Lynching
Lynching was domestic terrorism, and thousands of African Americans were the victims of racial terror lynchings between 1876-1950.
Following Emancipation, a wave of counterrevolutionary terror swept over the former Confederate States in a manner unlike that of any other western-hemisphere society that abolished slavery during the 17th or 18th century.
Black men, women, and children were lynched for violating social customs, resisting mistreatment, or for alleged crimes, even when little evidence tied the accused to the crime. White people accused of identical violations of law or custom were rarely subjected to this same fate.
Equal Justice Initiative
Lynching in the United States increasingly became a racialized tool of oppression over the African American community and amplified the hardships of ongoing exploitation, discrimination, and criminalization in Black communities.
The Equal Justice Initiative (Montgomery, AL) has documented the lynchings of thousands of African Americans and invited those communities with a history of lynching to engage in a series of acts of remembrance to promote a culture of healing, truth, and reconciliation. This is known as the Community Remembrance Project.
In Broad Daylight
Lynching was not the work of a few hooded vigilantes at night; whole communities gathered in broad daylight to witness the spectacle torture of African Americans. Minstrel shows, racial science, and the racist chromolithography of the Jim Crow era embedded in the mind of White America the presumption of Black guilt and justified the treatment of African Americans due to their alleged moral inferiority.
Some mobs would specifically harness the terror of lynching by conducting their lynchings within the Black part of town, or many other times, forcing other Black people to simply witness lynchings.
"What The Law Cannot Do..."
However, it wasn’t just accusations of a crime that resulted in lynching, violating the rules of the social order also had fatal consequences. There was a saying at the time that “what the law cannot do, the noose can.”
African Americans were lynched for things like speaking disrespectfully to a white person, refusing to step off the sidewalk, reprimanding white children, arguing with a white man, and other perceived social infractions. African Americans had to live with the constant knowledge that they could be lynched whether they intentionally or unintentionally violated social norms.
Enforcing Jim Crow
Any African American who resisted this mistreatment or espoused Black advancement beyond the confines of the Jim Crow era, was often subject to their own lynching for simply asserting their own humanity.
Thus, lynching became a tool to keep African Americans in a state of subjugation and repress African Americans’ fight for economic power and equal rights during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was lynching, more than any other force, that maintained and enforced the social stratification of the Jim Crow era.
