Lynching in the United States
Lynching in the United States
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lynching, the practice of murdering people by
extrajudicial mob action, occurred in
The body of George Meadows hanging from a tree near the
Pratt Mines in Alabama's Jefferson County on January 15,
1889, after being lynched.
The body of George Meadows hanging from a tree near the
Pratt Mines in Alabama's Jefferson County on January 15,
1889, after being lynched.
the United
States chiefly from the late 18th century through the 1960s. Lynchings took
place most frequently against African-American men in the southern U.S. after the American Civil War and the emancipation of
all slaves, and particularly from 1890 to the 1920s, with a peak in 1892.
Lynchings were also very common in the Old
West, where victims were primarily men of Mexican andChinese minorities,
although whites were also lynched.[1]
 |
The body of George Meadows hanging from a tree near the
Pratt Mines in Alabama's Jefferson County on January 15,
1889, after being lynched
|
The number
of lynchings in the South is associated with economic
strains: low cotton prices, inflation, and economic stress.[citation needed]It occurred most
frequently in areas with large concentrations of blacks, dominated politically
by Democrats, and with competition among local churches, as part of the
enforcement of white supremacyby whites in the late 19th century
following Reconstruction. The granting of U.S. Constitutional rights to freedmen after
the American Civil War during the Reconstruction era (1865–1877)
aroused anxieties among white Southerners, who were unwilling to concede such
social status to African Americans. They blamed the freedmenfor
their own wartime hardship, economic loss, and loss of social and political
privilege. During Reconstruction, freedmen and whites active
in the pursuit of civil rights, were sometimes lynched in the South. In
addition, blacks were intimidated and attacked to prevent their voting, with
violence increasing around elections from 1868 into the late 1870s. White
Democrats regained control of State Legislatures in 1876 and a national
compromise on the presidential election resulted in the removal of federal
troops and official end to Reconstruction. There continued to be violence
around elections to suppress black voting, particularly with the rise of the
Populist Party and some victories by Populist-Republican candidates in the
1890s.
 |
The corpses
of three Georgian men hanging from a tree after
being lynched in May 1892.
|
From 1890 to
1908, southern legislatures passed new constitutions and electoral rules
to disfranchise most
blacks and many poor whites, ending election violence by utterly excluding them
from politics. The dominant whites enacted a series of segregation and Jim
Crow lawsto enforce second-class status against blacks. During this period
of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, lynchings reached
a peak, reflecting the economic hard times. Lynchings peaked in many areas when
it was time to settle accounts with sharecroppers.[2]
The Tuskegee Institute has recorded 3,446
blacks and 1,297 whites being lynched between 1882 and 1968, with the annual
peak occurring in the 1890s, at a time of economic stress in the South and
political suppression.[3] A
five-year study published by the Equal Justice Initiative in 2015 found that
nearly 4,000 black men, women and children were lynched in the Southern states
alone between 1877 and 1950.[4]
African
Americans mounted resistance to lynchings in numerous ways. Intellectuals and
journalists encouraged public education, actively protesting and lobbying
against lynch mob violence and government complicity in that violence.
The National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as
numerous other organizations, organized support from white and black Americans
alike and conducted a national campaign to get a federal anti-lynching law
passed. African American women's clubs raised funds to support the work of
public campaigns, including anti-lynching plays. Their petition drives, letter
campaigns, meetings and demonstrations helped to highlight the issues and
combat lynching.[5] 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 migrated from counties with high numbers of lynchings.[6]
 |
John Heath's corpse hanging from a pole in Arizona
after being lynched on February 22, 1884.
|
From 1882 to
1968, "...nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress, and
three passed the House. Seven presidents between 1890 and 1952 petitioned
Congress to pass a federal law."[7] In
1920 the Republican Party promised at
its national convention to support passage of such a law. In 1921 Leonidas
C. Dyer from Saint Louis sponsored an anti-lynching bill; it was
passed in January 1922 in the United States House of
Representatives, but a Senate filibuster by the Southern whiteDemocratic block defeated it
in December 1922. With the NAACP, Representative Dyer spoke across the country
in support of his bill in 1923 and tried to gain passage that year and the
next, but was defeated by the Southern Democratic block.[7]
Name origin
The term
"Lynch's Law" – subsequently "lynch law" and
"lynching" – apparently originated during theAmerican Revolution when Charles Lynch, a Virginia justice of the
peace, ordered extralegal punishment for Loyalists. In the South before the
Civil War, members of the abolitionist movement and
other people opposing slavery were also targets of lynch mob violence.[8]
Social characteristics
During
the Civil War, Southern Home Guard units sometimes lynched
white Southerners whom they suspected of being Unionists or deserters.
One example of this was the hanging of Methodist ministerBill Sketoe in
the southern Alabama town
of Newton in December 1864.
A major motive
for lynchings, particularly in the South, was the white society's efforts to
maintain white supremacy after emancipation of slaves
following the American Civil War; they punished perceived violations of
customs, later institutionalized as Jim Crow laws,
which mandated racial segregation of whites and blacks, and second-class status
for blacks. Economic competition was another major factor; independent black
farmers or businessmen were sometimes lynched or suffered destruction of their
property. In the Deep South, the number of lynchings was higher in areas with a
concentration of blacks in an area (such as a county), dependent on cotton and
at a time of low cotton prices, rising inflation, a predominance of Democrats,
and competition among religious groups. and the economy went down.
Whites
sometimes lynched blacks to gain financially and to establish political and
economic control. For example, after the lynching of an African-American farmer
or an immigrant merchant, the victim's property would often become available to
whites.[citation needed] In much of
the Deep
South, lynchings peaked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as white
racists turned to terrorism to dissuade blacks from voting in a period of
disfranchisement. In the Mississippi
Delta, lynchings of blacks increased beginning in the late 19th century as
white planters tried to control former slaves who had become landowners
or sharecroppers. Lynchings had a seasonal pattern in the
Mississippi Delta; they were frequent at the end of the year, when
sharecroppers and tenant farmers tried to settle their accounts.
In the
1890s, African American journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B.
Wells conducted one of the first thorough investigations of lynching
cases; she found that black lynching victims were accused of rape or attempted
rape only about one-third of the time (although sexual infractions were widely
cited as reasons for the crime). The most prevalent accusation was murder or
attempted murder, followed by a list of infractions that included verbal and
physical aggression, spirited business competition, and independence of mind
among victims. White lynch mobs formed to restore the perceived social order.[9] Lynch
mob "policing" usually led to white mobs murdering persons suspected
of crimes or more casual infractions. Law-enforcement authorities sometimes
participated directly or held suspects in jail until a mob formed to carry out
the murder.
Lynchings
also occurred in Western frontier areas where legal
recourse was distant. In the West, cattle barons took the law into
their own hands by hanging those whom they perceived as cattle and horse thieves.
This was also related to a political and social struggle between these classes.
The West
Historians
have debated over the history of lynchings on the western frontier, which has
been obscured by the mythology of the American
Old West. In unorganized territories or sparsely settled states, law
enforcement was limited, often provided only by a U.S. Marshal who might, despite
the appointment of deputies, be hours, or days, away by horseback.
 |
The 1856 lynching of Charles Cora and James Casey by
the Committee of Vigilance in San
Francisco,California
|
People often
carried out lynchings in the Old West against accused criminals in custody.
Lynching did not so much substitute for an absent legal system as constitute an
alternative system dominated by a particular social class or racial group.
Historian Michael J. Pfeifer writes, "Contrary to the popular
understanding, early territorial lynching did not flow from an absence or
distance of law enforcement but rather from the social instability of early
communities and their contest for property, status, and the definition of
social order."[10]
By the time
of the California Gold Rush in 1848, at least
25,000 Mexicans had been longtime residents of California since
the Spanish colonial period. The Treaty of 1848 expanded United States
territory by one-third after the Mexican-American War. To settle the war, Mexico ceded
all or parts of Arizona,California, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming to
the United States. In September 1850, California became the 31st state of the
United States.
Many of the
Mexicans who were native to what would become a state within the United States
were experienced miners, and they had great success mining gold in California.[11] Their
success aroused animosity by white prospectors, who intimidated Mexican miners
with the threat of violence and committed violence against some. Between 1848
and 1860, European Americans lynched at least 163 Mexicans in California alone.[11] On
July 5, 1851, a mob in Downieville, California, lynched a Mexican
woman named Josefa Segovia.[12] She
was accused of killing a white man who had attempted to assault her after
breaking into her home.[13]
The San Francisco Vigilance Movement has
traditionally been portrayed as a positive response to government corruption
and rampant crime. But, revisionist historians have argued that it created more
lawlessness than it eliminated. It had a strongly nativist tinge.[14][page needed] Its members
initially targeted activities by the Irish and
later mounted mob violence against Chinese immigrants
andMexicans.[14] In
1871, a mob rampaged through Old Chinatown in Los Angeles and
killed at least 18 Chinese Americans, after a white businessman was
inadvertently killed there in the crossfire of a tongbattle within the Chinese community.
Another
well-documented episode in the history of the American West is the Johnson County War, a dispute in the 1890s over
land use in Wyoming.
Large-scale ranchers, with the complicity of local and federal Republican politicians,
hired mercenaries and assassins to lynch the small
ranchers, who were mostly Democrats. The latter were also
their economic competitors, characterized by the large-scale ranchers as
"cattle rustlers".
Reconstruction
(1865–1877)
After
the Civil War, nearly four million slaves were
emancipated in the South. They constituted a majority in some states, and in
numerous counties in several states. The first Ku Klux
Klan was founded in 1866 by veterans in Tennessee; it became
associated with insurgent violence against freedmen and
their allies that included lynchings but more often consisted of direct, isolated
attacks by secret groups against individuals. The first severe period of violence
in the South was between 1868 and 1871. White Democrats attacked black and
white Republicans.[16] To
prevent ratification of new constitutions formed during Reconstruction, the
opposition used various means to harass potential voters. Failed attacks led to
a massacre during the 1868 elections, with the insurgents' murders of about
1,300 voters across various southern states ranging from South
Carolina to Arkansas.
 |
An 1868 cartoon published in the Tuscaloosa, Alabama newspaper, The
Independent Monitor, threatening the lynching of carpetbaggers by
the Ku Klux Klan
|
The lynchers
sometimes murdered their victims, but sometimes whipped them to remind them of
their former status as slaves.[17] White
terrorists often made nighttime raids of African-American homes in order to
confiscate firearms. Lynchings to prevent freedmen and their allies from voting
and bearing arms were extralegal ways of trying to enforce the previous system
of social dominance and the Black Codes, which had been invalidated
by the 14th and 15th Amendments in 1868 and 1870.
Although
some states took action against the Klan, the South needed federal help.
President Ulysses S. Grant and Congress passed the Force Acts of
1870 and the Civil Rights Act of 1871, also known as
the Ku Klux Klan Act, intended to suppress the vigilante violence of the Klan.
This authorized the government to prosecute crimes committed by groups such as
the KKK, as well as the use of federal troops to control violence. The
administration began holding grand juries and prosecuting Klan members. In
addition, it used martial law in some counties in South Carolina,
where the Klan was the strongest. Under attack, the
Klan dissipated. Vigorous federal action and the disappearance of the Klan had
a strong effect in temporarily reducing the numbers of murders.
 |
| Mississippi Ku-Klux in the Disguises in Which They Were Captured, 1872. They were arrested in Tishomingo County, Mississippi for attempted murder. Wood engraving from photograph,Harper's Weekly, 27 January 1872, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress. |
From the
mid-1870s onward, violence rose as insurgent paramilitary groups
in the Deep South worked to suppress black voting and turn Republicans out of
office. In Louisiana, the Carolinas and Florida especially, the Democratic
Party relied on paramilitary "White Line" groups, such as the White Camelia,White
League and Red Shirts to terrorize,
intimidate and assassinate African American and white Republicans in an
organized drive to regain power. In Mississippi and the Carolinas, paramilitary
chapters of Red Shirts conducted overt
violence and disruption of elections. In Louisiana, the White
League had numerous chapters; they carried out goals of the Democratic
Party to suppress black voting. Grant's desire to keep Ohio in the
Republican aisle and his attorney general's maneuvers led to a failure to
support the Mississippi governor with Federal troops.[18] The
campaign of terror worked. InYazoo County, Mississippi, for instance, with an
African American population of 12,000, only seven votes were cast for
Republicans in 1874. In 1875, Democrats swept into power in the Mississippi
state legislature.[18]
Once
Democrats regained power in Mississippi, Democrats in other states adopted
the Mississippi Plan to control the election of
1876, using informal armed militias to assassinate political leaders, hunt down
community members, intimidate and turn away voters, and effectively suppress
African American suffrage and civil rights. In state after state, Democrats
swept back to power.[19] From
1868 to 1876, there were 50–100 lynchings annually.
Disfranchisement
(1877-1917)
Main
article: Disfranchisement after
Reconstruction era
Following
white Democrats' regaining political power in the late 1870s, legislators
gradually increased restrictions on voting, chiefly through statute. From 1890 to 1908,
most of the Southern states, starting with Mississippi, created new
constitutions with further provisions: poll taxes, literacy and understanding
tests, and increased residency requirements, that effectively disfranchised most
blacks and many poor whites. Forcing them off
voter registration lists also prevented them from serving on juries, whose
members were limited to voters. Although challenges
to such constitutions made their way to the Supreme Court in Williams v. Mississippi (1898)
and Giles v. Harris (1903), the states' provisions
were upheld.
 |
Rioters breaking into a parish prison during anti-Italian lynchings
in New
Orleans, Louisiana, in 1891
|
Most
lynchings from the late 19th through the early 20th century were of African
Americans in the South.[3][20] Other
victims included white immigrants, and, in the Southwest, Latinos. Of the
468 lynching victims in Texas between 1885 and 1942, 339 were black, 77 white, 53
Hispanic, and 1 Indian.[21]
The murders reflected
the tensions of labor and social changes, as the whites imposed Jim Crow rules,
legal segregation and white supremacy. The
lynchings were also an indicator of long economic stress due to falling cotton
prices through much of the 19th century, as well as financial depression in the
1890s. In the Mississippi bottomlands, for instance, lynchings rose when crops
and accounts were supposed to be settled.[22]
 |
The 1893 public
lynching of Henry Smith in Paris,
Texas
|
The late
1800s and early 1900s in the Mississippi Delta showed both frontier influence
and actions directed at repressing African Americans. After the Civil War, 90%
of the Delta was still undeveloped.[22] Both
whites and African Americans migrated there for a chance to buy land in the
backcountry. It was frontier wilderness, heavily forested and without roads for
years.[22] Before
the start of the 20th century, lynchings often took the form of frontier
justice directed at transient workers as well as residents.[22]
Thousands of
workers were brought in by planters to do lumbering and work on levees. Whites
were lynched at a rate 35.5% higher than their proportion in the population,
most often accused of crimes against property (chiefly theft). During the
Delta's frontier era, blacks were lynched at a rate lower than their proportion
in the population, unlike the rest of the South. They were most often accused
of murder or attempted murder in half the cases, and rape in 15%.[22]
A clear
seasonal pattern to lynchings existed with colder months being the deadliest.
As noted, cotton prices fell during the 1880s and 1890s, increasing economic
pressures. "From September through December, the cotton was picked, debts
were revealed, and profits (or losses) realized... Whether concluding old
contracts or discussing new arrangements, [landlords and tenants] frequently
came into conflict in these months and sometimes fell to blows."[22] During
the winter, murder was most cited as a cause for lynching. After 1901, as
economics shifted and more blacks became renters and sharecroppers in the
Delta, with few exceptions, only African Americans were lynched. The frequency
increased from 1901 to 1908 after African Americans were disfranchised.
"In the twentieth century Delta vigilantism finally became predictably
joined to white supremacy."
Conclusions
of numerous studies since the mid-20th century have found the following
variables affecting the rate of lynchings in the South: "lynchings were
more numerous where the African American population was relatively large, the
agricultural economy was based predominantly on cotton, the white population
was economically stressed, the Democratic Party was stronger, and multiple
religious organizations competed for congregants."[24]
Other ethnicities
After their
increased immigration to the U.S. in the late 19th century, Italian
Americans in the South were recruited for laboring jobs. On March 14,
1891, 11 Italian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans, Louisiana, after a jury
acquitted them in the murder of David
Hennessy, an ethnic Irish New Orleans police chief.[25] The
11 Sicilians were falsely accused of being associated with the Mafia. This incident
was one of the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history.[26] A
total of twenty Italians were lynched during the 1890s. Although most lynchings
of Italian Americans occurred in the South, Italians did not comprise a major
portion of immigrants or of the population as a whole. Isolated lynchings of
Italians also occurred in New York, Pennsylvania,
and Colorado.
Particularly
in the West, minorities such as Chinese and East Indian immigrants, Native Americans, and
Mexicans were also lynching victims. The lynching of Mexicans and Mexican
Americans in the Southwest was long overlooked in American history,
when attention was focused on treatment of African Americans in the South.
The Tuskegee Institute, which kept the most complete
records, noted the victims as simply black or white. Mexican, Chinese, and
Native American lynching victims were recorded as white.[27]
Researchers
estimate 597 Mexicans were lynched between 1848 and 1928. Mexicans were lynched
at a rate of 27.4 per 100,000 of population between 1880 and 1930. This
statistic was second only to that of the African American community, which
endured an average of 37.1 per 100,000 of population during that period.
Between 1848 and 1879, Mexicans were lynched at an unprecedented rate of 473
per 100,000 of population.[28]
Enforcing Jim Crow
After 1876,
the frequency of lynching decreased somewhat until the later 19th century.
White Democrats had regained political control of the state legislatures.
Lynching was extrajudicial punishment, used by the society to terrorize
freedmen and whites alike to maintain dominance by whites, Southern
Republicans in Congress sought to protect black voting rights by using Federal
troops for enforcement. But, a congressional deal to elect Ohio
Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as President in 1876
(in spite of his losing the popular vote to New York Democrat Samuel
J. Tilden) included a pledge to end Reconstruction in the South. The Redeemers,
many of whom had been members of such paramilitary groups
as the White Cappers, the Knights of the White Camellia, the White
League, and the Red Shirts, which supported
white Democrats, had used terrorist violence and assassinations to suppress
black and Republican voting and regain control of the state legislatures.
 |
From left to right, the lynching of killer-for-hire,Jim Miller, and 3 others inAda,
Oklahoma, on April 19, 1909
|
Lynchings
were public demonstrations of white power and a means to exert social control.
Racial tensions had an economic base. In attempting to reconstruct the
plantation economy, planters were anxious to control labor. In addition,
agricultural depression was widespread, and the price of cotton kept falling
after the Civil War into the 1890s. A labor shortage occurred in many parts of
the Deep South, most especially in the Mississippi
Delta, which was being rapidly developed for agriculture. Southern attempts
to recruit immigrant labor were unsuccessful, as immigrants would quickly leave
field labor. Lynchings erupted when farmers tried to terrorize the laborers,
especially when time came to settle and they were unable to pay wages, but
tried to keep laborers from leaving.
 |
The lynching of Will James in Cairo,
Illinois, on November 11, 1909
|
More than 85
percent of the estimated 5,000 lynchings in the post-Civil War period occurred
in the Southern states. With economic strains across the Deep South and a low
price for cotton, 1892 was a peak year when 161 African Americans were lynched.
The passage of Jim Crowlaws, beginning in the 1890s, completed the
revival of white supremacyin the South. Terror and lynching
were believed to be used to enforce both these formal laws and a variety
of unwritten rules of conduct meant to assert
white domination. In most years from 1889 to 1923, 50 to 100 lynchings occurred
annually across the South. They were at a peak in the last decade of the 19th
century, but remained high for years.
 |
The lynching of Laura Nelson in Okemah,Oklahoma, on
May 25, 1911
|
The
frequency of lynchings rose during years of poor economy and low prices for
cotton, demonstrating that more than social tensions generated the catalysts
for mob action against the underclass.[31]Researchers
have studied various models to determine what motivated lynchings. One study of
lynching rates of blacks in southern counties between 1889 and 1931 found a
relation to the concentration of blacks in parts of the Deep South; where black
population was concentrated, lynching rates were higher. Such areas also had a
particular mix of socioeconomic conditions, with a high dependence on cotton
cultivation.[32]
The stated
ideology of whites about lynching was directly connected with denial of
political and social equality, and sexual fears of white men; it was expressed
by Benjamin Tillman, a South Carolina governor andsenator, speaking on the floor of the U.S.
Senate in 1900:
We of the
South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we
never will. We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we
will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without
lynching him.[33]
 |
The front and back of a postcard showing the charred corpse
of Jesse Washington on display in Robinson,
Texas, after he was lynched in nearby Waco, Texas,
on May 16, 1916
|
Henry Smith,
an alcoholic African-American handyman accused of murdering a policeman's
daughter, was a noted lynching victim, because of the ferocity of the attack
against him and the huge crowd that gathered.[34] He
was lynched at Paris, Texas, in 1893 for killing Myrtle Vance, the
three-year-old daughter of a Texas policeman, after the policeman had assaulted
Smith.[35] Smith
was not tried in a court of law. A large crowd followed the lynching, as was
common then in the style of public executions. Henry Smith was fastened to a
wooden platform, tortured for 50 minutes by red-hot iron brands, and burned
alive while more than 10,000 spectators cheered.[34]
Fewer than
one percent of lynch mob participants were ever convicted by local courts and
they were seldom prosecuted or brought to trial. By the late 19th century,
trial juries in most of the southern United States were all white because
African Americans had been disenfranchised, and only registered voters could
serve as jurors. Often juries never let the matter go past the inquest.
Such cases
happened in the North as well. In 1892, a police officer in Port Jervis, New York, tried to stop the
lynching of a black man who had been wrongfully accused of assaulting a white
woman. The mob responded by putting the noose around the officer's neck as a
way of scaring him, and completed killing the other man. Although at the
inquest the officer identified eight people who had participated in the
lynching, including the former chief of police, the jury determined that the
murder had been carried out "by person or persons unknown."[36]
 |
A postcard showing
the1920 Duluth, Minnesota lynchings
|
In Duluth,
Minnesota, on June 15, 1920, three young African-American traveling circus
workers were lynched after having been accused of having raped a white
woman and jailed pending a grand jury hearing. A physician's subsequent
examination of the woman found no evidence of rape or assault. The alleged
"motive" and action by a mob were consistent with the "community
policing" model. The book, The Lynchings in Duluth (2000) by
Michael Fedo has documented the events.[37]
Although the rhetoric surrounding lynchings frequently
suggested they were to protect the virtue and safety of white women, the
actions basically arose out of white attempts to maintain domination in a
rapidly changing society and their fears of social change.[38] Victims
were the scapegoats for peoples' attempts to control agriculture, labor and
education, as well as a reaction to economic stresses during downturns when
cotton prices dropped, and larger disasters such as the boll weevil.
According to a Time magazine
article, April 2, 2002:
"There were lynchings in the
Midwestern and Western states, mostly of Asians, Mexicans, and Native
Americans. But it was in the South that lynching evolved into a semiofficial
institution of racial terror against blacks. All across the former Confederacy, blacks who were
suspected of crimes against whites—or even "offenses" no greater than
failing to step aside for a white man's car or protesting a lynching—were
tortured, hanged and burned to death by the thousands. In a prefatory essay
in Without Sanctuary, historian Leon
F. Litwack writes that between 1882 and 1968, at least 4,742 African
Americans were murdered that way.
Photographic
records and postcards
At the start
of the 20th century in the United States, lynching was photographic sport.
People sent picture postcards of lynchings they had witnessed. A writer
for Time magazine noted in 2000,
"Even the Nazis did not
stoop to selling souvenirs of Auschwitz,
but lynching scenes became a burgeoning subdepartment of the postcard industry.
By 1908, the trade had grown so large, and the practice of sending postcards
featuring the victims of mob murderers had become so repugnant, that the U.S. Postmaster General banned
the cards from the mails."[39]
In the
post-Reconstruction era South, lynching photographs were printed for various
purposes, including postcards, newspapers and event mementos.[40] Typically
these images depicted an African-American lynching victim and all or part of
the crowd in attendance. Spectators often included women and children. The
perpetrators of lynchings were not identified.[41] At
one particular lynching, it is said that nearly 15,000 people were in
attendance.[40] Often
lynchings were advertised in newspapers prior to the event in order to give
photographers time to arrive early and prepare their camera equipment.[42]After
the lynching, photographers would sell their pictures as-is or as postcards,
sometimes costing as much as fifty cents a piece.[41]
Though some
photographs were sold as plain prints, others contained captions. These
captions were either straightforward details—such as the time, date and reasons
for the lynching—while others contained polemics or poems with racist or
otherwise threatening remarks.[42] An
example of this is a photographic postcard attached to the poem "Dogwood
Tree," which says: "The negro now/By eternal grace/Must learn to stay
in the negro’s place/In the Sunny South, the land of the Free/Let the WHITE
SUPREME forever be."[43] Such
postcards with explicit rhetoric such as "Dogwood Tree" were
typically circulated privately or mailed in a sealed envelope.[44] Other
times these pictures simply included the word "WARNING,".[42]
In 1873, the
Comstock Act was passed, which banned the publication of "obscene matter
as well as its circulation in the mails".[42] In
1908, Section 3893 was added to the Comstock Act, stating that the ban included
material "tending to incite arson, murder, or assassination".[42] Although
this act did not explicitly ban lynching photographs or postcards, it banned
the explicit racist texts and poems inscribed on certain prints. According to
some, these texts were deemed "more incriminating" and caused their
removal from the mail instead of the photograph itself because the text made
"too explicit what was always implicit in lynchings,".[42] Some
towns imposed "self-censorship" on lynching photographs, but section
3893 was the first steps towards a national censorship.[42] Despite
the amendment, the distribution of lynching photographs and postcards
continued. Though they were not sold openly, the censorship was bypassed when
people sent the material in envelopes or mail wrappers.[44]
In Without
Sanctuary (2000), a book of lynching postcards collected by James Allen, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Leon
F. Litwack wrote:
"The photographs stretch our credulity, even numb our
minds and senses to the full extent of the horror, but they must be examined if
we are to understand how normal men and women could live with, participate in,
and defend such atrocities, even reinterpret them so they would not see
themselves or be perceived as less than civilized. The men and women who
tortured, dismembered, and murdered in this fashion understood perfectly well
what they were doing and thought of themselves as perfectly normal human
beings. Few had any ethical qualms about their actions. This was not the
outburst of crazed men or uncontrolled barbarians but the triumph of a belief system
that defined one people as less human than another. For the men and women who
composed these mobs, as for those who remained silent and indifferent or who
provided scholarly or scientific explanations, this was the highest idealism in
the service of their race. One has only to view the self-satisfied expressions
on their faces as they posed beneath black people hanging from a rope or next
to the charred remains of a Negro who had been burned to death. What is most
disturbing about these scenes is the discovery that the perpetrators of the
crimes were ordinary people, not so different from ourselves – merchants,
farmers, laborers, machine operators, teachers, doctors, lawyers, policemen,
students; they were family men and women, good churchgoing folk who came to
believe that keeping black people in their place was nothing less than pest
control, a way of combating an epidemic or virus that if not checked would be
detrimental to the health and security of the community."
Resistance
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.[45]
In 1892,
journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett was shocked when three
friends in Memphis, Tennessee were lynched because
their grocery store competed successfully with 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 crimes; 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 1903,
leading writer Charles Waddell Chesnutt published
his article, "The Disfranchisement of the Negro", detailing civil
rights abuses as southern states passed laws and constitutions that essentiallydisenfranchised 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.[46]
Great Migration
In what has
been viewed as multiple acts of resistance, tens of thousands of African
Americans left the South annually – especially from 1910 to 1940 – seeking jobs
and better lives in industrial cities of the North and Midwest in a movement
that was called the Great Migration.[38] More
than 1.5 million people went North during this phase of the Great Migration.
They refused to live under the rules of segregation and continual threat of
violence, and many secured better educations and futures for themselves and
their children, while adapting to the drastically different requirements of
industrial cities. Northern industries such as the Pennsylvania Railroad and others, and
stockyards and meatpacking plants in Chicago and Omaha, vigorously
recruited southern workers. For instance, by 1923, the Pennsylvania Railroad had hired 10,000
black men from Florida and Georgia to work at their expanding yards and tracks.[48]
Federal
action limited by the Solid South
President Theodore Roosevelt made public statements
against lynching in 1903, following George White's murder in Delaware, and
in his sixth annual State of the Union message on December 4,
1906. When Roosevelt suggested that lynching was taking place in the
Philippines, southern senators (all white Democrats) demonstrated their power
by afilibuster in
1902 during review of the "Philippines Bill". In 1903 Roosevelt
refrained from commenting on lynching during his Southern political campaigns.
 |
U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, a noted anti-lynching
politician
|
Despite
concerns expressed by some northern Congressmen, Congress did not act to strip
the South of seats as the states disfranchised black voters. The result was a
"Solid
South:" as the number of representatives (apportionment)
was based on its total population, the power of white southern Democrats was
nearly doubled, as blacks were disfranchised. They gained seniority and control
of important committees.
Roosevelt
published a letter he wrote to Governor Winfield T. Durbin of Indiana in
August 1903, saying:
My Dear Governor Durbin...permit me to thank you as an
American citizen for the admirable way in which you have vindicated the majesty
of the law by your recent action in reference to lynching...All thoughtful
men...must feel the gravest alarm over the growth of lynching in this country,
and especially over the peculiarly hideous forms so often taken by mob violence
when colored men are the victims – on which occasions the mob seems to lay more
weight, not on the crime but on the color of the criminal...There are certain hideous
sights which when once seen can never be wholly erased from the mental retina.
The mere fact of having seen them implies degradation...Whoever in any part of
our country has ever taken part in lawlessly putting to death a criminal by the
dreadful torture of fire must forever after have the awful spectacle of his own
handiwork seared into his brain and soul. He can never again be the same man.[49]
Durbin had
successfully used the National Guard to disperse
lynchers. Durbin publicly declared that an African-American man accused of
murder was entitled to a fair trial. Roosevelt's efforts cost him political
support among white people, especially in the South. Threats against him
increased so that the Secret Service added to the size
of his bodyguard detail.[50]
World
War I to World War II
Resistance
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 (play) 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
women 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 Crisis and Opportunity sponsored
contests to encourage black literary production.[51]
New Klan
In 1915,
three events highlighted racial and social tensions: distribution of D.W.
Griffith's film, The Birth of a Nation; the lynching of Leo Frank,
a Jewish factory manager, in Atlanta, Georgia; and the revival of the Ku Klux
Klan near Atlanta.
 |
| The lynching of Leo Frank in Marietta, Georgia, on August 17, 1915 |
D. W.
Griffith's 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation, glorified the original Klan
as protecting southern women during Reconstruction, which he portrayed as a
time of violence and corruption, following the Dunning
School interpretation of history. The film aroused great controversy;
it was popular among whites in the South, was protested by the NAACP and other
civil rights groups, who achieved banning it in some cities; and it garnered
much national publicity.
 |
A scene from the 1915 movie, The Birth of a Nation, showing
African-American character, Gus (played by white actor, Walter Long, inblackface)
about to be killed by the Ku Klux Klan
|
In
1915, Leo
Frank, an American Jew, was lynched near Atlanta,
Georgia. Frank was convicted in 1913 for the murder of Mary Phagan, a
thirteen-year-old girl employed by his pencil factory. There were a series of
appeals, but all failed. The final appeal, was a 7-2 decision by the US Supreme Court. After
Governor John Slaton commuted Frank's sentence to life
imprisonment, a group of men, calling themselves the Knights of Mary
Phagan, kidnapped Frank from a prison farm in Milledgeville in a planned event that
included cutting the prison's telephone wires. They transported him 175 miles
back to Marietta, near Atlanta, where they lynched him in
front of a mob.
 |
A scene from the 1919
movie, Within Our Gates, showing the lynching of film
characters, Jasper Landry and his wife
|
On November
25, 1915, two months after Frank was lynched, a group led by William J. Simmons burned a cross on top
of Stone Mountain, inaugurating a revival of the Ku
Klux Klan. The event was attended by 15 charter members and a few aging
survivors of the original Klan.[52]
The Klan
grew after that due to white peoples' anxieties and fears over the rapid pace
of change, economic and social competition; it promoted itself as a fraternal
organization for whites in new urban environments. Both white and black rural
migrants were moving into rapidly industrializing cities of the South. In
addition, many Southern white and African American migrants moved north in
the Great Migration. This change
resulted in labor shortages in some of the South and added to rapid population
change in major northern and midwestern industrial cities. They were also
receiving greatly increased immigration from southern and eastern Europe. The
Klan grew rapidly and became most successful and strongest in those cities that
had a rapid pace of growth from 1910 to 1930, such as Atlanta,
Georgia; Birmingham, Alabama; Dallas,
Texas; Detroit, Michigan; Indianapolis, Indiana; Chicago,
Illinois; Portland, Oregon; and Denver,
Colorado. It reached a peak of membership and influence about 1925. In some
cities, leaders' actions to publish names of Klan members and override its
secrecy provided enough publicity to sharply reduce membership.[53]
Continuing resistance
Main
article: Tulsa Race Riot
Further
information: Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill
The NAACP
mounted a strong nationwide campaign of protests and public education against
the movie, The Birth of a Nation. As a result, some city governments
prohibited release of the film. In addition, the NAACP publicized production
and helped create audiences for the 1919 releases, The Birth of a Race and Within
Our Gates, African American directed films that presented more positive
images of blacks.
On April 1,
1918, U.S. Representative Leonidas
C. Dyer of St. Louis, Missouri, introduced the Dyer
Anti-Lynching Bill in the U.S. House of Representatives. Rep.
Dyer was concerned over increased lynching and mob violence disregard for the
"rule of law" in the South. The bill made lynching a federal crime,
and those who participated in lynching would be prosecuted by the federal
government.
In 1920, the
black community succeeded in getting its most important priority in the
Republican Party's platform at the National Convention: support for an
anti-lynching bill. The black community supportedWarren
G. Harding in that election, but were disappointed as his
administration moved slowly on a bill.[54]
Dyer revised
his bill and re-introduced it to the House in 1921. It passed the House on
January 22, 1922, due to "insistent country-wide demand",[54] and
was favorably reported out by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Action in
the Senate was delayed, and ultimately the Democratic Solid Southfilibuster defeated
the bill in the Senate in December.[55] In
1923, Dyer went on a midwestern and western state tour promoting the anti-lynching
bill; he praised the NAACP's work for continuing to publicize lynching in the
South and for supporting the federal bill. Dyer's anti-lynching motto was
"We have just begun to fight," and he helped generate additional
national support. His bill was defeated twice more in the Senate by Southern
Democratic filibuster. The Republicans were unable to pass a bill in the 1920s.[56]
African-American
resistance to lynching carried substantial risks. In 1921, in Tulsa,
Oklahoma, a group of African-American citizens attempted to stop a lynch
mob from taking 19-year-old assault suspectDick
Rowland out of jail. In a scuffle between a white man and an armed
African-American veteran, the white man was killed. Whites retaliated by
rioting, during which they burned 1,256 homes and as many as 200 businesses in
the segregated Greenwood district, destroying what
had been a thriving area. Confirmed dead were 39 people: 26 African Americans
and 13 whites. Recent investigations suggest the number of African-American
deaths may have been much higher. Rowland was saved, however, and was later
exonerated.
The growing
networks of African-American women's club groups were instrumental in raising
funds to support the NAACP public education and lobbying campaigns. They also
built community organizations. In 1922, Mary
Talbert headed the anti-lynching crusade to create an integrated
women's movement against lynching.[47] It
was affiliated with the NAACP, which mounted a multi-faceted campaign. For
years the NAACP used petition drives, letters to newspapers, articles, posters,
lobbying Congress, and marches to protest the abuses in the South and keep the
issue before the public.
While the
second KKK grew rapidly in cities undergoing major change and achieved some
political power, many state and city leaders, including white religious leaders
such as Reinhold Niebuhr inDetroit, acted
strongly and spoke out publicly against the organization. Some anti-Klan groups
published members' names and quickly reduced the energy in their efforts. As a
result, in most areas, after 1925 KKK membership and organizations rapidly
declined. Cities passed laws against wearing of masks, and otherwise acted
against the KKK.[57]
In 1930, Southern
white women responded in large numbers to the leadership of Jessie Daniel Amesin forming the Association
of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. She and her co-founders
obtained the signatures of 40,000 women to their pledge against lynching and
for a change in the South. The pledge included the statement:
In light of the facts we dare no longer to... allow those
bent upon personal revenge and savagery to commit acts of violence and
lawlessness in the name of women.
Despite
physical threats and hostile opposition, the women leaders persisted with
petition drives, letter campaigns, meetings and demonstrations to highlight the
issues.[5] By
the 1930s, the number of lynchings had dropped to about ten per year in
Southern states.
In the
1930s, communist organizations,
including a legal defense organization called the International Labor Defense (ILD),
organized support to stop lynching (see The Communist Party USA
and African Americans). The ILD defended the Scottsboro
Boys, as well as three black men accused of rape inTuscaloosa in 1933. In the Tuscaloosa
case, two defendants were lynched under circumstances that suggested police
complicity. The ILD lawyers narrowly escaped lynching. Many Southerners
resented them for their perceived "interference" in local affairs. In
a remark to an investigator, a white Tuscaloosan said, "For New York Jews
to butt in and spread communistic ideas is too much."[17]
Federal
action and southern resistance[edit]
Anti-lynching
advocates such as Mary McLeod Bethune and Walter Francis White campaigned for
presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. They
hoped he would lend public support to their efforts against lynching.
Senators Robert F. Wagner and Edward P. Costigan drafted the
Costigan-Wagner bill in 1934 to require local authorities to protect prisoners
from lynch mobs. Like the Dyer bill, it made lynching a Federal crime in order
to take it out of state administration.
Southern
Senators continued to hold a hammerlock on Congress. Because of the Southern
Democrats' disfranchisement of African Americans in Southern states at the
start of the 20th century, Southern whites for decades had nearly double the
representation in Congress beyond their own population. Southern states had
Congressional representation based on total population, but essentially only
whites could vote and only their issues were supported. Due to seniority
achieved through one-party Democratic rule in their region, Southern Democrats
controlled many important committees in both houses. Southern Democrats
consistently opposed any legislation related to putting lynching under Federal
oversight. As a result, Southern white Democrats were a formidable power in
Congress until the 1960s.
In the
1930s, virtually all Southern senators blocked the proposed Wagner-Costigan
bill. Southern senators used a filibuster to prevent a vote on the bill. Some
Republican senators, such as the conservative William
Borah from Idaho, opposed the bill for constitutional reasons. He felt it
encroached on state sovereignty and, by the 1930s, thought
that social conditions had changed so that the bill was less needed.[58] He
spoke at length in opposition to the bill in 1935 and 1938. 1934 saw 15
lynchings of African Americans with 21 lynchings in 1935, 8 in 1936, and 2 in
1939.
A lynching
in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, changed the
political climate in Washington.[59] On
July 19, 1935, Rubin Stacy, a homeless African-American tenant farmer, knocked
on doors begging for food. After resident complaints, deputies took Stacy into
custody. While he was in custody, a lynch mob took Stacy from the deputies and
murdered him. Although the faces of his murderers could be seen in a photo
taken at the lynching site, the state did not prosecute the murder.[60]
Stacy's
murder galvanized anti-lynching activists, but President Roosevelt did not
support the federal anti-lynching bill. He feared that support would cost him
Southern votes in the 1936 election. He believed that he
could accomplish more for more people by getting re-elected.
In 1939,
Roosevelt created the Civil Rights
Section of the Justice Department. It started
prosecutions to combat lynching, but failed to win any convictions until 1946.[61] Second great migration
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States
Comments
Post a Comment