How White Americans Used Lynching As A Weapon To Terrorize And Control Black People

The Guardian is currently in Montgomery, Alabama, to cover the opening of America's first memorial for the victims of lynching. It's hard to ignore the legacy of these brutal and racist killings.

What was the purpose of the motives behind lynchings?

The majority of historians believe that lynchings are an instrument of control over society and racial terror that was intended to force black Americans to bow and be put in a lower racial position. They were widespread throughout the US South from 1877, after the post-civil war reconstruction had been completed, to 1950.

A typical lynching involves criminal charges, often dubious against a black American, an arrested, and the formation of a "lynch-mob" with the intent to subvert the normal judiciary process as a constitutional right. Clicking here: racial equity for more information.

Victims would be seized and subjected to every imaginable kind of physical torture which would typically end by being hanged from a tree before being set on fire. Most often, victims would be cut up, and mob members would steal fragments of their bones and flesh to take home as mementos.

In a great many cases, the mobs were aided and aided by law enforcement (indeed, they often were the same people). After rumors of a lynching were reported, police would usually leave an inmate's room unguarded in order to let a mob kill him or her prior to any legal trial could be initiated.

What can trigger a lynching?

One of the biggest crimes (occasionally real, but usually thought to be) was any claim of sexual contact between black men and white women. The myth of the sexually agressive and hypersexual black male, particularly in relation to the inviolable chastity of white women was and is one of the longest-lasting stereotypes of white supremacy. According to the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) more than 25% of lynching victims were charged with sexual assault. About 30% of victims were charged with murder.

"The mob believed that the lynching would have an significance that was beyond the punishment specific to the incident," wrote the historian Howard Smead in Blood Justice The Lynching of Mack Charles Parker. "The mob made this act a symbolic rite that saw the victim of color became the representative of his race. The victim of black race was being punished for many different crimes... This was a message that black people should not challenge the white supremacy."

What was the number of events that occurred in America?

There was no central tracking system because summary executions were not a subject of court records. This led to historians believing that the true number of lynchings is significantly under-reported.

For a long time, the most comprehensive total was compiled by the archives of the Tuskegee Institute, which tabulated 4,743 people who died in the hands of US mobs that lynched people between 1881 and 1968. According to the Tuskegee figures, 3,446 of those lynched were black Americans.

The EJI was a lynchpin on the Tuskegee numbers to calculate its own count, also incorporated additional sources, like archives of newspapers and other historical records in order to come up with a total of 4,084 racial terror lynchings in 12 southern states between beginning of Reconstruction between 1877 and 1950, and another 300 across other states.

The numbers of EJI aren't like the Tuskegee data. They exclude incidents that are deemed to be acts of mob violence committed in the aftermath of a trial or against non-minorities, without the risk of terrorist.