Public Lynching In Pre-Civil Rights Movement

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

Over the last two years in the United States the African-American people have been fighting a war within our own backyards. The Washington Post reports that since January 2015, the police have shot and killed over 175 young black men ranging from ages 18-29; 24 of them were unarmed. On the flip side 172 young white men were killed, only 18 being unarmed. With these statistics there are similarities in the numbers but, blacks were killed at rates disproportional to their percentage of U.S population (1.Washington Post). Of all unarmed people shot and killed by police in 2015. With 40% being black men make up just 6% of the nation’s populations. In the wake of the killings of Mike Brown, Sandra Bland, Alton Sterling, and many more the world has been made more publicly aware of injustices black people have to handle when dealing with law enforcement. Crime in the black community is nothing new in the black community or should I say black on black crime. There is a bad stereotype that has been put on black people since slavery times that I believe has help fueled the violence between the police and my people.

During the late Nineteenth Century, The Free Speech was one of the only journals in the country that spoke directly to African-Americans. As an author for this journal, Wells-Barnett sought to enlighten the public with information that was rarely published in other newspapers. In the event that knowledge of these lynchings were made public, they rarely contained accurate information. This journal was without a doubt a nuisance to the southern white press, who sought to discredit African-Americans in order to keep them out of political matters. The Free Speech went too far in a publication written for the May 21st, 1892 paper. The article describes the lynching of eight men since the previous publication. The deaths and crimes are described and doubt is expressed that most of the individuals were actually guilty. The spark that led to Wells-Barnett’s attempted lynching is found at the end of the article. “Nobody in this section of the country believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern white men are not careful, they will overreach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction, a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.” With the publishing of this article, local whites became enraged and took this as a direct threat to their “authority” over African-Americans. Local newspapers such as The Daily Commercial wrote follow up articles testifying to the

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

When President Abraham Lincoln addressed the nation in his Gettysburg address he expressed the bloodshed from the civil war would bring about a “new birth of freedom” for the American people and nation. During the 19th century and in the aftermath of the civil war, white southerners engaged in a ruthless and never ending cycle of violence against African Americans. The white southerners engaged in violence over whether or not, after slavery African Americans would get full benefits of citizenships. The terror that was inflicted by whites onto African Americans resulted in 4,743 of African Americans being tortured, and lynched between the years of 1882-1968. Lynching has become the most disturbing and lawless act in American history. Many scholars and leaders have debated over the reasoning of such violent acts such as lynching during this time period.

The selected primary source from the 1920s includes the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill of 1922. The tabling of the bill is valuable in understanding the racial conflicts prevalent in the 1920s. The textbook by The Stapleton Collection provides that it was common during the pre-war racial structure for the police to release detained African Americans to mobs to lynch them. Notably, such a treatment of African Americans was the reason behind the Tulsa race riots that took place when armed African Americans sought to rescue their detained compatriot from mob lynching. In an attempt to avoid such lynching, Leonidas C. Dyer tabled the bill in the Congress. The bill marked an important phase in

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

Between 1880 and 1930, lynching became not only a phenomenon but a way of life in the southern states. Lynching was racially motivated as it targeted mostly blacks. Within this 50 year period, 1000s of blacks and hundreds of whites were killed by lynch mobs within the southern states alone. Lynching was bloody and ruthless and a horrifying way to be executed. In Fitzhugh Brundage’s book, Lynching in the New South Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930, he talks about how lynching peaked and expanded throughout Georgia and compares mob violence between Georgia and Virginia in that time period. Brundage states that “Lynching in the American South during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was but one manifestation of strenuous and bloody campaign by whites to elaborate and impose a racial hierarchy upon people of color throughout the globe” (Brundage 2). Whites used lynching as a means for social and economic control. They did not want blacks to have any power and wanted to keep them oppressed. This book explores the differences in lynch mobs between Georgia and Virginia, and how the whites used lynching as a way to keep economic control in the hands of the whites.

The website Remembering Jim Crow gave useful information on the harsh lives endured by the African Americans in the South during the late 1800’s and mid 1900’s. This information expanded my knowledge of how the racist whites treated blacks unfairly and unjust. Places I visited on this site included “Bitter Times”, “Danger Violence and Exploitation”, and audios such as “Wrongly Accused” and “Mob Attack”. With this information, I was able to understand the cruelty that the African Americans felt. Listening to audios of peoples’ stories made me feel what they were going through, as I heard the fear in their own voices. In addition, I learned how the whites disgraced the blacks, and the blacks were put under the constant fear of the white man, even in their own communities. This material enhanced my understanding of Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird by helping me understand the circumstances of the Finches town and the biased judgement of the Tom Robinson trial due to the color of his skin.

“The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison” (Alexander, 2012). The numbers tell the story better than words can: black people are more likely to go to prison than any other race in the United States, shown by the fact that more than 60% of the prison population is composed of people of color (The Sentencing Project, 2016). These statistics can be traced back to several different cause, including the Era of Jim Crow and the War on Drugs, both of which led to higher policing in minority areas.

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.

There is no demand for reasons, or need of concealment for what no one is held responsible. The simple word of any white person against a Negro is sufficient to get a crowd of white men to lynch a Negro. Investigation as to the guilt or innocence of the accused is never made. Under these conditions, white men have only to blacken their faces, commit crimes against the peace of the community, accuse some Negro, nor rest till he is killed by a mob. Will Lewis, an 18 year old Negro youth was lynched at Tullahoma, Tennessee, August 1891, for being “drunk and saucy to white folks” (Duster

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

In “Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home”, author Tameka Hobbs examines the history of racial violence and lynchings in Florida, she focused especially on a string of ruthless lynchings that occurred during the 1940s. She argues that these lynchings created difficult diplomatic moments during both World War II and the Cold War period and that they forced the U.S. government to become more active in prosecuting racial violence. While reading this book it is very hard to not get upset. Although the stories of slavery and lynching are nothing new to the public it is just unbelievable that such events could go on and are still happening to this day.

In Latin America, one of the most violent conflicts between the government and its people occurred during the Cold War. The government wanted to prove its authority, which led to the oppression of the people. In the United States, black citizens faced racism and death as they fought to gain equal rights. White citizens wanted to prevent this struggle for equality and continued to oppress and lynch anyone who tried to change the current system. Compared to the terrorism of the Latin American Dirty Wars, I argue that the history of the lynching of African Americans is the United State’s equivalent of the Dirty Wars due to the desire for compliance with the preferred political system. However, the basis for the United States’ version was race