January 1955
By 1955, only about 5 percent of eligible Black voters in Mississippi are registered despite being a majority of the population in many counties. Barriers include literacy tests administered subjectively (requiring interpretation of obscure constitutional provisions), poll taxes, economic retaliation, physical violence, and murder. Registrars accept illiterate white applicants while rejecting college-educated Black applicants. In Humphreys County, where Black people are 70 percent of the population, not a single Black voter is registered in 1955.
The Highlander Folk School incubates Citizenship Schools that teach literacy and voting rights to tens of thousands across the South.
Events
- 1955Mississippi Voter Registration: 5 Percent Black Voter Registration Through Systematic Terror
By 1955, only about 5 percent of eligible Black voters in Mississippi are registered despite being a majority of the population in many counties. Barriers include literacy tests administered subjectively (requiring interpretation of obscure constitutional provisions), poll taxes, economic retaliation, physical violence, and murder. Registrars accept illiterate white applicants while rejecting college-educated Black applicants. In Humphreys County, where Black people are 70 percent of the population, not a single Black voter is registered in 1955.
- 1955Mississippi Voter Registration: 5 Percent Black Registration Through Systematic Terror
By 1955, only about 5 percent of eligible Black voters in Mississippi are registered despite being a majority of the population in many counties. Barriers include literacy tests administered subjectively, poll taxes, economic retaliation, physical violence, and murder. Registrars accept illiterate white applicants while rejecting college-educated Black applicants. In Humphreys County, where Black people are 70 percent of the population, not a single Black voter is registered in 1955.
- 1955Robert Taylor Homes: Largest Public Housing Project Traps Black Chicago in Concentrated Poverty
Construction begins in 1955 on the Robert Taylor Homes on Chicago's South Side — 28 high-rise buildings stretching two miles, housing 27,000 people in the world's largest public housing project. The Chicago Housing Authority, under pressure from white aldermen who block public housing in white neighborhoods, concentrates all projects in already Black areas. The result is a racially homogeneous 'second ghetto' of concentrated poverty with substandard maintenance, crime, and social isolation. The towers become symbols of deliberate segregation by public policy.
- 1955Robert Taylor Homes: Largest Public Housing Project Traps Black Chicago in Concentrated Poverty
Construction begins in 1955 on the Robert Taylor Homes on Chicago's South Side — 28 high-rise buildings stretching two miles, housing 27,000 people. The Chicago Housing Authority, under pressure from white aldermen who block public housing in white neighborhoods, concentrates all projects in already Black areas. The result is a racially homogeneous 'second ghetto' of concentrated poverty with substandard maintenance, crime, and social isolation. The towers become symbols of deliberate segregation by public policy.
- January 1955Army Leaks Louis Till's Execution Record to Discredit Emmett Till's Murder Outrage
After Emmett Till's murder and the acquittal of his killers, Mississippi Senator James Eastland and the White Citizens Council obtain Louis Till's confidential military records — his father, executed by the U.S. Army in Italy in 1945 for murder and rape — and leak them to the press to suggest Emmett inherited criminal tendencies. The U.S. Army cooperates in releasing normally confidential records. The smearing of a dead soldier's record to justify his son's murder illustrates government complicity in white supremacist propaganda.
- c. 1955The Highlander Citizenship Schools
The Highlander Folk School incubates Citizenship Schools that teach literacy and voting rights to tens of thousands across the South.