Four white men abducted a college student at gunpoint from a car outside a dance in 1959 and assaulted her.
Then something happened that had never happened in Florida: an all-white jury convicted all four of them.
Betty Jean Owens. Tallahassee.
She was a student at Florida A&M. Her three friends escaped and went straight to the police. Officers found the car and arrested the men that night — which was itself unusual.
The men confessed. And Betty Jean Owens did the thing the entire system was built to prevent: she testified, in open court, in front of them, and did not waver.
Florida A&M students shut the campus down and packed the courthouse every day of the trial.
All four were convicted and sentenced to life.
It was the first time in Florida's history that white men received life sentences for raping a Black woman.
She was 18 years old and she changed what was possible in that state by refusing to stay silent in a room full of men who assumed she would.
Betty's case was historic—but it also exposes how rarely Black women received that kind of justice for crimes committed against them.
We documented stories of Black Americans who faced violence, injustice, and crimes that went unanswered. Take a look: https://t.co/V6OJtayKnF
i knew #that community wasn't meant to be taken seriously when they'd fantasize about harming, s*xually assaulting & killing women for disagreeing with them instead of the men actually harming & killing them. just an unserious bunch.
Being a trans ally is a slippery slope because you start off giving trans people a little bit of grace and now you’re stuck being forced to comply with their demands that get more insane every other day
i was raised on the melissa mccall–noah stilinski regimen so i really thought they were gonna start including jenna as their responsible adult in supernatural business after she found out. instead THEY KILLED HER OFF
Nigga stated the exact amount, the location he relocated to & to even make it better he post a current photo of said individual. Who needs enemies with friends like these
The actress Gillian Anderson tried to call attention to the real genocide happening in Sudan, and was immediately attacked by progressives who are angry that her first (and likely only) priority isn't Gaza.
Her tire blew out. She pulled into a gas station, locked the doors, and waited for her family to come help.
When police arrived she was unconscious in the driver's seat.
They broke the window and fired twenty-three shots into the car.
Tyisha Miller. Riverside, California, December 1998. She was 19.
She was hit twelve times. Four officers fired.
No one was charged with anything. A grand jury declined. The Justice Department reviewed it and closed it.
The four officers were eventually fired by the city — and the police union fought that, too.
A nineteen-year-old waiting for roadside assistance, asleep behind a locked door, in a car that was not going anywhere.
Twenty-three shots. Riverside changed its entire police department after this, under state supervision. That is what it cost.
You know what happened to Tyisha Miller. But what happened to the hundreds of other cases that never became national headlines?
We went looking. The result is 150 Crimes Against Black America They Never Answered For—a collection of cases that deserve more than a paragraph in an archive.
Start uncovering them here https://t.co/V6OJtayKnF
She was seventeen years old. A mob of about a dozen men took her out of a jail cell and hanged her in the street. Marie Scott. Wagoner, Oklahoma, 1914.
Accounts of what happened are consistent on the core: a white man had forced his way into her home and attacked her, and her brother killed him defending her. Her brother escaped.
So they took the girl instead. She is one of the very few documented lynching of a Black woman in Oklahoma, and one of the youngest women in the national record.
Seventeen. Held in a cell, taken from a cell, and killed for surviving an assault that her attacker did not survive.
Nobody was charged. Say her name — most people have never heard it once.
Marie Scott was seventeen. Her story is one of up to 150 cases documented in our book.
Most people have never heard her name. That’s exactly why we documented it. Get yours https://t.co/V6OJtazidd