Lynching In America Essay

Lynching is called the last great skeleton in our nation's closet: It terrorized all of black America, claimed thousands upon thousands of victims in the decades between the 1880s and the Second World War, and leaves invisible but horrifying scars to this day. In the book, “At The Hands Of Persons Unknown”, by Philip Dray demonstrates that throughout America, not just in the South, blacks were accused of any crime or even just violating social or racial customs. The blacks everywhere were hunted by mobs, abducted from jails, and men and women were shot, hanged, tortured, and burned, often in sadistic, picnic-like "spectacle lynchings" involving thousands of witnesses that enjoyed watching.

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

In the late 19th century, lynchings were commonplace occurrences, especially in Southern states. The lynchings were publicized in newspaper ads and were so accepted that postcards showing pictures of the event were sold as souvenirs. Apologists claimed that the lynchings took place to punish criminals for their crimes and to protect white women from black aggressors. To counter the claims that resulted in these “punishments,” many activists, including Ida B. Wells, wrote speeches depicting the harsh and racist reality of lynchings. In 1909, Wells gave a speech at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s first annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia, in which she condemns lynchings and their public acceptance. By offering

Lynchings were a real threat to African Americans in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They created a lot of fear in the African American community especially in this time period. Between 1882 and 1969, 4,743 people lynchings occurred. In 1882, African Americans accounted for forty-six percent of lynchings. Yet from 1900 to 1910, African Americans represented eighty-nine percent of lynchings.

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

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.

After slavery ended four conflicts came up two of them were heavy racism and the fear of African Americans lives that were getting lynched very often. After the civil war the south was completely destroyed and they needed to rebuild. Lynching in the south was a big problem for blacks/African-Americans. In my primary source” Lynching in the United States, it shows how in the years 1889-1893 that 705 Lynchings were reported. Out of (705) 260 were white and 579 were black this a big impact on society of life for blacks. This made it very a hard and scared life for African Americans growing

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

During the past couple months a controversial case was brought to the grand jury in Ferguson. The jury decided to not indict Officer Darren Wilson, who shot Michael Brown. This major decision caused uprising, riots, protests, and lootings in the town of Ferguson. Many protesters feel this is a race issue, when clearly it is not. The grand jury did the right thing to not indict Officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Michael Brown. Michael Brown was guilty because he assaulted a police officer, the actions Michael Brown took apart in, and

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.

In the case of lynching, discourses emerge from heated debates about the meaning of the practice; these debates change over the long history of lynching in America. At different times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the term “lynching” has implied rather different historical acts amongst the community. It has also been used to specify acts that indicated a wide range of distinct motives, strategies, technologies and meanings, as well as a politically encumbered term. For many African Americans who grew up in the South in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the threat of lynching was mundane. Photographs and postcards illustrating the popular image of an angry white mob hanging a black man does not give the full historic

However insignificant the number of lynching against whites, the significance, as Brundage suggests, lies, “…not in their tiny number, but rather in the way in which they both exposed and molded whites’ attitudes toward mob violence.” (101) While the number of whites compared to blacks lynched was severely uneven it shows that race did not deter a mob from lynching. At this point in time it would be seen that the cause of mob violence from race relations to generalizations about court laws and the white mobs feeling their lack of

Another way that white southerners were able to rolled back many of the rights held by African Americans is by lynching. Lynch is a mob of people killed, especially by hanging, for an alleged offense with or without a legal trial. The primary source, ““Lynch Law in America” the author Ida B. Wells organized a national fight against lynching in the early twentieth century. Born a slave, Wells became a teacher and civil rights leader in Memphis, Tennessee. When a white mob lynched three of her friends, she helped organize a black boycott of white-owned businesses and wrote harsh editorials in her own newspaper. According to Wells, lynching “ It represents the cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent people who openly avow that there is

Ida B. Wells focuses on the repulsiveness of lynching and its executors in her book “On Lynchings.” She denounces the idea of capitalism in America because of the unjust and prejudiced lynching that it has resulted to after the emancipation of the blacks. She first establishes the fact that blacks are the source of the South’s restorations then opinionates that whites are in charge of the capitalist community when she writes, “If labor is withdrawn capital will not remain. The Afro-American is thus the backbone of the South…The white man 's dollar is his god, and to stop this will be to stop outrages in many localities” (Wells 3). She understands that if money is taken away from the whites, their power will cease to exist, and as a result, so will the lynching of the blacks for crimes that they may or, more conceivably, may have not committed. Before the emancipation, blacks have been the source of all labor in the South, as an outcome of their enslavement under the whites. Now that the blacks have no economic value for the white slave-owners, they find no reason for their presence in, what they view as, their world. Thus, they lynch backs in order to scare them into fearing and respecting the whites who come in mobs to destroy their lives and make a spectacle of it. In addition, it is noted by Gail Bederman in his book “Manliness & Civilization” that Wells was more focused on the idea of race and women’s issues until March of 1892 when her eyes are opened to the severity of

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.