The Lynching Of African Americans: Lynching In America

Lynching is when a mob of people gather in one place to hang a person is a general idea. However, lynching is just an execution of an accused person by a mob (Lynching). A lynching could happen for many reasons including severe crimes like murder or theft, simple custom violations, or to make a simple example to strike fear into the “other” population. According to the article, “Lynching in America,” over 4,000 African Americans were lynched between 1877-1950. Though majority of the African Americans lynched were men, there were some women that were lynched, too. Lynching has become illegal within the United States today, but it was a difficult time coming to the end of “legal” lynching. This essay discusses how several factors led to the

The number of lynching is truly uncertain at this day in age as researchers and historians try to piece together the documents of the past, but one thing that is true is that many African Americans lost their lives. However, the data most recently suggests that lynching of African Americans dates to the late 19th century, the Civil War was ending, and the African Americans were being freed from slavery by the Emancipation Proclamation. Location will be discussed in further detail later, but majority of the “lynchings began in the South,” where white people were trying to keep white supremacy a reality and ignore the newly enacted law (Lynch Law in America). The South did fight back against the law with the Plessy v. Ferguson case which ended up in Supreme Court in 1896 with a ruling that “public facilities for blacks and whites could be ‘separate but equal’” (A Brief History of Jim Crow). The South took that ruling and made it into the Jim

For example, the lynching rampage of 1918 where numerous slaves were killed for the death of a white plantation owner who did not pay one of his slaves. Among the deceased was an eight-month pregnant Mary Turner. The reason the plantation owner did not pay his slave was because the slave did not work while he was sick; in addition, The Great Depression was slowly coming up and the plantation owner was trying to salvage whatever money he could to survive the next several years (Remembering Mary Turner). Besides the white supremacy goal in the South, African Americans were blamed for the financial hardships, The Great Depression, because “the United States had never been through such a terrible money issue like that before and the Southern people wanted someone to blame.” However, once the Depression ended, the Jim Crow laws slowly disappeared as the United States entered World War II (Gibson). That’s when fewer and fewer lynchings were needed because all men were needed to defeat a common enemy, Hitler, and restore the damage done (Gibson). African Americans lived a difficult life always being in fear and never knowing if they were going to be killed next; nevertheless, the lynching did decline as the United States entered war because they needed as many people as possible to