Past Events
Brief description for the events
Yellow Fever
New Orleans
1878
The start of the year foreshadowed difficulties. Yellow fever  cases were prevalent throughout the Caribbean, particularly in Cuba, in the spring. After the end of an independence struggle with Spain, thousands of refugees left the island, and many people arrived in New Orleans. On April 26, 1878, President Rutherford B. Hayes passed into law the Quarantine Act of 1878, entrusting the Marine Hospital Service with the mission of preventing sickness from reaching shore by seamen from ships
Emmett Till case
Mississippi
1955
On August 28, 1955, a 14-year-old African-American from Chicago, Emmett Till, was brutally killed while visiting a family in Money, Mississippi, for flirting with a white woman four days ago. His perpetrators (a white woman's husband and his brother) sent Emmet a 75-pound cotton gin to the banks of the Tallahatchie River and ordered him to strip. The two men then tried to beat him to death, hollowing out his eyes, shooting his head, and throwing his body into the river tied to a cotton gin with barbed wire.
WoolWorth's SIT-IN
Jackson Mississippi
1963
Following the Greensboro (NC) sit-ins in 1960, the practice of segregated seating at Woolworth's lunch counters garnered national attention. Woolworths stated that it would continue to maintain its official policy of adhering to "local tradition" (i.e., segregated seating in the South). Even though they announced "improvement" in the number of integrated stores in the Woolworth's network from time to time, they did not forsake the "local custom" strategy.