Lynching in the south was not simply an act of hatred against blacks. It was an act of paranoia. Whites in the south had a belief that black men could not keep their hands off white women. The most common reason for a lynching was the accusation of rape of a white woman by a black man. Southern whites believed race mixing would lead to a weak society. They saw blacks as inferior humans that were obsessed with sex. Therefore, lynching was seen as a necessary act that was intended not only to protect the white woman of the south, but also save society from ruin.…
William Lynch made a letter in 1712 of how to break down Negros/blacks and how to make a slave. In my opinion, despite the fact that William Lynch composed the Willie lynch Letter in 1712; us as blacks/Negros still accompany the letter without knowing. First and foremost, William said assuming that they take after those steps legitimately it would be mostly effective for 300 years. Furthermore, it said in the event that they accompany the steps we might turn on one another and soon might need to execute one another off. In conclusion, he composed how to get us in line, "hanging" or as we commonly refer to the term "lynching" was restricted and it soon came to be traded with death penalty.…
They were deemed inferior to Whites and forced into slave labor in order to support the southern economy. Attempts to escape or revolt prompted Whites to pass "slave codes" which embraced criminal law and regulated almost every aspect of slave life. The unequal distribution of criminal penalties perpetuated the ideology of White supremacy and Black inferiority. These ideas of White superiority created many laws that protected and benefited White people during this era. "Black Codes", penalized African Americans for offenses such as vagrancy and prevented them from testifying against White Americans, serving on juries, and voting. These disparate laws were then enforced by criminal justice practitioners such as the police. Violators were often tried in court by all-White juries, found guilty, and then…
Brown has an excellent argument in chapters 7 and 8 that honor perpetuated violence in the case of the lynching laws. With just cause, and enough social support, just about anyone could be lynched. This was used to protect honor of the elite and the well spoken. These executions were done without judge orders or any trial. Therefore, they could be carried out by the majority and protect the ones who had the most power and influence. He argues that the whites of the time period used it as a complete dominance in power over the black slaves. They used this power of fear to keep the slaves from rebelling or running away. This also allowed the white slave owners who were in power in the government to keep control as Brown states in chapter 8. This lynching power was also used by the white slave owners to silence rebellions and in turn keep the family reputation and integrity intact. Wyatt‐Brown relates the story of fifteen year old Susan Foster’s murder by her husband James Foster, Jr. as the…
The black people of America at the time were targeted for crimes that they didn’t commit. This may have included suspicion of black people murdering white people, or raping white women. The only punishment that was given to black people was lynching, which meant hanging them without facing a trial to clear them. Many people attended these including families with young children. This was America at its worst in treating others with respect. The lynching at the time has been described as shameful to the pride of…
After the resolution of the Civil War, rich whites in the South scrambled to regain economic control and superiority. To prevent blacks and poor whites from joining together to challenge them, a series of Jim Crow laws that segregated blacks from whites were created (Cates 50). In this time, various legal decisions played instrumental roles in the transition to a heavily segregated south. Through the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision, the government legalized segregation which led to the establishment of myriad Jim Crow laws that stripped African Americans of their Constitutional rights.…
Lynching in the West aims to educate the reader by emphasizing the importance of recognizing the violent injustices that took California by storm in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These ignorant vigilante crimes risk being erased from the modern conscience if they are not documented and discussed in depth with candor.…
In 1862, a huge quantity of laws were made. These laws are called the Jim Crow Laws. Jim Crow Laws were laws that was only used in the southern states to separate the African Americans and the other races. The African American were not able to have the same civil rights that the white people had. In this essay, I will discuss the use of the Jim Crow laws and why they were used.…
* teaching black students that they are inferior is the worst kind of lynching, killing their drive to succeed therefore giving him no choice but to turn to a life of crime…
After reading the Jim Crow pieces, I can conclude that the Jim Crow laws were extremely dangerous to colored people. This new set of laws was making life extremely difficult for colored people, and if they did not follow the new laws they would be punished in terrible ways. For instance, “hanged or shot, but some were burned at the stake, castrated, beaten with clubs, or dismembered” (Pilgrim 5). These laws were so dangerous and ultimately unfair for the colored people.…
After the Civil War, the government had changed from a republican rule to a democratic rule that had hatred towards the South because of conflicts that had arisen during the Civil War. The Northern Republicans wanted to punish the South by forming laws that terminated slavery and granted freed blacks the right to vote, the right to own land, the right to due process, and outlawed discrimination based on race; all were attempts to try and end slavery by reconstructing the justice and social and economic equality among freed blacks. In theory, the thought of reconstruction was practical and could end slavery however, a thought is never the same when put into physical use because there are unforeseen obstacles that cannot be avoided such as the invention of sharecropping, the lynchings of blacks, the court case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, “Jim Crow” laws, and the cooperation of white southerners to adhere to these new laws.…
Through the history of lynchings, we can see that most lynchings happened right after 1880 until about 1920 and then started to decrease a lot. We know that not all lynchings have been published, but we can look at the ones we certainly know about to gather information. The press also tells us that an abundance of lynchings occurred in Arkansas and Louisiana. Ida B. Wells-Barnett would say that many of these lynchings were caused because of rapes. She discusses her personal observations of the killings of black men by white men. When a black man was accused of raping a white woman, then a lynching occurred. Not only instances of rape, but even something as small as an African American speaking to a white person in the wrong way to anger them. Ida explained how these were threatening to a whole community; leaving them in fear. One of the most common lynchings we learn of through the press is of Henry Smith; a teenage boy accused of whistling at a white woman. He was tragically decapitated by the white men, and Smith’s mother chose to have an open casket to show what a horrific thing was done to him for something he did not do. Therefore, lynchings can be arbitrary from case to case, because each one happened due to something different, no matter how big or small, leaving people to act violently on their anger by publicly killing someone in front of their…
The excuses whites used during Reconstruction to torture and murder newly freed African Americans were as false as they were numerous. In Southern Horrors and Other Writings, Wells relates many of these. Excuses ranging from sassing whites to rape to murder prove that "colored men and women [were] lynched for almost any offense" (Wells 78). According to Wells, the three most common excuses used to victimize African Americans during and after Reconstruction were that the victim had participated in a riot, the victim was a threat to white domination in government, or the victim had raped a white female. Each of these reasons Wells disclaims. The first excuse is easily disproved, as "no Negro rioter was ever apprehended and proven guilty, and no dynamite ever recorded the black man's protest against oppression and wrong" (76). In other words, no riots were ever transpired that caused threat to white supremacy. African American domination of government soon lost its appeal as an excuse to lynch because laws were passed eliminating any chance of such a scenario. "Southern governments all subverted and the Negro actually eliminated from all participation in state and national elections, there could be no longer an excuse for killing Negroes. to prevent 'Negro Domination"' (77). However the African Americans were still made victims of horrendous crimes. Thus the third excuse of rape surfaced. This excuse, once accepted as true, "placed [the African American] beyond the pale of human sympathy" and the violence increased(78). The charge of rape, therefore, was used in many cases to lynch innocent African American men. So many cases in fact, that it was soon obvious to the world that this was just a cover for mob violence. Indeed, the victim's innocence was often proved after his brutal…
The NAACP aided in reducing Black racial discrimination in the U.S. by fighting against their lynching and education discrimination. In the 20th century, the NAACP was at the forefront at condemning the killing of Blacks. It lobbied for the passing and enactment of anti-lynching bills which were prominent in the 1920s. Regardless of their failure in courts, its publicity improved and advanced political and legal pressure regarding the killing of Blacks. In 1950, it started lobbying for the equality of schools for African Americans and Whites. Through numerous cases, it gave…
heavily embellished the negro culture with much mockery. Jim crow became the symbol of how blacks should be treated hence the Jim Crow Laws that were developed. Whites would paint their faces black and perform on stage as bafoons. These shows helped paint the idea that African Americans were inferior and should be treated differently. The websites tells of how racism was being acted out and the propaganda that was used.…