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Lynching in the United States

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Roosevelt Townes and Robert McDaniels were lynched in 1937, after accusations that they had killed a white shopkeeper. McDaniels was shot, and Townes was burned alive. Beforehand, both were tortured. Pictures such as this one made it to Time Magazine, Life Magazine, and national newspapers.

Lynching is a form of murder. It is normally by hanging. Lynching is often by a group of people as a form of punishment. In the United States, lynchings happened more often after the American Civil War in the early-to-mid 1860s.[1]

Although the number of lynchings went down in the 1920s, they have continued into the 21st century.[2]

Most, but not all, lynchings were of African American men in the South. Ninety-two women were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1927. The lynchings of black people by white people happened in the Midwest and border states. There were also lynchings of Native Americans, Hispanics and Asian Americans in the West.[3] White people were also lynched but these lynchings were less common.

According to the Tuskegee Institute, 4,743 people were lynched between 1882 and 1968 in the United States. This includes 3,446 African Americans and 1,297 whites. More than 73 percent of lynchings after the Civil War happened in the Southern states.[4] According to the Equal Justice Initiative, 4,084 African-Americans were lynched between 1877 and 1950 in the South.[5] Whites lynched blacks to defend white supremacy. Blacks were lynched for violating social norms, including segregation (the separation of whites and blacks), and the lower status of blacks. White acted together to lynch an individual black person.[6] In the Deep South, lynching was also used to scare blacks away from voting.[7]

After the Civil War, nearly four million slaves in the South were made free. In some states and many counties, freed blacks made up over half the people who lived there. The first Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 by Confederate veterans in Tennessee. Ku Klux Klan groups were then founded by veterans throughout the South. They wanted to keep African Americans in fear, as they were before the war. This was when lynchings became common. In the 1890s, African American journalist and anti-lynching fighter Ida B. Wells was one of the first people to study lynching cases. She found that black lynching victims were accused of rape or attempted rape about one-third of the time. The most common accusation was murder or attempted murder. Other accusations were verbal and physical aggression, competitive businesses and independent thinking.[8] In 1940, sociologist Arthur F. Raper investigated one hundred lynchings after 1929. He said that about one-third of the victims were falsely accused.[9]

The stereotype of lynching is hanging. Hangings are what crowds of people saw. Hanging is also easy to photograph.[10] There are other forms of lynching. They include being shot repeatedly, being burned, dragged behind cars and being forced to jump from a bridge.[11]

In the late-1800s to early-1900s South, photographs were taken at lynchings. These were used in postcards and newspapers.[12] These images usually showed an African-American lynching victim and all or part of the crowd that attended. Women and children often watched lynchings. The people who killed the victim were not identified.[13] At one lynching, nearly 15,000 people were in the crowd.[12] Often lynchings were advertised in newspapers before the event so photographers could be there.[14] After the lynching, photographers would sell their pictures as-is or as postcards. They could cost as much as fifty cents each, or $9, as of 2016.[13]

Background

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Collective violence was a familiar aspect of the early American legal landscape, with group violence in colonial America being usually nonlethal in intention and result. In the 17th century, in the context of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the British Isles and unsettled social and political conditions in the American colonies, lynchings became a frequent form of "mob justice" when the authorities were perceived as untrustworthy.[15] In the United States, during the decades after the Civil War, African Americans were the main victims of racial lynching, but in the American Southwest, Mexican Americans were also the targets of lynching as well.[16]

At the first recorded lynching, in St. Louis in 1835, a Black man named McIntosh (who killed a deputy sheriff while being taken to jail) was captured, chained to a tree, and burned to death on a corner lot downtown in front of a crowd of more than 1,000 people.[17]

According to historian Michael J. Pfeifer, the prevalence of lynchings in post–Civil War America reflected people's lack of confidence in the "due process" of the U.S. judicial system. He links the decline in lynchings in the early 20th century to "the advent of the modern death penalty", and argues that "legislators renovated the death penalty...out of direct concern for the alternative of mob violence". Between 1901 and 1964, Georgia hanged and electrocuted 609 people. Eighty-two percent of those executed were Black men, even though Georgia was majority white. Pfeifer also cited "the modern, racialized excesses of urban police forces in the twentieth century and after" as bearing characteristics of lynchings.[18]

Lynching demographics (worst years for lynchings in the United States)

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Year White Victim Black Victim Total Victims
1892 69 161 230
1884 160 51 211
1894 58 134 192
1885 110 74 184
1891 71 113 184
1895 66 113 179
1889 76 94 170
1897 35 123 158
1893 34 118 152
1886 64 74 138

African American resistance

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African Americans resisted lynchings in numerous ways. Intellectuals and journalists encouraged public education, actively protesting and lobbying against lynch mob violence and government complicity. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and related groups, organized support from white and Black Americans, publicizing injustices, investigating incidents, and working for passage of federal anti-lynching legislation (which finally passed as the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act on March 29, 2022).[19] African-American women's clubs raised funds and conducted petition drives, letter campaigns, meetings, and demonstrations to highlight the issues and combat lynching.[20] In the great migration, particularly from 1910 to 1940, 1.5 million African Americans left the South, primarily for destinations in northern and mid-western cities, both to gain better jobs and education and to escape the high rate of violence. From 1910 to 1930 particularly, more Blacks migrated from counties with high numbers of lynchings.[21]

African-American writers used their talents in numerous ways to publicize and protest against lynching. In 1914, Angelina Weld Grimké had already written her play Rachel to address racial violence. It was produced in 1916. In 1915, W. E. B. Du Bois, noted scholar and head of the recently formed NAACP, called for more Black-authored plays.

African American female playwrights were strong in responding. They wrote ten of the 14 anti-lynching plays produced between 1916 and 1935. The NAACP set up a Drama Committee to encourage such work. In addition, Howard University, the leading historically Black college, established a theater department in 1920 to encourage African-American dramatists. Starting in 1924, the NAACP's major publications The Crisis and Opportunity sponsored contests to encourage Black literary production.[22]

African Americans emerged from the Civil War with the political experience and stature to resist attacks, but disfranchisement and imposition of Jim Crow in the South at the turn of the 20th century closed them out of the political system and judicial system in many ways. Advocacy organizations compiled statistics and publicized the atrocities, as well as working for enforcement of civil rights and a federal anti-lynching law. From the early 1880s, the Chicago Tribune reprinted accounts of lynchings from other newspapers, and published annual statistics. These provided the main source for the compilations by the Tuskegee Institute to document lynchings, a practice it continued until 1968.[23]

Ida B. Wells exposed lynching in the early 1890s to an international audience

In 1892, journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett was shocked when three friends in Memphis, Tennessee, were lynched. She learned it was because their grocery store had competed successfully against a white-owned store. Outraged, Wells-Barnett began a global anti-lynching campaign that raised awareness of these murders. She also investigated lynchings and overturned the common idea that they were based on Black sexual crimes, as was popularly discussed; she found lynchings were more an effort to suppress Blacks who competed economically with Whites, especially if they were successful. As a result of her efforts at education, Black women in the U.S. became active in the anti-lynching crusade, often in the form of clubs that raised money to publicize the abuses. When the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed in 1909, Wells became part of its multi-racial leadership and continued to be active against lynching. The NAACP began to publish lynching statistics at their office in New York City.

In 1898, Alexander Manly of Wilmington, North Carolina, directly challenged popular ideas about lynching in an editorial in his newspaper The Daily Record. He noted that consensual relationships took place between white women and Black men, and said that many of the latter had white fathers (as he did). His references to miscegenation lifted the veil of denial. Whites were outraged. A mob destroyed his printing press and business, ran Black leaders out of town and killed many others, and overturned the biracial Populist-Republican city government, headed by a white mayor and majority-white council. Manly escaped, eventually settling in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In 1903, writer Charles W. Chesnutt of Ohio published the article "The Disfranchisement of the Negro", detailing civil rights abuses as Southern states passed laws and constitutions that essentially disfranchised African Americans, excluding them wholesale from the political system. He publicized the need for change in the South. Numerous writers appealed to the literate public.[24]

Statistics

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Statistics for lynchings have traditionally come from three sources primarily, none of which covered the entire historical time period of lynching in the United States. Before 1882, no contemporaneous statistics were assembled on a national level. In 1882, the Chicago Tribune began to systematically tabulate lynchings nationally. In 1908, the Tuskegee Institute began a systematic collection of lynching reports under the direction of Monroe Work at its Department of Records, drawn primarily from newspaper reports. Monroe Work published his first independent tabulations in 1910, although his report also went back to the starting year 1882.[25] Finally, in 1912, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People started an independent record of lynchings. The numbers of lynchings from each source vary slightly, with the Tuskegee Institute's figures being considered "conservative" by some historians.[26]

Based on the source, the numbers vary depending on which sources are cited, the years that are considered by those sources, and the definitions that are given to specific incidents by those sources. The Tuskegee Institute has recorded the lynchings of 3,446 Blacks and the lynchings of 1,297 Whites, all of which occurred between 1882 and 1968, with the peak occurring in the 1890s, at a time of economic stress in the South and increasing political suppression of Blacks.[27] A six-year study published in 2017 by the Equal Justice Initiative found that 4,084 Black men, women, and children fell victim to "racial terror lynchings" in twelve Southern states between 1877 and 1950, besides 300 that took place in other states. During this period, Mississippi's 654 lynchings led the lynchings which occurred in all of the Southern states.[28][5][29]

The records of Tuskegee Institute remain the single most complete source of statistics and records on this crime since 1882 for all states, although modern research has illuminated new incidents in studies focused on specific states in isolation.[30] As of 1959, which was the last time that Tuskegee Institute's annual report was published, a total of 4,733 persons had died by lynching since 1882. The last lynching recorded by the Tuskegee Institute was that of Emmett Till in 1955. In the 65 years leading up to 1947, at least one lynching was reported every year. The period from 1882 to 1901 saw the height of lynchings, with an average of more than 150 each year. 1892 saw the most number of lynchings in a year: 231 or 3.25 per one million people. After 1924 cases steadily declined, with less than 30 a year.[31][4][32] The decreasing rate of yearly lynchings was faster outside the South and for white victims of lynching. Lynching became more of a Southern phenomenon and a racial one that overwhelmingly affected Black victims.[33] There were measurable variations in lynching rates between and within states.[34]

Table 3.8: Black victims of lynchings per 100,000 blacks, by state, 1882-1930 (from A festival of violence : an analysis of Southern lynchings, 1882-1930 by Tolnay & Beck, 1995, pg. 38)
State No. of victims per 100,000
Mississippi 52.8
Georgia 41.8
Louisiana 43.7
Alabama 32.4
South Carolina 18.8
Florida 79.8
Tennessee 38.4
Arkansas 42.6
Kentucky 45.7
North Carolina 11.0
Cause of Lynchings per Tuskegee Institute[33]
Cause of Lynching Percentage of victims
Murder 38%
Rape 16%
Attempted rape 7%
Felonious assault 6%
Theft 7%
Insult to white person 2%
Miscellaneous/no offence 24%

References

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  1. ↑ Civil War Legacy Lynchings accounts and pictures
  2. ↑ DeNeen L. Brown (2021-08-08). "'Lynchings in Mississippi never stopped'". The Washington Post.
  3. ↑ Lynching in the West. The Duke University Press. Archived from the original on June 12, 2018. Retrieved October 19, 2018.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 "Lynching, Whites and Negroes, 1882 – 1968" (PDF). Tuskegee University. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 13, 2016.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (Report) (3rd ed.). Montgomery, Alabama: Equal Justice Initiative. 2017. Archived from the original on 2018-05-10. Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; name "Eji" defined multiple times with different content
  6. ↑ Smångs, Mattias (2016). "Doing Violence, Making Race: Southern Lynching and White Racial Group Formation". American Journal of Sociology. 121 (5): 1329–1374. doi:10.1086/684438. PMID 27092388. S2CID 10753622.
  7. ↑ White, Paul; Strickler, Ryan; Witko, Christopher; Epperly, Brad (2019). "Rule by Violence, Rule by Law: Lynching, Jim Crow, and the Continuing Evolution of Voter Suppression in the U.S.". Perspectives on Politics. 18 (3): 756–769. doi:10.1017/S1537592718003584. S2CID 225243828.
  8. ↑ Ifill, Sherrilyn A. (2007). On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century. Boston: Beacon.
  9. ↑ Myrdal, Gunnar (1944). An American Dilemma. New York: Harper. p. 561.
  10. ↑ "Legacy of Lynching". PBS. Retrieved October 19, 2018.
  11. ↑ An Obsessive Quest (Report). Archived from the original on March 18, 2017. Retrieved October 19, 2018.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Ifill, Sherrilyn A. (2007). On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century. Boston: Beacon.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Goff, Jennie (2011). Blood at the Root Lynching as American Cultural Nucleus. Albany: State U of New York.
  14. ↑ Kim, Linda (2012). "A Law of Unintended Consequences: United States Postal Censorship of Lynching Photographs". Visual Resources. 28 (2): 171–193. doi:10.1080/01973762.2012.678812. S2CID 159670864.
  15. ↑ Pfeifer, Michael J. (2011). The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-09309-8. OCLC 724308353.
  16. ↑ Carrigan, William D.; Clive Webb (2013). Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848–1928. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-532035-0. OCLC 815043342.
  17. ↑ William Hyde and Howard L. Conrad (eds.), Encyclopedia of the History of St. Louis: A Compendium of History and Biography for Ready Reference: Volume 4. New York: Southern History Company, 1899; pg. 1913.
  18. ↑ Pfeifer 2004, pp. 7–9.
  19. ↑ Rush, Bobby L. (2022-03-29). "H.R.55 - 117th Congress (2021-2022): Emmett Till Antilynching Act". www.congress.gov. Retrieved 2022-04-02.
  20. ↑ Davis, Angela Y. (1983). Women, Race & Class. New York: Vintage Books. pp. 194–195.
  21. ↑ Tolnay, Stewart E.; Beck, E. M. (February 1992). "Racial Violence and Black Migration in the American South, 1910 to 1930". American Sociological Review. 57 (1): 103–116. doi:10.2307/2096147. JSTOR 2096147.
  22. ↑ McCaskill & Gebhard 2006, pp. 210–212.
  23. ↑ Wexler, Laura (June 19, 2005). "A Sorry History: Why an Apology From the Senate Can't Make Amends". The Washington Post. p. B1. Retrieved November 7, 2011.
  24. ↑ Ferguson, SallyAnn H., ed. (2001). Charles W. Chesnutt: Selected Writings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. pp. 65–81.
  25. ↑ McMurry, Linda (1985). Recorder of the Black Experience: A biography of Monroe Nathan Work. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. pp. 120–121. ISBN 978-0-8071-1171-0.
  26. ↑ Gibson, Robert A. "The Negro Holocaust: Lynching and Race Riots in the United States,1880–1950". Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. Archived from the original on July 22, 2010. Retrieved July 26, 2010.
  27. ↑ "Lynchings: By State and Race, 1882–1968". University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. Archived from the original on June 29, 2010. Retrieved July 26, 2010. Statistics provided by the Archives at Tuskegee Institute.
  28. ↑ "As Study Finds 4,000 Lynchings in Jim Crow South, Will U.S. Address Legacy of Racial Terrorism?". Democracy Now!. February 11, 2015. Retrieved June 20, 2020.
  29. ↑ Berg, M.; Wendt, S. (2011). Globalizing Lynching History: Vigilantism and Extralegal Punishment from an International Perspective. Springer. pp. 20, 79. ISBN 978-1-137-00124-5.
  30. ↑ Cite error: The named reference Bibliography of data sources was used but no text was provided for refs named (see the help page).
  31. ↑ "1959 Tuskegee Institute Lynch Report", Montgomery Advertiser; April 26, 1959, re-printed in Ginzburg 1988 [1962]
  32. ↑ Cite error: The named reference Thurston 33-36 was used but no text was provided for refs named (see the help page).
  33. ↑ 33.0 33.1 Myrdal, Gunnar (1944). An American Dilemma. New York: Harper. p. 561.
  34. ↑ Tolnay, Stewart Emory (1995). A festival of violence: an analysis of Southern lynchings, 1882-1930. Internet Archive. Urbana : University of Illinois Press. pp. 34–39. ISBN 978-0-252-02127-5.
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