Mother (Nettie Hunt) and daughter (Nickie) sit on the steps of the Supreme Court building on May 18, 1954, the day following the Court’s historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Nettie is holding a newspaper with the headline, “High Court Bans Segregation in Public Schools.” Reproduction courtesy of Corbis Images

In 2014, the two maps below show estimates of the number of people enslaved and where

Rhode Island’s 1652 Anti-Slavery Law

On May 18, 1652, the General Court of Election in Rhode Island passed one of the first anti-slavery statutes in the American colonies TIME+1. The law, enacted in Providence and Warwick, aimed to end the practice of lifetime enslavement by limiting the duration of servitude to ten years for any person—black or white—brought into the colony. If someone was taken under 14, they could not be bound for more than ten years or until they reached 24, whichever came first EBSCO.

Context and Influences

• Religious opposition: The law reflected the moral stance of Rhode Island’s Puritan and Quaker communities, who opposed lifelong enslavement EBSCO.
• Colonial identity: As a breakaway colony from Massachusetts, Rhode Island sought to distinguish itself by resisting some of the more oppressive practices of its neighbors TIME.
• Economic realities: Despite the law, Rhode Island’s economy relied on the slave trade. Newport was a major port for exporting slaves to the West Indies, and the colony exported rum made from molasses imported in exchange TIME.

Enforcement and Limitations

• The 1652 law was not widely enforced. There is little evidence that it was applied in practice TIME.
• It only applied to white and black people; enslavement of Native Americans was prohibited in 1676 TIME.
• The law allowed for indentured servitude for periods under ten years, which was still a form of bondage TIME.

Later Developments

• By the 1700s, Rhode Island’s laws had shifted toward perpetual slavery for African and Native Americans, with the 1703 General Assembly recognizing such slavery TIME.
• The colony remained involved in the slave trade until after the American Revolution, when gradual abolition laws began to take effect EBSCO.
• Slavery was fully abolished in Rhode Island by the mid-19th century Rhode Island Department of State ArchivesSpace.

In summary: Rhode Island’s 1652 law was a pioneering but ultimately limited attempt to limit slavery. It reflected early moral opposition to lifelong bondage but was undermined by economic ties to the slave trade and evolving colonial laws that eventually legalized and perpetuated slavery.

Sources: Time, EBSCO and AI

1302 – The weaver Peter de Coningk led a massacre of the Flemish oligarchs.

1642 – Montreal, Canada, was founded.

1643 – Queen Anne, the widow of Louis XIII, was granted sole and absolute power as regent by the Paris parliament, overriding the late king’s will.

1652 – In Rhode Island, a law was passed that made slavery illegal in North America. It was the first law of its kind.

1792 – Russian troops invaded Poland.

1798 – The first Secretary of the U.S. Navy was appointed. He was Benjamin Stoddert.

1802 – Great Britain declared war on Napoleon’s France.

1804 – Napoleon Bonaparte was proclaimed emperor by the French Senate.

1828 – Battle of Las Piedras ended the conflict between Uruguay and Brazil.

1896 – The U.S. Supreme court upheld the “separate but equal” policy in the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision. The ruling was overturned 58 years later with Brown vs. Board of Education.

1897 – A public reading of Bram Stoker’s new novel, “Dracula, or, The Un-dead,” was performed in London.

1904 – Brigand Raizuli kidnapped American Ion H. Perdicaris in Morocco.

1917 – The U.S. Congress passed the Selective Service act, which called up soldiers to fight in World War I.

1926 – Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson vanished while visiting a beach in Venice, CA. She reappeared a month later with the claim that she had been kidnapped.

1931 – Japanese pilot Seiji Yoshihara crashed his plane in the Pacific Ocean while trying to be the first to cross the ocean nonstop. He was picked up seven hours later by a passing ship.

1933 – The Tennessee Valley Authority was created.

1934 – The U.S. Congress approved an act, known as the “Lindberg Act,” that called for the death penalty in interstate kidnapping cases.

1942 – New York ended night baseball games for the duration of World War II.

1944 – Monte Cassino, Europe’s oldest Monastic house, was finally captured by the Allies in Italy.

1949 – Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America was incorporated

1951 – The United Nations moved its headquarters to New York City.

1953 – The first woman to fly faster than the speed of sound, Jacqueline Cochran, piloted an F-86 Sabrejet over Californiaat an average speed of 652.337 miles-per-hour.

1974 – India became the sixth nation to explode an atomic bomb.

1980 – Mt. Saint Helens erupted in Washington state. 57 people were killed and 3 billion in damage was done.

1983 – The U.S. Senate revised immigration laws and gave millions of illegal aliens legal status under an amnesty program.

1994 – Israel’s three decades of occupation in the Gaza Strip ended as Israeli troops completed their withdrawal and Palestinian authorities took over.

1998 – The U.S. federal government and 20 states filed a sweeping antitrust case against Microsoft Corp., saying the computer software company had a “choke hold” on competitors which denied consumer choices by controlling 90% of the software market.

1998 – U.S. federal officials arrested more than 130 people and seized $35 million. This was the end to an investigation of money laundering being done by a dozen Mexican banks and two drug-smuggling cartels.

2012 – Facebook Inc. held its initial public offering and began trading on the NASDAQ. The company was valued at $104 billion making it the largest valuation to date for a newly listed public company.

2014 – Russian President Putin signed a bill to absorb Crimea into the Russian Federation.

We all MUST thank Mr. Lonnie Bunch

TWO DECISIONS IN THE FIGHT FOR EQUALITY AND JUSTICEPreview

In Memory of May and the Constitutionality of State Laws and Segregation until 1954, Brown V Board of Education … the struggle for equality and justice continues to be 

Lonnie Bunch, museum director, historian, lecturer, and author, is proud to present A Page from Our American Story, a regular on-line series for Museum supporters. It will showcase individuals and events in the African American experience, placing these stories in the context of a larger story — our American story.

A Page From Our American Story

This month, as schoolchildren across the nation look forward to the beginning of summer vacation, the National Museum of African American History and Culture marks the anniversaries of two landmark United States Supreme Court decisions that profoundly impacted access to education – one that legally sanctioned an era of appalling discrimination, and the second that resulted in a major step toward equality and justice for African Americans.

The first case was the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which upheld the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in public facilities. It came about after the state of Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act in 1890, which mandated separate railway cars for blacks and whites. In response, a group of prominent black, white, and Creole New Orleans residents formed the Comité des Citoyens (Committee of Citizens) to fight for repeal of the law.

The Comité recruited Homer Plessy, a mixed-race man, to take part in a case challenging the law. On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a first-class ticket on an East Louisiana Railroad train in New Orleans and took a seat in a “whites only” car. He was asked to move to the blacks-only car, arrested when he refused, and remanded for trial. He was convicted and ordered to pay a $25 fine. Upon appeal, the Supreme Court of Louisiana upheld the ruling, setting the stage for a challenge in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Oral arguments in Plessy v. Ferguson were held before the Supreme Court on April 13, 1896. Plessy’s attorneys built his case upon the violation of his rights under the Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees equal rights and the protection of those rights to all U.S citizens.

In the seven-to-one decision handed down on May 18, 1896, the Court rejected Plessy’s arguments, holding that as long as the separate facilities for the separate races were equal, segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote a scathing dissent in which he predicted the court’s decision would become as infamous as the notorious 1857Dred Scott ruling that no African American, free or slave, could claim U.S. citizenship or petition the court for their freedom.

The impacts of the “separate but equal” doctrine established by Plessy ruling were immediate and far-reaching – erasing legislative achievements of the Reconstruction Era, legitimizing state laws establishing racial segregation in the South (the Jim Crow system), and inspiring the spread of segregation laws and practices northward. These developments exacerbated already vast differences in funding for segregated school systems. As with other segregated facilities and institutions, schools for African Americans were consistently inferior to those for whites, contradicting the claims of “separate but equal” underlying the Plessy decision.

“Separate but equal” remained the standard doctrine in U.S. law until the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, in which the Court ruled that segregation in public education was unconstitutional. The case began in 1951 as a class action suit filed in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas that called on the city’s Board of Education to reverse its policy of racial segregation. It was initiated by the Topeka chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the plaintiffs were 13 African American parents on behalf of their children. The named plaintiff was Oliver L. Brown, a welder and an assistant pastor at his local church, whose daughter had to walk six blocks to her school bus stop to ride to her segregated black school one mile away, while a white school was located just seven blocks from her house.

Citing the precedent set in Plessy, the District Court ruled in favor of the Board of Education, leading the plaintiffs to mount a U.S. Supreme Court challenge. The Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education combined the Brown case and four similar cases from various states, and NAACP Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall, later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, lead the team of attorneys that argued the case for the plaintiffs.

The Court heard the case in spring 1953 but was unable to decide the issue, and asked to rehear the case in fall 1953 at the urging of Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter, who wanted to build a consensus for an opinion outlawing segregation. After the September 1953 death of Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, who had been a major obstacle to securing such an opinion, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren as Chief Justice. Warren told the justices that the Court had to overrule Plessy unanimously to head off massive Southern resistance, eventually convincing the remaining holdouts on the Court. Warren himself drafted the basic opinion, circulating and revising it until all the justices endorsed it.

On May 17, 1954, the Court handed down its unanimous 9-0 decision overturning Plessy as it applied to public education, stating that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” As a result, racial segregation laws were declared in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, paving the way for integration and winning a major victory for the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement.

Many people today may not remember the details of these two landmark cases in the struggle for equality and justice. The National Museum of African American History and Culture was founded to ensure that this story and other important chapters in the African American experience are never forgotten. When the Museum opens its doors on September 24, 2016, we will bring major milestones like Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education to life through compelling interactive exhibitions and our unsurpassed permanent collection of African American historical artifacts, including an entire Jim Crow-era segregated railway car and the dining room that was used by Brown family and NAACP Legal Defense Fund during preparation for the Brown case.

All the best,

Lonnie G. Bunch III
Founding Director
P.S. We can only reach our $270 million goal with your help. I hope you will consider becoming a Charter Member today.

To read past Our American Stories, visit our archives.

In 1934, the act was amended to:

• Exclude parental abductions of their own minor children from federal jurisdiction Wikipedia.
• Expand penalties to include the death penalty in cases where the victim was not released unharmed Wikipedia.

These changes reflected a balance between preventing federal overreach in family-related cases and maintaining the law’s deterrent effect against interstate kidnapping.

Legal Purpose

The Lindbergh Law’s core provision (18 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1)) criminalizes transporting a kidnapped person in interstate or foreign commerce, regardless of whether the victim was alive at the time of crossing. It also created a 24-hour rebuttable presumption that if a victim is not released within 24 hours of abduction, they have likely been transported across state lines Crime Museum.

Significance

The 1934 amendments reinforced the law’s role as a national tool against interstate kidnapping, ensuring that kidnappers could not simply vanish across state lines. The death penalty provision was intended to deter the most heinous kidnappings, especially those resulting in death Wikipedia+1.

In short, the Lindbergh Act of 1934 was a legislative refinement of the 1932 Federal Kidnapping Act, tightening jurisdictional limits and expanding penalties to address the public’s outrage over the Lindbergh kidnapping and to strengthen federal law enforcement’s ability to combat interstate crime.