During the period between the Civil War and World War II, thousands of African Americans were lynched in the United States. Lynchings were violent and public acts of torture that traumatized black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials. These lynchings were terrorism. “Terror lynchings” peaked between 1880 and 1940 and claimed the lives of African American men, women, and children who were forced to endure the fear, humiliation, and barbarity of this widespread phenomenon unaided.
Lynching profoundly impacted race relations in this country and shaped the geographic, political, social, and economic conditions of African Americans in ways that are still evident today. Terror lynchings fueled the mass migration of millions of black people from the South into urban ghettos in the North and West throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Lynching created a fearful environment where racial
subordination and segregation was maintained with limited resistance for decades. Most critically, lynching reinforced a legacy of racial inequality that has never been adequately addressed in America. The administration of criminal justice in particular is tangled with the history of lynching in profound and important ways that continue to contaminate the integrity and fairness of the justice system.
This report begins a necessary conversation to confront the injustice, inequality, anguish, and suffering that racial terror and violence created. The history of terror lynching complicates contemporary issues of race, punishment, crime, and justice. Mass incarceration, excessive penal punishment, disproportionate sentencing of racial minorities, and police abuse of people of color reveal problems in American society that were framed in the terror era. The narrative of racial difference that lynching dramatized continues to haunt us. Avoiding honest conversation about this history has undermined our ability to build a nation where racial justice can be achieved.
In America, there is a legacy of racial inequality shaped by the enslavement of millions of black people. The era of slavery was followed by decades of terrorism and racial subordination most dramatically evidenced by lynching. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s challenged the legality of many of the most racist practices and structures that sustained racial subordination but the movement was not followed by a continued commitment to Consequently, this legacy of racial inequality has persisted, leaving us vulnerable to a range of problems that continue to reveal racial disparities and injustice. EJI believes it is essential that we begin to discuss our history of racial injustice more soberly and to understand the implications of our past in addressing the challenges of the present.
Lynching in America is the second in a series of reports that examines the trajectory of American history from slavery to mass incarceration. In 2013, EJI published Slavery in America, which documents the slavery era and its continuing legacy, and erected three public markers in Montgomery, Alabama, to change the visual landscape of a city and state that has romanticized the mid-nineteenth century and ignored the devastation and horror created by racialized slavery and the slave trade.
Over the past six years, EJI staff have spent thousands of hours researching and documenting terror lynchings in the twelve most active lynching states in America: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. We have more recently supplemented our research by documenting 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.
We distinguish racial terror lynchings—the subject of this report—from hangings and mob violence that followed some criminal trial process or that were committed against non-minorities without the threat of terror. Those lynchings were a crude form of punishment that did not have the features of terror lynchings directed at racial minorities who were being threatened and menaced in multiple ways.
We also distinguish terror lynchings from racial violence and hate crimes that were prosecuted as criminal acts. Although criminal prosecution for hate crimes was rare during the period we examine, such prosecutions ameliorated those acts of violence and racial animus. The lynchings we document were acts of terrorism because these murders were carried out with impunity, sometimes in broad daylight, often “on the courthouse lawn.”i These lynchings were not “frontier justice,” because they generally took place in communities where there was a functioning criminal justice system that was deemed too good for African Americans. Terror lynchings were horrific acts of violence whose perpetrators were never held accountable. Indeed, some public spectacle lynchings were attended by the entire white community and conducted as celebratory acts of racial control and domination.
KEY FINDINGS
1. Racial terror lynching was much more prevalent than previously reported. EJI researchers have documented several hundred more lynchings than the number identified in the most comprehensive work done on lynching to date. The extraordinary work of E.M. Beck and Stewart E. Tolnay provided an invaluable resource, as did the research collected at Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Alabama. These sources are widely viewed asthe most comprehensive collection of research data on the subject of lynching in America. EJI conducted extensive analysis of these data as well as supplemental research and investigation of lynchings in each of the subject states. We reviewed local newspapers, historical archives, and court records; conducted interviews with local historians, survivors, and victims’ descendants; and exhaustively examined contemporaneously published reports in African American newspapers. EJI has documented 4084 racial terror lynchings in twelve Southern states between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950, which is at least 800 more lynchings in these states than previously reported. EJI has also documented more than 300 racial terror lynchings in other states during this time period.
2. Some states and counties were particularly terrifying places for African Americans and had dramatically higher rates of lynching than other states and counties we reviewed. 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. Lafayette, Hernando, Taylor, and Baker counties in Florida; Early County, Georgia; Fulton County, Kentucky; and Lake and Moore Counties in Tennessee had the highest rates of terror lynchings in America. Phillips County, Arkansas; Lafourche and Tensas parishes in Louisiana; Leflore and Carroll counties in Mississippi; and New Hanover County, North Carolina, were sites of mass killings of African Americans in single-incident violence that mark them as notorious places in the history of racial terror violence. The largest numbers of lynchings were found in Jefferson County, Alabama; Orange, Columbia, and Polk counties in Florida; Fulton, Early, and Brooks counties in Georgia; Caddo, Ouachita, Bossier, Iberia, and Tangipahoa parishes in Louisiana; Hinds County, Mississippi; Shelby County, Tennessee; and Anderson County, Texas.
3. Racial terror lynching was a tool used to enforce laws and racial segregation—a tactic for maintaining racial control by victimizing the entire African American community, not merely punishment of an alleged perpetrator for a crime.Our research confirms that many victims of terror lynchings were murdered without being accused of any crime; they were killed for minor social transgressions or for demanding basic rights and fair treatment.
4. Our conversations with survivors of lynchings show that terror lynching played a key role in the forced migration of millions of black Americans out of the South. Thousands of people fled to the North and West out of fear of being lynched. Parents and spouses sent away loved ones who suddenly found themselves at risk of being lynched for a minor social transgression; they characterized these frantic, desperate escapes as surviving near-lynchings.
5. In all of the subject states, we observed that there is an astonishing absence of any effort to acknowledge, discuss, or address lynching. Many of the communities where lynchings took place have gone to great lengths to erect markers and monuments that memorialize the Civil War, the Confederacy, and historical events during which local power was violently reclaimed by white Southerners. These communities celebrate and honor the architects of racial subordination and political leaders known for their belief in white supremacy. There are very few monuments or memorials that address the history and legacy of lynching in particular or the struggle for racial equality more generally. Most communities do not actively or visibly recognize how their race relations were shaped by terror lynching.
6. We found that most terror lynchings can best be understood as having the features of one or more of the following: (1) lynchings that resulted from a wildly distorted fear of interracial sex; (2) lynchings in response to casual social transgressions; (3) lynchings based on allegations of serious violent crime; (4) public spectacle lynchings; (5) lynchings that escalated into large-scale violence targeting the entire African American community; and (6) lynchings of sharecroppers, ministers, and community leaders who resisted mistreatment, which were most common between 1915 and 1940.
7. The decline of lynching in the studied states relied heavily on the increased use of capital punishment imposed by court order following an often accelerated trial. That the death penalty’s roots are sunk deep in the legacy of lynching is evidenced by the fact that public executions to mollify the mob continued after the practice was legally banned.
The Equal Justice Initiative believes that our nation must fully address our history of racial terror and the legacy of racial inequality it has created. This report explores the power of truth and reconciliation or transitional justice to address oppressive histories by urging communities to honestly and soberly recognize the pain of the past. As has been powerfully detailed in Sherrilyn A. Ifill's extraordinary work on lynching i, there is an urgent need to challenge the absence of recognition in the public space on the subject of lynching. Only when we concretize the experience through discourse, memorials, monuments, and other acts of reconciliation can we overcome the shadows cast by these grievous events. We hope you will join our effort to help towns, cities, and states confront and recover from tragic histories of racial violence and terrorism and to improve the health of our communities by creating an environment where there can truly be equal justice for all.
SECESSION AND EMANCIPATION, 1861 - 1865
When eleven Southern states seceded from the Union to form the Confederate States of America, sparking the Civil War in 1861, they made no secret of their ultimate aim: to preserve the institution of slavery. As Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens explained, the ideological “cornerstone” of the new nation they sought to form was that “the negro is not equal to the white man” and “slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and moral condition.” 1
Slavery had been an increasingly divisive political issue for generations, and though United States President Abraham Lincoln personally opposed slavery, he had rejected abolitionists’ calls for immediate emancipation. Instead, Lincoln favored a gradual process of compensated emancipation and voluntary colonization, which would encourage freed black people to emigrate to Africa.2 Once the nation was in the throes of civil war, Lincoln feared any federal move toward emancipation would alienate border states that permitted slavery but had not seceded. Lincoln’s cabinet and other federal officials largely agreed, and shortly after the war’s start, the House of Representatives passed a resolution emphasizing that the purpose of the war was to preserve the Union, not to eliminate slavery.3
As the Civil War dragged on, however, increasing numbers of enslaved African Americans fled slavery to relocate behind Union lines, and the cause of emancipation became more militarily and politically expedient. On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation,4 which declared enslaved people residing in the rebelling Confederate states to be “then, thenceforward, and forever free.”5The Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to the roughly 425,000 enslaved people living in Tennessee, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland—states that had not seceded or were occupied by Union forces.
In most Confederate states where the proclamation did apply, resistance to emancipation was inevitable and there was almost no federal effort to enforce the grant of freedom.6 Southern planters attempted to hide news about Lincoln’s proclamation from enslaved people, and in many areas where federal troops were not present, slavery remained the status quo well after 1863.7 Even as the Confederacy faced increasingly certain defeat in the war, Southern whites insisted that Lincoln’s wartime executive order was illegal and that slavery could be formally banned only by a legislature or court. Many used deception and violence to keep enslaved people from leaving plantations.8
Formal nationwide codification of emancipation came in December 1865 with ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery throughout the United States Several states continued to symbolically resist into the twentieth century: Delaware did not ratify the Thirteenth Amendment until 1901; Kentucky ratified in 1976; and Mississippi ratified in 1995.9
The legal instruments that led to the formal end of racialized chattel slavery in America did nothing to address the myth of racial hierarchy that sustained slavery, nor did they establish a national commitment to the alternative ideology of racial equality. Black people might be free from involuntary labor under the law, but that did not mean Southern whites recognized them as fully human.White Southern identity was grounded in a belief that whites are inherently superior to African Americans; following the war, whites reacted violently to the notion that they would now have to treat their former human property as equals and pay for their labor. In numerous recorded incidents, plantation owners attacked black people simply for claiming their freedom.10
At the Civil War’s end, black autonomy expanded but white supremacy remained deeply rooted. The failure to unearth those roots would leave black Americans exposed to terrorism and racial subordination for more than a century.
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Formerly enslaved people were beaten and murdered for asserting they were free after the Civil War. Without federal troops, freed black men and women remained subject to violence and intimidation for any act or gesture that showed independence or freedom. (Library of Congress.)
PRESIDENTIAL RECONSTRUCTION
The federal government’s lackluster commitment to black civil rights and security following the Civil War was a disappointing failure that undermined the promise of freedom. Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau in March 1865 with a mandate to provide formerly enslaved people with basic necessities and to oversee their condition and treatment in the former Confederate states. But Congress appropriated no budget for the bureau, leaving it to be staffed and funded by President Andrew Johnson’s War Department.11
President Johnson, a Unionist former slaveholder from Tennessee, served as vice president during the Civil War and assumed the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865. Though he initially promised to punish Southern “traitors,” Johnson issued 7000 pardons to secessionists by 1866. He also rescinded orders granting black farmers tracts of land confiscated from Confederates.12 This greatly impeded formerly enslaved people’s ability to build their own farms because whites routinely refused to provide them credit, effectively barring black people from purchasing land without government assistance.
Instead of facilitating black land ownership, Johnson advocated a new practice that soon replaced slavery as a primary source of Southern agricultural labor: sharecropping.Under this system, black laborers worked white-owned land in exchange for a share of the crop at harvest minus costs for food and lodging, often in the same slave quarters they had previously inhabited. Because Johnson’s administration required that landowners pay off their debts to banks first, sharecroppers frequently received no pay and had no recourse.13
President Johnson also opposed black voting rights. During , whites of diverse political affiliations declared voting a “privilege” rather than a universal right, and even some whites who had opposed slavery were wary of measures that would lead to black voting in the North.14 Johnson believed black people were inherently servile and unintelligent; he feared they would vote as instructed by their former masters, reestablishing the power of the planter class and relegating poor white farmers to virtual slavery.15 Johnson made little effort to disguise his racist views.In his 1867 annual message to Congress, President Johnson declared that black Americans had “less capacity for government than any other race of people,” that they would “relapse into barbarism” if left to their own devices, and that giving them the vote would result in “a tyranny such as this continent has never yet witnessed.16”Not surprisingly, under President Johnson, federal Reconstruction efforts to support and enforce black Americans’ citizenship rights and social and economic freedom went largely unsupported and unrealized.
Meanwhile, the Johnson administration allowed Southern whites to reestablish white supremacy and dominate black people with impunity. Two incidents in 1866 foretold terrifying days to come for African Americans. On May 1, 1866, in Memphis, Tennessee, white police officers began firing into a crowd of African American men, women, and children that had gathered on South Street, and afterward white mobs rampaged through black neighborhoods with the intent to “kill every Negro and drive the last one from the city.”Over three days of violence, forty-six African Americans were killed (two whites were killed by friendly fire); ninety-one houses, four churches, and twelve schools were burned to the ground; at least five women were raped; and many black people fled the city permanently.17
Less than three months later, in New Orleans, a group of African Americans—many of whom had been free before the Civil War—attempted to convene a state constitutional convention to extend voting rights to black men and repeal racially discriminatory laws known as When the delegates convened at the Mechanics’ Institute on July 30, 1866, groups of black supporters and white opponents clashed in the streets. The white mob began firing on black marchers, indiscriminately killing convention supporters and unaffiliated black bystanders. Rather than maintain order, white police officers attacked black residents with guns, axes, and clubs, arresting many and killing several. By the time federal troops arrived to suppress the white insurgency, as many as forty-eight black people were dead and two hundred had been wounded.18
PROGRESSIVE RECONSTRUCTION
The Memphis and New Orleans attacks, which occurred just before the midterm elections of 1866, sparked national outrage outside the South and mobilized voters to support the progressive platform advocating expansive rights and protections for African Americans. Republicans won a landslide victory in the 1866 congressional races, gaining a veto-proof majority and control of the legislative agenda.19 Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania then led the progressive caucus in devising an ambitious civil rights program broader than anything Congress would attempt for another century.
First, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which declared black Americans full citizens entitled to equal civil rights.20 President Johnson vetoed the bill, but Congress—for the first time in United States history—overrode the veto.21 Next, the progressive Republican supermajority quickly passed the Fourteenth Amendment. Intended to eliminate any doubt about the constitutionality of civil rights, the proposed amendment established that all persons born in the country, regardless of race, were full citizens of the United States and the states in which they resided, entitled to the “privileges and immunities” of citizenship, due process, and the equal protection of the law.22 If ratified, the amendment would supersede the United States Supreme Court’s 1857 decision in , which held that African Americans were not citizens and had no standing to sue in federal court.23
Twenty-eight of the thirty-seven states had to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment in order for it to be added to the Constitution, but when Southern legislatures first considered the amendment, ten of the eleven former Confederate states rejected it overwhelmingly—Louisiana unanimously.24In response, again over President Johnson’s veto, Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, which imposed military rule on the South and required that any states seeking readmission to the Union had to first ratify the Fourteenth Amendment.25 In July 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was officially adopted.
The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 also granted voting rights to African American men while disenfranchising former Confederates, dramatically altering the political landscape of the South and ushering in a period of progress.In elections for new state governments, black voter turnout neared 90 percent in many jurisdictions,26 and black voters—who comprised a majority in many districts and a statewide majority in Louisiana—elected both white and black leaders to represent them. More than six hundred African Americans, most of them formerly enslaved, were elected as state legislators during this period. Another eighteen African Americans rose to serve in state executive positions, including lieutenant governor, secretary of state, superintendent of education, and treasurer. In Louisiana in 1872, P.B.S. Pinchback became the first black governor in America (and would be the last until 1990). The Reconstruction states sent sixteen black representatives to the United States Congress, and Mississippi voters elected the nation’s first black senators: Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce.27
The newly elected and racially integrated Reconstruction governments took bold action at the state level, repealing discriminatory laws, rewriting apprenticeship and vagrancy statutes, outlawing corporal punishment, and sharply reducing the number of capital offenses. African Americans also won election to law enforcement positions like sheriff and chief of police, and were empowered to serve on juries.28
Despite their advances, the racially diverse Reconstruction governments faced significant challenges. For one, the issue of social equality continued to divide the Republican Party. Black members and progressive whites advocated the full eradication of white supremacy, while more conservative whites still supported some forms of racial hierarchy and separation. Because nearly all black voters supported the Republican ticket in every election, the party began to take freedmen’s votes for granted and shifted its attention toward courting more “moderate” white swing voters.29 In addition, the Reconstruction governments faced a “crisis of legitimacy” as their efforts to attract capital to war-torn Southern state economies raised accusations of corruption and graft.30
In the midst of this growing instability, officials struggled to control increasingly violent and lawless groups of white supremacists in their states. Beginning as disparate “social clubs” of former Confederate soldiers, these groups morphed into large paramilitary organizations that drew thousands of members from all sectors of white society.31Collectively, and with the tacit endorsement of the broader white community, their members launched a bloody reign of terror that would overthrow Reconstruction and sustain generations of white rule.
WHITE BACKLASH: THE KU KLUX KLAN AND THE REIGN OF TERROR
Racial violence aimed at reestablishing white supremacy was widespread throughout the former Confederate states following emancipation and the Civil War. In 1866, L.E. Potts, a white woman living in Paris, Texas, wrote a letter entreating President Andrew Johnson to do something to curb the widespread violence raining down on local black people.32 She wrote that whites were so angered at the idea of losing their slaves, they were trying to “persecute them back into slavery” and the result was brutal violence: “[Black people] are often run down by blood hounds, and shot because they do not do precisely as the white man says.33
The post-war period was a time of frequent, extreme, and often undocumented violence targeting newly emancipated black people. As historian Leon F. Litwack writes, “[h]ow many black men and women were beaten, flogged, mutilated, and murdered in the first years of emancipation will never be known.”34 Similarly, historian Eric Foner explains,The “wave of counterrevolutionary terror that swept over large parts of the South between 1868 and 1871 lacks a counterpart either in the American experience or in that of the other Western Hemisphere societies that abolished slavery in the nineteenth century.”35
Occupation by federal troops restrained this violence but did not eliminate racial attacks or the commitment to white supremacy that fueled them. The political movement to restore white dominance in the South following the Civil War was termed Redemption and its advocates, called Redeemers, were staunchly opposed to progressive Republicans and black citizenship rights.36 This set up a tense conflict.As black people became voters with significant political power, especially in states and counties where they constituted majorities, disputed elections often devolved into bloody massacres.
In the face of black political and economic competition created by emancipation and progressive Reconstruction, white backlash worked to re-impose white dominance through violent repression.37 In 1868, white Democrats angered by growing black support for white Republican candidates in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana, terrorized the local black community in two weeks of attacks that left more than a hundred black people dead.38 In 1873, after a very close gubernatorial election, a militia of white Democrats killed dozens of black Republicans in what came to be known as the Colfax Massacre.39 Similarly, in 1875, a paramilitary group known as the Red Shirts organized in Mississippi to undermine black political power by disrupting Republican rallies, intimidating black voters with threats of violence and economic reprisal, and assassinating black leaders.40
COLFAX, LOUISIANA
Grant Parish in central Louisiana was one of several new parishes (or counties) created during Reconstruction, and home to the town of Colfax. A sugar and cotton plantation during slavery, Colfax rapidly transformed into a district controlled by political progressives in the early Reconstruction era.41
In 1872, following several years during which white former Confederates in the Democratic Party worked to undermine elected black progressive Republican officials, several Democratic candidates won an election widely recognized as fraudulent. In response, black protestors refused to recognize the illegitimate election results and staged a peaceful occupation of the town courthouse.42 Several weeks later, approximately 140 whites surrounded the courthouse and, in the first week of April 1873, engaged in skirmishes with the black militias that resulted in several deaths.
On Easter Sunday, 300 whites attacked the courthouse and three whites were killed in the assault.The outnumbered black forces waved white flags in surrender, but the assault continued; numerous unarmed black men who hid in the courthouse or attempted to flee were shot and killed.Approximately fifty African Americans who survived the afternoon assault were taken prisoner and executed by the white militia later that evening. As many as 150 African Americans were killed in the massacre, described as “the bloodiest single act of carnage in all of Reconstruction.”43
The whites who exacted this violence faced no consequences because the United States Supreme Court dismissed all federal charges against them.
The local narrative in Colfax has continued to praise the cause of racial violence and embrace the message of racial hatred. In 1921, the town erected a memorial to the three whites who died during the Colfax Massacre, memorializing them as “heroes [who] fell . . . fighting for white supremacy.” In 1950, at the site of the old courthouse, the state erected a monument that reads, “On this site occurred the Colfax Riot in which three white men and 150 negroes were slain. This event on April 13, 1873, marked the end of misrule in the South.” Today, Colfax is a town of less than 2000 people. Both markers still stand.
The earliest seeds of violent white resistance to Reconstruction were planted in Pulaski, Tennessee, in late 1865, when six Confederate veterans formed the Ku Klux Klan.44 Made up of well-educated young men of comparative wealth who would go on to prominent careers in law and state politics, the group was initially informal, with a stated purpose of “amusement.”45 The KKK spread quickly and developed a complex hierarchy with rules as intricate as an army manual. In less than a year, chapters spread throughout Tennessee and into northern Alabama.Famed Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest was the Klan’s first leader, or Grand Wizard, and today he is immortalized in stone monuments in many towns and cities throughout the South.46Far from the small band of extremist outsiders it is now, the Klan drew members from every echelon of white society in the nineteenth century, including planters, lawyers, merchants, and ministers. In York County, South Carolina, nearly the entire white male population joined.47 The Klan and similar organizations, including the Knights of the White Camelia and the Pale Faces, were independent and de-centralized but shared aims and tactics to form a vast network of terrorist cells. By the 1868 presidential election, those cells were poised to act as a unified military force supporting the cause of white supremacy throughout the South.48
Shortly before the 1868 election, progressive Republicans tried to impeach President Andrew Johnson and failed, hurting the party politically. As a result, former Union General Ulysses S. Grant—a moderate—won the Republican presidential nomination.49In the general election, Grant faced former New York Governor Horatio Seymour, who campaigned as the “white man’s candidate.” In a March 11, 1868 speech to the New York State Democratic Convention, Seymour said that black people “are in form, color, and character unlike the whites, and [] are, in their present condition, an ignorant and degraded race.”50Seymour also criticized post-war congressional civil rights laws that, by prohibiting racial discrimination and establishing equal citizenship rights, “abolished the black man and made him a white man by legislation.”51 As white terror groups sought to suppress the black vote and deliver the South for Seymour, violent attacks in Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia resulted in hundreds of deaths and successfully prevented black people from casting a single vote in many counties with significant black populations.52
Despite the campaign of terror, Grant carried most of the Southern states and won the presidency. The Klan initially retreated and Grand Wizard Nathan Bedford Forrest called for its dissolution, claiming that its mission had been hijacked by rogue elements—a refrain that became common among Klan leaders seeking to distance themselves from the extreme violence they had encouraged.53 While the Klan partially disbanded as a unified political organization, a patchwork of local entities continued to seek its goals, enforcing white supremacist social mores and economic structures through bloodshed and intimidation.
Varied white groups took up the cause of restoring labor discipline in the absence of slavery. Vigilantes whipped and lynched black freedmen who argued with employers, left the plantations where they were contracted to work, or displayed any economic success of their own.54 White terror groups also focused intense energy on imposing “their own vision of a righteous society,”55 which usually meant targeting black men for perceived sexual transgressions against white women. Charges of rape, while common, were “routinely fabricated” and often extrapolated from minor violations of the social code, such as “paying a compliment” to a white woman, expressing romantic interest in a white woman, or cohabitating interracially.56 White mobs regularly attacked black men accused of sexual crimes and historians estimate that at least 400 African Americans were lynched between 1868 and 1871.57 Whites also sought retribution for alleged rapes by targeting entire black communities with violent, public, and sexualized attacks, including forcing victims to strip, binding them in compromising positions, and whipping their genitals; widespread rape of black women, sometimes in front of their families; and genital mutilation and castration.58 Through these acts of violence, white vigilantes used terror “to revive the privileges of white masculinity over the bodies of their former slaves.”59
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(Thomas Nast/Harper's Weekly, Aug. 8, 1868)
WAVERING SUPPORT: FEDERAL INDIFFERENCE AND LEGAL OPPOSITION
By 1870, state Reconstruction governments were nearly powerless to stop the counterrevolutions surging within their borders. They sorely needed federal aid, and initially they got it. President Grant supported progressive Reconstruction and provided federal troops to enforce it.60 In addition, Congress passed a series of Enforcement Acts in 1870 and 1871, and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.61 These laws authorized individuals to go to federal court for help when their civil rights were violated and empowered the federal government to prosecute civil rights violations as crimes.62
In the Southern states, Reconstruction government officials remained ineffective in stopping rampant white violence, undermining officials’ legitimacy at home and frustrating Republicans in the North.63 In the 1872 election, the Republican Party split along regional lines and New York publisher Horace Greeley challenged incumbent President Grant for the presidential nomination. Representing the “liberal reform” wing of the party, Greeley generally supported civil rights for freedmen but his commitment to equality was tepid. He referred to African Americans as “an easy, worthless race,”64and supported universal amnesty and restored voting rights for former Confederates. Grant won the nomination and a second term by a landslide, but political division remained and violence in the South persisted. The rise of a new insurgent group, the White League, brought more terror, and the larger white community and legal establishment did nothing to stop it.
While white mobs attacked black voters, the United States Supreme Court began an assault on the legal architecture of Reconstruction.The Court’s intervention was orchestrated by lawyer John Archibald Campbell, a former Confederate bitterly opposed to Reconstruction.65 When Louisiana’s Reconstruction legislature implemented regulations consolidating New Orleans slaughterhouses into one location outside the city, Campbell saw an opportunity to undermine the recently ratified Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.66 His suit on behalf of a group of white butchers argued that the Louisiana law forbidding slaughterhouses within city limits interfered with the butchers’ livelihoods in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment’s ban on slavery and the Fourteenth Amendment’s “privileges and immunities” clause. Campbell sought to use the amendments as “weapons to bring about Reconstruction’s ultimate demise.”67 If he won the case, the courts would extend the Reconstruction amendments’ protections to the economic interests of whites, undermining their purpose; if he lost, the amendments’ power would be nearly destroyed.
Campbell’s case and several others were consolidated into The Slaughterhouse Casesand considered by a newly activist Supreme Court.Prior to 1865, the Court had only twice struck down congressional acts as unconstitutional; between 1865 and 1872, the Court did so twelve times.68The Slaughterhouse Cases would make thirteen.
The Court’s 1872 decision held that the Fourteenth Amendment protected solely the conferred by national citizenship—a narrow category of rights mostly irrelevant to the struggles facing Southern black people.69 The Court reasoned that rights derived from a person’s state citizenship were enforceable only in state court—a forum dominated by the white ruling class and utterly hostile to claims by African Americans in the South.Though The Slaughterhouse Cases explicitly acknowledged that the Reconstruction amendments were adopted to protect the rights of formerly enslaved people, the decision eviscerated their practical impact by drastically limiting freedmen’s ability to enforce their rights in federal court, the only forum where they stood a chance of a fair hearing.
The Fourteenth Amendment was tested again when a United States Attorney in Louisiana brought federal criminal charges against the white perpetrators of the Colfax Massacre. Charges were brought under the Enforcement Act, which made it a federal crime to conspire to deprive a citizen of his constitutional rights and allowed the federal government to prosecute any crime committed as part of such a conspiracy. The statute provided that the underlying crime could be punished with the same penalty prescribed by state law, and federal authorities took the unprecedented step of charging white defendants with capital offenses—subject to the death penalty—for murdering black people.70 Despite overwhelming evidence, one defendant was acquitted and jurors failed to reach a verdict against any others.
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(Charles Harvey Weigall/Harper's Weekly, May 10, 1873)
Before retrial could begin, the defense questioned whether the federal court had jurisdiction to hear the case at all, for the first time arguing that the Enforcement Act was unconstitutional as applied to private persons who were not state actors.71 The court reserved ruling on that issue and allowed the trial to proceed, and three defendants were convicted of conspiracy.72 The judge then ruled that the Enforcement Act was unconstitutional and dismissed the indictments, initiating an appeal to the United States Supreme Court.
In United States v. Cruikshank, decided March 27, 1876, the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment “prohibits a State from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; but this adds nothing to the rights of one citizen as against another.”73 In other words, the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment provided protection only against actions of the State, not against individual violence, and the power of the federal government was “limited to the enforcement of this guaranty.”74 As a result, the Enforcement Act was a dead letter: African Americans in the South were to be left at the mercy of white terrorists, so long as the terrorists were private actors.
The response was immediate. Enforcement Act trials in most of the Southern states had been halted pending the Supreme Court appeal.When Cruikshank was decided, the Justice Department dropped 179 Enforcement Act prosecutions in Mississippi alone.75 Violence continued to spread, and increasingly, attacks on African Americans in the South were carried out by undisguised men in broad daylight.76
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(State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory)
II
BACK TO BRUTALITY: RESTORING RACIAL HIERARCHY THROUGH TERROR AND VIOLENCE
Racial terrorism and intimidation of African Americans became characteristic of Southern democracy during the 1870s and prompted little action from federal observers. A proposal in Congress to discipline Georgia for the violence and corruption surrounding its 1870 election was defeated by a five-day filibuster in the Senate, and Northern support for federal intervention on behalf of black people living in the South diminished considerably.77 In 1872, Congress returned full civil rights to Confederate leaders and restored their eligibility to hold public office.
The Amnesty Act was passed over the objection of Congressman Jefferson Long. Born into slavery in 1836 and elected in 1870 as Georgia’s first black representative in the United States Congress, Long became the first black person to speak on the House floor when he opposed amnesty.
Jefferson Long (Library of Congress)
Long asked: “Do we, then, really propose here today, when the country is not ready for it, when those disloyal people still hate this government, when loyal men dare not carry the ‘stars and stripes’ through our streets, for if they do they will be turned out of employment, to relieve from political disability the very men who have committed these Kuklux outrages? I think that I am doing my duty to my constituents and my duty to my country when I vote against any such proposition...
Mr. Speaker, I propose, as a man raised as a slave, my mother a slave before me, and my ancestry slaves as far back as I can trace them... If this House removes the disabilities of disloyal men by modifying the test-oath, I venture to prophesy you will again have trouble from the very same men who gave you trouble before.”78
Long’s warning went unheeded.Even before Reconstruction’s official end, Confederate veterans espousing white supremacist rhetoric were able to employ violent intimidation to regain political control over many Southern governments.In Virginia, former Confederate General James L. Kemper was inaugurated as governor in 1874 and, that same year, delivered an address to the General Assembly outlining the racial regime he intended to create:
“Henceforth, let it be understood of all, that the political equality of the races is settled, and the social equality of the races is a settled impossibility. Let it be understood of all, that any organized attempt on the part of the weaker and relatively diminishing race to dominate the domestic governments, is the wildest chimera of political insanity. Let each race settle down in final resignation to the lot to which the logic of events has inexorably consigned it.”79
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(James Albert Wales/Harper's Weekly, Oct. 31, 1874)
Confederate Colonel James Milton Smith, who became Georgia’s governor in 1872, held similar sentiments.80 In an 1876 interview published in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Smith opined on the status of black people—then approximately 46 percent81 of his constituents:
“Well, the loss of the slaves was a severe blow to the south. Still we should be just as well off without them were the negro race less indolent and unreliable . . . They are constitutionally an idle, thriftless race, always depending on the whites for everything, and it will take a century of education before they can be brought up to the standard that will make them in any degree useful members of the community.”82
Things were not much better outside the South, as the Supreme Court continued to chip away at federal Reconstruction laws. In 1875, Congress passed Senator Charles Sumner’s Civil Rights Act, which mandated desegregation and imposed criminal penalties for racial discrimination in jury selection.83 But the Cruikshank decision left little legal basis to enforce desegregation provisions, and in 1883, the Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional.84 The next decade, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court would uphold racial segregation as fully consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment and create the doctrine of “separate but equal.”85
Executive action also waned during this time, as Southern racial violence became an increasingly divisive issue and politically-weakened President Grant became more reluctant to intervene. When Mississippi Governor Adelbert Ames requested federal troops to suppress intense violence during state elections, Grant sent an exasperated letter encouraging Ames to broker a “peace agreement” between the state militia and the white mobs, writing that “[t]he whole public are tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South.”86
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(A.B. Frost/Harper's Weekly, October 21, 1876)
Without federal protection, black voters were targeted in brutal attacks on election day in Mississippi and throughout the South. The presidential election of 1876 resulted in a deadlock between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. Congress and the Supreme Court brokered a “compromise” under which Hayes would become president if he promised to end Reconstruction. Within two months of taking office, President Hayes took action to end the federal troops’ role in Southern politics. In the words of Henry Adams, a black man living in Louisiana at the time,“The whole South—every state in the South—had got into the hands of the very men that held us as slaves.”87
On the defeat of Reconstruction, The Nation offered a solemn assessment: “The Negro will disappear from the field of national politics. Henceforth, the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him.”88 For millions of black men, women, and children, that abandonment foretold a grim future.“They are to be returned to a condition of serfdom,” predicted Governor Ames of Mississippi. “An era of second slavery.”89
AFTER RECONSTRUCTION: UNEQUAL, AGAIN
The presence of federal troops in the South during the Reconstruction era acted as a penetrable dam holding back some of the violence, political suppression, and racist rhetoric employed by those intent on restoring white supremacist rule. Their premature withdrawal unleashed a pent-up wave of violence that easily topped the few remaining protective structures and left black people cemented in an inferior economic, social, and political position.
Southern state governments set to work altering their constitutions to disenfranchise black citizens and codify segregation.At the 1890 Mississippi Constitutional Convention, where all but one of the delegates were white, the intentional purging of black people from the roll of eligible voters was a top priority.90 Analyzing the state’s electoral system six years later, the Mississippi Supreme Court readily acknowledged these motivations:
(Thomas Nast/Harper's Weekly, Sept. 5, 1868)
“It is in the highest degree improbable that there was not a consistent, controlling directing purpose governing the convention by which these schemes were elaborated and fixed in the constitution. Within the field of permissible action under the limitations imposed by the federal constitution, the convention swept the circle of expedients to obstruct the exercise of the franchise by the negro race. By reason of its previous condition of servitude and dependence, this race had acquired or accentuated certain peculiarities of habit, of temperament, and of character, which clearly distinguished it as a race from that of the whites,—a patient, docile people, but careless, landless, and migratory within narrow limits, without forethought, and its criminal members given rather to furtive offenses than to the robust crimes of the whites. Restrained by the federal constitution from discriminating against the negro race, the convention discriminated against its characteristics and the offenses to which its weaker members were prone.”91
Alabama rewrote its constitution in 1901. John B. Knox, a Calhoun County lawyer and president of the constitutional convention, opened the proceedings with a statement of purpose: “Why it is within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution, to establish white supremacy in this state.”92Now that political power had been regained, legalized racial subordination could and would be restored. “[I]f we would have white supremacy,” Knox explained, “we must establish it by law—not by force or fraud.”93 From 1885 to 1908, all eleven former Confederate states rewrote their constitutions to include provisions restricting voting rights with poll taxes, literacy tests, and felon disenfrachisement.94 Many of these new constitutions also included segregationist prohibitions against interracial marriage and integrated public education.
Over the ensuing decades, aided by convict leasing and Jim Crow laws, and emboldened by the federal government’s disinterest in enforcing the racial equality guaranteed by the federal Constitution, Southern legislatures institutionalized the racial inequality enshrined in their state constitutions.The South created a system of state and local laws and practices that constituted a pervasive and deep-rooted racial caste system. The era of “second slavery” had officially begun.
CONVICT LEASING
Convict leasing, the practice of selling the labor of state and local prisoners to private interests for state profit, utilized the criminal justice system to effectuate the economic exploitation and political disempowerment of black people. State legislatures passed discriminatory criminal laws or “black codes,” which created new criminal offenses such as “vagrancy” and “loitering.” This led to the mass arrest and incarceration of black people.Relying on language in the Thirteenth Amendment that prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude “except as punishment for crime,” lawmakers empowered white-controlled governments to extract black labor in private lease contracts or on state-owned farms.95“While a Black prisoner was a rarity during the slavery era (when slave masters were individually empowered to administer ‘discipline’ to their human property) the solution to the free black population had become criminalization. In turn, the most common fate facing black convicts was to be sold into forced labor for the profit of the state.”96
Beginning as early as 1866 in states like Texas, Mississippi, and Georgia, convict leasing spread throughout the Southern states and continued through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.97 In contrast to white prisoners who were routinely sentenced to the penitentiary, leased black convicts faced deplorable, unsafe working conditions and brutal violence when they attempted to resist or escape bondage.98
(John L. Spivak)
An 1887 report by the Hinds County, Mississippi grand jury recorded that, six months after 204 convicts were leased to a man named McDonald, twenty were dead, nineteen had escaped, and twenty-three had been returned to the penitentiary disabled, ill, and near death.99 The penitentiary hospital was filled with sick and dying black men whose bodies bore “marks of the most inhuman and brutal treatment . . . so poor and emaciated that their bones almost come through the skin.”100 Under this grotesquely cruel system that lasted decades, countless black men, women, and children lost their freedom—and often their lives. “Before convict leasing officially ended,” writes historian David Oshinsky, “a generation of black prisoners would suffer and die under conditions far worse than anything they had ever experienced as slaves.”101Convict leasing demonstrated the way in which the criminal justice system would become the central institution for sustaining racial domination and hierarchy in America. It legitimized excessive punishment and abuse of African Americans and terrorized people of color.
JIM CROW
Jim Crow laws proscribed the lives and possibilities of black people throughout the South. The term “Jim Crow” initially referred to a style of minstrel show in which white performers caricatured black life for the entertainment of white audiences.102By 1890, the term was used to describe the “subordination and separation of black people in the South, much of it codified and much of it still enforced by custom, habit, and violence.”103Under Jim Crow rule, all aspects of life were governed by a strict color line, from the most central and important—public education was segregated throughout the South and interracial marriage was criminalized—to the most mundane and tedious.
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(Elliott Erwitt/Magnum Photos)
In South Carolina, a 1917 law required that all circuses and other tent events maintain separate entrances and ticket booths for black and white attendees and imposed a maximum $500 fine for noncompliance.104 A 1915 law required that black and white employees of cotton textile mills be segregated at every stage of employment and restricted them from using the same entry/exit, occupying the same stairwell, or using the same tools.105 A 1924 law effectively outlawed interracial pool rooms by declaring that no license would be issued to a billiard room owner who intended his establishment to be patronized by customers of another race.106 And a 1910 law prohibited placing a white child in the permanent custody of a black adult.107 Similarly, Florida law required separation of the races on streetcars;108 Mississippi law mandated separate hospital entrances for white and black patients;109 North Carolina law authorized librarians to create separate reading areas for black patrons;110 and Alabama law prohibited white nurses from treating black male patients.111
In March 1901, a white woman and black man were arrested in Atlanta, Georgia, after two police officers claimed to have seen them talking and walking together on the street.112 Interviewed following her arrest, the white woman was indignant—not at the law, but at the suggestion that she would ever share the company of a black man in public. “I stopped and [a police officer] asked why I talked to a negro,” she told the press. “I told him I was a southern born woman, and his insinuations were an insult. He then said he would have to arrest me, and I was ridden to police barracks in a patrol wagon. It is the first ride I have ever taken of the kind, and I have been humiliated and disgraced. But somebody will suffer for this before it is done with.”113
Racial segregation often translated to the total exclusion of black people from public facilities, institutions, and opportunities. This separation plainly disadvantaged black people and served as a constant symbol of their inferior position in Southern society.
“Black southerners were left to brood over the message imparted by the Jim Crow laws and the spirit in which they were enforced. For all African Americans, Jim Crow was a daily affront, a reminder of the distinctive place “white folks” had marked out for them—a confirmation of their inferiority and baseness in the eyes of the dominant population. The laws made no exception based on class or education; indeed, the laws functioned on one level to remind African Americans that no matter how educated, wealthy, or respectable they might be, it did nothing to entitle them to equal treatment with the poorest and most degraded whites. What the white South insisted upon was not so much separation of the races as subordination, a system of controls in which whites prescribed the rules of racial conduct and contact and meted out the punishments.”114
Though legally emancipated from slavery and endowed with constitutional rights to participate in society as full citizens, black people soon learned that those rights were unenforceable in a white-controlled political system hostile to their exercise.This message was communicated through an intricate and complex system of racial subordination built after the Civil War to maintain and reinforce white supremacy in a world without chattel slavery. Constructed of law and custom, force and fear, disenfrachisement, convict leasing, and Jim Crow segregation, the system was fragile and fiercely guarded.Over the century that this racial caste system reigned, perceived violations of the racial order were met with brutal violence targeted at black Americans—and lynching was the weapon of choice.
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(Library of Congress)
III
LYNCHING IN AMERICA: FROM "POPULAR JUSTICE" TO RACIAL TERROR
Lynching became a vicious tool of racial control in America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—but it first emerged as a form of vigilante retribution used to enforce “popular justice” on the Western frontier.115 In the Western territories in the early nineteenth century, the individual desire for revenge was high, government was absent or underdeveloped, and public support for lynching was widespread.116Notably, lynching did not initially mean killing, and vigilante “regulators” often punished “thieves, highwaymen, swindlers, and card sharks”117 with tarring-and-feathering, beatings, and floggings.
Beginning in the 1830s and continuing in the decades following the Civil War, lynching became more synonymous with hanging. The first broadly publicized incident of lethal lynching occurred in Madison County, Mississippi, in 1835, after a fabricated story of a planned slave uprising sparked local panic and resulted in the hangings of two white men and several enslaved black people.118 Followed that same year by a notorious lynching of five gamblers in Vicksburg, Mississippi, these killings marked a change in American mob violence: “whereas in the era of the American Revolution mobs had rarely killed their victims, the 1835 riots claimed at least seventy-one lives.”119
Even as lynchings became more frequently deadly, they differed greatly by region. An individual subject to a frontier lynching typically was accused of a crime such as murder or robbery, given some form of process and trial, and hanged without any additional torture or foul play.120 Southern lynchings, on the other hand, were commonly extrajudicial and employed to defend slavery.121 Between 1830 and 1860, Southern mobs killed an estimated 130 white individuals122 and at least 400 enslaved black people. Most were lynched under suspicion of conspiring to mount a slave uprising—a growing but largely unsubstantiated fear among whites in slaveholding states.123 In addition, Southern lynchings of African Americans were distinct from lynchings of whites, and often featured extreme brutality such as burning, torture, mutilation, and decapitation of the victim.124
Southern lynching took on an even more racialized character after the Civil War. The act and threat of lynching became “primarily a technique of enforcing racial exploitation—economic, political, and cultural.”125Characterized by Southern mob violence intended to reestablish white supremacy and suppress black civil rights through political and social terror,126 the Reconstruction era was a violent period in which tens of thousands of people were killed in racially- and politically-motivated massacres, murders, and lynchings.127 White mobs regularly targeted African Americans with deadly violence but rarely aimed lethal attacks at white individuals accused of identical violations of law or custom.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Southern lynching had become a tool of racial control that terrorized and targeted African Americans. The ratio of black lynching victims to white lynching victims was 4 to 1 from 1882 to 1889; increased to more than 6 to 1 between 1890 and 1900; and soared to more than 17 to 1 after 1900. Professor Stewart Tolnay concluded from this data that “lynching in the South became increasingly and exclusively a matter of white mobs murdering African-Americans,”128 “ a routine and systematic effort to subjugate the African-American minority.”129
The character of the violence also changed as gruesome public spectacle lynchings became much more common. At these often festive community gatherings, large crowds of whites watched and participated in the black victims’ prolonged torture, mutilation, dismemberment, and burning at the stake.130 Such brutally violent methods of execution had almost never been applied to whites in America. Indeed, public spectacle lynchings drew from and perpetuated the belief that Africans were subhuman—a myth that had been used to justify centuries of enslavement, and now fueled and purportedly justified terrorism aimed at newly-emancipated African American communities.131 A report published in 1905 explained that“Lynching has been resorted to by whites not merely to wreak vengeance, but to terrorize and restrain this lawless element in the Negro population. Among Southern people, the conviction is general that terror is the only restraining influence that can be brought to bear upon vicious Negroes.”132
Southern states were equipped with readily-available, fully-functioning criminal justice systems eager to punish African American defendants with hefty fines, imprisonment, terms of forced labor for state profit, and legal execution.133 Lynching in this era and region was not used as a tool of crime control, but rather as a tool of racial control wielded almost exclusively by white mobs against African American victims. Many lynching victims were not accused of any criminal act, and lynch mobs regularly displayed complete disregard for the legal system.
In 1906, Edward Johnson, a black man, was convicted of raping a white woman and sentenced to death by an all-white jury in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His attorneys appealed the case and won a rare stay of execution from the United States Supreme Court. In response, a white mob seized Mr. Johnson from the jail, which had been vacated by the sheriff and his staff, dragged him through the streets, hanged him from the second span of the Walnut Street Bridge, and shot him hundreds of times. The mob left a note pinned on the corpse that read: “To Justice Harlan. Come get your nigger now.”134 Mr. Johnson used his last words to declare his innocence. Nearly a century later, he was cleared of the rape.135
Through lynching, Southern white communities asserted their racial dominance over the region’s political and economic resources—a dominance first achieved through slavery would now be restored through blood and terror.
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE LYNCHING ERA
African Americans were lynched under varied pretenses. Today, lynching is most commonly remembered as a punishment exacted by white mobs upon black men accused of sexually assaulting white women. During the lynching era, whites’ hypervigilant enforcement of racial hierarchy and social separation, coupled with widespread stereotypes of black men as dangerous, violent, and uncontrollable sexual aggressors, fueled a pervasive fear of black men raping white women.136 Of the 4084 African American lynching victims EJI documented, nearly 25 percent were accused of sexual assault137 and nearly 30 percent were accused of murder.138
Hundreds more black people were lynched based on accusations of far less serious crimes like arson, robbery, non-sexual assault, and vagrancy,139 many of which were not punishable by death if convicted in a court of law.African Americans frequently were lynched for non-criminal violations of social customs or racial expectations, such as speaking to white people with less respect or formality than observers believed was due.140
Finally, many African Americans were lynched not because they committed a crime or social infraction, and not even because they were accused of doing so, but simply because they were black and present when the preferred party could not be located. In 1901, Ballie Crutchfield’s brother allegedly found a lost wallet containing $120 and kept the money. He was arrested and about to be lynched by a mob in Smith County, Tennessee, when at the last moment he broke free and escaped. Thwarted in their attempt to kill the suspect, the mob turned its attention to his sister and lynched Ms. Crutchfield in her brother’s stead, though she was not accused of any involvement in the theft.141
The thousands of African Americans lynched between 1880 and 1950 differed in many respects, but in most cases, the circumstances of their murders can be categorized as one or more of the following: (1) lynchings that resulted from a wildly distorted fear of interracial sex; (2) lynchings in response to casual social transgressions; (3) lynchings based on allegations of serious violent crime; (4) public spectacle lynchings; (5) lynchings that escalated into large-scale violence targeting the entire African American community; and (6) lynchings of sharecroppers, ministers, and community leaders who resisted mistreatment, which were most common between 1915 and 1940.
LYNCHINGS BASED ON FEAR OF INTERRACIAL SEX
Nearly 25 percent of the lynchings of African Americans in the South were based on charges of sexual assault.142 The mere accusation of rape, even without an identification by the alleged victim, often aroused a mob and resulted in lynching. In fact, the definition of black-on-white “rape” in the South was incredibly broad and required no allegation of force because white institutions, laws, and most white people rejected the idea that a white woman could or would willingly consent to sex with an African American man. When black Memphis journalist Ida B. Wells published an editorial challenging the myth of widespread black-on-white sexual violence and insisting that consensual interracial sex did occur, white mobs burned her newspaper’s offices and threatened to lynch her.143
Whites’ fears of interracial sex extended to any action by a black man that could be interpreted as seeking or desiring contact with a white woman.In 1889, in Aberdeen, Mississippi, Keith Bowen allegedly tried to enter a room where three white women were sitting; though no further allegation was made against him, Mr. Bowen was lynched by the “entire (white) neighborhood” for his “offense.”144
William Brooks was lynched in 1894 in Palestine, Arkansas, after he asked his white employer for permission to marry the man’s daughter.145
General Lee, a black man, was lynched by a white mob in 1904 for merely knocking on the door of a white woman’s house in Reevesville, South Carolina.146
In 1912, Thomas Miles was lynched for allegedly writing letters to a white woman inviting her to have a cold drink with him.147
In 1934, after being accused of “associating with a white woman” in Newton, Texas, John Griggs was hanged and shot seventeen times and his body was dragged behind a car through the town for hours.148
Whites’ fear of sexual contact between black men and white women was pervasive and led to many lynchings. Narratives of these lynchings reported in the sympathetic white press justified the violence and perpetuated the deadly stereotype of African American men as hypersexual threats to white womanhood.
LYNCHINGS BASED ON MINOR SOCIAL TRANSGRESSIONS
Lynchings based on minor social transgressions were a tool of racial control designed to enforce social norms and racial hierarchy. Hundreds of African Americans accused of no serious crime were nonetheless lynched for myriad “offenses,” including speaking disrespectfully, refusing to step off the sidewalk, using profane language, using an improper title for a white person, suing a white man, arguing with a white man, bumping into a white woman, insulting a white person, and other social grievances.149African Americans living in the South during this era were terrorized by the knowledge that they could be lynched if they intentionally or accidentally violated any social more defined by any white person. Examples are plentiful.
In 1940, Jesse Thornton was lynched in Luverne, Alabama, for referring to a white police officer by his name without the title of “mister.”150
In 1918, Private Charles Lewis was lynched in Hickman, Kentucky, after he refused to empty his pockets while wearing his Army uniform.151
Richard Wilkerson was lynched in Manchester, Tennessee, in 1934 for allegedly slapping a white man who had assaulted a black woman at an African American dance.152
White men lynched Jeff Brown in 1916 in Cedarbluff, Mississippi, for accidentally bumping into a white girl as he ran to catch a train.153
In 1917, Sam Gates was lynched for the offense of “annoying white girls” in England, Arkansas.154
Law-abiding African Americans lived at risk of arbitrary and deadly mob violence. These lynchings and the threat of falling victim to the mobs who committed them sought to keep the African American community terrorized and in a constant state of fear.
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Jesse Washington was burned before a crowd of thousands in Waco, Texas, in 1916. (Library of Congress/Getty Images.)
LYNCHINGS BASED ON ALLEGATIONS OF CRIME
More than half of the lynching victims EJI documented were killed under accusation of committing murder or rape. The deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society during this time period often served to focus suspicion on black communities after a crime was discovered, whether evidence supported that suspicion or not. This was especially true in cases of violent crime against white victims.
It is dubious to claim that all or even most individuals lynched for violent offenses had committed them, considering that whites’ accusations of rape or murder were rarely subject to serious scrutiny when lodged against black people. In a strictly maintained racial caste system, the mere suggestion of black-on-white violence could spark outrage, mob violence, and murder before the judicial system could act. In this society, white lives held heightened value, while the lives of black people held little or none.
Of the hundreds of black people lynched under accusation of rape and murder, nearly every one was brutally killed without being legally convicted of any offense. When Berry Noyse was accused of killing the local sheriff in Lexington, Tennessee, in 1918, an angry mob lynched him in the courthouse square, then dragged his body through the streets of town, shot it dozens of times, and burned the body in the middle of the street below hung banners that read, “This is the way we do our bit.”155
Some lynching victims were demonstrably innocent of the serious crimes alleged. After a white woman was raped in Lewiston, North Carolina, in 1918, a black man named Peter Bazemore was accused of the crime and lynched by a mob before an investigation revealed that the real perpetrator had been a white man wearing black makeup.156
Race, rather than the alleged offense, sealed lynching victims’ fates. Lynching, a statement of racial terror and white supremacy, was largely reserved for black suspects. White people accused of murder or rape during this era were much more likely to be tried, convicted, and punished by the legal system than by a mob.157 In Thomasville, Georgia, in 1930, a black man named William Kirkland was arrested for the alleged rape of a nine-year-old white girl, and before a trial could be held, a mob of between fifty and seventy-five white men seized him from the jail, hung his body from a tree, riddled it with bullets, and then dragged the corpse through town behind a truck before depositing it on the courthouse lawn.158 Just three days after Mr. Kirkland’s lynching, an African American man named Lacy Mitchell was lynched in Thomasville for testifying against a white man accused of raping an African American woman. Mr. Mitchell, a key witness, was shot in his home by four white men and died; the white defendant was acquitted and released.159
PUBLIC SPECTACLE LYNCHINGS
Public spectacle lynchings were those in which large crowds of white people, often numbering in the thousands, gathered to witness pre-planned, heinous killings that featured prolonged torture, mutilation, dismemberment, and/or burning of the victim.160Many were carnival-like events, with vendors selling food, printers producing postcards featuring photographs of the lynching and corpse, and the victim’s body parts collected as souvenirs.161
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(National Archives)
In 1904, after Luther Holbert allegedly killed a local white landowner, he and a black woman believed to be his wife were captured by a mob and taken to Doddsville, Mississippi, to be lynched before hundreds of white spectators.162 Both victims were tied to a tree and forced to hold out their hands while members of the mob methodically chopped off their fingers and distributed them as souvenirs. Next, their ears were cut off. Mr. Holbert was then beaten so severely that his skull was fractured and one of his eyes was left hanging from its socket. Members of the mob used a large corkscrew to bore holes into the victims’ bodies and pull out large chunks of “quivering flesh,” after which both victims were thrown onto a raging fire and burned. The white men, women, and children present watched the horrific murders while enjoying deviled eggs, lemonade, and whiskey in a picnic-like atmosphere.163
Another public spectacle lynching took place in 1917 in Memphis, Tennessee, when a mob of twenty-five men seized Ell Persons from a train that was transporting him to stand trial for rape and murder. The mob had announced the lynching time and location in advance, and thousands of people attended, backing up traffic for miles. Food and gum vendors sold their wares to the many spectators as Mr. Persons was doused with gasoline and set on fire. A ten-year-old black child was forced to sit next to the fire and watch him die. When members of the crowd complained that Mr. Persons would die too quickly if burned, the fire was extinguished, and attendees fought over Mr. Person’s clothes and remnants of the rope to keep as mementos. Two men cut off his ears for souvenirs, after which the head of Mr. Person’s corpse was removed and thrown into a crowd in Memphis’s black commercial district.164
Later that year, just a few hours away in Dyersburg, Tennessee, Lation Scott was subjected to a brutal and prolonged lynching after being accused of “criminal assault.” Thousands gathered near a vacant lot across the street from the downtown courthouse and children sat atop their parents’ shoulders to get a better view as Mr. Scott’s clothes and skin were ripped off with knives.A mob tortured Lation Scott with a hot poker iron, gouging out his eyes, shoving the hot poker down his throat and pressing it all over his body before castrating him and burning him alive over a slow fire. Mr. Scott’s torturous killing lasted more than three hours.165
Gruesome public spectacle lynchings traumatized the African American community. The crowds of hundreds or thousands of white people attending as participants or spectators included elected officials and prominent citizens; white press coverage regularly defended the lynchings as justified; and cursory investigations rarely led to identifications of lynch mob members, much less prosecutions. White men, women, and children fought over bloodied ropes, clothing, and body parts, and proudly displayed these “souvenirs” with no fear of punishment.166 In Newnan, Georgia, in 1899, pieces of Sam Hose’s heart, liver, and bones were sold after he was lynched; that same year, spectators at the lynching of Richard Coleman in Maysville, Kentucky, took flesh, teeth, fingers, and toes from his corpse.167 Spectacle lynchings were preserved in photographs that were made into postcards and distributed unashamedly through the mail.168
These killings were not the actions of a few marginalized vigilantes or extremists; they were bold, public acts that implicated the entire community and sent a clear message that African Americans were less than human, their subjugation was to be achieved through any means necessary, and whites who undertook the duty of carrying out lynchings would face no legal repercussions.
PARIS, TEXAS
Founded in 1844, Paris, Texas, was named for the famous French city and quickly became the seat of Lamar County.169 By the start of the Civil War, the town of 700 residents was a center of farming and cattle ranching,170 and 28 percent of county residents were enslaved black people.171 In the lynching era that followed the Civil War and emancipation, Paris was the site of repeated bloody racial terror.
In early 1893, a seventeen-year-old black boy named Henry Smith was accused of killing a three-year-old white girl. Nearly a week after the child’s death, a posse located Henry in Hempstead County, Arkansas, and returned him to Paris by train. He was met at the station on February 1, 1893, by a mob of thousands of white people from across the state. Henry was placed on a carnival float and carried through the town to the county fairgrounds, where he was forced to mount a ten-foot-high platform. Henry was brutally tortured for nearly an hour in front of 10,000 people and then burned alive. According to an investigation by anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells, Henry pleaded his innocence until the end.172
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Lynching of Henry Smith in Paris, Texas, on February 1, 1893 (Library of Congress/Getty Images.)
Less than thirty years later, Paris hosted a second gruesome lynching. In 1920, brothers Irving and Herman Arthur worked on a white-owned farm where they suffered ongoing abuse. When the Arthurs decided to leave in search of better working conditions, the farm owners tried to stop them with gunfire and then alleged that the Arthurs had wounded them. Soon after Irving and Herman were arrested and jailed, local whites began posting signs throughout town advertising their impending lynching.173
On July 6, 1920, a mob of 3000 gathered to watch as both men were tied to a flagpole at the fairgrounds, tortured, and burned to death. During the lynching, the Arthurs’ sisters were jailed under the pretense of protection but then beaten and gang-raped by more than twenty white men while in custody. After the lynching, the brothers’ corpses were chained to a car and driven through Paris’s black community for hours. A local sheriff involved in the case later declared the brothers had been guilty of no crime.174
Today, Paris is a small but vibrant and diverse city of 25,000 people, with no historical markers to document either lynching. A large Confederate memorial adorns the courthouse lawn—a site of racial unrest in the twenty-first century.
Jacqueline McClelland with a photo of her son Brandon McClelland (AP)
In 2008, a twenty-four-year-old black man named Brandon McClelland was found dead by a roadside in Paris. An investigation determined he had been dragged behind or under a vehicle as far as seventy feet. Two white men who spent several hours with Mr. McClelland on the night he died were arrested after blood reportedly was found on the undercarriage of their truck. When the local prosecutor dropped all charges against the men in 2009, citing a lack of evidence, racial tensions flared. Members of the local black community rallying at the courthouse to protest officials’ inaction were met with a counter-protest by dozens of white supremacists holding Confederate flags and shouting “White Power!” State police in riot gear were called to quell the conflict.175
Paris’s deeply-rooted history of racial violence and division, epitomized by the lynchings of Henry Smith and Irving and Herman Arthur, remains a force in the community today despite efforts to forget and ignore that past. “A black man’s life is still not worth a white man’s life in Paris, Texas,” declared a black man protesting at the courthouse in 2009. “I am 55 years old and I know racism when I see it. Paris, Texas, is eaten up with racism.”176
…
Thousands watch as lynchers prepare to torture Henry Smith on a ten-foot-high platform at the county fairgrounds. (Library of Congress/Getty Images)
LYNCHINGS TARGETING THE ENTIRE AFRICAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY
Most lynchings involved the killing of one or more specific individuals, but some lynch mobs targeted entire black communities by forcing black people to witness lynchings and demanding that they leave the area or face a similar fate. After a lynching in Forsyth County, Georgia, in 1912, white vigilantes distributed leaflets demanding that all black people leave the county or suffer deadly consequences; so many black families fled that, by 1920, the county’s black population had plunged from 1100 to just thirty.177
To maximize lynching as a terrorizing symbol of power and control over the black community, white mobs frequently chose to lynch victims in a prominent place inside the town’s African American district.178 In 1918 in rural Unicoi County, Tennessee, a group of white men sought a black man named Thomas Devert who was accused of kidnapping a white girl. When the men found Mr. Devert crossing a river with the girl in his arms, they shot him in the head and the girl drowned. Insisting that the entire black community needed to witness Mr. Devert’s fate, the enraged mob dragged his dead body to the town railyard and built a funeral pyre. The white men then rounded up all sixty African American residents and forced the men, women, and children to watch the corpse burn. These African Americans and eighty black people who worked at a local quarry were then told to leave the county within twenty-four hours.179
In 1927, John Carter was accused of striking two white women in Little Rock, Arkansas. He was seized by a mob, forced to jump from an automobile with a noose around his neck, and shot 200 times. The mob then threw Mr. Carter’s mangled body across an automobile and led a twenty-six-block procession past city hall, through Little Rock’s black neighborhoods, and toward Ninth Street, which was the black community’s downtown center. At 7:00 p.m. at Broadway and Ninth Street, between the black community’s two most significant landmarks—Bethel African American Episcopal Church and the Mosaic Templars Building—rioting whites used pews seized from the church to ignite a huge bonfire on the trolley tracks. They threw Mr. Carter’s body onto the raging fire, which burned for the next three hours.180
The practice of terrorizing an entire African American community after lynching one alleged “wrong-doer” demonstrates that Southern lynching during this era was not to attain “popular justice” or retaliation for crime. Rather, these lynchings were designed for broad impact—to send a message of domination, to instill fear, and sometimes to drive African Americans from the community altogether.
LYNCHINGS OF BLACK PEOPLE RESISTING MISTREATMENT (1915 - 1940)
From 1915 to 1940, lynch mobs targeted African Americans who protested being treated as second-class citizens. African Americans throughout the South, individually and in organized groups, were demanding the economic and civil rights to which they were entitled. In response, whites turned to lynching.
In 1918, when Elton Mitchell of Earle, Arkansas, refused to work on a white-owned farm without pay, “prominent” white citizens of the city cut him into pieces with butcher knives and hung his remains from a tree.181 In 1927, Owen Flemming refused to follow an overseer’s command to retrieve mules out of a flooded district in Mellwood, Arkansas. The overseer pulled a gun, which Mr. Flemming wrestled away from him and fired in self-defense. A mob pursued and quickly caught him. Alerted of Mr. Flemming’s offense, the local sheriff told the mob, “I’m busy, just go ahead and lynch him.”182 They did.
In Hernando, Mississippi, in 1935, Reverend T. A. Allen tried to start a sharecropper’s union among local impoverished and exploited black laborers. When white landowners learned that Reverend Allen was using his pulpit to preach to the black community about unionization, they formed a mob, seized him, shot him many times, and threw him into the Coldwater River.183 Also in 1935, Joe Spinner Johnson, a sharecropper and leader of the Sharecroppers’ Union in Perry County, Alabama, was called from work by his landlord and delivered into the hands of a white gang. The gang tied Mr. Johnson “hog-fashion with a board behind his neck and his hands and feet tied in front of him” and beat him. They took him to the jail in Selma, Alabama, where other inmates heard him being beaten and screaming. Mr. Johnson’s mutilated body was found several days later in a field near the town of Greensboro.184
African Americans’ efforts to fight for economic power and equal rights in the early twentieth century—a prelude to the civil rights movement—were violently repressed by whites who acted with impunity. Whites used terrorism to relegate African Americans to a state of second-class citizenship and economic disadvantage that would last for generations after emancipation and create far-reaching consequences.
LYNCHINGS IN THE SOUTH, 1877 - 1950
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