What were lynchings?

Historians broadly agree that lynchings were a method of social and racial control meant to terrorize black Americans into submission, and into an inferior racial caste position. They became widely practiced in the US south from roughly 1877, the end of post-civil war reconstruction, through 1950.

A typical lynching would involve criminal accusations, often dubious, against a black American, an arrest, and the assembly of a “lynch mob” intent on subverting the normal constitutional judicial process.

Victims would be seized and subjected to every imaginable manner of physical torment, with the torture usually ending with being hung from a tree and set on fire. More often than not, victims would be dismembered and mob members would take pieces of their flesh and bone as souvenirs.

In a great many cases, the mobs were aided and abetted by law enforcement (indeed, they often were the same people). Officers would routinely leave a black inmate’s jail cell unguarded after rumors of a lynching began to circulate to allow for a mob to kill them before any trial or legal defense could take place.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where did most lynchings take place?

Unsurprisingly, lynching was most concentrated in the former Confederate states, and especially in those with large black populations.

According to EJI’s data, Mississippi, Florida, Arkansas and Louisiana had the highest statewide rates of lynching in the United States. Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana had the highest number of lynchings.

Who attended 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.

“Whole families came together, mothers and fathers, bringing even their youngest children. It was the show of the countryside – a very popular show,” read a 1930 editorial in the Raleigh News and Observer. “Men joked loudly at the sight of the bleeding body … girls giggled as the flies fed on the blood that dripped from the Negro’s nose.”

Adding to the macabre nature of the scene, lynching victims were typically dismembered into pieces of human trophy for mob members.

In his autobiography, WEB Du Bois writes of the 1899 lynching of Sam Hose in Georgia. He reports that the knuckles of the victim were on display at a local store on Mitchell Street in Atlanta and that a piece of the man’s heart and liver was presented to the state’s governor.

In the 1931 Maryville, Missouri, lynching of Raymond Gunn, the crowd estimated at 2,000 to 4,000 was at least a quarter women, and included hundreds of children. One woman “held her little girl up so she could get a better view of the naked Negro blazing on the roof”, wrote Arthur Raper in The Tragedy of Lynching.

After the fire was out, hundreds poked about in his ashes for souvenirs. “The charred remains of the victim were divided piece by piece,” wrote Raper.

Article by Jamiles Lartey and Sam Morris continues @ The Guardian.com