Ms. Rubenstein
Academic English I
8 April 2013
Lynching & Lynch Mobs Discrimination is a terrible and unfair act. White men and women are treating African Americans differently because of their skin color or race. Not only did lynch mobs lynch African Americans, but they also lynched and abused Chinese, Japanese and Italian immigrants. How are they harming other races with discrimination? They harm them by verbally and physically abuse them like kidnapping, beating, punching, shooting and even hanging. Lynching is murdering by mob action and without trial, as by hanging. By the 1880's 90 percent of all lynchings in the United States occurred in the southern states. Most victims were black and some victims were poor white families. There are well-known people who got lynched for their most innocent actions. "F.B. Baker from Lake City, South Carolina, got lynched for accepting the office of town postmaster" ("Lynching and the Law" 258). "Calvin McDowell, Thomas Moss, and Wil Stewart owned a grocery store outside of Memphis, Tennessee, in 1891." Another grocery store across the street didn't like competition. One night on March 1892, the white man who owned the grocery store across the street came over to McDowell's store with a gun, and as soon as he walked in, McDowell took him down before he could try anything. The white man said he'll be back to "clean them out." There was a gun battle when the white man came back with twelve men claiming to be deputies. The three black men got arrested. Two days after, a mob came into jail, took McDowell, Stewart and Moss and shot them to death ("Lynching and the Law" 258). Another example was when Edward Coy was tied to a tree, got his flesh cut from his body and got coal oil poured all over him by a lynch mob. He was accused for assaulting a woman, but the woman was criminally intimate with Coy for more than a year ("Lynching and the Law" 258). Now you might be wondering did anyone stand up for the people