A new study documents a horrific but critical to remember time in American history: The racial terror lynchings of African Americans across the South.
The study “Lynchings in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror,” was released earlier this month by the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative. The study documents the organizationís investigation into lynchings of Blacks in 12 southern states during the period between Reconstruction and just after World War II.
“These lynchings were terrorism,” the EJI study states in its summary. “These 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.”
Researchers documented 3,959 racial terror lynchings of Blacks in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.
Some experts estimate the total number of lynching to actually be closer to 5,000.
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