1. Wells makes her case by showing both sides of the events that lead to and happened during the lynching’s. “Truth is mighty and will prevail” (1) is the motto of their cause to stop the lynching. Because Wells gives the claims made during the times it gives the readers a sense of what’s actually happening and why, but when she finally includes the detectives findings it is shown that the actions taken by whites were taken hastily and without justice. The true will prevail is their motto because now that they have this information published, the hope is that the people who performed and participated in the lynching’s will be punished accordingly for their actions. 2. Sam Hose; or originally known as Samuel Wilkes, was lynched on April 23rd at 2:30pm in Newman, GA. Wilkes was burned alive on the stake in front of nearly 2,000 …show more content…
“E. D. Sharkey…was one of the most persistent advocates of the burning” (15). Le Vin made it a point to decried the claims made by Sharkey and then showed that those claims didn’t match the actual accounts of that day. Knowing they didn’t match Sharkey still told the story and pushed for the lynching of Wilkes. 7. The accounts given by the detective match fairly well to the accounts given in the newspaper. However the major difference noticed was the shooting of the nine black men. In the newspaper counts of the night, the mob single handedly checked the black men to ensure they were all dead when in the end they only missed one, where as in the detective’s findings this particular event didn’t happen. The mob shot off three round and hastily left the scene and the participants were never discovered. 8. The gruesome and horrifying details of the lynching’s are meant to affect the reader by making them feel as if they are really there watching it happen. This is to make the reader see how horrible these events truly were. By making the reader feel this way, it was hoped that they would reevaluate how things are being handled in
...ther than reciting facts of the documentation, he makes the city of Chicago come alive in a way that many could not accomplish. Throughout the book it was told with abundant cross-cutting and foreshadowing. It wasn’t until after the fair when people began to realize just how many people have simply vanished during the fair. The numbers were astounding. The big question was, were the missing people during that time connected with Dr. Holmes and his killings. Many people assumed it was him because this man was a serial killer with epic proportions. After years have passed, a detective was given the assignment to uncover the truth behind Holmes and what motivated him and his psychopathic mind. The information he found was shocking. In the end it seems to tell a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black.
When the public heard of the crime, the police perilously needed someone to blame. If a slayer of the 14-year old Mary Phagan were not found soon, public uproar would become uncontrollable. The public needed a victim to blame for the murder of a young white girl. Conditions in Atlanta were favorable for an outburst against the killer of an innocent soul, especially if the accused murder was non-Anglo- Saxon.
Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America by Laura Wexler, Scribner, January 13, 2004 288pp
The purpose of this essay is to compare three very similar cases, the Scottsboro Trials, Brown v. Mississippi, and the fictional trial of Tom Robinson in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird; and to prove why the defendant of the third trial never had a chance. Each took place in the rural South in the 1920’s and 30’s and involved the unfair conviction of young black males by all-white juries pressured by the threat of mob violence. Each lacked the evidence sufficient for conviction, most especially for the death penalty. Last, heroes emerged from each trial and made small but solid steps towards equal justice for all.
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
Lives were lost based on claims that were never found to be completely accurate. The author’s speak about how Hoke Smith, who was running for President at the time, used his power and raised tensions among Whites and Blacks. His power was superior and he was able to use it to sway and impact the newspapers into releasing certain stories. Smith wanted Blacks to stay stagnant and didn’t want them becoming too smart or powerful. Hoke created and initiated Jim Crow laws that were known to support and encourage the separation and exclusion of Blacks. He did this by ensuring literacy tests that were meant to discourage Blacks from prospering and gaining rights. The author’s said “The eventual winner, race-baiting Hoke Smith, might have conspired with ruffians who masqueraded as blacks and assaulted white girls, while Atlanta editors published unsubstantiated accounts of black beasts raping white women.” “739:52”. Editors and writers didn’t bother to investigate or confirm if these allegations were true. Since this was the early 1900’s most people were for the idea of Blacks being inferior to Whites and Whites being superior. They also didn’t care to hear whether of not Blacks were right or
The incident, now known as The Lynching at the Curve, was the spark which shifted her career into investigative journalism. She went on to investigate the cause of lynchings throughout the country, despite the great risk it made to her life. In that same year, she published a pamphlet titled, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. In 1894, she published a more detailed continuation of her studies in a pamphlet titled, A Red Record, 1892–1894. Both pamphlets were key in disproving the major accepted and given reasons for lynching, which were that black men were raping white women. Wells found that the majority of the relationships were consensual and unveiled a system of sexualized racism in the South (Schechter). In reaction to her anti-lynching writings, several threats were made to her life if she was to ever return to Memphis. Shortly after, her newspaper office in Memphis was destroyed (Jim Crow Stories, PBS).
As a reader I understand the form and the roles in this novel. The Symbolism of lynching is the practice of representing thins and attributing symbolic meanings or any significance to many different relations, situations, and events that can be taking place. A literal form in lynching is being in accordance with conforming, and stating the obvious in any giving situation. Literal can be expressed, which is what this novel represents. Between the FBI`s attempt at caring on all lynching, and having federal government cases which was represented by the civil rights. In the novel it reads “I did everything I could to try to find out who was in the lynching,” says Mattie Louise. Mattie Louise was a sweet hearted woman who wanted peace. Also in the novel she also says “You got to forgive”. (240) Despite the strategies you have to forgive and move on with your life even if something is solved or unsolved. Also it is pursing you to live life to every extent because you never know what might take place at any giving day. Why would you live your life unhappy? The lynching in the South was definitely remembered, although the civil rights legislators were held responsible for the ongoing lynching and torturing, there could possibly be a solution. Laura Wexler proved that she could at least make a difference in justice and creating a healing
Ida B. Wells felt that the white should be considered as rapist more than blacks. One excuse that whites use to justify lynch campaigns were that blacks raped their women or wives, which in some cases were not true. For instance, on page 54, it explains that on January 16, 1982 a white woman of highest respectability accused an African American man of raping her. So, with Mrs. Underwood testimony, they placed the man in the penitentiary, not knowing that in a few years she would confess that he was innocent.
The case of Mississippi Burning dealt with the incident of three Mississippi Summer Project Volunteers disappearance: Andrew Goodman, 20, Michael Schwerner, 24, also called “Goatee” or “Jew-Boy “by the KKK, , and James Chaney, 21. These young men were shot and killed on a road in Neshoba County because of their active involvement in fighting for African American civil rights and their voting rights. Neshoba County of Longdale had a reputation for “being hard on the blacks” (www.core-online.org). Lawrence Rainey, Neshoba County Sheriff, and his deputy, Cecil Price, were both members of the KKK. They initiated Plan 4 to do away with Michael Schwerner on Memorial Day and any other activists, so along with thirty men armed with shotguns they showed up to Mount Zion Church to kill him. They were unsuccessful as they did ...
in an apparent effort to avoid prostitution charges, claimed that they had been raped by the black youths and these accusations nearly led to a lynching in Scottsboro, where the youths had been jailed” (Jones Ross). The trails and appeals of these youth gained national attention throughout the 1930’s and, at one point, all but one of the young men was sentenced to death in the Alabama electric chair.
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
Zangrando, Robert L., John F Callahan and Dickson D Bruce. About Lynching. 2013. 16 April 2014 .
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...