Museum of Lynching
by
John C Abercrombie
Lynching represents a large, ugly stain on the history of the United States. Most often carried out by hanging, it is most often used against people who are only accused or suspected of a crime or violation of the social order.
Most of the Lynchings in the United States were carried out on Black men, although women and children were also included. Most, but by no means all, were in the Southern United States.
One intent was to enforce White supremacy and intimidate Blacks. Two of the noted sources of information include Ida B Wells (featured in a post on amazingblackhistory.com Click here to see) and Tuskegee University. Most of the victims of Lynching were accused of murder, attempted murder, rape or attempted rape, followed closely by violations of social norms or other violations of Jim Crow laws. Blacks have been lynched for such “crimes” as failing to walk in the gutter while a White person passes on the sidewalk. Failing to tip a hat. Even being in business and competing with Whites were carried out by Lynchings.
The noted sociologist Arthur Franklin Raper (11/8/1899 – 8/10/1979 educated at Vanderbilt University and University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill investigated 100 Lynchings during the 1930’s and estimated that approximately 1/3 were falsely accused. Many of the remaining were most likely innocent of the charge or under circumstances of a trial would have been spared the death penalty.
It is unthinkable that a country that prides itself on equality under the law would allow such horrendous acts to occur, but it took over 100 years before the legislature passed a law making Lynching a federal crime!
After looking at the 3rd verse of the Star Spangled Banner, the National Anthem of the United States, we should also recoil in horror at the truthfulness of such blunt and hateful language.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
These words were written by Francis Scott Key, a lawyer and very cruel slave owner. Well educated he knew the meaning of the words.
Many Lynchings were attended by 100’s and even 1,000’s of spectators, including women and children, dressed for the celebration. Many Lynchings were advertised in newspapers and other means. Imagine a young child being “treated” to such a spectacle. No wonder so many people undervalue the life of Blacks in this country.
The victim was often tortured, burned alive, the body mutilated, body, body parts became trophies as genitals were mutilated and body parts sold and traded. Post cards showing the event and the body were an industry.
We sometimes think that the only people Lynched were men, but women were included. 2 come immediately to mind. Laura Nelson was Lynched because of an alleged charge against her husband. She and her son L D were Lynched while her husband was safely in jail.
Mary Turner was Lynched because she protest the innocence of her husband Hayes. She was tortured, hung and being 8 months pregnant, had her baby cut out of her during the Lynching. When the baby fell to the ground, it was stomped to death.
At many of these events prominent people such as mayors, chiefs of police were in attendance. If any inquiry was made into the incident, the cause was always “died at the hand or hands of person or persons unknown”.
These Lynchings were intended to keep the Black community in an inferior status to that of Whites. This was an intimidation tactic and as such was domestic terrorism.
As horrific as these acts were, it took the legislative branch of the United States over 100 years to make it a federal crime.
There are over 4,400 documented Lynchings and many more suspected. They involved more than 800 Counties within the United States. Wide spread, inhumane acts of domestic terrorism were allowed to reign and intimidate an entire population. Although there are many photographs of the events and the people in attendance, there is no record of investigations or charges against any.
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This post is part of a series dedicated to Black History 2020. To see posts in the series, click 2020 Black History Indes
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Pain and terror: America remembers its past
More than 4,300 men, women and children were lynched by white mobs between 1877 and 1950. As America’s first memorial and museum dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people opens in Montgomery, Alabama, Guardian US chief reporter Ed Pilkington meets founder and racial justice lawyer Bryan Stevenson
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Trouble in Mind
“The stain of Jim Crow runs deep in 20th-century America. . . . Its effects remain the nation’s most pressing business. Trouble in Mind is an absolutely essential account of its dreadful history and calamitous legacy.” –The Washington Post “The most complete and moving account we have had of what the victims of the Jim Crow South suffered and somehow endured.” –C. Vann Woodward In April 1899, black laborer Sam Hose killed his white boss in self-defense. Wrongly accused of raping the man’s wife, Hose was mutilated, stabbed, and burned alive in front of 2,000 cheering whites. His body was sold piecemeal to souvenir seekers; an Atlanta grocery displayed his knuckles in its front window for a week. With the same narrative skill he brought to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Been in the Storm So Long, Leon Litwack constructs a searing history of life under Jim Crow. Drawing on new documentation and first-person accounts by blacks and whites, he describes the injustices–both institutional and personal–inflicted against a people. Here, too, are the black men and women whose activism, literature, and music preserved the genius of their human spirit. Painstakingly researched, important, and timely, Trouble in Mind recalls the bloodiest and most repressive period in the history of race relations in the United States–and the painful record of discrimination that haunts us to this day.
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Photography in America The Tuskegee Institute records the lynching of 3,436 blacks between 1882 and 1950.
This is probably a small percentage of these murders, which were seldom reported, and led to the creation of the NAACP in 1909, an organization dedicated to passing federal anti-lynching laws. Through all this terror and carnage someone-many times a professional photographer-carried a camera and took pictures of the events. These lynching photographs were often made into postcards and sold as souvenirs to the crowds in attendance. These images are some of photography’s most brutal, surviving to this day so that we may now look back on the terrorism unleashed on America’s African-American community and perhaps know our history and ourselves better. The almost one hundred images reproduced here are a testament to the camera’s ability to make us remember what we often choose to forget.
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American Identity (Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series)
While victims of antebellum Lynchings were typically white men, postbellum Lynchings became more frequent and more intense, with the victims more often black. After Reconstruction, Lynchings exhibited and embodied links between violent collective action, American civic identity, and the making of the nation. Ersula J. Ore investigates lynching as a racialized practice of civic engagement, in effect an argument against black inclusion within the changing nation. Ore scrutinizes the civic roots of lynching, the relationship between lynching and white constitutionalism, and contemporary manifestations of lynching discourse and logic today. From the 1880s onward, Lynchings, she finds, manifested a violent form of symbolic action that called a national public into existence, denoted citizenship, and upheld political community.
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A lynching memorial remembers the forgotten
Civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson shows CNN’s Nia-Malika Henderson around a new memorial and museum in Montgomery, Alabama that names some of the over 4,000 lynching victims in America.
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The Lynching:
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Lynching and Spectacle:
Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (New Directions in Southern Studies) Lynch mobs in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America exacted horrifying public torture and mutilation on their victims. In Lynching and Spectacle, Amy Wood explains what it meant for white Americans to perform and witness these sadistic spectacles and how lynching played a role in establishing and affirming white supremacy. Lynching, Wood argues, overlapped with a variety of cultural practices and performances, both traditional and modern, including public executions, religious rituals, photography, and cinema, all which encouraged the horrific violence and gave it social acceptability. However, she also shows how the national dissemination of lynching images ultimately fueled the momentum of the antilynching movement and the decline of the practice. Using a wide range of sources, including photos, newspaper reports, pro- and antilynching pamphlets, early films, and local city and church records, Wood reconfigures our understanding of lynching’s relationship to modern life.
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The Origins of Lynching Culture in the United States
How did the practice of lynching begin and evolve in American history? How did Ida B. Wells, a black female investigative journalist, start to challenge some of the entrenched practices of the South? Watch Paula Giddings, professor of Afro-American Studies at Smith College,
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Anatomy of a Lynching:
The Killing of Claude Neal “A sensitive and forthright analysis of one of the most gruesome episodes in Florida history… McGovern has produced a richly detailed case study that should enhance our general understanding of mob violence and vigilantism.” — Florida Historical Quarterly “[McGovern] has succeeded in writing more than a narrative account of this bloodcurdling story; he has explored its causes and ramifications.” — American Historical Review
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The cross and the lynching tree are the two most emotionally charged symbols in the history of the African American community. In this powerful new work, theologian James H. Cone explores these symbols and their interconnection in the history and souls of black folk
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Bryan Stevenson, Lester Holt Revisit A Painful Past To Create A Better Future |
NBC Nightly News An attorney and author, Bryan Stevenson created the National Memorial for Peace and Justice to remember the country’s painful past, in hopes of a brighter future. Lester Holt visits the moving memorial, making a powerful personal discovery of his own.
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At the Hands of Persons Unknown:
The Lynching of Black America (Modern Library) WINNER OF THE SOUTHERN BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR NONFICTION • “A landmark work of unflinching scholarship.”—The New York Times This extraordinary account of lynching in America, by acclaimed civil rights historian Philip Dray, shines a clear, bright light on American history’s darkest stain—illuminating its causes, perpetrators, apologists, and victims. Philip Dray also tells the story of the men and women who led the long and difficult fight to expose and eradicate lynching, including Ida B. Wells, James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and W.E.B. Du Bois. If lynching is emblematic of what is worst about America, their fight may stand for what is best: the commitment to justice and fairness and the conviction that one individual’s sense of right can suffice to defy the gravest of wrongs. This landmark book follows the trajectory of both forces over American history—and makes lynching’s legacy belong to us all.
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GROUNDBREAKING Lynching Museum Opens In Alabama
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The legacy of Lynching is the height of injustice. Although it is horrific, we can’t bury our heads and pretend it never happened. There are people who have been deeply affected by the tragedy in their families. There are versions still happening today. As all posts, it is our intent to discuss these matters. It is the only way to clear the air and start on the road to healing the great racial divide that exists in our great country.
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