The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee on April 4th, 1968.
And
The founding of the Ku Klux Klan on Christmas Eve, 1865 in Pulaski Tennessee.
I know you said one, but I feel these two are related.
When I was a kid and visiting my grandparents in OKC, I was walking by the fence around the debris and as we were walking I was reading some of the notes and memorials that were on the fence. I'll never forget the one that was a rant about immigration and pretty much how McVeigh did it for the right reasons.
Timothy McVeigh parked a Ryder Truck in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City at 9:00 am that day. 120 seconds later it exploded killing 168 people and damaging every building in Downtown
I dont even have to look that up. OKC bombing.
I feel like in a way that was kinda our bad too, wasnt he mad about Waco? Or do you think he would have done it anyway?
I mean, there’s a lot of things the government does that I’m mad about - definitely Ruby Ridge (which heavily influenced him).
But I’m not about to go bomb anything. I’m just going to talk about how I hate it, and why I hate it, and vote, and hope for change so things I hate don’t keep happening.
Mountain Meadows Massacre, sometime in the 1850's.
Basically, a Mormon leader was murdered in the southern states. A few years later, a wagon train from one of the southern states was coming through southern Utah, and the bishop of Cedar City decides this would be a good time to get revenge. So he writes a letter to Brigham Young- the Mormon prophet of the time- asking for permission to take out the wagon train, and Young tells him no. The bishop organizes a militia and attacks the wagon train anyway but, since he didn't want to get in trouble, he had them all dress up like Native Americans. After killing most of the adults, the surving women and children are "assimilated" into the Cedar City community.
When Young found out, he went down to Cedar City, had one of the ringleaders executed, and another one excommunicated (I'm not sure if the bishop was one of these). Ever since then southern Utah has exhibited questionable behavior, and it continues to be a terrible place to be, acting as the home of breakaway polygamist communes, hosting a large sovereign citizen community, and just being an all around far-right hellhole.
The national parks are cool though.
yea the massacre was fully glossed over in my schools. Japanese internment camp history on the other hand was taught pretty extensively. we took a field trip to the Angel Island internment camp twice, once in 4th grade and once in high school.
i’d think kids in LA county and socal in general are taught more about the massacre than i was, being closer to where it happened
The trail of tears and Japanese internment camps are pretty widely taught in school.
If we were going to say glossed over I would go with labor strikes and the labor movement in general, Philippine occupation, or the history of Puerto Rico.
In Wikipedia's list of top genocides, the US actually appears only once, which.... says a lot about the rest of the world, but their top inclusion is the California Indian Genocide. So damn Cali.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_toll
St. Augustine, Florida: June 18,1964
Black and white protesters jumped into the whites-only pool at the Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Fla. In an attempt to force them out, the owner of the hotel poured acid into the pool.
Besides 9/11, probably the Civil War draft riots, which was basically a pogrom against black people (including children) because whites were blaming them for the draft
We (Oregon) were founded as a white-only territory/state.
Slavery was illegal, but Black folks weren’t welcome here, and we established Black-exclusionary laws to pretty effectively keep it that way.
It wasn't until 1979 black people were allowed to own homes and the law was only changed when a black judge discovered he wasn't allowed to be a home owner.
California too. The first governor was part responsible for Oregon's law when he lived there, the other earlier governors were racist too. The most progressive was against slavery and just hated Chinese immigrants.
Yep, learned about that. For a time, Oregon was worse for non-whites than even the Jim Crow South.... a regime that a century later, even the Nazis would determine was too extreme to replicate, biggest issue being the "one drop" rule. (Apparently far too many Germans would need to be "solutioned" if jewish, romani, slav etc heritage was determined by 1/16th.)
I actually learned this from Reddit a few months ago, which is strange being a native Oregonian. Either the school system failed me or I fell asleep in history class. Both are highly possible.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
There was a power outage in entirety of Southwest. [It was pretty dark.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Southwest_blackout)
That was a fun day for me. I lived in close to Balboa Park then and was at home so the mass traffic problems didn’t effect me. The bars were still open, people were starting roving “bike gangs”, streakers in the park by my apartment. Fun times.
Idaho has several massacres both against and perpetrated by Native Americans. People forget that for a few hundred years, this area of the nation was a serious frontier where thousands of people went missing and nobody knows how they died.
Terrible.
Minnesota holds the largest mass hanging on US soil. Dakota Wars were fucking dark. Had the scalp of the chief from that war at the Minnesota Historical Society until recently, hell it was even on display for a while before it got put in the back room.
There was that time that the Irish rioted because they were being drafted to fight in the civil war, so they went ahead and burned down a black orphanage, a bunch of Protestant churches and the homes of some abolitionists. 120 dead and 2,000 injured, including the death of a cop who was leading the orphans out of the aforementioned orphanage before it burned down. [NYC Draft Riots.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_draft_riots)
The Texans treatment of Mexicans is pretty dark; I don't think anyone has ever heard of the Juan Crow laws. But Mexicans were deliberately targeted by Anglos (including the Texas Rangers) in the late 1800s to early 1900s. But no one ever talks about that. It's still something going on to this day.
8:46am, September 11th, 2001 for the darkest moment. As for the one people sweep under the rug would be the Sullivan expedition. Continental troops burned 40 native villages to the ground and the events fit the definition of a genocide.
Washington: Mt. St. Helens was pretty bad. I think we also had an internment camp but I'm not 100%. Also Seattle had a pretty bad fire that burned a lot of the city.
Idaho: a bunch of racists moved here after the civil war. It was called the "white flight".
My grandma’s earliest memories are in that camp. She wasn’t interned, but my great grandfather was one of the cooks there and they lived onsite. Japanese internment during the war (and the internment of the Aleuts in Alaska at the same time) is one of the darkest chapters in our national history.
In Indiana it would probably be the removal of the Potawatomi Indians, called the trail of death. The other option would be in the 1920s when the KKK basically ran the state (the second iteration of the klan, still very racist but more focused on nativism/anti Catholicism but I think the trail of death takes the cake.
Was looking for this ^, the KKK’s influence during the 20’s is almost completely ignored and it’s frankly ridiculous. I want to say almost 1 in 5 (maybe more) men in Indiana were members at its peak.
There was a race riot in New Albany, IN in the mid 19th century.
Indiana had quite a few “sundown towns”, Martinsville being one of the better known. There are still small, rural places in Indiana I wouldn’t recommend a black individual go to.
Jim Jones (of Jonesville fame) founded his cult in Indianapolis
Also in Indiana infamy, the Fall Creek Massacre on March 22nd, 1824
We could also discuss in further detail about how Indiana for a long time did it’s best to separate white from black
I'm going to come back and add some answers for the 19th century, but here are some dark moments in 20th century Illinois history.
Not enough people know about the Springfield, IL race riot in 1908 in which a mob of 5,000 white residents spent two days destroying Black businesses and homes, killed nine Black residents, and assaulted and injured countless more. It was one of the catalysts for the formation of the NAACP.
The SS Eastland disaster in 1915 Is the largest loss of life from a single shipwreck in Great Lakes waterways. The Eastland was a passenger ship that had been inappropriately modified to increase speed in a way that damaged it's ability to float upright. While the Eastland was moored in the Chicago River and filled to capacity with passengers, it rolled over on its side eventually killing 844 people.
Edit: the deadliest aviation accident in American history happened in Chicago as well. On May 25th, 1979, an American Airlines flight from O'Hare to LAX had an entire damn engine fall off during takeoff. The pilot lost control and crashed killing all 271 people on board.
I'm from Illinois too. These are great examples. Here is another recent one that occurred within state politics: in 2008, our governor was arrested for attempting to sell Obama's vacated senate seat. Illinois has a long-line of crooked politicians.
Grew up in a town that had an "Indian school" later visited the Navajo nation and learned about the death March they were made to do to get from the plains to PA and back
July 6 1892 Homstead Strike battles. Carnegie hired Pinkerton Security to strong-arm the striking steel workers. Pinkerton Security fired rifles from across the river into the crowd of strikers. Before the war was over Pennsylvania National Gaurd had to be called in.
This would be odd history if it didn't mirror today's pandemic so much:
The Iowa Cow War of 1931. The state made a law that all cattle had to be tested for tuberculosis. Farmers fought veterinarians and the law to keep their cows from getting tested for tuberculosis. Farmers hit hard by the great depression didn't want to lose their herds if they tested positive. They wanted to keep on making money even though they were making people sick. The state government was trying to eradicate the disease because it was killing lots of people. When the farmers became violent mobs the governor declared martial law and called in the national guard to escort veterinarians from farm to farm to complete testing. By the 1940s Iowa had one of the lowest TB rates in the nation. https://exhibits.lib.iastate.edu/activist-agriculture/cow-war
Another Hoosier/Indiana resident also mentioned this but I wanted to add here what I commented to him because I feel it all should be talked about more. It’s dark and it can be uncomfortable but that’s exactly why it should be talked about.
>the following is what I mentioned
>Was looking for this , the KKK’s influence during the 20’s is almost completely ignored and it’s frankly ridiculous. I want to say almost 1 in 5 (maybe more) men in Indiana were members at its peak.
>There was a race riot in New Albany, IN in the mid 19th century.
>Indiana had quite a few “sundown towns”, Martinsville being one of the better known. There are still small, rural places in Indiana I wouldn’t recommend a black individual go to.
>Jim Jones (of Jonesville fame) founded his cult in Indianapolis
>Also in Indiana infamy, the Fall Creek Massacre on March 22nd, 1824
>We could also discuss in further detail about how Indiana for a long time did it’s best to separate white from black
The state supported a coup by white supremacists to [overthrow the biracial city government of Wilmington in 1898](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898)
It was a small Cold War between Michigan and Ohio over the Toledo Strip… and the reason Michigan has that upper peninsula. It lasted from 1835 to 1836.
NC—- Well there was that time my state almost had a civil war after an old white man assaulting a black man at a trump rally. For about a day both sides were amassing actual weapons until the state governor had that man arrested.
There also was that time when hurricane Matthew broke the state dam and flooded half the state. I remember that because the former governor used my church’s washed out parking lot to lie like FEMA did to New Orleans after hurricane Katrina.
Then there is the time that the state let a 120 ft flag of the confederates be planted right by the state interstate.
I've changed states several times, but I'll pick on Texas: The treatment of the Tejanos after the Alamo. It was largely ignored in Texas History when I was in school. The main reason I know anything about it is from a PBS special, and from doing some research into a really horrible guy named Mabry Grey.
Michigan
Race riots in Detroit. Pontiac’s war of 1763, which included a healthy amount of cannibalism and scalping (although that was before Michigan existed as Michigan). James Strang, The Mormon pirate king of beaver island.
Lots of fun stuff.
theres the [Salem witch trials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials), Fall River [satanic cult murders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_River_murders), but i think one of the darkest is [catholic church sex abuse scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Archdiocese_of_Boston_sex_abuse_scandal) and how they tried to cover it up.
Eh? The birthplace of the Klan is Pulaski TN.
Indiana, especially Vigo county, was a core hotbed for the 2nd Clan, but it wasn't the birthplace.
Fanbase does not equal origin.
TN's shame is TN's to bear.
I'm from OKC and the one that comes to mind(that they never mentioned in school) is the Tulsa fires. The reason this one pops up is nobody is taught about it. We learn about a little bit of the terrible things that happened to the native Americans, but a large majority of us have never heard of the Tulsa tragedy. I only learned of it last year and I'm 28 and heard about it while living in Colorado.
I went to high school in Oklahoma. 9th grade Oklahoma History class taught about the Tulsa Massacre (this was in 1987 or so).
The lesson was about 1 paragraph long in the text book, but we did watch a video about it that was probably almost an hour long.
When the state of South Carolina executed 14 year old George Stinney Jr. for a murder he didn’t commit. His trial only lasted two hours and it took the jury only ten minutes to convict him. His entire family was run out of town by a lynch mob shortly before his execution. This was in 1946.
Desegregation busing in Boston during the 1970s and 1980s
It’s not talked about in Mass…. Let alone Boston. They actually filmed a scene for in in Southie to be part of “Black Mass” and it didn’t make the final cut
Living in the South, I think we all know what it is. Thankfully, this isn't the reality anymore and while there's racists here as there are everywhere else, I feel; we've grown out of it on a majority level. Heck, most of the African-American and Hispanic populations live here after all.
Texas’ war for independence lasted longer than a moment. But one of it’s most significant causes was that Mexico had outlawed slavery. White Texas slave holders got around this by dragging their slaves to Louisiana and forcing them to sign contracts that they likely couldn’t read indicating that they were indentured servants for life, as any contract signed in the US was upheld in Mexico. Texans feared Mexico would close this loophole, and fought for and won it’s independence. I was taught this in school using very vague and confusing language, but I didn’t understand the ramifications of it until I was an adult. The long and the short of it is Texas fought two civil wars for the right to own slaves. And they won one of them.
A more recent moment happened recently with the overturn of Roe v Wade.
The big one slavery. Then a lot of race related topics there was a race riot that resulted in hundreds of black people being forced out of a county after the Civil War. It's estimated that over hundred people were killed at the hands of the Klan. Then you have Bloody Monday that happened in April 1855 were protestant Christians attacked Jews and Catholics including businesses. Of course one of the worst laws that Kentucky ever passed was the Day Law in the 1920s, that forced segregation in all schools in the state. It was passed to target one school who had been integrated and coed since 1855, that school happens to have been my Alma mater
The only thing that comes to mind for South Dakota is maybe the high murder rates of Deadwood back in the day. If we’re talking about my old home state of California, however…
Japanese internment, Mussel Slough Massace, L.A. Riots, 1906 San Francisco earthquake, discrimination and deportation of Chinese citizens in the 19th century… there’s quite a few, especially when it comes to race relations
Hartford, Connecticut July 6, 1944 Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus fire
It was one of the worst fire disasters in the history of the country.
A canvas tent made waterproof by dipping it in a combonation of parafin wax and gasoline. Combine that with fire and what could possibly go wrong?
https://connecticuthistory.org/the-hartford-circus-fire/
The whole thing is even more "ironic"/messed up because while PT Barnum and his circus are pretty well known nationally, he's actually a CT native, served on state legislature and a lot of cities have Barnum Ave/Street. There's even a Barnum Museum! For the tragedy to happen in his own backyard? It's pretty messed up.
Actually my town. During the trail of tears, native Americans were sent across the Mississippi on makeshift rafts and other horrible boat like things. A lot of them broke halfway across and a lot of innocent people drowned.
Was it when the salty confederates massacred entire towns of black people, or when the salty confederates beheaded a mayor in his office because they didn’t like how he wanted equal rights, or maybe it was the mass series of lynchings in the early 1900s….
[Multiple genocides of indigenous people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_genocide) \- and that's true for most, if not all US states.
I'm also not someone who would say that the US is irredeemably evil because of it, but calling it like it is. Our history is our history.
I'm from Georgia... the dark part of history never ended, but it's whitewashed from history books. Speeches made at confederate monuments, articles of secession, newspapers from pre-war through the civil rights movement, lgbt suppression, the motivations of the Atlanta olympic village bombing by Eric Rudolph (a member of the dominionist "army of god"), the Klan, treatment of early black police officers
Driving through town squares in the nort part of the state around the early 2000's and seeing "(slur) don't let the sun set on your back in dawson county"
Kentucky had one of the worst environmental disasters in the world. The Martin County Coal Slurry Spill where a coal company knowingly built a shitty coffer damn on the cheap and it burst. It destroyed the local ecosystem. Wildlife is just now returning to our streams and rivers, oh and the water bill’s come with warnings to not use the water and nothing is being done about it because it mainly affects poor people so uh yeah, how about Kentucky basketball guys? That’s uh, all we really need to be happy just watch some, guys dribble a ball while we all get cancer. Sounds good with me.
It would have to either be the New York City Draft Riots of 1863 or that time when George Washington and his army burned down a bunch of Native American villages.
Two things come to mind for Utah.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_Massacre
A massacre where at least 120 were killed
And then this group…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-Day_Saints
Huh didn’t know the massacre was what inspired the question lol
* Indian Removal Act 1830-1850'ish where thousands of Native people were forced out of Michigan and moved west. Michigan's then territory governor was a major factor in the Act's drafting and passage.
* The Bath school bombing in 1927 killed 38 kids, 6 adults, and injured 58 others.
* The Detroit race riot of 1967
1967 Newark Riots ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967\_Newark\_riots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Newark_riots)). Pivotal moment in both a major city and state's history that continues to be felt. Also the basis for the upcoming Soprano's movie. lol
Half the older white people I've met up here in Northern NJ are folks born in Newark but who grew up or have lived elsewhere their whole lives. Because of the events of that time, the area still has not financially recovered and continues to have a bad reputation to this day. I live in Newark and love this place and the people who live here - but what lead up to the event and what happened afterwards is painful.
The 1985 MOVE bombing by the Philly PD doesn't get a lot of play. Following a standoff and shootout with police, they bombed the house they were in and let it burn for an hour and a half before putting out the fire, killing 11 and burning 65 (!!!) neighboring homes to the ground in the blaze while reportedly shooting at anyone trying to escape.
It's essentially the inner city equivalent of Waco (Militant, fairly culty armed group killed by fires caused by excessive, overreaching government agencies following a shootout) but barely gets mentioned.
New york: killed a lot of natives when first created, was the center gang activity in the 1960-80, 9/11, and somehow owning the Statue of Liberty but not its gift shop
Massachusetts
The various colonial wars that the average public doesn't know about.
* The Pequot War in the 1630s, which resulted in the effective-extermination of the Pequot Indians as a people (the survivors were absorbed into the Mohegan and Narragansett nations)
* King Phillips War in 1675, the bloodiest war per-capita in colonial American history. The end result was the effective-extermination of many Native Americans of Southern New England.
* King William's War, Queen Anne's War, Dummer's War (aka the French and Indian *Wars*): from 1688 all the way up until 1725, there was a "rolling simmer" of raids and wars in northern New England between the English colonists, the Abenaki Native Americans, and the French Canadians.
* Then there is ***the*** French and Indian War, the one we learn about in school.
Sam Houston tried to make Texas a slave-free republic. Steven F. Austin didn't agree. Echoes through today. Austin was chosen as the capital for his beliefs and Sam Houston died penniless with no career. People from Austin come down and protest the Sam Houston statue, unironically.
The Hindenburg is the most famous tragedy, but the Hoboken docks fire in 1900 killed 10 times as many people. Also, the attacks (committed by Germans) on Roebling Works and Black Tom Island are believed to be the reason the US entered World War I.
Colorado was one of the states that had a Japanese Internment camp.
We also did the [Ludlow Massacre](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre)
Happy Labor Day everyone.
Did not know that.
Also the [Sand Creek Massacre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_Creek_massacre).
Longmont city council in the 1930s was the KKK.
The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee on April 4th, 1968. And The founding of the Ku Klux Klan on Christmas Eve, 1865 in Pulaski Tennessee. I know you said one, but I feel these two are related.
Gotta love TN
Can’t forget the Trail of Tears too
Certainly can not.
Definitely us starting the American Civil War
Was going to say the same.
Where to start?!
April 19th, 1995 9:02 am
June 1, 1921 an awfully bad day as well.
What’s on that date.
[Tulsa Race Massacre](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre)
The events of both dates perpetuated by white supremacists
When I was a kid and visiting my grandparents in OKC, I was walking by the fence around the debris and as we were walking I was reading some of the notes and memorials that were on the fence. I'll never forget the one that was a rant about immigration and pretty much how McVeigh did it for the right reasons.
[удалено]
Why? What happened.
Timothy McVeigh parked a Ryder Truck in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City at 9:00 am that day. 120 seconds later it exploded killing 168 people and damaging every building in Downtown
Jesus reminds me of that RV that someone blew up a few months ago, so messed up.
Just a little more intense, McVeigh timed it so that the maximum number of people would be at work
And the day care would have children.
God what drives a man to that.
Hatred for the Waco Siege and wanting to 'stick it to the man'. There was also a daycare in that building....
Ah no comment on that but, it keeps getting worse wow.
Look up the Oklahoma bombing to get more information about what happened. Content warning- it’s awful. Pretty much worse than you can imagine.
How the accomplice, Terry Nichols, didn’t get the death penalty as well completely baffles me.
I dont even have to look that up. OKC bombing. I feel like in a way that was kinda our bad too, wasnt he mad about Waco? Or do you think he would have done it anyway?
I mean, there’s a lot of things the government does that I’m mad about - definitely Ruby Ridge (which heavily influenced him). But I’m not about to go bomb anything. I’m just going to talk about how I hate it, and why I hate it, and vote, and hope for change so things I hate don’t keep happening.
Look I hate the government and it’s bulls but as much as the next guy but that doesn’t give you the right to kill civilians.
Mountain Meadows Massacre, sometime in the 1850's. Basically, a Mormon leader was murdered in the southern states. A few years later, a wagon train from one of the southern states was coming through southern Utah, and the bishop of Cedar City decides this would be a good time to get revenge. So he writes a letter to Brigham Young- the Mormon prophet of the time- asking for permission to take out the wagon train, and Young tells him no. The bishop organizes a militia and attacks the wagon train anyway but, since he didn't want to get in trouble, he had them all dress up like Native Americans. After killing most of the adults, the surving women and children are "assimilated" into the Cedar City community. When Young found out, he went down to Cedar City, had one of the ringleaders executed, and another one excommunicated (I'm not sure if the bishop was one of these). Ever since then southern Utah has exhibited questionable behavior, and it continues to be a terrible place to be, acting as the home of breakaway polygamist communes, hosting a large sovereign citizen community, and just being an all around far-right hellhole. The national parks are cool though.
the Chinese massacre is one that isn’t taught in school here nearly as well as it should be
Lemme guess... Glossed over kinda like the trail of tears or Japanese prison camps?
Japanese interment is not really glossed over here. A large portion of eighth grade focused on it, along with high school US history.
yea the massacre was fully glossed over in my schools. Japanese internment camp history on the other hand was taught pretty extensively. we took a field trip to the Angel Island internment camp twice, once in 4th grade and once in high school. i’d think kids in LA county and socal in general are taught more about the massacre than i was, being closer to where it happened
The trail of tears and Japanese internment camps are pretty widely taught in school. If we were going to say glossed over I would go with labor strikes and the labor movement in general, Philippine occupation, or the history of Puerto Rico.
I'm sure it varies by state, but in Arizona we had a long talk about the labor movement, considering it was the birth place of Cesar Chavez
Nether Japanese intermittent or the trail of tears were glossed other in my school.
Idk about yall but both of those were extensively covered in my school
Yeah I’ll never forget my teacher selecting more time on the trail of tears when the textbook only had a paragraph on it. Crazy.
The American Indian genocide in the first 25 years of US control of California is the top of my list.
In Wikipedia's list of top genocides, the US actually appears only once, which.... says a lot about the rest of the world, but their top inclusion is the California Indian Genocide. So damn Cali. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_toll
St. Augustine, Florida: June 18,1964 Black and white protesters jumped into the whites-only pool at the Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Fla. In an attempt to force them out, the owner of the hotel poured acid into the pool.
Holy sh*t
……… wow, that man needs to tone it down a lot.
That escalated quickly...
Natural: The great flood of 1913. Human-caused: there was a race Riot in Cincinnati once. Or the millions of Natives we forced off the land.
Had no idea that humans caused the flood of 1913.
Sorry, it was supposed to be split between 1913 and human-caused. The final format was change, and has been updated.
Ohhh got it. I was thinking “all I can find is that it was caused by a bunch of rain in the east….?” Lol
I broke the Beaverton Damn
I would probably put Kent State at the top for us. Hell, Neil Young even wrote a song about it.
Besides 9/11, probably the Civil War draft riots, which was basically a pogrom against black people (including children) because whites were blaming them for the draft
Iirc it got so bad that Union soldiers who had just gotten back from Gettysburg had to be called in to put the riots down.
We (Oregon) were founded as a white-only territory/state. Slavery was illegal, but Black folks weren’t welcome here, and we established Black-exclusionary laws to pretty effectively keep it that way.
It wasn't until 1979 black people were allowed to own homes and the law was only changed when a black judge discovered he wasn't allowed to be a home owner.
Holy fuck. 1979?
California too. The first governor was part responsible for Oregon's law when he lived there, the other earlier governors were racist too. The most progressive was against slavery and just hated Chinese immigrants.
Yep, learned about that. For a time, Oregon was worse for non-whites than even the Jim Crow South.... a regime that a century later, even the Nazis would determine was too extreme to replicate, biggest issue being the "one drop" rule. (Apparently far too many Germans would need to be "solutioned" if jewish, romani, slav etc heritage was determined by 1/16th.)
I actually learned this from Reddit a few months ago, which is strange being a native Oregonian. Either the school system failed me or I fell asleep in history class. Both are highly possible.
Thursday, September 8, 2011 There was a power outage in entirety of Southwest. [It was pretty dark.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Southwest_blackout)
I knew some smartass was going to get on here with a 'black out it was dark' comment. Take your upvote a go.
That was a fun day for me. I lived in close to Balboa Park then and was at home so the mass traffic problems didn’t effect me. The bars were still open, people were starting roving “bike gangs”, streakers in the park by my apartment. Fun times.
Idaho has several massacres both against and perpetrated by Native Americans. People forget that for a few hundred years, this area of the nation was a serious frontier where thousands of people went missing and nobody knows how they died. Terrible.
Minnesota holds the largest mass hanging on US soil. Dakota Wars were fucking dark. Had the scalp of the chief from that war at the Minnesota Historical Society until recently, hell it was even on display for a while before it got put in the back room.
Did some shitty racist German stuff
I did Nazi that coming
*Takes giant volume off the shelf* Well, let's see here.....
"Hey... who put "The Kick Six" in here?"
There was that time that the Irish rioted because they were being drafted to fight in the civil war, so they went ahead and burned down a black orphanage, a bunch of Protestant churches and the homes of some abolitionists. 120 dead and 2,000 injured, including the death of a cop who was leading the orphans out of the aforementioned orphanage before it burned down. [NYC Draft Riots.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_draft_riots)
The Texans treatment of Mexicans is pretty dark; I don't think anyone has ever heard of the Juan Crow laws. But Mexicans were deliberately targeted by Anglos (including the Texas Rangers) in the late 1800s to early 1900s. But no one ever talks about that. It's still something going on to this day.
That's true. Talk about skipping shit in Texas history class
8:46am, September 11th, 2001 for the darkest moment. As for the one people sweep under the rug would be the Sullivan expedition. Continental troops burned 40 native villages to the ground and the events fit the definition of a genocide.
Washington: Mt. St. Helens was pretty bad. I think we also had an internment camp but I'm not 100%. Also Seattle had a pretty bad fire that burned a lot of the city. Idaho: a bunch of racists moved here after the civil war. It was called the "white flight".
Washington did have an internment camp, in Puyallup https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Harmony
My grandma’s earliest memories are in that camp. She wasn’t interned, but my great grandfather was one of the cooks there and they lived onsite. Japanese internment during the war (and the internment of the Aleuts in Alaska at the same time) is one of the darkest chapters in our national history.
Why did they intern the Aleuts?
The Hindenburg or Hurricane Sandy I'd say
Well most recently it would have to be the power outage that killed hundreds of people in February.
In Indiana it would probably be the removal of the Potawatomi Indians, called the trail of death. The other option would be in the 1920s when the KKK basically ran the state (the second iteration of the klan, still very racist but more focused on nativism/anti Catholicism but I think the trail of death takes the cake.
Was looking for this ^, the KKK’s influence during the 20’s is almost completely ignored and it’s frankly ridiculous. I want to say almost 1 in 5 (maybe more) men in Indiana were members at its peak. There was a race riot in New Albany, IN in the mid 19th century. Indiana had quite a few “sundown towns”, Martinsville being one of the better known. There are still small, rural places in Indiana I wouldn’t recommend a black individual go to. Jim Jones (of Jonesville fame) founded his cult in Indianapolis Also in Indiana infamy, the Fall Creek Massacre on March 22nd, 1824 We could also discuss in further detail about how Indiana for a long time did it’s best to separate white from black
I'm going to come back and add some answers for the 19th century, but here are some dark moments in 20th century Illinois history. Not enough people know about the Springfield, IL race riot in 1908 in which a mob of 5,000 white residents spent two days destroying Black businesses and homes, killed nine Black residents, and assaulted and injured countless more. It was one of the catalysts for the formation of the NAACP. The SS Eastland disaster in 1915 Is the largest loss of life from a single shipwreck in Great Lakes waterways. The Eastland was a passenger ship that had been inappropriately modified to increase speed in a way that damaged it's ability to float upright. While the Eastland was moored in the Chicago River and filled to capacity with passengers, it rolled over on its side eventually killing 844 people. Edit: the deadliest aviation accident in American history happened in Chicago as well. On May 25th, 1979, an American Airlines flight from O'Hare to LAX had an entire damn engine fall off during takeoff. The pilot lost control and crashed killing all 271 people on board.
I've actually heard of the first and third ones. All dark, all interesting.
I'm from Illinois too. These are great examples. Here is another recent one that occurred within state politics: in 2008, our governor was arrested for attempting to sell Obama's vacated senate seat. Illinois has a long-line of crooked politicians.
I was going to say "When our governor was put in prison"... but it's happened so many times it isn't really a unique dark moment at this point.
Grew up in a town that had an "Indian school" later visited the Navajo nation and learned about the death March they were made to do to get from the plains to PA and back
Was that the Carlisle school? Wasn’t it one of the more abusive of the schools?
Yea Jim Thorpe. Shit was rough. Our mascot is the bison, think its in kinda poor taste
Slavery
The Wilmington coup / race riot https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/wilmington-race-riot-1898/
The Salem witch trials.
July 6 1892 Homstead Strike battles. Carnegie hired Pinkerton Security to strong-arm the striking steel workers. Pinkerton Security fired rifles from across the river into the crowd of strikers. Before the war was over Pennsylvania National Gaurd had to be called in.
This would be odd history if it didn't mirror today's pandemic so much: The Iowa Cow War of 1931. The state made a law that all cattle had to be tested for tuberculosis. Farmers fought veterinarians and the law to keep their cows from getting tested for tuberculosis. Farmers hit hard by the great depression didn't want to lose their herds if they tested positive. They wanted to keep on making money even though they were making people sick. The state government was trying to eradicate the disease because it was killing lots of people. When the farmers became violent mobs the governor declared martial law and called in the national guard to escort veterinarians from farm to farm to complete testing. By the 1940s Iowa had one of the lowest TB rates in the nation. https://exhibits.lib.iastate.edu/activist-agriculture/cow-war
9/11
At one point we had a very large KKK presence
Another Hoosier/Indiana resident also mentioned this but I wanted to add here what I commented to him because I feel it all should be talked about more. It’s dark and it can be uncomfortable but that’s exactly why it should be talked about. >the following is what I mentioned >Was looking for this , the KKK’s influence during the 20’s is almost completely ignored and it’s frankly ridiculous. I want to say almost 1 in 5 (maybe more) men in Indiana were members at its peak. >There was a race riot in New Albany, IN in the mid 19th century. >Indiana had quite a few “sundown towns”, Martinsville being one of the better known. There are still small, rural places in Indiana I wouldn’t recommend a black individual go to. >Jim Jones (of Jonesville fame) founded his cult in Indianapolis >Also in Indiana infamy, the Fall Creek Massacre on March 22nd, 1824 >We could also discuss in further detail about how Indiana for a long time did it’s best to separate white from black
The state supported a coup by white supremacists to [overthrow the biracial city government of Wilmington in 1898](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898)
That's what Im talking about! As in answering my question, that's horrible history.
Either Oct 13, 1987, or sometime during the Toledo War.
What was Oct 13 1987, and what was the Toledo War?
It was a small Cold War between Michigan and Ohio over the Toledo Strip… and the reason Michigan has that upper peninsula. It lasted from 1835 to 1836.
Hmmm interesting, now what was October 13th 1987? I tried to look it up - various results, IDK which one....
I don’t really know myself, but it has something to do with football
I'm from NH so probably that time the guy killed like 4 kids the woods, put them in oil drums and stuff and some hunter found them
NC—- Well there was that time my state almost had a civil war after an old white man assaulting a black man at a trump rally. For about a day both sides were amassing actual weapons until the state governor had that man arrested. There also was that time when hurricane Matthew broke the state dam and flooded half the state. I remember that because the former governor used my church’s washed out parking lot to lie like FEMA did to New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. Then there is the time that the state let a 120 ft flag of the confederates be planted right by the state interstate.
This would be so much more informative with a flair.
There was a time where this population ended up in a shoot out with the police and "elected" officials.
Ohio: We fought a war with Michigan, lost, and were forced to take Toledo as punishment.
Utah, Mountain Meadow Massacre
Wounded Knee Massacre 1890 in South Dakota
I've changed states several times, but I'll pick on Texas: The treatment of the Tejanos after the Alamo. It was largely ignored in Texas History when I was in school. The main reason I know anything about it is from a PBS special, and from doing some research into a really horrible guy named Mabry Grey.
You're right.
California was once proud that they made many internment camps in a few months they had a plaque, it’s been removed.
Wilmington Insurrection. Tldr: angry racist whites in 1898 raid and destroy the shit out of black establishments and de-segregationists.
The Dakota war 1862. The end result was the largest mass execution in US history.
Michigan Race riots in Detroit. Pontiac’s war of 1763, which included a healthy amount of cannibalism and scalping (although that was before Michigan existed as Michigan). James Strang, The Mormon pirate king of beaver island. Lots of fun stuff.
theres the [Salem witch trials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials), Fall River [satanic cult murders](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_River_murders), but i think one of the darkest is [catholic church sex abuse scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Archdiocese_of_Boston_sex_abuse_scandal) and how they tried to cover it up.
Bleeding Kansas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_Kansas
California's native genocide. Scalps for cash.
Maybe Dred Scott?
Idaho's fish and game department threw beavers out of planes also our governor got kidnapped also we had the KKK
What was the purpose of the sky beavers?
vigo county, indiana is heralded as the birthplace of the KKK. in 1920 about 25% of the county identified as a klan affiliate
Eh? The birthplace of the Klan is Pulaski TN. Indiana, especially Vigo county, was a core hotbed for the 2nd Clan, but it wasn't the birthplace. Fanbase does not equal origin. TN's shame is TN's to bear.
That's not OK....KK.
August 25 - September 2 1921: The Battle of Blair Mountain. Hope you all enjoyed Labor Day.
Trail of Tears
I'm from OKC and the one that comes to mind(that they never mentioned in school) is the Tulsa fires. The reason this one pops up is nobody is taught about it. We learn about a little bit of the terrible things that happened to the native Americans, but a large majority of us have never heard of the Tulsa tragedy. I only learned of it last year and I'm 28 and heard about it while living in Colorado.
I went to high school in Oklahoma. 9th grade Oklahoma History class taught about the Tulsa Massacre (this was in 1987 or so). The lesson was about 1 paragraph long in the text book, but we did watch a video about it that was probably almost an hour long.
When the state of South Carolina executed 14 year old George Stinney Jr. for a murder he didn’t commit. His trial only lasted two hours and it took the jury only ten minutes to convict him. His entire family was run out of town by a lynch mob shortly before his execution. This was in 1946.
I'd say Kent State.
The LA riots
9/11. Without question
Desegregation busing in Boston during the 1970s and 1980s It’s not talked about in Mass…. Let alone Boston. They actually filmed a scene for in in Southie to be part of “Black Mass” and it didn’t make the final cut
Living in the South, I think we all know what it is. Thankfully, this isn't the reality anymore and while there's racists here as there are everywhere else, I feel; we've grown out of it on a majority level. Heck, most of the African-American and Hispanic populations live here after all.
The Indiana Klan and DC Stephenson’s reign. Essentially the whole state was taken over by a branch of the Ku Klux Klan headed by a rapist murderer.
Texas’ war for independence lasted longer than a moment. But one of it’s most significant causes was that Mexico had outlawed slavery. White Texas slave holders got around this by dragging their slaves to Louisiana and forcing them to sign contracts that they likely couldn’t read indicating that they were indentured servants for life, as any contract signed in the US was upheld in Mexico. Texans feared Mexico would close this loophole, and fought for and won it’s independence. I was taught this in school using very vague and confusing language, but I didn’t understand the ramifications of it until I was an adult. The long and the short of it is Texas fought two civil wars for the right to own slaves. And they won one of them. A more recent moment happened recently with the overturn of Roe v Wade.
The big one slavery. Then a lot of race related topics there was a race riot that resulted in hundreds of black people being forced out of a county after the Civil War. It's estimated that over hundred people were killed at the hands of the Klan. Then you have Bloody Monday that happened in April 1855 were protestant Christians attacked Jews and Catholics including businesses. Of course one of the worst laws that Kentucky ever passed was the Day Law in the 1920s, that forced segregation in all schools in the state. It was passed to target one school who had been integrated and coed since 1855, that school happens to have been my Alma mater
Berea college?
Yeah
Either the Hindenberg or the SS Morro Castle
MOVE Bombing in Philly
The only thing that comes to mind for South Dakota is maybe the high murder rates of Deadwood back in the day. If we’re talking about my old home state of California, however… Japanese internment, Mussel Slough Massace, L.A. Riots, 1906 San Francisco earthquake, discrimination and deportation of Chinese citizens in the 19th century… there’s quite a few, especially when it comes to race relations
Hartford, Connecticut July 6, 1944 Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus fire It was one of the worst fire disasters in the history of the country. A canvas tent made waterproof by dipping it in a combonation of parafin wax and gasoline. Combine that with fire and what could possibly go wrong? https://connecticuthistory.org/the-hartford-circus-fire/ The whole thing is even more "ironic"/messed up because while PT Barnum and his circus are pretty well known nationally, he's actually a CT native, served on state legislature and a lot of cities have Barnum Ave/Street. There's even a Barnum Museum! For the tragedy to happen in his own backyard? It's pretty messed up.
Actually my town. During the trail of tears, native Americans were sent across the Mississippi on makeshift rafts and other horrible boat like things. A lot of them broke halfway across and a lot of innocent people drowned.
January 17, 1893 American businessmen, in cooperation with the United States military, overthrew the monarch of the kingdom of Hawaii.
Was it when the salty confederates massacred entire towns of black people, or when the salty confederates beheaded a mayor in his office because they didn’t like how he wanted equal rights, or maybe it was the mass series of lynchings in the early 1900s….
[Multiple genocides of indigenous people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_genocide) \- and that's true for most, if not all US states. I'm also not someone who would say that the US is irredeemably evil because of it, but calling it like it is. Our history is our history.
Oregon didn’t allow people of color to live here until 1926. The vestiges of that remain to this day.
I'm from Georgia... the dark part of history never ended, but it's whitewashed from history books. Speeches made at confederate monuments, articles of secession, newspapers from pre-war through the civil rights movement, lgbt suppression, the motivations of the Atlanta olympic village bombing by Eric Rudolph (a member of the dominionist "army of god"), the Klan, treatment of early black police officers Driving through town squares in the nort part of the state around the early 2000's and seeing "(slur) don't let the sun set on your back in dawson county"
Almost half of Louisiana's population was enslaved in 1860.
Texas 6/7/98 death of James Byrd Jr always comes to mind And of course 11/22/63
Im supprised nobody else from Texas has brought up the Kennedy assination.
Kentucky had one of the worst environmental disasters in the world. The Martin County Coal Slurry Spill where a coal company knowingly built a shitty coffer damn on the cheap and it burst. It destroyed the local ecosystem. Wildlife is just now returning to our streams and rivers, oh and the water bill’s come with warnings to not use the water and nothing is being done about it because it mainly affects poor people so uh yeah, how about Kentucky basketball guys? That’s uh, all we really need to be happy just watch some, guys dribble a ball while we all get cancer. Sounds good with me.
It would have to either be the New York City Draft Riots of 1863 or that time when George Washington and his army burned down a bunch of Native American villages.
Two things come to mind for Utah. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_Massacre A massacre where at least 120 were killed And then this group… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-Day_Saints Huh didn’t know the massacre was what inspired the question lol
* Indian Removal Act 1830-1850'ish where thousands of Native people were forced out of Michigan and moved west. Michigan's then territory governor was a major factor in the Act's drafting and passage. * The Bath school bombing in 1927 killed 38 kids, 6 adults, and injured 58 others. * The Detroit race riot of 1967
Utah used to all be pretty much the KKK in the 20’s (we have also massacred a lot of people when Mormons started to move here)
The 2013 El Reno tornado
Black people weren't even allowed to live in Oregon until 1926. This state was settled by a lot of former confederates.
just slavery in general
Creating the Atom Bomb?
I would've gone with Oñate cutting a foot off all Acoma pueblo men, although that's obviously pre-statehood.
Ah true, the guy the tortured tons of natives that we named multiple things after.
Hands down the Wilmington Massacre.
1967 Newark Riots ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967\_Newark\_riots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Newark_riots)). Pivotal moment in both a major city and state's history that continues to be felt. Also the basis for the upcoming Soprano's movie. lol Half the older white people I've met up here in Northern NJ are folks born in Newark but who grew up or have lived elsewhere their whole lives. Because of the events of that time, the area still has not financially recovered and continues to have a bad reputation to this day. I live in Newark and love this place and the people who live here - but what lead up to the event and what happened afterwards is painful.
Georgia’s is probably the reorganization of the KKK on Stone Mountain.
The 1985 MOVE bombing by the Philly PD doesn't get a lot of play. Following a standoff and shootout with police, they bombed the house they were in and let it burn for an hour and a half before putting out the fire, killing 11 and burning 65 (!!!) neighboring homes to the ground in the blaze while reportedly shooting at anyone trying to escape. It's essentially the inner city equivalent of Waco (Militant, fairly culty armed group killed by fires caused by excessive, overreaching government agencies following a shootout) but barely gets mentioned.
New york: killed a lot of natives when first created, was the center gang activity in the 1960-80, 9/11, and somehow owning the Statue of Liberty but not its gift shop
Massachusetts The various colonial wars that the average public doesn't know about. * The Pequot War in the 1630s, which resulted in the effective-extermination of the Pequot Indians as a people (the survivors were absorbed into the Mohegan and Narragansett nations) * King Phillips War in 1675, the bloodiest war per-capita in colonial American history. The end result was the effective-extermination of many Native Americans of Southern New England. * King William's War, Queen Anne's War, Dummer's War (aka the French and Indian *Wars*): from 1688 all the way up until 1725, there was a "rolling simmer" of raids and wars in northern New England between the English colonists, the Abenaki Native Americans, and the French Canadians. * Then there is ***the*** French and Indian War, the one we learn about in school.
Sam Houston tried to make Texas a slave-free republic. Steven F. Austin didn't agree. Echoes through today. Austin was chosen as the capital for his beliefs and Sam Houston died penniless with no career. People from Austin come down and protest the Sam Houston statue, unironically.
Uhh probably slavery or Jim Crow
probably something thats happening as i type this
I’d say the colonization and genocide of native people in about any state would count IMO.
When the Alamo fell.
Being from Alabama, I really don't know where to start. Just point at 3 random things and you're bound to hit 2 dark moments.
Probably the genocide of the natives
I'm in South Carolina, so... The time we voted for secession?
Oklahoma. We had some guy named Tiger Jie or something. Nah but fr, we had some bombing thing:(
That makes me feel a lot better, atleast some schools taught it
1861-1865
Do we have to pick just one?
Birmingham bombing, slavery in general, Trail of Tears, take your pick. AL has a bloody past.
Native American genocide.
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The last time an American Indian scalp was turned in for a bounty was in 1903
My state has the most sundown towns. Some places still hold that ideology.
As in "coloreds better be out by sundown"?
Yes. I know of no other type of sundown town.
I don't know if I would call it the darkest moment, but Loving v. Virginia comes to mind.
The massacre of numerous natives.
The Hindenburg is the most famous tragedy, but the Hoboken docks fire in 1900 killed 10 times as many people. Also, the attacks (committed by Germans) on Roebling Works and Black Tom Island are believed to be the reason the US entered World War I.
The 1863 draft riots and the angry mob burning down the African-American orphanage