Show me your papers: America’s new war on Brown skin

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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May 22, 2026

DeAndre Brown, Afro

Today, the verdict is being rendered again. But this time the people fleeing are not Black Americans escaping the South. They are immigrants and the children of immigrants, running from a country that has decided their skin is evidence of a crime.

At the center of this moment is the machinery of ICE, the latest iteration of an enforcement tradition this country has rebuilt across centuries. Slave catchers were once federally deputized to identify and seize Black people based on appearance alone. Border Patrol was founded in 1924 to police Mexican migration. The names change. The logic does not. In September 2025, the Supreme Court issued a 6-3 ruling in Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem permitting immigration agents to use race and ethnicity as factors in investigative stops. Speaking Spanish. Working at a car wash. Looking Latino. These are now grounds for suspicion in the United States of America. Two lower federal courts had ruled these actions amounted to illegal racial profiling. The Supreme Court overruled them.

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