Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America

In the words of Miss Ida B. Wells: The student of American sociology will find the year of 1894 marked by a pronounced awakening of the public conscience to a system of anarchy and outlawry which had grown during a series of ten years to be so common, that scenes of unusual brutality failed to have any visible effect upon the humane sentiments of the people of our land. She is depicting a period of time in American history stained with the blood of hundreds of free African American men, women and children. These people were unjustly slaughtered through the practice of lynching within the South. Wells was an investigative journalist and was involved in exploring, reporting, publishing literature on, and eventually campaigning against the

Have you faced racial persecution due to the color of your skin? The time was 1900’s and this was the nightmare that Ida B. Wells-Barnett wrote of in Mob Rule in New Orleans. This is the true account of Robert Charles as he fights for his life to escape the hands of a lynching mob. This impassion story collaborates with the witness of this terrifying event that Wells describes. Wells uses her literary skills to shed light on racial discrimination, media bias, and her personal crusade for justice to portray this heart wrenching reality of the violent lynching during the 19th century.

First, ask yourself how would you feel after hearing the news that one of your family members had been lynched? Throughout the chapters 1-8, we can experience and observe the disheartening history of violence and lies. It is additionally an irritating depiction of a partitioned country on the very edge of the social equality development and an eerie contemplation on race, history, and the battle for truth. Throughout history, the conditions of the lynching, how it affected the legislators of the day, quickened the social equality development and keeps on shadowing the Georgia people group where these homicides occurred. During the 1900s until 19600s various African-Americans experienced various harsh conditions of violence, never being granted the right to vote and being segregated from whites based on their race and skin-color from their white masters. In general racism between whites and blacks can be seen throughout the globe during the era of slavery

Wells,“Lynch Law in America,”) Over a hundred of African Americans were lynched every year. The unwritten law was practiced for thirty years, inhumanly butchering thousands of men, women, children by either drowning, hanging, shooting, and burning them alive. By this point, the national law was irrelevant and the unwritten law was superior among the southern states. With every killing, white Americans would invent an excuse accordingly and to make matters worse, they realized it was sufficient to put anyone to death if the crime was against a woman, no matter if it were true or not, since it was under the unwritten law, which did not allow any sort of trial. This accusation was done in “the interest of those who did the lynching to blacken the good name of the helpless and defenseless victims of their hate. For this reason they publish at every possible opportunity this excuse for lynching, hoping thereby not only to palliate their own crime but at the same time to prove the negro a moral monster and unworthy of the respect and sympathy

In the United States in 1931, during America’s Great Depression, nine African American boys faced what is now known as one of America’s most tragic trails in history. These young boys were accused of raping two white girls while riding a train through Alabama. This accusation brought forth a mob of white people in the town of Scottsboro. The boys spent years on trial for this. The first trial was thought to have been the final convention, little did they know it was only the beginning. A second trial was held for the nine boys that shook the entire nation. After the second trial a third one was held after the judge suspected that the evidence was not properly examined. The nine young boys, known as “The Scottsboro Boys”, spent their lives in and out of a courtroom and in a cell for a crime that today is known to have never taken place.

The reading begins off with describing a mother, Dinah Kirkland and her traumatic experience with the concept of lynching. During the early 1930’s her son went missing after he was arrested and although Dinah knew that her son had been the product of a lynching, she could do nothing about it. She did not know where he was kept, who killed him, or even why he was killed. She contacted the head of the NAACP, and told him the fear she had regarding her son. Members of the African- American society came together to help Kirkland with her efforts, and eventually, Dinah did find the remains of her eighteen-year-old son.

Let’s examine the reality of violence during the Reconstruction Era. In the document, “Southern Horrors- Lynch Laws in All its Phases, by Ida B. Wells-Barnett we see countless examples of the continued violence in the south against African-Americans. The slogan “This is white man’s country and the

. . but specifics [to him] didn’t matter because the victims were now symbols of injustice: a NAACP cause” (78). Especially given the long-past, over-60-years-old nature of the lynching, Wexler’s goal, and therefore also her writing, must more profound, and compelling, than this, and therefore she, unlike White, is interested in the specifics: “Roger and Dorothy Malcolm, and George and Mae Murray [the lynching victims] . . . I have tried to bring them to life” (266). Wexler succeeds in that, rather than merely mentioning these victims in the context of the lynching, she includes detailed biographies of each, as well as of their relations, and describes their actions long before and immediately leading up to the lynching, in an attempt to give the reader a better understanding of and greater empathy for them.

Revenge is what set the beginning tone of Wexler’s story and the initial reason for why four African-Americans were shot to death. Roger Malcom, one of the lynching victims, stabbed Barnette Hester out of revenge; he believed that his wife, Dorothy, was sleeping with Barnette (Wexler, page13). Since Roger was black and not white, this was considered an act that the white population could not let go unpunished. The death of Roger Malcom was expected by everyone, even Roger knew, “when Barnette Hester died, he would die too” (Wexler, page 55). Many people at the time thought that this was the main motive behind the lynching and that the other three, Dorothy, Mae Murray,

In a progressive society like the United States, looking to the past is common, to learn from our mistakes but some undeniable issues of the past repeat and are omitted from our society because of their unpleasant nature, a great example of this is the Jim-Crow Era. In this paper, I will be discussing the main events of the Jim-Crow era, its initiation, the new style of slavery in the south, and the way it re-shaped the lives of African Americans all across the country, its re-enforcement in the beginning of the twentieth century, its major supporters, like the Ku Klux Klan. Confederate state leaders, and its major oppositions like the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, and the idea of the United States setting a global example of

The United States has a long, troubled history of slavery and racism within its culture. It is an unfortunate part of our history that we continue to see to this day. The Argument of D. T. Corbin in the Trial of the Ku-Klux before the States Circuit Court is a closing argument to the jury from David T. Corbin. Corbin was a very respected and qualified individual at this time. He would go on to win the Senate election a few years after this document was created. The trial was for the Ku-Klux Klan and whether or not their beliefs and actions were legal. Corbin was strongly against the klan and made sure people knew it. The events that took place in the trial of the Ku-Klux Klan, held in Columbia, South Carolina, happened in a tumultuous time period in United States history. The hearing took place in November of 1871, which was six years after the end of the Civil War. As many people know, the Civil War was fought largely due to the role of slavery in the United States. The southern states, the Confederacy, were pro-slavery, and the north, the Union, was against it. Racism was a major issue at the time. African-Americans had little to no rights before the war, and after the war Congress amended the constitution to give more rights to the African-Americans in this country to much disgust of the southern states. In this document Corbin portrays the KKK in a negative manner by calling on witnesses who were a part of the klan, calls witnesses who were victims, and brings up

Emancipated blacks, after the Civil War, continued to live in fear of lynching, a practice of vigilantism that was often based on false accusations. Lynching was not only a way for southern white men to exert racist “justice,” it was also a means of keeping women, white and black, under the control of a violent white male ideology. In response to the injustices of lynching, the anti-lynching movement was established—a campaign in which women played a key role. Ida B. Wells, a black teacher and journalist was at the forefront and early development of this movement. In 1892 Wells was one of the first news reporters to bring the truths of lynching to proper media attention. Her first articles

The argument that the author is trying to prove is that there has been numerous of lynching events in America but it has progressed into different levels over the years to prevent African- Americans from getting a voice in America’s society. Such as, using lynching as punishment for people’s actions that were not accepted to the public community, a source of intimidation and protection of white women. Majority of white men and women tried every way to keep African- Americans at the bottom of society. Like, when blacks were free from slavery however were still not able to participate in politics, go to the best schools and were only able to work for the low paying jobs. Blacks

Recently, an L.A. Times article (dated 2/13/00) reviewed a new book entitled "Without Sanctuary", a collection of photographs from lynchings throughout America. During the course of the article, the author, Benjamin Schwarz, outlined some very interesting and disturbing facts related to this gruesome act of violence: Between 1882 and 1930, more than 3,000 people were lynched in the U.S., with approximately 80% of them taking place in the South. Though most people think only African Americans were victims of lynchings, during those years, about 25% were white. Data indicates that mobs in the West lynched 447 whites and 38 blacks; in the Midwest there were 181 white victims and 79 black; and in the South, people lynched 291

Lynching was way of life in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. As Wells-Barnett points out, although most white people try to say that they did not want to discuss the noisy, because it will drag the reputation of angry white women, the vast majority of lynching had been completed, white people thought like lynching or burning some black people just to teach them their place. Wells intends to dissolve these myths and reasons into lynching, especially black rape white women. She repeats and the objectivity of the news proves that most black corpses killed black citizens are innocent and that their murders are not punished.