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United States

See also Wikipedia:Lynching in the United States

The lynching of African American William "Froggie" James in Cairo, Illinois, on November 11, 1909. A crowd of thousands watched the lynching.[1]
Postcard of the 1920 Duluth, Minnesota lynchings. Two of the Black victims are still hanging while the third is on the ground.[2]

Lynchings took place in the United States both before and after the American Civil War, most commonly in Southern states and Western frontier settlements and most frequently in the late 19th century. They were often performed by self-appointed commissions, mobs, or vigilantes as a form of punishment for presumed criminal offences.[3] From 1883 to 1941 there were 4,467 victims of lynching. Of these, 4,027 were male, and 99 female. 341 were of unknown gender, but are assumed to be likely male. In terms of ethnicity; 3,265 were black, 1,082 were white, 71 were Mexican or of Mexican descent, 38 were American Indian, ten were Chinese, and one was Japanese.[4] At the first recorded lynching, in St. Louis in 1835, a Black man named McIntosh who killed a deputy sheriff while being taken to jail was captured, chained to a tree, and burned to death on a corner lot downtown in front of a crowd of over 1,000 people.[5] Mob violence arose as a means of enforcing White supremacy[6] and it frequently verged on systematic political terrorism. After the American Civil War, secret white supremacist terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan instigated extrajudicial assaults and killings due to a perceived loss of white power in America.[7][8][9][10][11] Mobs usually alleged crimes for which they lynched Black people in order to instil fear. In the late 19th century, however, journalist Ida B. Wells showed that many presumed crimes were either exaggerated or had not even occurred.[12] The magnitude of the extralegal violence which occurred during election campaigns, to prevent blacks from voting, reached epidemic proportions.[7][8][9][10][11] 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: Template:Blockquote

Members of mobs that participated in lynchings often took photographs of what they had done to their victims. Souvenir taking, such as the taking of pieces of rope, clothing, branches and sometimes body parts was not uncommon. Some of those photographs were published and sold as postcards.[13][14]

Anti-lynching legislation and the civil rights movement

The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill was first introduced to the United States Congress in 1918 by Republican Congressman Leonidas C. Dyer of St. Louis, Missouri. The bill was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, and in the same year it was given a favorable report by the United States Senate Committee. Its passage was blocked by White Democratic senators from the Solid South, the only representatives elected since the southern states had disenfranchised African Americans around the start of the 20th century.[15] The Dyer Bill influenced later anti-lynching legislation, including the Costigan-Wagner Bill, which was also defeated in the US Senate.[16]

The song "Strange Fruit" was composed by Abel Meeropol in 1937, inspired by the photograph of a lynching in Marion, Indiana. Meeropol said that the photograph "haunted me for days".[17] It was published as a poem in the New York Teacher and later in the magazine New Masses, in both cases under the pseudonym Lewis Allan. The poem was set to music, also by Meeropol, and the song was performed and popularized by Billie Holiday.[18] The song reached 16th place on the charts in July 1939.Template:Citation needed The song has been performed by many other singers, including Nina Simone.

By the 1950s, the civil rights movement was gaining new momentum. It was spurred by the lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old youth from Chicago who was killed while visiting an uncle in Mississippi. His mother insisted on having an open-casket funeral so that people could see how badly her son had been beaten. The Black community throughout the U.S. became mobilized.[19] Vann R. Newkirk wrote "the trial of his killers became a pageant illuminating the tyranny of white supremacy".[19] The state of Mississippi tried two defendants, but they were acquitted by an all-White jury.[20] David Jackson writes that it was the photograph of the "child's ravaged body, that forced the world to reckon with the brutality of American racism."[21]

Most lynchings ceased by the 1960s,[22][23] but even in 2021 there were claims that racist lynchings still happen in the United States, being covered up as suicides.[24]

In 2018, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice was opened in Montgomery, Alabama, a memorial that commemorates the victims of lynchings in the United States.

On March 29, 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act of 2022 into law, which classified lynching as a federal hate crime.[25][26]

  1. ↑ (2015) Black Woman Reformer: Ida B. Wells, Lynching, & Transatlantic Activism. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 9780820345574. 
  2. ↑ Moyers, Bill. "Legacy of Lynching". PBS. Retrieved July 28, 2016
  3. ↑ The Guardian, 'Jim Crow lynchings more widespread than previously thought', Lauren Gambino, February 10, 2015
  4. ↑ (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. DOI:10.1177/2378023119841780. ISSN 2378-0231. Research Blogging.
  5. ↑ William Hyde and Howard L. Conrad (eds.), Encyclopedia of the History of St. Louis: A Compendium of History and Biography for Ready Reference: Volume 4. New York: Southern History Company, 1899; pg. 1913.
  6. ↑ Gibson, Robert A.. The Negro Holocaust: Lynching and Race Riots in the United States, 1880–1950. Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Brundage, W. Fitzhugh (1993). Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-06345-7. 
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Crouch, Barry A. (1984). "A Spirit of Lawlessness: White violence, Texas Blacks, 1865–1868". Journal of Social History 18 (2): 217–226. DOI:10.1353/jsh/18.2.217. Research Blogging.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Foner, Eric (1988). Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper & Row, 119–123. ISBN 0-06-015851-4. 
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Stagg, J. C. A. (1974). "The Problem of Klan Violence: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1868–1871". Journal of American Studies 8 (3): 303–318. DOI:10.1017/S0021875800015905. Research Blogging.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Trelease, Allen W. (1979). White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 0-313-21168-X. 
  12. ↑ Lynching. MSN Encarta. 
  13. ↑ Tharoor, Ishaan. U.S. owes black people reparations for a history of 'racial terrorism,' says U.N. panel, September 27, 2016. “"Lynching was a form of racial terrorism that has contributed to a legacy of racial inequality that the United States must address. Thousands of people of African descent were killed in violent public acts of racial control and domination and the perpetrators were never held accountable."”
  14. ↑ Template:Cite report
  15. ↑ Richard H. Pildes, "Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon", Constitutional Commentary, Vol. 17, 2000. Accessed March 10, 2008.
  16. ↑ Zangrando, NAACP Crusade, pp. 43–44, 54.
  17. ↑ Cone, James H. (2011). The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Maryknoll, New York: Oribis Books, 134. 
  18. ↑ Strange Fruit. PBS Independent Lens credits the music as well as the words to Meeropol, though Billie Holiday's autobiography and the Spartacus article credit her with co-authoring the song.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 II, Vann R. Newkirk. How 'The Blood of Emmett Till' Still Stains America Today, The Atlantic. (in en-US)
  20. ↑ Whitfield, Stephen (1991). A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till. pp 41–42. JHU Press.
  21. ↑ How The Horrific Photograph Of Emmett Till Helped Energize The Civil Rights Movement.
  22. ↑ Lynchings: By State and Race, 1882–1968. University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. “Statistics provided by the Archives at Tuskegee Institute.”
  23. ↑ Lynchings: By Year and Race. University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. “Statistics provided by the Archives at Tuskegee Institute.”
  24. ↑ Brown, DeNeen L.. 'Lynchings in Mississippi never stopped', August 8, 2021. Retrieved on February 16, 2022.
  25. ↑ Zaslav, Ali. Senate passes Emmett Till Antilynching Act of 2022, CNN, March 8, 2022.
  26. ↑ Shear, Michael D.. Biden Signs Bill to Make Lynching a Federal Crime, The New York Times, March 29, 2022. (in en-US)
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