Lynching has been a serious case in the history of America. What does lynching mean? Lynching means an illegal execution of someone who is accused by a jury. Dating back to the early 1600s, lynching cases were rapidly spreading and can be traced throughout the years. John Billington was one of the first victims of lynching. Billington was lynched in the year 1630 when the pilgrims he was with at Plymouth Rock accused him of “blasphemous harangues.” As years went on lynching became a punishment towards people of a different race and ethnicity. During the 19th century racial tension was on the rise throughout America, especially in the southern parts. Between the years 1882 and 1968 there has been a total of 4,743 lynching, 3,446 of them were …show more content…
Due to the past history of racial tension and lynching, black journalist and activist associate lynching with white on black violence. If you google “lynchings today,” the top five links are about black people being lynched. Today America has practiced using new and old ways of lynching. In the 21st century people are still be lynched for crimes they committed. Hate crimes involving lynching have died down a lot since the 20th century and so has the activity of the notorious Ku Klux Klan. Lynching was a punishment system designed to prevent a rape culture from spreading and help protect white women from being raped. However, over the years this punishment formed into a racial tension that increased as years went by. During the 20th century black activists and journalist such as Ida B. Wells documented every lynching in the United States to show the people what is happening behind closed curtains in the south. Wells stressed the importance of recording these numbers into something called “Lynch Law.” In this documentation Wells numbers the amount of black people being lynched in different states. You can tell the difference in demographic areas were lynching occurred more frequently; while New York only had 1, Tennessee had 28. The numbers vary from state to state, based on where they were located on the map. Wells’ “Lynch Law,” shows that the further down south you go the more frequent lynchings happen toward black
C. Vann Woodward’s most famous work, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, was written in 1955. It chronicles the birth, formation, and end of Jim Crow laws in the Southern states. Often, the Jim Crow laws are portrayed as having been instituted directly after the Civil War’s end, and having been solely a Southern brainchild. However, as Woodward, a native of Arkansas points out, the segregationist Jim Crow laws and policies were not fully a part of the culture until almost 1900. Because of the years of lag between the Civil War/Reconstruction eras and the integration and popularity of the Jim Crow laws, Woodward advances that these policies were not a normal reaction to the loss of the war by Southern whites, but a result of other impetuses central to the time of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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
White northerners were being bombarded with propaganda involving black men uncontrollably lusting after white women; they believed that the savages wanted to taint white purity. This was sometimes called the, “new Negro crime” (Bederman p.46), starting around the late 1880’s. Contrary to popular belief around this time, the number of these types of rapes stayed that same and may have possibly gone down. Since rapes clearly weren’t the driving force behind the Southern lynching, historians accredit it to a multitude of different reasons; Bederman says they are, “Populism, economic depression, the uncertainty of a new market economy, and Southern politics” (p. 47). What does this boil down to?
In 1860-1960 there was lynching in the United States. When the confederates (south) lost the civil war the slaves got freedom and got rights of human beings. This was just to say because segregation wasn 't over in the South and didn 't go away for over 100 years. Any black person in the South accused but not convicted of any crime of looking at a white woman, whistling at a white woman, touching a white woman, talking back to a white person, refusing to step into the gutter when a white person passed on the sidewalk, or in some way upsetting the local people was liable to be dragged from their house or jail cell by lots of people crowds, mutilated in a terrible
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.
Moores Ford Lynching On July 25, 1946, two young black couples- Roger and Dorothy Malcom, George and Mae Murray Dorsey-were killed by a lynch mob at the Moore's Ford Bridge over the Appalachee River connecting Walton and Oconee Counties (Brooks, 1). The four victims were tied up and shot hundreds of times in broad daylight by a mob of unmasked men; murder weapons included rifles, shotguns, pistols, and a machine gun. "Shooting a black person was like shooting a deer," George Dorsey's nephew, George Washington Dorsey said (Suggs C1). It has been over fifty years and this case is still unsolved by police investigators.
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 stereotypes of this popular white belief in an analysis of Wells’ reports.... ... middle of paper ... ...]” http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lynching/lynching.htm>. [3] Tabulating the statistics for lynchings in 1893, [in A Red Record] Wells demonstrated that less than a third of the victims were even accused of rape or attempted a rape.. http://www.alexanderstreet6.com/wasm/wasmrestricted/aswpl/doc4.htm> 4 Royster.
C. Vann Woodward’s book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, has been hailed as a book which shaped our views of the history of the Civil Rights Movement and of the American South. Martin Luther King, Jr. described the book as “the historical Bible of the civil rights movement.” The argument presented in The Strange Career of Jim Crow is that the Jim Crow laws were relatively new introductions to the South that occurred towards the turn of the century rather than immediately after the end of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Woodward examines personal accounts, opinions, and editorials from the eras as well as the laws in place at the times. He examines the political history behind the emergence of the Jim Crow laws. The Strange Career of Jim Crow gives a new insight into the history of the American South and the Civil Rights Movement.
The Jim Crow era was a racial status system used primarily in the south between the years of 1877 and the mid 1960’s. Jim Crow was a series of anti-black rules and conditions that were never right. The social conditions and legal discrimination of the Jim Crow era denied African Americans democratic rights and freedoms frequently. There were numerous ways in which African Americans were denied social and political equality under Jim Crow. Along with that, lynching occurred quite frequently, thousands being done over the era.
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.
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.”