1945

Through the 1940s and 1950s, nearly all hospitals in the South and many in the North maintain strict racial segregation. Black patients are refused admission at white hospitals or placed in basement wards with inferior care. Black physicians cannot admit patients or practice at white hospitals. The Hill-Burton Act of 1946, which funds hospital construction, permits 'separate but equal' facilities. Pregnant Black women are turned away from labor and delivery wards; people die in hospital parking lots. The system directly contributes to Black maternal and infant mortality rates roughly twice those of white Americans.

Through the 1940s and 1950s, nearly all hospitals in the South and many in the North maintain strict racial segregation. Black patients are refused admission at white hospitals or placed in basement wards with inferior care. Black physicians cannot admit patients or practice at white hospitals. The Hill-Burton Act of 1946, which funds hospital construction, permits 'separate but equal' facilities. Pregnant Black women are turned away from labor and delivery wards. The system directly contributes to Black maternal and infant mortality rates roughly twice those of white Americans.

Through the 1940s and into the 1960s, Fannie Lou Hamer works as a sharecropper on a Sunflower County, Mississippi plantation, earning poverty wages in a system designed to maintain debt bondage. In 1961, she is given a hysterectomy without her consent during a minor operation — a practice so common in Mississippi that it is called a 'Mississippi appendectomy.' Involuntary sterilization of Black women is documented across Southern states as part of eugenic policies. Hamer's experiences shape her 1964 Democratic National Convention testimony and her lifelong economic justice advocacy.

Through the 1940s and 1950s, AFL craft unions — the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Plumbers Union, and building trades generally — maintain explicit racial exclusion through segregated locals or outright membership bans. Black workers locked out of unionized trades are barred from apprenticeship programs and the high wages that come with them. The building trades' exclusion of Black workers from federally funded construction projects persists into the 1960s and beyond, denying Black men access to postwar construction employment.

Through the 1940s and 1950s, Black jazz musicians who create bebop and swing — Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis — perform in segregated venues where Black audiences are not admitted, receive far lower pay than white bandleaders performing their arrangements, and are denied hotel accommodations requiring sleeping on tour buses. Columbia Records and major labels pay Black artists flat session fees while white artists recording their songs receive royalties. Radio stations refuse to play records by Black artists while rewarding white artists who cover them.

Veterans Administration hospitals across the South maintain strict racial segregation through the late 1940s, with Black veterans treated in inferior wards or denied admission entirely. Black veterans with service-connected disabilities are turned away from nearby VA facilities and told to travel hundreds of miles to Black wards. The American Medical Association's membership is overwhelmingly closed to Black physicians. Black veterans cannot use VA benefits at most Southern hospitals. The Tuskegee VA Hospital, opened 1923, is the only VA facility initially built for Black veterans.

Through the 1940s and 1950s, Black jazz musicians who create bebop and swing — Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis — perform in segregated venues where Black audiences are not admitted, receive far lower pay than white bandleaders performing their arrangements, and are denied hotel accommodations. Columbia Records and major labels pay Black artists flat session fees while white artists recording their songs receive royalties. Radio stations refuse to play records by Black artists while rewarding white artists who cover them.

Veterans Administration hospitals across the South maintain strict racial segregation through the late 1940s, with Black veterans treated in inferior wards or denied admission entirely. Black veterans with service-connected disabilities are turned away from nearby VA facilities and told to travel hundreds of miles to Black wards. The American Medical Association's membership is overwhelmingly closed to Black physicians. Black veterans cannot use VA benefits at most Southern hospitals.

Louis Till, Emmett Till's father, is executed by the U.S. Army in Italy on July 2, 1945 for murder and rape. In 1955, after Emmett's murder and the acquittal of his killers, Mississippi Senator James Eastland and the White Citizens Council obtain Louis Till's military records — normally confidential — and leak them to the press to suggest Emmett inherited criminal tendencies. The U.S. Army cooperates in releasing the records. The smearing of a dead soldier's record to justify his son's murder illustrates government complicity in white supremacist propaganda.