Lynching in the United States
Lynchings followed African Americans with the Great Migration (c. 1916–1970) out of the American South, and were often perpetrated to enforce white supremacy and intimidate ethnic minorities along with other acts of racial terrorism.[5] A significant number of lynching victims were accused of murder or attempted murder. Rape, attempted rape, or other forms of sexual assault were the second most common accusation; these accusations were often used as a pretext for lynching African Americans who were accused of violating Jim Crow era etiquette or engaged in economic competition with Whites. One study found that there were "4,467 total victims of lynching from 1883 to 1941. Of these victims, 4,027 were men, 99 were women, and 341 were of unidentified gender (although likely male); 3,265 were Black, 1,082 were white, 71 were Mexican or of Mexican descent, 38 were American Indian, 10 were Chinese, and 1 was Japanese."[6]
A common perception of lynchings in the U.S. is that they were only hangings, due to the public visibility of the location, which made it easier for photographers to photograph the victims. Some lynchings were professionally photographed and then the photos were sold as postcards, which became popular souvenirs in parts of the United States. Lynching victims were also killed in a variety of other ways: being shot, burned alive, thrown off a bridge, dragged behind a car, etc. Occasionally, the body parts of the victims were removed and sold as souvenirs. Lynchings were not always fatal; "mock" lynchings, which involved putting a rope around the neck of someone who was suspected of concealing information, was sometimes used to compel people to make "confessions". Lynch mobs varied in size from just a few to thousands.
Lynching steadily increased after the Civil War, peaking in 1892. Lynchings remained common into the early 1900s, accelerating with the emergence of the
Background
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.[7] 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.[8]
At the first recorded lynching, in
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". Pfeifer also cited "the modern, racialized excesses of urban police forces in the twentieth century and after" as bearing characteristics of lynchings.[10]
Lynching as a means to maintain white supremacy
Lines of continuity from slavery to present
A major motive for lynchings, particularly in the South, was white society's efforts to maintain white supremacy after the emancipation of enslaved people following the American Civil War. Lynchings 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. A 2017 paper found that more racially segregated counties were more likely to be places where Whites conducted lynchings.[11]
Lynchings emphasized the new social order which was constructed under Jim Crow; Whites acted together, reinforcing their collective identity along with the unequal status of Blacks through these group acts of violence.[12]
Lynchings were also (in part) intended as a voter suppression tool. A 2019 study found that lynchings occurred more frequently in proximity to elections, in particular in areas where the Democratic Party faced challenges.[13]
According to historian Ty Seidule, lynchings as a tool to "ensure racial control effectively"[14] was replaced by the death penalty.[15]
According to historian Michael J. Pfeifer, "the modern, racialized excesses of urban police forces in the twentieth century and after" bear characteristics of lynchings.[16]
Tuskegee definition
Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University, defined conditions that constituted a recognized lynching, a definition which became generally accepted by other compilers of the era:
1. There must be legal evidence that a person was killed.
2. That person must have met death illegally.
3. A group of three or more persons must have participated in the killing.
4. The group must have acted under the pretext of service to justice, race, or tradition.[17][18]
Statistics
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
Based on the source, the numbers vary depending on the sources which are cited, the years which are considered by those sources, and the definitions which 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.[21] 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.[22][2][23]
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.[18] 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. 1882 to 1901 saw the highest period of lynchings, with an average of over 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.[24][25][26] 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.[27] There were measurable variations in lynching rates between and within states.[28]
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 |
According to the Tuskegee Institute, 38% of victims of lynching were accused of murder, 16% of rape, 7% for attempted rape, 6% were accused of felonious assault, 7% for theft, 2% for insult to white people, and 24% were accused of miscellaneous offenses or no offense.[27] In 1940, sociologist Arthur F. Raper investigated one hundred lynchings after 1929 and estimated that approximately one-third of the victims were falsely accused.[27]
Tuskegee Institute's method of categorizing most lynching victims as either Black or white in publications and data summaries meant that the murders of some minority and immigrant groups were obscured. In the West, for instance, Mexican, Native Americans, and Chinese were more frequent targets of lynchings than were African Americans, but their deaths were included among those of other Whites. Similarly, although Italian immigrants were the focus of violence in Louisiana when they started arriving in greater numbers, their deaths were not tabulated separately from Whites. In earlier years, Whites who were subject to lynching were often targeted because of suspected political activities or support of freedmen, but they were generally considered members of the community in a way new immigrants were not.[29]
Other victims included white immigrants, and, in the Southwest,
There were also Black-on-Black lynchings, with 125 recorded between 1882 and 1903, and there were four incidences of Whites being killed by Black mobs. The rate of Black-on-Black lynchings rose and fell in similar pattern of overall lynchings. There were also over 200 cases of white-on-white lynchings in the South before 1930.[26]
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."[31]
Reconstruction (1865–1877)
After the American Civil War, southern Whites struggled to maintain their dominance. Secret vigilante and terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) instigated extrajudicial assaults and killings in order to discourage freedmen from voting, working, and getting educated.[33][34][35][36][37][38][39] They also sometimes attacked Northerners, teachers, and agents of the Freedmen's Bureau. The magnitude of the extralegal violence which occurred during election campaigns reached epidemic proportions, leading the historian William Gillette to label it "guerrilla warfare",[33][34][35][36][37] and historian Thomas E. Smith to understand it as a form of "colonial violence".[40]
The lynchers sometimes murdered their victims, but sometimes whipped or physically assaulted them to remind them of their former status as slaves.[41] Often night-time raids of African American homes were made 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.
Journalist, educator, and civil rights leader, Ida B. Wells commented in an 1892 pamphlet she published called Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases that, "The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense."[42] A study published in August 2022 by researchers from Clemson University has stated that, "...rates of Black lynching decreased with greater Black firearm access..."[43]
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.[44] The campaign of terror worked. In Yazoo 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.[44]
Jim Crow era
Lynching attacks on African Americans, especially in the
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.[47] 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 the 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.[53]
Henry Smith, an 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.[54] 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.[55] 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.[54]
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".[56]
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 were 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.[further explanation needed][57]
In 1903, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported a new, popular make-believe children's game: "The Game of Lynching". "Imaginary mayor gives order not to harm imaginary mob, and an imaginary hanging follows. Fire contributes realistic touch." "It has crowded out baseball", and if it continues, "may deprive of some of its prestige the game of football".[58]
The new Ku Klux Klan
D. W. Griffith's 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation, glorified the original Ku Klux Klan as protecting white southern women during Reconstruction, which he portrayed as a time of violence and corruption, following the Dunning School's interpretation of history. The film aroused great controversy. It was popular among Whites nationwide, but it was protested against by Black activists, the NAACP and other civil rights groups.[59][60]
On November 25, 1915, a group of men led by William J. Simmons burned a cross on top of Stone Mountain, inaugurating the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. The event was attended by 15 charter members and a few aging former members of the original Klan.[61]
The Klan and their use of lynching was supported by some public officials like John Trotwood Moore, the State Librarian and Archivist of Tennessee from 1919 to 1929.[62] Moore "became one of the South's more strident advocates of lynching".[62]
1919 was one of the worst years for lynching with at least seventy-six people killed in mob or vigilante related violence. Of these, more than eleven African American veterans who had served in the recently completed war were
The NAACP mounted a strong nationwide campaign of protests and public education against The Birth of a Nation. As a result, some city governments prohibited the 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.
During and after the Great Depression
While the frequency of lynching dropped in the 1930s, there was a spike in 1930 during the Great Depression. For example, in North Texas and southern Oklahoma alone, four people were lynched in separate incidents in less than a month. A spike in lynchings occurred after World War II, as tensions arose after veterans returned home. White people tried to re-impose white supremacy over returning Black veterans. The last documented mass lynching occurred in Walton County, Georgia, in 1946, when local white landowners killed two war veterans and their wives.
Soviet media frequently covered racial discrimination in the U.S.[64] Deeming American criticism of Soviet Union human rights abuses at this time as hypocrisy, the Russians responded with "And you are lynching Negroes".[65] In Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (2001), the historian Mary L. Dudziak wrote that Soviet communist criticism of racial discrimination and violence in the United States influenced the federal government to support civil rights legislation.[66]
Most lynchings ceased by the 1960s.[21][67] However, in 2021 there were claims that racist lynchings still happen in the United States, being covered up as suicides.[68]
Justifications of lynchings
Part of a series on the |
Nadir of American race relations |
---|
Opponents of legislation often said lynchings prevented murder and rape. As documented by Ida B. Wells, the most prevalent accusation against lynching victims was murder or attempted murder. Rape charges or rumors were present in less than one-third of the lynchings; such charges were often pretexts for lynching Blacks who violated Jim Crow etiquette or engaged in economic competition with Whites. Other common reasons given included arson, theft, assault, and robbery; sexual transgressions (miscegenation, adultery, cohabitation); "race prejudice", "race hatred", "racial disturbance"; informing on others; "threats against whites"; and violations of the color line ("attending white girl", "proposals to white woman").[69]
Although the rhetoric which surrounded lynchings frequently suggested that they were carried out in order 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.[20]
Mobs usually alleged crimes for which they lynched Black people. In the late 19th century, however, journalist Ida B. Wells showed that many presumed crimes were either exaggerated or had not even occurred.[70]
The ideology behind lynching, directly connected to the denial of political and social equality, was stated forthrightly in 1900 by United States Senator Benjamin Tillman, who was previously governor of South Carolina:
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.[71][72]
Lynchings declined briefly after White supremacists, the so-called "
Members of mobs that participated in lynchings often took photographs of what they had done to their victims in order to spread awareness and fear of their power. Souvenir taking, such as pieces of rope, clothing, branches, and sometimes body parts was not uncommon. Some of those photographs were published and sold as postcards. In 2000, James Allen published a collection of 145 lynching photos in book form as well as online,[81] with written words and video to accompany the images.
The murders reflected the tensions of labor and social changes, as the Whites imposed
In the Mississippi Delta region
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.[52] Both Whites and Blacks migrated there for a chance to buy land in the backcountry. It was frontier wilderness, heavily forested and without roads for years.[52] Before the start of the 20th century, lynchings often took the form of frontier justice directed at transient workers as well as residents.[52] Thousands of workers were brought in by planters to do lumbering and work on levees.[citation needed]
Whites accounted for just over 12 percent of the Delta region's population, but made up nearly 17 percent of lynching victims. So, in this region, they were lynched at a rate that was over 35 percent higher than their proportion in the population, primarily due to being accused of crimes against property (chiefly theft). Conversely, Blacks were lynched at a rate, in the Delta, lesser than their proportion of the population. This was unlike the rest of the South, where Blacks comprised the majority of lynching victims. In the Delta, they were most often accused of murder or attempted murder, in half the cases, and 15 percent of the time, they were accused of rape, meaning that another 15 percent of the time they were accused of a combination of rape and murder, or rape and attempted murder.[52]
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."[52] 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."[82]
Other ethnicities
According to the Tuskegee Institute, of the 4,743 people lynched between 1882 and 1968, 1,297 were listed as "white". The Tuskegee Institute, which kept the most complete records, documented victims internally as "Negro", "white", "Chinese", and occasionally as "Mexican" or "Indian", but merged these into only two categories of Black or white in the tallies it published. Mexican, Chinese, and Native American lynching victims were tallied as white. Particularly in the West, minorities such as Chinese, Native Americans, Mexicans, and others 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 the treatment of African Americans in the South.[25][29][83]
In modern scholarship, researchers estimate that 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.[29]
After their increased immigration to the U.S. in the late 19th century,
On February 21, 1909,
In 1915,
After the lynching of Leo Frank, around half of Georgia's 3,000 Jews left the state.
Between the 1830s and 1850s, the majority of those lynched were Whites. More Whites were lynched than Blacks for the years 1882–1885. By 1890s, the number of Blacks lynched yearly grew to a number significantly more than that of Whites, and the vast majority of victims were Black from then on. White people were mostly lynched in the Western states and territories, although there were over 200 cases in the South. According to the Tuskegee Institute, in 1884 near Georgetown, Colorado, there was one instance of 17 "unknown white men" being hanged as cattle thieves in a single day. In the West, lynchings were often done to establish law and order.[21][20][26]
Spectacle lynching and racist memorabilia
Lynching was often treated as a spectator sport, where large crowds gathered to partake in or watch the torture and mutilation of the victim(s). The attendants often treated these as festive events, with food, family photos, and souvenirs.[88] Whites used these events to demonstrate their power and control. This often led to the exodus of the remaining Black population and discouraged future settlement.[89]
In the post–Reconstruction era, lynching photographs were printed for various purposes, including postcards, newspapers, and event mementos.[90] 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.[91] The 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas, drew nearly 15,000 spectators.[90] Often lynchings were advertised in newspapers prior to the event in order to give photographers time to arrive early and prepare their camera equipment.[92]
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
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.[93]
After the lynching, photographers would sell their pictures as-is or as postcards, sometimes costing as much as fifty cents a piece, or $9, as of 2016.[91] 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.[92] 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."[95] Such postcards with explicit rhetoric such as "Dogwood Tree" were typically circulated privately or mailed in a sealed envelope.[96] Other times these pictures simply included the word "WARNING".[92]
In 1873, the Comstock Act was passed, which banned the publication of "obscene matter as well as its circulation in the mails".[92] In 1908, Section 3893 was added to the Comstock Act, stating that the ban included material "tending to incite arson, murder, or assassination".[92] 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".[92] Some towns imposed "self-censorship" on lynching photographs, but section 3893 was the first step towards a national censorship.[92] 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.[96]
Resistance
African American resistance
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
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.[100]
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.[101]
In 1892, journalist
In 1898,
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.[102]
In 1904,
African American resistance to lynching carried substantial risks. In 1921, in
The growing networks of African American women's club groups were instrumental in raising funds to support the NAACP's public education and lobbying campaigns. They also built community organizations. In 1922,
A 2022 study found that African American communities that had increased access to firearms were less likely to be lynched. The study authors write, "In states and years in which Black residents had more access to firearms, there were fewer lynchings... In all three estimation strategy variants, the estimated negative effect of Black firearm access on lynchings is quite large and statistically significant. An increase of one standard deviation in firearm access, for example, is associated with a reduction in lynchings of between 0.8 and 1.4 per year, about half a standard deviation."[107]
Resistance by Southern white women
In 1930, Southern white women responded in large numbers to the leadership of Jessie Daniel Ames in 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.[98] By the 1930s, the number of lynchings had dropped to about ten per year in Southern states.
Religious Leaders
Cardinal
Great Migration
The rapid influx of Blacks during the Great Migration disturbed the racial balance within Northern cities, exacerbating hostility between Black and white Northerners. The Red Summer of 1919 was marked by hundreds of deaths and higher casualties across the U.S. as a result of race riots that occurred in more than three dozen cities, such as the Chicago race riot of 1919 and the Omaha race riot of 1919.[109]
Federal legislation inhibited by the Solid South
In 1900, as the
From 1896 until 1900, the House of Representatives with a Republican majority had acted in more than thirty cases to set aside election results from Southern states where the House Elections Committee had concluded that "[B]lack voters had been excluded due to fraud, violence, or intimidation". However, in the early 1900s, it began to back off, after Democrats won a majority, which included Southern delegations that were solidly in Democratic hands.
President Theodore Roosevelt made public statements against lynching in 1903, following George White's murder in Delaware, and in the 1906 State of the Union Address on December 4, 1906. When Roosevelt suggested that lynching was taking place in the Philippines, Southern senators (all white Democrats) demonstrated their power by a filibuster in 1902 during review of the "Philippines Bill". In 1903, Roosevelt refrained from commenting on lynching during his Southern political campaigns.
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.[111]
From 1882 to 1968, "nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress, and three of them passed the House. Seven presidents between 1890 and 1952 petitioned Congress to pass a federal law."[112] None succeeded in gaining passage, blocked by the Solid South—the delegation of powerful white Southerners in the Senate, which controlled, due to seniority, the powerful committee chairmanships.[112] In 2005, by a resolution sponsored by senators Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and George Allen of Virginia, and passed by voice vote, the Senate made a formal apology for its failure to pass an anti-lynching law "when it was most needed".[112]
Dyer Bill
The
The bill was passed by the
As passed by the House, the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill stated:
"To assure to persons within the jurisdiction of every State the equal protection of the laws, and to punish the crime of lynching.... Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the phrase 'mob or riotous assemblage,' when used in this act, shall mean an assemblage composed of three or more persons acting in concert for the purpose of depriving any person of his life without authority of law as a punishment for or to prevent the commission of some actual or supposed public offense."[115]
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 supported Warren G. Harding in that election, but were disappointed as his administration moved slowly on a bill.[116]
Dyer revised his bill and re-introduced it to the House in 1921. It passed the House, 230 to 119,
Roosevelt presidency
Anti-lynching advocates such as
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. As a result, Southern white Democrats were a formidable power in Congress until the 1960s and they consistently opposed any legislation related to putting lynching under Federal oversight.
In the 1930s, virtually all Southern senators blocked the proposed Costigan–Wagner 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 had also opposed the Dyer Bill). He felt it encroached on state sovereignty and, by the 1930s, thought that social conditions had changed so that the bill was less needed.[120] 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.[121] 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.[122]
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.
In 1937, the lynching of Roosevelt Townes and Robert McDaniels gained national publicity, and its brutality was widely condemned.[123] Such publicity enabled Joseph A. Gavagan (D-New York) to gain support for anti-lynching legislation he had put forward in the House of Representatives; it was supported in the Senate by Democrats Robert F. Wagner (New York) and Frederick Van Nuys (Indiana). The legislation eventually passed in the House, but the Solid South of white Democrats blocked it in the Senate.[124][125] Senator Allen Ellender (D-Louisiana) proclaimed: "We shall at all cost preserve the white supremacy of America."[126]
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.[127]
Cold War period
In 1946, the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department gained its first conviction under federal civil rights laws against a lyncher. Florida constable Tom Crews was sentenced to a $1,000 fine (equivalent to $15,000 in 2022) and one year in prison for civil rights violations in the killing of an African-American farm worker.
In 1946, a mob of white men shot and killed two young African American couples near Moore's Ford Bridge in Walton County, Georgia, 60 miles east of Atlanta. This lynching of four young sharecroppers, one a World War II veteran, shocked the nation. The attack was a key factor in President Harry S. Truman's making civil rights a priority of his administration. Although the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated the crime, they were unable to prosecute. It was the last documented lynching of so many people in one incident.[127]
In 1947, the Truman administration published a report entitled To Secure These Rights which advocated making lynching a federal crime, abolishing poll taxes, and other civil rights reforms. The Southern Democratic bloc of senators and congressmen continued to obstruct attempts at federal legislation.[128]
In the 1940s, the Klan openly criticized Truman for his efforts to promote civil rights. Later historians documented that Truman had briefly made an attempt to join the Klan as a young man in 1924, when it was near its peak of social influence in promoting itself as a fraternal organization. When a Klan officer demanded that Truman pledge not to hire any Catholics if he were re-elected as county judge, Truman refused. He personally knew their worth from his World War I experience. His membership fee was returned and he never joined the Klan.[129]
International media, including the media in the Soviet Union, covered racial discrimination in the U.S.[130][131]
In a meeting with President
In the early Cold War years, the FBI was worried more about possible communist connections among anti-lynching groups than about the lynching crimes. For instance, the FBI branded Albert Einstein a communist sympathizer for joining Robeson's American Crusade Against Lynching.[133]
Civil rights movement
By the 1950s, the
In the 1960s, the civil rights movement attracted students to the South from all over the country to work on voter registration and integration. The intervention of people from outside the communities and threat of social change aroused fear and resentment among many Whites. In June 1964, three civil rights workers disappeared in Neshoba County, Mississippi. They had been investigating the arson of a Black church being used as a "Freedom School". Six weeks later, their bodies were found in a partially constructed dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi. James Chaney of Meridian, Mississippi, and Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman of New York City had been members of the Congress of Racial Equality. They had been dedicated to non-violent direct action against racial discrimination. The investigation also unearthed the bodies of numerous anonymous victims of past lynchings and murders.
The United States prosecuted 18 men for a Ku Klux Klan conspiracy to deprive the victims of their civil rights under 19th century federal law, in order to prosecute the crime in a federal court. Seven men were convicted but received light sentences, two men were released because of a deadlocked jury, and the remainder were acquitted. In 2005, 80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen, one of the men who had earlier gone free, was retried by the state of Mississippi, convicted of three counts of manslaughter in a new trial, and sentenced to 60 years in prison. Killen died in 2018 after serving 12+1⁄2 years.
Because of J. Edgar Hoover's and others' hostility to the civil rights movement, agents of the FBI resorted to outright lying to smear civil rights workers and other opponents of lynching. For example, the FBI leaked false information in the press about the lynching victim Viola Liuzzo, who was murdered in 1965 in Alabama. The FBI said Liuzzo had been a member of the Communist Party USA, had abandoned her five children, and was involved in sexual relationships with African Americans in the movement.[137]
After the civil rights movement
Although lynchings have become rare following the civil rights movement and the resulting changes in American social norms, some lynchings have still occurred. In 1981, two Klan members in
In 1998, Shawn Allen Berry, Lawrence Russel Brewer, and ex-convict John William King murdered James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas. Byrd was a 49-year-old father of three, who had accepted an early-morning ride home with the three men. They attacked him and dragged him to his death behind their truck.[139] The three men dumped their victim's mutilated remains in the town's segregated African-American cemetery and then went to a barbecue.[140] Local authorities immediately treated the murder as a hate crime and requested FBI assistance. The murderers (two of whom turned out to be members of a white supremacist prison gang) were caught and stood trial. Brewer and King were both sentenced to death (with Brewer being executed in 2011, and King being executed in 2019). Berry was sentenced to life in prison.
On June 13, 2005, the U.S. Senate formally apologized for its failure to enact a federal anti-lynching law in the early 20th century, "when it was most needed". Before the vote, Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu noted: "There may be no other injustice in American history for which the Senate so uniquely bears responsibility."[141] The resolution was passed on a voice vote with 80 senators cosponsoring, with Mississippians Thad Cochran and Trent Lott being among the twenty U.S. senators abstaining.[141] The resolution expressed "the deepest sympathies and most solemn regrets of the Senate to the descendants of victims of lynching, the ancestors of whom were deprived of life, human dignity and the constitutional protections accorded all citizens of the United States".[141]
In February 2014, a noose was placed on the statue of James Meredith, the first African American student at the University of Mississippi.[142] A number of nooses appeared in 2017, primarily in or near Washington, D.C.[143][144][145]
In August 2014, Lennon Lacy, a teenager from Bladenboro, North Carolina, who had been dating a white girl, was found dead, hanging from a swing set. His family believes that he was lynched, but the FBI stated, after an investigation, that it found no evidence of a hate crime. The case is featured in a 2019 documentary about lynching in America, Always in Season.[146]
In May 2017, Mississippi Republican state representative Karl Oliver of Winona stated that Louisiana lawmakers who supported the removal of Confederate monuments from their state should be lynched. Oliver's district includes Money, Mississippi, where Emmett Till was murdered in 1955. Mississippi's leaders from both the Republican and Democratic parties quickly condemned Oliver's statement.[147]
In 2018, the Senate attempted to pass new anti-lynching legislation (the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act), but this failed.
On April 26, 2018, in Montgomery, Alabama, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice opened. Founded by the Equal Justice Initiative of that city, it is the first memorial created specifically to document lynchings of African Americans.
In 2019, Goodloe Sutton, then editor of a small Alabama newspaper, The Democrat-Reporter, received national publicity after he said in an editorial that the Ku Klux Klan was needed to "clean up D.C."[148] When he was asked what he meant by "cleaning up D.C.", he stated: "We'll get the hemp ropes out, loop them over a tall limb and hang all of them." "When he was asked if he felt that it was appropriate for the publisher of a newspaper to call for the lynching of Americans, Sutton doubled down on his position by stating: …'It's not calling for the lynchings of Americans. These are socialist-communists we're talking about. Do you know what socialism and communism is?'" He denied that the Klan was a racist and violent organization, comparing it to the NAACP.[149]
On January 6, 2021, during the
As of 2021, the Equal Justice Initiative claims that lynchings never stopped, listing 8 deaths in Mississippi that law-enforcement deemed suicides, but the civil rights organization Julian believes were lynchings. According to Jill Jefferson, "There is a pattern to how these cases are investigated", "When authorities arrive on the scene of a hanging, it's treated as a suicide almost immediately. The crime scene is not preserved. The investigation is shoddy. And then there is a formal ruling of suicide, despite evidence to the contrary. And the case is never heard from again unless someone brings it up."[152]
The West
Historians have debated the history of lynchings on the western frontier, which has been obscured by the
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."[153]
The exact number of people in the Western states/territories killed in lynchings is unknown. There were 571 lynchings of Mexicans between 1848 and 1928. The most recorded deaths were in Texas, with up to 232 killings, then followed by California (143 deaths), New Mexico (87 deaths), and Arizona (48 deaths). Lynch mobs killed Mexicans for a variety of reasons, with the most common accusations being murder and robbery. Others were killed as suspected bandits or rebels.[154]
California
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.[29] 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, white Americans lynched at least 163 Mexicans in California.[29] On July 5, 1851, a mob in Downieville, California, lynched a Mexican woman named Josefa Segovia.[155] She was accused of killing a white man who had attempted to assault her after breaking into her home.[156]
The
During the same year of 1851, just after the beginning of the
On October 24, 1871, a mob rampaged through Old Chinatown, Los Angeles and killed at least 18 Chinese Americans, after a white businessman had inadvertently been killed there in the crossfire of a tong battle within the Chinese community.
After the body of
Minnesota
Four lynchings are included in a book of 12
In 1866, when Alexander Campbell and George Liscomb were lynched at
Texas
"Lynching in Texas", a project of Sam Houston State University, maintains a database of over 600 lynchings committed in Texas between 1882 and 1942.[163] Many of the lynchings were of people of Mexican heritage.
During the early 1900s, hostilities between Anglos and Mexicans along the "Brown Belt" were common. In Rocksprings, Antonio Rodriguez, a Mexican, was burned at the stake for allegedly killing a white woman, Effie Greer Anderson. This event was widely publicized and protests against the treatment of Mexicans in the U.S. erupted within the interior of Mexico, namely in Guadalajara and Mexico City.[164]
Members of the
Arizona
In 1859, white settlers began to expel Mexicans from Arizona. The mob was able to chase Mexicans out of many towns, southward. Even though they were successful in doing so, the mob followed and killed many of the people that had been chased out. The Sonoita massacre was a result of these expulsions, where white settlers killed four Mexicans and one Native American.[citation needed]
On April 19, 1915, the Leon brothers were lynched by hanging in Pima Country by deputies Robert Fenter and Frank Moore. This lynching was unusual, since the perpetrators were arrested, tried, and convicted for the murders. Fenter and Moore were both found guilty of second degree murder and each sentenced to 10 years to life in prison. However, they were both pardoned by Governor George W. P. Hunt upon his departure from office in February 1917.[166][page needed][167]
Wyoming
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 hired mercenaries to lynch the small ranchers.
Oregon
Other lynchings include many Native Americans.[169]
Laws
For most of the history of the United States, lynching was rarely prosecuted, as the same people who would have had to prosecute and sit on juries were generally on the side of the action or related to the perpetrators in the small communities where many lived. When the crime was prosecuted, it was under state murder statutes. In one example in 1907–09, the U.S. Supreme Court tried its only criminal case in history,
Starting in 1909, federal legislators introduced more than 200 bills in Congress to make lynching a federal crime, but they failed to pass, chiefly because of Southern legislators' opposition.
Under the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department tried, but failed, to prosecute lynchers under Reconstruction era civil rights laws. The first successful federal prosecution of a lyncher for a civil rights violation was in 1946. By that time, the era of lynchings as a common occurrence had ended. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. succeeded in gaining House passage of an anti-lynching bill, but it was defeated in the Senate, still dominated by the Southern Democratic bloc, supported by its disfranchisement of Blacks.
On December 19, 2018, the U.S. Senate voted unanimously in favor of the "
As of June 4, 2020, while protests and civil unrest over the murder of George Floyd were occurring nationwide, the bill was being considered by the Senate, with Senator Rand Paul preventing the bill from being passed by unanimous consent. Paul opposed the passage of the bill because its language is overly broad, it includes attacks which he believes are not extreme enough to qualify as "lynching", he stated that "this bill would cheapen the meaning of lynching by defining it so broadly as to include a minor bruise or abrasion," and he has proposed the inclusion of an amendment that would apply a "serious bodily injury standard" for a crime to be classified as a lynching.[176][177][178]
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer criticized Rand Paul's position, saying on Twitter that "it is shameful that one GOP Senator is standing in the way of seeing this bill become law." Senator Kamala Harris added that "Senator Paul is now trying to weaken a bill that was already passed – there's no reason for this" while speaking to have the amendment defeated.[178][176]
In 2022, the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act passed both chambers of Congress and President Joe Biden signed it into federal law on March 29 of that year.[179] The Act, proposed by Illinois House Representative Bobby L. Rush, is the first bill to make lynching a federal hate crime, despite over a century of failed attempts to pass an anti-lynching bill through Congress. Anyone who violates the terms of the bill will be penalized with a fine, a prison sentence of up to 30 years, or both.[97]
State laws
In 1933, California defined lynching, punishable by 2–4 years in prison, as "the taking by means of a riot of any person from the lawful custody of any peace officer", with the crime of "riot" defined as two or more people using violence or the threat of violence.[180] It does not refer to lynching homicide, and has been used to charge individuals who have tried to free someone in police custody – leading to controversy.[181][182] In 2015, Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation by Senator Holly Mitchell removing the word "lynching" from the state's criminal code without comment after it received unanimous approval in a vote by state lawmakers. Mitchell stated, "It's been said that strong words should be reserved for strong concepts, and 'lynching' has such a painful history for African Americans that the law should only use it for what it is – murder by mob." The law was otherwise unchanged.[180]
In 1899, Indiana passed anti-lynching legislation. It was enforced by Governor Winfield T. Durbin, who forced investigation into a 1902 lynching and removed the sheriff responsible. In 1903 he sent militia to bring order to a race riot which had broken out on Independence Day in Evansville, Indiana. Durbin also publicly declared that an African American man accused of murder was entitled to a fair trial.
In 1920, 600 men attempted to remove a Black prisoner from Marion County Jail, but were prevented by the city's police.[183][184] Lawrence Beitler photographed the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in 1930 in Marion, Indiana.[185] Seeing this image inspired Abel Meeropol to write the song "Strange Fruit",[186] which was popularized by singer Billie Holiday. In reaction to these murders, Flossie Bailey pushed for passage of the 1931 Indiana anti-lynching law.[187][188] The law provided for the immediate dismissal of any sheriff who allowed a jailed person to be lynched, and allowed the victim's family to sue for $10,000. However, local authorities failed to prosecute mob leaders. In one case when a sheriff was indicted by Indiana's attorney general, James Ogden, the jury refused to convict.[183][184]
In an odd turn in 1951, South Carolina passed a law criminalizing second-degree lynching, which it defined as "any act of violence inflicted by a mob upon the body of another person and from which death does not result shall constitute the crime of lynching in the second degree and shall be a felony. Any person found guilty of lynching in the second degree shall be confined at hard labor in the State Penitentiary for a term not exceeding twenty years nor less than three years, at the discretion of the presiding judge."[189] By 2003, however, all but two of the state's 46 counties charged blacks with second-degree lynching out of proportion to their representation in the population. In the prior 5 years, 4,000 adults were charged, and 136 were convicted. Black suspects were convicted of this assault charge at twice the rate of white suspects. 1,400 juvenile lynching charges were filed, and, in 2002, 231 Black youths were convicted, ten times as many as white youths.[190] In 2006, five white teenagers were given various sentences for second-degree lynching in a non-lethal attack on a young Black man in South Carolina.[191] In 2010, the South Carolina Sentencing Reform Commission voted to rename the law "assault and battery by a mob", and to soften consequences for situations in which no one was killed or seriously injured in an attack by two or more people on a single victim.[192][193]
Representation in popular culture
The
Literature and films
- Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, an 1885 novel, depicts attempted (although failed) lynching as a minor episode.
- Western novels in the United States, dealt with a fictional treatment of the Johnson County Warand frontier lynchings in the West.
- Tracked by Bloodhounds; or, A Lynching at Cripple Creek, a 1904 silent crime drama short film directed by Harry Buckwalter.
- Angelina Weld Grimké's Rachel (1914) was the first play about the toll of racial violence directed at African-American families; it was produced in 1916.
- Following the commercial and critical success of Reconstruction, African-American director and writer Oscar Micheaux responded in 1919 with the film Within Our Gates. The climax of the film is the lynching of a Black family after one member of the family is wrongly accused of murder. Considered a commercial failure, the film was an inductee of the 1992 National Film Registry list.[194]
- Regina M. Anderson's play, Climbing Jacob's Ladder, was about a lynching; it was performed[when?] by the Krigwa Players (later called the Negro Experimental Theater), a Harlem theatre company.
- William Faulkner's short story "Dry September" (1931) tells the story of a lynch mob forming in response to an alleged offense against a white woman.
- Lynd Ward's 1932 book Wild Pilgrimage (printed in woodblock prints, with no text) includes three prints of the lynching of several Black men.
- Annie Nathan Meyer's 1932 play Black Souls was about an innocent black man lynched on the campus of a fictional college in the Deep South. It was performed on Broadway at the Provincetown Playhouse in a cast led by Juano Hernandez and Rose McClendon.[195]
- In Irving Berlin's 1933 musical, As Thousands Cheer, Ethel Waters sang a ballad about lynching, "Supper Time". She wrote in her 1951 autobiography, His Eye Was on the Sparrow: "if one song could tell the story of an entire race, that was it."
- Murder in Harlem (1935), by director Oscar Micheaux, was one of three films he made based on events in the controversial trial of Leo Frank, a northern Jewish man convicted of murder of a Georgia factory girl. He portrayed the character analogous to Frank as guilty and set the film in New York, removing sectional conflict as one of the cultural forces in the trial. Micheaux's first version was a silent film, The Gunsaulus Mystery (1921). Lem Hawkins Confession (1935) was also related to the Leo Frank trial.[196]
- 1933 lynchings of John Maurice Holmes and Thomas Harold Thurmond in San Jose, California, on November 16, 1933.[197]
- The film They Won't Forget (1937) was inspired by the Frank case; it featured the Leo Frank character portrayed as a Christian.
- In 1933 lynching in San Jose, California. This had been recorded on newsreel footage and was an event in which Governor of California James Rolphrefused to intervene.
- In Walter Van Tilburg Clark's 1940 novel, The Ox-Bow Incident, two drifters are drawn into a Western posse formed to find the murderer of a local man. After suspicion centered on three innocent cattle rustlers, they were lynched, an injustice that deeply affected the drifters. The novel was adapted as a 1943 film by the same name. It symbolized a wartime defense of United States' values, seen to be based on law, versus the characterization of Nazi Germany as mob rule.
- Harper Lee's novel, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), featured a Black man, Tom Robinson, who is wrongfully accused of rape and narrowly escapes lynching. After having been wrongfully convicted by an all-white jury, Robinson is later killed while attempting to escape from prison. The novel was adapted as a 1962 film of the same name starring Gregory Peck.
- "Going to Meet the Man" (1965) is a short story by James Baldwin that includes an account of a particularly horrific lynching.
- The 1968 film Hang 'Em High, set on the Western frontier, stars Clint Eastwood.
- The 1988 film Mississippi Burning includes a depiction of a Black man being lynched.
- Peter Matthiessen depicted several lynchings in his Killing Mr. Watson trilogy (first volume published in 1990), set in Florida of the late 19th century.[198]
- In the 1996 made-for-television film Stolen Memories: Secrets from the Rose Garden, protagonist Jessyca (Mary Tyler Moore) slowly recalls scenes from the night in which she suffered severe and permanent brain damage, which include the lynching of her African American friend Isaac at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as her cousin Cletis's involvement.
- "A Party Down at the Square" (first published in 1997) is a short story by Ralph Ellison that describes a lynching from the point of view of a white boy from Cincinnati.[199]
- HBO film starring Christopher Walken and directed by Nicholas Meyer, is based on events that took place in New Orleans in 1891. After the acquittal of 18 Italian American men falsely accused of the murder of police chief David Hennessy, a lynch mob attacked them, killing 11 by shooting or hanging in one of the largest mass lynchings in United States history.
- Atlanta, Georgiain the early 1900s after being convicted of murder of a young factory girl in a highly biased trial.
- The 2014 biopic Get on Up about the life of American singer James Brownfeatures a scene in which a young Brown finds the body of a lynched man hanging from a tree near Brown's childhood home.
- Quentin Tarantino's film The Hateful Eight (2015), set in the Reconstruction era, features a finale with a detailed depiction of the lynching of a white woman identified as a working-class racist Southerner, with graphic focus on her suffering, prompting some debate among critics about whether it is a political commentary on racism and hate in America or simply sensational and sexist exploitation.[200][201][202]
"Strange Fruit"
Among artistic works that grappled with lynching was the song "Strange Fruit", written as a poem by Abel Meeropol in 1939 and recorded by Billie Holiday. In part it goes:
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
The song became identified with her and was one of her most popular ones. The song became an anthem for the anti-lynching movement. It also contributed to activism of the American civil rights movement. A documentary about a lynching and the effects of protest songs and art, entitled Strange Fruit (2002) and produced by Public Broadcasting Service, was aired on U.S. television.[203]
See also
- And you are lynching Negroes
- Black genocide – the notion that African Americans have been subjected to genocide
- Chinese massacre of 1871
- Crimes against humanity
- Death of Lennon Lacy
- Domestic terrorism
- Domestic terrorism in the United States
- East St. Louis riots(1917)
- Hate crime laws in the United States
- History of homeland security in the United States
- Human rights in the United States
- List of lynching victims in the United States
- Lynching of American Jews
- Lynching of Jesse Washington
- Lynching of Olli Kinkkonen
- Lynching of women in the United States
- March 14, 1891 New Orleans lynchings
- Mass racial violence in the United States
- Nadir of American race relations
- New York City draft riots of 1863
- Ocoee massacre (1920)
- Porvenir massacre (1918)
- Racism against Black Americans
- Racism in the United States
- False accusations of rape as justification for lynchings
- Red Summer (1919)
- Right-wing terrorism
- Robert Prager
- Rosewood massacre (1923)
- Slavery in the United States
- Tarring and feathering
- Terrorism in the United States
- Tulsa race massacre (1921)
- Vigilantism
- Wilmington insurrection of 1898
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- ^ Stand Your Ground: A History of America's Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense. Beacon Press. 2017. p. 81.
- ^ "The Black Activist Who Fought Against D. W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation"". The New Yorker. Retrieved March 11, 2022.
- ^ "The Various Shady Lives of the Ku Klux Klan". Time. April 9, 1965. Archived from the original on August 19, 2008.
An itinerant Methodist preacher named William Joseph Simmons started up the Klan again in Atlanta in 1915. Simmons, an ascetic-looking man, was a fetishist on fraternal organizations. He was already a "colonel" in the Woodmen of the World, but he decided to build an organization all his own. He was an effective speaker, with an affinity for alliteration; he had preached on "Women, Weddings and Wives," "Red Heads, Dead Heads and No Heads," and the "Kinship of Kourtship and Kissing". On Thanksgiving Eve 1915, Simmons took 15 friends to the top of Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, built an altar on which he placed an American flag, a Bible and an unsheathed sword, set fire to a crude wooden cross, muttered a few incantations about a "practical fraternity among men," and declared himself Imperial Wizard of the Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
- ^ JSTOR 42627447.
Moore—a trained attorney, the son of an Alabama judge, and the descendant of a United States Supreme Court justice—became one of the South's more strident advocates of lynching.
- ISBN 978-0-8078-3394-0.
- ^ Quinn, Allison (November 27, 2014), "Soviet Propaganda Back in Play With Ferguson Coverage", The Moscow Times, retrieved December 17, 2016
- ^ Volodzko, David (May 12, 2015), "The History Behind China's Response to the Baltimore Riots", The Diplomat, archived from the original on April 28, 2016, retrieved December 17, 2016,
Soon Americans who criticized the Soviet Union for its human rights violations were answered with the famous tu quoque argument: 'A u vas negrov linchuyut' (and you are lynching Negroes).
- ^ Dudziak, M.L.: Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (2001)
- ^ "Lynchings: By Year and Race". University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. Archived from the original on July 24, 2010. Retrieved July 26, 2010.
Statistics provided by the Archives at Tuskegee Institute.
- ^ DeNeen L. Brown (August 8, 2021). "'Lynchings in Mississippi never stopped'". The Washington Post. Retrieved February 16, 2022.
- ISBN 978-0-486-77999-7.
- MSN Encarta. Archived from the originalon October 28, 2009.
- ^ Herbert, Bob (January 22, 2008). "The Blight That Is Still With Us". The New York Times. Retrieved January 22, 2008.
- ^ "'Their Own Hotheadedness': Senator Benjamin R. 'Pitchfork Ben' Tillman Justifies Violence Against Southern Blacks". History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web. George Mason University. Retrieved September 3, 2020.
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- ^ "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.
- ^ "Lynchings: By Year and Race". University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. Archived from the original on July 24, 2010. Retrieved July 26, 2010.
Statistics provided by the Archives at Tuskegee Institute.
- ^ Glanton, Dahleen (May 5, 2002). "South revisits ghastly part of past". Chicago Tribune. Archived from the original on August 10, 2019.
- S2CID 143851795.
For instance, the files at Tuskegee Institute contain the most comprehensive count of lynching victims in the United States, but they only refer to the lynching of fifty Mexicans in the states of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas. Our own research has revealed a total of 216 victims during the same time period.
- ^ "When Italian immigrants were 'the other'". CNN. July 10, 2012.
- ISBN 978-0-19-090090-8.
At least 163 Mexicans were lynched in California between 1848 and 1860, a rate comparable to that of Black Americans in the American South in the early part of the 20th century.
- S2CID 143851795.
- ^ Allen, James. "Musarium: Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America". Retrieved September 3, 2018.
- ^ Willis 2000, p. 157.
- ^ "Lynching files per state" [Database typed on paper]. Tuskegee Institute Lynching records, Box: Box 132.020, File: see for example 'Lynchings in Texas 1882–1942' p. 238-245. Tuskegee, AL: Tuskegee University Archives.
- ^ "Chief of Police David C. Hennessy". The Officer Down Memorial Page, Inc. Retrieved November 7, 2011.
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- ^ Theoharis and Cox p. 45.
- ^ Yarrow, Allison (May 13, 2009). "The People Revisit Leo Frank". Forward.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-8078-7811-8.],' he wrote."; p. 180: "What is more, several months before the lynching of Washington, photographs of a lynching by burning of Will Stanley in Temple, Texas, including images of Stanley's charred corpse, were sold on the streets of Waco for ten cents each."
p. 93: "the corpse of Will Stanley, lynched in Temple, Texas, in 1915, his burned arms are contorted to make it appear that he his flexing his biceps... the postcard"; p. 108: "As noted above, Joe Meyers marked the postcard of Will Stanley's charred body to show his parents he was in the crowd. 'This is the barbeque we had last Saturday [sic
- ^ "Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror". lynchinginamerica.eji.org. Retrieved March 3, 2022.
- ^ a b Ifill, Sherrilyn A. (2007). On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century. Boston: Beacon. 58.
- ^ a b Goff, Jennie (2011). Blood at the Root Lynching as American Cultural Nucleus. Albany: State University of New York.[page needed]
- ^ S2CID 159670864.
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- ^ Moyers, Bill. "Legacy of Lynching". PBS. Retrieved July 28, 2016
- ^ Harkrider Drug Co., Center, Texas (publisher), photographic postcard titled "Scene in Sabine County, Texas, June 15, 1098, with poem "Dogwood Tree" (1908). Photograph records the lynching of Jerry Evans, Will Johnson, Moss Spellman, Clevel Williams, and Will Manuel in Hemphill, Texas. Image: Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, NAACP Papers. Washington, DC.
- ^ a b Apel, Dora (2004). Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob. New Brunswick, N.J.: London.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ^ a b Rush, Bobby L. (March 29, 2022). "H.R.55 - 117th Congress (2021-2022): Emmett Till Antilynching Act". www.congress.gov. Retrieved April 2, 2022.
- ^ a b Davis, Angela Y. (1983). Women, Race & Class. New York: Vintage Books. pp. 194–195.
- JSTOR 2096147.
- ^ McCaskill & Gebhard 2006, pp. 210–212.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Ferguson, SallyAnn H., ed. (2001). Charles W. Chesnutt: Selected Writings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. pp. 65–81.
- ^ Rogers, Angelica (July 14, 2016). "Does This Flag Make You Flinch?". The New York Times. Retrieved October 21, 2019.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-394-71351-9.
- ^ "Arkansas Stages Lynching". The Chicago Whip. Vol. 1, no. 21. November 15, 1919. p. 1. Retrieved August 9, 2021.
- ^ Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (February 28, 2001). Tulsa Race Riot (PDF) (Report). Tulsa, Oklahoma. pp. 13, 23, 114. Retrieved April 10, 2016.
{{cite report}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ^ "Firearms and Lynching" (PDF). August 8, 2022.
- JSTOR 25105465.
- JSTOR 30036966.
- ISBN 978-0-226-84527-2. Retrieved October 21, 2015.
- ^ Morris, Edmund (2001). Theodore Rex. pp. 110–11, 246–49, 250, 258–59, 261–62, 472.
- ^ a b c "Senate Apologizes for Not Passing Anti-Lynching Laws". Fox News. June 13, 2005. Archived from the original on May 10, 2012. Retrieved July 27, 2011.
- ^ Richard H. Pildes, "Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon", Constitutional Commentary, Vol. 17, 2000. Accessed March 10, 2008.
- ^ Zangrando, NAACP Crusade, pp. 43–44, 54.
- ^ ""Anti-Lynching Bill," 1918". Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000. Archived from the original on February 17, 2009. Retrieved May 23, 2017.
- ^ a b Harvier, Ernest (July 9, 1922). "Political Effect of the Dyer Bill: Delay in Enacting Anti-Lynching Law Diverted Thousands of Negro Votes" (PDF). The New York Times. Retrieved July 26, 2011.
- ^ "House Passes Bill to Curb Lynching— Votes 230 to 119 Making It a Federal Crime and Providing Penalties", The New York Times, January 27, 1922, p. 27
- ^ "Filibuster Kills Anti-Lynching Bil" (PDF). The New York Times. December 3, 1922. Retrieved July 20, 2011.
- ^ Rucker & Upton 2007, pp. 182–183.
- ^ "Proceedings of the U.S. Senate on June 13, 2005 regarding the "Senate Apology" as Reported in the Congressional Record". African American Studies, University of Buffalo. Archived from the original on March 22, 2012. Retrieved July 26, 2011.
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- ^ "Rubin Stacy. Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. July 19, 1935". strangefruit.org. Archived from the original on December 5, 2007. Retrieved November 8, 2011.
- ^ "State Lynching Stirs U.S. Action: 2 Negroes Slain By Mob, Officers Will Investigate". The Clarion-Ledger. Jackson, MS. April 14, 1937.
- ^ Finley, Keith M. (2003). Southern Opposition to Civil Rights in the United States Senate: A Tactical and Ideological Analysis, 1938–1965 (PDF). Louisiana State University. Archived from the original (PDF) on June 11, 2014. Retrieved February 2, 2018.
{{cite book}}
:|work=
ignored (help) - ISBN 978-0-691-10151-4.
- ^ Finley, Keith M. (2003). Southern Opposition to Civil Rights in the United States Senate: A Tactical and Ideological Analysis, 1938-1965 (PDF). Louisiana State University. Archived from the original (PDF) on June 11, 2014. Retrieved February 2, 2018.
{{cite book}}
:|work=
ignored (help) - ^ ISBN 978-0-684-86816-5.
- ^ "To Secure These Rights: The Report of the President's Committee on Civil Rights". Harry S. Truman Library and Museum. Retrieved July 26, 2010.
- Hearst Corporationpapers had questioned him about Truman's past with the Klan. He said he had seen Truman at a Klan meeting, but that "if he ever became a member of the Klan I did not know it."
- ^ "Un lynchage monstre". Le Petit Journal (in French). September 24, 1906.
- ^ Quinn, Allison (November 27, 2014). "Soviet Propaganda Back in Play With Ferguson Coverage". The Moscow Times. Retrieved December 17, 2016.
- ^ Cooke, Alistair (January 8, 1953). "A year of no lynchings". The Guardian. Retrieved June 20, 2020.
- ^ Jerome, Fred (2002). The Einstein File: J. Edgar Hoover's Secret War Against the World's Most Famous Scientist. St. Martin's Press.; "Albert Einstein". foia.fbi.gov. Archived from the original on August 10, 2004. Retrieved June 21, 2020.
- ^ Newkirk, Vann R. II (February 16, 2017). "How 'The Blood of Emmett Till' Still Stains America Today". The Atlantic. Retrieved July 29, 2017.
- ^ Whitfield, Stephen (1991). A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till. JHU Press. pp. 41–42.
- ^ "How The Horrific Photograph Of Emmett Till Helped Energize The Civil Rights Movement". 100photos.time.com. Archived from the original on July 6, 2017. Retrieved July 3, 2017.
- ]
- ^ "Ku Klux Klan". Spartacus Educational. Retrieved June 26, 2005.
- ^ "Closing arguments today in Texas dragging-death trial". CNN. February 22, 1999. Retrieved June 20, 2020.
- ^ Fox, Faulkner (September 17, 1999). "Justîce in Jasper". The Texas Observer. Archived from the original on January 23, 2005.
- ^ a b c Thomas-Lester, Avis (June 14, 2005). "A Senate Apology for History on Lynching". The Washington Post. p. A12. Retrieved June 26, 2005.
- New Orleans Times-Picayune. Associated Press. July 21, 2016. Archived from the originalon July 25, 2016.
- ^ Eversley, Melanie (June 15, 2017). "Latest noose stirs worry, anger in D.C. region". USA Today. Retrieved June 20, 2020.
- ^ Jackman, Caresse (July 1, 2017). "Noose found hanging outside of New Orleans business". WWL-TV. Retrieved June 20, 2020.
- ^ Stolberg, Sheryl Gay; Dickerson, Caitlin (July 5, 2017). "Hangman's Noose, Symbol of Racial Animus, Keeps Cropping Up". The New York Times. Retrieved June 20, 2020.
- ^ Pilkington, Ed (September 21, 2019). "Always in Season: behind the painful film about lynching in America". The Guardian. Retrieved June 20, 2020.
- ^ "Mississippi rep: Lynch people removing Confederate monuments". Starkville Daily News. Associated Press. May 22, 2017. Archived from the original on December 26, 2017. Retrieved December 26, 2017.
- ^ Farzan, Antonia Noori (February 19, 2019). "'Time for the Ku Klux Klan to night ride again': An Alabama newspaper editor wants to bring back lynching". The Washington Post. Retrieved June 20, 2020.
- ^ Brown, Melissa (February 18, 2019). "Alabama newspaper editor calls for Klan return to 'clean out D.C.'". Montgomery Advertiser. Retrieved June 20, 2020.
- ^ Pengelly, Martin (January 10, 2021). "Hang Mike Pence: Twitter stops phrase trending after Capitol riot". The Guardian. Retrieved January 11, 2021.
- ^ Kilander, Gustaf (June 4, 2021). "Capitol police officer reveals rioters called him a 'traitor' for refusing to help hang Mike Pence". The Independent. Retrieved August 25, 2021.
- ^ Brown, DeNeen L (August 8, 2021). "Lynchings in Mississippi never stopped". Washington Post. Retrieved August 9, 2021.
- ^ Pfeifer 2004, p. 30.
- ISBN 978-0-19-532035-0.
- ^ McLure, Helen (January 2011). "Review of Segrave, Kerry, Lynchings of Women in the United States: The Recorded Cases, 1851–1946". H-Law, H-Net Reviews. Retrieved September 20, 2018.
- ^ "Latinas: Area Studies Collections". American Memory. Library of Congress. Retrieved November 8, 2011.
- ^ Pfeifer 2004.
- ^ "Executions in San Francisco 1851–1890 | History of the San Francisco Sheriff's Department". sfsdhistory.com. Retrieved September 20, 2018.
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- ^ Nolte, Carl (November 23, 2008). "Bay Area mob lynched kidnappers 75 years ago". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved June 20, 2020.
- ^ Holzmeister, Karen; O'Brien, Matt (November 29, 2005). "Hayward site of spark for last lynching in state". East Bay Times. Retrieved June 20, 2020.
- ISBN 0-87351-180-8
- ^ "About". Lynching in Texas. Sam Houston State University. Retrieved August 31, 2020.
- ^ Rosales, Francisco A. (1997). Chicano!: The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Arte Publico Press. p. 29.
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- ^ Pfeifer 2013.
- ^ "Robert Fenter and Frank Moore". The Coconino Sun. February 16, 1917. p. 2. Retrieved July 17, 2023.
- ISBN 978-0-9819363-1-4.
- OCLC 60321341. Retrieved August 31, 2020.
White men were lynched less often than Indians. Indians were regarded as living outside legal justice and therefore more likely to suffer from lynch law, much like Blacks in the South. As a hated and feared ethnic group, the Indians had first-hand experience with hangings.
- ^ Linder, Douglas O., U.S. Supreme Court opinion in United States vs. Shipp Archived 2011-01-01 at the Wayback Machine, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law
- ISBN 978-1-139-50315-0.
- ^ Viebeck, Elise (December 19, 2018). "Senate unanimously approves bill to make lynching a federal hate crime". The Washington Post. Retrieved June 20, 2020.
- ^ Egwuonwu, Nnamdi (December 19, 2018). "Senate Unanimously Passes Anti-Lynching Bill". Newsy. Retrieved December 20, 2018.
- ^ Resnick, Gideon (June 29, 2018). "The Senate's Three Black Members Introduce Bill to Finally Make Lynching a Federal Crime". The Daily Beast. Retrieved June 20, 2020.
- ^ Rummler, Orion (February 26, 2020). "House passes bill to make lynching a federal hate crime". Axios. Retrieved May 4, 2019.
- ^ a b Foran, Clare; Fox, Lauren (June 4, 2020). "Emotional debate erupts over anti-lynching legislation as Cory Booker and Kamala Harris speak out against Rand Paul amendment". CNN. Retrieved June 5, 2020.
- ^ "Senate Session". C-SPAN. Retrieved June 6, 2020.
- ^ a b Barrett, Ted; Foran, Clare (June 3, 2020). "Rand Paul holds up anti-lynching legislation as he seeks changes to bill". CNN. Retrieved June 7, 2020.
- ^ McDaniel, Eric; Moore, Elena (March 29, 2022). "Lynching is now a federal hate crime after a century of blocked efforts". NPR. Archived from the original on March 30, 2022. Retrieved March 29, 2022.
- ^ a b "Officials change Calif. law after activist's "lynching" arrest". CBC News. Associated Press. July 3, 2015. Retrieved June 14, 2016.
- ^ Barragan, James (September 4, 2014). "Murrieta immigration protesters charged with obstructing officers". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved June 14, 2016.
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- ^ ISBN 978-0-8214-4390-3.[page needed]
- ^ ISBN 978-1-137-05393-0.[page needed]
- ^ "The lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, 1930". Rare Historical Photos. March 16, 2014. Retrieved April 18, 2015.
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- ISBN 978-0-253-33799-3. Retrieved April 18, 2015.
- ^ South Carolina Code of Laws section 16-3-220 Lynching in the second degree
- ^ Breed, Allen G. (June 8, 2003). "Lynching Law Has Unintended Results". The Washington Post. Retrieved June 14, 2016.
- ^ "Guilty: Teens enter pleas in lynching case". The Gaffney Ledger. January 11, 2006. Archived from the original on July 4, 2017. Retrieved June 29, 2007.
- ^ Jonsson, Patrik (January 12, 2010). "South Carolina takes aim at lynching law because it hurt blacks". The Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved June 14, 2016.
- ^ "SC panel softening lynching law, says it is abused". GoUpstate.com. Associated Press. January 11, 2010. Archived from the original on August 10, 2016. Retrieved June 14, 2016.
- ^ "Complete National Film Registry Listing". loc.gov. Library of Congress. Retrieved June 20, 2020.
- New York American. March 31, 1932.
- .
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- ^ "Strange Fruit". PBS. Retrieved August 23, 2011.
Sources
- Beck, E. M.; Tolnay, Stewart E. (August 1990). "The Killing Fields of the Deep South: The Market for Cotton and the Lynching of Blacks, 1882–1930". American Sociological Review. 55 (4): 526–539. JSTOR 2095805.
- Brundage, William Fitzhugh, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
- Curriden, Mark and Leroy Phillips, Contempt of Court: The Turn-of-the-Century Lynching That Launched a Hundred Years of Federalism, ISBN 978-0-385-72082-3
- Finegan, Terence. A Deed So Accursed: Lynching in Mississippi and South Carolina, 1881–1940. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2013.
- ISBN 978-0-933121-18-8.
- Rucker, Walter; Upton, James Nathaniel, eds. (2007). Encyclopedia of American Race Riots. Vol. 1. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ISBN 978-0-313-33301-9.
- ISBN 0-374-24855-9.
- McCaskill, Barbara; Gebhard, Caroline, eds. (2006). Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877–1919. New York: ISBN 978-0-8147-3167-3.
- Markovitz, Jonathan, Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004 ISBN 0-8166-3994-9.
- Newton, Michael and Judy Ann Newton, Racial and Religious Violence in America: A Chronology. N.Y.: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1991
- Pfeifer, Michael J. (2004). Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947. Urbana and Chicago: ISBN 978-0-252-02917-2.)
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link - Pfeifer, Michael J., ed. (2013). Lynching Beyond Dixie: American Mob Violence Outside the South. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. p. 336. JSTOR 10.5406/j.ctt2jcc5k.)
{{cite book}}
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- Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918 New York City: Arno Press, 1969.
- Thompson, E.P. Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. New York: The New Press, 1993.
- Tolnay, Stewart E., and Beck, E.M. A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
- Willis, John C. (2000). Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta After the Civil War. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. ISBN 0-8139-1971-1.
- Wright, George C. Racial Violence in Kentucky 1865–1940 Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990 ISBN 0-8071-2073-1.
- Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. Southern Honor: Ethics & Behavior in the Old South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Primary sources
- Waldrep, Christopher, ed. Lynching in America: A history in documents (NYU Press, 2006) online
Further reading (arranged chronologically)
- ISBN 978-0-486-77999-7.
- Gibbons, J. Card. "Lynch Law: Its Causes and Remedy." The North American Review 181, no. 587 (1905): 502–9. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25105465.
- Wheeler, Wayne (November 17, 1910). The Newark [Ohio] Lynching: Its Causes and Results. Westerville, Ohio: American Issue Publishing Company.
- Fleming, Walter Lynwood (1911). . In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 17 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 169.
- National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
- "1856 Committee of Vigilance". San Francisco News Letter Wasp. 1925. Archived from the original on September 27, 2006. Retrieved October 31, 2018.
A treatment of the San Francisco vigilante movement, sympathetic to the vigilantes.
- Yost, Genevieve (May 1933). "History of Lynchings in Kansas". The Kansas Historical Quarterly. 2 (2): 182–219. Archived from the originalon November 16, 2002. Retrieved October 31, 2018.
- Eaton, Clement (December 1942). "Mob Violence in the Old South". JSTOR 1897915.
- ISBN 0-933121-44-X.
- Rhodes, Henry A. (1989). ""Lynch Law"—An American Community Enigma". Curriculum Units by Fellows of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. 1.
Title of volume is American Communities, 1880–1980.
- Wilkes, Donald E. Jr. (September 10, 1997). "The Last Lynching in Athens [Georgia]". Flagpole Magazine. p. 8. Archived from the original on April 14, 2012. Retrieved October 31, 2018.
- Simkin, John (September 1997). "Lynching and the Wild West". Spartacus Educational. Retrieved October 31, 2018.
- Wilkes, Donald E. Jr. (June 24, 1998). "'Bloody Injuries:' Lynchings in Oconee County, 1905–1921". Flagpole Magazine. p. 8. Archived from the original on December 15, 2012. Retrieved October 31, 2018.
- Allen, James, ed. (2000). Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America. Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers. ISBN 978-0-944092-69-9.
- Wilkes, Donald E. Jr. (July 19, 2000). "A Civil War Lynching in Athens [Georgia]". Flagpole Magazine. p. 10. Archived from the original on April 14, 2012. Retrieved October 31, 2018.
- Davis, Gode (September 2005). "American Lynching: A Documentary Feature". Retrieved October 31, 2018.
- Fox, James W. Jr. (Fall 2006). "Intimations of Citizenship: Reressions and expressions of Equal Citizenship in the era of Jim Crow". Howard Law Journal. 50 (1).
- Smith, Tom (2007). The Crescent City Lynchings: The Murder of Chief Hennessy, the New Orleans "Mafia" Trials, and the Parish Prison Mob. Guilford: Lyons Press. ISBN 978-1-59228-901-1.
- Budiansky, Steven (2008). The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War. New York: Plume. ISBN 978-0-452-29016-7
- Wood, Amy Louise. Lynching and spectacle: witnessing racial violence in America, 1890-1940 (2009)
- Hill, Karlos K. (2010). "Black Vigilantism: The Rise and Decline of African American Lynch Mob Activity in the Mississippi and Arkansas Deltas, 1883–1923". The Journal of African American History. 95 (1): 26–43. S2CID 140461204.
- Sudar, Anna (July 12, 2010). "100 years ago, Newark [Ohio] streets were lawless". Newark Advocate. Archived from the original on August 27, 2015. Retrieved September 2, 2015.
- Auslander, Mark (November 8, 2010). "'Holding on to Those Who Can't be Held': Reenacting a Lynching at Moore's Ford, Georgia". Southern Spaces. Retrieved October 31, 2018.
- Waldrep, Christopher. African Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resistance from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012)
- Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. American Lynching (Yale UP, 2012)
- Carrigan, William D., and Christopher Waldrep, eds. Swift to Wrath: Lynching in Global Historical Perspective (University of Virginia Press, 2013)
- Shuler, Jack (2014). The Thirteenth Turn: A History of the Noose. Public Affairs. ISBN 978-1-61039-136-8.
- Robertson, Campbell (February 10, 2015). "History of Lynchings in the South Documents Nearly 4,000 Names". The New York Times.
- Lyman, Bryan (April 20, 2018). "'There will be lynchings': How the Advertiser failed victims of racial terror". Montgomery Advertiser. Retrieved April 29, 2018.
- Gregory, Vanessa (April 25, 2018). "A Lynching's Long Shadow". The New York Times.
- Seguin, Charles; Rigby, David (January 2019). "National Crimes: A New National Data Set of Lynchings in the United States, 1883 to 1941". Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World. 5: 1–9. .
- Ore, Ersula J. (2019) Lynching: Violence, rhetoric, and American identity (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2019).
- Gorup, M. (2020). "The Strange Fruit of the Tree of Liberty: Lynch Law and Popular Sovereignty in the United States." Perspectives on Politics
- Moody, Chris (March 11, 2021). "The lynching that Black Chattanooga never forgot takes center stage downtown". Washington Post.
- Gaston, Shytierra. (2021) "Historical racist violence and intergenerational harms: Accounts from descendants of lynching victims." ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 694.1 (2021): 78-91. online
- Seguin, Charles, and Sabrina Nardin. (2022) "The Lynching of Italians and the Rise of Antilynching Politics in the United States." Social Science History 46.1 (2022): 65-91. online
External links
- An Outrage (2017). Documentary film about the history and legacy of lynching in the American South
- Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America
- account of 1873 lynching Bozeman Montana True West Magazine November 2015 pp.26–29
- lynching Santa Cruz California 1877 Archived September 12, 2016, at the Wayback Machine
- Map of 73 years of lynching, 1900–1931
- This Map Shows Over a Century of Documented Lynchings in the United States. Smithsonian. January 24, 2017.
- Lynching Photographs Getty Images website
- Lynching photograph October 18, 1891 Clifton Forge Virginia
- Cotter, Holland, "'The Legacy of Lynching,' at the Brooklyn Museum, Documents Violent Racism", The New York Times, July 26, 2017. Museum page: https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/legacy_of_lynching
- Lynching Sites Project Memphis (May 22, 2017). "Research material". Retrieved January 8, 2018.