A History of Lynching in the USA from Reconstruction to Trayvon Martin
Commentary by Black Kos Managing Editor dopper0189
There is a reason that the tragic death of Trayvon Martin has hit a nerve among many people of color (and those that support them) that even the worse case of police brutality never will. People of color and black people in this country specifically have had a long history of abuse at the hands of self appointed vigalantees. The first picture in this diary was a young man who was "convicted" by a group of self appointed people who were "defending their neighborhood". There is a reason that this country was founded on the rule of laws, a system of due process, and a trial by a jury of your peers. Because when the powers of these rights are not extended to people of color, both the first and second images happen. The founders for many obvious reason didn't extend those rights to people of African descent and to Native Americans. The lack of these rights lead to generations of mothers and fathers having to bury their young men.
When I tried to evaluate my anger I couldn't express my feeling for why this killing angered me so much more than police brutality. Police for all their historics faults (not to discount their heroics) when dealing with people of color at least swear and oath to serve. They also are duly depubitized by the law to perform their duty. But Zimmerman was an entirely different form of outrage. It wasn't until this comment by a2nite that my anger found a name.
The name for this sytem of injustice is LYNCHING!
Lynching is the practice of killing people by extrajudicial mob action. Lynchings took place most frequently in the South from 1890 to the 1920s, with a peak in the annual toll in 1892.
It is associated with re-imposition of White supremacy in the South after the Civil War. The granting of civil rights to freedmen in the Reconstruction era (1865–77) aroused anxieties among white citizens, who came to blame African Americans for their own wartime hardship, economic loss, and forfeiture of social privilege. Black Americans, and Whites active in the pursuit of equal rights, were frequently lynched in the South during Reconstruction. Lynchings reached a peak in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Southern states changed their constitutions and electoral rules to disfranchise most blacks and many poor whites, and, having regained political power, enacted a series of segregation and Jim Crow laws to reestablish White supremacy. Notable lynchings of civil rights workers during the 1960s in Mississippi contributed to galvanizing public support for the Civil Rights Movement and civil rights legislation.
The Tuskegee Institute has recorded 3,446 blacks were lynched between 1882 and 1968. Southern states created new constitutions between 1890 and 1910, with provisions that effectively disfranchised most blacks, as well as many poor whites. People who did not vote were excluded from serving on juries, and most blacks were shut out of the official political system.
African Americans mounted resistance to lynchings in numerous ways. Intellectuals and journalists encouraged public education, actively protesting and lobbying against lynch mob violence and government complicity in that violence. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as numerous other organizations, organized support from white and black Americans alike and conducted a national campaign to get a federal anti-lynching law passed; in 1920 the Republican Party promised at its national convention to support passage of such a law. In 1921 Leonidas C. Dyer sponsored an anti-lynching bill; it was passed in January 1922 in the United States House of Representatives, but a Senate filibuster by Southern white Democrats defeated it in December 1922. With the NAACP, Representative Dyer spoke across the country in support of his bill in 1923, but Southern Democrats again filibustered it in the Senate. He tried once more but was again unsuccessful.
African-American women's clubs, such as the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, raised funds to support the work of public campaigns, including anti-lynching plays. Their petition drives, letter campaigns, meetings and demonstrations helped to highlight the issues and combat lynching.
We need to drive this idea into people's heads. Lynch mobs result when ever people thought "government justice was too slow", "why should we give rights to criminals?", "those other people act like animals why not treat them that way!?". These ideas a distrust of government, a presumption of guilt, a hatred of people unlike themselves. These are the seeds that turn everyday folks who on most days would consider themselves living a "good moral life" into indiscriminate wantom killers. It's a regular occurance throughout American history and for that matter throughout the world. People taking the law into their own hands are lynch mobs.
As a2night put it:
Not happy Tuesday: (12+ / 0-)
Recommended by:Denise Oliver Velez, oysterface, Rogneid, Progressive Witness, TrueBlueMajority, dopper0189, arizonablue, uciguy30, peregrine kate, Reason to believe, Avila, Larsstephens
As I've said repeatedly, Trayvon was lynched with a bullet by a lone man w/o a hood instead of many men w/ hoods & a rope. Both are & wete approved by "the law" Guess bullets are cheaper. Win-win 4 the NRA and white supremacists. It is our great loss.
I hate people especially Rs and their voters. Ok, done with that rant.
Excellent diary, porch people....off 2 have an adult beverage.
This lead me to think more about Lynching. Deoliver wrote a
diary for Black Kos on one of the worse episodes of this in American history. Some of which is below.
Elizabeth Freeman
In her book, The First Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP, author Patrica Bernstein describes the picture below.
At first, the picture appears to be nothing more than a group of hundreds of men crowded into a city square, almost all of them wearing the flat-crowned straw "boater" hats that were popular in the summer of 1916. This ocean of flat-brimmed white hats is lapping against a scraggly little tree in the center of the square.
Only when you look closer do you see a fuzzy area in the center of the picture, below the tree, like a ribbon of smoke. And then, through the smoke, you can just make out . . . a leg, a foot, an elbow. A naked human being lies collapsed at the bottom of the tree on top of a smoldering pile of slats and kindling. Around his neck is a chain, which stretches up over a branch of the tree.
A man in a white shirt with a dark fedora mashed down on his head stands by the folded-up body, yanking on one end of the chain. He is wearing a heavy glove on the hand that holds the chain because it has been heated by the fire and is hot. This self-appointed executioner may have been caught in the act of jerking the blistered creature below the tree upright against the tree trunk in order to display him to the mob. Or perhaps he has just lowered his victim back into the fire. In the meantime, another man in white shirt and light-colored hat is poking and prodding the dying man with a stick or rod of some kind, almost as if he is trying to turn the body on the fire. The onlookers watch intently. Some appear to be smiling or shouting encouragement to the torturers.
Waco Lynch Mob May 15, 1916
Between the years 1877 and World War I is a period known as the disfranchisement. This is the period after the recontruction when lynching became an instrument of terror.
Most lynchings from the late 19th through the early 20th century were of African Americans in the South, with other victims including white immigrants, and, in the southwest, Latinos. Of the 468 victims in Texas between 1885 and 1942, 339 were black, 77 white, 53 Hispanic, and 1 Indian. They reflected the tensions of labor and social changes, as the whites imposed Jim Crow rules, legal segregation and white supremacy. The lynchings were also an indicator of long economic stress due to falling cotton prices through much of the 19th century, as well as financial depression in the 1890s. In the Mississippi bottomlands, for instance, lynchings rose when crops and accounts were supposed to be settled.
There was a clear seasonal pattern to the lynchings, with the colder months being the deadliest. As noted, cotton prices fell during the 1880s and 1890s, increasing economic pressures. "From September through December, the cotton was picked, debts were revealed, and profits (or losses) realized... Whether concluding old contracts or discussing new arrangements, [landlords and tenants] frequently came into conflict in these months and sometimes fell to blows." During the winter, murder was most cited as a cause for lynching. After 1901, as economics shifted and more blacks became renters and sharecroppers in the Delta, with few exceptions, only African-Americans were lynched. The frequency increased from 1901 to 1908, after African-Americans were disenfranchised. "In the twentieth century Delta vigilantism finally became predictably joined to white supremacy."
The ideology behind lynching, which was directly connected with denial of political and social equality of people of color, was expressed by
Benjamin Tillman– Governor of South Carolina and later a United States Senator:
We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.
Often victims were lynched by a small group of white vigilantes late at night. Sometimes, however, lynchings became mass spectacles with a circus-like atmosphere because they were intended to emphasize majority power. Children often attended these public lynchings. A large lynching might be announced beforehand in the newspaper. There were cases in which a lynching was timed so that a newspaper reporter could make his deadline. Photographers sold photos for postcards to make extra money. The event was publicized so that the intended audience, African Americans and whites who might challenge the society, was warned to stay in their places.
Fewer than one percent of lynch mob participants were ever convicted by local courts. By the late 19th century, trial juries in most of the southern United States were all white because African Americans had been disfranchised, and only registered voters could serve as jurors. Often juries never let the matter go past the inquest.
Even as activist fought to end Lynching the real first break in how the vast majority of American's viewed lynching didn't come until 1946. When someone who served his country in uniform lie was taken by cowards who didn't.
In 1946, a mob of white men shot and killed two young African-American couples near Moore's Ford Bridge in Walton County, Georgia 60 miles east of Atlanta. This lynching of four young sharecroppers, one a World War II veteran, shocked the nation. The attack was a key factor in President Harry S. Truman's making civil rights a priority of his administration. Although the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated the crime, they were unable to prosecute. It was the last documented lynching of so many people.
In 1946, the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department gained its first conviction under federal civil rights laws against a lyncher. Florida constable Tom Crews was sentenced to a $1,000 fine and one year in prison for civil rights violations in the killing of an African-American farm worker.
In 1947, the Truman Administration published a report titled To Secure These Rights, which advocated making lynching a federal crime, abolishing poll taxes, and other civil rights reforms. The Southern Democratic bloc of senators and congressmen continued to obstruct attempts at federal legislation.
In many ways Trayvon death reminds me of Emmit Till's death. They were both killed for doing things that teanagers across America take for granted. Maybe in some way Trayvon's death will put a face to the unjustness of racial profiling.
A 1955 lynching that sparked public outrage about injustice was that of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy from Chicago. Spending the summer with relatives in Money, Mississippi, Till was killed for allegedly having wolf-whistled at a white woman. Till had been badly beaten and shot before being thrown into the Tallahatchie River. His mother insisted on a public funeral with an open casket, to show people how badly Till's body had been disfigured. News photographs circulated around the country, and drew intense public reaction. People in the nation were horrified that a boy could have been killed for such an incident. The state of Mississippi tried two defendants, but they were speedily acquitted.
Some people may recoil at the idea of equating the admitted crazy vigilante from a neighborhood watch program and lynching. But especially in the south lynch mobs often operated with the quiet acuiesense of law enforcement. A true neighborhod watches are composed of concerned citizens who
watch and then report suspicous activities to the proper authorities. Lynch mobs are created when people decide to pursue and engage people they decided are
suspicious. Lynch mobs then convict them without the benefits of our fundamental rights as Americans. Neighborhood watch programs are great asset for a community. They help to
build neighborhoods. Lynching is about keeping out of your neighborhood or at least keeping control of people whom these folks consider undesireable or less than human in their eyes.
Whether the lynching is the result of a group of individuals or a lone wolf, the results are the same. Dead young black men. It seems that Southern states are still producing strange fruit indeed.
But out of the anger and tragedy there are rays of sunlight. Coalitions of concerned parents who see their own kids in Trayvon Martin, parents of all races who don't see a black child but just a child. Police associations and civil rights groups that are often at odds both speaking out against "stand your ground" laws. Online activist helped move the story even as more traditional civil rights groups started to take to the streets. Unfortunately it sometimes take the loss of innocent life to spur divergent groups to work together. One life is to many it's time to once again stop lynchings in the USA.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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The March Madness Statistic You Don’t Hear About. ColorLines: College Grad Rates
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There are a lot of stats that matter during March Madness. But one that’s not often tallied as the country’s best college basketball teams compete for a national championship is how often those schools graduate players. On the whole, comparatively few Division I men’s college basketball players wind up playing professionally, and that underscores a central question facing some of the top programs in the country: Are schools preparing their student athletes to lead productive lives off of the basketball court after their playing days are over?
The answer hasn’t always been a good one, and it’s often colored by race. The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports (TIDES) at the University of Central Florida released its annual study, “Keeping Score When It Counts: Graduation Success and Academic Success for the 2012 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament Team” just in time for this year’s tournament.
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A study shows that bias might hinder fundraising for these organizations. The Root: Stereotypes Hurt Black-Teen Programs
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When 19-year-old Kaila Gilbert was in high school in La Vergne, Tenn., she was the exact type of kid that organizations designed to reach at-risk black teens might target. Her high school was "not particularly known for scholastic accomplishment," she delicately explains to The Root.
At one point during the recession, both of her parents lost their jobs. And while she hesitates to emphasize the negative aspects of her upbringing, she admits, "It was hard living in a household like that," and says she "probably had it a little harder than people who came from more privileged backgrounds."
Today Gilbert is thriving as a freshman at Vanderbilt University. She's still deciding between a major in English and one in public policy, but she sounds as if she already has a degree or two under her belt when you get her talking about the nuances of the African-American experience. Gilbert could easily be a spokesperson for the Ron Brown Scholar Program, which saw her potential when she was in high school and awarded her a $10,000-per-year scholarship packaged with leadership and service opportunities.
Hers is the exact kind of success story that the organization, which features beaming black teens decked out in business attire in its printed materials, would understandably love to use to drum up support.
Except, new research shows that people might not be inclined to give to organizations that help people who look like Gilbert: African-American youths past elementary school age. According to the study, the stereotypes thrust upon black teens may be working overtime to turn off potential donors to the very projects designed to support these young people.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School found that those negative associations attached to black students (lazy, unreliable, dumb and irresponsible, to name a few) kicked in with more force as the students got older, and charitable support for them decreased at the same time.
Thinkstock
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Notice how people can do the worse things now-a-days and then with a straight face say "it's not racist". ColorLines: Woman Behind ‘Don’t Re-Nig 2012’ Stickers Insists They’re Not Racist
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The online store that originally started selling “Don’t Re-Nig 2012” stickers has been taken down but now a second site is selling the bumper stickers and the owner has no qualms about selling the sticker.
Forbes.com has an exclusive interview with Paula Smith, the Hinesville. Georgia woman behind Stickatude.com. Ms. Smith insists she’s not racist. Her defense? “Obama is not even black. He’s got a mixture of race. It’s his choice of what his nationality is.”
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While we mourn Trayvon Martin at least this killer has been brought to justice. NewsOne: White Teen Gets Life For Killing Black Man With Pickup Truck
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A white Mississippi teenager has pleaded guilty to murder and committing a hate crime for running over a black man with his pickup truck, killing him.
Dedmon, 19, apologized to Anderson’s family. “I do not ask y’all to forget, but I do ask y’all to forgive,” he said in court just before he was sentenced by Hinds County Circuit Judge Jeff Weill Sr.
As members of his family and the victim’s relatives wiped away tears, Demon said God has taught him not to see race and he is a changed man.
Seven white teens were partying in the early morning hours June 26 when Dedmon suggested they find a black man to harass, authorities said. Anderson was beaten before Dedmon ran over him, authorities said.
Another teenager, John Aaron Rice, is charged with simple assault in the case. Authorities said he left the scene before Anderson was killed. Rice has pleaded not guilty and is free on a $5,000 bond.
The case received widespread attention after a video of Anderson’s death was obtained by news organizations, including The Associated Press.
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John A. Payton, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, has died. The Root: John A. Payton of the NAACP LDF Has Died
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Payton passed away suddenly on Thursday afternoon at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore after a brief illness, a spokesman for the LDF told The Root. No further details were available. He leaves behind a wife, Gay McDougall.
Payton, the LDF's sixth president and director-counsel, leaves a gaping hole in the fight for civil rights. He led the fund's involvement in five cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, according to a bio on the organization's website.
John A. Payton (NAACP LDF)
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There has been widespread condemnation of Mali's troops, after they ousted President Amadou Toumani Toure. BBC: Mali coup: World condemns mutineers.
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The UN Security Council called for the "immediate restoration of constitutional rule and the democratically elected government". The World Bank and African Development Bank said they were suspending all aid until the crisis is resolved.
The coup leaders went on state TV to say they had closed the borders. They added that the president was safe. A government official told the BBC that President Amadou Toumani Toure was not in the custody of mutineers.
Meanwhile, soldiers looted the presidential palace in the capital Bamako, following the coup. They said they had led Wednesday's mutiny because the government had not giving them enough arms to tackle a rebellion by ethnic Tuareg in the north of Mali.
They attacked the presidential palace, traded gunfire with soldiers loyal to the government and took over the state radio and TV broadcaster in Bamako and took it off air.
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