A History Of Lynching

Definition: Lynching is a mob act of vigilantism to illegally execute an accused person by a mob. The term allegedly originated as a reference to a Virginia Justice of the Peace (1736-96). These acts often occurred in front of thousands of spectators, who would gather “souvenirs” afterward.

Lynching is another sad fact of American history and has been immortalized in song (“Strange Fruit”, recorded by Billie Holliday, in pictures (the poignant, “The Black Book”), in a scholarly tome (Ralph Ginzburg’s, “100 Years Of Lynchings”), and in fiction (In Richard Wright's "Big Boy Leaves Home", 1938, Big Boy and his friend Bobo accidentally shoot and kill a white man. The black community fearful of a mass killing spree by whites hide the boys, hoping to help them escape later. However, Bobo is caught and lynched as a frightened Big Boy looks on). .

Lynching was originally a system of punishment used by whites against African-american slaves. It seldom mattered whether the charges were true or not, since it usually camde down to the word of whites against the accused black person.

“The accusations against persons lynched, according to the Tuskegee Institute records for the years 1882 to 1951, were: in 41 per cent for felonious assault, 19.2 per cent for rape, 6.1 per cent for attempted rape, 4.9 per cent for robbery and theft, 1.8 per cent for insult to white persons, and 22.7 per cent for miscellaneous offenses or no offense at a 11.5 In the last category are all sorts of trivial “offenses” such as “disputing with a white man,” attempting to register to vote, “unpopularity”, self-defense, testifying against a white man, “asking a white woman in marriage”, and “peeping in a window.” (Gibson). However, whites who protested against this were also in danger of being lynched.

Gibson writes, “In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the lynching of Black people in the Southern and border states became an institutionalized method used by whites to terrorize Blacks and maintain white supremacy. In the South, during the period 1880 to 1940, there was deep-seated and all-pervading hatred and fear of the Negro which led white mobs to turn to “lynch law” as a means of social control. Lynchings—open public murders of individuals suspected of crime conceived and carried out more or less spontaneously by a mob—seem to have been an American invention. In Lynch-Law, the first scholarly investigation of lynching, written in 1905, author James E. Cutler stated that ‘lynching is a criminal practice which is peculiar to the United States’.”

John F. Callahan states that, “Lynching did not come out of nowhere. Its actual and symbolic grounding in history and literature goes back to slavery and slavery's defining persons of African descent as property. During slavery there were numerous public punishments of slaves, none of which were preceded by trials or any other semblance of civil or judicial processes. Justice depended solely upon the slaveholder. Executions, whippings, brandings, and other forms of severe punishment, including sometimes the public separation of families, were meted out by authority or at the command of the master or his representative.”

Though the Chicago Times and New York Times derided the practice of lynching, Other newspapers abetted these efforts, often creating the rationale for the attack. R.W. Logan writes, “It is next to impossible to locate a newspaper article that does not identify the victim as a Negro or that refrains from suggesting that the accused was guilty of the crime and therefore deserving of punishment. For example, The New Orleans Picayune described an African-American who was lynched in Hammond, Louisiana for robbery as a "big, burly negro" and a "Black wretch"

On November 7th, 1837, Elijah Parish Lovejoy, the white editor of the Alton Observer, was killed by a white mob after he had published articles criticizing lynching and advocating the abolition of slavery. On 9th March, 1892, three African American businessmen were lynched in Memphis. When Ida Wells Barnett (a black woman) wrote an article condemning the lynchers, a white mob destroyed her printing press. They declared that they intended to lynch her but fortunately she was visiting Philadelphia at the time.

It is estimated that between 1880 and 1920, an average of two African Americans a week were lynched in the United States. Dr. Arthur Raper was commissioned in 1930 to produce a report on lynching. He discovered that "3,724 people were lynched in the United States from 1889 through to 1930. Over four-fifths of these were Negroes, less than one-sixth of whom were accused of rape. Practically all of the lynchers were native whites. The fact that a number of the victims were tortured, mutilated, dragged, or burned suggests the presence of sadistic tendencies among the lynchers. Of the tens of thousands of lynchers and onlookers, only 49 were indicted and only 4 have been sentenced."

After the First World War ten black soldiers, several still in their army uniforms, were amongst those lynched. Between 1919 and 1922, a further 239 blacks were lynched by white mobs and many more were killed by individual acts of violence and unrecorded lynchings. During the 100 year period from 1865 to 1965 over 2400 African Americans were lynched in the United States. 1892 had a record 230 deaths (161 black, 69 white).

According to social economist Gunnar Myrdal: “The Southern states account for nine-tenths of the lynchings. More than two-thirds of the remaining one-tenth occurred in the six states which immediately border the South: Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Kansas.” (Gunnar Myrdal, “An American Dilemma,” 1944, pp. 560-561).

In 1901George Henry White, the last former slave to serve in Congress, proposed a bill in that would outlaw lynching, making it a federal crime. He argued that any person participating actively in or acting as an accessory in a lynching should be convicted of treason. White pointed out that lynching was being used by white mobs in the Deep South to terrorize African Americans. The bill was defeated.

In 1935 President Franklin Roosevelt declined to support the Costigan-Wagner bill, designed to punish sheriffs who failed to protect their prisoners from lynch mobs. He believed he would lose the votes of southern whites and therefore, not be re-elected. In July of that year six deputies were escorting Ruben Stacy to Dade County jail in Miami when he was snatched away by a white mob and hanged outside the home of a white woman named Marion Jones, whom had made a complaint against him. The New York Times reported that a later investigation revealed Stacy “Went to the house to ask for food; (and) the woman became frightened and screamed when she saw Stacy's face."

Other lynchings of note: Scottsboro (1931), James Byrd (1997), Will Brown (Omaha, NE, 1919)

Sources:

Robert L. Langrando, “About Lynching.”

Richard M. Perloff, “The Press and Lynchings of African Americans,” Journal Studies, January 2000, pp. 315-330.

R.W. Logan, “The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson,” 1965, p. 298.

Robert A. Gibson, “The Negro Holocaust: Lynching and Race Riots in the United States,1880-1950,” 1979.

James E. Cutler, “Lynch Law” (New York, 1905), p. 1.