Johnnie Robinson – The Huntsville Times Article, “Negroes”

Description

September 22, 1963 article from The Huntsville Times presenting a chronological summary of several deaths associated with racial violence and the civil-rights struggle during 1963. The article references the killing of civil-rights leader Medgar Evers, other racially motivated shootings, the September 4 death of John D. Coley in Birmingham, the four girls killed in the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and the deaths of Johnnie Robinson and Virgil Ware on September 15.

The Robinson entry states that he died from a shotgun wound inflicted by a police officer after allegedly failing to obey an order to stop during unrest following the church bombing. The clipping uses the spelling “Johnny Robinson” and appears to give his age as 15, both of which differ from official records identifying him as Johnnie Brown Robinson, age 16. The article is therefore valuable primarily as contemporary documentary evidence of how Robinson’s death was publicly contextualized alongside other incidents of racial violence, rather than as an authoritative factual account of the shooting.