Lynching in America
By
John C Abercrombie
Today we post day 15 of 28. Once again looking at Lynching, an American tragedy. It is important because it represents the denial of that which is considered one of our basic tenants, liberty and justice for all.
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This post looks at lynchings. It is surprising that there have been in excess of 4,000 in America, mostly of Blacks. A lynching is the often-public killing of a person who has essentially not received any due process. As such lynchings are usually carried out by lawless mobs of Whites and sometimes by police or other ranked personnel. These incidents are carried out as domestic acts of terrorism and are intended to dissuade Blacks from seeking what is due to them, upsetting the existing White Supremacy policies that have been carried on for centuries.
Lynchings are often carried out in public with White people or mobs of same used to terrorize and control Blacks, with most of them taking place in the 19th and 20 centuries, but continuing into the 21st century. Keep in mind that it has taken over 120 years to have lynchings declared a violation of federal law.
Lynching photos that we see today are horrific and show Black men and women hanging from trees and include such acts of extreme brutality, such as torture, mutilation, decapitation and desecration. Some victims were burned alive, others shot with hundreds of rounds of lead bullets. They were often accompanied with a celebratory atmosphere with entire White families in attendance, including men, women and children. Parts of the mutilated bodies were often sold, and an entire industry sprang up featuring post cards and other memorability. There was no shame in killing a Black human even without due process, by White blood thirsty mobs.
From 1882 to 1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the U.S., according to records maintained by NAACP. Other accounts, including the Equal Justice Initiative’s extensive report on lynching, count slightly different numbers, but it’s impossible to know for certain how many lynchings occurred because there was no formal tracking. Many historians believe the true number is underreported.
During this time, there were:
- 581 recorded in Mississippi.
- 531 in Georgia
- 493 in Texas
During this time, there none recorded in:
- Arizona
- Idaho
- Maine
- Nevada
- South Dakota
- Vermont
- Wisconsin
Black people were the primary victims of lynching: 3,446, or about 72 percent of the people lynched, were Black. But they weren’t the only victims of lynching. Some white people were lynched for helping Black people or for being anti-lynching. Immigrants from Mexico, China, Australia, and other countries were also lynched.
White mobs often used dubious criminal accusations to justify lynchings. A common claim used to lynch Black men was perceived sexual transgressions against White women. Charges of rape were routinely fabricated. These allegations were used to enforce segregation and advance stereotypes of Black men as violent, hypersexual aggressors.
Hundreds of Black people were lynched based on accusations of other crimes, including murder, arson, robbery, and vagrancy.
As if a charge were required, many were murdered without there be any accusation of a crime. The “excuses” used were violations of social customs or racial expectations. People were accused of speaking to White people with less respect than what White people believed they were owed.
As Black Americans fled the South to escape the terror of lynchings, a historic event known as the Great Migration, people began to oppose lynchings in a number of ways. They conducted grassroots activism, such as boycotting White businesses. Anti-lynching crusaders like Ida B. Wells composed newspaper columns to criticize the atrocities of lynching.
And several important civil rights organizations — including NAACP — emerged during this time to combat racial violence.
There were several organizations including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In fact, editor WEB DuBois published pictures of the “Waco Horror”, the lynching of a young man named Jesse Washington.
Waco, Texas was the site where a 17 year-old Black was accused by a White mob of killing Lucy Fryer, a White woman. Du Bois used postcards of the murder to energize the anti-lynching movement. The Crisis’s circulation grew by over 50,000 during the next year and they raised $20,000 for the anti-lynching campaign.
In 1919, NAACP published Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1919, to promote awareness of the scope of lynching. The data in this study offer the gruesome facts by number, year, state, color, sex, and alleged offense.
Among the campaign’s other efforts, from 1920 to 1938, they flew a flag from the national headquarters in New York that bore the words “A man was lynched yesterday.” The campaign turned the tide of public opinion and even persuaded some southern newspapers to oppose lynching because it was damaging the South’s economic prospects.
It is hard to imagine the mind of a White mob, but the image of Mary Turner comes close. Her crime, telling the mob that her husband was not involved in the murder that he was lynched for. They tied her hands and feet hung her upside down in a tree, doused her with gasoline and oil and set her afire. As she was due to deliver a child, someone cut her abdomen open and when the baby dropped to the ground was stomped to death, and her body riddled with bullets.
It is savage to imagine this type of action taking place or that it was a replacement for the justice system that is touted so much in America. Despite the barbarity of such actions, it has taken over 120 years to make it a federal crime.
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Lynchings – America
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As Study Finds 4,000 Lynchings in the Jim Crow South, Will U.S. Address Legacy of Racial Terrorism?
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Book
Lynching in America: A History in Documents
Whether conveyed through newspapers, photographs, or Billie Holliday’s haunting song “Strange Fruit,” lynching has immediate and graphic connotations for all who hear the word. Images of lynching are generally unambiguous: black victims hanging from trees, often surrounded by gawking white mobs. While this picture of lynching tells a distressingly familiar story about mob violence in America, it is not the full story. Lynching in America presents the most comprehensive portrait of lynching to date, demonstrating that while lynching has always been present in American society, it has been anything but one-dimensional.
Ranging from personal correspondence to courtroom transcripts to journalistic accounts, Christopher Waldrep has extensively mined an enormous quantity of documents about lynching, which he arranges chronologically with concise introductions. He reveals that lynching has been part of American history since the Revolution, but its victims, perpetrators, causes, and environments have changed over time. From the American Revolution to the expansion of the western frontier, Waldrep shows how communities defended lynching as a way to maintain law and order. Slavery, the Civil War, and especially Reconstruction marked the ascendancy of racialized lynching in the nineteenth century, which has continued to the present day, with the murder of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s contention that he was lynched by Congress at his confirmation hearings.
Since its founding, lynching has permeated American social, political, and cultural life, and no other book documents American lynching with historical texts offering firsthand accounts of lynchings, explanations, excuses, and criticism.
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Strange Fruit: Lynching in America, new exhibit at Idaho Black History Museum
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Book
Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (New Directions in Southern Studies)
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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.
Wood expounds on the critical role lynching spectacles played in establishing and affirming white supremacy at the turn of the century, particularly in towns and cities experiencing great social instability and change. She also shows how the national dissemination of lynching images fueled the momentum of the antilynching movement and ultimately led to the decline of lynching. By examining lynching spectacles alongside both traditional and modern practices and within both local and national contexts, Wood reconfigures our understanding of lynching’s relationship to modern life.
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The Lynching of Henry ‘Peg’ Gilbert
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Book
Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America
Many people today, despite the evidence, will not believe don’t want to believe that such atrocities happened in America not so very long ago. These photographs bear witness to . . . an American holocaust.” —Congressman John Lewis 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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Remembering Three Lynchings in Montgomery County
Historian Anthony Cohen of The Menare Foundation, Inc. reveals the stories of three racial terror lynchings that occurred in Montgomery County in 1880 & 1896.
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Book
Lynching Photographs (Volume 2) (Defining Moments in Photography)
Why do we look at lynching photographs? What is the basis for our curiosity, rage, indignation, or revulsion? Beginning in the late nineteenth century, nearly five thousand blacks were put to death at the hands of lynch mobs throughout America. In many communities it was a public event, to be witnessed, recorded, and made available by means of photographs. In this book, the art historian Dora Apel and the American Studies scholar Shawn Michelle Smith examine lynching photographs as a way of analyzing photography’s historical role in promoting and resisting racial violence. They further suggest how these photographs continue to affect the politics of spectatorship. In clear prose, and with carefully chosen images, the authors chart the history of lynching photographs―their meanings, uses, and controversial display―and offer terms in which to understand our responsibilities as viewers and citizens.
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Monument: The Untold Story of Stone Mountain
Atlanta History Center explores the controversial history of the Stone Mountain carving through online resources and a documentary film.
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America is a conundrum and an enigma. We often state that we are a nation that believes in liberty and justice for all when we are for neither when it comes to all citizens. Some? Yes!
We have allowed thousands of our citizens to be lynched, mutilated, dishonored and subjected to terrorism on an almost daily basis. Whether it is allowing citizens, based on the color of their skin, to be subjected to the most barbaric treatment imaginable or denied the right to even the appearance of a trial.
We tell others that we stand for these principals, but for what ever reason are too cowardly to stand and support that that we hold so dear. Who are these people that call themselves Americans?