Photos of victims, with exultant white observers posed next to them, were taken for distribution in newspapers or on postcards. Body parts, including genitalia, were sometimes distributed to spectators or put on public display. Most infractions were for petty crimes, like theft, but the biggest one of all was looking at or associating with white women. Many victims were black businessmen or black men who refused to back down from a fight. Headlines such as the following were not uncommon:.
Newspapers even printed that prominent white citizens in local towns attended lynchings, and often published victory pictures -- smiling crowds, many with children in tow -- standing next to the corpse.
Thousands of Victims In the South, an estimated two or three blacks were lynched each week in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Mississippi alone, blacks were lynched from the s to Nationwide, the figure climbed to nearly 5, Killed for Being "Insolent" Although rape is often cited as a rationale, statistics now show that only about one-fourth of lynchings from to were prompted by an accusation of rape.
In fact, most victims of lynching were political activists, labor organizers or black men and women who violated white expectations of black deference, and were deemed "uppity" or "insolent. Wells, who launched a fierce anti-lynching campaign in the s, the lynching of successful black people was a means of subordinating potential black economic competitors.
One was the "whipping party," in which a large group of whites whipped or beat a black person who was suspected of an offense of some kind. In alone, according to Oklahoma Gov. Jack Walton, 2, whippings took place. Another manifestation was the "race riot. Interracial violence occurred in Berwyn in , Lawton in , and Boynton in In Henryetta in whites burned the black residential district and established a "sundowner" law, and in Dewey in a similar incident occurred.
This activity reached its lowest point in the Tulsa Race Massacre in June During the violence a foiled lynch mob, enraged when confronted by angry, armed black Tulsans, marched to the Greenwood District and destroyed most of it and many of its residents.
Why did the violence end after , or at least go underground, so far as no longer to be recorded? Historians have offered a number of explanations. First, black newspaper editors of the — era continually encouraged their readers to confront and stop lynch mobs. Some, like Tulsa's A. Smitherman, even suggested armed resistance. Returning black veterans of World War I were inclined to follow his advice. Second, the NAACP began to publicly report lynching statistics in order to embarrass state officials.
Third, a national movement created a Commission on Interracial Cooperation, in Oklahoma called the Oklahoma Interracial Committee, with prominent black and white citizens as members. Fourth, the Oklahoma branch of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching worked diligently to publicize the accomplishments of blacks and to discourage men from participating in violence. In combination, black and white men and women worked successfully together to stop the madness.
Lowell L. Charles N. Michael F. Stewart E. Tolnay and E. Murray R. Robert L. 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. Communities of free blacks also faced the constant threat of race riots and pogroms at the hands of white mobs throughout the 19th century and continuing into the lynching era. Among the best known of these was the decimation of the Tulsa, Oklahoma, neighborhood of Greenwood in , after a black man was falsely charged with raping a white woman in an elevator.
According to the Tulsa Historical Society, it is believed to blacks were killed by white mobs in a matter of a few hours. Similar events, from the New York draft riots during the civil war to others in New Orleans, Knoxville, Charleston, Chicago, and St Louis, saw hundreds of blacks killed. The start of the lynching era is commonly pegged to , the year of the Tilden-Hayes compromise, which is viewed by most historians as the official end of Reconstruction in the US south.
In order to settle a razor-thin and contested presidential election between the Republican Rutherford B Hayes and the Democrat Samuel Tilden, northern Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the last of the formerly renegade states. The move technically only affected South Carolina and Louisiana but symbolically gestured to the south that the north would no longer hold the former Confederacy to the promise of full citizenship for freed blacks, and the south jumped at the chance to renege on the pledge.
The end of Reconstruction ushered in a widespread campaign of racial terror and oppression against newly freed black Americans, of which lynching was a cornerstone. The vast majority of lynching participants were never punished, both because of the tacit approval of law enforcement, and because dozens if not hundreds often had a hand in the killing. Still, punishment was not unheard of — though most of the time, if white lynchers were tried or convicted, it was for arson, rioting or some other much more minor offense.
They conducted grassroots activism, such as boycotting white businesses. Anti-lynching crusaders like Ida B. Wells composed newspaper columns to criticize the atrocities of lynching.
And several important civil rights organizations — including NAACP — emerged during this time to combat racial violence. NAACP led a courageous battle against lynching. Du Bois published a photo essay called "The Waco Horror" that featured brutal images of the lynching of Jesse Washington. Washington was a year-old Black teen lynched in Waco, Texas, by a white mob that accused him of killing Lucy Fryer, a white woman.
Du Bois was able to turn postcards of Washington's murder against their creators to energize the anti-lynching movement. The data in this study offer the gruesome facts by number, year, state, color, sex, and alleged offense. Among the campaign's other efforts, from to , we flew a flag from our national headquarters in New York that bore the words "A man was lynched yesterday.
We also fought hard for anti-lynching legislation. NAACP continued to push for federal anti-lynching legislation into the s. The first full year without a recorded lynching occurred in The tide may have turned against lynching, but white supremacy and violence continued to terrorize Black communities.
In , year-old Emmett Till was brutally murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman. Till's murder and subsequent injustice deeply affected the Black community and galvanized a young generation of Black people to join the Civil Rights Movement. An all-white jury acquitted the two men accused, who later bragged about their crimes in a magazine article. Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley, Emmet Till's mother, decided to hold an open-casket funeral to put her son's brutalized body on display for the world to see.
Jet Magazine published photos of his body in the casket, along with the headline "Negro Boy Was Killed for 'Wolf Whistle,'" causing national outrage among Black and white Americans alike, helping to catalyze the Civil Rights Movement. You might think of lynchings as a disgraceful and barbaric practice from the past, but they continue to this day.
In , James Byrd was chained to a car by three white supremacists and dragged to his death in the streets of Jasper, Texas. In , Ahmaud Arbery was fatally shot while jogging near Brunswick, Georgia.
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