Fidel, Mohammad Ali and Martin Luther King gave me hope. But by 1968 I realized hope can disappear in seconds. Kennedy’s assassination was one of many: John F. Kennedy (1963), Malcolm X (1965), and Martin Luther King Jr. (1968). And soon to come were the murders of Fred Hampton and Marc Clark on December 4, 1969. But this saga of assassinations began in the fifties.

https://youtu.be/9mx8XQhPILM
Terrible Murder Blues · Blind Blake

These murders proliferated in the fifties..

May 7, 1955 · Belzoni, Mississippi

Rev. George Lee, used his pulpit and his printing press to urge others to vote. White officials offered Lee protection on the condition he end his voter registration efforts, but Lee refused and was murdered.
https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/rev-george-lee/

August 13, 1955 · Brookhaven, Mississippi

Lamar Smith was shot dead on the courthouse lawn by a white man in broad daylight while dozens of people watched. Smith had organized blacks to vote in a recent election.
https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/lamar-smith-murdered

August 28, 1955 · Money, Mississippi

Emmett Louis Till, a 14-year-old boy on vacation from
Chicago, reportedly flirted with a white woman in a store.
Three nights later, two men took Till from his bed, beat him, shot him and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till

October 22, 1955 · Mayflower, Texas

John Earl Reese, 16, was dancing in a café when white men fired shots into the windows. Reese was killed and two others were wounded.




https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/john-earl-reese-murdered/

January 23, 1957 · Montgomery, Alabama

Willie Edwards Jr., a truck driver, was on his way to work when he was stopped by four Klansmen. The men mistook Edwards for another man who they believed was dating a white woman. They forced Edwards at gunpoint to jump off a bridge into the Alabama River.
https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/klan-forces-man-jump/

April 25, 1959 · Poplarville, Mississippi

Mack Charles Parker, 23, was accused of raping a white woman. Three days before his case was set for trial, a masked mob took him from his jail cell, beat him, shot him and threw him in the Pearl River.

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/parker-mack-charles-1936-1959/

September 25, 1961 · Liberty, Mississippi

Herbert Lee, who worked with civil rights leader Bob Moses to help register black voters, was killed by a state legislator who claimed self-defense and was never arrested. Louis Allen, a black man who witnessed the murder, was later also killed.


https://snccdigital.org/people/herbert-lee/

April 9, 1962 · Taylorsville, Mississippi

Cpl. Roman Ducksworth Jr., On April 9, 1962 Ducksworth was traveling to a hospital to visit his sick wife and newborn child. He was sleeping on the bus when a police officer escorted him off due to his race and mistaking him as a freedom rider. A small tussle broke out, the officer drew his gun, and fired into Ducksworth’s chest. Ducksworth’s sister-in-law and her son, Odell Ducksworth, were present as he was pronounced dead on the scene.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Ducksworth_Jr.#

September 30, 1962 · Oxford, Mississippi

Paul L. Guihard was a French-British journalist for Agence France-Press. He was murdered in the 1962 riot at the University of Mississippi while covering the events surrounding James Meredith’s attempts to enroll at the all-white university.  He was shot in the back at almost point-blank range by an unknown assailant. Guihard’s case was closed without success and never reinvestigated.
https://ebwiki.org/cases/paul-guihard


April 23, 1963 · Attalla, Alabama

William Lewis Moore, a postman from Baltimore, worked as a substitute mail carrier and devoted his free time to writing and demonstrating. As Moore was resting by the road in Keener , he was killed by bullets fired at close range from a .22-caliber rifle. Ballistics tests later proved the rifle belonged to a white storeowner named Floyd Simpson, but no one was ever indicted for the April 23, 1963 murder.

https://www.splcenter.org/william-lewis-moore

June 12, 1963 · Jackson, Mississippi

Medgar Evers,

Medgar Wiley Evers (/ˈmɛdɡər/; July 2, 1925 – June 12, 1963) was an American civil rights activist and the NAACP‘s first field secretary in Mississippi. He was assassinated by Byron De La Beckwith. Evers, a decorated U.S. Army combat veteran who had served in World War II, was struck in the back with a bullet fired from an Eddystone Enfield 1917 rifle; the bullet passed through his heart. Evers rose and staggered 30 feet (10 meters) before collapsing outside his front door. His wife, Myrlie, was the first to find him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medgar_Evers#

September 15, 1963 · Birmingham, Alabama

Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley were getting ready for church services when a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing all four of the school-age girls.
https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/witnesses/sixteenthstreetbaptist.htm

September 15, 1963 · Birmingham, Alabama

Virgil Lamar Ware, 13, was riding on the handlebars of his brother’s bicycle. Ware was an eighth grader, an A student and football player who dreamed of becoming a lawyer. Ware and his brother James were returning home when Larry Joe Sims and Michael Lee Farley, both 16, were riding their motorcycle coming from a segregationist rally. Sims shot Virgil twice, once in the cheek and once in the chest. Both were sentenced to seven months in jail, but the judge suspended their sentences, substituting two years’ probation. https://iloveancestry.net/post/59247996239/virgil-lamar-ware-december-6-1949-september-15

November 22, 1963, Parkland Health, Dallas, TX

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963), often referred to as JFK, was an American politician who served as the 35th president of the United States from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. He was the youngest person elected president.^[2] Kennedy served at the height of the Cold War, and the majority of his foreign policy concerned relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba. A Democrat, Kennedy represented Massachusetts in both houses of the United States Congress prior to his presidency. Some historians still contend that Jack Kennedy was executed because he was withdrawing forces from Vietnam.

January 31, 1964 · Liberty, Mississippi

Louis Allen, Allen was harassed and jailed repeatedly by Amite County Sheriff Daniel Bryant Jones (January 3, 1930 – July 26, 2013). The day before he planned to move out of state, Allen was fatally shot on his property. Since the late 20th century, his case has been investigated by Tulane University history professor Plater Robinson. The case was reopened by the FBI beginning in 2007 as part of its review of civil rights-era cold cases. In 2011 the CBS program 60 Minutes conducted a special on his murder as well. Their work suggested that Allen was killed by Jones. However, no one has been prosecuted for the murder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Allen

March 23, 1964 · Jacksonville, Florida

Johnnie Mae Chappell (c. 1929 – March 23, 1964) during race riots in Jacksonville, Florida, was killed by a gunshot from a passing car. Johnnie Mae Chappell was murdered as she walked along a roadside. Her killers were white men looking for a black person to shoot following a day of racial unrest. After evidence and documents went missing her killer was charged with manslaughter – only serving three years in prison – and the other passengers were never charged. Detectives working the investigation claimed they lost their jobs due to their complaints regarding police racism and how the case was handled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Johnnie_Mae_Chappell

April 7, 1964 · Cleveland, Ohio

Rev. Bruce William Klunder was among civil rights activists who protested the building of a segregated school by placing their bodies in the way of construction equipment. The young white minister was crushed to death. Rev. Klunder, 26 years old, a well known civil rights leader and adviser to college students, was killed during demonstrations in which policemen and 1,000 demonstrators battled for more than an hour. https://www.nytimes.com/1964/04/08/archives/bulldozer-kills-racial-protester-cleveland-minister-crushed-during.html

May 2, 1964 · Meadville, Mississippi

Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore were killed by Klansmen. Their bodies were found during a massive search for the missing civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. On July 12, 1964 the bodies of Charles Eddie Moore, a college student, and Henry Hezekiah Dee, a millworker, both 19 and from Franklin County, Mississippi, were found. On May 2, 1964, they had been abducted by Ku Klux Klan members, tortured, and drowned in the Mississippi River. Their bodies were found, but then ignored by the authorities (some who were complicit in the horrific crime). It was not until four decades later when Canadian filmmakers learned about and actively pursued the case, along with Thomas Moore (Charles’s older brother), that charges were filed. https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/mississippi-cold-case/

June 21, 1964 · Philadelphia, Mississippi

James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Henry Schwerner, young civil rights workers, were arrested by a deputy sheriff and then shot. Those found guilty on October 20, 1967, were Cecil Price, Klan Imperial Wizard Samuel Bowers, Alton Wayne Roberts, Jimmy Snowden, Billy Wayne Posey, Horace Barnette, and Jimmy Arledge. Sentences ranged from three to ten years. After exhausting their appeals, the seven began serving their sentences in March 1970. None served more than six years. Sheriff Rainey was among those acquitted. Two of the defendants, E.G. Barnett, a candidate for sheriff, and Edgar Ray Killen, a local minister, had been strongly implicated in the murders by witnesses, but the jury came to a deadlock on their charges and the Federal prosecutor decided not to retry them.^[30] On May 7, 2000, the jury revealed that in the case of Killen, they deadlocked after a lone juror stated she “could never convict a preacher”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Chaney,_Goodman,_and_Schwerner

July 11, 1964 · Colbert, Georgia

Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn, a Washington, D.C., educator, was driving home from U.S. Army Reserves training. On July 11, 1964, Athens-area Ku Klux Klan members shot and killed Lemuel Penn. Penn was an African American World War II veteran (1941–45), an officer in the U.S. Army Reserves, and the father of two daughters and one son. He was also the assistant superintendent of Washington, D.C. public schools. https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/lemuel-penn-killed/



February 21, 1965, Columbia University Irving Medical Center, New York, NY

Malcolm X , original name Malcolm Little, Muslim name el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, (born May 19, 1925, Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.—died February 21, 1965, New York, New York), African American leader and prominent figure in the Nation of Islam who articulated concepts of race pride and Black nationalism in the early 1960s. Thomas Hagan (/ˈheɪɡən/; born March 16, 1941) is a former member of the Nation of Islam who assassinated Malcolm X in 1965. For a period he also went by the name Talmadge X Hayer, and his chosen Islamic name is Mujahid Abdul Halim (Arabic: مجاهد عبد الحليم). Some historians contend that the FBI, NYPD, and CIA were actively involved in the assassination.
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/malcolm-xs-family-alleges-nypd-cia-fbi-played-role-in-his-death-plans-to-sue/4116428/ In 2022, a $40 million lawsuit was filed on behalf of Muhammad Aziz, who was wrongfully convicted in the assassination of Malcolm X and exonerated in 2021. https://btlonline.org/new-information-in-the-assassination-of-malcolm-x-implicates-the-fbi/
February 26, 1965 · Marion, Alabama

Jimmie Lee Jackson was beaten and shot by state troopers as he tried to protect his grandfather and mother from a trooper attack on civil rights marchers. Jackson, a civil rights activist and a deacon in the Baptist church, was beaten and shot by state troopers in Marion, Alabama, during a peaceful voting rights march. He was unarmed. His death was the catalyst for the march from Selma to Montgomery just a month later. https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/jimmie-lee-jackson-murder/

March 11, 1965 · Selma, Alabama

Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Boston, was among many white clergymen who joined the Selma marchers after the attack by state troopers, white supremacists. Reeb had traveled to Selma to answer Martin Luther King’s call for clergy to support the nonviolent protest movement for voting rights there.
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/reeb-james

March 25, 1965 · Selma Highway, Alabama

Viola Fauver Liuzzo (née Gregg; April 11, 1925 – March 25, 1965) was an American civil rights activist in Detroit, Michigan. Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a housewife and mother from Detroit, was ferrying marchers between Selma and Montgomery when she was shot and killed by three Ku Klux Klan members while driving activists between the cities and transportation. Also in the pursuit car was an undercover informant working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). His role in this and other events was not revealed until 1978. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viola_Liuzzo

June 2, 1965 · Bogalusa, Louisiana

Oneal Moore was one of two black deputies hired by white officials in an attempt to appease civil rights demands. Moore and his partner, Creed Rogers, were blasted with gunfire from a passing car. Moore was killed and Rogers was woundedin the shoulder and blinded in one eye. He managed to broadcast a description of the vehicle on the police radio – a black pickup truck with a Confederate flag decal on the front bumper. No one was ever convicted in the shooting. The prime suspect in the case died in 2003. https://www.splcenter.org/oneal-moore

July 18, 1965 · Anniston, Alabama

Willie Brewster was on his way home from work when he was shot and killed by white men. On July 15, 1965, Brewster was driving home with his coworkers from a nightshift at the Union Foundry, when shots were fired into the car by white supremacist Hubert Damon Strange. Brewster was hit in the neck and died three days afterwards from his wounds. Strange never served his sentence: he was released pending appeal, and on November 2, 1967, was fatally shot during a fight.^[5] His appeal was subsequently dismissed. In 1969, Billy Claude Clayton was convicted of first degree manslaughter for killing Strange and sentenced to one year and one day in prison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Willie_Brewster

August 20, 1965 · Hayneville, Alabama

Jonathan Myrick Daniels, an Episcopal Seminary student in Boston, had come to Alabama to help with black voter registration in Lowndes County. He was arrested at a demonstration, jailed in Hayneville and then he was shot to death by a deputy sheriff. A grand jury indicted Deputy Coleman for manslaughter. Richmond Flowers Sr., the Attorney General of Alabama, believed the charge should have been murder and intervened in the prosecution, but was thwarted by the trial judge T. Werth Thagard.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Daniels

January 3, 1966 · Tuskegee, Alabama

Samuel Leamon Younge Jr., a student civil rights activist, was fatally shot by a white gas station owner following an argument over segregated restrooms. Samuel Younge Jr. (November 17, 1944 – January 3, 1966) was a civil rights and voting rights activist who was murdered for trying to desegregate a “whites only” restroom.^[1] On January 4, 1966, Younge’s killer Segrest was arrested, but released on $20,000 bond.^[20] He was indicted for murder in the second degree and tried on December 7.^[20] The trial was moved from Macon County, where blacks outnumbered whites by a 2-1 margin, to Lee County.^[20] He was found not guilty by an all-white jury the next day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sammy_Younge_Jr.

January 10, 1966 · Hattiesburg, Mississippi

Vernon Ferdinand Dahmer, was a local NAACP official, farmer, and storekeeper. He offered to pay poll taxes for those who couldn’t afford the fee required to vote. The night after a radio station broadcasted Dahmer’s offer, on January 10, 1966, Ku Klux Klan members firebombed his home in response to his voter registration efforts. Dahmer died of injuries received during the incident.

https://crdl.usg.edu/people/dahmer_vernon_ferdinand_1908_1966

June 10, 1966 · Natchez, Mississippi

Ben Chester White, who had worked most of his life as a caretaker on a plantation, had no involvement in civil rights work. He was murdered by Klansmen who thought they could divert attention from a civil rights march by killing a black person. On June 10, 1966, Ben Chester White, was brutally murdered in Natchez, Mississippi, on land where his grandparents had been enslaved. He was not involved in the voting rights struggle. The Klansmen hoped that the killing of White would bring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the area and then they could kill him, too.
https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/ben-chester-white-murdered/

July 30, 1966 · Bogalusa, Louisiana
Clarence Triggs was a bricklayer who had attended civil rights meetings sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality. He was found dead on a roadside, shot through the head.
https://ebwiki.org/cases/clarence-triggs

February 27, 1967 · Natchez, Mississippi

Wharlest Jackson, the treasurer of his local NAACP chapter, was one of many blacks who received threatening Klan notices at his job. After Jackson was promoted to a position previously reserved for whites, a bomb was planted in his car. The FBI closed the case in 2015, stating, “It cannot be conclusively determined who committed the crime,” and the most likely suspects had died. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interactive/unresolved/cases/wharlest-jackson

May 12, 1967 · Jackson, Mississippi

Benjamin Brown, a former civil rights organizer, was watching a student protest from the sidelines when he was hit by stray gunshots from police who fired into the crowd. Benjamin Brown (May 12, 1945 – May 12, 1967) was an African-American student at Jackson State University active in the civil rights movement, killed on campus during a standoff between law enforcement and students. Upon encountering the standoff (at the sidelines) after picking up a sandwich from a cafe to bring back to his wife, he was shot. No arrests were ever made. In 2001, a Hinds County grand jury reviewed the case and blamed two deceased officers: Jackson police officer Buddy Kane and Mississippi Highway Patrolman Lloyd Jones. The Brown family filed a lawsuit and settled for $50,000 from the city of Jackson. There has been no marker on the JSU campus recognizing the events that took place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Brown_(activist)

February 8, 1968 · Orangeburg, South Carolina

Samuel Ephesians Hammond Jr., Delano Herman Middleton and Henry Ezekial Smith were shot and killed by police who fired on student demonstrators at the South Carolina State College campus. The jury acquitted the troopers, who claimed they acted in self-defense. The violence became known as the Orangeburg Massacre, foreshadowing the shootings that followed at Kent State University and Jackson State University. The on-campus arena has since been renamed in honor of the slain students.

April 4, 1968 · Memphis, Tennessee

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated as he prepared to lead a demonstration in Memphis. Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Christian minister, activist, and 
political philosopher who was one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. A black church leader and a son of early civil rights activist and minister Martin Luther King Sr., King advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through the use of nonviolent resistance and nonviolent civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws and other forms of legalized discrimination.

https://www.splcenter.org/what-we-do/civil-rights-memorial/civil-rights-martyrs

Fred Hampton and Marc Clark on December 4, 1969

Mark Clark (June 28, 1947 – December 4, 1969) was an American activist and member of the Black Panther Party (BPP). He was killed on December 4, 1969, with Fred Hampton, state chairman of the Black Panthers, during a Chicago police predawn raid.  In January 1970, a coroner’s jury held an inquest and ruled the deaths of Clark and Hampton to be justifiable homicide.^[4] Survivors and the relatives of Clark and Hampton filed a wrongful death lawsuit ^[5] against the City of Chicago, Cook County, and the federal government (specifically FBI). It was settled in November 1982, with each entity paying $616,333 to a group of nine plaintiffs.  https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/dec/4

Fredrick “Chairman Fred” Allen Hampton Sr. (August 30, 1948 – December 4, 1969) was an American activist. He came to prominence in his late teens and very early 20s in Chicago as deputy chairman of the national Black Panther Party and chair of the Illinois chapter. As a progressive African American, he founded the anti-racist, anti-classist Rainbow Coalition,^[4] a prominent multicultural political organization that initially included the Black Panthers, Young Patriots (which organized poor whites), and the Young Lords (which organized Hispanics), and an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them end infighting and work for social change. A Marxist–Leninist-Maoist,^[5][6] Hampton considered fascism the greatest threat, saying, “nothing is more important than stopping fascism, because fascism will stop us all.”^[7]

In 1967, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) identified Hampton as a radical threat. It tried to subvert his activities in Chicago, sowing disinformation among black progressive groups and placing a counterintelligence operative in the local Panthers organization. In December 1969, Hampton was drugged,^[8][9] then shot and killed in his bed during a predawn raid at his Chicago apartment by a tactical unit of the Cook County State’s Attorney‘s Office, who received aid from the Chicago Police Department and the FBI leading up to the attack. Law enforcement sprayed more than 100 gunshots throughout the apartment; the occupants fired once.^[10] During the raid, Panther Mark Clark was also killed and several others were seriously wounded. In January 1970, the Cook County Coroner held an inquest; the coroner’s jury concluded that Hampton’s and Clark’s deaths were justifiable homicides

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton# 

Political Assassinations: From the Assassins to Modern Politics

https://politicstoday.org/political-assassinations-from-the-assassins-to-modern-politics/

“At the time, no one anticipated that the assassination of Ferdinand could lead to a world war. Could political assassinations today be the trigger for an all-out war, especially as today’s politics are becoming ever more intense?

Just like the term Hashashiyyin originated in Iran in the eighth century, another assassination in Iran could cause a full-blown war, the implications of which are yet to be known. The cost of such a conflict might exceed those of World War I and II.”

Lead Photo by Professor of Geography Derek Alderman of the University of Tennessee.

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