type
and license plates number, executed Patrick, a son of
Congo immigrants, instead of giving a “Citation”. He
noticed the big black in the car, and demanded “Get
out of the Car!” After wrestling him face down to the
ground, shot him one in the back of the head.
Institional Racsm for over 400 years
© Dr. Galen Royer Frysinger
Credits:
Dates used from “the 1619 Project” by Nikole Hannah-Jones
Graphics from :”Born on the Water” by Nikole Hannah-Jones