Lynching Case

A perfect example backing up what Wells-Barnett argues the cause of lynching is in Southern Horrors is the case of a lynching that occurred on March 9th, 1892 in Memphis, Tennessee. Tensions were rising in a Memphis neighborhood after three African American men; Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell and Will Stewart, opened their own grocery store that was taking business away from a nearby white owned store. The three black men stayed overnight at their store to protect it from vandals that night. Sometime in the night they shot off some of the white men who came to attack. In retaliation for the white men who were shot, the storeowners were arrested and taken to jail. These men were never given the opportunity to defend their actions due to a lynch mob dragging them from their cell then murdering them. Additionally, Wells-Barnett informed the public that some of the cases, more often than not where black men that were lynched for raping white women, the sexual relations were consensual and not forced. Learning of the unjust treatment of the store owners, the other men who were falsely accused of rape, and countless other injustices Wells-Barnett became outraged to the degree of taking it upon herself to put her life at risk by traveling the south for two months gathering information on other lynching incidents

The article “Regarding the Aftermaths of Lynching” is one written by Kidada E. WIlliams, that helps explain why it is important to be interested in what happens after an individual is lynched. This is indeed Williams’ argument, which is later elaborated more on in the article. Her argument is arguable due to the fact that, even though Kidada believes that lynching should be researched, every scholar does not. Williams has stated that lynching is wrong and immoral, but there are obviously individuals that do not agree.

‘Fire in a canebrake’ is quite a scorcher by Laura Wexler and which focuses on the last mass lynching which occurred in the American Deep South, the one in the heartland of rural Georgia, precisely Walton County, Georgia on 25th July, 1946, less than a year after the Second World War. Wexler narrates the story of the four black sharecroppers who met their end ‘at the hand of person’s unknown’ when an undisclosed number of white men simply shot the blacks to death. The author concentrates on the way the evidence was collected in those eerie post war times and how the FBI was actually involved in the case, but how nothing came of their extensive investigations.

The documentary, narrative "The Lynching of Emmett Till" by Christopher Metress, tells Emmett's story of death through various points of view. On August 24, 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago, entered a rural grocery store of Money, Mississippi. Because the young child had been gloating about his bond with white people up north, his southern cousins had dared him to go into the store and say something to the women working the register. Emmett accepted their challenge; seconds later he was at the counter, set on purchasing two items. What he did or said next will never be known for sure, but whatever passed between these two strangers from two different worlds set off a chain reaction that would forever

On July 25, 1946, two young black couples- Roger and Dorothy Malcom, George and Mae Murray Dorsey-were killed by a lynch mob at the Moore's Ford Bridge over the Appalachee River connecting Walton and Oconee Counties (Brooks, 1). The four victims were tied up and shot hundreds of times in broad daylight by a mob of unmasked men; murder weapons included rifles, shotguns, pistols, and a machine gun. "Shooting a black person was like shooting a deer," George Dorsey's nephew, George Washington Dorsey said (Suggs C1). It has been over fifty years and this case is still unsolved by police investigators. It is known that there were atleast a dozen men involved in these killings. Included in the four that were

Before and during the Civil War it was not uncommon for masters to physically harm their slaves, often times hurting them just enough so that they didn't die. But now as slavery was abolished, harm still came to those who were free. The only difference was that it had a new name (lynching) and some of the reasoning behind it. White southern leaders felt threatened and thought that their rights were the ones being threatened. They saw the North trying to elevate the colored population in the South, holding the freedmens' rights above the white population. Those men then began retaliating against those freedmen and any of their supporters. Where slavery usually involved the harming of the slave, lynching involved both white and black people, men and women. Many massacres occurred during this time of Reconstruction, most of them could have been avoidable if the North had stricter laws and higher security in places with high

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 a prominent influence in the South, African Americans were constantly attacked and threatened, a result of Southerners need to show authority. Lynching became a social event for white Southerners, in Ida B. Wells narrative, she accounts the horrific events of lynchings, Wells states, “Here Smith was placed upon a scaffold, six feet square and ten feet high, securely bound, within the view of all beholders. Here the victim was tortured for fifty minutes by red-hot iron brands ... Then, being apparently dead, kerosene was poured upon him, cottonseed hulls placed beneath him and set on fire” (90). Racial classes were divided and lynchings showcased this inequality.

During the nineteenth century, lynching was brought to America by British Isles and after the Civil War white Americans lynching African American increased. Causing and bringing fear into their world. In the Southern United States, lynching became a method used by the whites to terrorize the Blacks and to remain in control with white supremacy. The hatred and fear that was installed into the white people’s head had caused them to turn to the lynch law. The term lynching means to be put to death by hanging by a mob action without legal sanction. So many white people were supportive of lynching because it was a sign of power that the white people had. “Lynching of the black people was used frequently by white people, their is no specific detail of how many times they had done it, but lynching of black people has lasted from 1882 to 1968. Lynching also is in fact a inhuman combination of racism and sadism which was used to support the south’s caste system,’’(Gandhi).

Lynching was a punishment in the 1920’s and 30’s. It was a majorly flawed system of punishment. It could be done without any sort of trails. They KKK made it really bad for African Americans because they were trying to use it as a way to abolish African Americans along with Caucasian people. It involved hanging, whipping and other more common ways of punishment. Sometimes people would be tied up to a tree and whipped repeatedly in front of crowds of people. Lynching is an extrajudicial punishment which means that often people were killed by government authority. That would show major flaws in lynching itself and the government officials sovereign's ideas of a stable society to uphold the peace of the

Belle Hathaway, Mae Murray Dorsey, and Dorothy Malcom were powerless to their killers. In both cases, the mob overpowered the women. On January 23, 1912, Belle Hathaway and some other prisoners in Harris County Jail were overpowered by a 100-person mob, who barged their way into the jail and took the prisoners and shot their bodies with 300 bullet rounds (Davis). On July 25, 1946, Mae Murray Dorsey and Dorothy Malcom along with their husbands were shot hundreds of times by 12 to 15 unmasked white men in daylight (Davis). This lynching occurred at the Moore’s Ford bridge, where Oconee and Walton counties meet at the bridge (Davis). These lynching cases fell under the powerless attribute that is associated with many slaves because the individuals

During the twentieth-century lynching was a form of punishment exercised frequently in the Southern states. "Lynching is the practice whereby a mob-usually several dozen or several hundred persons-takes the law into its own hands in order to injure or kill a person accused of some wrongdoing" (Zangrando). In several cases the mob would not really reason with the people they are punishing, most times there would not be a trial, like there would be if it had gone through the courts. The mob would dictate whether they were guilty or not and determine the punishment they would receive. People could be lynched for a crime they did not commit or because they were affiliated with someone who were guilty of something, and because the mob assumed they were guilty, they took matters into their own hands and those people would be lynched.

Lynchings impacted the social hierarchy in the United States as the victims were specifically African Americans and Mexicans, which left a legacy of discrimination against anyone who was not white. Contemporary artist, Vincent Valdez, uses his art of photography to make people aware of the targeted victims of the executions with the goal of creating a systematic change. The system he wishes to change is the social hierarchy which is the organization of people at different ranks in an administrative body. Firstly, the social hierarchy in the United States was affected because African Americans and Mexicans were the sufferers of the hangings. The article, Vincent Valdez's The Strangest Fruit: A Bitter Crop in Texas, claims, “If the story of lynching

Before I opened the Philip Dray At The Hands of Persons Unknown I looked at the cover of the book. The cover of the book displayed an African American male hanging from a tree. The cover of the book gave me a bad fuzzy feeling; however, it made me anxious to see what the first few pages would be about, how would Dray describe the lynching of Black Americans? When I began my journey into the reading the book I notice Dray decided to give an unflinching, unbiased, all-encompassing view of the roots of lynching. Complicatedly the origins of lynching are stitched into the cloth of America's being. Through evidences, analytical reports, laws passed by the various sessions of Congress, and Supreme Court’s ruling; no gravels are left uninterrupted

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.