Portside

Racist reign of terror in Georgia
September 19, 1868 (155 years ago). All the Black citizens of Camilla, Georgia, are terrorized, and between seven and fifteen are murdered by whites in an outburst of racist violence like many others during the nearly four-year period between the end of the Civil War and the election of President Grant. Slavery might have been formally abolished throughout the South in April 1865, but, in many if not most parts of the South, racists had remained free to use extreme violence without restraint against the newly emancipated Black population. The Camilla Massacre is a case in point.
The death toll in Camilla, like most information about the massacre, remains shrouded in mystery that was imposed by the victorious whites.  
Before the Massacre took place, Georgia had ratified a new constitution and been readmitted to the Union. In April 1868, Georgia's citizens, Black and white, had elected a state government with a white Republican governor (who was strongly in favor of equal economic opportunity and political rights for all), a Republican-majority Senate, with three Black Republican Senators, and an Assembly almost evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, with the Democrats holding a 3-seat majority. Of the 84 Assembly Republicans, 29 were Black. When the legislature met on September 3, 1868, it voted to expel all its Black members on the totally specious ground they were not eligible to hold office. Georgia Republicans, many of them Black, were outraged and held huge rallies throughout the state, denouncing the racist coup.
One of those protest rallies was planned to take place on September 19 in the courthouse square of Camilla, a county seat. When the protesters began to assemble, Camilla's white sheriff ordered them to leave town. When they asserted their right to protest, the sheriff and a mob calling itself a "citizens committee" opened fire on them, killing and wounding many. How many was known only to the racists, who kept the number a secret.
What followed was a was a reign of terror. All over the state, whites beat Black citizens with impunity and warned them to refrain from voting in the upcoming Presidential election, if they valued their lives. The terrorists succeeded; before the wave of terrorism, Georgia's electorate had chosen a Republican Governor and 32 Black Republican legislators. In the November 3 Presidential vote following the racist rampage, hardly any Blacks dared to cast ballots, with the result that Grant's racist opponent won Georgia's electoral votes by a wide margin. https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/sep/19
The illustration, by Thomas Nast, was published after the Georgia legislature expelled all of its Black members, but before the Camilla Massacre.
  
The First Great Depression Begins
September 20, 1873 (150 years ago). Two days after one of the largest U.S. banks closes its doors in a vain attempt to avoid bankruptcy, the New York Stock Exchange shuts down in order to prevent the complete collapse of the stock market. The Panic of 1873 marks the beginning of what will be called the Great Depression, the longest and deepest economic downturn the U.S. will ever experience until it is eclipsed in 1929. Millions of workers will soon lose their jobs, and many of them will never have a decent job again. https://digital.lib.niu.edu/illinois/gildedage/chronological3 

War Resisters' League Organizes the First U.S. Vietnam War Protest
September 21, 1963 (60 years ago). One month after the South Vietnamese government's deadly nighttime attacks on Buddhist temples throughout a country where the majority of the population is Buddhist (see This Week in People's History for 8/21/1963 at https://portside.org/2023-08-14/week-peoples-history-august-15-21), and one day after a high-ranking South Vietnamese official told the media that "Buddhist priests don't exist in Vietnam. Actually, they are saboteurs or naive people directed by the Communists toward burning themselves," the first demonstration against U.S. support for the Vietnam War is organized by the War Resisters' League outside the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in Manhattan.  https://www.warresisters.org/first-us-demonstration-against-war-vietnam…

The Redcoats Are Coming!
September 22, 1768 (255 years ago). Less than six years before the start of the Revolutionary War, the citizens of the Massachusetts colony learn that England is about to send a large contingent of troops to enforce the law in the face of widespread, sometimes violent, anti-British activity. Delegates from 96 Massachusetts towns come together in Boston's Faneuil Hall for a week-long meeting to discuss a response to the troops imminent arrival. 
During what is known as the Massachusetts Convention of Towns, a militant faction, led by Samuel Adams and John Hancock, which favors armed resistance, is outvoted by a majority that favors peaceful protest.
When the troopships arrived in October, it was clear that their commanders were expecting violent opposition, which never materialized. After the troops disembarked in full battle array, they encountered no resistance while they marched to Faneuil Hall, which they took over. As anticlimactic as the landing was, it helped to solidify an understanding among the colonists that peaceful protest was never going to resolve the contradiction between North Americans and the British Crown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Convention_of_Towns

Promises, promises
September 23, 1823 (200 years ago). The Treaty of Moultrie Creek is signed by the representatives of Native Americans in northern Florida and the U.S. Government. Under the treaty, which is the product of an effort to eliminate sometimes violent conflicts between Native Americans and white settlers, four million acres in north-cental Florida is declared to be a reservation under the exclusive control of Native Americans and off-limits to whites. 
The U.S. Government started the break the treaty before the ink was dry, but it remained in force for more than six years until the U.S. Congress passed, and President Andrew Jackson signed, the Indian Removal Act, which made it illegal for Native Americans to live east of the Mississippi River, without any regard for the terms of the Treaty of Moultrie Creek and scores of similar solemn obligations of the U.S. Government. https://seminoletribune.org/the-treaty-of-moultrie-creek/ 

Putting an End to Nuke Fallout
September 24, 1963 (60 years ago). The U.S. Senate ratifies the treaty that bans all testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, under water, or in outer space by a vote of 80 to 14. The Soviet Union ratified it the next day and it went into force on October 10. The treaty is the culmination of a worldwide 18-year grassroots campaign to permanently outlaw atmospheric nuke tests and thereby prevent further increases in the large and growing quantity of radiactive material in the air, water, and ground that has been created by fallout from atmospheric testing. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/us-nuclear-testings-…

Pandemic Turns Troop Train Deadly
September 25, 1918 (105 years ago). As part of the military build-up for World War I, a troop train departs Rockford, Illinois, carrying 3108 apparently healthy draftees to an Army base in Georgia. While en route, a wave of the highly contagious (and misnamed) "Spanish flu" sweeps through the recruits. When the train reaches its destination, more than 700 of the men aboard are so sick they are taken directly to the base hospital.
At this very moment, the United States is just beginning to experience a public health crisis that will kill at least 700,000 people in the U.S. and some 21 million around the world. The rapidly spreading infection is being reported in the news, but not as a major story, because no one is yet aware of how bad it is going to get. The pandemic had yet to make the front pages as it would within weeks. 
The wave of a deadly infection among so many young, otherwise healthy, young men on the troop train  would certainly have been the top story, which might have helped alert the population to the developing crisis, but it was not reported at all, because the U.S. Army treated it as a military secret. https://www.paho.org/en/who-we-are/history-paho/purple-death-great-flu-…