Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
The influence of African slaves on America
The influence of African slaves on America
Influences of slavery
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Lynching was a widespread and profound phenomenon that obliterated the African American populace of the southern states throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lynching was both physically cataclysmic, and psychologically calamitous. Lynching generated a level of fear and horror that surpassed that of all other forms of violence that the African American population had endured. Lynching was a gruesome spectacle that assumed tremendous symbolic power as a result of its physically and visually sensational and performative nature. Lynchings were often witness by thousands of white spectators, with tales of torture, hanging, mutilation and burning consequently reverberating swiftly around the region, further intensifying the fear associated
“Hellhounds” in the Trouble in Mind by Leon Litwack: In this reading the author graphically describes lynching as punishment and deterrence for “high-falutin’” blacks. In page 292, distinctions were drawn between a “good” and “bad” lynching – depending on who executed the sentence and the atmosphere of the punishment.
One of the most appalling practices in history, lynching — the extrajudicial hanging of a person accused of a crime — was commonplace in American society less than 100 years ago. The word often conjures up horrifying images of African Americans hanging from lampposts or trees. However, what many do not know is that while African Americans certainly suffered enormously at the hands of a white majority, they were not the only victims of this practice. In fact, the victims of the largest mass lynching in American history were Chinese (Johnson). On October 24th, 1871, a white mob stormed into the Chinatown of Los Angeles.
Interestingly, the book does not focus solely on the Georgia lynching, but delves into the actual study of the word lynching which was coined by legendary judge Charles B Lynch of Virginia to indicate extra-legal justice meted out to those in the frontier where the rule of law was largely absent. In fact, Wexler continues to analyse how the term lynching began to be used to describe mob violence in the 19th century, when the victim was deemed to have been guilty before being tried by due process in a court of law.
By the end of the 19th century, lynching was clearly the most notorious and feared means of depriving Bl...
Wexler, Laura. 2003. Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America. Scribner; 2004. Print
Zimring first examines the relationship between past lynchings and modern executions. At the regional level he shows past lynchings were most concentrated in the western and southern regions that currently execute the most people. Zimring then explores if this link holds at the state level. He shows that it does, modern executions are highly concentrated in states with histories of high lynching rates and states with historically low levels of lynchings had lower levels of modern executions.
Emancipated blacks, after the Civil War, continued to live in fear of lynching, a practice of vigilantism that was often based on false accusations. Lynching was not only a way for southern white men to exert racist “justice,” it was also a means of keeping women, white and black, under the control of a violent white male ideology. In response to the injustices of lynching, the anti-lynching movement was established—a campaign in which women played a key role. Ida B. Wells, a black teacher and journalist was at the forefront and early development of this movement. In 1892 Wells was one of the first news reporters to bring the truths of lynching to proper media attention. Her first articles appeared in The Free Speech and Headlight, a Memphis newspaper that she co-edited. She urged the black townspeople of Memphis to move west and to resist the coercive violence of lynching. [1] Her early articles were collected in Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, a widely distributed pamphlet that exposed the innocence of many victims of lynching and attacked the leaders of white southern communities for allowing such atrocities. [2] In 1895 Wells published a larger investigative report, A Red Record, which exposed how false or contrived accusations of rape accompanied less than one third of the cases documented around 1892. [3] The statistics and literature of A Red Record denounced the dominant white male ideology behind lynching – the thought that white womanhood was in need of protection against black men. Wells challenged this notion as a concealed racist agenda that functioned to keep white men in power over blacks as well as white women. Jacqueline Jones Royster documents the...
Although abolition of slavery in the South coincided with the conclusion of the Civil War, a century of institutionalized racism was widespread in the former Confederacy. This institutionalized racism came in the form of the Jim Crow laws. It was a social norm to look at African Americans as inferior or even harmful to the White population. Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan roamed around "defending" the white population from the African Americans. This defense came in the form of public executions (lynching) or intimidation.
...dation and violence, including lynching, were an ever-present danger. Northern African Americans were not unaffected and suffered the same widespread discrimination and school and residential segregation.
Slavery in the eighteenth century was worst for African Americans. Observers of slaves suggested that slave characteristics like: clumsiness, untidiness, littleness, destructiveness, and inability to learn the white people were “better.” Despite white society's belief that slaves were nothing more than laborers when in fact they were a part of an elaborate and well defined social structure that gave them identity and sustained them in their silent protest.
The laws known as “Jim Crow” were laws presented to basically establish racial apartheid in the United States. These laws were more than in effect for “for three centuries of a century beginning in the 1800s” according to a Jim Crow Law article on PBS. Many try to say these laws didn’t have that big of an effect on African American lives but in affected almost everything in their daily life from segregation of things: such as schools, parks, restrooms, libraries, bus seatings, and also restaurants. The government got away with this because of the legal theory “separate but equal” but none of the blacks establishments were to the same standards of the whites. Signs that read “Whites Only” and “Colored” were seen at places all arounds cities.
Southern Horror s: Lynch Law in All Its Phases by Ida B. Wells took me on a journey through our nations violent past. This book voices how strong the practice of lynching is sewn into the fabric of America and expresses the elevated severity of this issue; she also includes pages of graphic stories detailing lynching in the South. Wells examined the many cases of lynching based on “rape of white women” and concluded that rape was just an excuse to shadow white’s real reasons for this type of execution. It was black’s economic progress that threatened white’s ideas about black inferiority. In the South Reconstruction laws often conflicted with real Southern racism. Before I give it to you straight, let me take you on a journey through Ida’s
Part of the aftermath of lynching in the South was the psychological consequences on the rabbles involved. The entire culture of African Americans is marked by lynching because the root reason of why white mobs lynched Southern African Americans was skin pigmentation. This means the blacks were lynched based on ignorant intolerance; however, the supposed basis for the white southerners’ hatred is internalized by every black person in their skin color. In the words of Lee H. Butler, Jr., “Unlike a single traumatic event that has been experienced by one person, lynching is a trauma that has marked an entire culture and several generations because it spanned more than eight decades.”
Lynching, which occurred most frequently in the southern states, resulted in the hanging, mutilation, and death of many blacks at the hands of a powerful white ruling class. While lynchings of this type have not occurred as frequently as in previous decades, it has morphed into a new form, a form that is arguably just as devastating. Instead of unjustly prosecuting blacks, this new form of lynching targets celebrities and politicians and media to accomplish what is commonly referred to as “hi-tech lynching”. The job of the media is to relay information to a general public.