You can also get lesson plans for teaching the report to students. Over a hundred years after Thomas Miles Sr. EJI researchers documented racial terror lynchings of African Americans in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between and —at least more lynchings of Black people in these states than previously reported in the most comprehensive work done on lynching to date.
In , EJI supplemented this research by documenting racial terror lynchings in other states, and found these acts of violence were most common in eight states: Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, and West Virginia.
Lynching in America makes the case that lynching of African Americans was terrorism, a widely supported phenomenon used to enforce racial subordination and segregation. Lynchings were violent and public events that traumatized Black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials.
Instead, many African Americans who were never accused of any crime were tortured and murdered in front of picnicking spectators including elected officials and prominent citizens for bumping into a white person, or wearing their military uniforms after World War I, or not using the appropriate title when addressing a white person.
Photos of lynchings were often sold as souvenir postcards. Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. From to , 4, lynchings occurred in the U. Other accounts, including the Equal Justice Initiative's extensive report on lynching , count slightly different numbers, but it's impossible to know for certain how many lynchings occurred because there was no formal tracking.
Many historians believe the true number is underreported. The highest number of lynchings during that time period occurred in Mississippi, with recorded. Georgia was second with , and Texas was third with Lynchings did not occur in every state. Black people were the primary victims of lynching: 3,, or about 72 percent of the people lynched, were Black. But they weren't the only victims of lynching. Some white people were lynched for helping Black people or for being anti-lynching.
Immigrants from Mexico, China, Australia, and other countries were also lynched. White mobs often used dubious criminal accusations to justify lynchings.
A common claim used to lynch Black men was perceived sexual transgressions against white women. Charges of rape were routinely fabricated. These allegations were used to enforce segregation and advance stereotypes of Black men as violent, hypersexual aggressors.
Hundreds of Black people were lynched based on accusations of other crimes, including murder, arson, robbery, and vagrancy. Many victims of lynchings were murdered without being accused of any crime. They were killed for violating social customs or racial expectations, such as speaking to white people with less respect than what white people believed they were owed. As Black Americans fled the South to escape the terror of lynchings, a historic event known as the Great Migration, people began to oppose lynchings in a number of ways.
They conducted grassroots activism, such as boycotting white businesses. Anti-lynching crusaders like Ida B. The survey details nearly 2, racial terror lynchings of black men, women and children during the Reconstruction era of to In , EJI researchers released a report documenting more than 4, lynchings that took place between and Because of the nature of lynchings — summary executions that occurred outside the constraints of court documentation — there was no formal, centralized tracking of the phenomenon.
Most historians believe this has left the true number of lynchings dramatically underreported. For decades, the most comprehensive total belonged to the archives at the Tuskegee Institute, which tabulated 4, people who died at the hands of US lynch mobs between and According to the Tuskegee numbers, 3, nearly three-quarters of those lynched were black Americans.
The EJI , which relied on the Tuskegee numbers in building its own count, integrated other sources, such as newspaper archives and other historical records, to arrive at a total of 4, racial terror lynchings in 12 southern states between the end of Reconstruction in and , and another in other states. Unsurprisingly, lynching was most concentrated in the former Confederate states, and especially in those with large black populations.
Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana had the highest number of lynchings. Among the most unsettling realities of lynching is the degree to which white Americans embraced it, not as an uncomfortable necessity or a way of maintaining order, but as a joyous moment of wholesome celebration. Adding to the macabre nature of the scene, lynching victims were typically dismembered into pieces of human trophy for mob members.
In the Maryville, Missouri, lynching of Raymond Gunn, the crowd estimated at 2, to 4, was at least a quarter women, and included hundreds of children.
After the fire was out, hundreds poked about in his ashes for souvenirs. Lynchings were only the latest fashion in racial terrorism against black Americans when they came to the fore in the late 19th century. White planters had long used malevolent and highly visible violence against the enslaved to try to suppress even the vaguest rumors of insurrection.
In , after a failed insurrection outside New Orleans , for example, whites decorated the road to the plantation where the plot failed with the decapitated heads of blacks, many of whom planters later admitted had nothing to do with the revolt. In , colonial authorities in New York City manacled, burned and broke on the wheel 18 enslaved blacks accused of plotting for their freedom.
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