1951

Harvey Clark, a Black bus driver, rents an apartment in Cicero, Illinois after being denied housing in Chicago. On July 11, 1951, a mob of 4,000 white residents stones the building, breaks windows, and destroys furnishings. Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson calls in the National Guard. The Clark family is driven out. Cook County states attorney charges the building owner's attorney, the NAACP's representative, and the building owner with inciting a riot and conspiracy — not the mob. Harvey Clark never moves in.

On Christmas night 1951, a bomb planted under the floor of Harry T. Moore's home in Mims, Florida explodes. Moore, the NAACP's Florida director and executive director of the Progressive Voters League who had registered 100,000 Black voters, dies on the way to the hospital. His wife Harriette dies nine days later. Moore had investigated the Groveland Boys case and the lynching of Jesse James Payne. The FBI investigates but no one is ever prosecuted. Moore is the first NAACP leader assassinated.

In February 1951, Virginia executes seven Black men — Frank Hairston Jr., Booker T. Millner, Howard Lee Hairston, John Clabon Taylor, James Luther Hairston, Francis DeSales Grayson, and Joe Henry Hampton — for the rape of a white woman. NAACP lawyers document that Virginia had never executed a white man for rape. The seven are electrocuted over two weekends. Their case illustrates the racially discriminatory application of capital punishment.

In February 1951, the Truman Justice Department indicts 83-year-old W.E.B. Du Bois as an unregistered foreign agent for his role with the Peace Information Center, which circulated a Soviet-backed petition against nuclear weapons. Du Bois and colleagues are handcuffed and fingerprinted. The case is eventually dismissed, but the indictment effectively silences Du Bois domestically, ruins his reputation among mainstream civil rights organizations, and exemplifies Cold War suppression of Black radical politics.

Willie McGee, a Black man from Mississippi, is executed on May 8, 1951 after three trials for the alleged rape of Willette Hawkins, a white woman. McGee maintained the relationship was consensual and that he was being coerced. International protests from labor unions and civil rights groups fail to stop the execution. McGee is electrocuted in a portable electric chair set up in the county courthouse. His case illustrates how rape law was applied almost exclusively against Black men in the South regardless of circumstances.

Doctors take Henrietta Lacks's cells without consent; the immortal "HeLa" line transforms medicine while her family is left unrecognized and uncompensated for decades.