This partition was constructed in the early 20th Century to keep people of different races apart. It is decorated with an original pre-1929 Dr. Pepper logo. At the time of its construction (circa 1906) only Caucasian customers were allowed to sit in the front of the saloon. All Hispanic, Asian and African-American customers had to sit behind the wall. When the saloon was remodeled and re-opened in 2014 the wall, no longer used for its original purpose, was retained as a historical reminder. It has recently been demolished.

Racial discrimination is not limited to the Deep South, nor is it limited to African Americans. In the early 1900's Clark's Café, in the railroad town of Huntington, Oregon boasted of their good food and their all white help. This proclamation refers to the barring of Asian people, who represented the largest minority. Many of the people who helped build the railroad and work the local mines were Chinese, who also operated one local restaurant and several laundries. The historic sign was demolished in August, 2019.

The enigmatic inscription "change," floating above Chartres Street in New Orleans' French Quarter, largely goes unnoticed. It is the vestige of the sign over the St. Louis Hotel Slave Exchange. The luxurious hotel included a bank, ballroom, shopping arcade and trading exchange. Six days each week from 1838-1862, under the hotel's domed rotunda, auctioneers sold off land and goods as well as thousands of enslaved people.

Houston Negro Hospital School of Nursing, built in 1931, now stands abandoned along with the hospital with which it once was associated. The hospital was created five years earlier when the black Union-Jeramiah Hospital was no longer capable of accommodating the rapidly growing black population of Houston. It was dedicated on June 19, 1926, a major local holiday in Texas known as Juneteenth, which commemorates the day Emancipation occurred in the state. The medical facility became the first non-profit hospital for black patients in Houston. It also provided work for black physicians, who were not allowed to admit patients in the black wards of other Houston hospitals. The Houston Negro Hospital School of Nursing was established next to the hospital and was the first educational institution created for the training of black nurses in Houston.

The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the African American was an infamous and unethical clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service. The Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church was the first recruitment site for the experiment. On these benches, African American volunteers in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study would wait to have their blood samples drawn by Nurse Eunice Rivers outside Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church in Notasulga, Alabama. By the end of the study in 1972, only 74 of the test subjects were alive. Of the original 399 men, 28 had died of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis. Registered nurse Eunice Rivers, who had trained at Tuskegee Institute and worked at its affiliated John Andrew Hospital, was recruited at the start of the study to be the main contact with the participants in the study.

Mount Pleasant Baptist Church was one of 3 black churches firebombed in St. Landry Parrish, Louisiana in April 2019. The greatest loss was the church's heritage, said Earnest Hines, 66, a member for close to 40 years. "All those memories of that building, and that place has been burned," he said. "I was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1956. I remember the 1960's and all the violence. 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, Bloody Sunday; I was just 8 or 9, but I remember. When this tragedy occurred, it was hard not to think of those troubled times. Looking at these burned pews and fallen walls, I know our church is going to rise again, but my heart aches. I laid every one of these bricks by hand, and each one is like a part of me."

On September 15, 1963, the congregation of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama greeted each other before the start of Sunday service. In the basement of the church, five young girls, two of them sisters, gathered in the ladies room in their best dresses, happily chatting about the first days of the new school year. It was Youth Day and excitement filled the air, they were going to take part in the Sunday adult service. Just before 11 o'clock, instead of rising to begin prayers the congregation was knocked to the ground. As a bomb exploded under the steps of the church, they sought safety under the pews and shielded each other from falling debris. In the basement, four little girls, 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and 11-year-old Cynthia Wesley, were killed. Addie's sister Susan survived, but was permanently blinded.

During WWII Americans of Japanese descent on the West Coast of the United States were forced into internment camps hastily built in remote inland areas of the West. Minidoka, also known as Hunt Camp, is located in scrubland about 25 miles north of Twin Falls. At its peak it housed over 9,000 Japanese Americans in tar paper barracks lacking running water. This is a room in the only original unremodeled barracks in any of the 10 relocation camps. Between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were subject to this mass exclusion program, of whom about 80,000 were full U.S. citizens born in America.

Years after the end of Jim Crow segregation, many architectural vestiges remain. This curious palimpsest of bricks covers the entrance for "colored people" at the Saenger Theater, a once-grand movie house in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Often these entrances were down an alley away from the glittering lights of the main entrance. Usually they led directly to a set of stairs ascending to a segregated portion of the balcony.

Years after the end of Jim Crow segregation, many architectural vestiges remain. This curious palimpsest of bricks covers the entrance for "colored people" at the Saenger Theater, a once-grand movie house in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Often these entrances were down an alley away from the glittering lights of the main entrance. Usually they led directly to a set of stairs ascending to a segregated portion of the balcony.

The "Colored Entrance" at the Ellis Theater in Philadelphia, Mississippi is tucked to the left of the ticket booth. It led directly up stairway to the segregated section of the balcony.

On the left is the Ellis Theater's entrance for "colored people." On the right is the colored restroom entrance. Buddy Jennings writes: "The one thing that sticks out most in my mind about the Ellis is the Saturday June Smith (a black friend of mine who also lived on Kennedy's farm) and I walked all the way there to see a Tarzan movie and they would not let us sit together. June had to sit up in the balcony and they would not let me sit up there with him. The movie cost me a quarter and cost June fifteen cents. We were only nine or ten years old at the time and had our parents' permission to walk all the way to Cleveland and back, even though it would be close to midnight before we were back home."

A scar over a deep wound, bricks cover the "colored entrance" to a movie theatre in Tylertown, Mississippi. Such palimpsests abound throughout the South, obcsure reminders of Jim Crow-era segregation. Often situated in an alley, these entrances led to a segregated section of the balcony. While whites sat in upholstered seats, blacks frequently were relegated to wooden backless benches or rickety wooden seats.

The enigmatic door atop the stairway on the south side of the Texan Theater, long locked and largely overlooked, is the "colored entrance," a vestige of Jim Crow-era segregation. In Kilgore, Texas, the term "colored" extended to anyone not Caucasian, including Hispanics and the occasional Asian.

During WWII, Americans of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast of the United States were forced into internment camps hastily built in remote inland areas of the West. Minidoka, also known as Hunt Camp, is located in scrubland about 25 miles north of Twin Falls. At its peak it housed over 9,000 Japanese Americans in tar paper barracks lacking running water. This is the only original unremodeled barracks in any of the 10 relocation camps. Between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were subject to this mass exclusion program, of whom about 80,000 were full U.S. citizens born in America.

The small resort town of Idlewild, Michigan was known as the Black Eden, and at its height in the 1950s and '60s, more than 25,000 African Americans would travel from Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Indianapolis each summer to visit its 2,700 acres of lakes and western Michigan wilderness for intellectual stimulation, partying, and a sense of community. "If you were a doctor, a lawyer, an entrepreneur, an educator, and you had the income to travel either by train or auto, it was a place that you wanted to be," says Dr. Ronald Stephens, a professor of 20th-century African American history and culture at Ohio University. Idlewild became a place for intellectual and political interaction among prominent members of the 1920s African American community, including William Pickens and W.E.B. Du Bois.

Edd's opened in 1954, during the era of Jim Crow. Until the late 1960's, people of color had to order at the segregated window on the far right, and they could only place their order when no white customers were waiting. When I asked the manager about the window, she indicated that while many people think it's an old drive-up window, the owners retained it as a reminder of the suffering so many have endured. "If we forget where we've been," she said, "we can get lost again."

On May 2, 1964, Charles Eddie Moore, a college student, and Henry Hezekiah Dee, a millworker, both 19 and from Franklin County, Mississippi, were picked up by KKK members while hitchhiking from this Meadville drive-in, at the time known as Tastee Treat. They were abducted, interrogated and tortured in a nearby forest, locked in a trunk of a car, driven across state lines, chained to a Jeep motor block and train rails, and dropped alive into the Mississippi River to die. Moore's and Dee's mangled torsos were discovered on July 12 and 13, 1964 during the frantic FBI search for James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, the three civil rights workers who disappeared on June 21. When it was discovered that the bodies were those of two black men and not those of the civil rights workers, two of whom were white, media interest evaporated and the press moved on. While the FBI investigated the case and arrested two suspects in November 1964, the district attorney concluded there was insufficient evidence for prosecution. The case was dropped by local authorities, some of whom were complicit in the crime, according to FBI and HUAC documents. In January 2007 the murderer, James Ford Seale, was arrested.

On May 2, 1964, teenagers Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Dee were picked up by KKK members while hitchhiking from the Tastee Treat Drive-In in Meadville, Mississippi. They were interrogated and tortured in a nearby forest, locked in a trunk of a car, driven across state lines, chained to a Jeep motor block and train rails, and dropped alive into the Mississippi River to die. Charles Eddie Moore's poignantly humble homemade gravestone is in an overgrown corner of the Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church cemetery in Meadville, Mississippi. It reads: "Cherlie Eddie Moor; Baud Aug 10, 1944; Beried July 1964; Darling, we will miss you." Obscured by the flowers, written on the base, is added "Anywhere in Glory Is All Right."

The only remaining Rosenwald School gymnasium was demolished days before I arrived in Eagle Lake, Texas to photograph it. During the dark days of Jim Crow, many communities had no schools for children of color. These children would receive their education, if they were lucky, at home or in a church. Philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, part-owner of Sears Roebuck and Company created a charitable foundation in 1917 to help African American communities build schools for their children. Partnering with Booker T. Washington, the Rosenwald Foundation helped build nearly 5,000 schools by 1932. The effect of Rosenwald's approximately $70 million (in todays dollars) investment was transformative. By 1932, Rosenwald Schools educated more than 35 percent of all African American children in the South. Fewer than 60 of the buildings remain in 2019.

On July 27, 1919 when large crowds of white and black patrons went to the Lake Michigan beach in Chicago, Illinois to seek relief from the 96° heat, an angry dispute erupted over the stoning of Eugene Williams, a young African American swimmer who inadvertently crossed a segregated boundary into the "white" swimming area by 29th Street Beach. White beachgoers hailed stones at the young man, causing him to drown. When police refused to arrest any whites, who were accused by black bystanders of having thrown the stones, and instead arrested a black beachgoer on a white's complaint of some minor offense, the blacks began to attack the white policeman. Reports of the incident spread throughout Chicago igniting a clash of white and black rioters across the city's South Side. 38 people were killed and over 500 injured. Allegedly one of the white rioters was a 17-year old named Richard J. Daly, who went on to be elected mayor of Chicago in 1955. He served until his death in 1976.

During the era of segregation, traveling African Americans had few options for lodging. In Jackson, many black musicians stayed at the Summers Hotel, established in 1944 by W.J. Summers. In 1966 Summers opened a club in the hotel basement that he called the Subway Lounge. The Subway was a regular jazz venue and offered popular late night blues shows from the mid-1980s until the hotel's demolition in 2004. During the segregated 1940s, '50s, and '60s, the two main Jackson hotels open to African Americans were the Edward Lee Hotel on Church Street and the Summers Hotel. The Summers Hotel, originally the Maples, a rooming house for whites, stood here at 619 W. Pearl Street. The building was remodeled and renamed the Summers Hotel in 1943 after its purchase by W. J. Summers (1897-1977), a prominent African American businessman, who ran the hotel with his wife Elma. The hotel was popular among touring musicians, including James Brown, Hank Ballard, and Nat "King" Cole.

The Sunset Cafe, also known as The Grand Terrace Cafe, was a jazz club in Chicago, Illinois operating during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. It was one of the most important jazz clubs in America, especially during the period between 1917 and 1928, when Chicago became a creative capital of jazz innovation and, again, during the emergence of bebop in the early 1940s. By 2018, the building housed a beauty and sundries supply store. The only clue as to its past fame was the back wall of the bandstand, with its iconic mural, which dates to a 1937 remodel, at which time the club was renamed The Grand Terrace Café. From its inception, the club was a rarity as a haven from segregation, since the Sunset Cafe was an integrated or "Black and Tan" club where African Americans, along with other ethnicities, could mingle freely with white Americans without much fear of reprisal. Many important musicians developed their careers at the Sunset/Grand Terrace Cafe. The building that housed the Cafe still stands at 315 E 35th St in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. Originally built in 1909 as an automobile garage, after a 1921 remodeling it became a venue with around 100 tables, a bandstand and dance floor. Owned by Louis Armstrong's manager, Joe Glaser, the venue played host to such performers as Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Fletcher Henderson, Cab Calloway, Johnny Dodds, Bix Beiderbecke, Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa and Earl "Fatha" Hines and his orchestra's members: Billy Eckstine, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Sarah Vaughan.

Hamtramck, long known as a blue collar Polish enclave surrounded by Detroit, has undergone a dramatic demographic shift. In November 2015 the city became the first to elect a Muslim-majority council in the United States. Originally settled by Germans, it became predominantly Polish in the 1910's, as immigrants moved in to work in the auto industry. Later waves of immigrants included those of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent, many Yemeni and Bengali. Of Hamtramck's population, nearly 43 percent are foreign born, according to recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau. More than 60 percent speak a language other than English at home. A mural honoring Yemeni Americans which graces the side of Sheeba Restaurant was created by Dasic Fernandez. It was commissioned by the Arab American and Chaldean Council and OneHamtramck, a coalition in the city that seeks to bring together residents representing dozens of cultural groups in the city. "I saw the buildings and I thought of uprooting our whole families when we migrate and then traveling forward," said Hasan Newash, a Palestinian-American who served on the mural committee. "It goes from all the pain in the eyes of the old man to the eyes of that woman, the hope, the purpose." Added Ahmed Al-Ammari, who serves on the OneHamtramck board of advisers, "The eyes of that young woman looking to the future gives us hope. Not just for Yemeni Americans but all."

When the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was founded in 1934, the process of "redlining," the act of denying loans and financial services to black neighborhoods while granting them for white neighborhoods, was codified. The Detroit neighborhood of Wyoming was a redlined black neighborhood for nearly a decade until the early 1940s, when developers wanted to build a white development in the area. They were denied by the FHA because their plan placed the white neighborhood "too close" to the black neighborhood. Thinking quickly, the developers responded by building a half-mile long wall directly between Mendota Street and Birwood Avenue for a full three blocks. This was enough to be given the nod of approval from the U.S. government. The wall, now known as 8 Mile Wall, was the official racial divider for over 20 years, until the Fair Housing Act supposedly abolished such racist policies in 1968.

The Stonewall Inn in New York's Greenwich Village, site of the 1969 riots that launched the gay rights movement. A violent police raid in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969 led to series of demonstrations by members of the gay community, an important event leading to the modern fight for LBGTQ rights in the United States. Very few establishments welcomed openly gay people in the 1950s and 1960s. Those that did were often bars. Gay Americans also faced an anti-gay legal system. The last years of the 1960s, were very contentious, as many social/political movements were active, including the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. After the Stonewall riots, gays and lesbians in New York City faced gender, race, class, and generational obstacles to becoming a cohesive community. Within six months, two gay activist organizations were formed in New York, concentrating on confrontational tactics, and three newspapers were established to promote rights for gays and lesbians.

The newly freed African Americans of the Shiloh Community established a school for their children shortly after the Civil War. The one-room building was demolished in the late 1800's and classes were held at the Shiloh Baptist Church. With financial assistance from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, a new two-room school was erected in 1920. It was replaced by a large brick building in the 1930's. The High School was closed in 1949; the end of segregation closed the rest of the Shiloh School in 1966. Shiloh graduates became contributing citizens in Texas and the nation. Long vacant, the school building was later used to store chemicals for a plastics company, and burned in 1993. All that remains is the brick front wall. In many communities there were no schools for children of color. These children would receive their education, if they were lucky, at home or in a church. Partnering with Booker T. Washington, the Rosenwald Foundation helped build nearly 5,000 schools by 1932. The effect of Rosenwald's approximately $70 million (in today's dollars) investment was transformative. By 1932, Rosenwald Schools educated more than 35 percent of all African American children in the South. Fewer than 60 of the buildings remain in 2019.

The Victoria Colored School was built in an area of Victoria that had been settled by freedmen after the Civil War. Slavery had been illegal in Texas under Mexican rule but, in 1836, with the establishment of the Republic of Texas slavery was legalized. For the first time, cotton farming in the Victoria area was profitable. The flat, fertile, well-watered, "empty" ranch lands throughout Texas interested cotton growers in the southeast. They began immigrating to Victoria, buying land and bringing slaves with them to work the fields. Twenty-five years after the legalization of slavery, at the outbreak of the Civil War, slaves equaled more than half of Victoria County's population. The influx of Southerners had surpassed the influx of the strict-abolitionist German immigrants and Victoria County voted overwhelmingly for the succession of Texas. The war eventually destroyed the market for cotton. Former slaves either became sharecroppers or drifted into the city, establishing a community and social infrastructure. After the war, area leaders wanted to establish schools for African Americans that would channel them into vocational training for the kind of workforce area businesses demanded. Children in grades one to seven attended free, but citizen resistance to free education resulted in students in grades 8 through 10 paying a fee until 1906.

In the 1920s, The Travelers was a bare-bones 13-room, second-story hotel that accommodated colored railroad workers. It is located at 212 Third Street, in an area of Clarksdale once referred to as "The New World," the belly of the blues and red light district. It was commonly referred to as a "railroad hotel" because its guests were mostly rail workers. As of March 2018 it was undergoing restoration to become a boutique hotel.

The African Free School was founded on November 2, 1787 in Lower Manhattan by the New-York Manumission Society and founding fathers Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. It was the very first school for blacks in America. Ultimately consisting of seven schools, the system's third school was located in Greenwich Village, at 120 West 3rd Street, then known as Amity Street. The mission of the institution was to empower young black people and educate them for something other than slavery, which was a complicated and bold proposition for the time. In 1785 the Society worked to pass a New York State law prohibiting the sale of slaves imported into the state. This preceded the national law prohibiting slave trade, passed in 1808. The 1783 New York law also lessened restrictions on the manumission of enslaved Africans. In New York, a gradual emancipation law was passed in 1799, which provided that children of enslaved mothers would be born free. However, long periods of indentured servitude were required; 28 years for men and 25 for women. Existing slaves were eventually freed, until the last were freed in 1827.

Foster Auditorium, on the campus of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. It was at the doors at the center that George Wallace, the governor of the state, stood to ceremonially block the entrance of African American students who were about to integrate the public university. This incident has become known as "The Stand in the Schoolhouse Door." Late that night, Medgar Evers, the first Mississippi state field secretary for the NAACP, was murdered in nearby Jackson, Mississippi by Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and member of the White Citizens Council and Ku Klux Klan.

Shortly after midnight on June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers, the first Mississippi state field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People pulled into the driveway of his humble home in Jackson. He had been at an integration meeting, watching President John F. Kennedy's speech on national television in support of civil rights. Emerging from his car carrying T-shirts that stated, "Jim Crow Must Go," Evers was struck in the back with a bullet that ricocheted into his home. He staggered 30 feet before collapsing, dying at the local hospital 50 minutes later. Less than 24 hours earlier George Wallace had dramatically stood in a doorway at the University of Alabama's Foster Auditorium, physically blocking the entrance of the first 2 African American students enrolled at the university. During World War II, Evers volunteered for the U.S. Army and participated in the Normandy invasion. In 1952, he joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). As a field worker for the NAACP, Evers traveled through his home state encouraging poor African Americans to register to vote and recruiting them into the civil rights movement. He was instrumental in getting witnesses and evidence for the Emmett Till murder case, which brought national attention to the plight of African Americans in the South.

On May 28, 1961, a Greyhound bus with nine Freedom Riders aboard arrived here, the third group of Riders into Jackson. The first two came on Trailways buses May 24. That summer 329 people were arrested in Jackson for integrating public transportation facilities. Convicted on "breach of peace" and jailed, most refused bail and were sent to the state penitentiary. Their protest worked. In September 1961, the federal government mandated that segregation in interstate transportation end.

Po' Monkey's is located amidst cotton fields in a sharecropper's shack outside the tiny town of Merigold. It opened in 1961 and is the last rural juke joint in the Mississippi Delta. During the era of Jim Crow, people "of color" and Caucasians were largely prohibited from socializing, let alone dance or make music together. The juke joint, an evolution of African American plantation musical customs, provided a space for Black people to play music and socialize. Over time, these musical oases became desegregated. "Po' Monkey" was the nickname given to the owner of the establishment, William Seaberry. He explained the name: "Po' Monkey is all anybody ever called me since I was little," he said. "I dont know why, except I was poor for sure." He died in 2016. The term "juke" is thought to derive from the Gullah dialect of southeast Africa, where it means "boisterous."

Built in 1930, Hamtramck Stadium was home to the Negro National League Detroit Stars in 1930-1931 and again in 1933. The field was also home to the Detroit Wolves of the Negro East-West League in 1932, and to the Negro American League Detroit Stars in 1937.

The United States government has recently begun fortifying the border between the US and Mexico. This new gate actually separates American farmers from their croplands just to the south, still in the United States. Nearby, in a former Walmart store, nearly 1500 immigrant children separated from their parents are incarcerated (as of July 2018.)

In 1955, when Emmett Till was fourteen, his mother put him on a train from Chicago to spend the summer visiting his cousins in Money, Mississippi. She never saw him alive again. Her son was abducted and brutally murdered on August 28, 1955, after being falsely accused of interacting inappropriately with a white woman. His body was dumped into the muddy waters below Black Bayou bridge. The following month, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam faced trial for Till's kidnapping and murder but were acquitted by the all-white jury after a five-day trial and a 67-minute deliberation. One juror said, "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't have taken that long." Only months later, in an interview with Look magazine in 1956, protected against double jeopardy, Bryant and Milam admitted to killing Emmett Till. In 2017 the alleged victim, Carolyn Bryant, admitted that Emmett was innocent.

The Goliad Hanging Tree is a symbol of justice, Texas-style. For 24 years the court trials of Goliad County were held under this big oak tree. Death sentences were carried out promptly, usually within a few minutes, courtesy of the tree's many handy noose-worthy branches. The tree also served as a gallows for approximately 75 lynchings, many during the 1857 "Cart War" between Texans and Mexicans. No tally was kept for how many men died in The Hanging Tree, but some estimates range into the low hundreds.

During the Freedom Summer of 1964 three civil rights activists were jailed briefly in the small Neshoba County jail on trumped up charges. When Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney were released that night, they were followed by Ku Klux Klan members tipped off by the sheriff's office. They were forced off the road en route to their office in Meridian, taken to this remote backroads location and bludgeoned to death. Their bodies were later found in an earthen dam.