On April 18, 1931, Thomas, J Pressley witnessed a man hanging from a limb. The newspaper article title states ‘Mob Lynches Negro in Court House Yard”. It stated that the mob of whites’ march into the jailhouse took out George Smith a Negro and hang him from a tree. That is when Mr. Pressely saw him hanging. The reason he hung is that a white girl at that time stated that he came into her room and tried to attack her and she scratched him in his face. So, when he was found the white girl pointed him out as his assailant. Mr. Pressel sated this was his first time seeing a dead body or even someone being lynched.…
In this modern take on Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander presents the evolutionary roots of racism in the United States. She argues that racism is no longer based solely on race, but has transformed to more covert and legal forms through the criminalization of African Americans in the criminal justice system. As soon as a person of color is classified as a felon, it is legal for establishments to discriminate against them virtually as much as it was at the height of the Jim Crow era.…
In this reading, Shawn Michelle Smith writes about W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk and Du Bois’ photographs. Smith argues that “Du Bois’ photographs challenge a physical, and biological, paradigm of white supremacists racial differentiation.” Throughout the reading Smith compares and contrasts how whites and blacks look at photos, mainly of lynching, and can see two separate things in the same photographs.…
In his public letter, "Lynching in the South: A Protest Against the Burning and Lynching of Negros," Booker T. Washington asserts that African Americans were unjustly lynched or another form of murder because they were not put to trial yet. He states that the ruling is unjust because "The laws as a rule made by the white people and their execution is in the hands of the white people." He also says, "If the law is disregarded when a Negro is concerned, it will soon be disregarded when a white man is concerned," which shows that there will be equality in the end. The author's purpose was to state just how unjustly they have been treated in order to show the ones causing the injustice the wrongdoings they have committed; those of which that cannot…
Group display of aggression (behaviour with intent to harm) in ancestors has been seen as an adaptive response, promoting inter-group harmony and mutual defence. Lynch mobs have been explained by social transition and the need for conformity, for example, Myrdal (1944) found that black lynchings in the USA were due to fear of negroes and white mobs turned to ‘lynch law’ as a means of social control to maintain white supremacy. Mobs are often most active at a time of major social transition, such as after the collapse of slavery, thus when the community is at risk, group survival becomes more important, producing hostility towards outsiders. The Social Power-Threat hypothesis claims that lynching atrocity increases with the proportion of blacks in the community, for example, as the minority poses a greater perceived threat to the majority, resulting in violent discrimination. However, the Self-Attention theory argues that atrocity increases with the proportion of mob members, Freud claimed that aggression is a manifestation of our natural death instinct (Thanatos), thus lynch mobs are a collective release of innate energy of pent-up thanatos which is displaced onto others.…
Lynching was used as a tool for creating and maintaining white dominance in the South. This gruesome method was used to reverse the laws that were made to progress the equality of white and black races. The racially driven lynching persisted during the time of the Jim Crow laws as a way of enforcing subservience and preventing economic competition, and later as a method of resisting the civil rights movement.…
They accounted for about 61% of robbery arrest in 87’ as well as 55% of homicide arrests, though they only accounted for 11% of the general population (Sampson 348). As astonishing as those numbers are, they represented the problems which were engulfing the country. Consequently, this violence was causing even more of a racial divide than there was before. For instance, minorities were struggling with money and instead of turning to the path of education and seeking social mobility, most went down the so-called “easy” path. This path leads to drugs, violence, death and general unhappiness. As Sampson continues to explain, “Race is one of the strongest predictors of major social dislocations in American cities. Black communities are characterized by disproportionately high rates of drug addiction, welfare dependence, out-of-wedlock births, teenage pregnancy, and families headed by females (Sampson 348).” The image of the black body at this time was one of savagery, foolishness, and senselessness. Coates was always in fear for his body, he did not know whether someone could take it from him, “I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog (Coates 20).”…
It was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who famously said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”. There was a deep-seated irrational fear in Lake County, Florida in 1949 four black boys accused of raping a 17-year-old girl. White supremacists obsessed over controlling the black race, and protecting the “flower of southern womanhood”. While blacks feared for their lives. And with the influential but extremely courageous help of the NAACP, especially Thurgood Marshall, some fought back. Gilbert Kings Novel, The Devil in the Grove, tells the story of a rather suspenseful tragic time for our Nation that should never be forgotten or repeated. A time when irrational fears oppressed an entire population of people under the system, above the law, that was racism.…
What is lynching? Lynching is characterized as a hanging by a swarm or somebody for an affirmed offense with or without a lawful trial. In the novel "At The Hands Of Persons Unknown" by Philip Dray, he discusses what lynching is and how it influenced those in those days the distance to now. Dray talks on the numerous casualties who were influenced inside that time from the 1800's completely through the 1900's. The novel opens up with the account of Sam Hose. Sam was blamed for murdering his manager Alfred Cranford with a hatchet and assaulting his better half Mattie Cranford a while later. With no solid confirmation of this incident he was beaten, lynched, and consumed to death before several racial oppressors in Coweta County, Georgia. The…
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…
All types of white people were in this mob, white women, white children, and white men. We walked towards where the heart of the mob must have been, and through all of the commotion, I got separated from my family. “MOM”, I called out. “DAD”, I shouted even louder, though my voice was drowned out in the crowd. Over the noise of a thousand voices, I heard some say “those blacks deserve to die”, or “think about that poor girl”. I started to get scared, and pushed through the crowd, hoping that I would bump into my mom or dad. Unknowingly, though, I ended up in the front lines of the mob, in the front of the police station. I was handed a brick by a stranger and told “hey kid, throw this brick at that window”, while he pointed at one of the first floor windows. Eventually, I put together the pieces. All these people were yelling about lynching some blacks,and how a girl had been violated. I came to the conclusion that these black men had been arrested for raping a young white girl, and were being held at the police station jail. Upon coming to this realization, I dropped the brick in disgust. I was completely against killing anyone in cold blood, no matter what they had done. Overwhelmed by the angry energy of all these white men who towered over me, and losing my parents, I started to cry. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. I spun around as fast as a bolt of lightning, only to be relieved to see my dad standing there. He pulled my back, and right then the crowd seemed to surge forward. It seemed as if they had breached the defenses of the police and were now storming through the station. My dad pulled me over to the outskirts of the crowd, and witnessed that in no time the mob exited the station, with 3 black men in their…
The years after 1877 were to say the "Reconstruction" of the black condition improves. In this case, the right to vote is granted. Several hundred are elected in state assemblies and Congress. Northern troops occupied the South to enforce the new amendments of the Constitution. Booker T. Washington in 1881, black leader and advocate of conciliation, founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. And the Supreme Court nullified the law on civil rights in 1875 declaring unconstitutional. In 1896 Stop Plessy against Ferguson: the Supreme Court establishes access "separate but equal" to blacks and whites in the railways, thus legalizing segregation. Many organisms are born. Mary Church Terrell, black activist, founded the National Association of Colored…
During the 1940s-1950s there was segregation between the whites and blacks. Because of this many things were life threatening to the African Americans. This included things such as flirting, disobeying, entering an environment labeled "whites only" etc. If one was to do the following they could get beaten, shot, spit at, tortured, and a lot more. On the 28th of August, 1955 in Money, Mississippi a boy named Emmett Till was murdered for flirting with a white women, this was unacceptable because of the segregation and the Jim Crow Laws.…
Carr, C. (2005). Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America, Publishers Weekly, Vol. 252, Issue 39…
Ida B. Well once against notes the racist framing of black masculinity where narratives of rape were claimed as, “It was not a sudden yielding to a fit of passion, but the consummation of a devilish purpose which has been seeking and waiting for the opportunity” (pg.62). This narrative not only legitimized white fear but further instigated violence in order to punish black men who dared to prey on defenseless white women. Such accounts of violence were evident in the lynching as narrated by James Baldwin, “Then the crowd rushed forward, tearing at the body with their hands, with knives, with rocks, with stones, howling and cursing” (p.1760). Richard Yarborough further notes how the threat of white male violence further made black men complicit in the continued sexual exploitation of black women at the hands of white men, “I walked ahead of the girl, ashamed to face her” (p.13). This system of racism creates a notion in which violence of white, hegemonic masculinity is justified to subjugate black masculinity as black men are stereotyped to be savages and rapists. It furthermore disempowers black men within their own community as they are unable to protect their own…