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.
The study corrects the misconceptions of lynchings being rare and done by a few.
“Lynchings were violent and public events that traumatized [B]lack people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials,” the study states. “This was not ‘frontier justice’ carried out by a few marginalized vigilantes or extremists. Instead many African Americans who were never accused of any crime were tortured and murdered in front of picnicking spectators [including elected officials] for bumping into a White person, or wearing their military uniforms after World War I, or not using the appropriate title when addressing a White person.”
The threat of lynching was commonplace. Like terrorism today the purpose of lynching was to instill fear. Lynchings were meant to spread fear among African Americans and maintain White supremacy.
In addition to the murder of thousands of Black lives, lynchings also had a devastating impact on the economic condition of African Americans as a group.
Researchers said lynchings played a much bigger role in the estimated six million Black people who left the South for the North during the Great Migration between 1910 and 1970 than history would like to acknowledge. Researchers said racial terror lynchings were a tool used to enforce Jim Crow laws and racial segregation.
“It is imperative that we begin to talk about the Great Migration as a response to terror and trauma Ö not just the pursuit of economic opportunity,” said Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the EJI, in an article in Black Enterprise.
“There’s no question that that kind or disruption—becoming a refugee and becoming an exile—takes away any accumulated wealth and stability. Think of them as coming North as refugees burdened and stigmatized in ways that other immigrant communities were not,” said Stevenson.
Stacey Tisdale, Black Enterprise senior producer for personal finance, points out this contributed to putting Blacks at the bottom of the wealth gap in the U.S.
Tisdale observes that research by the Federation of Southern Cooperative Land Assistance Fund shows land ownership among Blacks peaked at 15 million acres in 1910, of which 218,000 Black farmers were full or part owners.
“A steady decline of landownership begins after that,” said Tisdale.
Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of New York Times bestseller “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic story of America’s Great Migration,” also points out the economic impact of lynchings.
“Lynchings were not just for things like talking to a White woman or some of the other reasons we commonly associated with these killings. Many people were lynched because they were seen as getting out of their place in the caste system — people who were experiencing business success,” Wilkerson said. “There’s an economic consequence to the loss of human capital.”
Although lynching had existed before slavery, it gained momentum during Reconstruction, when viable African-American towns sprang up across the South and African Americans began to make political and economic advancements by registering to vote, establishing businesses and running for public office. Many Whites felt threatened by this rise in Black prominence.
The brutal violence against Blacks would not taper off until after World War II, when Blacks filled with new hope began to organize en masse and risked their lives to bring about change.
The new study of lynching documents a painful but necessary history all Americans should know and understand.
(Reprinted from the Philadelphia Tribune)
