Summary: The Shadow Of The Lynching Tree

The Forgotten Dead takes in an account in US History that the problem of lynching did not only occurred in the US Southern states with African-Americans, but it also occurred in the US southwest with the Mexican-Americans.

He wants his readers to imagine the pain and humiliation of the ill treatment that African Americans endure on a daily basis. King writes of vicious mobs lynching people’s mothers and fathers, policemen killing people’s brothers and sisters, a man and his wife not receiving the proper respect they deserve because of their skin color, and the notion that African Americans feel insignificant within their communities; this is why these peaceful demonstrators of whom the clergymen attack “find it difficult to wait” (King, 20). However, King believes that soon, injustice will be exposed, like “a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up” (King, 30). This vivid description helps arouse an emotional response, driving shame into the hearts of his white readers.

“The kidnapping and savage lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till” (Chandler) is a title in the news that would surely catch your attention. Racism has played a major role in American history. It still plays in society today, but not in as much of a big case. Having somebody kill a boy because will cause a lot of fighting between the whites and the blacks. In the end, somebody is going to come out on top. But that takes a lot of sacrifice. That all ties into this, the death of a boy that caused major support to the civil rights of African Americans. The death of Emmett Till has a lasting effect on the Jim Crow opposition, court trials, and the failure of racism in American culture today.

We have yet to break out of this curse that Willie Lynch and the white slave owners have put upon us. The effects of Willie Lynch are apparent in the actions of blacks today including myself. The way I act and some of the small things I say come from the work of one man and the knowledge that he gave the white slave owners to train African slaves to act and think according to their will. Whether we want to believe if Willie Lynch was a real person or not it is apparent that the words lynch spoke still mentally enslaved the black people of

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.

2. One of the texts most focused on educating readers about race and the challenges it presents to American culture is Ida B. Wells’ “Lynch Law in All its Phases.” As discussed in previous reading responses, Wells’ speech is made up primarily of evidence due to the limitations placed on women of colors’ speech but even more so due to her “deep-seated conviction that the country at large does not know the extent to which lynch law prevails in parts of the Republic” (189). In this way, Wells endeavours to educate the US both about lynching and about the repercussions of allowing lynch law to prevail. That is, Wells forces audiences to acknowledge the fact that lynching, and thus white supremacy and racism, actively threaten the moral pillars that the United States is built on.

The death of a young African American male in 1955 haunted the south and the African American society. Images of Emmett Till hanging in a tree were plastered on television and in newspapers for Joseph McNeil, Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, and David Richmond to see while attending North Carolina A & T College in 1960. These four African American men would soon become known as the Greensboro Four after instigating a sit-in at a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina. Their courage and determination ignited a movement to end segregation not only in their state but across the nation. History was being made that day as the young men sat at the counter, customers inside watching as the events unfolded, and the impact of this incident permeating across American’s eyes.

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

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

Wexler’s attention to these details ensures that the lynching victims are more than flat “symbols,” constructed by a foreign and long past semiotic system, to the reader. She writes, for instance, of George Murray, or Dorsey, who had “returned [to Monroe] from the army” (167), after “four and one-half years” of service, in September 1945, that he was a man who had “love for music,” “skill as a farmer,” and a memorable smile (99). In this respect, Wexler accomplishes the same empathy for an innocent victim as the NAACP, in 1946, might have done, and in similar style—as she contends, in parallel fashion to the deceased victims’

‘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.

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 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).

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 the book Devil in the Grove, Gilbert King writes about the case of the Groveland Four and the incredible career of Thorogood Marshall. This book is a broad sweep of the unbelievable struggle against racism and the fight for civil rights in the Jim Crowe south. The case of the Groveland Four shows how the social climate of the South allowed a racist Sheriff and other people in power to intimidate, imprison and even lynch innocent black people. It took only an unsubstantiated claim of one white woman to effectively end the lives of four black men and effect the safety of a whole community.